Shakespeare Essay, Research Paper
Shakespeare was a playwright during the Elizabethan era. He wrote many famous plays, many of which are performed today. Shakespeare?s characters, themes and situations of his plays reflect people of the Elizabethan time period, this would make sense because that was the time in which he wrote the plays. Surprisingly, many of the situations and themes in Shakespeare?s plays are still situations in modern times that remain unresolved. In fact most all of Shakespeare?s plays contain a timeless quality. One timeless situation was the view white people had on black or non-white people. Another quality that was brought up in one of his plays was inter-racial marriages.
In Shakespeare?s play Othello, there is an inter-racial marriage between Desdemona and Othello. For that time period it was almost unheard of for a white women to marry a non-white man. Shakespeare was almost condemning inter-racial relationships. You can see how he did this in his play, Othello and Desdemona elope and get married and at the end of the play they both end up dead. So in fact it just reflects on his time period, because Shakespeare wrote to please his audience and if he was condoning inter-racial marriages the audience would not be pleased because they disagreed with that. Another reason why Shakespeare was condemning inter-racial relationships what the fact that in the Elizabethan era there were almost no black people living in Britain. For that time period it was so unusual for a black person to be with a white person. Today obviously there are many more people in the world. America is a melting pot, it has many people from different ethnic groups and races living within the borders. In todays society inter-racial relationships are generally more accepted however, there is always that large number of people that do not accept it and have problems with it. With all the people in the world today there is still only a small percent that are in relationships with people of a different race. Why is this? It could be because people just like people of their own race more or it could be because of another reason. The attitudes of the people in the Elizabethan period could have been passed down along the centuries and not changed. Maybe one day inter-racial relationships will be accepted widespread but for now there are still many people that do not accept it and they will just have to learn.
In the play other characters also refer to Othello as the Moore. This shows that even Shakespeare could have had a biased towards them. However he could have been writing to please a biased audience again. Although the movie Shakespeare in Love is not one of Shakespeare works it still was very accurate to the life and times of the Elizabethan people. Judging from the movie, which contained no black people, you can see that Shakespeare was more open minded than the general people. So he probably had different views towards other races. However in his writing there still is a bias towards the black people, you can see it in his play Titus and Andronicus, because the black person in that play is the bad guy and you tend to dislike him after viewing the play. Also you can see Shakespeare?s bias in Othello because the other characters generally do not recognise Othello by his name. This shows that he is below the other races. In todays world there is still a lot of racism. People just cannot except the fact that the races are equal, no one race is better than any other. Racism exists in many forms today and is still out there, just as it was in the Elizabethan era. Hopefully one day this racism and bias will not be in society, however it still exists today and the human race will just have to learn that there is only one race, the Human Race.
It is funny how something that related to the people and the times of the Elizabethan era still have meaning today. This shows just how Shakespeare?s writing is timeless and aspects of it will always be related to the modern times of today and the future.