William Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’ (1602) – Context

This context pack should be used to build up your own notes. Remember, you should only ever use contextual
points which are directly relevant to the question; they should also be linked to your analysis of Shakespeare’s
language.

Use the following sites to help you:

a) http://www.shakespeare-navigators.com/othello (Excellent notes on key themes)
b) www.massolit.io (Lectures on ‘Othello’)
c) http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Oth_CriticalSurvey/complete/
d) https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/critical-approaches-to-othello
e) https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/misunderstanding-in-othello
f) https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/racism-misogyny-and-motiveless-malignity-in-othello
g) https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/character-analysis-iago-in-othello
h) https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/themes/ethnicity-and-identity
i) On Twitter, follow—@explore_Othello--and scroll down to their first Tweet as they work through the play
from the opening scene. Use these to add to your own notes.

Acknowledgements: This resource is adapted from many different sources and is intended only for the
individual use of students at Beal High School. Along with the sources mentioned above, it uses notes from
the Arden edition of ‘Othello’, Frank Kermode’s Shakespeare’s Language, and Graham Bradshaw’s Connell
Guide to Othello.

Contexts of Production:

1. When was it written?

Between 1599 and 1608, Shakespeare wrote a series of tragedies: ‘Julius Caesar’, ‘Hamlet’, ‘Othello’,
‘King Lear’, ‘Macbeth’, ‘Anthony and Cleopatra’, and ‘Coriolanus’.

‘Othello’ was written around 1602 and exists in two early forms: the Quarto and the Folio. The Folio
edition was published in 1623 after Shakespeare’s death and
shows some changes—which could reflect Shakespeare’s
revisions or those of an editor.

2. What influenced the writing of the play?

In the huge sea-battle of Lepanto (1571) Christian forces

regained control of Cyprus from the Ottoman Turks.
Shakespeare set parts of ‘Othello’ in war-torn Cyprus, giving the
play a strong political resonance for its first audiences.

The Moroccan Ambassador visited London in late 1600, to

negotiate with Queen Elizabeth I about a military alliance
against Spain. Shakespeare may have seen the impressive North
African party before he wrote Othello as they spent half a year in
London and there was wide interest in them—being Muslims
and, according to early commentators, ‘barbarians’.

3. Where did Shakespeare get the story from?

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 Shakespeare took the plot of ‘Othello’ from Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi (1565) – a story about
Disdemona and her Moorish husband, who is duped by his villainous Ensign.

4. How did Shakespeare change Cinthio’s narrative?

Cinthio tells the tale of Disdemona and a Moorish Captain duped by his villainous Ensign (or
standard-bearer). This clearly gives Shakespeare the framework for his tragedy of Othello and his
Ensign, Iago. In Cinthio’s story, the virtuous and beautiful Disdemona is the only character to be
given a name. Against the advice of her relatives, she marries the gallant Moor, not through lust but
for love of his valour.

There are, however, some key differences between Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’ and his source. Firstly, in
Cinthio’s tale, Iago’s hatred of Othello stems from his love for Disdemona. By contrast, Shakespeare
deliberately makes Iago’s motivations more elusive. Secondly, Shakespeare refers directly to the
war between the Muslim Turks and the Christian Venetians, giving the play more political
resonances for an early modern audience. Thirdly, and perhaps most significantly, in Cinthio’s tale
both Othello and Iago and tortured and killed by Disdemona’s relatives, whilst in Shakespeare’s
play, Othello has the death of a tragic hero, not a criminal—taking his own life.

5. What do we know about Venetian society in the Renaissance?

A number of
contemporary visitors
were struck by the
multicultural character of
16th-century Venice,
particularly in the
trading centre, the Rialto.
Gasparo Contarini notes
the ‘wonderful concourse
of strange and forraine
people … of the farthest
and remotest nations’.
This multiculturalism is
also reflected in
Carpaccio’s painting of
The Miracle of the Relic of the True Cross on the Rialto Bridge (1494). There is a busy multicultural mix
of Venetians in red and black togas, Armenians or Turks in tall-brimmed black hats, and turbaned
Turkish or Arabic traders. It has often been noted that two of the 14 smartly-dressed gondoliers are
black men; probably slaves, domestic servants or freed slaves originally from sub-Saharan Africa.
One is clearly visible in the foreground, with his feathered red cap, red jerkin and flamboyantly
patterned hose, while the other is less prominent on the right-hand side.

