othello

Hi everyone
Ive got to write an essay about whether we should judge Othello by views on race and identity in the 21st century or consider shakespeare's intentions when it was written!! has anyone got anything usefull that might help me please?? Thanks
ellie

It sounds like you need to consider differences between how race is percieved then and now. I'd reccomend looking at Virginia Mason Vaughan's "Othello: A Contextual History." There's a whole chapter on race in Elizabethan England and how it affects Othello.

What are the best critical faculties? Those you possess now, not those of someone else. If you focus on what 'was accepted then' you are likely to freeze the text in a condition of irrelevance to today. That's not to say you ignore that aspect completely. Do you think Anglo Saxon racial attitudes have changed all that much. I don't. No nor any one else's