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Othello: the role that entices and enrages actors of all skin colours

Andrew Dickson explores how different actors have struggled with the character of Othello and the play's depiction of race.

'Of all the parts in the canon, perhaps Othello is the one which should most definitely not be played by a black actor,' wrote the British-Ghanaian actor Hugh Quarshie in a lecture published in 1998. Doing so risked legitimising - in fact condoning - the racist stereotype of a black man who loses his wits, then resorts to killing his white wife in a fit of crazed jealousy, Quarshie argued.

Seventeen years later, Quarshie - who cut his teeth at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1980s and 90s in a number of high-profile roles - has played the Moor of Venice in the RSC's new production of . When we talk after a long day of rehearsals, he is at pains to point out that things are more complex than his earlier argument suggests. He wasn't saying that no black performer should ever play Othello; rather, that black performers should think long and hard about doing battle not just with the play, but the context from which it springs. 'Only by black actors playing the role,' he says, 'can we address some of the racist traditions and assumptions that the play is based on'.

Photograph of Hugh Quarshie and Lucian Msamati in Othello, 2015

In the RSC's 2015 production of Othello, the lead role was played by Hugh Quarshie and Iago was played by Lucian Msamati.

Quarshie was joined on stage by Lucian Msamati, who will make theatrical history as the first black actor to play Iago at the RSC, and one of only a handful worldwide. The casting of the British-Tanzanian actor has thrown up tantalising questions about the dynamics of this most complex and controversial of plays. Does it matter that Msamati's Iago is black? Can he be that, and also an out-and-out racist? Is the play itself even about race?

For much of its history, Othello has provided nourishing fodder for racists: from the queasy arguments of Samuel Taylor Coleridge that it would be 'something monstrous' to conceive of Desdemona 'falling in love with a veritable negro', to the grim parodies that circulated in 19th-century South Africa.

Coleridge's annotated copy of Shakespeare

In his hand-written notes on Othello (c. 1818-19), Samuel Taylor Coleridge makes a racist distinction between different types of African - the 'Moor' and the 'Negro'.

The tragedy doesn't make that easy, however. 'I see it as two halves, almost,' says Quarshie. 'The more successful you are in depicting the first Othello, this man who is wise, astute, mature, magnanimous, the harder it is to show a man who is persuaded that his wife has committed adultery, and who turns into an obsessive, compulsive, murderous maniac.'

Boydell's Collection of Prints illustrating Shakespeare's works

A Bedchamber - Othello threatens Desdemona while she sleeps, convinced that she has been unfaithful. Othello, Act 5, Scene 2 by John Graham.

It is difficult to know what the play's author might have made of the question. The number of non-white men and women living in early modern London was tiny, perhaps less than one per cent of the population. Black performers were not unknown - John Blanke, perhaps of North African heritage, played the trumpet at the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII - but seem not to have appeared on the public stage.

It's all but certain that Shakespeare's first Othello was Richard Burbage, a white Londoner. It's even more likely that Burbage would have worn dark makeup, as actors in Britain did until the late 1980s (Michael Gambon was one of the last, at Scarborough in 1990).

Portrait of Richard Burbage

17th-century portrait of the actor, Richard Burbage, probably the first man to play Othello. He played the part wearing black make-up and a wig made of black lamb's wool.

Usage terms © By Permission of the Trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.

How should the play be interpreted?

Shakespeare's play is both fascinating and perplexing in determining how Othello should be interpreted. On the one hand, there was a strong tradition on the Elizabethan stage of black characters being played as snarling villains, as in the anonymous revenge tragedy Lust's Dominion and the playwright's own Titus Andronicus; anxiety about black immigration into Britain was such that Elizabeth I issued several proclamations ordering the expulsion of 'blackamoores' from her realm.

Draft proclamation on the expulsion of 'Negroes and Blackamoors', 1601

A draft proclamation of 1601 asked for the deportation of black people from England.

Usage terms Reproduced courtesy of the Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House

On the other, the Moor of Venice is the hero of the play, a decorated general in the service of the Venetian state. The villain of the piece is the white racist who plots Othello's downfall. 'When a Moor appeared on stage, it was like the Red Indian in an American western,' says Quarshie. 'There was a convention where you expect trouble to follow. And Shakespeare goes against the grain'.

Ira Aldridge and Paul Robeson

There is also an alternative history of Othello, in which the role has been interpreted as an act of out-and-out emancipation. The great African-American actor Ira Aldridge was unable to make a career on stage in his homeland because of segregationist limits on black performers. Criss-crossing Europe from the 1830s to the 1860s, the 'African Roscius' specialised in parts, notably Othello, that emphasised his African heritage (Aldridge liked to put about the story that he'd been born in Senegal rather than New York City).

Playbill advertising Ira Aldridge's appearance as Othello in Northampton, 1831

The great American actor, Ira Alridge, was known as the 'African Roscius' after a celebrated Roman actor who had been born a slave.

The actor-activist Paul Robeson identified closely with his great forebear and was said to have taken acting lessons from Aldridge's daughter. When he first played the Moor in London in 1930, the reviews were disparaging, with many in the audience outraged by the sight of Robeson kissing Peggy Ashcroft, but Robeson felt it was his destiny to play what he termed a 'tragedy of racial conflict'.

Paul Robeson as Othello and Uta Hagen as Desdemona in New York, 1943-44

When Paul Robeson played Othello in New York in 1943, it ran for 296 performances - still the longest Shakespearean run in Broadway history.

Usage terms © Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

When he returned to the role on Broadway in 1943, one reviewer declared that 'no white man should ever dare play the part again'. With the notable exception of Patrick Stewart, who played Othello as part of an otherwise African-American cast in a 'photonegative' production in Washington DC in 1997, most actors in Britain and America have heeded the advice.

Perhaps this is the lesson to draw from Othello, Quarshie suggests: that the play's history on stage uncovers as much about the societies in which it appears as the play itself.

Sometimes, as when John Kani played Othello at the Markettheatre in Johannesburg in 1987 in the midst of apartheid, only the second black South African actor in history to do so, the play can seem as if it's about nothing other than race. At others, such as Adrian Lester's modern-dress performance at the National Theatre in 2012, the colour of the hero's skin can seem almost incidental; the play's tragedy primarily one of jealousy.

'What we make of it tells us more about ourselves than it does about Shakespeare,' says Quarshie. He laughs: 'I'm sure our production will be no different.'

This article was originally published in the Guardian newspaper in June 2015

Andrew Dickson is an author, journalist and critic. A former arts editor at the Guardian in London, he writes regularly for the paper and appears as a broadcaster for the BBC and elsewhere. His book about Shakespeare's global influence, Worlds Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare's Globe, is out now in paperback. He lives in London, and his website is andrewjdickson.com.

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Othello: the role that entices and enrages actors of all skin colours | The British Library

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Andrew Dickson explores how different actors have struggled with the character of Othello and the play's depiction of race.

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There have been numerous interpretations of Othello over the last 400 years. Virginia Mason Vaughan discusses four recent critical approaches: feminist, new historicist, marxist and post-colonial.

was crafted at the dawn of the 17th century, shaped by complex social and geopolitical issues that new historicist critics, who seek to place literary works within a historical framework, have recently sought to unravel. Yet from its first staging to the present, Othello has also been among the few Shakespearean plays to be repeatedly staged to enthusiastic audiences, not only in England, but across the globe. This continuing appeal suggests that the tragedy transcends the time and location in which it was written, provoking new interpretations from generation to generation, place to place. In order to fully appreciate Othello, we need to see it in its multifaceted historical context - then - and consider the myriad ways it speaks to audiences now.

Cinthio's Gli Hecatommithi, an Italian source for Othello and Measure for Measure

Shakespeare took the idea for Othello from a tale of doomed mixed-race marriage in Cinthio's De Gli Hecatommithi, 1565.

Postcolonial reading: 'something from Cyprus'

Postcolonial readings focus on the play's representation of Ottoman Turks. Shakespeare derived Othello's plot from a short narrative in Giraldi Cinthio's Gli Hecatommithi (1565), but set his play within the context of Venice's struggle during the 1570s with the Ottoman Empire for control of Cyprus, the eastern Mediterranean island that overlooked the shipping lanes between Europe and trading centres in the East. Venice owned Cyprus from 1470 to 1569, but in 1571 Turkish forces seized the island. Later that year an alliance of Christian powers defeated the Turk in the famous naval battle of Lepanto. As a young man, James VI of Scotland (James I of England in 1603) celebrated that battle, fought 'Betwixt the baptiz'd race, / And circumcised Turband Turkes'. References throughout Othello to 'the Turk' or 'turning Turk' evoke the intermittent conflict between Europe's Christian powers and the Islamic Ottoman Empire, which was as much an economic competition as a clash of religions. In sermons and treatises, English writers like Richard Knolles, who published The General Historie of the Turks (1603), demonised the Ottoman Empire as barbaric and cruel, even as they admired its military success and bureaucratic structure.

Description of the Battle of Lepanto in Knolles's History of the Turks

Richard Knolles' General Historie of the Turks (1603) demonizes the lion-like Turks but admires their military power.

Shakespeare draws upon the Christian-Turkish binary but also undercuts it by making the play's most villainous character a Venetian and its hero an outsider. Fearful of vesting military power in one of its own citizens, Venice's republican government contracted with foreign mercenaries who could easily be dismissed once the crisis was over (as Othello is in Act 5). Although Othello has been chosen by the Venetian government to lead its army, 'the Moor' (a term that originally referred to practitioners of Islam) remains an alien in Venice. Like the liminal island of Cyprus, he is caught in the middle, neither European nor Turk yet embodying both, and in his suicide he highlights his service as a Christian hero by killing the 'turbaned Turk' within, who 'beat a Venetian and traduced the state' (5.2.352-53).