Venice was also widely seen in the Renaissance as the pleasure capital of Europe, especially in its
sexual tolerance and licentiousness: it was famous for its courtesans and prostitutes. Interestingly,
courtesans in the city were often dressed in expensive clothes so could not always be distinguished
from ladies—something which Iago plays upon in ‘Othello’ to deadly effect, saying: ‘In Venice they
do let God see the pranks / They dare not show their husbands’ (3.3.205-6).
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6. What about Cyprus?
Shakespeare saw Venice as part of his own world, a place not entirely different from Renaissance
London, but not so Cyprus. Whilst it was a territory of Venice, it was always under threat from the
Turks and therefore was a crucible where Europe’s encounter with otherness could be explored.

Shakespeare draws upon the Christian-Turkish binary, but also undercuts it by making the play’s
most villainous character a Venetian, Iago, and its tragic hero an outsider, Othello. Fearful of
vesting military power in one of its own citizens, Venice’s republican government contracted with
foreign mercenaries who could easily be dismissed once the crisis was over (as Othello is in Act 5).
Although Othello has been chosen by the Venetian government to lead its army, ‘the Moor’ (a term
that originally referred to practitioners of Islam) remains an alien in Venice. Like the liminal island
of Cyprus, he is caught in the middle, neither European nor Turk yet embodying both, and in his
suicide he highlights his service as a Christian hero by killing the ‘turbaned Turk’ within, who ‘beat
a Venetian and traduced the state’ (5.2.352–53).

Othello’s geopolitical impact is not limited, however, to conflicts between Venice and the Ottoman
Empire. Othello’s blackness and his background as a foreign mercenary prefigures the hybridity
postcolonial theorists have identified in colonial subjects. Brabantio and Desdemona are fascinated
by his strange stories of cannibals and anthropophagi; Othello’s first gift to her is a handkerchief
given to him by an Egyptian charmer, ‘dyed in mummy [a black liquid distilled from corpses] and
steeped in the ancient lore of charmers, sibyls and magic’.[2] The Moor’s stories allow Desdemona
to experience the exotic/erotic delight found by many early modern readers in travel narratives that
described the ‘antres vast’ of unexplored territories in Africa, the East and the New World.

7. What about attitudes towards the Moors?

Anyone who doubts that Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies were written from an imaginative
standpoint far ahead of his time need only think of ‘Othello’. The basic idea of the play is so well
known that it is easy to forget the startling boldness of Shakespeare’s decision to take Cinthio’s brief
tale of a doomed mixed-race marriage and transform it into a heart-breaking tragedy. In a country
where few people outside London would ever have seen a black person, and centuries before the
problems that fuel the tragedy became as ubiquitous and pressing as they are today, Shakespeare
produced in Othello a searing critique of racial and sexual injustice, which is more powerful now in
the 21st century than it could ever have been at the dawn of the 17th.

The tragic sequence of events is triggered by the elopement of Othello and Desdemona—and the
fact that they are obliged to elope certainly makes the illicit nature of their relationship in the eyes of
Venice immediately clear. But in their eyes, and seemingly in Shakespeare’s also, there appears
nothing illicit about their love. Undeterred by the paternal wrath and widespread disapproval they
are bound to incur, Othello and Desdemona act as if a black man from Africa and an upper-class
white woman from Venice have every right to fall in love, marry and be left to live happily together.
They act, in other words, as if they were already free citizens of a truly civilized future, instead of
prisoners of a time when racial prejudice and sexual inequality are so ingrained that even their
heroic hearts are tainted by them. To see Elizabethan prejudice we need look no further than:

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  A draft proclamation of 1601, which asked for the deportation of black people, described as ‘Negroes
and blackamoors’, from the realm of England. This was justified on the grounds that they were
draining national resources at a time of ‘dearth’ or hardship.
 Likewise, The Travels of John Mandeville, which was one of the most popular travel books of the Middle
Ages, describes wondrous races and creatures that inhabit the edges of the known world, including
men with eyes in their shoulders (a reference Othello himself makes in 1.3).
 Leo Africanus, himself a Moor brought up in Barbary, used reductive racial stereotypes to describe
the ‘vertues’ and ‘vices’ of Africans in 1550. He says ‘no nation in the world is so subject to jealousie’
and claims that Africans are ‘so credulous that they beleeve matters impossible which are told to
them’. It is easy to see Shakespeare play with elements of this stereotype but, importantly, white
characters in the play prove equally gullible and susceptible to Iago’s manipulations.
 From an Elizabethan viewpoint, Othello’s rank as governor of Cyprus would magnify his otherness.
This led Thomas Rymer to suggest that the moral of the play was to be ‘a caution to all Maidens of
Quality how, without their Parents consent, they run away with Blackamoors’ (1693).

Shakespeare was certainly interested in exploring stereotypes of otherness in his plays. There is the
Prince of Morocco and a nameless Moorish girl made pregnant by Launcelot Gobbo in ‘The
Merchant of Venice’. In ‘Titus Andronicus’ the sole black character, Aaron, is a vicious criminal.
However, in ‘The Tempest’, Caliban, who is likewise monstrous, is presented in more ambivalent
terms—a victim of a magician’s colonisation. In ‘The Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare explored the
plight of another minority group in the Jewish Shylock with a similar ambivalence to his portrayal
of Othello.

