Flashback, November 1604: Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’ Premieres With Dark Mirror of Its Time

When it was presented by "the King's Majesty's players” 420 years ago this month, Othello seems to have pleased his primary audience, King James I, still only a year and a half into his reign.

Understandably, considering that “the Moor of Venice” is the only black character in all of William Shakespeare’s 38 plays, current dramaturgy tries to examine how the playwright speaks to the racism of our time. It has, as part of that process, thrown into question the common practice of actors donning blackface for the role.

But the tragedy should also be subjected to literary excavation to determine how the play was written, performed, and viewed in its own time—an era of danger and secrets.

Shakespeare had learned his lesson well while crafting plays under the watchful eye of James’ predecessor, Queen Elizabeth I: searingly depict the society and psyches of courts swirling with intrigue, but set the action far away, lest listeners find the plots and characters striking too close to home. 

(And Renaissance Venice was much farther away in time if not distance from England than we can ever imagine today: storms in the English Channel were known to delay passage to France for as much as two weeks.)

Clare Asquith’s 2005 study, Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare, with its contention that the playwright was a secret Catholic when the faith was banned in England, has hardly been universally accepted by Bardologists. But she draws some interesting parallels between Othello and James, including that both leaders:

*survived narrow escapes;

*professed that their wives offered life-saving love;

*came to their new status as foreigners (James had been James VI of Scotland before assuming the English throne, while Othello, “the Moor of Venice,” would have been understood by audiences of the time as being from modern North Africa);

*celebrated Venice’s preservation from Moslem invaders (James, in his poetry; Othello, in battle).

For all the coding and deflection that Shakespeare, like other literary figures of the time, resorted to throughout his work, he was also sending “an urgent message” to James in this new play: “Royal authority must not fall into the hands of base men like Angelo [the Me-Too-like abuser of Measure for Measure] and Iago; it must be exercised responsibly.”

Starting in 1600, Shakespeare wrote what are often considered his four greatest tragedies: Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello. Of these, the last is the most tightly constructed in character (three main ones: Othello, Desdemona, and Iona) and time.

The time element may be the most important, as Iago, with an energy to match his cunning, sets in motion with stunning speed the plot that will destroy the life, reputation, and happiness of his commander. Two days after Othello and Desdemona reunite in Cyprus with mutual ardor, they are dead.

Commercial, overcivilized, seething with intrigue, Venice provides a ripe environment in which Iago can plant the seeds of the downfall of his plain-dealing commander. But such is his sense of invention that even a military outpost like Cyprus, more congenial to Othello, furthers his nefarious purposes: this time, the innocent Desdemona is utterly at sea.

The Venetian republic had depended on foreigners to defend itself from Moslem attacks, as seen in the play by service personnel from Spain (Iago—interestingly enough, Spanish for “James”) and Othello (from North Africa). Even so, the court of King James and throngs who saw the play at both the open-air Globe playhouse and the indoor Blackfriars in the next couple of decades would have known that its possession Cyprus had eventually fallen to the Ottoman Empire.

Venice could ill afford, then, to lose the likes of great commanders like Othello, and their absence from future councils of war could only increase the vulnerability of the republic.

Even in this point of geographic deflection, Shakespeare was hinting to his audience that the personal could become the political very quickly.

In the case of the English monarch, listeners had a strong reason to think so: a monarch’s inability to produce a male heir had pushed the nation into the cohort of Protestant European nations under King Henry VIII, then had hastened the transition from his childless (Tudor) daughter Elizabeth to James (Stuart).

Literary and theatrical culture supplied Shakespeare’s plot. His major source was an Italian novella in Giraldi Cinthio's Gli Hecatommithi, translated into French (where, presumably, the playwright saw a translation).

Cinthio's “ensign” brings about the fall of his chief in this tale, too. But the lesson is decidedly different from what Shakespeare conveyed: children should obey their parents, even if—especially if— this means the bride should not marry a black male without their permission.

Shakespeare also drew on a tradition better known to English theatergoers: morality plays that were popular in his teens. As Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt observes in Will in the World, these productions had fallen out of favor by the time the playwright reached his creative zenith late in the Elizabethan era, but they had concentrated viewers’ attention on a representative figure of evil, often named Vice.

In Othello, the sin—jealousy—becomes the tragic flaw that Othello, so used to commanding men in battle, finds impossible to quell within his heart, with Iago serving as the supercharged symbol of evil.

