George Best on Frobisher's Travels (1578), in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations

I my self have seen an Ethiopian as black as coal brought into England, who taking a fair English woman to wife, begat a son in all respects as black as the father was, although England were his native country, and an English woman his mother: whereby it seemeth this blackness proceedeth rather of some natural infection of that man, which was so strong, that neither the nature of the Clime, neither the good complexion of the mother concurring, could anything alter.

Queen Elizabeth I's proclamation for the exportation of "negroes" from England (1601)

... whereas the Queen's majesty, tendering the good and welfare of her own natural subjects greatly distressed in these hard times of dearth, is highly discontented to understand the great numbers of Negars and Blackamoors which as she is informed are crept into this realm since the troubles between Her Highness and the King of Spain, who are fostered and relieved here to the great annoyance of her own liege people that want the relief which those people consume; as also for that the most of them are infidels, having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel, hath given especial commandment that the said kind of people should be with all speed avoided and discharged out of her majesty's dominions. ... And if there shall be any person or persons which are possessed of any such Blackamoors that refuse to deliver them in sort as aforesaid, then we require you to call them before you and to advise and persuade them by all good means to satisfy Her Majesty's pleasure therein; which if they shall eftsoons willfully and obstinately refuse, we pray you then to certify their names unto us, to the end Her Majesty may take such further course therein as it shall seem best in her princely wisdom.

Thomas Rymer (1692)

The Character of that State is to employ strangers in their Wars; but shall a Poet thence fancy that they will set a Negro to be their General; or trust a Moor to defend them against the Turk? With us a Black-amoor might rise to be a Trumpeter; but Shakespeare would not have him less than a Lieutenant-General. With us a Moor might marry some little drab, or Small-coal Wench: Shakespeare, would provide him the Daughter and Heir of some great Lord, or Privy-Councellor: And all the Town should reckon it a very suitable match.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1812)

Can we imagine him so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth, —at a time too, when negroes were not known except as slaves? As for lago's language to Brabantio, it implies merely that Othello was a Moor, that is black ... No doubt Desdemona saw Othello's visage in his mind; yet, as we are constituted and most surely as an English audience was disposed in the beginning of the seventeenth century, it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro. It would argue a disproportionateness, a want of balance, in Desdemona which Shakespeare does not appear to have in the least contemplated.

M. R. Ridley, Introduction to the Arden edition of Othello (1958, and reprinted through the 1980s)

Much argument, and an even more plentiful lack of it, has been devoted to showing that Othello was not black, or alternatively that he was at least not what Coleridge calls a "veritable negro", but rather, like the Prince of Morocco in a Q, stage-direction in The Merchant of Venice, a "tawny Moor"—Coleridge, rather surprisingly, admits the blackness but insists that he was a Moor in our sense of the word. The reductio ad absurdum of this line of criticism was achieved by a lady writing from Maryland, who said, "In studying the play of Othello, I have always imagined its hero a white man. It is true the dramatist paints him black, but this shade does not suit the man. It is a stage decoration, which my taste discards; a fault of colour from an artistic point of view. I have, therefore, as I have before stated in my readings of this play, dispensed with it. Shakespeare was too correct a delineator of human nature to have coloured Othello black, if he had personally acquainted himself with the idiosyncrasies of the African race.

"We may regard, then, the daub of black upon Othello's portrait as an ebullition of fancy, a freak of imagination,—the visionary conception of an ideal figure,—one of the few erroneous strokes of the great master's brush, the single blemish on a faultless work.

''Othello was a white man."¹

Now a good deal of the trouble arises, I think, from a confusion of colour and contour. To a great many people the word "negro" suggests at once the picture of what they would call a "nigger", the woolly hair, thick lips, round skull, blunt features, and burnt-cork blackness of the traditional nigger minstrel. Their subconscious generalization is as silly as that implied in Miss Preston's "the African race" or Coleridge's "veritable negro". There are more races than one in Africa, and that a man is black in colour is no reason why he should, even to European eyes, look sub-human. One of the finest heads I have ever seen on any human being was that of a negro conductor on an American Pullman car. He had lips slightly thicker than an ordinary European's, and he had somewhat curly hair; for the rest he had a long head, a magnificent forehead, a keenly chiselled nose, rather sunken cheeks, and his expression was grave, dignified, and a trifle melancholy. He was coal-black, but he might have sat to a sculptor for a statue of Caesar, or, so far as appearance went, have played a superb Othello.