Othello (21 page)

Lines 271–416:
Emilia asks to be laid by her mistress’s side. Montano tells Gratiano to guard “the Moor” while he pursues Iago. Emilia’s last words are to assure Othello of Desdemona’s innocence and her love for him. As Othello laments Desdemona’s death, Lodovico and Montano bring in Iago as a prisoner and the wounded Cassio. Othello stabs Iago but fails to kill him. With all the remaining characters assembled, the truth is established and evidence produced of Iago’s villainy, but he refuses to explain himself and vows “From this time forth I never will speak word.” Othello is stripped of his command and Cassio given leadership in Cyprus. As he is to be led away, Othello begs to be remembered as “one that loved not wisely but too well” before stabbing himself. He kisses Desdemona as he dies. Iago’s punishment is for Cassio to decide. Lodovico recommends the use of torture while he returns immediately to Venice to report what has happened.

The best way to understand a Shakespeare play is to see it or ideally to participate in it. By examining a range of productions, we may gain a sense of the extraordinary variety of approaches and interpretations that are possible—a variety that gives Shakespeare his unique capacity to be reinvented and made “our contemporary” four centuries after his death.

We begin with a brief overview of the play’s theatrical and cinematic life, offering historical perspectives on how it has been performed. We then analyze in more detail a series of productions staged over the last half-century by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The sense of dialogue between productions that can only occur when a company is dedicated to the revival and investigation of the Shakespeare canon over a long period, together with the uniquely comprehensive archival resource of promptbooks, program notes, reviews, and interviews held on behalf of the RSC at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, allows an “RSC stage history” to become a crucible in which the chemistry of the play can be explored.

Finally, we go to the horse’s mouth. Modern theater is dominated by the figure of the director. He or she must hold together the whole play, whereas the actor must concentrate on his or her part. The director’s viewpoint is therefore especially valuable. Shakespeare’s plasticity is wonderfully revealed when we hear directors of highly successful productions answering the same questions in very different ways.

FOUR CENTURIES OF
OTHELLO
: AN OVERVIEW

Despite the theatrical challenges it presents,
Othello
has been performed almost continuously since the first recorded performance on November 1, 1604, at the court of James I. This has resulted in a remarkably full performance history focused historically on the roles of Othello and Iago and, to a lesser extent, Desdemona. The uneven balance between the main parts, with Iago speaking 31 percent of the lines to Othello’s 25 percent, has often resulted in a sort of theatrical contest between the two which a number of productions have capitalized on by having actors alternate the roles.

Richard Burbage, the leading tragedian with the King’s Men, and the first Othello, was celebrated for his performance, described by an anonymous elegist as “his chiefest part, / Wherein beyond the rest he moved the heart.” There is evidence that Iago was played by one of the company comedians, John Lowin.
¹
A spectator of the performance by the King’s Men at Oxford in 1610 records how the audience was moved “to tears” in the last scene when “that famous Desdemona, killed before us by her husband, although she always acted her whole part supremely well, when she was killed she was even more moving, for when she fell back upon the bed she implored the pity of the spectators by her very face.”
²
Interestingly, neither Othello’s color nor the fact that Desdemona was played by a boy was considered noteworthy. After Burbage’s death, until the closure of the theaters in 1642 Othello was played by Ellyaerdt Swanston with Joseph Taylor as Iago. Since Taylor is also known to have inherited the role of Hamlet, this suggests that it was no longer regarded as a role for a comic actor.

Othello
was one of the first plays to be performed after the Restoration and subsequent reopening of the theaters in 1660. It was assigned to the newly formed King’s Men under Thomas Killigrew and hence avoided the radical rewriting of William Davenant, although promptbooks that survive for the next two centuries record a tendency to cut lines and sometimes whole scenes (such as Othello’s fit and the eavesdropping scene) that came to be regarded as lacking in decorum.
³
Samuel Pepys saw a performance at the Phoenix, recording in his diary how the “very pretty lady that sat by me cried to see Desdemona smothered.”
⁴
The Restoration theater introduced scenery and women actors, but the first recorded instance of a woman performing on the English stage was Margaret Hughes as Desdemona on December 8, 1660, so the production Pepys saw in October which so moved the “pretty lady” must have been with a boy actor.

Othello was the part in which Thomas Betterton, the leading actor of the early eighteenth century, “excelled himself,” according to Colley Cibber.
⁵
Judging by contemporary accounts, he was able to combine heroic and pathetic aspects of the character. Cibber talks of Betterton’s “commanding mien of majesty” and the way in which his voice “gave more spirit to terror than the softer passions,” whereas Richard Steele was struck by “the wonderful agony” in which he appeared “when he examined the circumstances of the handkerchief…the mixture of love that intruded upon his mind upon the innocent answers Desdemona makes.”
⁶
If Othello was the noble Moor, Iago had to be irredeemably villainous; the actor specializing in such parts who played Iago to Betterton’s Othello was Samuel Sandford, described by Cibber as “a low and crooked person” having “such bodily defects” as rendered him unsuitable for “great or amiable characters.”
⁷

Barton Booth, renowned for noble deportment and dignity, took over the part from Betterton, bringing charm and “manly sweetness” to the role and a grief in which his “tears broke from him.”
⁸
The
Grub Street Journal
complained that Colley Cibber’s Iago, by contrast,“shrugs up his shoulders, shakes his noddle, and with a fawning motion of his hands” drawls out his words so that “Othello must be supposed a fool, a stock, if he does not see through him.”
⁹
James Quin, who succeeded Booth, was also noted for his dignity, whereas David Garrick, who revolutionized eighteenth-century acting with his ease and naturalness, failed in the part. His interpretation, described as suggesting rather “a man under the impression of fear, or on whom some bodily torture was inflicting, than one labouring under the emotions of such tumultuous passions,”
¹⁰
was clearly in advance of the times.

