The racial politics of William Shakespeare’s Othello did not surprise English audiences when it premiered in 1604. By the late 1500s, English dramatists were used to manufacturing Satan’s Black agents on earth. Shakespeare’s first Black character, the evil, oversexed Aaron in Titus Andronicus, first came to the stage in 1594. Down in Spain, dramatists frequently staged Black people as cruel idiots in the genre called comedias de negros.7