8. What about attitudes towards women?

In Shakespeare’s day, Venice was notorious for its high-class prostitutes or courtesans. In the play,
Othello frequently implies that Venetian men have an insufficient grasp of the ‘true’ character of
their womenfolk; men cannot see women for who they ‘really’ are. This is a society in which
attractive women are dangerously and hyperbolically misconceived of as statues made from
‘monumental alabaster’ (5.1.5).

Emilia’s function as the ‘straight-talking’ working woman seeking to cut through patriarchal mis-
readings makes her one of the text’s most memorable figures. It gives her death a real poignancy
too. In the most powerful performances of this scene, such as Ayesha Dharker’s recent offering with
the RSC, Emilia’s cry before her death that ‘Twill out! twill out!’ (4.2.219) is ear-splittingly loud and
fills the auditorium. As it should. Because the vigour of her voice and the force of these
exclamations come from her recognition that her struggle is not just against the tendency for
concealment and obscurity within her husband or Othello. She is shouting against a whole society’s
desire to complicate what should be made plain.

A common figure of comic scorn in Renaissance comedies were cuckolds—men whose wives were
unfaithful. They were depicted with animal horns as a shameful sign of their plight. The humour
surrounding the image arises from fears of being publically exposed as a laughing stock, ignorant of
your wife’s deception but also unaware of the horns sprouting from your head. ‘Othello’ is,
however, not a comedy, but a tragedy, and in this play the implications of cuckoldry in the
patriarchy of Renaissance society become plainly apparent. Convinced that Desdemona has slept
with Cassio, Othello swears that ‘A horned man’s a monster and a beast’ (4.1.62). He vows to ‘chop’

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 his wife into pieces (4.1.200), but then kills her by suffocation, silencing her even as she protests her
innocence.

9. What about attitudes towards class?

There were, according to Sir Lewis Lewkenor (1599) two social classes in Venice: the nobility and
gentlemen, and the ‘common and meaner people’. Class distinctions seem to have been more rigid
than in England—something which perhaps explains Iago’s resentment against privilege and his
desire to be treated as an equal by gentlemen. By contrast, Shakespeare who was himself the son of
a glove maker, had by the time he wrote ‘Othello’ acquired the title of ‘gentlemen’ as a major
shareholder and playwright for the group, the Queen’s Men.

Onstage in the 1600s, there would have been a clear divide in the costumes of characters of different
social classes, underlining the social stratification of the world of Venice in the play.

Contexts of Reception:

A survey of criticism of ‘Othello’ by Jessica Slights

(http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Oth_CriticalSurvey/complete/ )

You can refer to the views of critics to help you evaluate different interpretations of characters and themes.
Never just quote a critic—always engage with their viewpoint and explore whether there are potential
counter-arguments based on textual evidence.

As early as the final decade of the seventeenth century, Othello was criticized for depicting a man of colour
as a tragic hero. Thomas Rymer (c. 1641-1713), whose A Short View of Tragedy appeared in 1693, is
notable for providing the first major published criticism of the play, and also for the intensity of his
dislike of ‘Othello’ and its titular hero. He attacked the play's violation of the conventions of a natural
hierarchy that positions people of colour firmly below white Europeans, and non-Christians below
Christians. Although Rymer's hostility to Othello and his overt racism make unpleasant reading for
modern critics, A Short View of Tragedy is not without valuable perceptions about the play, and it is worth
noting that Rymer is the first published critic to recognize (however disapprovingly) that language or ‘talk’
is the basis of Othello's courtship of Desdemona:

Shakespeare, who is accountable both to the eyes and to the ears, and to convince the very heart of
an audience, shows that Desdemona was won by hearing Othello talk . . . . This was the charm, this
was the filter, the love powder that took the daughter of this noble Venetian [i.e., Brabantio]. This
was sufficient to make the blackamoor white and reconcile all, though there had been a cloven foot
into the bargain. (89-90).

While Rymer takes Brabantio's part in understanding Othello's rhetorical skill as a kind of devilishness, the
critic's insight that language is presented in the play as equal to the task of reconciling difference, if not
finally of overcoming tragedy, is one that continues to inform modern readings of the play.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, German poet and translator August Wilhelm Schlegel
(1767-1845) read Othello's descent into murderous jealousy not as a shocking reversal, but as the
inevitable return of an innately barbarous man to his ostensibly uncivilized roots. In Schlegel's view,
nature dictates that that which is European is civilized and moral, while that which is Moorish is savage

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and immoral; Othello may have ‘acquired’ a veneer of civilization, but he was born with savagery in his
‘blood,’ and it is this ‘poison’ which causes his fall. While this gross oversimplification of the play based on
racist stereotypes seems absurdly simpleminded now, its account of the association of Moorish identity
with violent sensuality persisted, in various guises, throughout the nineteenth century.

