Othello William Shakespeare

Performance history

Shakespeare's day to the Interregnum

Othello was written for and performed by the King's Men, the playing company to which Shakespeare belonged, and the 1622 Quarto notes on its title page that the play was "Diuerse times acted at the Globe, and at Black-Friers, by his Maiesties seruants".[173] These two theatres had very different features - the former a large outdoor theatre accommodating an audience of 3,000; the latter a private indoor theatre that sat around 700, paying higher prices - and the style of playing would have adapted to these different conditions.[173] The play was performed at Court by the King's Men on 1 November 1604, and again in 1612-13 as part of the celebrations for the Wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V of the Palatinate.[173]

The title role was originally played by Richard Burbage, whose eulogies reveal that he was admired in the role.[174][175] Moorish characters were conventionally played in turbans, with long white gowns and red trousers, with the actor's face darkened with lampblack or coal.[176] The original Iago was likely John Lowin.[177][178]

Restoration and 18th century

All theatres were closed down by the Puritan government on 6 September 1642. Upon the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, two patent companies (the King's Company and the Duke's Company) were established, and the existing theatrical repertoire divided between them: Othello being allocated to the King's Company's repertoire.[179] These patents stated that "all the women's parts to be acted in either of the said two companies for the time to come may be performed by women". The first professional acting appearance by a woman on the English stage was that of Desdemona in Othello on 8 December 1660, although history does not record who took the role.[180][181] Margaret Hughes is the first woman known to have played Desdemona.[182]

In Restoration theatres, it was common for Shakespeare's plays to be adapted or rewritten.[183] Othello was not adapted in this way, although it has often been cut to conform to current ideas of decorum or refinement.[184] These cuts were not limited to removing violent, religious or sexual content, but extended on different occasions to removing references to eavesdropping, to Othello's fit, to Othello's tears, to the first 200 lines of the fourth act, or to the entire role of Bianca.[185]

Among seventeenth- and eighteenth-century actors praised for expressing the nobility of the Moor - and fully exploring the degrading passions which lead to the brutal murder he commits - were Thomas Betterton and Spranger Barry.[186] A review of the latter by John Bernard expressed how Barry's Othello "looked a few seconds in Desdemona's face, as if to read her feelings and disprove his suspicions; then, turning away, as the adverse conviction gathered in his heart, he spoke falteringly, and gushed into tears."[187]

The first professional performances of the play in North America are likely to have been those of the Hallam Company: Robert Upton (William Hallam's advance man) performed Othello at a makeshift theatre in New York on 26 December 1751; and religious objections to theatre led the Hallam Company to perform Othello as a series of "moral dialogues" at Rhode Island in 1761.[188]

Although not performed in Portugal until the nineteenth century, the play holds of the distinction of being the first of Shakespeare's works to have reached a Portuguese-speaking country, possibly at the request of a Portuguese reader, in 1765.[189]

19th century

Paul Robeson's iconic performance (see 20th Century, below) was not the first professional performance of the title role by a black actor: the first known is James Hewlett at the African Grove Theatre, New York, in 1822.[190] And Hewlett's protégé Ira Aldridge (billed as "The African Roscius") played many Shakespearean roles across Europe for forty years, including Othello at the Royalty Theatre, London, in 1825.[191]

There are stories of extravagant audience reactions to the play. One of the most extreme is related by French novelist Stendhal who reports that at the Baltimore Theatre in 1822 a soldier interrupted the performance just before Desdemona's murder, shouting "It will never be said that in my presence a confounded Negro has killed a white woman!" The soldier fired his gun, breaking the arm of the actor playing Othello.[192]

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Othello was regarded as the most demanding of Shakespeare's roles: it is considered a part of theatre legend that Edmund Kean collapsed while playing the role, and died two months after.[193] Leigh Hunt saw Kean's Othello in 1819, describing his performance in The Examiner as "the masterpiece of the living stage".[194] Before Kean, the leading exponent of the role had been John Philip Kemble who played a "neoclassical hero". In contrast, Kean presented Othello as a man of romantic temperament, and uncontrollable passion.[195] It was also Kean who initiated the so-called "Bronze Age of Othello" by insisting that "it was a gross error to make Othello either a negro or a black"[196] and thereby commencing a stage tradition of using lighter makeup rather than blackface.[197] An advantage of this change was that the actor's facial expressions could be more clearly seen.[198]

