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Othello: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Othello
The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, written by William Shakespeare around the 2nd of May 1603, begins with a storm that destroys the Turkish fleet, a plot device that removes the external enemy to focus entirely on the internal destruction of the protagonist. This play, often shortened to Othello, is widely considered one of Shakespeare's greatest works and is usually classified among his major tragedies alongside Macbeth, King Lear, and Hamlet. The story depicts a Moorish military commander named Othello as he is manipulated by his ensign, Iago, into suspecting his wife Desdemona of infidelity. The play survives in one quarto edition from 1622 and in the First Folio, having been unpublished during the author's life. Othello has been one of Shakespeare's most popular plays, both among playgoers and literary critics, since its first performance, spawning numerous stage, screen, and operatic adaptations. Among actors, the roles of Othello, Iago, Desdemona, and Emilia are regarded as highly demanding and desirable. Critical attention has focused on the nature of the play's tragedy, its unusual mechanics, its treatment of race, and on the motivations of Iago and his relationship to Othello. Originally performed by white actors in dark makeup, the role of Othello began to be played by black actors in the 19th century. Shakespeare's major source for the play was a novella by Cinthio, the plot of which Shakespeare borrowed and reworked substantially. Though not among Shakespeare's longest plays, it contains two of his four longest roles in Othello and Iago.
The Ensigns Of Envy
Iago, the ensign to Othello, thirsts for revenge on Othello for promoting an aristocrat named Cassio as lieutenant over him, whom Iago considers a less capable soldier than himself. Iago tells Roderigo, a wealthy and dissolute gentleman who loves Desdemona, that he plans to exploit Othello for his own advantage and convinces Roderigo to wake Brabantio and tell him about his daughter's elopement. Iago sneaks away to find Othello and warns him that Brabantio is coming for him. Brabantio, provoked by Roderigo, is enraged and seeks to confront Othello, but he finds Othello accompanied by the Duke of Venice's guards, who prevent violence. News has arrived in Venice that the Turks are going to attack Cyprus, and Othello is therefore summoned to advise the senators. Brabantio has no option but to accompany Othello to the Duke's residence, where he accuses Othello of seducing Desdemona by witchcraft. Othello defends himself before the Duke of Venice, Brabantio's kinsmen Lodovico and Gratiano, and various senators. Othello explains that, while he was invited to Brabantio's home, Desdemona became enamoured of him for the sad and compelling stories he told of his life before Venice, not because of any witchcraft. The senate is satisfied once Desdemona confirms that she loves Othello, but Brabantio leaves, saying that Desdemona will betray Othello: Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see. She has deceived her father, and may thee. Iago, still in the room, takes note of Brabantio's remark. By order of the Duke, Othello leaves Venice to command the Venetian armies against invading Turks on the island of Cyprus, accompanied by his new wife, his lieutenant Cassio, his ensign Iago, and Iago's wife, Emilia, as Desdemona's attendant. The party arrives in Cyprus to find that a storm has destroyed the Turkish fleet. Othello orders a general celebration and leaves to consummate his marriage with Desdemona. In his absence, Iago gets Cassio drunk and then persuades Roderigo to draw Cassio into a fight. Montano tries to calm down an angry and drunk Cassio. This leads to their fighting one another and Montano's being injured. Othello arrives and questions the men as to what happened. Othello blames Cassio for the disturbance and strips him of his rank. Cassio, distraught, is then persuaded by Iago to ask Desdemona to persuade her husband to reinstate him.
William Shakespeare wrote Othello around the 2nd of May 1603, with a terminus ad quem of 1604 and a terminus a quo of 1601. Scholars date the play between 1603 and 1604 during the reign of James I.
Who are the main characters in the play Othello by William Shakespeare?
The main characters in Othello are the Moorish military commander Othello, his ensign Iago, his wife Desdemona, and Emilia. Other key figures include Cassio, Roderigo, Brabantio, and the Duke of Venice.
What is the source material for the plot of Othello by William Shakespeare?