Contemporary criticism suggests a growing awareness of racial issues. The actor-dramatist Samuel Foote objected to Quin’s performance, commenting: “Sure never has there been a character more generally misunderstood, both by audience and actor, than this before us, to mistake the most tender-hearted, compassionate, humane man, for a cruel, bloody, and obdurate savage,”
¹¹
while Quin in turn criticized Garrick’s appearance in the part, for which he wore a turban, asking: “Why does he not bring the tea-kettle and lamp?”
¹²
—a reference to the “small black boy in a plumed turban holding a kettle in Hogarth’s series
A Harlot’s Progress
.”
¹³
Garrick was more successful as one of several actors who played Iago to Spranger Barry’s handsome, graceful Othello. Barry contrived by all accounts to be even more “sweet” and “comely”
¹⁴
than Booth. His performance, characterized by “blended passages of
rage
and
heartfelt affection
,”
¹⁵
was perfectly matched by Susanna Cibber’s “expression of love, grief, tenderness”
¹⁶
as Desdemona.

A translation of the play in 1792 by Jean-François Ducis, in which the great French tragedian Talma played Othello, caught the mood of revolutionary France, coming a year after the successful slave revolt in the French colony of San Domingo (modern-day Haiti). Ducis’ version was heavily cut and adapted. There was further cutting of the English text in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the interests of propriety, which suited the neoclassical acting of John Philip Kemble, described by Hazlitt as “the very still-life and statuary of the stage.”
¹⁷
His Othello was “grand and awful and pathetic,…European,”
¹⁸
despite his Moorish costume. However, Kemble’s sister, Sarah Siddons, playing Desdemona, was warmly praised and given credit for a changed appreciation of the role in which she “established an interest and importance to that character which it had never possessed before.”
¹⁹
Despite the beginnings of a changing critical perspective with regard to Iago, the part was still being played as “a pantomime villain,”
²⁰
although Edmund Kean had given an innovative performance as “a gay, light-hearted monster, a careless, cordial, comfortable villain.”
²¹

Kean went on to play Othello for many years in a performance Leigh Hunt regarded as “the masterpiece of the living stage.”
²²
Like Garrick before him, Kean brought passion and naturalism to his roles, triumphing as Othello despite the limitations imposed by his physique.
²³
He used relatively light makeup for the part in order for his facial expressions to be more easily visible. Kean’s performance developed over the years and he continued to play the part until 1833, when he finally collapsed onstage into the arms of his son Charles, who was then playing Iago. By the time that William Charles Macready took over the role, there was a growing public debate over Othello’s racial origins and the role of sexuality within the play. Macready had played Iago to Kean’s Othello, but was “baffled”
²⁴
when he took over the role.

2.
“Talk you of killing?” Sarah Siddons as Desdemona at Drury Lane in 1785. Her performance established a new “interest and importance” to the part.

Meanwhile, in New York, leading American tragedian Edwin Forrest played Othello at the Bowery Theater. He was so successful that he continued to play the part for forty years, visiting London with it in 1845. Although it was popular with audiences, many English critics objected to the violence of Forrest’s performance. His biographer, William Rounesville Alger, argued for the legitimacy of Forrest’s interpretation though, comparing it favorably with his predecessors and contemporaries.
²⁵
There were also notable productions in mainland Europe. French actor Charles Fechter played the part in English at the Princess’ Theatre in 1861 to mixed reviews. Novelist and critic Henry James greatly admired Tommaso Salvini’s Othello, despite the “grotesque, unpardonable, abominable” practice of having him speak in his native Italian while the rest of the cast performed in English. James reflected upon the Italianate nature of Salvini’s Othello: “No more complete picture of passion can be given to the stage in our day,— passion beginning in noble repose and spending itself in black insanity…Salvini’s rendering of the part is the portrait of an African by an Italian; a fact which should give the judicious spectator, in advance, the pitch of the performance.” He went on to contrast his performance with that of another notable Italian actor:

3.
“Were it my cue to fight, I should have known it / Without a prompter.” Edmund Kean at Drury Lane Theatre, 1814. His Othello was “the masterpiece of the living stage.”

While Forrest was playing Othello in the United States and England, the first black Othello, Ira Aldridge, played to packed houses across Europe, having previously played the role to acclaim in the English provinces and, for just two performances in April 1833, on the stage of Covent Garden in London. Touring in the years after the revolutions of 1848, Aldridge’s performances were enthusiastically received, although criticism of his “naturalness” often suggests unconsciously racist attitudes: “In the role of Othello Mr Aldridge was extraordinary—he is a genuine tiger and one is terrified for the artists who play Desdemona and Iago, for it seems that actually they will come to harm.”
²⁷

Henry Irving was another actor who found that Othello eluded him. In the 1881 Lyceum production he alternated Othello/Iago with Edwin Booth. Despite their different styles, Booth’s traditional, classical style versus Irving’s more modern naturalism, both actors won praise as Iago while disappointing as Othello. However, Irving’s was recognized as “emphatically a new Iago,”
²⁸
decisively changing attitudes to the role: