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After the establishment of Islam by Mohammed, the Arabs finally got organized and became a power. Bursting out of the desert, they conquered all of the Middle East, Turkey, and all of North Africa extending all the way to the Atlantic. They then crossed Gibralter and conquered most of Spain, which is where the events portrayed in Othello take place. These Arab invaders were referred to as "Moors", a word which comes from the same root as the modern nation name "Morocco" (the nation of the Moors, more or less). In other words, a Moor was an Arab: a dark skinned caucasian. Of course, nothing says that traditional racial classifications are binding on modern presenters of historical drama. There are five ways that race can be handled in historical drama: without change, transplant, being color blind, satirically, and tokenism/misinterpretation. The first is obvious, of course: if the part calls for a white man, cast a white man. If it calls for a black woman, cast a black woman. Transplant is interesting and can be very successful. Kurosawa transplanted King Lear into medieval Japan and converted the daughters into sons in his great film Ran and to my mind the result was even more successful than the original. Much of the character motivation in the film just makes more sense to me in the context of the early part of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Of course, that meant that every part was cast with Japanese actors, and all the dialog was rewritten into Japanese -- yet the essence of the play was preserved and even enhanced. I have seen this kind of thing done several times, with varying degrees of success. Probably the most famous was the transplantation of Romeo and Juliet into the Brooklyn slums in West Side Story. When casting is color blind, the results can be a bit jarring. Every once in a while some opera company decides to try to actually put on an entire production of Wagner's "Ring". (Sometimes it destroys them, since it is a major undertaking.) About fifteen years ago this was done and televised, and I watched and taped it. The second of the four plays is Die Walküre, and one of the characters in it is Sieglinde. Wagner was a notorious bigot, and all the main heroic or sympathetic characters in The Ring were envisioned by him as being played by whites with blonde hair and blue eyes. Yet for this particular presentation, a stunningly lovely black woman was cast as Sieglinde. After a momentary shock, the beauty of her voice and performance as she sang suspended my disbelief and I went with the flow. (I regret that I don't recall her name; I'm not much of an opera fan and don't keep up with who's hot.) Frankly, I don't think she was cast to make a statement; she was cast because she was the best person available for the role, being one of the top altos performing in the world at that time. Then there is satirical casting. The best example of this is the play The Mikado which is ostensibly about Japan but was actually a satire about Victorian England. Which is why you have the Emperor of Japan singing about punishing billiards sharps by condemning them to play "On a cloth untrue, With a twisted cue, And elliptical billiard balls!" Hardly something the real emperor would have been concerned with. As a result, no-one pays the slightest attention to the ostensible race of any of the characters, and casts anyone they feel like. I also once saw a small play done in Boston which was based on the legendary cartoon strip "Krazy Kat", which was superb, by the way. It was definitely low budget but there was charm to it. Now Kokonino County was a pretty surreal place anyway, full of strange characters like Peking Duck and Don Kyoti. In this production all the supporting actors played multiple parts. One of the supporting actors was a beautiful Chinese-American woman with a lovely face and a figure to die for. (I'm a sucker for Chinese women. Always have been.) One of the great plot arcs in Krazy Kat was when the gorgeous Fifi the French Poodle came into Kokonino County, and all the male characters went ga-ga over her. Naturally, this Chinese woman played Fifi -- and she was superb. Her French accent was flawless, and she had the moves (and the equipment to make them). The jarring contrast between her Chinese features and her complete absorption into a stereotypical French babe-type character (because, of course, Fifi the French Poodle was a stereotype anyway) just made the performance that much more hilarious. It was 
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