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An online lecture providing detail on Greek theatre and tragedy.

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An academic paper on the subversive nature of Medea.

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Barlow - Medea - a subversive play - 1995

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A more modern stage production of the play Oedipus Rex.

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An academic article examining the extent to which Medea can be considered a proto-feminist character in Euripides' play.

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A chapter from the book 'A Companion to Medea' on the text.

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This comparative academic paper compares Seneca's and Euripides' treatment of Medea's filicide.

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An accessible academic paper on race and patriarchy in Othello.

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St. Rose - Race and Patriarchy in Othello

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A chapter from the book 'Mapping Medea' on the character as cultural 'Other'.

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An article outlining the artistic representation of Medea across the centuries.

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The anguished figure of Medea is the subject of Frederick Sandys' painting of 1868. The enchantress tears at her beaded necklace while concocting a poisonous potion, with which she will use to commit murder.

An artist affiliated with the Pre-Raphaelites, Sandys submitted his work to the Royal Academy for display in the Summer Exhibition of the same year. Although agreed to be of quality, the painting was ultimately rejected, sparking controversy.

After its acceptance the following year, one critic writing for Art Journal claimed 'either by its merits or its defects, [it] certainly stands alone...' He predicted that Medea would be 'either vastly admired or supremely detested.'

Ambiguity remains as to whether Sandys' rejection was due to internal politics, or because his subject matter - a sorceress known for killing her own children - was deemed to be deplorable to members of the Academy. However the ambivalent responses to Sandys' painting reflect the historic divisiveness of the character of Medea - a woman so enraged by her deceitful husband that she commits the unthinkable. She is the ultimate embodiment of female vengeance and an archetype of the femme fatale.

Medea's tale has prompted artists to explore the following questions: did she kill her children in an impassioned fit of rage, or did she murder in cold blood? Should we regard her as an evil monstrosity? Or should she be humanised, as a wronged woman driven to madness?

Following the legend of the Golden Fleece, featuring the characters of Jason and Medea, the play Medea was written by the Greek writer Euripides and first performed in Athens in 431 BC. The Roman philosopher Seneca later adapted the tragedy in AD 50.

Medea was a princess of the barbarian kingdom of Colchis and the wife of Jason, leader of the Argonauts. Because she was a descendant of the Sun god Helios, Medea was not merely mortal, but possessed magical and prophetic powers. When she fell in love with Jason, she helped him to obtain the Golden Fleece from her father King Aeëtes, betraying her own family in the process (she killed her brother).

Medea lived in exile with Jason and their children in Corinth, until Jason betrayed her by marrying princess Glauce, the daughter of Creon, King of Corinth. He left Medea, who was disgraced by the affair. Medea's unquenchable desire for revenge against her husband led her to create a treacherous plot. She slyly pretended to support Jason's marriage, ingratiating herself to him, before murdering King Creon and his daughter. She also stabbed to death her children by Jason and, according to Seneca's version, tossed the bodies of her sons down the roof palace before fleeing Corinth in a chariot drawn by dragons.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the story of Medea experienced a particular resurgence in literature and the dramatic arts, though as early as 1556, Étienne Jodelle's ballet proper Argonautes presented the character of Medea to the court of Catherine de Médici. The French playwright Pierre Corneille dramatised her tale in 1635, influenced by the texts of Euripides and Seneca. Many musical and operatic productions followed this, including adaptions by Francesco Cavalli (1649), Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1693), Antonio Caldara (1711), and notably, Handel, whose opera Teseo (1713) centred upon the vengeful character of Medea.

During the French revolutionary period, there were at least nine operas based on Medea, including Cherubini's of 1797. It has been suggested that Medea stood as a metaphor for the spirit of the French Revolution itself. In the German-speaking world, the tale inspired countless dramatists including the Austrian Franz Grillparzer who, according to historians, used Medea to launch a 'serious study in the victimisation of both womanhood and the outsider.' Grillparzer's Medea doesn't commit infanticide out of revenge, but to prevent her children from meeting a doomed fate.

Among artists, Medea was a popular mythological subject in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, during which time she was typically presented as an allegorical, feminine seductress, though in many different guises.

Around 1600, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) created his ink drawing The Flight of Medea (in The Getty), followed by Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1654) who, in 1620, radically depicted Medea in the moment of killing her son (in a work now in a private collection).

