Othello

Critical Essays

Philip Kolin, Philip Kolin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136536311
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Including twenty-one groundbreaking chapters that examine one of Shakespeare's most complex tragedies. Othello: Critical Essays explores issues of friendship and fealty, love and betrayal, race and gender issues, and much more.

Blackness Made Visible

A Survey of Othello in Criticism, on Stage, and on Screen

PHILIP C. KOLIN

In what must be the most egregious understatement in Othello criticism, William Hazlitt wrote in 1817 that the play “excites our sympathy in an extraordinary degree.” Exceeding Hazlitt’s enthusiasm, A. C. Bradley announced in 1904 that “Of all Shakespeare’s tragedies Othello is the most painfully exciting and terrible” (Shakespearean Tragedy, 140). For centuries, though, the play had been terrifying readers and audiences. Dr. Johnson confessed that he could not bear to read or see the last act performed. Audience responses—like those of Hazlitt, Bradley, and Johnson—are a prolegomenon to any discussion of the critical heritage or stage history of the play. Audience reactions crystallize the major anxieties Othello has raised in its 400 year history At the emotional center of the play—the vortex of its web—are some of the most inflammatory issues confronting early and late modern audiences alike: (a) miscegenation—a black man marrying a white woman; (b) adultery—openly incensing Othello yet based upon Iago’s tissue of flimsy clues; (c) violence— directed toward both women and men; (d) sexuality/desire—narrated through violent fictions but horribly physicalized as well; (e) jealousy—the curse of marriage and military office undermining faith and trust; (f) loss of reputation —for Desdemona, Cassio, Othello; (g) class warfare—Iago, the underdog, Othello, the outsider. Inescapably, Othello is a cultural seismograph, measuring the extent and force of gender, racial, or class upheavals in any society that performs the script.

Historically, audiences have inscribed themselves in the text: Othello has been unpacked in their discomfitures. Propelled into the play, audiences have been imperilled in the web of its magic, and perplexed through its magic web of tangled uncertainties and implausible outrages. No other Shakespearean play seems to have invoked such pained and/or recriminatory audience/reader response as has Othello. As criticism of the play reveals, audiences have been ejected from the safety of readership/spectatorship and press-ganged into collaboration with or against the characters. In 1930, G. Wilson Knight declared an essential truth—Othello affects us because of its “outstanding differences” (Wheel of Fire, 80). Recent studies by Jean Howard, E. A. J. Honig-mann (Shakespeare: Seven Tragedies), and Stephen Greenblart all trace how Iago, Othello, Emilia, and even Desdemona employ dramaturgical strategies to recruit audiences into an Othello constituency, exploding expectations into anxiety, contradictions, and resistance. With timorous accent and dire yell, readers have advanced interpretations as if they were as strong a proof as holy writ. As Edward Pechter, one of the most perceptive Othello readers, repeatedly cautions, “It is not uncommon for Othello critics to claim that their interpretations are not just valid but true, yet another piece of evidence for the special pressures the play puts on us” (Othello, 18). Persistently, the epistemology of Othello criticism resides uncomfortably in the “contradictory energies of the play” (Othello,164).

The fact that Othello has been repeatedly censored in production further documents an audience’s demand to have their worst anxieties calmed, and quieted through excision. What editors and actors have tried to quarantine has erupted into pain and anger for audiences over the centuries. Marvin Rosenberg documents several instances where bowdlerization in Othello was exceeded by plumptrianization, a radical example of textual cautery performed by the nineteenth-century editor, the Rev. James Plumptre. Edwin Booth, for example, refused to utter any Othello vocabulary of assignation/ copulation—sheets, bed, lie and so on. Yet the Othello text, if left to unfold in its most elemental, most unguarded shape, turns into an envenomed weapon against the audience’s composure, destablizing their emotional status quo. At the end of the twentieth century, Edward Pechter argues that the play graphically projects the reader’s revulsion of sexual fluids; the “slime” of the deceitful deed has its verbal roots in sexual secretions (Othello, 104; see also Pechter, “Sex and Sexual Stories”). Othello is a riotous text disturbing readers’/spectators’ peace of mind, frustrating their desire for closure. Speaking to this point, Peter Davison aptly quotes Susan Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation”: “Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.” And as Davison further notes, “What is certain is that Othello is not a comfortable play: neither is its style, its construction, or its matter comfortable; and it ought to make us uneasy, a little nervous” (Othello, 5).