Othello 's geopolitical impact is not limited, however, to conflicts between Venice and the Ottoman Empire. Othello's blackness and his background as a foreign mercenary prefigures the hybridity postcolonial theorists have identified in colonial subjects. Brabantio and Desdemona are fascinated by his strange stories of cannibals and anthropophagi; Othello's first gift to her is a handkerchief given to him by an Egyptian charmer, 'dyed in mummy [a black liquid distilled from corpses] and steeped in the ancient lore of charmers, sibyls and magic'. The Moor's stories allow Desdemona to experience the exotic/erotic delight found by many early modern readers in travel narratives that described the 'antres vast' of unexplored territories in Africa, the East and the New World.

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville

Headless men and men with mouths behind their shoulders: these are some of the wondrous creatures depicted in The Travels of John Mandeville, a book still hugely popular in Shakespeare's day.

New historicist reading: 'far more fair than black'

New historicist critics often debate whether or not race was a factor in early modern representations of non-English peoples. Although Othello's racial identity is clearly a factor in Shakespeare's text, when the play was first performed the audience would not have seen it as squarely focussed on race as we do. As editor Michael Neill observes, 'to talk about race in Othello is inevitably to fall into some degree of anachronism, while to ignore it is to efface something fundamental to the tragedy.' As a result, Shakespeare's Othello has been appropriated worldwide as a vehicle for the exploration of racial and ethnic tensions.

In the opening scene Iago refers to Othello as 'the thick-lips' (1.1.66) and later he raises a toast to 'the health of black Othello' (2.2.29). Through these and other comments we learn that Othello is a black African of sub-Saharan origin. In 1604 England was not yet formally immersed in the slave trade, but as early as 1565 English privateers had bought captured Africans, and Shakespeare may well have known some of them or other people of African heritage. Contemporary conceptions of race and racism, influenced by the history of racial slavery and 18th-century pseudo-science, are often based on hard and fast racial categories that were only incipient in Shakespeare's England. While Iago's and Brabantio's remarks in Act 1 exude what is today accepted as racism, the Duke's pronouncement that Othello is 'far more fair than black' and Montano's claim that 'the man commands / Like a full soldier' (2.1.36-37) indicate the high esteem others have for him. Nevertheless, references to Othello as black and a Moor, as well as his lack of understanding of Venetian customs, establish his liminal position in Venetian society.

16th-century costume guide

A wealthy Moor, 1598: In his guide to global fashions, Cesare Vecellio shows the fluid meaning of the word 'Moor' at the time Shakespeare was writing.

In Shakespeare's time Othello was performed by Richard Burbage, a white actor who wore black make-up and a wig of black lamb's wool. (Burbage's powerful cross-racial performance should not be confused with the caricatured blackface used in 19th-century minstrel shows.) Still, by the early 19th century, a truly black Othello was no longer tenable in England and America. The English actor Edmund Kean chose instead to appear as a North African in light brown make-up, suggesting an African from the Mediterranean rim rather than a sub-Saharan. With the exception of Ira Aldridge, a black actor who portrayed Othello throughout northern Europe in the 19th century, the role was taken by white actors in various shades of make-up until the African-American actor Paul Robeson undertook the role in London (1930) and New York (1943). Since then, black actors have usually impersonated Shakespeare's Moor.

Portrait of Richard Burbage

17th-century portrait of the actor, Richard Burbage, probably the first man to play Othello. He played the part wearing black make-up and a wig made of black lamb's wool.

Usage terms © By Permission of the Trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.

Paul Robeson as Othello and Uta Hagen as Desdemona in New York, 1943-44

When Paul Robeson played Othello in New York in 1943, it ran for 296 performances - still the longest Shakespearean run in Broadway history.

Usage terms © Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.

Feminist reading: 'a maiden never bold'

Feminist critics highlight the ways Shakespeare portrays gender roles. In Act 1, Scene 3, Brabantio describes his daughter Desdemona as 'a maiden never bold', yet in choosing a foreigner she has violated the Venetian norm of arranged endogamous marriages (the practice of marrying within a local community or ethnic group) and rejected her father's authority. Still, she honours the patriarchal dictum that, once married, the wife owes her husband the same respect and duty she had shown her father. Emilia, too, defers to her husband Iago's wishes. Even after she realises the full extent of his villainy, she admits, ''Tis proper I obey him, but not now' (5.2.194). At the same time, romances, poems and plays often countered patriarchal authority in favour of romantic love. Just as the Duke overrules Brabantio's demands in Act 1, Scene 3, in fictional narratives the blocking father figure cannot prevail and young lovers marry. If Othello ended after Act 1, it would be, as many commentators have observed, a romantic comedy.

Alas, Desdemona and Othello's love is no match for Iago's plots and the green-eyed monster jealousy. Infidelity was the ultimate marital crime in early modern England. The prospect of illegitimate children subverted the bedrock of the era's social and economic system, the inheritance of property from father to son. In a speech that is often described as 'proto-feminist', Emilia argues that a wife's infidelity is a response to the husband's behaviour:

Say they slack their duties,
And pour our treasures into foreign laps,
Or else break out in peevish jealousies,
Throwing restraint upon us; or say they strike us,
Or scant of former having in despite -
. . .
Yet have we some revenge. (4.4.82-88)

Desdemona rejects this reasoning, promising 'Not to pick bad from bad, but by bad mend' (4.4.100). As she nears death in the play's final moments, she exonerates Othello by claiming no one has murdered her except herself.

From the play's earliest performances, audiences responded sympathetically to Desdemona's plight. After a 1610 production at Oxford, Henry Jackson recalled that Desdemona 'entreated the pity of the spectators by her very countenance'. That changed in the late 20th century, however, when feminist critics underscored Desdemona's initial independence and Emilia's eventual strength, and outlined the ways both women - as well as the courtesan Bianca - were constrained by the male characters' patriarchal suppositions. From a feminist perspective, early modern England's preoccupation with cuckoldry demonstrates a basic male insecurity about women's sexuality.

Broadside ballad on cuckolds

This 17th-century ballad, 'Cuckolds Haven', shows the early modern obsession with cuckolds - men who were depicted with animal horns as a sign that their wives had been unfaithful.

Marxist reading: ''Tis the curse of service'

Marxist critics are concerned with the economic and psychological impact of early modern England's hierarchical social system. In 1604 James I took Shakespeare's acting company under his patronage, making Shakespeare a 'servant' of the king. Indeed, service to someone in a higher position was expected from the lowest kitchen maid to the lords and ladies of the king's court. The pecking order in Othello is clear. The Duke and aristocratic members of the Venetian Senate give orders to Othello, who in turn commands his Lieutenant Cassio. Ensign Iago is subordinate to both. All three ostensibly serve out of loyalty to the state and for the status their military position brings, but they can be dismissed at the pleasure of their superiors. Iago resents Cassio, a man with 'a daily beauty in his life' (5.1.19), hates being tied to Othello's service and yearns for preferment.

The different gradations of status embedded in the text are often represented in military terms, with Iago presented as a rough-speaking non-commissioned officer, resentful of Cassio's rank and courtly manners. But the play's exploration of rank and class go beyond the military. Iago's repeated advice, 'Put money in thy purse', suggests that a new economic model has replaced the feudal obligations of service, which had been based on a bond of loyalty and duty between servant and master. As a 'servant' of the king, Shakespeare - who applied for a coat of arms to be named a 'gentleman' but was also an entrepreneur who loaned money and invested in land and rents - was implicated in both models.

Photograph of Hugh Quarshie and Lucian Msamati in Othello, 2015

In the RSC's 2015 production of Othello, the lead role was played by Hugh Quarshie and Iago was played by Lucian Msamati.

'O bloody period!'

Shakespeare wove the contradictory discourses of his age into Othello's tangled web, whether it be the conflict between women's self-rule and patriarchal marriage, western society's fascination with and fear of the Islamic or African other, or the resentment caused by shifting economic parameters. 400 years later the discourses have changed, but as contemporary appropriations of Othello remind us, the issues have only intensified.

Footnotes

[1] James VI of Scotland, 'Lepanto', in The Poems of James VI of Scotland, ed. by James Craigie (Edinburgh: William Blackwood for the Scottish Text Society, 3rd series, no. XXII, 1955), p. 202.

[2] Ian Smith, 'Othello's Black Handkerchief', in Othello: The State of Play, ed. by Lena Cowan Orlin (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 95-120 (p. 103).

[3] Michael Neill, 'Introduction', Othello (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 125.

[4] See Neill, p. 9.

[5] See Neill, p. 161.

Written byVirginia Mason Vaughan

Virginia Mason Vaughan is Research Professor and Professor Emerita of English at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts where she taught for thirty-eight years. She is the author of Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and The Tempest for Manchester University Press's 'Shakespeare in Performance' series (2011). With Alden T. Vaughan she also co-authored Shakespeare's Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Shakespeare in America (Oxford Shakespeare Topics, 2012) and co-edited The Tempest for the Third Arden Series (1999; rev. ed. 2011). She is also a co-editor of Women Making Shakespeare (with Gordon McMullan and Lena Cowen Orlin [Arden Shakespeare, 2014]). Her textual edition of Antony and Cleopatra for the Norton Shakespeare 3 was published this year, as was the monograph, Antony and Cleopatra: Language and Writing, for Arden Shakespeare.

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Critical approaches to Othello | The British Library

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There have been numerous interpretations of Othello over the last 400 years. Virginia Mason Vaughan discusses four recent critical approaches: feminist, new historicist, marxist and post-colonial.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Essays, Articles and Book Excerpts on Shakespeare's Othello

Lectures on Othello: Play Construction and the Suffering and Murder of Desdemona
Lectures on Othello: Othello's Jealousy
The Moral Enigma of Shakespeare's Othello
Othello as Tragic Hero
Iago's Motives: The Relationship Between Othello and Iago
Shakespeare and Race: The Relationship Between Othello and Desdemona
Stage History of Othello
The Problem of Time in Othello

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shakespeare essays othello soliloquies othello iago devices othello jealous

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Essays and articles on Shakespeare's Othello

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Lectures on Othello: Play Construction and the Suffering and Murder of Desdemona Lectures on Othello: Othello's Jealousy The Moral Enigma of Shakespeare's Othello Othello as Tragic Hero Iago's Motives: The Relationship Between Othello and Iago Shakespeare and Race: The Relationship Between Othello and Desdemona Stage History of Othello The Problem

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Racism, misogyny and 'motiveless malignity' in Othello

The causes of the tragedy of Othello are more complex and disturbing than they might at first appear, Kiernan Ryan contends.