Medea, or The Marriage of Jason and Creusa

In 1648, Rembrandt (1606-1669) created the etching Medea, or The Marriage of Jason and Creusa.

Not long after, the artists Henry Ferguson (1655-1730), Corrado Giaquinto (1703-1765) and Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini (1675-1741) painted the mythical enchantress too.

In 1715, Charles Antoine Coypel created this striking study of Medea's countenance in pastel, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The final painting was submitted to the Académie Royale in 1715, and depicted the climactic moment of Medea's tale, when she kills her children and escapes the wrath of Jason. It is likely that stage adaptions of the story influenced Coypel's version, which clearly has a dramatic flair.

Medea

By the nineteenth century, images of Medea appeared widely across Europe, and representations ambivalently emphasised her as a scorned sorceress, or wronged wife and mother.

Eugene Delacroix's most famous depiction of 1838, titled Medea About to Murder Her Children, offers a sexualised rendering. Medea appears to hover between the role of mother and murderess - she tentatively holds the dagger close to her sons who try to escape her clutches.

Medea About to Kill her Children (Medée furieuse)

The German painter Anselm Feuerbach (1829-1880) depicted Medea in 1870 (now in Munich's Neue Pinakothek), followed by Valentine Prinsep (1838-1904) in 1888, and Evelyn de Morgan (1855-1919) in 1889.

In Prinsep's depiction, Medea calmly gathers poisoned fungi from a forest floor, which she will later use to poison Glauce (Jason's new bride) and her father. In her right hand, she holds a dagger, pointing to her eventual infanticide.

In De Morgan's portrayal, Medea wonders the marble halls of Ancient Greece, plotting her revenge against Jason. She holds a vial of purple potion. When De Morgan exhibited this painting for the first time at the New Gallery in 1890, she accompanied the work with a William Morris poem titled The Life of Jason.

'Day by day she saw the happy time fade fast away,
And as she fell from out that happiness,
Again she grew to be the sorceress,
Worker of fearful things, as once she was.'

In contrast to other depictions, De Morgan offers a more sympathetic interpretation of Medea, presenting her as a grieving and wronged woman, responding to her own misfortune.

In 1907, John William Waterhouse (1849-1917) presented Medea concocting a magical potion that will enable Jason to complete the tasks set out for him by her father King Aeëtes. Waterhouse presents Medea in a Pre-Raphaelite style. Artists associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement shared a preoccupation with Tennysonian figures, often involving empowered female witches and enchantresses, all of whom are dangerously in control of their own sexuality.

Jason and Medea

Historians continue to grapple with the resurgence of interest in Medea during the nineteenth century. Some have observed that representations of Medea in culture coincided with public debates about divorce laws and the enfranchisement of women in England. In 1857, the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act was passed, which allowed for separation on the grounds of adultery, cruelty, or desertion.

It seems plausible that Medea was appropriated for political and proto-feminist purposes, a vehicle to talk about social and political emancipation for women. For example, in 1856, Ernest Legrouvé opened his theatrical version of Medea to Parisian audiences, a man who would be known for supporting the women's movement and for publishing essays about the status of women in France. In 1868, the female writer and advocate of women's suffrage, Augusta Webster (1837-1894) translated Euripides' Medea in an attempt to promote the tale to British audiences.

Medea also challenged preconceived notions about female sexuality. Christine Sutphin argues that mythological figures such as Circe and Medea countered the Victorian notion of female 'asexuality'. Against Coventry Patmore's conception of the ' Angel in the House' - a submissive and self-sacrificing wife who dutifully fulfils the expectations of her husband - Medea embodied a transgressive and deviant symbol of 'womanhood', which stood in contrast to the Victorian pure ideal.

By the twentieth century, the archetype of Medea expanded beyond being a symbol of female expression, though she continued to represent discourses to do with gender. Notable filmmakers, from Pier Paolo Pasolini to Lars von Trier have adapted her tale for their own cinematic purposes. In Pasolini's 'Marxist' rendering of Medea (1969), the opera singer Maria Callas stars as the powerful enchantress (though she doesn't sing).