Shakespeare's primary source for the plot of Othello is the novella Gli Hecatommithi by Cinthio. The story involves a Moorish captain and his ensign who murder the captain's wife, which Shakespeare adapted and reworked substantially.
When was the first professional performance of Othello by a black actor?
The first known professional performance of Othello by a black actor was by James Hewlett at the African Grove Theatre in New York in 1822. This preceded the more famous performances by Ira Aldridge who played the role across Europe for forty years.
How many early editions of Othello exist and what are their differences?
Othello survives in one quarto edition from 1622 and in the First Folio from 1623. The First Folio contains about 160 lines not found in the quarto, while the quarto has fuller stage directions and more profanities.
Why is Othello considered one of Shakespeare's greatest plays?
Othello is considered one of Shakespeare's greatest plays because it is widely classified among his major tragedies alongside Macbeth, King Lear, and Hamlet. The play is renowned for its complex characters, themes of jealousy and race, and its demanding roles for actors.
Iago persuades Othello to be suspicious of Cassio and Desdemona's relationship. When Desdemona drops a handkerchief, the first gift given to her by Othello, Emilia finds it and gives it to Iago at his request, unaware of what he plans to do with it. Othello appears and, then being convinced by Iago of his wife's unfaithfulness with his captain, vows with Iago for the death of Desdemona and Cassio, after which he makes Iago his lieutenant. Iago plants the handkerchief in Cassio's lodgings, then tells Othello to watch Cassio's reactions while Iago questions him. Iago goads Cassio on to talk about his affair with Bianca, a local courtesan, but whispers her name so quietly that Othello believes the two men are talking about Desdemona. Later, Bianca accuses Cassio of giving her a second-hand gift which he had received from another lover. Othello sees this, and Iago convinces him that Cassio received the handkerchief from Desdemona. Enraged and hurt, Othello resolves to kill his wife and tells Iago to kill Cassio. Othello proceeds to make Desdemona's life miserable and strikes her in front of visiting Venetian nobles. Meanwhile, Roderigo complains that he has received no results from Iago in return for his money and efforts to win Desdemona, but Iago convinces him to kill Cassio. Roderigo unsuccessfully attacks Cassio in the street after Cassio leaves Bianca's lodgings, as Cassio wounds Roderigo. During the scuffle, Iago comes from behind Cassio and badly cuts his leg. In the darkness, Iago manages to hide his identity, and when Lodovico and Gratiano hear Cassio's cries for help, Iago joins them. When Cassio identifies Roderigo as one of his attackers, Iago secretly stabs Roderigo to death to stop him from revealing the plot. Iago then accuses Bianca of the failed conspiracy to kill Cassio. Othello confronts a sleeping Desdemona. She denies being unfaithful, but he smothers her. Emilia arrives, and Desdemona defends her husband before dying, and Othello accuses Desdemona of adultery. Emilia calls for help. The former governor Montano arrives with Gratiano and Iago. When Othello mentions the handkerchief as proof, Emilia realizes what Iago has done, and she exposes him. Othello, belatedly realising Desdemona's innocence, stabs Iago, but not fatally, saying that Iago is a devil, but not before the latter stabs Emilia to death in the scuffle. Iago refuses to explain his motives, vowing to remain silent from that moment on. Lodovico apprehends both Iago and Othello for the murders of Roderigo, Emilia, and Desdemona, but Othello commits suicide. Lodovico appoints Cassio as Othello's successor and exhorts him to punish Iago justly. He then denounces Iago for his actions and leaves to tell the others what has happened.
