Women Talk Back to Shakespeare

Contemporary Adaptations and Appropriations

Jo Eldridge Carney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000466164
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This study explores more recent adaptations published in the last decade whereby women—either authors or their characters—talk back to Shakespeare in a variety of new ways.

"Talking back to Shakespeare", a term common in intertextual discourse, is not a new phenomenon, particularly in literature. For centuries, women writers—novelists, playwrights, and poets—have responded to Shakespeare with inventive and often transgressive retellings of his work. Thus far, feminist scholarship has examined creative responses to Shakespeare by women writers through the late twentieth century. This book brings together the "then" of Shakespeare with the "now" of contemporary literature by examining how many of his plays have cultural currency in the present day. Adoption and surrogate childrearing; gender fluidity; global pandemics; imprisonment and criminal justice; the intersection of misogyny and racism—these are all pressing social and political concerns, but they are also issues that are central to Shakespeare's plays and the early modern period.

By approaching material with a fresh interdisciplinary perspective, Women Talk Back to Shakespeare is an excellent tool for both scholars and students concerned with adaptation, women and gender, and intertextuality of Shakespeare's plays.

1

Toni Morrison and Rokia Traoré’s Desdemona and William Shakespeare’s Othello

DOI: 10.4324/9781003166580-2

On May 15, 2011 an innovative performance piece, Desdemona, premiered at the Akzent Theatre in Vienna, Austria. Billed as a combined concert and theatrical experience, Desdemona was created by three internationally known artists: writer Toni Morrison, theatre director Peter Sellars, and musician Rokia Traoré. Morrison’s libretto, a series of monologues and dialogues spoken by an actress who played Desdemona and channeled various other characters from Othello, alternated with songs written and performed by Traoré, a renowned Malian singer and composer. After its initial staging, Desdemona was performed throughout Europe before traveling to New York and Berkeley, and finally London, where it was featured in the World Shakespeare Festival, part of the Cultural Olympiad of 2012.

In numerous interviews, Morrison, Sellars, and Traoré have described the conception of Desdemona. In short, Sellars once explained to Morrison that he found Shakespeare’s Othello a thin play with stereotypical principal characters. Morrison convinced Sellars that there was more depth to Desdemona than productions had typically extrapolated, but she conceded that even Shakespeare had not allowed Desdemona to tell her full story. Sellars challenged Morrison to write that missing story and, after enlisting Traoré’s participation in the project, an intermedial and transnational collaboration was born. Theatrical performances are ephemeral—there are some reviews and brief YouTube clips of Desdemona but no full-length video or audio recordings, without which we cannot provide a full analysis of the musical components or performance choices integral to the production. However, the text was published in 2012, allowing us to read Desdemona in conjunction with Othello.

Othello is one of Shakespeare’s most frequently adapted works, as composers, filmmakers, novelists, poets, and other playwrights have been drawn to the play’s doomed love story and its exposure of entrenched racial fault lines. Among the most significant cinematic adaptations in recent decades are Oliver Stone’s 1995 film with Lawrence Fishburne as Othello, notable as the first major Hollywood film that cast an actor of color in the lead role after centuries of portrayals in blackface; and, in 2006, Indian director Vishal Bhardwaj reframed Othello as a contemporary crime drama in the highly acclaimed film Omkara. In literature, Caribbean poet Derek Walcott’s poem, first published in 1965, “Goats and Monkeys,” and Sudanese novelist Talib Salih’s 1966 novel, Season of Migration to the North, expose the heteronormative and racial oppression in Othello. Djanet Sears’ 1997 play, Harlem Duet, is a time-traveling prequel that imagines an Othello who betrays his black wife for a white woman and examines the damaging consequences of internalized racism. In recent years, Becoming Othello: A Black Girl’s Journey, a play that weaves autobiography with Shakespeare and features author Debra Ann Byrd in the role of Othello, radically subverts gender conventions. Another timely interface with Othello is the one-man play by Keith Hamilton Cobb, American Moor, about a black man’s audition for the role of Othello before an egotistical, narrow-minded white director, an occasion that engenders a piercing exploration of racial prejudices in America.