An enduring and powerful symbol of female rage, Medea's story has stood the test of time - it has been adapted and weaponised according to each century's defining socio-political characteristics. Consistently, the story serves a warning against betrayal, reminding us of its corrupting nature, aptly worded in Euripides' drama:

'I understand too well the dreadful act I'm going to commit, but my judgement can't check my anger, and that incites the greatest evil human beings do.'
Lydia Figes, Content Editor at Art UK Further reading
Maria Berbara, '15 Visual Representations of Medea's Anger in the Early Modern Period: Rembrandt and Rubens', Discourses of Anger in the Early Modern Period, 2015

Deborah Boedecker, Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy, and Art, Princeton University Press. pp.127-148

Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh and Oliver Taplin, Medea in Performance 1500-2000, University of Oxford,2000

Madison Skye Lauber, 'The Murdering Mother: The Making and Unmaking of Medea in Ancient Greek Image and Text', Bard College, 2018

Betine van Zyl Smit, 'Medea the Feminist' Acta Classica, Vol. 45, 2002, pp.101-122

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Representing Medea: the tale of a mythical murderess

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Discover artworks, explore venues and meet artists. Art UK is the online home for every public collection in the UK. Featuring over 300,000 artworks by over 50,000 artists.

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An article discussing the depiction of women and their use of voice in Othello.

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An older but accurate and well made stage production of the play (featuring Ian McKellen (Gandalf)).

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Othello - Willard White - Ian McKellen - Imogen Stubbs - 1990 - REMASTERED - 4K

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Professional theatre productions of Othello, Medea and other plays can be found here.

username = ICSZurich

password = Othello

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Download the learning pack for this production here . Age recommendation: 14+ Recorded through National Theatre Live on 4th September, 2014. Terrible things breed in broken hearts. Medea is a wife and a mother, stricken with grief. For the sake of her husband, Jas

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A webpage providing an overview of Elizabethan (Renaissance) theatre in context.

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English Renaissance theatre, also known as early modern English theatre, or (commonly) as Elizabethan theatre, refers to the theatre of England between 1562 and 1642.

This is the style of the plays of William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe andBen Jonson.

Theatrical life and the establishment of permanent theatres

Theatrical life was largely centred just outside of London, as the theatre was banned inside the city itself, but plays were performed by touring companies all over England.

English companies even toured and performed English plays abroad, e.g. in Germany and in Denmark.

The period starts before the establishment of the first permanent theatres. Initially two types of location were used for performing plays, the courtyards of inns and the Inns of Court such as the Inner Temple. These venues continued to be used even after permanent theatres were established.

The first permanent English theatre, the 'Red Lion' opened in 1567 but it was a short-lived failure. The first successful theatres, such as The Theatre, opened in 1576.

The establishment of large and profitable public theatres was an essential enabling factor in the success of English Renaissance drama. Once they were in operation, drama could become a fixed and permanent rather than a transitory phenomenon. Their construction was prompted when the Mayor and Corporation of London first banned plays in 1572 as a measure against the plague, and then formally expelled all players from the city in 1575. This prompted the construction of permanent playhouses outside the jurisdiction of London, in the liberties of Halliwell/Holywell in Shoreditch and later the Clink, and at Newington Butts near the established entertainment district of St. George's Fields in rural Surrey. The Theatre was constructed in Shoreditch in 1576 by James Burbage with his brother-in-law John Brayne (the owner of the unsuccessful Red Lion playhouse of 1567) and the Newington Butts playhouse was set up, probably by Jerome Savage, some time between 1575and 1577. The Theatre was rapidly followed by the nearbyCurtain Theatre (1577), the Rose (1587), the Swan (1595), the Globe (1599), the Fortune (1600), and the Red Bull(1604).

Archaeological excavations on the foundations of the Rose and the Globe in the late 20th century showed that all the London theatres had individual differences; yet their common function necessitated a similar general plan.The public theatres were three stories high, and built around an open space at the centre. Usually polygonal in plan to give an overall rounded effect (though the Red Bull and the first Fortune were square), the three levels of inward-facing galleries overlooked the open centre, into which jutted the stage-essentially a platform surrounded on three sides by the audience, only the rear being restricted for the entrances and exits of the actors and seating for the musicians. The upper level behind the stage could be used as a balcony, as in Romeo and Juliet or Antony and Cleopatra, or as a position from which an actor could harangue a crowd, as in Julius Caesar.

