1
It was widely believed in Renaissance Europe that temperature influenced temperance —that is, that the proclivities of a human being were conditioned by the climate of the region in which they were born. Their complexion, also, was determined by these accidents. The belief was not new but stemmed from the writers of Antiquity, who developed their own ‘humoral theories’ to define human behaviour. If the English considered themselves phlegmatic, as per Hippocrates, it was a result of the temperate England weather. People from the torrid zones of Africa, on the other hand, were choleric, unruly, their moods ever-changing. The Aristotelian view was quite different in that it proposed a theory of opposites: people from torrid regions, cold inside, sluggish in manner; people from cold regions, hot, determined. Mary Floyd-Wilson called this system of values ‘geo-humoralism’: “the interrelation of geographical and weather issues and their impact on the human conduct and temperament —and it implied that humoral temperance [. . .] was held to be attainable only in a temperate clime”.1
This is an essay on race in Shakespeare, and how ‘geo-humoralism’ determined his depiction of racialized characters. While it was common for darkness to be associated with Christian ideas of evil and sin, the humoral theories of Elizabethan England were perhaps even more relevant in the construction of his racialized characters, specifically in the later plays. The main issue regarding these ‘Othered’ subjects is that of temperance, or lack thereof. Aaron from Titus Andronicus (1591), Othello from Othello (1601) and Cleopatra from Antony and Cleopatra (1607) are racialized, and as racialized characters (Africans, in the case of Cleopatra and Othello) were forged by the conditions of their climate. The darkness of their skin distinguishes them from white Europeans not solely for its complexion but as a marker of their climate of origin, a reminder of their ‘voluble’, ‘fickle’, ‘untrustworthy’ nature. This, of course, is a form of racism, an early manifestation of what became complex, systemic ideologies propagated and sustained by Empire. Shakespeare does not subvert the hegemonic racial beliefs of his epoch: in many ways he remains enforcer. Yet it is worthwhile —and fascinating— to trace how geo-humoralism influenced Shakespeare in the construction of some of his most complex, compelling characters.
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The Moor was an emergent figure in English society at the turn of the sixteenth century. ‘Black’ or ‘tawny’, from North Africa, India or the Middle East, Moor was an interchangeable denomination for a subject that was recognised as Other. As England entangled itself in colonial enterprises, the Moor in Elizabethan drama became representative of its racial anxieties. He was ambiguous, mysterious; either demonised menace or Orientalized noble figure. The racialized binary which signified blackness as inferior and whiteness as superior was not ossified the way it would be, once Britain became main agent in the slave trade during the seventeenth century. Because of this, the Other was signalled through other means. “Before this shift took place”, Emily Bartels writes, “color differences, as well as a nation’s natural disposition and potential, were commonly attributed to a region's climatic effects.”2 Thus, Shakespeare’s depictions of racialized characters seem to us, contemporary readers, as peculiar and quite fluid.
Aaron the Moor, antagonist of Titus Andronicus (1591), Shakespeare’s earliest play, strikes us as the most stereotypical, a villain unbound in his evil. He is the absolute outsider in Roman society, naturally doted with an ability to scheme and manipulate others, and is unrepentant in his ‘heinous deeds’: ‘But I have done a thousand dreadful things / As willingly as one would kill a fly, / And nothing grieves me heartily indeed / But that I cannot do ten thousand more.’ (Act V, Scene 1). The blackness of his skin is repeatedly alluded when discussing his ruthless, murderous character, as if its hue mirrored the blackness of his soul: ‘Let fools do good and fair men call for grace, / Aaron will have his soul black like his face.’ (Act III, Scene 1). He is seen as monstrous by the Romans, a ‘devil incarnate’: he, however, is not ashamed by his complexion (‘Is black so base a hue?’, he asks rhetorically). This is not meant to induce sympathy but as a point of scandal for the audience.