Yet as Romantic poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge's (1772-1834) comments on the play
illustrate, the conviction that Othello depicts fundamental truths about human nature did not always lead
to the sort of condemnation of its central character found in Schlegel. Coleridge reads the tragic hero's
actions as the product not of innate and uncontrollable passions, or even of jealousy, but rather as the
consequence of moral indignation and wounded honour, and he argues that by generating an
empathetic response in the audience the play is finally sympathetic to Othello (2:350). Coleridge was also
fascinated by the figure of Iago, and his assessment of the play's enigmatic villain as a ‘passionless
character, all will in intellect’ (1:49) influenced readings of the play for decades. Indeed, Coleridge's claim
that Iago's final soliloquy is best understood as ‘the motive-hunting of motiveless malignity’ (1:49)
remains one of the most quoted assessments of Iago to this day.

In addition to prompting a reassessment of Iago, the nineteenth-century view of Shakespeare's

characters as expressions of fundamental truths about human nature stimulated a growing interest in
Desdemona. Anna Jameson (1794-1860) is notable as the author of the first substantial and systematic
discussion of Shakespeare's female characters, a volume published first in 1832 as Characteristics of
Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical, and later retitled simply Shakespeare's Heroines. Jameson
challenges boldly many of her contemporaries by locating Othello's tragedy not in the plight of its male
hero, but rather in the character of its heroine, arguing that ‘the source of the pathos throughout—of that
pathos which at once softens and deepens the tragic effect—lies in the character of Desdemona’ (224).
Desdemona is, on Jameson's account, a young woman who is neither clever nor dynamic, and whose
dominant features—her goodness and gentleness—are both beyond her control and inadequate to
ensure her survival: ‘Desdemona displays at times a transient energy, arising from the power of affection,
but gentleness gives the prevailing tone to the character—gentleness in excess—gentleness verging on
passivity—gentleness which not only cannot resent—but cannot resist’ (218).

Critical interest in Othello continued into the early twentieth century, when, thanks to A.C.
Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), the play gained a place alongside ‘Hamlet’, ‘King Lear’, and
‘Macbeth’ in the pantheon of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies. Bradley locates a thoroughly
romanticized Othello, a noble and mysterious everyman whose destruction results from the cunning
Iago's ability to turn his virtues against him and whose ruin speaks to a universal experience of tragedy.

Bradley's sympathetic reading of Othello, with its emphasis on Othello's nobility, Desdemona's
saintliness, and Iago's central role as destroyer of their mutual and admirable love, has been
enormously influential, although his approach has been attacked vigorously over the years. In ‘Diabolic
Intellect and the Noble Hero’ (1937), F.R. Leavis contributes to this attack by finding Bradley's reading
of Othello excessively sentimental, and accusing him of an over-identification with Othello that blinds
him to what Leavis reads as the general's ‘self-approving self-dramatization’ (142). For Leavis, Othello is
not the naïve and noble victim of Iago's superior intellect, but an egoist whose ‘self-pride becomes
stupidity, ferocious stupidity, an insane and self-deceiving passion’ (146-47).

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 Influenced by the same impulses that propelled the American civil rights movement, many other
twentieth century critics explored the play's relationship to early modern representations of race. This
period produced such ground-breaking work as Eldred Jones's Othello's Countrymen: The African in English
Renaissance Drama (1965) and G.K. Hunter's Othello and Colour Prejudice (1967), which offered accounts of
medieval and early modern discussions of blackness, traced the effect of racial prejudice on the reception of
literary texts featuring characters of colour. The collective effect of these twentieth century studies was to
remind readers of the prominence of black characters on the early modern stage and literary page, to
prompt new thinking about the impact of pernicious stereotypes equating blackness with ugliness,
disloyalty, and evil, and to encourage further investigation of the historical realities and enduring
legacies of slavery.

Although attempts to carry issues of history and race to the centre of the conversation about Othello
gained ground in the 1960s, the determination persisted to read the play's characters and events as
representative of a universal human experience. Bradleian character criticism had fallen out of favour, but
the impulse to address the psychological complexities of Shakespeare's characters found fertile new ground
in the insights of psychoanalytic theory. First published in the 1950s and reprinted a decade later, a series
of influential psychoanalytic readings of the plays found a readership fascinated to explore links among
Shakespeare, Freud, and the psychological dimensions of human sexuality. Martin Wangh's Othello: The
Tragedy of Iago, for instance, treats Iago as a case study in repressed homosexuality, arguing that the
ensign's stifled erotic desire for Othello causes him to despise, and so to seek the destruction of, his rival
for the general's affection, Desdemona.