Critics have naturally focused on the two central male roles. But Emilia becomes a powerful role in the final act. Indeed Charlotte Cushman's Emilia was said to upstage Edwin Forrest's Othello in 1845.[199] And when Fanny Kemble played Desdemona in 1848 she changed the performance tradition. Previously, Desdemonas had (in her words) "always appeared to me to acquiesce with wonderful equanimity in their assassination" but Kemble, a passionate feminist and abolitionist, decided "I shall make a desperate fight for it, for I feel horribly at the idea of being murdered in my bed."[200]

In 1848, Othello was produced by Barry Lewis at the Sans Souci Theatre in Calcutta. The casting of the white "Mrs. Anderson" opposite the dark-skinned Indian Baishnav Charan Auddy led to controversy, to polarized reviews, and to a fiasco on the opening night when half of the cast, military men, were prohibited from leaving barracks by order of the Brigadier of Dum Dum.[201]

For Tommaso Salvini and Edwin Booth the role of Othello was a career-length project.[202] Salvini always played the role in Italian, even when acting alongside a company performing in English.[203] His conception of the role was of a barbarian with savage and passionate instincts concealed by a thick veneer of civilisation.[204] Konstantin Stanislavski admired, and was greatly influenced by, Salvini's Othello, which he saw in 1882. In My Life in Art, Stanislavski recalls Salvini's scene before the Senate, saying that the actor "grasped all of us in his palm, and held us there as if we were ants or flies".[205] Booth, in complete contrast, played Othello as a restrained gentleman. When Ellen Terry played Desdemona she commented on how much Booth's style helped her: "It is difficult to preserve the simple, heroic blindness of Desdemona to the fact that her lord mistrusts her, if her lord is raving and stamping under her nose. Booth was gentle with Desdemona."[206]

Booth was also an acclaimed Iago, and his advice to actors of the role was: "to portray Iago properly you must seem to be what all the characters think and say you are, not what the spectators know you to be; try to win even them by your sincerity. Don't act the villain."[207]

Stanislavski himself first played Othello in 1896. He was dissatisfied with his own performance, later recalling "I was able to reach nothing more than insane strain, spiritual and physical impotence, and the squeezing of tragic emotion out of myself."[208]

20th century

Othello was performed in the Shimpa style in Japan in 1903 by Otojiro Kawakami, resetting the location Cyprus to Taiwan, which was then a Japanese colony.[209]

In 1930 Stanislavski directed a production of Othello for the Moscow Art Theatre, which was influential in the development of his system. The performance was directed remotely, by letter, while Stanislavski recovered from illness in France.[210]

The most significant theatre production in wartime America featured Paul Robeson as Othello.[211] Robeson had previously played the role in London in 1930 with a cast including Peggy Ashcroft, Sybil Thorndike and Ralph Richardson, and would later take the role for the RSC in 1959 at Stratford-Upon-Avon.[212] Margaret Webster's 1943 Broadway production was considered a theatrical landmark, with Robeson (in the words of Howard Barnes) "making the Moor the great and terrible figure of tragedy which he has so rarely been on the stage."[213] José Ferrer played Iago and Uta Hagen Desdemona. Taking the Broadway run with its subsequent tour, the show was seen by over half a million people.[214] Earle Hyman saw the production numerous times when he was 17 and later recalled "this tremendous excitement - the first African-American onstage to be playing this role ... to all the blacks, he represented us. It was a moment of great pride."[215]

In 1947, Kenneth Tynan saw Frederick Valk and Donald Wolfit play Othello and Iago respectively, and described the experience as equivalent to witnessing the Chicago Fire, the Quetta Earthquake or the Hiroshima Bomb.[216]

"Black all over my body, Max Factor 2880, then a lighter brown, then Negro Number 2, a stronger brown. Brown on black to give a rich mahogany. Then the great trick: that glorious half yard of chiffon with which I polished myself all over until I shone... The lips blueberry, the tight curled wig, the white of the eyes, whiter than ever, and the black, black sheen that covered my flesh and bones, glistening in the dressing-room lights."