Aaron is something that Cleopatra and Othello are not: he is an unchanging character. In fact in a play of shifting definitions, it is the parameters of a respectable whiteness that are fluid: be that of the barbarous Goths or the ‘moderate’ Romans, who actually are ruled by a cruel, licentious Emperor and by the end behave just as savagely as the Goths (Titus at the banquet, feeding Tamora her sons). The one figure of constancy is Aaron. While the others oscillate before plunging into acts, he is assuredly and confidently evil. His stereotypical blackness is ‘the one reliable measure of difference, the one stable and unambiguous sign of Otherness within a wilderness of meanings.’3
Aaron taunts the Romans and Goths for their white complexion, which betray their emotions when they blush or turn red —they are not opaque as him. His dark skin shields his ulterior motives, renders them illegible. He is cast as villain and embodies it, because the un-nuanced way he is perceived by the Romans makes them underestimate his capabilities. As he says in Act II:
AARON Coal-black is better than another hue In that it scorns to bear another hue; For all the water in the ocean Can never turn the swan's black legs to white, Although she lave them hourly in the flood. (Act IV, Scene 2)
Shakespeare briefly specifies Aaron’s place of origin. He is a ‘Swart Cimmerian’ —a racial insult which marks him as black, from a land of perpetual darkness. Given the racial stereotypes of the time, the play doesn’t question but takes them for granted, feeding into them, to an extreme degree. Aaron is simply incapable of temperance. It is alien to his nature. If he is steadfast it is in the way that sin is steadfast; as Francesca Royster notes: “what is gained in permanence is lost to villainy— Aaron's main point is that the changelessness of black skin is an indispensable aid to the project of dissembling and of covering up wicked deeds.”4 By the end Shakespeare makes sure to bring Aaron to justice: he is hanged by the Romans.
In his total lack of temperance Aaron represents the most crass racial stereotype of the Moor. He is an entertaining, formidable villain —but lacks the psychologic depths Shakespeare achieved later, in characters like Othello and Cleopatra. In fact, of the three plays discussed, Titus Andronicus seems to be the less concerned with climate, less engaged with notions of geo-humoralism. It appears this became more relevant for Shakespeare as he matured; he probably recognised the force and poetry that came with pairing the psychic landscape of his characters with phenomena like climate and weather.
3
Written twelve years after Titus Andronicus, Othello (1603) presents an altogether different depiction of the Moor. Othello is protagonist, and one of Shakespeare’s more admirable figures in the first half of the play —which makes his descent into rage and jealousy all the more shocking. Shakespeare deploys a cluster of metaphors, images, to emphasise Othello’s downfall, the loss of his temperance: many are related to weather or to his place of origin, Barbary, in Africa.
Contrary to Aaron, Othello’s temperament is exemplar. It is so spotless that it bewilders his Venetian contemporaries. He is too close, too much of an insider. This renders him, paradoxically, as an even more marked Other to the Venetians: who is this Moor so fluent in their ways and conventions? Their anxiety is manifested to the extreme in Iago.
Iago is hyperfixated on Othello; one has the impression that his world revolves around plotting Othello’s demise. His evil is as bottomless as Aaron’s, and even more cryptic. Why does he hate Othello? If it is personal Shakespeare withholds the reason. Iago is an abbreviation of Santiago Matamoros, St. James the Moor Slayer —in the name, an implication. While Othello is a practicing Christian, a commendable military leader and a valuable asset for the Venetians, as racial outsider his infiltration in Venetian society is intolerable for Iago. Iago’s hatred for Othello can only be understood in these terms.
