Context in Jacobean times

Context in Jacobean times

1. Race

   • Shakespeare portrays Othello as being set apart from the white European society.
   • Anxieties about the mixing of races through inter marriage- racial divide between Othello and Desdemonda is portrayed in calling Othello ‘Barbary horse’ and ‘black ram’, Iago associates carnality and animality with Othello and blackness.
   • ‘Moor’ is a name applied to the Arab and Berber peoples of North Africa who inhabited medieval Spain. Iago calls Othello a ‘Barbary horse’ - associations of ‘barbarian’ with paganism and savagery.
   • Because there was no official categorization for race, few other than diarists remarked on that distinction.

2. women's limited rights

   • treatment of women implies confidence in their audience's involvement in the issues on which they focus.
   • Puritans promoted liberal attitudes towards women, The dramatists echo them in disapproving of virginity as an end in itself, and in encouraging sexual passion in marriage.
   • opposing inhumane practices such as forced marriage, and in pointing out that a wife's obedience to her husband is conditional on his treatment of her
   • The drama reflects contemporary uneasiness at women's liberty in a society where economic change alters a wife's relation to her husband's work
   • The dramatists focus on the causes of adultery, the temptations of money and social status, the corruption of Court life, the condition of womanhood - which operate against women.
     • whether they lie in witchcraft, or in special pressures
     • attack the double standard by dividing moral responsibility equally between seducer and seduced, and by implicating the husband in the adulteress's guilt.

3. customs in theatre

   • English Renaissance theatre
   • Shakespeares plays were set for king James' opion and he intended to please him including plays such as macbeth.
   • inter act music
   • conventional drama, poetry was the convention
   • Minimal scenery and limited costume changes made the transitions between scenes lightning-fast and kept the story moving.

4. religious divisions between Christians and Turks

   • THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE was a major threat to the hegemony of Christian Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries.
     • The final collapse of the Empire was precipitated after the government entered the First World War on the side of Germany.
   • The Christians ruled over by the Turks were not only the Orthodox and Roman Catholics in Europe, but also many Eastern-rite Christians in Asia Minor and North Africa.
   • Partly on behalf of the large numbers of Christians who lived under Turkish rule: the Armenians in particular had suffered persecution at the hands of the Turks.