The Elizabethan Age was an age of remarkable global expansion. While this is so obvious as to need not bear repeating, it still is important to consider how this influences the plays. In particular, we find the question of the cultural outsider coming into the play. Three plays in particular – Othello, The Merchant of Venice, and The Tempest- are concerned with the outsider. Granted, we find other kinds of “outsiders” throughout Shakespeare: Richard III. But unlike Othello, Shylock, and Caliban they are isolated from others, as opposed to being outside and alien to the culture. It is not simply an issue of Anti-Semitism with Shylock nor Race with Othello. Link this to a fairly insular that is now engaging commercially and colonially with other peoples, and the issue becomes even more fraught. Well, consider the issue of the outsider in the plays we have read.
Use Othello, The merchant of venice, and Richard III