Desdemona’s murder, for example, has provoked feverish agony in audiences. In 1610, Henry Jackson described a contemporary spectator’s pained response to the play performed at Oxford’s Corpus Christi College:

They also had tragedies, which they acted with propriety and fitness. In which [tragedies], not only through speaking but also through certain things, they moved [the audience] to tears. But truly the celebrated Desdemona, slain in our presence by her husband, although she pleaded her case very effectively throughout, yet moved [us] more after she was dead, when lying on her bed, entreated the pity of the spectators by her very countenance.(Riverside Shakespeare, 1852)

Other scenes have also evoked pity and terror. Richard Steele in the Tattler (2 May 1710) recorded the impact Thomas Betterton’s Othello had on early eighteenth-century audiences: the actor “betrayed in his gesture such a variety and vicissitude of passion as would admonish a Man to be afraid of his own heart, and perfectly convince him that it is to stab it to admit that worst of daggers, Jealousy.” In 1776, the power of the Moor’s horrible deed put audiences of Ludwig Schroeder’s adaptation of Othello in a state of turmoil. This spectacle on stage:

… exceeded by far what the nerves of the men of Hamburg, and even more those of the women…could bear. The closer the performance approached the catastrophe, the more uneasy the audience grew. “Swoons followed upon swoons,” reports an eyewitness. “The doors of the boxes opened and closed. People left, or when necessary, were carried out; and, according to trustworthy reports, the miscarriages suffered by various prominent ladies were the result of seeing and hearing the overly tragic play.” (quoted in Habicht, 5)

Sixteen years later, when the great French tragedian François-Joseph Talma murdered Desdemona in Jean-François Ducis’s adaptation (1792), the audience sent up:

… a universal tumult. Tears, groans, and menaces resounded from all parts of the theatre; and what was still more demonstrative, and more alarming, several of the prettiest women in Paris fainted in the most conspicuous boxes and were publicly carried out of the house. Ducis was alarmed for his tragedy, for this fame, and for his life. (Rosenberg, 32)

Seeing Edmund Kean as Othello, an actor who sent “flashes of lightning” into the audience, “Byron wept sobs” (Rosenberg, 61), and recalling Kean’s horrific performance in Act 3.3 demanding blood, John Keats claimed it was “direful and slaughterous to the deepest degree, the very words appeared stained and gory…His voice is loosed on … [audiences] like the wild dog on the savage relics of an Eastern conflict” (quoted in Rosenberg, 65). Especially noteworthy, too, was the manner in which Kean delivered Othello’s “farewell speech” (3.3)—audiences were “reduced … to tears” (Cowhig, “The Importance of Othello’s Race,” 158).

Yet audiences have not been content merely to be wailing walls of pity or frozen columns of terror. Othello is so explosive that it has uprooted audiences from their stunned and seated anonymity to become vocal rhetors of protest and rage and, on some occasions, even defenders of character. Watching Othello about to put out the light of a sleeping Desdemona, a woman in nineteenth-century Charleston, South Carolina stood up to rebuke the actor, “She did not do it.” In another instance of audience entrapment in the world of the play, Pechter points out that:

Perhaps the most striking instance of such bizarre overinvolvement comes in an anecdote transcribed in Stendhal of an 1822 performance in Baltimore, during which a soldier on guard duty, “seeing Othello … about to kill Desdemona, shouted: ‘It will never be said that in my presence a confounded Negro has killed a white woman!’” whereupon “he fired his gun and broke an arm of the actor who was playing the Moor. (Othello, 12)

Conversely, when the Russian actor Alexander Ostuzhev (1874–1953) voiced Othello’s bloody threats in his last speech, a man in the audience shouted: “It wasn’t his fault: his kind of love could burn up a city.” This last incident raises one of the most crucial questions for readers/audiences about the play. Is Othello a criminal, or simply a man who loved not wisely but too well?

