I'm going to add to this. The question of whether the character Othello was supposed to be "black" (in the modern sense) can only be correctly considered with a proper background knowledge of how the term "black" was used as a descriptor of other people in Shakespeare's time (it did not mean then what it means now).
Even in the play "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (in which every character is a European), one Athenian male says to an Athenian female:
Away, you Ethiope!. In saying that, he is not suggesting that she is an African. He is merely expressing the view, common and normal in Tudor society, that those with the fairest skin and the blondest hair were the most desirable, with others being very much in the "also-ran" category by
comparison. There is any amount of commentary on this aspect of Shakespeare's language if you look for it. Here's a good place to take a quick look:
https://www.reddit.com/r/shakespeare/comments/6avks8/is_midsummers_hermia_black/Yesterday, I came across this question and answer on the Quora website; I'll quote it:
Question:Was King Charles II of England, Scotland, and Ireland black?
Answer:I know why this question has come up. When Charles was on the run from the Parliamentary army after his father’s defeat, there were Wanted posters put up around England asking people to alert the authorities if they saw him. One of these posters described him as:
a tall, black man more than two yards highIn the English language of the 21st century, the assumption is that someone described as ‘black’ will be of recent African ancestry and have dark brown skin. The thing is, that’s a relatively recent usage, dating back only to the
1960s [
my emphasis - JN]. The word didn’t have that meaning back in the 17th century.
Back then, describing a person as ‘black’ could mean either that he had black hair and dark eyes, or simply that he was dressed in black. Even as late as the 1950s in Britain, a popular author could describe someone as ‘a black man’ and mean only that he was dressed from head to foot in black robes — his skin colour was irrelevant, and in fact not even visible to the person describing him:
‘These black men,’ said the landlord lowering his voice. ‘They’re looking for Baggins, and if they mean well, then I’m a hobbit. It was on Monday, and all the dogs were yammering and the geese screaming. Uncanny, I called it. Nob, he came and told me that two black men were at the door asking for a hobbit called Baggins.’— J R R Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings.
This is not to say that the word ‘black’ was never used in English to describe a dark-skinned person prior to the 1960s: but not as the standard term or label.
In the case of Charles II, he was called a ‘black man’ because his hair was black and his eyes dark brown. That’s all. Dark blond or brown hair is most common in Britain, so black hair stood out as distinctive.
Stephen Tempest
MA Modern History, University of Oxford (1985)Answered June 6