A play for today

Anyone who doubts that Shakespeare's greatest tragedies were written from an imaginative standpoint far ahead of his time need only think of . The basic idea of the play is so well known that it's easy to forget the startling boldness of Shakespeare's decision to take Cinthio's brief tale of a doomed mixed-race marriage and transform it into a heart-breaking tragedy. In a country where few people outside London would ever have seen a black person, and centuries before the problems that fuel the tragedy became as ubiquitous and pressing as they are today, Shakespeare produced in Othello a searing critique of racial and sexual injustice, which is more powerful now in the 21st century than it could ever have been at the dawn of the 17th.

Cinthio's Gli Hecatommithi, an Italian source for Othello and Measure for Measure

Shakespeare took the idea for Othello from a tale of doomed mixed-race marriage in Cinthio's De Gli Hecatommithi, 1565.

The tragic sequence of events is triggered by the elopement of Othello and Desdemona. The fact that they are obliged to elope makes the illicit nature of their relationship in the eyes of Venice immediately clear. But in their eyes and in Shakespeare's there's nothing illicit about their love, to which they regard themselves, and the play regards them, as fully entitled. Undeterred by the paternal wrath and widespread disapproval they are bound to incur, Othello and Desdemona act as if a black man from Africa and an upper-class white woman from Venice have every right to fall in love, marry and be left to live happily together. They act, in other words, as if they were already free citizens of a truly civilized future, instead of prisoners of a time when racial prejudice and sexual inequality are so ingrained that even their heroic hearts are tainted by them.

Draft proclamation on the expulsion of 'Negroes and Blackamoors', 1601

A draft proclamation of 1601 asked for the deportation of black people from England.

Usage terms Reproduced courtesy of the Marquess of Salisbury, Hatfield House

'Haply, for I am black'

As a result, Othello and Desdemona find unleashed upon them, in the shape of Iago, the venomous rage of a society whose foundations are rocked by the mere fact of their marriage. 'For if such actions may have passage free,' Brabantio warns the Venetian Senate, 'Bond-slaves and pagans shall our statesmen be' (1.2.98-9). Brabantio perceives at once that there's much more at stake in this interracial union than the violation of his honour as Desdemona's father. If we turn a blind eye to this outrage, Brabantio argues in effect, we're treating our inferiors as our equals, which means there's nothing to stop the subhuman underclass or the heathen outcasts of society taking our place and having power over us. Shakespeare makes it plain from the start that it's not just Iago the newly-weds are up against, but the status quo and a view of the world which Iago merely embodies in its most lethal form.

For it's not just Iago whose speech is infected with contempt for 'the Moor' (as he repeatedly refers to Othello), though the intensity of his loathing is unrivalled. 'Even now, now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe' (1.1.88-9), he cries to Brabantio in the opening scene. Roderigo derides Othello too as 'the thick-lips' (1.1.66), while Brabantio, in his public confrontation with Othello, finds it inconceivable that his daughter should desire to 'Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom / Of such a thing as thou' (1.2.70-1) without being drugged or bewitched. In a vain attempt to placate Brabantio, the Duke assures him that 'If virtue no delighted beauty lack, / Your son-in-law is far more fair than black' (1.3.289-90). So endemic to Venetian culture are such attitudes that Othello and Desdemona can't help absorbing them too: 'I saw Othello's visage in his mind' (1.3.252), Desdemona declares to the Senate, oblivious to the unintended insult that brave declaration implies. When Othello's faith in Desdemona's love for him begins to crumble, his complexion is the first thing he blames: 'Haply, for I am black, / And have not those soft parts of conversation / That chamberers have' (3.3.263-5). And he instinctively employs his own blackness as a metaphor for his wife's alleged depravity: 'Her name, that was as fresh / As Dian's visage, is now begrim'd and black / As mine own face' (3.3.386-8)

Painting of Ira Aldridge as Othello

This painting, A Moor by James Northcote (1826), shows Ira Alridge as Othello. He was 17 when he first played the role in 1825 - the first black actor to do so in Britain.

Usage terms © Bridgeman Art Library / Manchester Art Gallery

'the green-eyed monster'

The grounds of the tragedy can't be fully explained, however, by pointing to the deep-seated racism that poisons the Venetian view of Othello and even Othello's view of himself. The colour of Othello's skin is obviously a crucial factor in his downfall, because his visibly alien racial identity makes him and his bride far more vulnerable to the machinations of Iago than if he were an equally accomplished and indispensable white man. Their defiance of the Venetian taboo against such marriages locks them from the outset into a defensive posture, which predisposes Othello to the insecurity and doubt that grip him so swiftly at Iago's prompting. But Othello's vulnerability as a black outsider, who unconsciously shares the white perception of his blackness, is inseparable from his thraldom to a patriarchal concept of masculinity and a misogynistic concept of marriage that are just as endemic as racism in Venetian culture, and that play an equally crucial role in sealing both Desdemona's fate and his own.

Niccholes's Discourse of Marriage and Wiving

Niccholes' Discourse of Marriage and Wiving (1620) gives man-to-man advice about how to deal with women. It warns against putting your trust in friends or giving into 'idle jelousie'.

Thus sexual jealousy is shown to be the rule in Venice rather than an exceptional emotional disorder to which Othello is especially prone to succumb. Roderigo's infatuation with Desdemona makes him intensely jealous of both Othello and Cassio. The same emotion flares up in Bianca, when Cassio gives her Desdemona's handkerchief: 'You are jealous now', says Cassio, 'That this is from some mistress, some remembrance' (3.4.185-6). Above all, Iago himself betrays the same toxic disposition, when he fastens automatically on sexual jealousy as a pretext for provoking it in Othello and revenging himself on Cassio: 'I do suspect the lusty Moor / Hath leap'd into my seat; the thought whereof / Doth (like a poisonous mineral), gnaw my inwards'; 'I fear Cassio with my night-cap too' (2.1.295-7, 307). Although none of them is as consumed by jealousy as Othello, all these characters fall prey like him to 'the green-eyed monster' (3.3.166) that stalks any society in which the sexual desire of one human being is regarded as the property of another.

As the handkerchief, the 'ocular proof' (3.3.360) of infidelity, passes from Othello to Desdemona to Emilia to Iago to Cassio to the courtesan Bianca, it links the three couples together to highlight what they have in common. It draws an implicit parallel between the despised kept woman Bianca and the respectable wives Desdemona and Emilia, revealing the true nature of the married woman's role by erasing the distinction between them. And it underscores the fact that Othello's proprietorial relationship with Desdemona as husband and wife is typical - that it's extraordinary only in the fatal consequences it leads to in this particular case, not in its essential character.

Friendship album of Moyses Walens

A blindfolded man is led into a bedroom by a courtesan, from Moyses Walen's friendship album, 1605-15.

Italian handkerchief

Fine linen Italian handkerchief, c. 1600. In this period, handkerchiefs were exchanged as lovers' gifts and displayed as fashion accessories.

Usage terms © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Held by© Victoria and Albert Museum

Iago: 'What you know, you know'

Othello's dread of cuckoldry and the misogyny that feeds it are perfectly in tune with the patriarchal culture of a city where his colour makes him feel like an alien, but where he's entirely at home as a man. The reason why Iago is so quickly and spectacularly successful in persuading Othello to swallow the vile tale he spins round Desdemona is that Othello is primed to believe it by the warped view of women and female sexuality that he shares not only with Iago but with other men. When Iago reminds Othello that Desdemona 'did deceive her father, marrying you' (3.3.206) as proof of her capacity to hoodwink her husband too, he's merely echoing the parting words with which Brabantio sought to sow the same seeds of suspicion in Othello's mind in Act 1: 'Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see; / She has deceived her father, and may thee' (1.3.292-3).

Iago differs from his fellow Venetians only in the ferocity with which he espouses their values and the deadly extremes to which he resorts to vindicate them. His devious stratagem works so well because it works by reflecting his victims' own beliefs, by confirming their suspicions and fulfilling their expectations. When Emilia begs him to deny that he duped Othello into murdering Desdemona, Iago replies: 'I told him what I thought, and told no more / Than what he found himself was apt and true' (5.2.176-7). And when Othello asks Cassio to 'demand that demi-devil / Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body', Iago brusquely interjects: 'Demand me nothing; what you know, you know' (5.2.301-3). In other words: 'Don't ask me why, ask yourselves, because you know as well as I do'.

Painting of 'Santiago the Moor-slayer'

15th-century Spanish painting of 'Santiago the Moor-slayer', mounted triumphantly on a white horse and trampling the heads of men beneath him.

Usage terms Altarpiece with St. James in the central panel. Chapel of the Alcazar of Segovia. Spain. / Photo © Tarker / Bridgeman Images

Much has been made of Iago's ostensibly 'motiveless malignity' ever since Coleridge coined his famous phrase 200 years ago. But there's surely no great mystery about what makes this villain tick. As Iago sees it, a black African has had the gall to court and marry a white Venetian beauty as if he were the equal of a man of her class and colour. And she has had the gall to prefer 'a lascivious Moor' (1.1.126) to her own kind and defiantly proclaim her love for this 'erring barbarian' (1.3.355-6) in public. As if being passed over for promotion by the Moor in favour of Cassio - in contempt of loyal service and the right of precedence, of 'old gradation' (1.1.37) - wasn't outrageous and insulting enough! Othello and Desdemona have made a mockery of the principles of social, sexual and racial hierarchy on which Iago's very identity and sense of self-worth depend. So he hatches a plot and tells a tale designed to put them in their place: to turn 'The divine Desdemona' (2.1.73) into the 'subtle whore' (4.2.21) he thinks every woman really is, and to turn the noble, eloquent Othello into a deranged wife-killer, who proves the racist's worst fears fully justified.