Laurence Olivier's makeup routine for Othello[217]

When Laurence Olivier performed Othello at the National in 1964,[218] his sense of "being black", in his words, required him "to be beautiful" with a voice "dark violet - velvet stuff" and a walk "like a soft black leopard".[219] (The filmed version of this production is discussed under "Screen" below.)

The play was extremely popular in Ethiopia, running for three years in the mid-1980s at the City Hall Theatre, Addis Ababa, in Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin's translation - performed in a static and declamatory style.[220] When Janet Suzman directed the play in South Africa during Apartheid in 1988, the performance was passionately politicised, with the racism of several characters - and especially Iago (modelled on Eugène Terre'Blanche) - foregrounded.[221] The play was highly controversial - the physical contact between the black John Kani and the white Joanna Weinburg provoking walk-outs and a pile-up of hate mail.[222]

White actors continued to dominate the role until the 1980s.[218] Willard White in 1989 was the first black actor to play Othello at Stratford since Paul Robeson thirty years earlier.[223]

A "singular and idiosyncratic"[224] performance of a white actor in the central role was Jude Kelly's "photonegative" production for the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. in 1997, in which Patrick Stewart played Othello as white, while almost all other speaking parts were played by actors of African descent.[225] The script remained unchanged as regards the character's race, so the white Othello was, throughout, referred to as black.[226]

21st century

At the turn of the century, performances at the RSC were dominated by their Iagos. Richard McCabe followed Simon Russell Beale in portraying misogynistic, embittered NCOs, older than their respective Othellos:[227]

Singaporean director Ong Keng Sen produced an intercultural version of the play in 2000: his Desdemona featured actors, musicians, designers and artists from India, Korea, Myanmar, Indonesia and Singapore, performing in a range of different traditional Asian styles.[228]

Cathy Downes' 2001 production at the Court Theatre in Christchurch, New Zealand made effective use of a trope (which had had racist overtones when used by earlier European directors) of Othello reverting to his native culture: setting the action in the Waikato Land Wars, Othello was a British-adopted general leading forces against his own people, until finally bursting into a "terrifying wero" (a warrior's challenge) before exacting his revenge on Desdemona.[229]

A radically different approach was taken in Jette Steckel's 2009 German language production for the Deutsches Theater Berlin. Although the translation consistently used the word "Schwarze" for "Moor" in the original, Othello was played by the white German actress Susanne Wolff in a range of different costumes and disguises, including a gorilla suit for part of Act 4 - creating a performance in which everything is (in Ayanna Thompson's words) "conveyed through representational metaphors which render Othello's race less of a stable physical marker and more of a fractured and performative one."[230]

A common theme of modern productions of the play is an emphasis on military life. When Adrian Lester played the role in Nicholas Hytner's 2013 National Theatre production, a retired army veteran was employed to teach the cast about ranks, comportment and off-duty behaviours.[231] Another 21st century trend exemplified by that performance is to reduce the focus of the play on Othello's race by having other parts played by actors of colour also.[232] And a third is an increasing focus on Desdemona's youth and innocence, at the expense of her strength of character.[233]

Othello's "difference" has been tested in ways other than race. A rare example is Stein Winge's 2015 casting of a white American actor, Bill Pullman, as an American Navy man adrift in Norway.[234]

The play has provided opportunities for breakout roles for rising black stars, such as Chiwetel Ejiofor who played Othello at the Donmar Warehouse in 2008, and for a change of direction for other established stars: Willard White (see "20th century", above) was better known as an opera singer and Lenny Henry (see "True Identity" under "Screen" below), who played Othello for Northern Broadsides in 2009, was better known as a stand-up comedian.[235]

When Antony Sher played Iago for the RSC, the final moment of the play, before a snap blackout, was for him to look up and stare at the audience. Director Greg Doran intended this to be strange, enigmatic, open to interpretation. But Sher later wrote that he was always clear about it: in his head the question which always rang out was:

"You saw what was happening - why didn't you stop it?" [236]