The Source Of Shadows
Shakespeare's primary source for the plot was the story of a Moorish Captain in Gli Hecatommithi by Cinthio, a collection of one hundred novellas about love, grouped into ten decades by theme. The third decade deals with marital infidelity. Of Cinthio's characters, only Disdemona, the equivalent of Shakespeare's Desdemona, is named; the others are simply called the Moor, the Ensign, the Corporal, and similar descriptions. In its story the Ensign falls in love with the Moor's wife Disdemona, but her indifference turns his love to hate and in revenge he persuades the Moor that Disdemona has been unfaithful. The Moor and the Ensign murder Disdemona with socks filled with sand, and bring down the ceiling of her bedchamber to make it appear an accident. The story continues until the Ensign is tortured to death for unrelated reasons and the Moor is killed by Disdemona's family. Shakespeare's direct sources for the story do not include any threat of warfare; it seems to have been Shakespeare's innovation to set the story at the time of a threatened Turkish invasion of Cyprus, apparently fixing it in the events of 1570. Those historical events would however have been well known to Shakespeare's original audience, who would therefore have been aware that, contrary to the action of the play, the Turks took Cyprus, and still held it. Scholars have identified many other influences on Othello, including Virgil's Aeneid, Ovid's Metamorphoses, both The Merchant's Tale and The Miller's Tale from Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Fenton's Certaine Tragicall Discourses, Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, George Peele's The Battle of Alcazar, the anonymous Arden of Faversham, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness. Influences also include Shakespeare's own earlier plays Much Ado About Nothing, in which a similar plot was used in a comedy, The Merchant of Venice with its high-born, Moorish, Prince of Morocco, and Titus Andronicus, in which a Moor, Aaron, was a prominent villain, and as such, a forerunner of both Othello and Iago. One such influence is not a literary work at all. In 1600, London was visited for half a year by the Moorish ambassador of the King of Barbary, whose entourage caused a stir in the city. Shakespeare's company is known to have played at court during the time of the visit, and so would have encountered the foreign visitors at first hand. Among Shakespeare's non-fiction, or partly-fictionalised, sources were Gasparo Contarini's Commonwealth and Government of Venice and Leo Africanus's A Geographical Historie of Africa. Himself a Moor from Barbary, Leo said of his own people they are so credulous they will beleeue matters impossible, which are told them and no nation in the world is so subject vnto iealousie; for they will rather lose their liues than put vp any disgrace in the behalfe of their women, both traits seen in Shakespeare's Othello. From Leo's own life story Shakespeare took a well-born, educated African finding a place at the height of a white European power. From Philemon Holland's translation of Pliny's Natural History Shakespeare took the references to the Pontic Sea, to Arabian trees with their medicinable gum, and to the Anthropophagi and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders, elements which also featured in the fantastic The Travels of Sir John Mandeville.
The Date Of The Tragedy
The terminus ad quem for Othello, that is, the latest year in which the play could have been written, is 1604, since a performance of the play in that year is mentioned in the accounts book of Sir Edmund Tilney, then Master of the Revels. A terminus a quo, the earliest year in which it could have been written, is given by the fact that one of its sources, Holland's translation of Pliny's Natural History, was published in 1601. Within this range, scholars have tended to date the play 1603 to 1604, within the reign of James I, since the play appears to have elements designed to appeal to the new king, who had written a poem about the defeat of the Turkish navy at Lepanto, and to the new queen, Anne of Denmark, in whose circle there was an interest in the blackface exoticism also reflected in Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blackness, in which the queen and her ladies appeared as daughters of Niger. That dating is supported by similarities to Measure for Measure, another of Shakespeare's plays often dated around 1604, and which, like Othello, draws its plot from Cinthio's Gli Hecatommithi. This date is also supported by the possibility that Shakespeare may have consulted Richard Knolles' 1603 The Generall Historie of the Turkes. However, evidence of an earlier date, 1601 to 1602, is provided by the so-called bad quarto of Shakespeare's play Hamlet, published in 1603. The theory is that the bad quarto is a memorial reconstruction of Hamlet, made by some