The playhouses were generally built with timber and plaster, and were three stories high. Individual theatre descriptions give additional information to their construction, such as flint stones being used to build the Swan. Theatres were also constructed to be able to hold large amounts of people.

A different model was developed with the Blackfriars Theatre, which came into regular use on a long-term basis in 1599. The Blackfriars was small in comparison to the earlier theatres and roofed rather than open to the sky; it resembled a modern theatre in ways that its predecessors did not. Other small enclosed theatres followed, notably the Whitefriars (1608) and the Cockpit (1617). With the building of the Salisbury Court Theatre in 1629 near the site of the defunct Whitefriars, the London audience had six theatres to choose from: three surviving large open-air "public" theatres, the Globe, the Fortune, and the Red Bull, and three smaller enclosed "private" theatres, the Blackfriars, the Cockpit, and the Salisbury Court.Audiences of the 1630s benefited from a half-century of vigorous dramaturgical development; the plays of Marlowe and Shakespeare and their contemporaries were still being performed on a regular basis (mostly at the public theatres), while the newest works of the newest playwrights were abundant as well (mainly at the private theatres).

Around 1580, when both the Theatre and the Curtain were full on summer days, the total theatre capacity of London was about 5000 spectators. With the building of new theatre facilities and the formation of new companies, the capital's total theatre capacity exceeded 10,000 after 1610.

Ticket prices in general varied during this time period. The cost of admission was based on where in the theatre a person wished to be situated, or based on what a person could afford. If people wanted a better view of the stage or to be more separate from the crowd, they would pay more for their entrance. Due to inflation that occurred during this time period, admission increased in some theatres from a penny to a sixpence or even higher.

Performances

The acting companies functioned on a repertory system; unlike modern productions that can run for months or years on end, the troupes of this era rarely acted the same play two days in a row. Thomas Middleton's A Game at Chess ran for nine straight performances in August 1624 before it was closed by the authorities-but this was due to the political content of the play and was a unique, unprecedented, and unrepeatable phenomenon. Consider the 1592 season of Lord Strange's Men at the Rose Theatre as far more representative: between 19 Feb. and 23 June the company played six days a week, minus Good Friday and two other days. They performed 23 different plays, some only once, and their most popular play of the season, The First Part of Hieronimo, (based on Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy), 15 times. They never played the same play two days in a row, and rarely the same play twice in a week. The workload on the actors, especially the leading performers like Edward Alleyn, must have been tremendous.

One distinctive feature of the companies was that they included only males. Female parts were played by adolescent boy players in women's costume. Performances also occurred in the afternoon since no artificial lighting existed. When the light did begin to fade, candles were lit so that the play could continue until its end.Plays contained little to no scenery as the scenery was described by the actors through the course of the play.

Costumes during this time period were often bright in color, visually entrancing, and expensive. Due to the fast-paced nature of the plays and their runs, there was sometimes not even enough time to create period specific costumes for the actors. As a result, the actors wore contemporary and not period specific clothing for the plays. Occasionally costumes were donated to actors by patrons, but more often than not, actors wore the clothes of their day.

Costumes were also used to recognize characters. Colors symbolized class, and costumes were made to reflect that. For example, if a character was royalty, their costume included purple. The colors as well as the different fabrics of the costumes allowed viewers to know the roles of each actor when they came on stage. Even though the English Sumptuary Law of 1574, a law which clearly defined the color, style, and fabric of the clothing different castes could wear, was in effect, a clause was built in that allowed actors to dress in clothes that were above their rank so long as they belonged to a licensed acting troupe.

Playwrights

The growing population of London, the growing wealth of its people, and their fondness for spectacle produced a dramatic literature of remarkable variety, quality, and extent. Although most of the plays written for the Elizabethan stage have been lost, over 600 remain.

The men (no women were professional dramatists in this era) who wrote these plays were primarily self-made men from modest backgrounds. Some of them were educated at either Oxford or Cambridge, but many were not. Although William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson were actors, the majority do not seem to have been performers, and no major author who came on to the scene after 1600 is known to have supplemented his income by acting.

Not all of the playwrights fit modern images of poets or intellectuals. Christopher Marlowe was killed in an apparent tavern brawl, while Ben Jonson killed an actor in a duel. Several probably were soldiers.

