I cannot but believe that the Othello of Shakspeare is black, and all black. I cannot conceive the ethnography of that age drawing—on the stage especially—the finer distinction which we know between a Moor and a Blackamoor or Negro. The opposition, entertained by nature, is between White and Black—not between White and Brown. You want the opposition to tell with all its power. "I saw Othello's visage in his mind" is nothing, unless the visible visage is one to be conquered—to be accepted by losing sight of it. I say again, that I cannot myself imagine the contemporary audience of Shakspeare deciding colour between a Moor and a Negro. The tradition of the Stage, too, seems to have made Othello jet black. Such, I opine, was the notion of the Moor, then, to the People, to the Court, to the Stage, to Shakspeare.
TALBOYS.
Woolly-headed?
NORTH.
Why, yes—if you choose—in opposition to the "curled darlings."
TALBOYS.
Yet Coleridge has said it would be "something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl failing in love with a veritable Negro."
NORTH.
Coleridge almost always thought, felt, wrote, and spoke finely, as a Critic—but may I venture, in all love and admiration of that name, to suggest that the removal which the stage makes of a subject from reality must never be forgotten. In life you cannot bear that the White Woman shall marry the Black Man. You could not bear that an English Lady Desdemona—Lady Blanche Howard—should—under any imaginable greatness—marry General Toussaint or the Duke of Marmalade. Your senses revolt with offence and loathing. But on the Stage some consciousness that everything is not as literally meant as it seems—that symbols of humanity, and not actual men and women, are before you—saves the Play.