The influence of psychoanalytic approaches to Shakespeare continued to be felt as feminist

criticism and sexuality studies evolved throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and as Othello criticism began
to consider the play's language, symbols, and characters in relation to such broader social institutions as
marriage, religion, and law. In an oft-quoted 1975 article titled ‘Othello's Handkerchief: 'The Recognizance
and Pledge of Love,'‘for instance, Lynda Boose argues that the strawberry-spotted handkerchief given to
Desdemona by her husband gathers a heavy symbolic burden in the course of the play as it comes to
stand for that much larger expanse of fabric, the couple's wedding sheets, and thus for both ‘the
sanctified union promising life and the tragic union culminating in death’ (373).

Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) finds in ‘Othello’ the operations of a

patriarchy based in sexual repression and the subordination of women. Coppélia Kahn also accounted
men's expectations about women's lustful nature responsible for Desdemona's death in her analysis of
the intensity of early modern anxiety about cuckoldry in 1981's Man's Estate.

Irene Dash's sociological approach to Othello in Wooing, Wedding, and Power: Women in Shakespeare
(1981) marked an important moment in the history of the play's reception as, for the first time, it focused
critical attention on its depiction of the potential destructiveness, for women, of the institution of marriage.
According to Dash, Othello explores the tragic possibilities for married women trapped within a
patriarchal system that condones their subjection and even their abuse. Desdemona experiences ‘a slow
loss of confidence in the strength of the self, always with the aim of adjusting to marriage’ (104), and thus
her death must be laid at the door of a sexist system that celebrates compliance and self-abnegation in
wives rather than mutual respect in marriage. A few years later, Carol Thomas Neely's Broken Nuptials in
Shakespeare's Plays (1985)—with its nuanced understanding of history and its attentiveness to the
operations of power within patriarchy—locates the characters within an early modern moment that
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celebrates a newly emerging ideal of companionate marriage even as it continues to advocate for
women's subservience to their husbands. Desdemona and Emilia become, on Neely's reading, the
victims not of marriage but of male characters who view them through the opposing but mutually
reinforcing cultural lenses of romantic idealization and anxious misogyny.

Gradually the discourses of race studies, psychoanalysis, feminism, new historicism, and
sex/gender criticism began to coalesce as scholars became increasingly alert to the interplay of sexual
politics and race in Othello and in history. In 1987's ‘'And wash the Ethiop white': Femininity and the
Monstrous in Othello,’ for instance, Karen Newman argued that Desdemona's love for Othello represents
a direct threat to Venice because it embodies the twin dangers of freely expressed female desire and
miscegenation (interracial relationships). The work of male critics, too, integrated analysis of the play's
psycho-sexual elements with historically aware discussions of its treatment of race and of gender. For
example, picking up on Snow's earlier analysis of Iago's repressed sexuality and employing a similar
hermeneutic of suspicion, Michael Neill's ‘'Unproper Beds'‘ (1989) finds in the play's curtained bed a
potent symbol for an ‘unutterable’ anxiety about interracial love and sex (394).

In 1994, Ruth Vanita's work on Othello addressed directly the vexed issue of its relationship to
both sexism and racism, arguing that ‘the play forcefully combats racism (which posits blacks and
whites as essentially different) precisely by its presentation of Othello as not at all different from any
white husband’ (342). Vanita's article indicts not only the play's male bystanders but also its readers and
audiences for silent collusion in Desdemona's murder, claiming that she ‘is killed not only by Othello and
Iago but by all those who see her humiliated and beaten in public, and fail to intervene’ (338).

Throughout the 2000s Othello criticism continued to benefit from the development of increasingly
sophisticated accounts of the body, the self, race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and citizenship, while
postcolonial theory offered useful frameworks within which questions about Othello's nature and his
relationship to the people and institutions around him could be examined. For example, Othello's
intersections with Islam have fascinated a number of critics, including Daniel Vitkus whose Turning Turk
(2003) identifies the play as one of a series of early modern dramas about the rise of the Ottoman Empire
and the complex commercial, political, and ideological space of the early modern Mediterranean.
According to Vitkus, Othello participates in stereotypes about Muslim men as despotic, lustful, and
emotionally undisciplined by presenting Othello as a Christianized Moor so overcome by jealousy that he
reverts to ‘a version of the Islamic tyrant’ (99) and then ensures his own damnation by committing suicide.