I have seen several productions of Othello onstage or onscreen, featuring such compelling actors as Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, James Earl Jones, Laurence Fishburne, and Ron O’Neal. This has continued the tradition that began with Shakespeare’s leading player, Richard Burbage, playing the role before King James.

But Jones’ 1982 Broadway hit crystallized one of the common dilemmas of the play: No matter how magnetic the star playing Othello might be, the spotlight, more often than not, swings to the actor embodying Iago. 

Ecstatic reviews for that show’s Iago, Christopher Plummer, considerably annoyed Jones (and, let’s face it, brought out a jealous streak not unlike his character), who was already perturbed by his co-star’s penchant for hamming up scenes with crowd-pleasing humor, according to Plummer's memoir In Spite of Myself.

But this tendency of Iago consuming greater viewer attention is also grounded in the play itself:

*Unlike other Shakespearean tragedies such as King Lear, evil is massed in one character rather than dispersed across multiple ones;

*Iago not only has more lines than Othello, but also, because he appears before he comes onstage, has the opportunity to set expectations about their relationship;

*Iago’s soliloquys render the audience complicit in his plotting;

*Iago neither makes amends for nor adequately explains his actions—indeed, he offers so many, with so little real justification, that he appears to be grasping at straws to fill what poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge memorably called the villain’s “motiveless malignity.”

The great essayist William Hazlitt, in his book Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, aptly summarizes Iago as possessing a "diseased intellectual activity, with an almost perfect indifference to moral good or evil, or rather with a decided preference of the latter."

(The image accompanying this post shows a particularly celebrated influential production of Othello, from 1930 at London’s Savoy Theatre, with Paul Robeson as the title character and Peggy Ashcroft as Desdemona.)

Appreciations: Christopher Plummer, Prince of Players

“No matter what I do between, the stage always beckons and gets me every time. I suppose it's because there are no tedious retakes, no endless waiting, no cutting-room floor upon which I can end up. Once on the stage, we are thrown to the lions, no barrier comes down between us and the mob; everything is exposed, dangerous and now."—Canadian Tony- and Oscar-winning actor Christopher Plummer (1929-2021), In Spite of Myself: A Memoir (2008)

The death this past weekend of Christopher Plummer at age 91 concluded a career lengthy and storied enough to land his passing on the front page of The New York Times.

Like Falstaff (the one role he scoffed at playing in his last years because it required a fat suit), Plummer had many a time “heard the chimes at midnight.” Indeed, it was nothing short of miraculous that he survived into his nineties.

Reading In Spite of Myself is likely to induce in a reader the worst case of drunkenness by osmosis since Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Plummer was such a champion hell-raiser that around 20 years ago, when I visited the place that thrust him into the spotlight in the 1950s, the Stratford Festival, one aficionado of the longtime Canadian theater institution was still shaking his head over a drinking binge by the actor from years before.

With his keen intelligence, matinee-idol looks, vigorous libido, and epic thirst, Plummer could have easily sunk into sodden self-parody as John Barrymore had. But he credited his third and last wife, Elaine, with curbing his wild ways, and he proceeded to do much of his best work well into old age.

Unlike, say, Nathan Lane, whom I blogged about last week, Plummer had a significant film career. Early on, he appeared in the most high-profile vehicle imaginable, the blockbuster musical The Sound of Music (which he insisted afterward on terming The Sound of Mucus).

Although he felt his role as Captain Von Trapp to be woefully wooden and thin, he found later parts far more suited to his talents, including in John Huston’s The Man Who Would Be King; a personal favorite of mine, the Sherlock Holmes thriller Murder by Decree; and three films that netted Oscar nominations, The Last Station, All the Money in the World, and Beginners (the last of which earned him the coveted trophy, at age 82, making him the oldest actor ever to win the Academy Award for supporting actor).

But it was the stage, with its audiences reacting, its rich classic texts by Shakespeare, Sophocles, Rostand and Shaw, and its never-to-be repeated moments, that clearly catalyzed Plummer. His transatlantic theater appearances were sensations.

Much to my regret, I missed Plummer on the three different times I visited Stratford in the 1990s and 2000s. But I caught him on Broadway in the winter of 1982, and it wasn’t just any play. It was Othello, a production of fire (James Earl Jones, as the Moor of Venice) and ice (Plummer, in perhaps the greatest of all villain roles, Iago).