Desdemona adds a unique contribution to the growing body of works engaging with Othello in its emphasis on the intersection of race with gender, religion, and social class; as a hybrid narrative of words and music, it pushes against aesthetic boundaries as well. Morrison’s Desdemona is something so “wholly new” that its creators were not even sure what to name it, as Sellars explained in an interview, “A concert? A theatrical experience? We’ll split the difference” (UC Berkeley Events). Desdemona is also an unusual addition to the body of Othello revisions because it is both prequel and sequel to Shakespeare’s tragedy; it expands the temporal parameters of the play by imagining Desdemona’s girlhood as well as her story from the other side of the grave, the “undiscovered country” Hamlet famously evokes. Morrison’s reconstruction of Desdemona’s world is a rich, lyrical narrative in itself, but it also explicitly engages with Shakespeare’s articulation of Desdemona and with a subsequent tradition of critical and performative dismissals of her and the other even more marginalized female characters. As Sellars writes in the foreword to Desdemona, Toni Morrison’s entire fictional oeuvre “honors the missing histories of generations whose courage, struggles, achievements, loves, tragedies, fulfillments and disappointments have gone unrecorded” (7). In this work, it is the lacunae in the histories of Desdemona, the other women in the play, both black and white, and Othello himself that Morrison is filling. In the liberating world of the afterlife she creates a space for them to talk with each other and, thus, to talk back to Shakespeare.

Othello and Desdemona: Synopses

For the purposes of adaptive comparison, it is necessary to provide brief synopses of Shakespeare’s Othello, probably written in 1602–1603 and first performed in 1604, and the text of Toni Morrison’s Desdemona, published in 2012.

Othello, one of Shakespeare’s most well-known plays then and now, centers on the precipitous downfall of Othello, a great warrior and a Moor who is summoned to Venice to assist in its foreign affairs. Brabanzio, a revered senator, is impressed with Othello’s military reputation and invites him to his home where he meets and falls in love with Desdemona, Brabanzio’s daughter. Equally enamored, Desdemona elopes with Othello and her father is outraged to learn she got married without his permission, especially to a black man. Brabanzio’s fury is fueled by Iago, one of Othello’s officers, who is intent on destroying Othello. The cause of Iago’s extreme hatred of Othello is one of the vexing questions of the play, though it seems in part due to jealousy that Othello gave another officer, Cassio, the job promotion that Iago thought he deserved.

The Senate overrules Brabanzio’s complaint against Othello because they need him to fend off an impending Ottoman invasion. When a storm at sea prevents the Turkish attack, Othello, Desdemona, and the other Venetians are reunited in Cyprus, where Iago masterminds a plot to convince Othello that Desdemona is having an affair with Cassio. Othello demands tangible “ocular” proof and through a series of lucky coincidences; the unwitting cooperation of Roderigo, who is infatuated with Desdemona; and the reluctant help of his wife Emilia, Desdemona’s lady-in-waiting, Iago manages to persuade Othello of Desdemona’s guilt. At Iago’s urging, Othello smothers Desdemona in her bed; its duration and its enactment directly on stage make it one of the most agonizing episodes of violence performed in a Shakespearean tragedy. Emilia discovers the murderous act just as Desdemona is dying; she alerts everyone that Othello has killed his wife, and when she realizes Iago’s wrongdoing and exposes him as well, Iago stabs her and she dies next to Desdemona. Othello, then understanding his error, kills himself and also lies by Desdemona, first asking that the story of his life be honestly told. Iago is led off to his punishment but refuses to speak another word. The play ends, in the lament of one of the Venetian noblemen, with “the tragic loading of this bed.”

Desdemona is a slim work, just fifty-seven pages of text by Morrison and song lyrics by Traoré. Desdemona’s monologues and her dialogues with other characters are interspersed with songs by Sa’ran, the African woman referred to as Barbary in Othello. The work is divided into sections or scenes representing Desdemona’s various soliloquies or conversations and the songs, and it takes place entirely in the afterlife. Morrison’s text alludes to all of the major plot events of Othello, and in spite of its brevity, it also amplifies Shakespeare’s narrative. In addition to Desdemona’s account of her girlhood and her fractious relationship with her parents, she has conversations with Emilia, her serving woman and confidante, and with Sa’ran, whose counterpart is described as her mother’s maid in Othello, although here she is Desdemona’s nurse. There is also a brief interlude in which new characters are added to the narrative: the mothers of Desdemona and Othello meet and express their mutual grief over their children’s fate. Finally, Desdemona speaks with Othello, and he too supplies a backstory of his boyhood, his experiences as a child soldier, and the war crimes he committed with his comrade, Iago. The play ends, if not in complete reconciliation, in an acknowledgement of mistakes and an increased understanding among the various characters.

