Page Two

• Elizabethan stereotypes about Moors - innately immoral and sinful - an association influenced by the artistic tradition of depicting devils as black-skinned, which dated back to medieval woodcuts
• Elizabethan stereotypes about Moors - sexually deviant and driven by primitive desires (rather than reason, logic or morality)
• Elizabethan stereotypes about Moors - intellectually inferior and credulous; prone to violence, anger and jealously (influenced by the Moorish scholar Leo Africanus' stereotypical descriptions of Africans in a Geographical Historie of Africa (1600)
• '[Elizabethan] England was increasingly hostile to foreigners [xenophobic]... and London had witnessed several major riots against foreign residents and artesans [workers]' (Ania Loomba)
• Moors as a threat to Elizabethan society - Queen Elizabeth I's privy council issues a draft decree demanding the deportation of 'negars and blackamoores' who had 'crept into the realm'
• Shakespeare's depiction of Othello as an eloquent Moor with great military expertise may have been influenced by the Moorish ambassador of the King of Barbary who visited Queen Elizabeth I's court in 1600 to negotiate an alliance against Catholic Spain. However, Othello's reference to being 'sold to slavery; aligns himself with a more stereotypical Moorish narrative of enslavement
• In the Elizabethan period cuckolds (men whose wives were unfaithful) were stigmatised as weak, lacking in control and impotent. They were often depicted using the imagery of stag horns (an allusion to the mating habits of stags who forfeit their mates when they are defeated by another male)