Robert Hornback
Emblems of Folly in the First Othello: Renaissance Blackface, Moor's Coat, and "Muckender"
Volume 35.1, Spring 2001

Despite recognizing comic elements, Othello criticism has failed to recognize the overlap between traditional emblems of folly and those initially used in performance to characterize Othello-blackface, handkerchief, and Moor's coat. Yet, Shakespeare emphatically evoked such emblems in his depiction of this character, whose own "best judgement [is] collied" or blackened, like the everyman Wit's face in late-Tudor morality plays. The Jacobean actor's "begrimed ... black ... face" further linked Othello to the devils of mystery cycles who were not simply evil but laughable, blackened fools who had lost their wits. Shockingly, part of the allegorical depiction of losing one's reason and being made an abject fool often included having one's face blackened. In Renaissance festivity, then, blackface was associated with the so-called "natural" fool, a comic butt who is laughed at because he is physically and/or mentally deficient, a transgressor of norms to be scapegoated and abused. Even Othello's obsession with the handkerchief recalls the natural fool's "muckender," a handkerchief appended to a long-coat as a means of wiping a fool's nose or mouth. Similarly, a Moor's conventional alien stage apparel, the exotic ankle-length "Mores cotte," would have suggested the natural's long-coat. The abused Moor is, moreover, actually referred to as a "credulous fool," "fool," "coxcomb," "ass," "gull," and "dolt," and he rebukes himself with "O fool, fool, fool!" upon realizing his folly. Painfully, then, part of the effect of this tragedy was that "the noble Moor" was made to become the abject fool he allegorically appeared to be.

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