The performance history by Jessica Slights

(http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/Oth_PerfHistory/complete// )

The first record of a performance of ‘Othello’ is an entry in the Accounts Book of Master of the Revels
Edmund Tilney noting that on 1 November 1604 ‘the King's Majesty's players . . . [acted] a play in the
Banqueting House at Whitehall called The Moor of Venice [by] Shaxberd.’ This performance at the London
palace of James I was just one of many early outings for what would become one of Shakespeare's most
popular plays.

We know little about these first productions, though we can assert with some certainty that they
would have looked and sounded quite different from most modern performances of ‘Othello’. Acting
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styles, stage technologies, even expectations about audience behaviour have undergone enormous changes
over the last four hundred years, and some shifts in theatrical convention—particularly those involving
casting practices—have had significant impact on the play. In the seventeenth century, for instance, the
parts of Othello and Desdemona would have been played by white men. Richard Burbage, the foremost
tragedian of Shakespeare's acting company, was almost certainly the first Othello, while Desdemona
would have been acted by a young male actor from the troupe, since women were banned from the
public stage in England until the second half of the seventeenth century.

Modern readers sometime assume that such casting decisions would have created a distracting
artifice in these early productions, interfering with the play's ability to generate a powerful emotional
response in its audience. There is no evidence to suggest that Othello's first viewers felt disengaged from its
wrenching story, however. Instead, as the comments of one attentive audience member suggest, cross-
dressed male actors were accepted as female characters even under close scrutiny, and the affective force of
their performances could be formidable: ‘Desdemona,’ he reports, ‘murdered by her husband in our
presence, although she always pled her case excellently, yet when killed moved us more, while stretched
out on her bed she begged the spectators' pity with her very facial expression.’ Detailing the expression on
the actor's face while at the same time designating him with the feminine pronouns ‘her’ and ‘she,’ this
early theatre critic demonstrates that early modern audiences could simultaneously read and read through
the bodies of the male actors who took female roles.

When London's theatres reopened after the war, professional female actors were finally
permitted on English stages for the first time. While it seems plausible that the regular appearance of
female actors in productions of Othello might have resulted in increased interest in the play's female
characters throughout the later seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, the popularity of play's titular
role with leading men seeking to establish a strong following among paying audiences appears instead to
have produced a particular fascination with the figure of Othello at the expense of Desdemona, Emilia, and
Bianca. Indeed, scholars have noted that although the play was not extensively adapted at its revival as
so many of Shakespeare's plays were at the Restoration, the roles of its female characters were
consistently diminished thanks to the removal of ostensibly unseemly sexual references, modifications
which may, in turn, have contributed to the growing interest in the figure of Othello.

Although there was a general fascination with Othello and his transformation from eminent general
and loving husband to murderer and suicide, there was what many modern readers find surprisingly little
discussion about Othello's racial identity during these years. Nor was there much variety in the ways that
Othello's Moorishness was staged: Othello was played by white actors who darkened their skin using stage
makeup to present him as a sub-Saharan ‘black Moor.’ While their understanding of the physical
characteristics of Othello's racial identity was fairly consistent, however, the leading men of this period
offered varied readings of his temperament. James Quin, for instance, a popular Othello in the first half of
the eighteenth century, chose to emphasize the general's dignified professionalism, presenting his lines in a
then-stylish declamatory fashion while costumed in full British military uniform and wearing a powdered
wig above his heavily blackened face. David Garrick, on the other hand, challenged the depiction of
Othello as a confident leader, playing him instead as a taught, anxious figure topped with an elaborately
plumed turban that lent him an isolating exoticism. The tall, deep-voiced Irish actor Spranger Barry also
appeared turbaned and in blackface, though his famously electrifying performance—characterized by
emotional turmoil and physical vigour—proved far more popular than Garrick's more neurotic one.

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 Among the most interesting of the late-eighteenth-century Othellos was John Philip Kemble, who
took the role several times over his long career. Unlike the tumultuous Othello presented by Spranger
Barry, Kemble's Othello was majestic and stately, and his restrained performances were not always popular
with audiences, especially early in his career. While experience doubtless enriched his approach to the
character as the years went by, comments by his contemporaries suggest that at least some of the negative
response to his earliest performances resulted from the destabilizing effect of his dignified Othello on
widely held assumptions about the inability of Africans to control their ostensibly tempestuous passions.

In 1814, an even more significant shift in performance tradition occurred when Edmund Kean
presented the first of the so-called ‘tawny’ Othellos. Kean gave audiences a light-skinned, North African
Othello rather than the black, sub-Saharan Othello they had grown accustomed to seeing. But if Kean's
lightened stage makeup challenged established theatrical convention, his reading of Othello did little to
destabilize entrenched stereotypes about the savagery of non-Europeans. His was a performance
remarkable for its bursts of passion, and writer and critic Leigh Hunt wrote in The Examiner on 8 October
1818 that he ‘never saw anything that so completely held us suspended and heart-stricken.’