Playwrights were normally paid in increments during the writing process, and if their play was accepted, they would also receive the proceeds from one day's performance. However, they had no ownership of the plays they wrote. Once a play was sold to a company, the company owned it, and the playwright had no control over casting, performance, revision or publication.

The profession of dramatist was challenging and far from lucrative. Entries in Philip Henslowe's Diary show that in the years around 1600 Henslowe paid as little as £6 or £7 per play. This was probably at the low end of the range, though even the best writers could not demand too much more. A playwright, working alone, could generally produce two plays a year at most; in the 1630s Richard Brome signed a contract with the Salisbury Court Theatre to supply three plays a year, but found himself unable to meet the workload. Shakespeare produced fewer than 40 solo plays in a career that spanned more than two decades; he was financially successful because he was an actor and, most importantly, a shareholder in the company for which he acted and in the theatres they used. Ben Jonson achieved success as a purveyor of Court masques, and was talented at playing the patronage game that was an important part of the social and economic life of the era. Those who were playwrights pure and simple fared far less well; the biographies of early figures like George Peele and Robert Greene, and later ones like Brome and Philip Massinger, are marked by financial uncertainty, struggle, and poverty.

Playwrights dealt with the natural limitation on their productivity by combining into teams of two, three, four, and even five to generate play texts; the majority of plays written in this era were collaborations, and the solo artists who generally eschewed collaborative efforts, like Jonson and Shakespeare, were the exceptions to the rule. Dividing the work, of course, meant dividing the income; but the arrangement seems to have functioned well enough to have made it worthwhile. (The truism that says, diversify your investments, may have worked for the Elizabethan play market as for the modern stock market.) Of the 70-plus known works in the canon of Thomas Dekker, roughly 50 are collaborations; in a single year, 1598, Dekker worked on 16 collaborations for impresario Philip Henslowe, and earned £30, or a little under 12 shillings per week-roughly twice as much as the average artisan's income of 1 s. per day. At the end of his career, Thomas Heywood would famously claim to have had "an entire hand, or at least a main finger" in the authorship of some 220 plays. A solo artist usually needed months to write a play (though Jonson is said to have done Volpone in five weeks); Henslowe's Diary indicates that a team of four or five writers could produce a play in as little as two weeks. Admittedly, though, the Diary also shows that teams of Henslowe's house dramatists-Anthony Munday, Robert Wilson, Richard Hathwaye, Henry Chettle, and the others, even including a young John Webster-could start a project, and accept advances on it, yet fail to produce anything stageworthy. (Modern understanding of collaboration in this era is biased by the fact that the failures have generally disappeared with barely a trace; for one exception to this rule, see: Sir Thomas More). Most playwrights, like Shakespeare for example, wrote in verse.

Genres of the period included the history play, which depicted English or European history. Shakespeare's plays about the lives of kings, such as Richard III and Henry V, belong to this category, as do Christopher Marlowe's Edward II andGeorge Peele's Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First. History plays dealt with more recent events, like A Larum for London which dramatizes the sack of Antwerp in 1576.

Tragedy was an amazingly popular genre. Marlowe's tragedies were exceptionally popular, such as Dr. Faustus and The Jew of Malta. The audiences particularly liked revenge dramas, such as Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. The four tragedies considered to be Shakespeare's greatest ( Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth) were composed during this period, as well as many others (see Shakespearean tragedy).

Comedies were common, too. A subgenre developed in this period was the city comedy, which deals satirically with life in London after the fashion of Roman New Comedy. Examples are Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday and Thomas Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.

Though marginalised, the older genres like pastoral ( The Faithful Shepherdess, 1608), and even the morality play ( Four Plays in One, ca. 1608-13) could exert influences. After about 1610, the new hybrid subgenre of the tragicomedyenjoyed an efflorescence, as did the masque throughout the reigns of the first two Stuart kings, James I and Charles I.