Contemporary feminist critics analogize Desdemona’s (and Emilia’s) plight to that of post-millennial battered wives who too often suffer (murderous) spousal abuse; Sheryl Craig, for example, studies the battered wife syndrome in Othello. Yet diarist Samuel Pepys recorded in the1660s that “a very pretty lady sat by me and called out to see Desdemona smothered,” an early alarming response to violence in the play. Thomas Rymer minimized the violence in Othello by framing it as an etiquette lesson for ladies to be more careful in disposing of their dirty linen. We may look back with smug humor today at Rymer’s displaced morality or Pepys’s “pretty lady,” but have audiences really come that far from Restoration moralities? As Ania Loomba and others have pointed out, audiences have witnessed spousal cruelties inflicted on women for far less serious offenses than losing handkerchiefs (Gender). Sending even more into the docket of the guilty, Ruth Vanita claims that “Desdemona is killed not only by Othello and Iago but by all those who see her humiliated and beaten in public, and fail to intervene” (“‘Proper Men’ and ‘Fallen Women,’” 3). Hugh Macrae Richmond explores the audience and Othello later in this volume.

Audience reaction to Othello’s race has also evoked vitriolic and contradictory responses, mapping oppositional currents in the play that tug and pull at spectators’ loyalties, exposing their prejudices. In the early 1930s, Paul Robeson declared that “Othello won’t play in Memphis,” because segregation and prejudice stood at the footlights with pickets. Corroborating Robeson’s fear, a story in the New York Times for 22 May 1930 ran this title: “Negro Who Kisses White Girl on London Stage Would Expect Protest in America.” In this story, Robeson was quoted as saying: “If any one does object to our [his and Peggy Ashcroft’s Desdemona’s] love making, the objection almost certainly will have to come from America.” In 1979, Paul Winfield received hate mail for kissing a white Desdemona (Lower, 221). Yet the range of responses to Othello and the fair Desdemona also includes that of “a refined and lovely young lady” who, upon seeing Edwin Forrest’s virile nineteenth-century Othello, confessed that “if that is the way Moors look and talk and love, give me a Moor for a husband” (quoted in Pechter, Othello, 12). And G. K. Hunter, quoting from the Variorum, analyzes a comment from a nineteenth-century Maryland lady who outlandishly stated, “In studying the play of Othello I have always imagined its hero a white man” (“Othello and Colour Prejudice”). No less outlandish was Peter Zadek’s postmodern parody in 1976 in Hamburg where Ulrich Wildgruber’s Othello, dressed in a King Kong costume with a black “paper-maché mask,” had “deliberately pull[ed] up Desdemona’s nightgown to expose her nude posterior to the audience.” In turn they “laughed and shouted at him [while] Wildgruber shouted back … [in a] pandemonium of comic terror” (Kennedy, Looking at Shakespeare, 269).

On the other hand, examining Othello from the perspective of the O. J. Simpson case, audiences have seen the play as something “To haunt us as an uncanny projection from the past, of our conflicted present,” as Mitchell Greenberg points out (quoted in Pechter, Othello, 7). Exploring Othello from the contemporary perspective of race relations and prejudice, Germaine Greer contends that the play is “an authentic and sensitive portrait of a black hero in a white society” (“Old Black Ram,” 24), and Ruth Cowhig similarly concludes that Othello’s tragedy is that of “a black man whose humanity is eroded by the cunning and racism of whites” (“Blacks in English Renaissance Drama,” 7). Beyond a doubt, Othello has been exploited as a mirror of the times.

These contradictory reactions—from prejudiced outrage to fascination over sexual crimes—document “our willingness, even eagerness, to engage with the play’s disturbing sexuality” (Pechter, Othello, 19). Terror gives way to expectation. As Lynda Boose perceptively claims, we want to see, gaze upon the ocular proof of Cassio tupping Desdemona and yet recoil in horror at the very thought of such an act (“‘Let it Be Hid’”). Even more boldly implicating audiences in their desire to participate in the play, David Polland asserts that:

We the audience, share in its exciting pathology. Our instincts healthily rep...