The innovation of the ‘tawny Othello’ at first unsettled audiences familiar with Kemble's dark-
skinned version of the role, but eventually the idea of a scimitar-wielding North African Othello at the
mercy of his passions caught on and successfully held the stage in England and the United States for the
next hundred years. In the 1840s, Edwin Forrest, the first notable American Othello, brought to the role an
animated physicality that prompted comparisons to wild animals, and, although audiences were
reportedly sympathetic to Forrest's proclamation that he was proud to be what his biographer called ‘the
impersonator of oppressed races,’ his Othello seems to have relied on, rather than to have dislodged,
persistent generalizations about the relationship of race to temperament and morality. Starting in 1875,
Italian-born Tommaso Salvini could play into what had become firmly entrenched stereotypes about the
inability of African men to control their innate savagery to perform Othello as a barbarian lurking under a
veneer of European sophistication, and at the beginning of the twentieth century Herbert Beerbohm Tree
was still playing him as a ‘stately Arab’ whose jealous rage transforms him into a ‘wild beast’ (Hankey 67;
quoted in Potter 90).

While the practice of casting white actors who ‘blacked up’ to play Othello continued to dominate
throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, a significant challenge to this convention
was initiated in 1825 when an American teenager named Ira Aldridge arrived in London and became the
first professional black actor to perform the role. His appearance at East London's Royalty Theatre
received mixed reviews, and Aldridge left the city fairly quickly to build his repertoire and his experience
in England's provincial theatres. Although he would become one of the nineteenth century's better known
actors, in the early days of his career Aldridge was billed as the ‘Gentleman of Colour,’ and his acting
skills were often overshadowed by a preoccupation with his skin colour. Some critics dismissed his
casting as a marketing gimmick, while others argued that his race made him unsuited for major
theatrical roles, including those designated as ‘Moors.’ Still others acknowledged the affective power of
Aldridge's performances, but, relying on the same stereotypes associating black men with excessive
displays of emotion that had led eighteenth-century critics to praise Spranger Barry for his acting skill,
dismissed as ‘natural’ Aldridge's ability to embody an Othello so tempestuous that he could wrench
audiences from terror to sympathy over the course of a brief scene.

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 After almost a decade of touring, Aldridge returned to London where he played Othello opposite
Ellen Tree at Covent Garden. Although audiences were mostly enthusiastic, the papers, heavily influenced
by a pro-slavery lobby whose financial backing they received in exchange for supportive copy, were hostile
to the idea of a black man performing a leading role in a play by the nation's most revered playwright. The
Times review was marked by a thinly-veiled racism that constructed Aldridge's accent as ‘unpleasantly,
and we would say vulgarly, foreign’ and found his ‘manner, generally, drawling and unimpressive.’ The
bigotry of other critics was even more overt. The Athenaeum reviewer, for instance, railed against the
‘blow at respectability’ of having a ‘black servant in the character of Othello—Othello forsooth!!!
Othello, almost the master-work of the mastermind.’

It took until 1930 before American singer and civil rights advocate Paul Robeson became only
the second black man to be cast as Othello in a major London production. Directly challenging
pernicious associations between blackness and savagery that continued to dominate in the theatre, Robeson
moved away from readings of Othello as domestic psychological drama and instead presented the play as a
tragedy about racial conflict. Robeson's Othello, dignified but finally defenceless in the face of Iago's
malignant racism, proved immensely popular with audiences and, increasingly, with critics, and his 1943
taboo- and record-breaking appearance on Broadway opposite Uta Hagen—which marked the first time a
black man kissed a white woman on a major American stage—ran longer than any other Broadway
performance of Shakespeare.

It became more common for black actors to perform Othello after Robeson's commercial and
critical success in the role, but the blackface tradition that dominated the first three hundred years of
Othello's rich performance history proved remarkably resilient. White actors continued to play the part
well into the 1960s, including John Gielgud in a much derided 1961 Stratford production directed by
Franco Zeffirelli, Laurence Oliver in a legendary 1964 National Theatre production that was turned into
a film directed by Stuart Burge the following year, and Michael Gambon in a 1968 Birmingham
Repertory Company production set during the Crimean War. Since the 1970s, however, black actors have
regularly played Othello in England and the United States, and some notable performances include those
by Tony-award winner James Earl Jones, Jamaican-born opera singer Willard White, television's David
Harewood, BAFTA award-winning actor Chiwetel Ejifor, British standup comedian Lenny Henry, and,
most recently, Adrian Lester, whose performance was broadcast around the world as part of the National
Theatre Live project.

