Othello in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries and the Colonial Origins of Heterosexuality

Abstract

Unlike most of Shakespeare’s other plays and unlike Arden and A Woman Killed with Kindness, Othello held the stage largely without adaptation throughout the Restoration and eighteenth century. Actors and managers cut the play for production, but its basic plot and especially the relationship between Othello and Desdemona remained intact, although those cuts and critical interpretation established a Desdemona who conformed to emerging gender ideals for women.¹ In this chapter I contend that, as well as picking up, adapting, and newly valuing the sexual mores from representations of debased English servants, the emerging ideology of heterosexuality newly valued the sexual interests of Othello, who in his original incarnation was written as overly sexually interested. In early-seventeenth-century England, the male racial or ethnic other who was deeply invested in women was read as uncontrolled, weak, and unproductive. However, by the middle of the eighteenth century, as we have seen, a man’s sexual desire for, and investment in, a woman could be seen as proper and even heroic.