Othello on Othello. Although characters described as "moors" appear in two other Shakespeare plays ("Titus Andronicus" and "The Merchant of Venice"), such characters were a rarity in contemporary theatre, and it was unknown for them to take centre stage. There is no consensus over Othello's ethnic origin. 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 terms such as 'African', 'Somali', 'Ethiopian', 'Negro', 'Arab', 'Berber', and
Crollalanza theory of Shakespeare authorship part of Palladino's theories from the 1920s, but Shaul Bassi of the University of Venice suggests that the first clear identification of Crollalanza as Shakespeare's original name came from the once-famous medium Luigi Bellotti who in 1936 told a reporter that Shakespeare had communicated with him "psychographically" and revealed that his real name was Crollalanza, from Valtellina. In 1943 Bellotti published a pamphlet repeating these claims: "L'Italianità di Shakespeare: Guglielmo Crollalanza grande genio italiano". In 2002 Martino Iuvara published "Shakespeare era Italiano: Saggio" ("Shakespeare was an Italian: an Essay"). In this work, Iuvara, a retired Sicilian journalist and teacher of