WHEN OTHERNESS BECOMES FATAL: A POSTCOLONIAL STUDY OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S OTHELLO, THE MOOR OF VENICE

As an adroit playwright, William Shakespeare wrote numerous remarkable plays and created many memorable characters that, even after four centuries, are still the topic of many scholars’ debates. These perpetual debates affirm Ben Jonson’s words that Shakespeare is “not of an age, but for all time.” In effect, modern-day readers and critics acknowledge Ben Jonson’s famous praising of the Bard, and study Shakespeare’s plays from different perspectives. In this respect, the present study is aimed at analyzing one of Shakespeare’s most controversial tragedies, Othello, the Moor of Venice, based on postcolonial theories. In the course of this paper, at first, the titular black-skinned character is examined in the light of Edward Said’s Orientalism in order to depict how the Venetians see him. Next, Homi Bhabha’s theories of hybridity and mimicry are adopted in order to discuss how Othello’s new diasporic and traumatized identity is shaped by his interactions with the Venetians, his past slave hood, and his present noble stature. Furthermore, it is concluded that no matter how hard Othello tries to mimic and imitate the inhabitants of Venice so as to become one of them, they never stop looking at him as an exotic Oriental Other, rendering him almost the same as them, but not entirely. Thus, Othello’s Otherness and his ambivalent identity cause his low self-esteem and insecure personality that lead to his tragic flaw, which is jealousy, and consequently his tragic ending.

Keywords:

postcolonialism , William Shakespeare , Othello , the Moor of Venice , Orientalism , mimicry