PRE-COLONIAL ANXIETIES: REASSESSING ORIENTALISM IN OTHELLO AND ANTHONY AND CLEOPATRA

This study offers a critical reassessment of Edward Said’s Orientalism by examining William Shakespeare’s Othello and Antony and Cleopatra. It challenges Said’s assertion that early modern Western representations of the East uniformly served to construct the Orient as irrational, inferior, and uncultured in contrast to a rational and superior Occident. Instead, this study argues that such a binary does not adequately account for England’s pre-colonial encounter with the powerful Ottoman Empire. During this period, English portrayals of the East were marked more by anxiety, fascination, and perceived vulnerability than by imperial dominance. In Othello, the protagonist’s racial and cultural ambiguity reflects English fears of “turning Turk”—the conversion to Islam and betrayal of Christian identity. In Antony and Cleopatra, Cleopatra embodies the destabilizing allure of the East, threatening Roman masculinity and imperial order. Antony’s symbolic “going native” and feminization express contemporary fears of cultural absorption. Moreover, Cleopatra subverts Orientalist stereotypes through her strategic manipulation of exoticism, overturning patriarchal hierarchies. By contextualizing both plays within early modern geopolitical tensions, this study argues for a more complex reading of Shakespeare’s representations of the East—one informed by ambivalence, awe, and political unease rather than simplistic notions of Western superiority.