of its actors; so where there are unintentional echoes of Othello in the bad quarto, for example to my vnfolding / Lend thy listning eare in the bad quarto and To my unfolding lend your prosperous ear in Othello, and a number of others, it suggests that the actors must have been performing Othello, at the latest, in the season preceding the bad quarto's publication. Othello was not published in Shakespeare's lifetime. The first published version of the play was a quarto in 1622, usually abbreviated to Q, which was followed a year later by the play's appearance in the First Folio, usually abbreviated to F. There are significant differences between the two early editions, the most prominent of which are that F contains about 160 lines which are not in Q, sometimes in passages which are quite extended and well-known, such as Othello's Pontic Sea speech and Desdemona's Willow Song. Q has fuller and more elaborate stage directions than F. Q has 63 oaths or profanities which do not appear in F, suggesting the possibility that F was based on a manuscript which had been edited to conform with the 1606 Act of Abuses. There are over a thousand variations in wording, lineation, spelling and punctuation. There is no scholarly consensus to account for the differences between Q and F. E. K. Chambers in 1930 argued that Q derived from a scribal manuscript, and F from the author's holograph. Alice Walker in 1952 argued that F was printed from a corrected copy of Q. W. W. Greg in 1955 argued that Q's copy must have been a difficult-to-read transcript of Shakespeare's foul papers, or first drafts. M. R. Ridley in 1958, rejecting Walker's argument and accepting Greg's, argued that Q had greater authority and rejected F's changes as memorial contamination from a theatre prompt book or as sophistications by the editors of F. Nevill Coghill in 1964 argued that the changes in F were improvements made by the author, who might have taken advantage of the need to revise the play in consequence of the Act of Abuses to make other changes. Gary Taylor in 1983 agreed with Coghill that F incorporated the author's own improvements to Q, but argued that another scribal hand had also made intervening changes to F. E. A. J. Honigmann in 1996 partly revived Walker's theory, by arguing that the scribe responsible for preparing the manuscript for F had consulted Q whenever the copy was illegible. He also argues that sequences in F but not in Q, such as the Willow Song, may have been cuts from the original made for the manuscript of Q, rather than later additions made for the manuscript of F. As The Oxford Shakespeare editor Michael Neill summarises things, the textual mystery of Othello is unlikely ever to be resolved to general satisfaction.
The Jealousy Of Race
The influential early twentieth-century Shakespeare critic A. C. Bradley defined Othello's tragic flaw as a sexual jealousy so intense that it converts human nature into chaos, and liberates the beast in man, the animal in man forcing itself into his consciousness in naked grossness, and he writhing before it but powerless to deny it entrance, grasping inarticulate images of pollution, and finding relief only in a bestial thirst for blood. This jealousy is symbolized in the play through animal imagery. In the early acts of the play it is Iago who mentions ass, daws, flies, ram, jennet, guinea-hen, baboon, wild-cat, snipe, monkeys, monster and wolves. But from the third act onwards Othello catches this line of imagery from Iago as his irrational jealousy takes hold. The same occurs with diabolical imagery, images of hell and devils, of which Iago uses 14 of his 16 diabolical images in the first two acts, yet Othello uses 25 of his 26 in the last three acts. Not only Othello, but also Iago is consumed by jealousy; his is a kind of envy, which contemporary scholar Francis Bacon called the vilest affection, and the most depraved; for which cause, it is the proper attribute of the Devil. As it always cometh to pass, that envy worketh subtilly, and in the dark; and to the prejudice of good things. Sometimes critics have struggled to define the kind of jealousy Othello suffers, or to deny it as a motive, for example, those who claim that in Russia between 1945 and 1957 only one actor portrayed Othello as obsessed by jealousy. In fact jealousy is a wide-ranging emotion and encompasses the spectrum from lust to spiritual disillusionment within which Othello's obsession must fall. And he displays many accepted aspects of jealousy: an eagerness to snatch at proofs, indulging degrading images of the jealousy's object, snatching at ambiguities to ease the mind, dread of vulgar ridicule, and a spirit of vindictiveness. In plot terms, Othello's race serves to mark him as other. As both a Christian and a black African, Othello is, as scholar Tom McAlindon puts it, both of, and not of, Venice. And actor Paul Robeson considered Othello's colour as essentially