New York Times critic Walter Kerr called Plummer’s Iago “quite possibly the best single Shakespearean performance to have originated on this continent in our time.” I was hardly prepared to argue that point. I barely noticed then an up-and-coming young actor named Kelsey Grammar as the easily gulled Cassio, and, despite the admiration of Jones and Plummer, had little use for Diane Wiest as Desdemona. Instead, I was intent on how Plummer’s Iago devised his intricate spider’s web to ensnare Jones’ Othello.

That February night, as Plummer let his resonant voice drop as Iago vowed to turn Desdemona’s “virtue into pitch,” the atmosphere in the Winter Garden Theatre turned darker and chillier than what awaited us on the street.

That production, which began at Connecticut’s American Shakespeare Theatre, was booked for a limited Broadway run but was so popular had to be extended twice. Nevertheless, all was not well backstage.

The problems began in initial rehearsals, according to Michael Riedel’s Singular Sensation: The Triumph of Broadway, when the original director, Peter Coe, was sacked, after his impolite suggestion to Jones that “Mr. Plummer is mopping the floor with you.” A new director, Zoe Caldwell, on good terms with both leads, dissipated much of the animosity, but the issue Coe identified remained: Plummer was, astonishingly enough, “mopping the floor” with Jones.

During the play's run, I heard scuttlebutt that Jones was annoyed by Plummer. In his memoir, Plummer, while praising his co-star’s “great authority” in the role, thought he had decided to “restrain and underplay the great moments of surging poetry.” Nor did it help that Jones objected to the unexpected laughs that Plummer elicited.

How much did this barely suppressed bristling reflect honest differences in interpreting the play? How much derived from the leads’ egos? In the end, it didn’t matter. Those like myself fortunate enough to witness one of those shows will remember how an old play took on new life amid this clash of theatrical titans.

Jones shouldn’t have felt badly about coming off second best to Plummer. Over 60 years in the theater, the Canadian channeled his flamboyance and astuteness into a well-earned reputation as an international prince of players. He brought to his craft an abiding love, realizing that acting had:

“…taught me music, poetry, painting and dance; it has introduced me to the big bad world outside; it has made me face rejection; it has taught me humour in its blackest and gentlest forms; it has made me think; it has even taught me about love. It has shown me the majesty of language, the written word in all its glory, and it has taught me above all that there is no such thing as perfection -- that in the arts, there are no rules, no restrictions, no limits -- only infinity."

(The photo accompanying this post shows Christopher Plummer at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, September 2007. Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/gdcgraphics/1752518829/in/set-72157602744288487/ ; author: gdcgraphics at https://www.flickr.com/photos/gdcgraphics/ )

Quote of the Day (Robertson Davies, on Actors’ Memoirs)

“Good books of reminiscence by actors are uncommon: Alec Guinness wrote an excellent one, but Olivier didn’t; Gielgud covers his tracks in every line; Robert Morley simply gives a performance as himself. They can’t write for beans and you are a very good writer.”—Robertson Davies, Sept. 20, 1995, to English actor-director Tony Van Bridge, in For Your Eye Alone: The Letters of Robertson Davies, edited by Judith Skelton Grant (1999)

(Years ago, I was lucky enough both to be introduced to the work of the Canadian man of letters Davies and to hear him in person, at Fairleigh Dickinson University, before his death in 1995. I enjoyed one of his best-known novels, Fifth Business, as well as his amusing collection of ghost stories, High Spirits.

Davies was also a man of the theater, serving on the board of governors of Canada’s great Stratford Theatre Festival in its early years. In that context, I wonder what he would make of another alum of that festival, Christopher Plummer, who has recently issued his own autobiography, In Spite of Myself.

Plummer’s memoir has gotten excellent reviews, including one on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. I imagine that Davies would scrutinize it most carefully for Plummer’s views on Stratford before looking at it from the prism by which he judged Guinness, Olivier, Gielgud, and Morley.

I think Davies’ basic point is inarguable. I enjoyed John Houseman’s memoir, Front and Center, but offhand can think of few other memoirs by actors that really measured up. Yet those books keep getting published.

Part of the problem, of course, is that actors are trained to say words rather than write them—so, when it comes to penning the stories of their lives, a ghostwriter is invariably employed. But there’s another, less-noticed problem: the actor’s ego. The droll title of Joseph Cotton’s autobiography, Vanity Will Get You Somewhere, encapsulates thespians’ narcissism pretty succinctly, I think. That tendency, evidenced in their usual 9-to-5 preoccupations--"How was I? How did I look?"--leaves them little room to reflect on either their environment or the larger meaning of their world or times.

Then, once you get past the gossip that publishers are shelling out big books for anyway, there's rather thin gruel left over.)