Screen

Othello has influenced many film makers, and often the results are adaptations, rather than performances of Shakespeare's text. The UK's National Film and Television Archive holds over 25 20th-Century films containing performances, adaptations or extracts from Othello including Anson Dyer's 1920 animated Othello, 1921's Carnival and its 1932 remake, the 1922 German film The Moor, the 1936 Men Are Not Gods, 1941's East of Piccadilly, George Cukor's 1947 A Double Life, Orson Welles in Return to Glennascaul and Welles' own Othello, Sergei Yutkevich's Russian language Othello discussed below, two productions for BBC Television (including Jonathan Miller's for the BBC Television Shakespeare series, discussed below), Basil Dearden's All Night Long, a 1988 South African TV screening of Janet Suzman's Othello, a film of Trevor Nunn's RSC production with Willard White and Ian McKellen in the central roles, and True Identity - a crime caper in which Lenny Henry's character Miles lands the role of understudy to James Earl Jones (playing himself) in a production of Othello.[237] Carnival, Men Are Not Gods and A Double Life all feature the plot of an actor playing the title role in Shakespeare's Othello developing murderous jealousy for their Desdemonas.[238][239] This plot is also shared by the very first Othello-influenced film: the 18-minute Danish 1911 Desdemona.[240][241] All Night Long reframes the story in a jazz milieu.[242] And Richard Eyre's Stage Beauty depicts a restoration performance of the play.[243]

The filming of Orson Welles' Othello was plagued by chaos. A pattern emerged where Welles would collect his cast and crew for filming, then after four or five weeks his money would run out and filming would cease: Welles would then appear in another movie, and using his acting fee would reconvene filming. Scenes in the final movie were sometimes spliced together from one actor filmed in Italy in one year, and another actor filmed in Morocco the next.[244] Welles uses shadows, extreme camera angles and discordant piano music to force the audience to feel Othello's disorientated view of Desdemona.[245] Cages, grilles and bars are frequent images.[246] And the text is heavily cut: Othello's first words are his speech to the Senators from Act 1 Scene 3.[247][248] The film was critically panned on its 1955 release (headlines included "Mr Welles Murders Shakespeare in the Dark" and "The Boor of Venice") but was acclaimed as a classic upon its re-release in a restored version in 1992.[249]

Sergei Yutkevich's Russian film, with a screenplay by Boris Pasternak, was an attempt to make Shakespeare accessible to "the working man".[250] Yutkevitch had begun his career as a painter and then as a set designer, and his film was widely praised for its pictorial beauty.[250] The director saw his film as an opposite of Welles': where Welles began his film with a sequence from the end of the story, highlighting fate, Yutkevitch began with his Othello's back-story, thereby highlighting his characters' free will.[251]

Laurence Olivier said that the role of Othello demanded "enormously big"[252] acting, and he incorporated what The Spectator described as his "outsize, elaborate, overwhelming"[253] performance into the film of his National Theatre production. The effect to modern audiences is (in the words of Daniel Rosenthal) "laughably over-the-top"[254] - in keeping with its nature as a filmed stage performance, rather than a performance designed for the screen. The film was a financial success, and earned Oscar nominations for each of Olivier as Othello, Maggie Smith as Desdemona, Frank Finlay as Iago and Joyce Redman as Emilia.[255] Subsequent critics have been less sympathetic to Olivier's performance than his contemporary audience had been, tending to read it as racist.[256] As Barbara Hodgdon expresses it: "Oliver's Othello confirms an absolute fidelity to white stereotypes of blackness."[257]

The last of the screen versions to portray Othello in blackface was Jonathan Miller's for the BBC Television Shakespeare series, with Anthony Hopkins in the title role. Miller is said to have commented that "the play is about jealousy, not race."[258] The TV film of Willard White's performance as Othello (discussed under 20th Century performances above) has been described by Carol Chillington Rutter as "The one [screen] Othello where the women's stories get fully told",[259] particularly praising the dynamic between Imogen Stubbs' Desdemona and Zoë Wanamaker's Emilia.[260]

Oliver Parker's 1995 Othello was trailed as an "erotic thriller", including a ritualized love scene between Othello and Desdemona, and, most memorably, Othello's jealous fantasies of encounters between Desdemona and Cassio.[261][262] Swiss actress Irène Jacob as Desdemona struggled with the verse, as did Laurence Fishburne, more experienced in expletive-ridden thriller roles, as Othello.[263] Iago was Kenneth Branagh in his first outing as a screen villain.[264] The overall effect was to create, in Douglas Brode's words "the tragedy of Iago" - a performance in which Iago's dominance is such that Othello is a foil to him, not the other way around.[265] The film was described as a "fair stab at turning the Bard into a decent night at the multiplex"[266] but failed to achieve success at the box office.[264]

