Excerpt from "The Moor in English Renaissance Drama"

Othello is the tragic hero of Shakespeare's play, but other characters often refer to him as "the Moor." Find out what this means through this list based on the literary criticism by Jack D'Amico.

Here are all the word lists to support the reading of Grade 12 Unit 3's texts from SpringBoard's Common Core ELA series: The Right to Love, The Canonization, Othello, The Moor in English Renaissance Drama, Othello on Stage and Screen
12 words 17 learners

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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. inscrutable
    difficult or impossible to understand
    What we find is not one image of the Moroccan, but many images, from the dangerously inscrutable alien to the exotically attractive ally.
  2. despot
    a cruel and oppressive dictator
    But traditional images of the Moor as black devil, Islamic infidel, or oriental despot were certainly drawn on to articulate what the traders and diplomats experienced.
  3. polemic
    a verbal or written attack, especially of a belief or dogma
    The theatrical representation of the Moor, while shaped in part by the traditional anti-Islam polemic, or the characterization of the black man as devil, also reshapes those traditions.
  4. titillation
    a tingling feeling of excitement
    Yet the representation of the Moor could also lead the dramatist and the audience beyond a comfortable sense of superiority or the superficial titillation provided by a darkly alien villain.
  5. prowess
    a superior skill learned by study and practice
    Or power could be sought in ways acceptable to society, as was the case for Othello, who could seem "fair" both within his dark exterior and within the Venetian state because of his military prowess.
  6. alienation
    separation, often resulting from hostility
    Audiences and dramatists were drawn to the Moor as a type because the character provided a way to examine some of the most difficult questions of division and alienation.
  7. insidious
    working or spreading in a hidden and usually injurious way
    The audience that witnessed the struggle for self-control and the insidious powers that transform Othello would confront the destructiveness of its own collective perceptions of race, religion, and cultural difference.
  8. exploitation
    the act of making use of and profiting from resources
    Traditional definitions of Western norms and of the others who deviated from those norms provided a groundwork for curiosity, or a base of operations for exploration and exploitation.
  9. projection
    a defense mechanism attributing traits to someone else
    As we have seen with Tamburlaine, an outsider who became a projection of new political ambition, the imaginative contact with the outsider became a way of dramatizing the need to create new categories.
  10. deviation
    a variation from the standard or norm
    It is unsettling and also exciting to feel the ground of assumptions shift, as is the case in travel, when the norm is not your norm, when dress, speech, food, and the details of life reflect a difference that places you at the margin, reduced to a sign of deviation from the norm.
  11. degrade
    reduce in worth or character, usually verbally
    What is most disturbing for the outsider is the sense that the secret, unwritten codes are being used to degrade one's true image.
  12. convention
    something regarded as a normative example
    As a group, sharing language, a national and racial identity, and an inherited set of theatrical conventions, the audience would have been like those Venetians or Spaniards who share a culture the Moor can never understand.
Created on Fri Mar 06 13:56:23 EST 2015 (updated Fri Mar 06 16:41:21 EST 2015)

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