Does this Tudor portrait reveal the inspiration for Othello?

An enigmatic portrayal of the Moroccan ambassador to London was painted during his visit to the court of Queen Elizabeth I in 1600. Then William Shakespeare got to work...

The portrait of Abd Al Wahid bin Mas'ud bin Muhammad bin ’Anuri is on display at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The ambassador has cast his piercing gaze over four centuries of history. Empires have risen and fallen, wars won and lost. He has seen it all, stern and unblinking.

His likeness was created in London in 1600, the artist probably drawn to the exotic appearance – even in Elizabethan England – of the man’s robes, turban and magnificently decorated curved simcha or sword.

The sitting by His Excellency Abd Al Wahid bin Mas'ud bin Muhammad bin ’Anuri took place soon after his arrival to represent the Sa'adian ruler of Morocco, Ahmed Al Mansur, at the court of Queen Elizabeth I.

Thought to be the oldest surviving painting of a Muslim in England, the portrait also carries an air of mystery. We do not know who painted it or why.

The work vanished from public view until it was sold at auction by Christie's in 1955 and now forms part of the collection at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at the University of Birmingham, which recently reopened after a major refurbishment.

But the greatest unsolved question of all centres on the playwright William Shakespeare.

Within the year of the ambassador's arrival in London, Shakespeare began work on one of his greatest tragedies. Othello has as its central character a Moor, as Christians of that period described Muslims from the Maghreb, the western Arab countries that include Morocco.

Could the ambassador have been an inspiration for Shakespeare’s Othello, a commander in the army of Venice and married to Desdemona, a beautiful Christian woman?

The idea has its supporters. After all, the painting hung on the walls of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, the playwright’s birthplace, before being moved to the Birmingham campus.

The actor Ben Kingsley used it as the basis of his costume when playing Othello in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1985 production directed by Terry Hands.

Professor Michael Dobson, the director of the Shakespeare Institute, thinks it is highly likely that playwright would have been aware of the ambassador, whose position in his own country was almost equivalent to prime minister.

The ambassador arrived at the port of Dover in the summer of 1600 on an English ship, The Eagle, and then travelled by road to London with a retinue of 15.

He and his team of diplomats were seen about town, perhaps even visiting the newly opened Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare’s plays were performed, including Hamlet.

“[The ambassador] was around in London for the best part of a year,” says Prof Dobson. “He was very much an object of public discussion and Shakespeare was around court performing plays. There was a lot of talk about this bloke, and Shakespeare is very likely to have seen him.”

On the surface, this was a simple trade mission but the ambassador imagined more than that in the relationship with England. In 1588, just 12 years earlier, Elizabeth had seen off the Spanish Armada, and Catholic Spain and Protestant England were still at war.

Could the Queen be persuaded to form a military alliance with Morocco that would drive the Spanish from southern Spain and restore Arab rule in what had been Muslim Al Andalus, lost a century earlier?

Prof Dobson speculates that the painting may even have been commissioned by the ambassador himself, and left as a gift for the Queen and as a permanent record of his visit. The fact that it prominently carries his age, unusual in Elizabethan portraiture, could be significant, he thinks.

“We know he was at the accession day tournament in 1600 which was an event to celebrate the fact that Elizabeth had been on the throne for 42 years. And here's this painting that labels him as having been alive for 42 years. That says my life, your reign, we can work together,” he says.

In the end, the plan failed. Elizabeth was 66, in declining health, and with no interest in starting a new front in the war. She died three years later, with her successor, James I, making peace with Spain.

As for inspiring the Bard, Prof Dobson notes that there is a general connection in that the play features a figure from the East who is associated with Islam, “which is very important in Othello in a way that it isn't in other Shakespeare plays”.

But he strongly doubts that the character could be based on the ambassador. “The idea that he was the direct inspiration for Othello won't do at all. Othello is a dramatisation of an Italian story, which Shakespeare probably knew already. And Othello is clearly sub-Saharan African rather than an Arab nobleman of some kind.”

Still, the Moroccan and his entourage certainly did make an impact on Elizabethan London. Mostly, they seem to have been regarded with suspicion and some hostility.

The party was observed by the Elizabethan historian John Stow, who saw that they “killed all their own meat within their house, as sheep, lambs, poultry and such like, and they turned their face eastward, when they killed anything”.

At least one of the group, known at the time as Barbarians after the Barbary Coast of North Africa, appears to have died during the trip.

John Chamberlain, whose letters provide a valuable record of this period, reported in October 1600 that “the Barbarians were yesterday at Court to take theyre leave and will be gon shortly”.

Housed in a “speciale place” in Whitehall, according to Stow, the ambassador is known to have had at least two meetings with Elizabeth before departing for home in February 1601.

Londoners were not alone in regarding him with suspicion. He was from a family of Spanish-born Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity, and had then returned to Islam in Morocco. Seen as a convert, many of his fellow Muslims did not trust him, and by the time he died, also in 1603, the plan to rebuild Al Andalus was abandoned.

More recently the ambassador, or at least his portrait, has been traversing the seas again. In 2022 and 2023 the painting was part of a major travelling exhibition, The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England, that went to several major US institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum Of Art in New York.

After returning last October, it was cleaned and slightly retouched. Painted in oil on three oak panels, these were supported from behind by a new foam block that matched the curvature of the wood.

A decision was taken to rehang it at the Barber Institute, a world-class collection that includes old masters by Botticelli, Rubens, Turner, Monet, Degas, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Magritte. The institute, which is undergoing a £10 million (Dh46m) refurbishment, reopened its main galleries on June 22.