Swarbrick, Steven. “Shakespeare’s Blush, or ‘the Animal’ in Othello.” Exemplaria, vol. 28, no. 1, 2016, pp. 70–85., doi:10.1080/10412573.2016.1115624.
In the article by Steven Swarbrick for Exemplaria, Swarbrick argues that the notions of animality and shame are inextricably connected in Shakespeare’s Othello. According to Swarbrick, animaliy is the “key optic through which the play visualizes and dehumanizes its black protagonist”, as evidenced through all of the instances in the play in which Othello is compared to animals like a black ram, a beast with two backs, a Barbary horse, and more. The key goals in this article are to compel us to rethink early modern categories of race in connection with “human” vs “animal”, and to prove that humanization cannot be countered with a simple return to the human. A key part of the argument is about an animal’s inability to blush. The blush is what many consider to be what distinguishes humans from animals, in that not only can we blush, but we can feel shame at nakedness, whereas animals cannot. Because black skin was seen at this time to be unable to blush, people with black skin, like Othello, were deemed animalistic. But while many would draw distinctions between Iago and Othello on this point, Swarbrick contends that Iago himself has a compulsion to hide his feelings and his own blush, thus blurring the lines between animal and human.
The majority of the article, then, focuses on the line “Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago”. Using this line, Swarbrick argues that “Iago is black, even though he is not in blackface. Similarly, Othello is white, both because of and despite the fact that he is in blackface” (Swarbrick). Iago is the Moor, while Othello, the character often compared to an animal, is not the Moor that the audience would expect. Ultimately, then, what Swarbrick attempts to prove in this article is that while many scholars believe that animality asserts the racial difference between the characters, the opposite is true, and that when animals enter the scene, racial difference becomes undone.
-- Wes Wingert