Printed texts

Only a minority of the plays of English Renaissance theatre were ever printed; of Heywood's 220 plays noted above, only about 20 were published in book form.A little over 600 plays were published in the period as a whole, most commonly in individual quarto editions. (Larger collected editions, like those of Shakespeare's, Ben Jonson's, and Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, were a late and limited development.) Through much of the modern era, it was thought that play texts were popular items among Renaissance readers that provided healthy profits for the stationers who printed and sold them. By the turn of the 21st century, the climate of scholarly opinion shifted somewhat on this belief: some contemporary researchers argue that publishing plays was a risky and marginal business-though this conclusion has been disputed by others. Some of the most successful publishers of the English Renaissance, like William Ponsonby or Edward Blount, rarely published plays.

A small number of plays from the era survived not in printed texts but in manuscript form.

End of English Renaissance theatre: ban on plays by the English Parliament

The rising Puritan movement was hostile toward theatre, as they felt that "entertainment" was sinful. Politically, playwrights and actors were clients of the monarchy and aristocracy, and most supported the Royalist cause. The Puritan faction, long powerful in London, gained control of the city early in the First English Civil War, and on 2 September 1642, the Parliament, pushed by the Parliamentarian party, under Puritan influence, banned the staging of plays in the London theatresthough it did not, contrary to what is commonly stated, order the closure, let alone the destruction, of the theatres themselves:

The text of the act is as follows: Whereas the distressed Estate of Ireland, steeped in her own Blood, and the distracted Estate of England, threatened with a Cloud of Blood by a Civil War, call for all possible Means to appease and avert the Wrath of God, appearing in these Judgements; among which, Fasting and Prayer, having been often tried to be very effectual, having been lately and are still enjoined; and whereas Public Sports do not well agree with Public Calamities, nor Public Stage-plays with the Seasons of Humiliation, this being an Exercise of sad and pious Solemnity, and the other being Spectacles of Pleasure, too commonly expressing lascivious Mirth and Levity: It is therefore thought fit, and Ordained, by the Lords and Commons in this Parliament assembled, That, while these sad causes and set Times of Humiliation do continue, Public Stage Plays shall cease, and be forborn, instead of which are recommended to the People of this Land the profitable and seasonable considerations of Repentance, Reconciliation, and Peace with God, which probably may produce outward Peace and Prosperity, and bring again Times of Joy and Gladness to these Nations.

Note that the Act purports the ban to be temporary ("...while these sad causes and set Times of Humiliation do continue, Public Stage Plays shall cease and be forborn") but does not assign a time limit to it.

After 1642, during the English Civil War and the ensuing Interregnum (English Commonwealth), even after the Puritan mandated banning of the performance of plays, theatrical activity which continued English Renaissance theatre could be seen to some extent, e.g. in the form of short comical plays called Drolls that were allowed by the authorities, while proper full-length plays were banned. The theatres were not closed. The buildings were used for purposes other than staging plays.

The performance of plays remained banned for most of the next eighteen years, becoming allowed again after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. The theatres started again performing many of the plays of the previous era, though often in adapted forms; new genres of Restoration comedy and spectacle soon evolved, giving English theatre of the later seventeenth century its distinctive character.

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English Renaissance theatre, also known as early modern English theatre, or (commonly) as Elizabethan theatre, refers to the theatre of England between 1562 and 1642. This is the style of the plays of William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe andBen Jonson.

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A short critical guide to the play from Routledge.

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The Routledge Guide to William Shakespeare -(Othello)

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An excellent critical introduction to the play.

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Othello - A Critical Reader - Introduction

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An academic article on how Medea does neatly fit the Aristotelian conception of tragedy.

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A chronology of key performances of the play and how it has developed over time.

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1 The first record of a performance of is an entry in the Accounts Book of Master of the Revels Edmund Tilney noting that on 1 November 1604 "the King's Majesty's players . . . [acted] a play in the Banqueting House at Whitehall called The Moor of Venice [by] Shaxberd." This performance at the London palace of James I was just one of many productions of what would become one of Shakespeare's most popular plays. According to the title page of the first quarto edition of the play, Othello was performed "diverse times" at both the open-air playhouse and the indoor Blackfriars . Records show that the play was performed by the King's Men in celebration of the 1612 wedding of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick V, Elector Palatine, and that Othello continued in the repertory until the early days of the English Civil War when, in 1642, Parliament banned the staging of plays in London theaters.

