Mar 20, 2020
Early modern associations with locusts and the practice of eating them help establish more context around a startling line in Shakespeare's play Othello.
It is plausible that, in penning this line from Othello, Shakespeare was self-consciously drawing on the longstanding literary trope of dietary othering which recurs across many genres of early modern writing. Iago’s choice of words suggests that locusts, while unappealing to the European palate, would have been “luscious” to Othello because of his ‘Moorish’ heritage. This suggests that an Elizabethan audience might have been expected to recognize the association between ‘Moors’ and locust-eating.
