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There is an often-employed stage property that consistently shows up in productions of Othello: very frequently, we see Othello wielding a scimitar. Edmund Kean, one of the most publicized performers of the nineteenth century, famously did so in the role (Honigmann 93). Tomasso Salvini similarly used a scimitar to "slit" his own throat as Othello, "and fell to the ground, gasping and gurgling" (94–96). Ira Aldridge, the first Black Othello, equipped himself with a menacingly bent scimitar as well (Greenblatt, et al. 16). The list goes on. Charles Kemble, Paul Robeson, Lawrence Olivier, and others have all carried the menacing, curved weapon so intrinsically tied to Mediterranean armies during the Crusades in their performances. As Ian Smith points out, "stage properties have a 'cultural biography'; beginning in the real world outside the theater, they assume different functions and manifest different identities at various stages in their social circulation up to and including their transition into the theater space" (3). What, then, is the extrinsic meaning of the scimitar on the early modern stage? For the above reasons, using the sabre in Europe was a culturally embattled undertaking. European swordsmen were finding the sabre to be a useful tool in their cavalries and navies, even though the weapon was attached to a longstanding cultural memory of the efficient mamelukes of Saladin's armies. The weapon was therefore a perfect example of the superiority of some Eastern weapons, but at the same time created anxiety in the fact that it was seeing use throughout Europe. Ewart Oakeshott explains that, by 1796, the cavalry sabre was the most prolific sword found in European warfare, and this sword directly descended from the Turkish scimitar (151). The fear that some English polemicists experienced relating to cultural miscegenation could easily latch on to the sabre, because it was an object that directly exercised upon other English swords the kinds of displacement polemicists decried. They were, ultimately, right, as this sword outlasted other European blades by centuries. In this sense, the weapon was a powerful object in mimetic discourse because it came ready-laden with associations of alterity. In short, appropriating the weapons of the Moors allowed English dramatists to speak of alterity through the kinetic language of violence.
With such a longstanding tradition,...