When he recounts the story that won Desdemona's heart, Othello mentions having been taken by the / And sold to (1) For readers today these lines, spoken by a character described as on multiple occasions, immediately evoke the specter the Atlantic triangle and the widespread enslavement sub-Saharan Africans. In recent years, however, many critics have warned against such associations on the grounds that they are anachronistic. They argue that we lose sight Othello's historical specificity if we read it in the context racial categories that would only crystallize later in the century with the rise a plantation economy. (2) Instead, scholars such as Jonathan Burton, Julia Reinhardt Lupton, and Daniel Vitkus have suggested that Othello's capture by the insolent foe should be read not in the context the Atlantic slave trade but rather that piracy and kidnapping in the Islamic Mediterranean. In this reading, the play becomes a drama conversion, in which Othello's Moorishness associates him with Islam as much as it does with blackness. (3) Placing Othello in this Mediterranean context thus avoids naturalizing--enshrining as timeless and essential--vocabularies race that are in fact the product a particular moment in the development a global economy. In his introduction to the most recent Oxford edition Othello, Michael Neill ably sums up the significance this Mediterranean-focused approach to our understanding the play's engagement with slavery: For modern audiences, Othello's story enslavement will inevitably be colored by the horrors that later history; but, as the work Nabil Matar and Daniel Vitkus has demonstrated, Moors were, on balance, more likely to figure in the early seventeenth-century English imagination as enslavers than as slaves; and Othello's narrative capture, enslavement, and redemption thence actually parallels the experience many prisoners on both sides a Muslim-Christian conflict that stretched back at least to the Crusades. As such it belongs not to the industrialized human market place the Atlantic triangle, but to the same Mediterranean theatre war as the Turkish invasion Cyprus. (4) Neill and the critics cited above propose that we read Othello as a Mediterranean drama conversion as an engagement with the rise color-based slavery. In this essay, I draw on and develop their important insights, but argue that this instead of is unnecessary: it is not in fact anachronistic to read Othello in the context both the Mediterranean and the enslavement sub-Saharan Africans. If we read Othello as participating in a nascent discourse that associates enslavement with blackness, we do not need to see that interpretation as looking forward in time, anticipating a global system chattel slavery that is yet to be firmly entrenched. Instead, I argue that we can see Othello's engagement with slavery by looking across space, and bringing the play into dialogue with early seventeenth-century Spanish representations blackness. There were tens thousands enslaved black Africans in Spain and Portugal by the turn the seventeenth century, and the Spanish comedia inscribes a relationship between blackness and slavery. (5) Although the relationship between blackness and slavery is far more explicit in these Spanish plays than it is in Othello, a similar tension around blackness and service can be seen in English and Spanish texts alike. I begin with a brief history the Iberian slave trade and representations blackness and slavery in the Spanish comedia before turning to a close reading one Spanish play, Ximenez de Enciso's Juan Latino. My reading demonstrates the ways in which representations slavery and blackness were closely intertwined on the early modern Spanish stage. I conclude by reading Othello in the context Juan Latino's frequent and explicit references to the enslavement black Africans. …