Othello’s position in Venice was tenuous in the first place: his marriage to Desdemona, a Venetian woman, daughter of a senator, subjected him to public scrutiny. That a Moor marries white Desdemona is outrageous to Brabantio, her father, who accuses Othello of using witchcraft to seduce his daughter. When he is put into question in front of the Duke of Venice, it is his powers of rhetoric which save him. This is Othello’s finest moment: it is hard not to be moved by the cunning, pathos and fortitude of this black Moor who is put in the crosshairs of a racist society, eager to find a reason to eliminate him: his very life is hanging by his every word. Even though Othello describes himself as ‘rude in speech’, ‘little blessed with the soft phrase of peace’, it is evident that he is a talented orator —if Desdemona was bewitched it was for his enrapturing stories, their power of seduction:
OTHELLO […] if I had a friend that loved her, I should but teach him how to tell my story, And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake. She loved me for the dangers I had passed, And I loved her that she did pity them. This only is the witchcraft I have used. (Act I, Scene 3)
Othello’s marriage to Desdemona is the point of contention in the play. It is also Othello’s one weakness, the potential dent in his armour, for although he is an experienced commander, he is somewhat daft, gullible in amorous affairs. Iago taps into his ingenuousness and inflames it with misogynist lies. Like Othello, who is described as an ‘erring Barbarian,’ a ‘Barbary horse’—that is, an inhabitant of Barbary, in North Africa— Desdemona’s character is ascribed maliciously by Iago as being conditioned by Venice, city of vice and promiscuousness.5 This explains, for him, her scandalous marriage to the Moor (and provides him with the frame to fabricate her infidelity). Iago thus tricks Othello into believing that she has been unfaithful.
Up to here, the play has showed Othello to be a capable strategist —his questioning in front of the Duke of Venice demonstrates that he is also good at reading people. As such it confounds the reader how oblivious he is to Iago’s machinations. His rationality is blinded, his level-headedness inflamed by the passions: a common racial stereotype given by the Elizabethans to people from the ‘torrid zones’ of Africa. Iago reduces it to a sentence: “These Moors are changeable in their wills”.
Because Moors are changeable, Iago is able to manipulate Othello; to debase him into madness and jealousy. Even if Othello seems to be of ‘a constant, loving, noble nature’, as Iago himself admits, the apparent facets of his personality are not enough to overwrite what is already determined by climate. The gradual loss of his temperament is encoded in the darkness of his skin. Iago sees Othello’s complexion and thinks: this Moor is changeable, gullible, as he comes from Barbary, and so it is in his nature to be intemperate, savage. I, Iago, will manipulate him:
IAGO Trifles light as air Are to the jealous confirmations strong As proofs of holy writ. […] The Moor already changes with my poison: Dangerous conceits are in their natures poisons, Which at the first are scarce found to distaste, But with a little act upon the blood Burn like the mines of sulphur. (Act III, Scene 3)
In an ironic note Shakespeare plays around with these geo-humoral notions. Moments before being murdered by Othello, Desdemona is asked by Emilia if her husband is the jealous type. Desdemona responds: “Who? he? I think the sun where he was born / Drew all such humours from him.” (Act III, Scene 4). But in the end it is Iago’s view of the Moor which prevails. One strawberry-spotted handkerchief is all it takes to taint his spotless temperament.
Once tainted, it is Othello himself, in the torment of his jealousy, who discards his temperance, and lets loose a rage which is constant, all-consuming. Iago’s manipulations are consummated:
IAGO Patience, I say. Your mind may change. OTHELLO Never, Iago. Like to the Pontic Sea, Whose icy current and compulsive course Ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on To the Propontis and the Hellespont, Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace, Shall ne’er look back, ne’er ebb to humble love, Till that a capable and wide revenge Swallow them up. (Act III, Scene 3)
4
Taking place in ‘parched Egypt’, Antony and Cleopatra (1607) allows us to visualize Shakespeare’s conception of Africa as an intemperate climate. Perhaps more than in the other two plays, the fluctuations of weather are fundamentally linked to the moods and emotions of its main character, Cleopatra. With cosmic tragedy and grandeur she becomes Egypt —the Nile embodied.