The really disturbing thing about Iago is not that he's an unfathomable psychopath, but that he's pathologically normal and theatrically irresistible. Although he initiates and engineers its catastrophe, Iago is not the fundamental or sole cause of the tragedy, which could plainly have erupted in a similar form for the same reasons without his intervention. To grasp that fact is to pluck out the heart of Iago's mystery, which is dispelled by the realisation that his malignity is not a monstrous deviation from the Venetian norm but its mirror image. The patriarchal, racist universe of Othello confronts in 'damned Iago', the 'inhuman dog' (5.1.62), not its demonic antithesis but its grotesque epitome.

Shakespeare has no intention of letting the audience off the hook either. Iago talks directly to us throughout the play and takes us into his confidence, assuming that we share his views, understand his reasoning and admire his ingenuity. Othello, in marked contrast, is kept at a distance from us by Shakespeare, who denies his tragic protagonist the profound rapport with the audience that Hamlet and Macbeth forge through their soliloquies. Iago exploits his devilish charisma and seductive intimacy with the audience to make us complicit with him, to implicate us in his hatred and entrapment of Othello, whether we like it or not. So when he retorts unfazed in his final speech 'Demand me nothing; what you know, you know', refusing point blank to explain his malevolence, we can be sure every word of that barbed line is addressed, disconcertingly, to us too.

Kiernan Ryan is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, an Emeritus Fellow of Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon. He is the author of Shakespeare (3rd edition, 2002), Shakespeare's Comedies (2009), Shakespeare's Universality: Here's Fine Revolution (2015) and the Introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of King Lear (2015). His next book, Shakespearean Tragedy, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2020.

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racism misogny and motivelss malignity in othello

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Racism, misogyny and 'motiveless malignity' in Othello | The British Library

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The causes of the tragedy of Othello are more complex and disturbing than they might at first appear, Kiernan Ryan contends.

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Othello is a tragedy that proceeds from misunderstandings and miscommunication. Many of these errors are bound up with Iago's deception, but Michael Donkor looks at other, additional causes in the play.

We might think of a night at the theatre as a deeply uplifting experience because of drama's ability to communicate; because of playwrights' abilities to express 'finer feelings' with a precision we mere mortals can only dream of. But with their misplaced letters and cunning disguises Shakespeare's plays are so often marked by a lack of straightforward communication. is a powerful example of this, where the text's tragedy essentially springs from acts of misunderstanding.

Our attention when exploring the idea of miscommunication in the text rightly rests on Iago and his deceptions. Posing leading questions and withholding information, Iago manipulates Othello's latent insecurities about his new marriage to Desdemona, enabling Iago to shape how his 'credulous' master (4.1.43) construes 'light behaviours' (4.1.102). Even though Iago uses arachnid imagery to describe his own plotting, Iago's whisperings in fact transform Othello into a spider. Othello feverishly spins a 'web' from self-loathing and faulty logic, a 'web' with a design so mesmerising and terrible in its potential significance that it diverts Othello from his previous, unshakeable belief in Desdemona, his 'Excellent wretch' (3.3.90). So, in his efforts to distort comprehension, Iago changes individuals and their perceptions of one another: as a result of Iago's tireless work, Cassio's stainless 'reputation' (2.3.194) for professionalism becomes 'begrim'd' (3.3.387) in Othello's eyes, and Roderigo is 'led' to believe that Desdemona's feelings for Othello are only fleeting fancies. But Iago's ambitions extend beyond this. In his quest to obscure, Iago alters the meaning of objects as well as people - principally, of course, Desdemona's handkerchief.

Photograph of Conrad Nelson as Iago in Othello at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, 2009

Conrad Nelson as Iago with the precious handkerchief, in the West Yorkshire Playhouse's production of Othello, 2009.

The handkerchief

Ironically, some of our first encounters with the handkerchief involve ideas of truth and pure intention. In Act 3, Scene 3, when Desdemona accidentally drops this precious 'trifle' (3.3.322) and it is discovered by Emilia, Emilia makes a 'note to self' to have its pattern reproduced to 'please' her husband (3.3.299). This episode is later imitated when, having 'found' the abandoned 'napkin', Cassio has such a liking for it that he demands Bianca replicate it for him (3.4.179). Indeed, thinking more about this connection between the handkerchief and the theme of faithful duplication, this 'token' (3.3.293) is an heirloom, handed down from Othello's mother to her son. In giving Desdemona this delicate prize, Othello hopes it will mystically bind him with his wife in the same way that it did his mother and father. Iago's attitude towards the handkerchief couldn't be more contrasting. His approach is to manipulate and change the 'napkin's' meaning entirely.

Italian handkerchief

Fine linen handkerchief, made c. 1600, with a delicate web of stitches embroidered in the spaces at the corners.

Usage terms © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Held by© Victoria and Albert Museum

Audiences might detect within the handkerchief's composition an inherent ambiguity, one which Iago plays with and exploits to achieve his own ends. On the one hand, this 'little' (3.3.287) piece of white cloth is spun from 'hallowed' silk that emblematises both the unblemished quality of the couple's affections and Desdemona's sexual purity (3.4.73). Exacerbating this, Othello informs us that this token's fabric consists, in part, of mummified virgins' hearts (3.4.75). But this bloodiness, along with its 'spotted' pattern of 'red' strawberries equally implies the loss of virginity. This blood represents the beginning of greater sexual experience and the potential dangers of those experiences. It is this second set of associations, with their implication of possible promiscuity, which Iago's accusations draw on. This is perhaps most pertinent when Iago describes Cassio's lascivious use of the napkin to wipe his beard at dinner, continuing the link between culinary and sexual consumption. Rather than serving as a memento of the couple's innocent first encounters, Iago encourages Othello to repurpose the handkerchief as an accessory to adultery.

The Venetian 'state of mind'

But most fascinatingly, the play asserts that these misreadings occur not just as result of the individual action, but also because of social forces. The text makes us wonder if there is something particular about the 'world' of Shakespeare's Venice and the Venetian 'state of mind' which makes the play's catalogue of misunderstandings inevitable.

Discussion of Venice and London in Florio's Italian language manual

In John Florio's Firste Fruites (1578), conversation turns to Venice and its reputation as a 'sumptuous' place full of 'fayre women' and 'good things'.

A number of early 17th-century travelogues like Moryson's An Itinerary (1617) revel in their stereotyping of southern Europeans as hot headed and impulsive. It's worth considering how Othello seems to characterise Venice similarly, as an immensely sensationalist society - and perhaps such sensationalism adds to the characters' difficulty in acquiring unequivocal knowledge. Desdemona's flirtatious 'devour[ing] up [of Othello's] discourse' and her 'serious incl[ing]' (1.3.146-50) towards his autobiographical stories are reflective of Shakespeare's Venice at large; a society eager for the most colourful version of events and with no pressing concern for the truth of the tales it is told. This Venetian appetite for the scandalous as opposed to more nuanced thought is also present in the immediacy with which Brabantio believes the speculations about how his daughter's union with Othello started. Chiming with the habits of his state, Brabantio leaps on the most outlandish of possible explanations for his daughter's 'disobedience': witchcraft and violent coercion. In keeping with this, when Othello is questioned about how his relationship with Desdemona began, the difference between him and the surrounding noblemen is more rhetorical than racial: Othello declares that, for his testimony, he will a 'round unvarnish'd tale deliver' (1.3.90). Here Othello's dignified and deliberate language strikingly resonates with diplomat Joannes Leo's casting of 'the African' as 'most honest' and 'high minded'. It is a counterpoint to the Venetian desire for salacious statements, a desire he is repeatedly confronted with.

Leo Africanus's Geographical History of Africa

In his Geographical Historie of Africa (1600), John Leo Africanus describes Africans as 'most honest' and 'high minded', but also 'subject to jealousie'.

War

As well as the supposed nature of the Venetian character and its impact on the text's treatment of miscomprehension, the immediate political context of the play's action is relevant too. Othello's conflicted conscience and Desdemona's fight to convince her beloved of her fidelity are microcosms for the play's international conflict - the war with 'general enemy Ottoman' (1.3.49).

Description of the Battle of Lepanto in Knolles's History of the Turks

The Ottoman Sultan Selim II who captured the island of Cyprus, from Richard Knolles' Generall Historie of the Turkes, 1603.

Given that it passes so quickly, we might justifiably overlook the importance of the storm that opens Act 2. But the dialogue's focus on confusion here is telling. In this scene, Montano is desperate to find out what can be 'discern[ed]' at sea; his initial speech is dominated by a series of questions that emphasise his ignorance. The 'gentlemen' nearby, seemingly Montano's only source of information, describe to him visions of 'monstrous' chaos, 'wind-shak'd surges' and 'enchafed' flood (2.1.13, 17). Such description, the frenetic tone and the fact that the feared foe ends up defeated by nature rather than by human design underline the chaos of war; where one minute, the foe is advancing terrifyingly; the next, the enemy is surprisingly pushed back. In such an atmosphere of unpredictable change, on an island defined as 'warlike' (2.1.43), misunderstanding between characters seems unavoidable. To extend the aquatic imagery, Othello is a play about 'fish out of water', not only with regards to Othello's blackness amongst his white peers, but also in its investigation of what happens to military personnel when they are away from the frontline. In trying to establish the 'honesty' of his ensign and the conduct of his wife, audiences might feel that Othello transplants the rapid, impulsive decision-making of the battlefield to the 'domestic' sphere where we might hope for more measured meditation.

Lift-the-flap picture of a gondola in the friendship album of Erckenprecht Koler

Romantic scene on a gondola, with a paper flap to preserve the couple's privacy; from the friendship album of Erckenprecht Koler, 1588.

