Othello (character) arrested, transported from Cyprus to Venice, and tortured, but refuses to admit his guilt. He is condemned to exile; Desdemona's relatives eventually put him to death. The ensign escapes any prosecution in Desdemona's death but engages in other crimes and dies after being tortured. There is no consensus over Othello's race. E. A. J. Honigmann, the editor of the Arden Shakespeare edition concluded that Othello's race is ambiguous. "Renaissance representations of the Moor were vague, varied, inconsistent, and contradictory. As critics have established, the term 'Moor' referred to dark-skinned people in general, used interchangeably with similarly ambiguous terms as 'African',
Religious views of William Shakespeare Elizabeth's chief councillor Lord Burghley, and the 1584 "Doctrine of Equivocation" by the Spanish prelate Martin Azpilcueta that was disseminated across Europe and into England in the 1590s. Perhaps Shakespeare's most direct reference in the plays to contemporary religious issues comes at the birth of Queen Elizabeth in "Henry VIII", during whose reign, as the character Archbishop Cranmer, architect of the reformation, predicts: "God shall be truly known". The words in question, however, are generally attributed to Fletcher, and not directly attributable to Shakespeare. One perspective is that to deduce from the evidence a definite Anglican Shakespeare is to misapprehend