The Nile was seen as the life-blood of Egypt, inextricable to its identity. The region was also known for its torrid climate. As Sophia Chiari notes, “Egypt as a southern region was associated with extreme heat, so that the climatic conditions of Alexandria partly explained the alleged indolence and sluggishness of its inhabitants.”6 These characteristics were commonly associated with femininity in treatises of the age, establishing a false etymological connection between the Latin word for woman and softness.7 Shakespeare thus constructs an imagery which associates Cleopatra, regent of Egypt, with natural elements such as water and air, and the mud and slime of the Nile.
The climate of Egypt too affects the Romans. Antony succumbs to the Egyptian climate. He turns soft, indulgent, effeminate in the eyes of his Roman compatriots.8 They reminisce on his younger years as military commander and scarce recognise this middle-aged man so in sync with the whims and passions of his lover: they blend and shift into one another.
Like Cleopatra, Mark Antony is larger than life, and is compared to elements of nature, such as the sun and earth. A dichotomy of images between the lovers is thus established, to be subverted at the end by their grand death, becoming a truly sidereal spectacle. In lamenting Antony’s suicide —botched at first, consummated by aid of Cleopatra’s hand— Cleopatra compares him to the skies:
CLEOPATRA His face was as the heavens, and therein stuck A sun and moon, which kept their course and lighted The little O, th’ earth. (Act V, Scene 2)
And by joining him in suicide, she too sheds off her earthly ties:
CLEOPATRA Husband, I come: to that name my courage prove my title! I am fire and air; my other elements I give to baser life. (Act V, Scene 2)
Cleopatra is the opposite of temperate: she is a force of nature. Cleopatra is not a Moor, as the Ptolemies were Greek —but she is racialized as Other, a southern woman with a ‘tawny front’, sensual, powerful. She makes hail rain in the Nile and swells its waters with her desires. As Chiari states:
In the context of her hot eastern clime, Cleopatra’s intemperance, according to his own male bias, is what seems to guide her actions and promotes a form of triumphant promiscuity. As an embodiment of the southern woman supposedly unable to control her fleshly appetites, she is a seductress and luxuriousness thus runs through her blood. To make things worse for Anthony, she proves sufficiently cunning to stick to power, frail as it may be under Roman rule.9
Antony mournfully complains about Cleopatra’s lack of temperance: “For I am sure, / Though you can guess what temperance should be, / You know not what it is.” (Act III, Scene 13). For even though he boasts of being like the sun which nurtures her soil (Lepidus slyly comments to him: “Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mud by the operation of / your sun; so is your crocodile” Act II, Scene 7), in truth he is unable to govern her. In fact I would say it is quite the opposite, that their relationship is that of lovers who compliment each other and recognise themselves as equals —equals, at least, in their respective faculties.
Where a lack of temperance was seen before in wholly negative terms, it is precisely because of it that Cleopatra retains her power in face of Mark Antony and the Romans. It is framed as part of an opposed system of values to that of the imperial invaders, with their sobriety, their stoic temperance —eroded in Antony but consummated in victorious Caesar. In the end, while the Romans prevail and conquer Alexandria, our sympathies remain squarely with intemperate Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt: in life, death and beyond.
FLOYD-WILSON, M. (1998). Temperature, Temperance, and Racial Difference in Ben Jonson’s “The Masque of Blackness.” English Literary Renaissance, 28(2), 183–209.
BARTELS, E.C. (1990). Making more of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashionings of Race. Shakespeare Quarterly, 41(4), 433-454.
ibid.
ROYSTER, F. T. (2000). White-Limed Walls: Whiteness and Gothic Extremism in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Shakespeare Quarterly, 51(4), 432-455.
CHIARI, S. (2019). Othello: Shakespeare’s À bout de souffle. Shakespeare’s Representation of Weather, Climate and Environment: The Early Modernn Fated Sky, 111-149. Edinburgh University Press.
CHIARI, S. (2019). Overflowing the Measure: Cleopatra Unbound. Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare.
ibid.
CHIARI, S. (2019). Clime and Slime in Anthony and Cleopatra. Shakespeare’s Representation of Weather, Climate and Environment: The Early Modern Fated Sky. 176-216. Edinburgh University Press.
ibid.