Gender

But perhaps the most moving of these socially and politically generated misunderstandings is the lack of sympathy between genders in the text. Contemporary friendship albums, like those of Walens and Koler, offer glimpses into lively Venetian court life. In many instances, pages in the texts delight with vignettes of amorous exchanges between men and women. However, when the beautifully crafted images of Walens' work focus on masquerading and masks, they seem to touch on a particularly pertinent idea within the play with regards to the relationship between Venice's men and women. Othello frequently implies that Venetian men have an insufficient grasp of the 'true' character of their womenfolk; men cannot see women for who they 'really' are. This is a society in which attractive women are dangerously and hyperbolically misconceived of as statues made from 'monumental alabaster' (5.1.5). This is a world where, despite female characters often expressing themselves with startling sharpness, they are seen as duplicitous 'pictures out a' doors' (2.1.109). Emilia rails against this. In Act 4, Scene 3, she makes a rallying cry to:

Let husbands know
Their wives have sense like them; they see, and smell,
And have their palates both for sweet and sour,
As husbands have. (4.3.93-96)

These are words of frustration at not being properly listened to or understood. In this compelling speech Emilia articulates herself in some of the wittiest and most acerbic poetry in the text.

Friendship album of Moyses Walens

A masked troupe of travelling players, from the friendship album of Moyses Walens, 1605-15.

Here, Emilia's function as the 'straight-talking' working woman seeking to cut through patriarchal misreadings makes her, to my mind, one of the text's most memorable figures. It gives her death a real poignancy too. In the most powerful performances of this scene, such as Ayesha Dharker's recent offering with the RSC, Emilia's cry before her death that 'Twill out! twill out!' (4.2.219) is ear-splittingly loud and fills the auditorium. As it should. Because the vigour of her voice and the force of these exclamations come from her recognition that her struggle is not just against the tendency for concealment and obscurity within her husband or Othello. She is shouting against a whole society's desire to complicate what should be made plain.

Michael Donkor is a writer and is currently working on his first novel Hold. He also teaches English Literature at St Paul's Girls' School in London.

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Misunderstanding in Othello | The British Library

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Othello is a tragedy that proceeds from misunderstandings and miscommunication. Many of these errors are bound up with Iago's deception, but Michael Donkor looks at other, additional causes in the play.

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Character analysis: Iago in Othello | The British Library

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Alexandra Melville provides a close reading of the villainous character of Iago in Act 2, Scene 1 of Othello. ( Aside) O, you are well tuned now! But I'll set down the pegs that make this music, As honest as I am. (2.1.191-93) In Act 2, Scene 1 of , Iago formulates his plan to drive Othello mad.

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Hugh Quarshie describes his reservations about Othello, and how he used these to shape the production in which he played the title role.

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Is Othello a racist play? Highlights with subtitles | Debates | Royal Shakespeare Company

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Othello and Iago  | Othello | National Theatre

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Act 1 Scene 3 | Othello  | Royal Shakespeare Company

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'Othello' Quote Song | A level English Literature Revision

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'Jealousy' in Othello: Key Quotes & Analysis

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Critical Readings and Approaches to Othello

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Othello by William Shakespeare: Social and Historical Context

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Lecture on Othello - Othello's Jealousy

From Shakespearean Tragedy by A. C. Bradley. London: MacMillan and Co., 1919.

The character of Othello is comparatively simple, but, as I have dwelt on the prominence of intrigue and accident in the play, it is desirable to show how essentially the success of Iago's plot is connected with this character. Othello's description of himself as

one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
Perplexed in the extreme,

is perfectly just. His tragedy lies in this--that his whole nature was indisposed to jealousy, and yet was such that he was unusually open to deception, and, if once wrought to passion, likely to act with little reflection, with no delay, and in the most decisive manner conceivable.
Let me first set aside a mistaken view. I do not mean the ridiculous notion that Othello was jealous by temperament, but the idea, which has some little plausibility, that the play is primarily a study of a noble barbarian, who has become a Christian and has imbibed some of the civilisation of his employers, but who retains beneath the surface the savage passions of his Moorish blood and also the suspiciousness regarding female chastity common among Oriental peoples, and that the last three Acts depict the outburst of these original feelings through the thin crust of Venetian culture. It would take too long to discuss this idea, and it would perhaps be useless to do so, for all arguments against it must end in an appeal to the reader's understanding of Shakespeare. If he thinks it is like Shakespeare to look at things in this manner; that he had a historical mind and occupied himself with problems of 'Culturgeschichte'; that he laboured to make his Romans perfectly Roman, to give a correct view of the Britons in the days of Lear or Cymbeline, to portray in Hamlet a stage of the moral consciousness not yet reached by the people around him, the reader will also think this interpretation of Othello probable. To me it appears hopelessly un-Shakespearean. I could as easily believe that Chaucer meant the Wife of Bath for a study of the peculiarities of Somersetshire. I do not mean that Othello's race is a matter of no account. It has, as we shall presently see, its importance in the play. It makes a difference to our idea of him; it makes a difference to the action and catastrophe. But in regard to the essentials of his character it is not important; and if anyone had told Shakespeare that no Englishman would have acted like the Moor, and had congratulated him on the accuracy of his racial psychology, I am sure he would have laughed.

Othello is, in one sense of the word, by far the most romantic figure among Shakespeare's heroes; and he is so partly from the strange life of war and adventure which he has lived from childhood. He does not belong to our world, and he seems to enter it we know not whence--almost as if from wonderland. There is something mysterious in his descent from men of royal siege; in his wanderings in vast deserts and among marvellous peoples; in his tales of magic handkerchiefs and prophetic Sibyls; in the sudden vague glimpses we get of numberless battles and sieges in which he has played the hero and has borne a charmed life; even in chance references to his baptism, his being sold to slavery, his sojourn in Aleppo.

And he is not merely a romantic figure; his own nature is romantic. He has not, indeed, the meditative or speculative imagination of Hamlet; but in the strictest sense of the word he is more poetic than Hamlet. Indeed, if one recalls Othello's most famous speeches--those that begin, 'Her father loved me,' 'O now for ever,' 'Never, Iago,' 'Had it pleased Heaven,' 'It is the cause,' 'Behold, I have a weapon,' 'Soft you, a word or two before you go'--and if one places side by side with these speeches an equal number by any other hero, one will not doubt that Othello is the greatest poet of them all. There is the same poetry in his casual phrases--like 'These nine moons wasted,' 'Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them,' 'You chaste stars,' 'It is a sword of Spain, the ice-brook's temper,' 'It is the very error of the moon'--and in those brief expressions of intense feeling which ever since have been taken as the absolute expression, like

If it were now to die,
'Twere now to be most happy; for, I fear,
My soul hath her content so absolute
That not another comfort like to this
Succeeds in unknown fate,

or
If she be false, O then Heaven mocks itself.
I'll not believe it;

or
No, my heart is turned to stone; I strike it, and it hurts my hand,
or
But yet the pity of it, Iago! O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!
or
O thou weed,
Who art so lovely fair and smell'st so sweet
That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne'er been born.

And this imagination, we feel, has accompanied his whole life. He has watched with a poet's eye the Arabian trees dropping their med'cinable gum, and the Indian throwing away his chance-found pearl; and has gazed in a fascinated dream at the Pontic sea rushing, never to return, to the Propontic and the Hellespont; and has felt as no other man ever felt (for he speaks of it as none other ever did) the poetry of the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war.
So he comes before us, dark and grand, with a light upon him from the sun where he was born; but no longer young, and now grave, self-controlled, steeled by the experience of countless perils, hardships and vicissitudes, at once simple and stately in bearing and in speech, a great man naturally modest but fully conscious of his worth, proud of his services to the state, unawed by dignitaries and unelated by honours, secure, it would seem, against all dangers from without and all rebellion from within. And he comes to have his life crowned with the final glory of love, a love as strange, adventurous and romantic as any passage of his eventful history, filling his heart with tenderness and his imagination with ecstasy. For there is no love, not that of Romeo in his youth, more steeped in imagination than Othello's.

The sources of danger in this character are revealed but too clearly by the story. In the first place, Othello's mind, for all its poetry, is very simple. He is not observant. His nature tends outward. He is quite free from introspection, and is not given to reflection. Emotion excites his imagination, but it confuses and dulls his intellect. On this side he is the very opposite of Hamlet, with whom, however, he shares a great openness and trustfulness of nature. In addition, he has little experience of the corrupt products of civilised life, and is ignorant of European women.

In the second place, for all his dignity and massive calm (and he has greater dignity than any other of Shakespeare's men), he is by nature full of the most vehement passion. Shakespeare emphasises his self-control, not only by the wonderful pictures of the First Act, but by references to the past. Lodovico, amazed at his violence, exclaims:

Is this the noble Moor whom our full Senate
Call all in all sufficient? Is this the nature
Whom passion could not shake? whose solid virtue
The shot of accident nor dart of chance
Could neither graze nor pierce?

Iago, who has here no motive for lying, asks:
Can he be angry? I have seen the cannon
When it hath blown his ranks into the air,
And, like the devil, from his very arm
Puffed his own brother--and can he be angry?¹
This, and other aspects of his character, are best exhibited by a single line--one of Shakespeare's miracles--the words by which Othello silences in a moment the night-brawl between his attendants and those of Brabantio:
Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.
And the same self-control is strikingly shown where Othello endeavours to elicit some explanation of the fight between Cassio and Montano. Here, however, there occur ominous words, which make us feel how necessary was this self-control, and make us admire it the more:
Now, by heaven,
My blood begins my safer guides to rule,
And passion, having my best judgment collied,
Assays to lead the way.

We remember these words later, when the sun of reason is 'collied,' blackened and blotted out in total eclipse.
Lastly, Othello's nature is all of one piece. His trust, where he trusts, is absolute. Hesitation is almost impossible to him. He is extremely self-reliant, and decides and acts instantaneously. If stirred to indignation, as 'in Aleppo once,' he answers with one lightning stroke. Love, if he loves, must be to him the heaven where either he must live or bear no life. If such a passion as jealousy seizes him, it will swell into a well-nigh incontrollable flood. He will press for immediate conviction or immediate relief. Convinced, he will act with the authority of a judge and the swiftness of a man in mortal pain. Undeceived, he will do like execution on himself.

