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/ )

This Day in Film History (Birth of Orson Welles, Genius-Manchild)

May 6, 1915—George Orson Welles, who dropped his first name and thus stood out even more than his sizable talent and ego would have warranted alone, was born in Kenosha, Wisc. Appropriately enough, his first name would come up again in the headstrong young protagonist of the pivotal film of his career, the one that demonstrated his creator’s enormous skill and his crippling inability to work with others in bringing his cinematic visions to fruition: the 1942 period drama The Magnificent Ambersons.

Welles was like a little kid, so fascinated by a brand-new toy that he was easily distracted by the one he already possessed. In 1942, he had been so excited about the prospect of directing a documentary at the behest of the State Department, It's All True, that he assigned work he considered beneath him--editing and dealing with studio bosses--to his assistant, Robert Wise. He was not around, then, when Ambersons was reduced to 88 minutes, a shell of its former length.

Interest in the centennial of the creator of Ambersons and Citizen Kane, the perennial winner of those Greatest Film of All Time lists, has been intensifying for awhile now, not just because of his achievements but also because of the grand projects he left unfinished at the time of his death 30 years ago. 

The saga of The Other Side of the Wind is typical in this regard. It appeared, for the longest time this year, that Welles’ film about a director struggling to make a movie would at last be finished in time for this centennial year. But, earlier this month at the University of Indiana, film historian Joseph McBride elicited from a fellow panelist the news that potential distributors of this film want to see a negative before committing themselves any further, posing the risk of further delays.

Longtime readers of this blog know that my interest in Welles, a multifaceted but troublesome genius, runs deep. One way of thinking about how strong that interest is might be by this fact: I know that I saw an entertaining, somewhat fictionalized account of the young Welles’ Mercury Theatre production of Julius Caesar—a movie called Me and Orson Welles, directed by Richard Linklater and starring Zac Efron, Claire Danes, and Christian McKay as a charismatic but willful Welles—but I can’t recall a single other film I saw on the big screen that year (2008).

I have given full vent to my fascination with Welles in seven prior posts. If read in the following order below, as the events occurred chronologically, they will demonstrate how Welles developed his projects, how he unintentionally sabotaged them through his ego and wandering attention span—and how nevertheless, against all odds, he still managed to complete as much as he did:

* Welles’ First Break (1934)—a supporting role in Katherine Cornell’s Romeo and Juliet.

*The Second Hurricane (1937)—how Welles directed high-school students, only slightly younger than himself, in an Aaron Copland opera created just for them.

*The War of the Worlds (1938)—the radio show that scared America out of its wits.

*Citizen Kane (1941)—Welles’ original title, “American,” perfectly fit his masterpiece of the corruption--and loneliness bred by--power.

*The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)—how Welles’ eagerly awaited follow-up to Citizen Kane Changed the Course of His Career.

*RKO Ends Contract With Welles (1944)—two years after the wreck of Ambersons, the studio cut Welles--and a contract guaranteeing unprecedented creative freedom for a director--adrift.

*Othello (1952)—in an act of guerrilla film financing, Welles took his daring Shakespearean adaptation on the road.

After all I have written about Welles, I am still eager to write even more about this magnificent but maddening moviemaker: how he experimented with radio before and after War of the Worlds; why the FBI was so interested in him; how he improvised his famous clock speech in The Third Man; how one film project of his after another from the Fifties through the Seventies never fulfilled the promise of Kane; how he died old and embittered…and that’s just the start. I can't wait.

Come to think of it, he never could, either...

Flashback, November 1952: Welles Takes Self-Financed ‘Othello’ on Road

An enthusiastic amateur magician, Orson Welles undoubtedly wished he could have used some of his act in bringing his cinematic vision before the public. His latest film, Othello—which had won the grand prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1952—premiered in Portugal on November 7 and in France 12 days later. Amazingly, it would be three years before it would come to the United States. Even more astonishing, however, was that this—the first self-financed motion picture by an American—had already taken two years to shoot and two more years to edit.

