‘[A] Maid Called Barbary’: Othello, Moorish Maidservants And The Black Presence In Early Modern England

Abstract

Scholarly discussions of race in Othello have almost exclusively focused on the eponymous character. 1 Often forgotten is another Moorish character the play evokes, even if she does not make an appearance on the stage: Barbary, the maidservant Desdemona remembers in the Folio version and with whose tragic story she identifies to process her own experience of rejection and grief. 2 Barbary is an example of those women about whom Kim F. Hall wondered: why, '[w]hile feminists are increasingly uncovering the voices and presence of white Englishwomen,' do 'women of color [...] [even though] clearly a presence in [...] sixteenthand seventeenth-century England, [...] remain "invisible women" existing at the margins of