This character is so noble, Othello's feelings and actions follow so inevitably from it and from the forces brought to bear on it, and his sufferings are so heart-rending, that he stirs, I believe, in most readers a passion of mingled love and pity which they feel for no other hero in Shakespeare, and to which not even Mr. Swinburne can do more than justice. Yet there are some critics and not a few readers who cherish a grudge against him. They do not merely think that in the later stages of his temptation he showed a certain obtuseness, and that, to speak pedantically, he acted with unjustifiable precipitance and violence; no one, I suppose, denies that. But, even when they admit that he was not of a jealous temper, they consider that he _was_ 'easily jealous'; they seem to think that it was inexcusable in him to feel any suspicion of his wife at all; and they blame him for never suspecting Iago or asking him for evidence. I refer to this attitude of mind chiefly in order to draw attention to certain points in the story. It comes partly from mere inattention (for Othello did suspect Iago and did ask him for evidence); partly from a misconstruction of the text which makes Othello appear jealous long before he really is so; ² and partly from failure to realise certain essential facts. I will begin with these.

(1) Othello, we have seen, was trustful, and thorough in his trust. He put entire confidence in the honesty of Iago, who had not only been his companion in arms, but, as he believed, had just proved his faithfulness in the matter of the marriage. This confidence was misplaced, and we happen to know it; but it was no sign of stupidity in Othello. For his opinion of Iago was the opinion of practically everyone who knew him: and that opinion was that Iago was before all things 'honest,' his very faults being those of excess in honesty. This being so, even if Othello had not been trustful and simple, it would have been quite unnatural in him to be unmoved by the warnings of so honest a friend, warnings offered with extreme reluctance and manifestly from a sense of a friend's duty. ³ Any husband would have been troubled by them.

(2) Iago does not bring these warnings to a husband who had lived with a wife for months and years and knew her like his sister or his bosom-friend. Nor is there any ground in Othello's character for supposing that, if he had been such a man, he would have felt and acted as he does in the play. But he was newly married; in the circumstances he cannot have known much of Desdemona before his marriage; and further he was conscious of being under the spell of a feeling which can give glory to the truth but can also give it to a dream.

(3) This consciousness in any imaginative man is enough, in such circumstances, to destroy his confidence in his powers of perception. In Othello's case, after a long and most artful preparation, there now comes, to reinforce its effect, the suggestions that he is not an Italian, not even a European; that he is totally ignorant of the thoughts and the customary morality of Venetian women; ⁴ that he had himself seen in Desdemona's deception of her father how perfect an actress she could be. As he listens in horror, for a moment at least the past is revealed to him in a new and dreadful light, and the ground seems to sink under his feet. These suggestions are followed by a tentative but hideous and humiliating insinuation of what his honest and much-experienced friend fears may be the true explanation of Desdemona's rejection of acceptable suitors, and of her strange, and naturally temporary, preference for a black man. Here Iago goes too far. He sees something in Othello's face that frightens him, and he breaks off. Nor does this idea take any hold of Othello's mind. But it is not surprising that his utter powerlessness to repel it on the ground of knowledge of his wife, or even of that instinctive interpretation of character which is possible between persons of the same race, should complete his misery, so that he feels he can bear no more, and abruptly dismisses his friend (III. iii. 238).

Now I repeat that any man situated as Othello was would have been disturbed by Iago's communications, and I add that many men would have been made wildly jealous. But up to this point, where Iago is dismissed, Othello, I must maintain, does not show jealousy. His confidence is shaken, he is confused and deeply troubled, he feels even horror; but he is not yet jealous in the proper sense of that word. In his soliloquy (III. iii. 258 ff.) the beginning of this passion may be traced; but it is only after an interval of solitude, when he has had time to dwell on the idea presented to him, and especially after statements of fact, not mere general grounds of suspicion, are offered, that the passion lays hold of him. Even then, however, and indeed to the very end, he is quite unlike the essentially jealous man, quite unlike Leontes. No doubt the thought of another man's possessing the woman he loves is intolerable to him; no doubt the sense of insult and the impulse of revenge are at times most violent; and these are the feelings of jealousy proper. But these are not the chief or the deepest source of Othello's suffering. It is the wreck of his faith and his love. It is the feeling,

If she be false, oh then Heaven mocks itself;
the feeling,
O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!
the feeling,
But there where I have garner'd up my heart,
Where either I must live, or bear no life;
The fountain from the which my current runs,
Or else dries up--to be discarded thence....

You will find nothing like this in Leontes.
Up to this point, it appears to me, there is not a syllable to be said against Othello. But the play is a tragedy, and from this point we may abandon the ungrateful and undramatic task of awarding praise and blame. When Othello, after a brief interval, re-enters (III. iii. 330), we see at once that the poison has been at work and 'burns like the mines of sulphur.'

Look where he comes! Not poppy, nor mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou owedst yesterday.

He is 'on the rack,' in an agony so unbearable that he cannot endure the sight of Iago. Anticipating the probability that Iago has spared him the whole truth, he feels that in that case his life is over and his 'occupation gone' with all its glories. But he has not abandoned hope. The bare possibility that his friend is deliberately deceiving him--though such a deception would be a thing so monstrously wicked that he can hardly conceive it credible--is a kind of hope. He furiously demands proof, ocular proof. And when he is compelled to see that he is demanding an impossibility he still demands evidence. He forces it from the unwilling witness, and hears the maddening tale of Cassio's dream. It is enough. And if it were not enough, has he not sometimes seen a handkerchief spotted with strawberries in his wife's hand? Yes, it was his first gift to her.
I know not that; but such a handkerchief--
I am sure it was your wife's--did I to-day
See Cassio wipe his beard with.

'If it be that,' he answers--but what need to test the fact? The 'madness of revenge' is in his blood, and hesitation is a thing he never knew. He passes judgment, and controls himself only to make his sentence a solemn vow.
The Othello of the Fourth Act is Othello in his fall. His fall is never complete, but he is much changed. Towards the close of the Temptation-scene he becomes at times most terrible, but his grandeur remains almost undiminished. Even in the following scene (III. iv.), where he goes to test Desdemona in the matter of the handkerchief, and receives a fatal confirmation of her guilt, our sympathy with him is hardly touched by any feeling of humiliation. But in the Fourth Act 'Chaos has come.' A slight interval of time may be admitted here. It is but slight; for it was necessary for Iago to hurry on, and terribly dangerous to leave a chance for a meeting of Cassio with Othello; and his insight into Othello's nature taught him that his plan was to deliver blow on blow, and never to allow his victim to recover from the confusion of the first shock. Still there is a slight interval; and when Othello reappears we see at a glance that he is a changed man. He is physically exhausted, and his mind is dazed. He sees everything blurred through a mist of blood and tears. He has actually forgotten the incident of the handkerchief, and has to be reminded of it. When Iago, perceiving that he can now risk almost any lie, tells him that Cassio has confessed his guilt, Othello, the hero who has seemed to us only second to Coriolanus in physical power, trembles all over; he mutters disjointed words; a blackness suddenly intervenes between his eyes and the world; he takes it for the shuddering testimony of nature to the horror he has just heard, and he falls senseless to the ground. When he recovers it is to watch Cassio, as he imagines, laughing over his shame. It is an imposition so gross, and should have been one so perilous, that Iago would never have ventured it before. But he is safe now. The sight only adds to the confusion of intellect the madness of rage; and a ravenous thirst for revenge, contending with motions of infinite longing and regret, conquers them. The delay till night-fall is torture to him. His self-control has wholly deserted him, and he strikes his wife in the presence of the Venetian envoy. He is so lost to all sense of reality that he never asks himself what will follow the deaths of Cassio and his wife. An ineradicable instinct of justice, rather than any last quiver of hope, leads him to question Emilia; but nothing could convince him now, and there follows the dreadful scene of accusation; and then, to allow us the relief of burning hatred and burning tears, the interview of Desdemona with Iago, and that last talk of hers with Emilia, and her last song.

But before the end there is again a change. The supposed death of Cassio (V. i.) satiates the thirst for vengeance. The Othello who enters the bed-chamber with the words,

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,
is not the man of the Fourth Act. The deed he is bound to do is no murder, but a sacrifice. He is to save Desdemona from herself, not in hate but in honour; in honour, and also in love. His anger has passed; a boundless sorrow has taken its place; and
this sorrow's heavenly:
It strikes where it doth love.

Even when, at the sight of her apparent obduracy, and at the hearing of words which by a crowning fatality can only reconvince him of her guilt, these feelings give way to others, it is to righteous indignation they give way, not to rage; and, terribly painful as this scene is, there is almost nothing here to diminish the admiration and love which heighten pity. And pity itself vanishes, and love and admiration alone remain, in the majestic dignity and sovereign ascendancy of the close. Chaos has come and gone; and the Othello of the Council-chamber and the quay of Cyprus has returned, or a greater and nobler Othello still. As he speaks those final words in which all the glory and agony of his life--long ago in India and Arabia and Aleppo, and afterwards in Venice, and now in Cyprus--seem to pass before us, like the pictures that flash before the eyes of a drowning man, a triumphant scorn for the fetters of the flesh and the littleness of all the lives that must survive him sweeps our grief away, and when he dies upon a kiss the most painful of all tragedies leaves us for the moment free from pain, and exulting in the power of 'love and man's unconquerable mind.'
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FOOTNOTE 1: For the actor, then, to represent him as violently angry when he cashiers Cassio is an utter mistake.

FOOTNOTE 2: I cannot deal fully with this point in the lecture. See Note L.

FOOTNOTE 3: It is important to observe that, in his attempt to arrive at the facts about Cassio's drunken misdemeanour, Othello had just had an example of Iago's unwillingness to tell the whole truth where it must injure a friend. No wonder he feels in the Temptation-scene that 'this honest creature doubtless Sees and knows more, much more, than he unfolds.'

FOOTNOTE 4: To represent that Venetian women do not regard adultery so seriously as Othello does, and again that Othello would be wise to accept the situation like an Italian husband, is one of Iago's most artful and most maddening devices.

How to cite this article:
Bradley, A.C. Shakespearean Tragedy. London: MacMillan and Co., 1919. Shakespeare Online. 20 Aug. 2009. (date when you accessed the information) < http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/othello/othellobradley2.html >.

