Context in Jacobean times - created from Mind Map

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Race

women's limited rights

customs in theatre

religious divisions between Christians and Turks

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.

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.

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.

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE was a major threat to the hegemony of Christian Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries.

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.

The final collapse of the Empire was precipitated after the government entered the First World War on the side of Germany.