Other adaptations of Shakespeare's story to be filmed include Franco Zeffirelli's 1986 film of Verdi's Otello[267] and the 1956 Jubal which resets the story as a Western, centered on the Cassio character.[268] The play was abridged to 30 minutes by Leon Garfield, and produced with cel animation for the TV series Shakespeare: The Animated Tales.[269] Tim Blake Nelson's basketball-themed teen drama O reset the story at an elite boarding school. The similarity of the film's ending to the Columbine massacre, which happened while the film was being edited, delayed its release for over two years, until August 2001.[270] A British TV adaptation by Andrew Davies, screened in 2001, re-set the story among senior officers of the Metropolitan Police.[271] And the first decade of the 21st-Century saw two non-English language film adaptations: Alexander Abela's French Souli set the story in a modern-day Madagascan fishing village, and Vishal Bhardwaj's Hindi Omkara amidst political violence in modern Uttar Pradesh.[272] The 1997 malayalam movie Kaliyattam is an adaptation set against the backdrop of Theyyam artform of Kerala.[273][274]

Other media

Stage adaptations

Adaptations of - or borrowings from - Shakespeare's Othello began shortly after it first appeared, including Middleton & Rowley's 1622 The Changeling, John Ford's 1632 Love's Sacrifice, Thomas Porter's 1662 The Villain and Henry Nevil Payne's 1673 The Fatal Jealousy.[275] Edward Young's 1721 play The Revenge reversed the racial roles, featuring the "swagger part" of a black villain called Zanga whose victim was a white man.[276]

Voltaire's 1732 French play Zaïre was a "neoclassical refurbishment" of Shakespeare's "barbarous" work.[275] And across continental Europe through most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the play was better known than Shakespeare's in Jean-François Ducis' adaptation and its subsequent translations, in which a heroine renamed Hédelmone is stabbed to death by Othello.[277]

Part of the explosion of the Romantic movement in France was a fashion for re-writing English plays as melodrama, including Alfred de Vigny's 1829 Othello adaptation Le More de Venise.[278]

After the Restoration, London Theatres other than the patent companies got around the illegality of performing Shakespeare by allusion and parody, such as Charles Westmacott's Othello The Moor of Fleet Street at the Adelphi in 1833.[279]

In the 19th-Century United States, Othello was often used in parody, sometimes allied with minstrel shows: with the contrast between Shakespearean verse and African-American dialect a source of racist humour.[280] Indeed, racist parodies were common in the aftermath of the abolition of the slave trade in the UK and, later, in the US: for example Maurice Dowling's 1834 Othello Travestie, George W H Griffin's 1870 Othello (Ethiopian Burlesque), the anonymous Desdemonum An Ethiopian Burlesque of 1874 and the anonymous Dar's de Money (Othello Burlesque) of 1880.[281][282]

The Black Arts Movement appropriated Othello in an entirely different vein. Amiri Baraka's twinned 1964 plays Dutchman and Slave are said to "represent the ultimate African American revision of Othello",[283] especially in Dutchman's murder of Clay, a black man, by Lulu, a white woman.[284]

The Othello story became the rock opera Catch My Soul in 1968, depicting Othello as a charismatic religious cult leader, Desdemona as a naive convert, and Iago as a malcontent cult member who thinks himself to be Satan.[285][286] In Murray Carlin's 1969 Not Now Sweet Desdemona the protagonist says of Shakespeare's play that it was "the first play of the Age of Imperialism ... Othello is about colour and nothing but colour."[287] Charles Marowitz's 1974 An Othello reworked the play in the context of the Black Power movement.[288] C. Bernard Jackson's 1979 Iago made Iago himself a Moor and a victim of racism.[289] And Caleen Sinnette Jennings' 1999 Casting Othello is a metadrama about a performance of Shakespeare's play, and the racial tensions it evokes.[290]