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Related Articles
The Moral Enigma of Shakespeare's Othello
Othello as Tragic Hero
Stage History of Othello
Othello: Plot Summary
Othello: Q & A
Quotes from Othello

How to Pronounce the Names in Othello
Iago Character Introduction
Othello Character Introduction
Desdemona Character Introduction
Iago's Motives: The Relationship Between Othello and Iago
Shakespeare and Race: The Relationship Between Othello and Desdemona

Othello: Essay Topics
Shakespeare's Sources for Othello
The Problem of Time in Othello

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shakespeare othello passion analysis act by act explanatory notes othello

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Shakespeare's Othello - Othello's Jealousy

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From Shakespearean Tragedy by A. C. Bradley. London: MacMillan and Co., 1919. The character of Othello is comparatively simple, but, as I have dwelt on the prominence of intrigue and accident in the play, it is desirable to show how essentially the success of Iago's plot is connected with this character.

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Othello's Relationship with Iago

From Hamlet, an ideal prince, and other essays in Shakesperean interpretation: Hamlet; Merchant of Venice; Othello; King Lear by Alexander W. Crawford. Boston R.G. Badger, 1916.

The first scene of Othello presents a conversation between Roderigo, the disappointed suitor of Desdemona, and Iago, concerning incidents of which Othello is the chief agent. Othello and Desdemona have eloped, it seems, leaving Roderigo disappointed and distressed. He complains that Iago had not forewarned him in order that their marriage might have been prevented. But Iago, though in close touch with Othello, protests he did not "dream of such a matter," implying that it was as much a surprise to him as to any one. For some time lago had what he considered good reason for hating the Moor, though this latest episode enables him for the first time to see through the whole affair. Othello's attachment to Desdemona now explains why he was passed by and the new appointment of lieutenant to Othello was conferred upon Cassio. lago now suspects that the post was given to Cassio by reason of Desdemona's friendship for him, and because he was a go-between in the courtship of Othello and Desdemona. this lago now declares his hatred of the pair, and intimates his willingness to join Roderigo in an attempt to harass Othello, and if not too late, to prevent his marriage.

After his usual manner Shakespeare has made the opening conflict, that between Othello and lago, the chief conflict of the play. But this is a conflict between two men who had up to this time been the nearest and warmest friends, one a great general and the other his most trusted officer. There is plenty of evidence throughout the play that up to this time there had been the fullest confidence between the two, and both alike were looked upon as men of excellent ability and sterling character. Othello was known as a noble Moor and had attained the highest military position, and therefore must have had the fullest confidence of the state and the senate. Every one regarded lago also as an upright and noble-minded man, and he had earned for himself the epithet of "honest." But all at once the "honest" lago becomes the mortal enemy of the "noble" Moor. We must then account for this change, as upon this change all the development of the play depends. This is the play. Shakespeare has apparently been at pains to show us what lago's attitude toward the Moor was, as well as what it is, and the explanation of the change can be found only in the play itself. We must explain it either from the incidents of the play or from the words of the play, or from both.

The incidents that take place at the opening of the play, at the same time as the change in the attitude of lago, are two, the courtship and marriage of Othello and Desdemona, and the promotion of Cassio to the position of lieutenant under Othello. The words of Iago at the opening of the play show that he regards the latter as an offence to himself, and therefore makes it the ground of his hostility to Othello. He complains that Cassio has "had the election," and that,

"He (in good time) must his [Othello's] Lieutenant be,
And I (bless the mark) his Moorship's Ancient."
(I. i. 34-5.)
At a later time he comes to see some connection between the two incidents, and believes that Cassio got the appointment because of an old friendship with Desdemona, and probably because he carried messages between Othello and Desdemona during their courtship.
When Othello had occasion to appoint a lieutenant, "Three great ones of the city in personal suit" appealed to him on behalf of lago, only to find that he had already chosen Cassio. It appeared to be a matter of personal preference only, for he could give no reason for the choice of Cassio. This capricious choice lago at once took as a very great slight upon him, and rightly so. As one of "the usual lunacies," so-called, in the interpretation of the play, however, Professor Bradley says, "It has been held, for example, that Othello treated lago abominably in preferring Cassio to him." But the "lunacy" on this occasion is to be charged to Othello in utterly disregarding and flouting the principle of preferment that holds in military circles more rigorously than perhaps anywhere else. This is the basis of the complaint of lago, and arouses at once his suspicion and bitter resentment, and soon turns him into an abiding but very stealthy enemy.

If Othello can be capable of such gross violation of all military rules and practices, lago sees that he can no longer trust Othello, and that all confidence between them has virtually ceased to exist, and no longer can he hope for the intimate relationships of former days to continue. This rewarding of Cassio with a military position because of personal service to himself and Desdemona was a most dangerous thing for a general to do, and opened up all kinds of possibilities of trouble, not only with lago, but with the discipline of all his forces. Only the fortune that favors fools could save him from disaster. But it was fatal when one of the disposition of lago was involved, for it turned him at once into an enemy, not only to himself, but to all the others connected with the insult, to Desdemona and Cassio, linking all three in his plan of revenge.

Here, then, is an outstanding fact that too few critics have even observed, and none have adequately explained. At this point in the lives of Othello and lago a great change comes over their relations. It cannot be too much insisted upon that up to this time they had, been the warmest and closest friends, and that lago had been in fact the confidential officer of Othello. Now all at once, for some reason that has not been understood, lago has been turned into the bitter enemy of his old friend, Othello, and as if to mark the importance of this for the interpretation of the play, the dramatist has chosen this point in their relations for the opening scene. But in spite of all that has been observed about the importance of Shakespeare's opening scenes for the exposition of his dramatic art, little attention has been paid to this fact in respect to Othello. The task of the critic at present, then, is to discover the cause of this great change in the relationships of these two men, and from this to trace the further development of the play.

Ever since Coleridge it has been the common thing, though by no means universal, to attribute the whole trouble to the sudden and unmotived malignity of lago, or to forget the fact that it has been sudden and unlike anything heard of before on the part of lago, and to assume only the malignity. Later critics, however, have not been able to overlook the emergence of the malignity at this time, and have attempted to explain it from their own imaginations rather than from the words of the play. Professor Bradley may be taken as voicing the best that can be said by those who would lay all the blame of the tragedy upon lago, but who feel they must account in some manner for this sudden malignity. Not content with charging lago with the evil the play undoubtedly lays upon his shoulders, Professor Bradley suggests that lago has always been in reality a villain, and has worn his "honesty" only as a mask, which now he throws off, revealing suddenly the real villain that he is, his true nature. He has always been, says Professor Bradley, "a thoroughly bad, cold man, who is at last tempted to let loose the forces within him." But this is sufficiently answered for the present if we have succeeded in discovering a change of attitude on the part of Othello, due to his infatuation with Desdemona, and to the fact that he found Cassio very [helpful in that regard]. A complete criticism of the assigned motive of lago, and an attempt at the elaboration of his real state of mind must be left until after we have followed the conflict through the initial stages, when we shall be better able to judge the real merits of the case.

Sufficient reason has been found, however, for declining to admit that the drama is the story of the intrigue of lago, and as the name would intimate it is the play of Othello. There is also now justification for attempting to explain the play as in the main the tragedy of the Moor in his new home in Venice. In our attempt to find the explanation of the tragedy in the hero, as assigned by the dramatist, we seem forced to say that now at last, when a crisis comes upon him, the great Moorish general, transplanted from the wilds of his African or Spanish home into the cultured and refined life of Venice, finds himself unable to bear honorably all the great responsibilities of his high position and his new life. It may be that the dramatist, who was a man of peace and had little admiration for the Caesars and 'other great warriors, is here taking his opportunity to show how little of the higher virtues dwells in great military ability. But the fact that he makes Othello a Moor, and so designates him throughout the play, must also be accounted for.

Up to this time Othello had borne himself nobly in his adopted state, and had the full confidence of the people and the senate, and was universally acknowledged to be the first soldier of Venice. But at this point he fails. For once, and for the first time, he allows purely personal considerations to sway him from following the established order of preferment in the army, and does a great injustice to lago. With no reason that he dare give, he appoints a wholly inexperienced man in preference to a tried and proven soldier who had fought under his own eyes, "At Rhodes, at Cyprus, and on other grounds Christen'd and heathen." (I. i. 81-2.) This wholly unwarranted rightly grieved lago, who took it as a great slight, for he believed he was entitled to promotion. It also shook his confidence in Othello, and roused in him all his force of resentment and turned him into a bitter enemy of Othello.

