According to Errol Hill, Shakespeare has only four black characters: “Aaron the Moor, who appears in Titus Andronicus [c. 1592], The Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice [c. 1597], Othello, in the play written at the height of Shakespeare’s powers in 1604, and his only black female, Cleopatra, in Antony and Cleopatra [1606-1607].” Caliban is not mentioned, despite his having become a postcolonial icon of the oppressed slave.
Othello is, versus Caliban, not a slave but a noble man in a context where he is perceived as different. He is respected and, despite the quiet racism expressed by Iago, his blackness does not stop him from marrying the white and virginal Desdemona. Othello is also a noble savage, protagonist of his own tragedy. He is described as a Moor and in that sense black or blackened. His colour has made this character attractive for reinterpretation by African and Caribbean writers in addition to the complex topic of the black male/white woman relationship.
The paper analyses how this relationship between the black man and the white woman is rewritten under the shadow of the Othello complex in two plays by Caryl Phillips: Strange Fruit (1981) and The Shelter (1984), and in Fred D’Aguiar’s A Jamaican Airman Foresees His Death (1995). In these plays Great Britain becomes a new Venice, where ‘trying freedom’ is not possible due to the existence of prejudice and racism.