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.)
