The European Renaissance forever changed the life of the contemporary individual. Explosive advances in education, technology, and commerce have expanded geographic and mental horizons; however, in England these developments were accompanied by demographic crises of poverty and unemployment. Moreover, the increased interaction with foreign cultures fomented by various commercial and diplomatic engagements aroused apprehension in English sensibilities. Eventually, Christian England would attempt to refashion these “foreigners” in their image and modern racial tensions would arise. The recursion of the trope of race, under the guise of blackness, paganism or even femininity, is widely present in literary tradition, and in particular in the work of Shakespeare. “There exists throughout literature an archetypal figure who escapes both poles of classical definition – appearing sometimes as a hero, sometimes as a villain, sometimes as a clown…[he] has been variously called “the shadow,” “ the other”, “the other”. the stranger, the stranger, the stranger. » It is this borderline figure, mired in ambiguity, that this investigation is interested in: firstly abroad like the Moor in Othello, the Welshman in Henry IV, Part 1, and the woman in both . I suggest that there is no concrete prospect of prejudice or sympathy towards these character types. Rather, the plurality in representations of qualities such as race, ethnicity, religion, morality, and gender demonstrates how fluid the condition of being foreign can be. In her book Shakespeare and Outsiders, Marianne Novy describes it as “a relative identity and not a fixed position”. Mockery or expression of hatred by one group of characters towards another who is different from them...... middle of paper ...... interpretation using the term "outsider" does not presume that inflexible dichotomies define characters as always either outsiders or insiders, or that the works in question always associate the strange with evil or the familiar with good or do the opposite. Especially in Henry IV, Part One and Shakespeare's Othello, being a foreigner is more of a relative condition than a firm position. Consider Othello: a central aspect of the experience of this play is the constantly changing point of view. The initial impression of Othello provided is that of a stranger through Iago's eyes, then his subsequent refutation of Iago's image, his character's gradual approach to actualizing this image as Iago makes him perceive Desdemona as an alien, and the destruction of the alien within himself while Iago reveals himself to all other characters as the true moral alien.