secondary, as a way of emphasizing his cultural difference and consequent vulnerability in a society he does not fully understand. In the world of the play itself, Jyotsna Singh argues that Brabantio's and others' objection to Othello, a decorated and respected general, as a suitable husband for Desdemona, a senator's daughter, only makes sense in racist terms, reinforced by the bestial imagery used by Iago in delivering the news. The racist slurs used by Iago, Roderigo and Brabantio in the play suggest that Shakespeare conceived of Othello as a black African: thicklips, an old black ram is tupping your white ewe, you'll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse, the sooty bosom of such a thing as thou, as do things Othello says of himself: haply for I am black, or begrimed and black as mine own face. There is critical divide over Othello's ethnic origin. A Moor broadly refers to someone from northwest Africa, especially if Muslim, but in Shakespeare's England Moor was used with broader connotations: sometimes referring to Africans of all regions, sometimes to Arabic or Islamic peoples beyond Africa, such as those of Turkey and the Middle East, and sometimes to Muslims of any race or location. In Shakespeare's main source, Cinthio's Gli Hecatommithi, the character Disdemona says I know not what to say of the Moor; he used to be all love towards me; but within these few days he has become another man; and much I fear that I shall prove a warning to young girls not to marry against the wishes of their parents, and that the Italian ladies may learn from me not to wed a man whose nature and habitude of life estrange from us. Similar wording was used in one of the earliest, and most negative, critiques of the play: Thomas Rymer writing in his 1693 A Short View of Tragedy suggested that one of the play's morals was a caution to all Maidens of Quality how, without their Parents consent, they run away with Blackamoors. Rymer, however, dryly observed that another such moral might be a warning to all good Wives, that they look well to their Linnen, as such his comments should be read within the context of his overarching criticism of the play, as unrealistic and lacking in obvious moral conclusions. In the nineteenth century, such well-known writers as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb questioned whether the play could even be called a true tragedy when it dramatized the inviolable taboo of a white woman in a relationship with a black man. Coleridge, writing in 1818, argued that Othello could not have been conceived as black: Can we imagine Shakespeare so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth, at a time, too, when negroes were not known except as slaves? and most surely as an English audience was disposed at the beginning of the seventeenth century, it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro. It would argue a disproportionateness, a want of balance, in Desdemona, which Shakespeare does not appear to have in the least contemplated. These sentiments were instrumental in ushering in the so-called bronze age of Othello. Martin Orkin's 1987 essay Othello and the Plain Face of Racism acknowledges the racist sentiments in the play; but vindicates Shakespeare who confines these views to discredited characters such as Iago, Roderigo and Brabantio. He concludes that in its fine scrutiny of the mechanisms underlying Iago's use of racism, and in its rejection of human pigmentation as a means of identifying human worth, the play, as it always has done, continues to oppose racism. The critical approach to racial issues in the play changed direction with the publication in 1996 by Howard University Press of Othello: New Essays by Black Writers edited by Mythili Kaul, which made clear that black readers and audience members may be experiencing a different play from white ones. Questions about whether Othello is among Shakespeare's greatest plays are rendered irrelevant in the context of discussions about how the play illuminates the racial thinking of Shakespeare's time, and of the present day. The Nigerian poet Ben Okri in his 1997 A Way of Being Free included several meditations on Othello, arguing that because it is possible that Othello actually is a blackened white man he is not a fully formed character with a psychology but a white myth or stereotype of black masculinity. Even with that knowledge, Okri writes, The black person's response to Othello is more secret, and much more anguished, than can be imagined. It makes you unbearably lonely to know that you can empathise with white people, but they will rarely empathise with you. It hurts to watch Othello. From the 1980s, Othello became a role that only black actors performed. However, in 1998 black actor Hugh Quarshie questioned whether the central role in Othello should be played by a black actor, saying Scholar Virginia Vaughan made a related point in 2005.
