How were the moors regarded in Shakespeares day?
As slavery was still a normal part of the social life of England, generally aristocratic people would look down upon ‘Moors’ as being inferior. However, in academic circles, the idea of ‘The Noble savage’ was becoming fashionable. Most people saw the ‘Moors’ as a novelty, an ethnographic curiosity, as ‘barbarian’. Some saw them as exotic, like where Shakespeare refers to black people in Romeo and Juliet, he writes ‘ It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night like a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear (Romeo & Juliet Act I, Scene V). So here is one attitude of an attraction to the exotic. Daniel Defoe, writing Robinson Crusoe in the early 1700’s, refers to cannibals and savages, and writes of black people as uncivilized, “the other”, to be feared. In 1595 Queen Elizabeth wrote a letter complaining about the number of ‘blackamoors’ coming into the country, when, she said, there were too many of them here already. Evidently people were worrying about immigration even in those days. But what th