You can view Welles’ movie adaptation of Shakespeare’s Moor of Venice in several ways. One, simply, might be as part of a 30-year set of productions reflecting his fascination with the Bard (also including, for film, the 1948 Macbeth and 1966 Chimes at Midnight; on the stage, the 1937 modern-dress Julius Caesar that had first put Welles on the cultural map; and, on radio, in 1936, Hamlet, followed two years later by Julius Caesar). The other is as a helter-skelter—half-mad, half-heroic—attempt to live down a Hollywood reputation as a director who could never finish his work, dating back to The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

Without a studio—or even a constant producer—to back him, Welles was forced to put it all together himself. Though his directing services were not wanted in Hollywood, his acting services were still in demand, his tax consultant told him, producing $100,000 a picture. That might mean that Welles might have to appear in a movie that he regarded as substandard, such as Prince of Foxes, but at least it paid his (often hefty) bills—and, the actor-hyphenate figured, he would use the funds from these appearances as seed money for films he intended to direct.

That scenario should sound familiar to fans of independent cinema. John Sayles has used a variation of it (writing screenplays for others, rather than appearing in their works), and John Cassavetes has been credited with launching the independent film scene in earnest in 1959 with Shadows. But Welles got there a decade before Cassavetes, and a quarter century before Sayles. (Moreover, while Sayles has been able to rely on his creative and off-screen partner, Maggie Renzi, Welles’ European labors rested increasingly on his own shoulders, as his producer from his Mercury Theatre days, Richard Wilson, elected to stay in the United States after his boss decamped for the continent.)

Much like Woody Allen today, Welles saw a golden opportunity to make films cheaply in Europe, outside the U.S. studio system. For one thing, he had contacts in the Italian film industry, and, as Seth Alexander Thévoz notes in a pos tfor the blog I.B. Tauris, “many European countries had growing post-war film industries, propped up by generous state subsidies in France, Italy and Spain.”

Those hopes were misplaced. Financing seemed to evaporate just as a new scene was ready to be shot, forcing Welles either to run off for another quick-and-dirty acting payday or to think of another creative way of making do with what he had.

Not every instance of the latter was equally inspired. “Every time you see someone with his back turned or with a hood over his head, you can be sure that it's a stand-in,” French critic Andre Bazin quoted the director in Orson Welles: A Critical View (1972).  “I had to do everything by cross-cutting because I was never able to get Iago, Desdemona and Rodrigo, etc., together at once in front of the camera."

If that sounds like something like using a stand-in for the deceased Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood’s Plan 9 From Outer Space, another scene stands up brilliantly. Assured that costumes would be ready for the murder of Roderigo, Welles discovered they weren’t. At this point, he decided to go ahead anyway and film the murder in a Turkish bath, with the actors wearing only towels. It’s the culmination of Cassio’s pursuit of Iago’s witless confederate through a labyrinth, a metaphor for the unnerving pursuit of truth in an environment created by Iago, a master of deceit.

Limits imposed by the ad-hoc financing, different locations and crew skill levels consistently determined Welles’ methods:

*Technical skills of the European crew did not match those of American studios, so Welles dispensed with the long takes he had favored as recently as Macbeth (1948).

*Shooting was so prolonged that some actors opted out from continuing—and Welles himself ended up recasting. Thus, Everett Sloane (Mr. Bernstein of Citizen Kane) was replaced as Iago by a friend Welles knew from early in his career in Ireland, Michael MacLiammoir, and Suzanne Cloutier was the third actress slated to play Desdemona.

* Welles could not afford to record sound on some of his locations, so he had the lines dubbed after filming was completed. Sometimes he himself dubbed the voices.

* Three times, Welles was forced to shut down production until he could either earn the money himself or prevail on someone to bail him out. For that reason, Welles might splice together a shot of an actor, then his own response, filmed a year later and in another country.

Shakespeare purists were not enamored of Welles’ adaptation: The running time of the film was only 91 minutes (in contrast to the Laurence Olivier version of 1965, which ran for 175 minutes, and the 1995 Laurence Fishburne-Kenneth Branagh version, which clocked in at 123 minutes). Whole chunks of dialogue were deleted, with some scenes transposed.  In particular, several critics criticized the film’s audio quality when it finally premiered in the United States in 1955.

Forty years after the film was shown at Cannes, Portugal and France, Welles’ daughter Beatrice Welles-Smith, teamed with Chicago producers Michael Dawson and Arnie Saks to restore the film to something close to her father’s ambitions. The revamped version featured a long-mislaid 35mm master negative of the movie, along with a re-score with members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and the Lyric Opera Chorus.

Vincent Canby of The New York Times expressed the feelings of many colleagues when he observed that the film “doesn't rank below Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, but alongside them."