The Stage Of History
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. 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. The play was performed at Court by the King's Men on the 1st of November 1604, and again in 1612 to 1613 as part of the celebrations for the Wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V of the Palatinate. The title role was originally played by Richard Burbage, whose eulogies reveal that he was admired in the role. Moorish characters were conventionally played in turbans, with long white gowns and red trousers, with the actor's face darkened with lampblack or coal. The original Iago was likely John Lowin. All theatres were closed down by the Puritan government on the 6th of 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. 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 the 8th of December 1660, although history does not record who took the role. Margaret Hughes is the first woman known to have played Desdemona. In Restoration theatres, it was common for Shakespeare's plays to be adapted or rewritten. Othello was not adapted in this way, although it has often been cut to conform to current ideas of decorum or refinement. 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. 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. 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. 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 the 26th of 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. Although not performed in Portugal until the nineteenth century, the play holds 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. Paul Robeson's iconic performance 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. 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. 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. 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. Leigh Hunt saw Kean's Othello in 1819, describing his performance in The Examiner as the masterpiece of the living stage. 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. 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, thereby commencing a stage tradition of using lighter makeup rather than blackface. An advantage of this change was that the actor's facial expressions could be more clearly seen. 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. 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. 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. For Tommaso Salvini and Edwin Booth the role of Othello was a career-length project. Salvini always played the role in Italian, even when acting alongside a company performing in English. His conception of the role was of a barbarian with savage and passionate instincts concealed by a thick veneer of civilisation. 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. 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. 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 be; try to win even them by your sincerity. Don't act the villain. 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.
The Screen Of Shadows
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 Othello, the 1936 Men Are Not Gods, 1941's East of Piccadilly, George Cukor's 1947 A Double Life, Orson Welles' Othello, Sergei Yutkevich's Russian language Othello discussed below, two productions for BBC Television, including Jonathan Miller's for the BBC Television Shakespeare series, 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. 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. This plot is also shared by the very first Othello-influenced film: the 18-minute Danish 1911 Desdemona. All Night Long reframes the story in a jazz milieu. Richard Eyre's Stage Beauty depicts a restoration performance of the play. 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. Welles uses shadows, extreme camera angles and discordant piano music to force the audience to feel Othello's disorientated view of Desdemona. Cages, grilles and bars are frequent images. And the text is heavily cut: Othello's first words are his speech to the Senators from Act 1 Scene 3. 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. Sergei Yutkevich's Russian film, with a screenplay by Boris Pasternak, was an attempt to make Shakespeare accessible to the working man. Yutkevitch had begun his career as a painter and then as a set designer, and his film was widely praised for its pictorial beauty. 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. Laurence Olivier said that the role of Othello demanded enormously big acting, and he incorporated what The Spectator described as his outsize, elaborate, overwhelming 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, 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. Subsequent critics have been less sympathetic to Olivier's performance than his contemporary audience had been, tending to read it as racist. As Barbara Hodgdon expresses it, Oliver's Othello confirms an absolute fidelity to white stereotypes of blackness. 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. The TV film of Willard White's performance as Othello has been described by Carol Chillington Rutter as The one screen Othello where the women's stories get fully told, particularly praising the dynamic between Imogen Stubbs' Desdemona and Zoë Wanamaker's Emilia. 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. Swiss actress Irène Jacob as Desdemona struggled with the verse, as did Laurence Fishburne as Othello. Iago was Kenneth Branagh's first portrayal of a screen villain. 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. The film was described as a fair stab at turning the Bard into a decent night at the multiplex, but failed to achieve success at the box office. Other adaptations of Shakespeare's story to be filmed include Franco Zeffirelli's 1986 film of Verdi's Otello and the 1956 Jubal which resets the story as a Western, centered on the Cassio character. The play was abridged to 30 minutes by Leon Garfield, and produced with cel animation for the TV series Shakespeare: The Animated Tales. 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. A British TV adaptation by Andrew Davies, screened in 2001, re-set the story among senior officers of the Metropolitan Police. 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. The 1997 Malayalam film Kaliyattam is an adaptation set against the backdrop of Theyyam artform of Kerala. The 2023 Malayalam film Iru is an adaptation set against a campus political love story in Kerala. The 2024 Bengali film Athhoi is an adaptation set against a fictional town of Vinsura in West Bengal. Stage 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. 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. Voltaire's 1732 French play.