In addition to a rich and varied history on the stage, ‘Othello’ has had a successful career in film and
television. The first English-language film version of the play was Orson Welles' 1952 production. With
Welles himself in the title role, the film presents a psychologically taut exploration of marriage, military
life, and racial difference against a starkly shot backdrop of Morocco.

The next full-length film of the play, this one featuring Shakespearean language and characters, was
Stuart Burge's ‘Othello’ (1965), which recorded a version of John Dexter's National Theatre production of
the previous year. Featuring strong performances by Maggie Smith as Desdemona and Frank Finlay as
Iago, the film is best remembered for Laurence Olivier's legendary blackface presentation of the title
character. Olivier's performance, embellished by a wig of kinked dark hair, heavy black stage makeup, and
an accent that has been described variously as Nigerian, South African, or West Indian now appears as a
grotesque impersonation of blackness but was widely praised at the time for its ostensible authenticity and
was greeted with enthusiasm by audiences. His Othello dominates the film throughout, grandly controlling
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in the opening scenes, relentlessly brutal in its closing moments, and always the sensual victim of Iago's
eerily gentle manipulations. Identifying in Iago an anxiety based in repressed homosexuality—a reading
that would influence later portrayals of the character by such actors as David Suchet (1985), Ian
McKellen (1989), and Kenneth Branagh (1995)—Finlay plays him as a man whose angst about his own
nature arouses in him a viciously racist revulsion of his commander.

No big-screen Othello was released in the 1980s, but Jonathan Miller's adaptation for BBC TV
appeared in 1981. Returning to the tradition of featuring white actors in the play's title role, Miller's
production stars Anthony Hopkins as a stony Othello whose dark side is gradually nurtured by Bob
Hoskins's energetically nasty Iago. Crowded interior shots give this studio production a claustrophobic
texture that appears at first to emphasize its personal over its political dimensions, but the film develops a
feminist edge as the malevolence of the male characters is increasingly focused on Desdemona (Penelope
Wilton) and Emilia (Rosemary Leach), whose love and wit prove woefully inadequate defences against the
forces of patriarchal outrage. Twenty years later, another made-for-TV movie, this time a modern-
language adaptation set among senior officers of the London Metropolitan Police, explored the play's
intersections of sexism and racism by turning Othello into a taught crime thriller about the death of a
black drug addict at the hands of three white police officers. Black officer John Othello (Eamonn Walker)
is promoted over white Assistant Commissioner Ben Jago (Christopher Eccleston) as scandal rocks a
metropolitan police force, and Othello's wife, Dessie Brabant (Keeley Hawes) becomes the target of neo-
Nazi thugs. When Dessie's ostensible infidelity is established using to falsified DNA evidence, she is
murdered by her husband who then commits suicide, clearing the way for Jago to be appointed
Commissioner. In a moment of triumphant revisionism, Eccleston's Jago closes the film by peering directly
into the camera and insisting that the film's events have had nothing to do with race or politics, but only
with love. Directed by Geoffrey Sax for Masterpiece Theatre, this stylish production's explicit
confrontation of institutionalized bias and its deep cynicism seem even more apt now than they did
when the film first aired.

1995's ‘Othello’ was directed by Oliver Parker and stars Laurence Fishburne in the title role,
Kenneth Branagh as an engagingly scheming Iago, and Irène Jacob as a beautiful if rather vague
Desdemona. This is a visually lush film that emphasizes the stark isolation of its stunning Mediterranean
setting and the casual sexism of the masculinist military culture it depicts. Parker draws on the play's
lengthy production history, offering knowing nods to memorable moments from earlier stage and film
productions, but he also provides innovative touches, adding, for instance, a dream sequence depicting
Desdemona's alleged adultery.

While Parker employs Shakespeare's language and period costumes, Tim Blake Nelson's 2001 film
‘O’ is a considerably freer adaptation that exchanges early modern poetry and clothes for more modern
patterns of speech and fashions. With a twenty-something cast including Mekhi Phifer as Odin (Othello),
Josh Hartnett as Hugo (Iago), and Julia Stiles as Desi (Desdemona), Otargets a young audience by engaging
with concerns about violence, drugs, and racism in youth culture, school shootings, and sexual violence on
campus. Brad Kaaya's screenplay shifts the action from a Cypriot citadel to a private American boarding
school, transforms the play's external threat from an Ottoman armada into a rival basketball team, and
effects a generic transformation tragic romance to contemporary teen thriller.

The most recent English-language film version of Othello is Zaib Shaikh's TV adaptation ‘Othello,
the Tragedy of the Moor’ (2008). This self-consciously post-9/11 production presents Italian-Canadian actor
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Carlo Rota as Othello as a North African Muslim whose ethnic identity determines his relationships in
ways that exceed his control.

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