ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at originally black, African surface that has been ‘washed’ since the Renaissance. This is the stolen handkerchief in William Shakespeare’s Jacobean tragedy Othello a black textile washed white less wittingly but no less troublingly than in Victorian advertisements for detergents or in banned 1930s cartoons. In 2005, Michael Neill noted that, with the twentieth century’s civil rights struggles, ‘the significance of Othello’s blackness has come to dominate interpretation of the play to an extraordinary degree’. His essay contrasts this emphasis on race with the historical periods of apparent indifference to or acceptance of the otherwise loaded issue of Othello and Desdemona’s interracial marriage. Lynda Boose’s Shakespeare ‘insistently created for his audience a highly visual picture of a square piece of white linen spotted with strawberry-red fruit’, which functioned as ‘a visually recognizable reduction of Othello and Desdemona’s wedding-bed sheets, the visual proof of their consummated marriage’.
