Imagining Alterity and Belonging on the EngUsh Stage in an Age of Expansion: A reading of Othello SANDRA YOUNG The "Master of the Revels" of the Jacobean court records a performance of The Moor of Venis by "Shaxberd" in November 1604.' The timing and the setting of this first performance of Othello in the court of James I, almost 20 years before it appeared in quarto, are of interest for a reflection on the relationship between the play's exploration of alterity and the constmction of 'Englishness'. The play comes into being within the English court, rather than the Globe or the Rose theatre. It is first performed to an audience that includes the expansionist Stuart monarch and.during a period marked by the active pursuit of English colonisation.^ The period's preoccupation with an emergent English nationalism precedes the appearance of the "Moor of Venice" before the newly crowned James, however. This preoccupation had already become evident in the production of texts fomiulating their projects in terms of an emergent consciousness of 'the nation', such as Richard Hakluyt's Principall Navigations voiages and discoueries of the English nation (1589), within a global context of competitive colonisation.^ The production of the national in Hakluyt's deliberately "English" compilation bespeaks an insecurity in relation to the global context into which the national is inserted. It is this anxiety, manifest in the period's cultural production, which I take as the setting for an investigation into alterity and belonging in Othello. Admittedly, Othello is set in Venice and Cypms. One might argue that England and Englishness don't feature. And yet one might read an assertion of the nation-based identification of "our Countrymen" in the play's preoccupation with what constitutes "Christian" identity, as opposed to the "Turks" and "Ottomites", who are associated with what is "barbarous", and in the distinctions that set "the Moor" apart. At least, so declares Shakespeare's contemporary, the English playwright Thomas Heywood, in An Apology for Actors (1612):'* "If wee present a foreign History, the subject is so intended, that in the lives of Romans, Grecians, or others, either the virtues of our Countrymen are extolled, or their vices reproved." Heywpod would have us know that 'we' playwrights are engaged with imagining "virtues", or characteristics, that can be attributed to a group identifiable in relation to the nation - "our countrymen" - even when the play is set within Venetian public culture. The welcome extended to the audience is an invitation, also, to participate in an act of imagining their own cultural context, even when the action is placed beyond English borders. And although Heywood is writing about historical drama, Jonathan Bate applies Heywood's interpretative instmctions to the tragedy of Titus Andronicus. Othello seems as open to this transposition. . A global context for interpreting Othello brings into view the ways in which the play might be said to unsettle demarcations of alterity even as it calls into being an imaginary within which alterity and difference are offered up for consumption within the English court. Scholars have become increasingly alert to some of the ways in which the Shakespearean stage manifests the English preoccupation with worlds beyond its coastline and with the emergence of 'Englishness'. The fact that England had become exposed to difference during the sixteenth century has been well acknowledged in a growing body of critical work within Shakespeare studies. Virginia Mason Vaughan argues that "after centuries of relative ethnic isolation English men and women were jolted by sudden exposure, in print and in person, to peoples remarkably different from themselves" (29). Though racial difference had not hardened into the unforgiving Shakespeare in Southern AfricaYQl23,2011,21-29 DOI: http://dx/doi.org/10.4314/sisa.v23il.3