Thus far in Shakespeare's play there is not so much as a hint of the motive assigned to lago in Cinthio's novel, the presumed source of the play. The dramatist has almost completely changed the point of view of the whole story, by inventing an entirely new, and perhaps loftier if not better, motive for his lago. On the other hand, he transformed the one he found in the story, and invented the character of Roderigo to bear that vulgar part. Then he invents a second motive for Iago, and makes him hate Othello also for his supposed relations with Emilia. By way of revenge for this offence, lago's first impulse is to try to corrupt Desdemona, and thus get even with Othello. But how little this was his intention is seen by the fact that he never seems to have seriously considered it. In place of this, however, he has an alternative that becomes his ruling motive, to put Othello into a jealousy of Cassio. This he thinks will serve to revenge himself on Othello for both offences at one blow:

And nothing can, or shall content my soul
Till I am even'd with him, wife, for wife.
Or failing so, yet that I put the Moor
At least into a jealousy so strong
That judgment cannot cure.
(II. i. 331-5.)
The two offences with which lago charges Othello are both matters of honor, and mark phases of Othello's inability to sustain the new and exalted life of his adopted country. He was quite equal to the task of maintaining his military, or semi-barbaric, relations to the state, and rose to the highest command in Venice. But in matters of personal honor he is not above reproach, and in his obtuseness offends lago in two ways. Some critics think it is because of such offences as that with Emilia that Othello is unable to maintain an undisturbed married relationship with his refined and delicate Venetian bride. But his guilt is left very doubtful by the play, and therefore this conclusion is unwarranted. It is sufficient to observe, however, that the clear-headed lago perceives this to be his most vulnerable point, and by enlisting the dupe Roderigo, attacks him where he is weakest.
lago's dominating personality quickly subjects Roderigo to his schemes, and makes him a willing agent in his revenge. The first thing they do is to rouse up Brabantio, and under his leadership institute a search for the eloping pair. Shakespeare has here greatly enlarged and dignified the meaning of his play by making Roderigo, and not lago, the disappointed suitor of Desdemona. lago is thus reserved for the more tragic passion, and Roderigo bears the baser motives, and at; the same time supplies the needed money, and helps to carry out the intrigues of the crafty ancient. Their joint appeal to Brabantio will be the best possible plan of attack on Othello, as it will show Othello in opposition to the law and to a senator of the state. lago wishes at first only to plague Othello with flies, but the sick fool, Roderigo, stupidly hopes still to become the accepted lover of Desdemona.

lago sees it is quite out of the question to enter upon a course of open hostility and revenge against his General, and the appearance of friendliness will better serve his purpose. His inferior position compels him to play the hypocrite, and appear to continue faithful to Othello. But this very position enables him the better to work out his purpose, which is not to destroy Othello, but only to disturb his relations with Desdemona, and to put him into an agony of jealousy. lago does not fully understand the fierce nature of Othello, and does not appear at first to foresee the terrible extremes to which his barbaric and ungovernable passion will drive him. He realizes that he must at no time be found in a position "Against the Moor" (I. i. 162), and therefore separates himself from Roderigo, and hastens to join himself to Othello, in order to appear on his side in the ensuing disturbance.

Continue to The Relationship Between Othello and Desdemona

How to cite this article:
Crawford, Alexander W. Hamlet, an ideal prince, and other essays in Shakesperean interpretation: Hamlet; Merchant of Venice; Othello; King Lear. Boston R.G. Badger, 1916. Shakespeare Online. 20 Aug. 2009. (date when you accessed the information) < http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/othello/othelloessay2.html >.

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Related Articles
Lectures on Othello: Play Construction and the Suffering and Murder of Desdemona
Lectures on Othello: Othello's Jealousy
The Moral Enigma of Shakespeare's Othello
Othello as Tragic Hero
Stage History of Othello
Othello: Plot Summary
Othello: Q & A
Quotes from Othello

How to Pronounce the Names in Othello
Iago Character Introduction
Othello Character Introduction
Desdemona Character Introduction
Shakespeare and Race: The Relationship Between Othello and Desdemona

Othello: Essay Topics
Shakespeare's Sources for Othello
The Problem of Time in Othello

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shakespeare iago othello passion analysis act by act explanatory notes othello

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Shakespeare's Othello - Othello's Relationship with Iago and Iago's Motive

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From Hamlet, an ideal prince, and other essays in Shakesperean interpretation: Hamlet; Merchant of Venice; Othello; King Lear by Alexander W. Crawford. Boston R.G. Badger, 1916. The first scene of Othello presents a conversation between Roderigo, the disappointed suitor of Desdemona, and Iago, concerning incidents of which Othello is the chief agent.

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shakespeare desdemona othello passion analysis act by act explanatory notes othello

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Shakespeare's Othello - Othello's Relationship with Desdemona - Shakespeare and Race

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An examination of the relationship between Othello and Desdemona, and the racial element in Othello.

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In this thirteenth lecture in the Approaching Shakespeare series the focus is on the inevitability of the ending of Richard III: does the play endorse Richmond's final victory?

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Yasmin Alibhai-Brown examines the powerful drama of a marriage between the Moor Othello and the Venetian lady Desdemona.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown explores five Shakespeare plays which cross the racial divide. No one has ever captured the joy and lunacy and power of love better than William Shakespeare. And his transgressive depictions of love in particular remain unsurpassed.

Othello, Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra and A Midsummer Night's Dream - in these five plays there's so much more to love than love. These are not tidy tragedies. Shakespeare apparently never left England except through his plays yet he embraced interracial relationships and supernatural relationships and turned them into thrilling, dangerous drama. We bring together scholars, directors and actors to explore how the compulsions and fears, joys and sorrows, very much part of everyday life for many in Britain today, were so brilliantly showcased by Shakespeare more than four hundred years ago.

In the first play of the series, Othello, Shakespeare creates a powerful drama of a marriage between the Moor Othello and the Venetian lady Desdemona. Shakespeare builds so many differences into his hero and heroine - differences of race, of age, of cultural background - the tragic end is almost inevitable. Yet most people who see or read the play come away feeling, but for Iago's cruel hand, the couple would have won the day.

Producer Mohini Patel.

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BBC Radio 4 - Shakespeare: Love Across the Racial Divide, Othello

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Yasmin Alibhai-Brown examines the powerful drama of a marriage between the Moor Othello and the Venetian lady Desdemona. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown explores five Shakespeare plays which cross the racial divide. No one has ever captured the joy and lunacy and power of love better than William Shakespeare.

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Himself a celebrated Othello several years ago, Lenny Henry looks at the complex stage history of Shakespeare's 'Moor'. From November 2015.

In the third of ten programmes tracing a century of black British theatre and screen, Lenny Henry uses Shakespeare's character of Othello to tell the story of how the Moor of the play has for nearly 200 years offered black actors a part to savour - and also provoked debates about who can play the role.

In 2009, Lenny himself took the role in a production by Northern Broadsides at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, and subsequently in London. It won him the Evening Standard newspaper's Newcomer of the Year award, and was generally acknowledged a triumph.

Yet nearly 200 years ago, in 1833, the black American-British actor Ira Aldridge (known as 'the negro tragedian') played Othello with the Covent Garden players for just two nights until deplorable racist reviews, objecting to "this wretched upstart", forced the management to close the production.

Even well into the twentieth century, those 19th century newspapers' complaints about Desdemona being 'pawed' by a black actor were echoed when the great Paul Robeson took the role, and white actors in blackface have regularly played Othello right up to the modern era.

Featuring an interview with Lolita Chakrabarti, whose award-winning play Red Velvet, depicted Aldridge's Othello.

Series Consultant Michael Pearce
Producer Simon Elmes.

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BBC Radio 4 Extra - Raising the Bar: 100 Years of Black British Theatre and Screen, Othello Across the Ages

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Himself a celebrated Othello several years ago, Lenny Henry looks at the complex stage history of Shakespeare's 'Moor'. From November 2015. In the third of ten programmes tracing a century of black British theatre and screen, Lenny Henry uses Shakespeare's character of Othello to tell the story of how the Moor of the play has for nearly 200 years offered black actors a part to savour - and also provoked debates about who can play the role.

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Looking for the Moor, Sunday Feature - BBC Radio 3

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Hugh Quarshie seeks resolution to the dilemmas of a black actor playing Othello.

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Looking for the Moor, Sunday Feature - BBC Radio 3

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hugh Quarshie seeks resolution to the dilemmas of a black actor playing Othello.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown examines the powerful drama of a marriage between the Moor Othello and the Venetian lady Desdemona.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown explores five Shakespeare plays which cross the racial divide. No one has ever captured the joy and lunacy and power of love better than William Shakespeare. And his transgressive depictions of love in particular remain unsurpassed.

Othello, Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, Antony and Cleopatra and A Midsummer Night's Dream - in these five plays there's so much more to love than love. These are not tidy tragedies. Shakespeare apparently never left England except through his plays yet he embraced interracial relationships and supernatural relationships and turned them into thrilling, dangerous drama. We bring together scholars, directors and actors to explore how the compulsions and fears, joys and sorrows, very much part of everyday life for many in Britain today, were so brilliantly showcased by Shakespeare more than four hundred years ago.

In the first play of the series, Othello, Shakespeare creates a powerful drama of a marriage between the Moor Othello and the Venetian lady Desdemona. Shakespeare builds so many differences into his hero and heroine - differences of race, of age, of cultural background - the tragic end is almost inevitable. Yet most people who see or read the play come away feeling, but for Iago's cruel hand, the couple would have won the day.

Producer Mohini Patel.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
BBC Radio 4 - Shakespeare: Love Across the Racial Divide, Othello

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Yasmin Alibhai-Brown examines the powerful drama of a marriage between the Moor Othello and the Venetian lady Desdemona. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown explores five Shakespeare plays which cross the racial divide. No one has ever captured the joy and lunacy and power of love better than William Shakespeare.

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Thirty Best Othello Podcasts For 2020. Latest was The Othello Connection. Listen online, no signup necessary.

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About This Show

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Readers and audiences have turned to Shakespeare's greatest plays for their insights into power and performance, sex and religion, demagoguery and populism. Every month, Slate's Isaac Butler takes listeners deep into a different play to find out what Shakespeare has to say about politics in our troubled age. This podcast is made possible by Slate Plus members, who will get full-length bonus episodes. Find out more at slate.com/shakespeare.Read more "

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6: Coriolanus

In this sixth and final episode of Lend Me Your Ears, host Isaac Butler talks to the Public Shakespeare Initiative's Michael Sexton, Villanova professor John-Paul Spiro, Brooklyn College professor Roy Tsao, and theater critic Helen Shaw about the themes of populism, political authenticity, and the body in Shakespeare's final tragedy, Coriolanus.

The actors in this episode are Geordie Broadwater as Coriolanus, Sean Williams as Menenius, Daryl Lathon as Sicinius, David Rosenberg as Brutus, and Henry Jenkinson and Will Sturdivant as the soldiers.

Slate Plus members get a bonus episode of Lend Me Your Ears every month. Learn more at slate.com/shakespeare

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Episodes of This Show

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Lend Me Your Ears | A Podcast About Shakespeare and Modern Politics

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Listen to Lend Me Your Ears | A Podcast About Shakespeare and Modern Politics episodes free, on demand. Readers and audiences have turned to Shakespeare's greatest plays for their insights into power and performance, sex and religion, demagoguery and populism.

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Othello: Origins of the Play / Genre of Tragedy