Roysten Abel's Othello - A Play in Black and White is set among a group of Indian actors rehearsing a Kathakali version of Othello whose own story begins to mirror the play's plot: with Iago's seduction of Othello played as a guru-disciple relationship.[291]

Among feminist appropriations of the Othello story, Paula Vogel's 1994 Desdemona, A Play about a Handkerchief sets the story in a kitchen in Cyprus, where only Desdemona, Emilia and Bianca appear.[292] In Djanet Sears' 1998 Harlem Duet, Othello's lover challenges his subservient passion: "...why you trying to please her? ... I'm so tired of pleasing White folks."[293] And Toni Morrison and Rokia Traoré's 2012 Desdemona sets its story in a timeless afterlife of the characters, in which Othello and Desdemona have leisure to talk through all facets of their relationship, and in which Desdemona is reunited with her former maid Barbary, whose actual name is Sa'ran.[294]

Othello is parodied in the form of a rap song in the stage show The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged).[295]

Audio

One of the first full-length plays to be released on vinyl was the Broadway production starring Paul Robeson, José Ferrer and Uta Hagen, issued in 1944.[296] Othello has been performed on at least twelve separate occasions on BBC Radio.[297]

Music

The Willow Song, sung by Desdemona in Act 4 Scene 3,[298] is not an original creation of Shakespeare's, but was already a well-known ballad. As such it has surviving arrangements from both before and after Shakespeare's time.[299] The version of it thought to be most authentic, because it closely matches the lyric given by Shakespeare, is known as "The Poore Soule Sate Sighing"[300] and is one of the most performed pieces of early modern English music.[301]

The two other songs sung in the play are the drinking songs in Act 2 Scene 3.[302] The first of these, "And Let Me The Cannikin Clink", has no surviving arrangement, although it fits to several extant popular tunes.[303] The other, "King Stephen Was a Worthy Peer", is the seventh of the eight stanzas of the existing ballad "Take Thy Old Cloak About Thee".[304]

The play has been a popular source for opera. Rossini's 1816 Otello, ossia il Moro di Venezia made Desdemona its focus, and was followed by numerous translations and adaptations, including one with a happy ending.[305] But the most notable version, considered a masterpiece with a power equivalent to that of the play, is Verdi's 1887 Otello,[306] for which Arrigo Boito's libretto marked a return to faithfulness to the original plot, including the reappearance of the pillow as the murder weapon, rather than Ducis' dagger.[307]

Othello was, with Antony and Cleopatra, one of the two plays which most influenced Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn's jazz suite Such Sweet Thunder. Its opening track (itself titled Such Sweet Thunder, a quotation from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream)[308] came to stand for Othello telling his tales of travel and adventure to Desdemona, as reported in the play's first act.[309][310]

Sometimes the order of the play influencing a composer is reversed, as in the appropriations of classical music by filmmakers retelling Othello's story: for example in the film O, in which excerpts from Verdi's Otello are used as a theme for Odin (the Othello character) while modern rap and hip-hop are more associated with the white college students around him.[311]

Bob Dylan's song Po' Boy features lyrics in which Desdemona turns the tables on Othello, borrowing the idea of using poisoned wine from the final act of Hamlet.[312]

Literature

Aphra Behn's 1688 novel Oroonoko, and its subsequent dramatisation by Thomas Southerne, reset Othello's enslavement in the context of the then-current Atlantic triangle.[276]

In addition to his theatrical performances noted above, the play was also central to Konstantin Stanislavski's writings, and to the development of his "system". In particular, the part of Othello is a main subject of his book Creating a Role.[313] In it, the characters of Tortzov, the director, and Kostya, the young actor - both partly autobiographical - rehearse the role of Othello in the opening act.[314]

A plot-line in Farrukh Dhondy's novel Black Swan involves the central character Lazarus, a freed slave, travelling to London in the time of Shakespeare and authoring many of the plays attributed to Shakespeare, including Othello, in a production of which Lazarus plays the title character, and kills himself.[315] The narrative voice of Caryl Phillips 1997 novel The Nature of Blood harangues Othello as a sexual and political sell-out.[288] And in Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih's retelling of the Othello story, Season of Migration to the North, the central character Mustafa Sa'eed, on trial for the murder of his white mistress, refuses to be judged by the standards of the play, declaring:

"Othello was a lie."[316]