Othello: Speak of me as I am

Shakespeare, himself an enthusiastic adapter, draws directly on at least two popular sources for Othello, neither of which originated in England. The skeleton of the plot comes from a tale in Italian author Giraldi Cinthio’s popular collection, The Hecatommithi. Shakespeare focuses much more on the subject of race than Cinthio, and for that he likely drew on John Pory’s 1600 translation of A Geographical History of Africa by Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wezzan, known in England as Leo Africanus. A Muslim who was born in Granada and lived in Morocco, he was captured in 1518 by pirates in the Mediterranean and given as a “gift” to Pope Leo X in Rome where he was converted, perhaps forcibly, to Christianity and baptized with his captor’s name. Most scholars agree that Shakespeare borrows some of the racial stereotypes that appear in Othello from Pory’s inaccurate and sensationalized translation of the Africanus narrative and that Othello himself may have partially been inspired by al-Wezzan, though the differences between the two are as significant as the correspondences (Andrea 10–14 and Zhiri 176–180). Shakespeare’s representation of race also reflects influences he absorbed by literary osmosis: many dramatic works that precede Othello include portrayals of racial stereotyping and, as Kim Hall points out, “Moors who frequented the Elizabethan stage and popular entertainment were overwhelmingly, stereotypically evil and male” (182). Another contemporary example that likely informed Shakespeare’s representation of “Othello the Moor” was the diplomatic visit to London in 1600–1601—just a year or so before Shakespeare wrote Othello—of the Moroccan Ambassador Abd el-Ouahed and his entourage. Over the course of their six-month stay, Londoners responded to their guests with a combination of curiosity, suspicion, and xenophobia, and Shakespeare would surely have been aware of the presence of African visitors of such high degree and of the gossip surrounding them (Harris 32–35).

Although scholarship on Othello is extensive, only in recent decades have critics foregrounded the subject of racism so fundamental to the play, which previous considerations worked hard to erase. Long overdue discussions of race in all of Shakespeare’s plays, but especially Antony and Cleopatra, The Merchant of Venice, The Tempest, and Titus Andronicus, along with Othello, have invigorated Shakespeare studies, for as Ayanna Thompson insists, “If you ask today in the 2020s if the concept of race existed for Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the answer is an emphatic yes … racialized epistemologies existed and were deployed” (Cambridge Companion 2). Against continued claims that “race did not exist in Shakespeare’s cultural and creative imagination,” (Cambridge Companion 1) many early modern scholars are currently turning to Geraldine Heng’s monumental study, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (2018). Heng argues that from the eleventh century through the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, “race has no singular or stable referent,” and its manifestations were inconsistent and malleable, but they were always intended to mark the real and perceived differences between people: race was “a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences, rather than a substantive content” (19). Othello, a play in which the eponymous tragic hero is described more often as “the Moor” rather than by his name and is repeatedly marked as “other” within Venetian society, is central to these discussions.

Othello begins with the daring elopement of a celebrity couple, the beautiful aristocratic white woman, Desdemona, and the admired, noble military leader, Othello the “Moor.” But any suggestion that this will be a progressive love story is quickly overshadowed by Iago’s vitriol and intended revenge. Iago, Othello’s ensign, offers conflicting reasons to his underling Roderigo why he “hates the Moor,” but he is clear about his goal to destroy him. In the streets outside of Brabanzio’s house, Iago and Roderigo shout to him that his daughter has married Othello, reveling in a tirade of racialized slurs that sets the tone for the manifestations of racism that pervade the entire play. Never using Othello’s actual name, they instead refer to him as “the Moor” and “the thick lips,” and then describe the couple’s marriage in terms of bestial coupling. They urge Brabanzio to imagine pornographically that an “an old black ram/ Is tupping your white ewe,” that “your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs,” and that Desdemona is “cover’d with a Barbary horse” and will reproduce animals. Brabanzio is enraged, not at Iago for his racist fear-mongering, but at Desdemona; her transgression in choosing her own husband is second only to her choice of a black man who will “degrade his lineage,” as Joyce MacDonald puts it. Brabanzio agrees with the racist characterization of Othello so completely that he laments that her marriage to the reprehensible—but white—Roderigo would have been preferable: “Shared notions of racial standing and identity unite men more intimately than they can be separated by social gradation” (Macdonald 210). This racism displayed at the outset by Brabanzio, Iago, and Roderigo becomes the center of the play’s tragedy, and it cannot be considered apart from Othello’s marriage to Desdemona, his professional identity, and their social positions.

A play that describes the demise of an upper-class white woman nonetheless subject to patriarchal contr...