2We know little about these first productions, though we can assert with some certainty that they would have looked and sounded quite different from most modern performances of Othello. Acting styles, stage technologies, even expectations about audience behavior have undergone enormous changes over the last four hundred years, and some shifts in theatrical convention-particularly those involving casting practices-have had significant impact on the play. In the early seventeenth century, for instance, the parts of Othello and Desdemona would have been played by white men. Richard Burbage,the foremost tragedian of Shakespeare's acting company , was almost certainly the first Othello, while Desdemona would have been acted by a young male actor from the troupe, since women were banned from the public stage in England until the second half of the century.

3Modern readers sometime assume that such casting decisions would have created a distracting artifice in these early productions, interfering with the play's ability to generate a powerful emotional response in its audience. There is no evidence to suggest that Othello's first viewers felt disengaged from its wrenching story, however. Instead, as the comments of one attentive audience member suggest, cross-dressed male actors were accepted as female characters even under close scrutiny, and the affective force of their performances could be formidable: "Desdemona," he reports, "murdered by her husband in our presence, although she always pled her case excellently, yet when killed moved us more, while stretched out on her bed she begged the spectators' pity with her very facial expression." Detailing the expression on the actor's face while at the same time designating him with the feminine pronouns "her" and "she," this early theater critic demonstrates that early modern audiences could simultaneously read and read through the bodies of the male actors who took female roles.

4When London's theatres reopened after the war, professional female actors were finally permitted on English stages for the first time. Othello was quickly revived and diarist Samuel Pepys, who attended one of the first performances at the Cockpit Theatre on 11 October 1660, reports seeing Nicholas Burt in the title role. Pepys makes no mention of who took the female lead, though he does note that "a very pretty lady that sat by me, called out, to see Desdemona smothered," an anecdote which suggests that the play continued to generate passionate responses in its audiences. Records suggest that just two months later the King's Company performed Othello with Margaret Hughes as Desdemona.

5While it seems plausible that the regular appearance of female actors in productions of Othello might have resulted in increased interest in the play's female characters throughout the later seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, the popularity of play's titular role with leading men appears instead to have produced a particular fascination with the figure of Othello at the expense of Desdemona, Emilia, and Bianca. Indeed, scholars have noted that although the play was not so extensively adapted at its revival as so many of Shakespeare's plays were during the Restoration period, the roles of its female characters were consistently diminished thanks to the removal of ostensibly unseemly sexual references, modifications which may, in turn, have contributed to the growing interest in the figure of Othello.

6 Although there was a general fascination with Othello and his transformation from eminent general and loving husband to murderer and suicide, there was what many modern readers find surprisingly little discussion about Othello's racial identity during these years. Nor was there much variety in the ways that Othello's Moorishness was staged: Othello was played by white actors who darkened their skin using stage makeup to present him as a sub-Saharan "black Moor." While their understanding of the physical characteristics of Othello's racial identity was fairly consistent, however, the leading men of this period offered varied readings of his temperament. James Quin, for instance, a popular Othello in the first half of the eighteenth century, chose to emphasize the general's dignified professionalism, presenting his lines in a then-stylish declamatory fashion while costumed in full British military uniform and wearing a powdered wig above his heavily blackened face. David Garrick, on the other hand, challenged the depiction of Othello as a confident leader, playing him instead as a taught, anxious figure topped with an elaborately plumed turban that lent him an isolating exoticism. The tall, deep-voiced Irish actor Spranger Barry also appeared turbaned and in blackface, though his famously electrifying performance-characterized by emotional turmoil and physical vigor-proved far more popular than Garrick's more neurotic one.

7 Among the most interesting of the late-eighteenth-century Othellos was John Philip Kemble, who took the role several times over his long career. Unlike the tumultuous Othello presented by Spranger Barry, Kemble's Othello was majestic and stately, and his restrained performances were not always popular with audiences, especially early in his career. While experience doubtless enriched his approach to the character as the years went by, comments by his contemporaries suggest that at least some of the negative response to his earliest performances resulted from the destabilizing effect of his dignified Othello on widely held assumptions about the inability of Africans to control their ostensibly tempestuous passions. Recalling a 1785 Drury Lane Theatre production, his friend and biographer James Boaden celebrates Kemble's Othello as "grand, and awful, and pathetic," but then qualifies his praise this way: "but he was a European: there seemed to be philosophy in his bearing; there was reason in his rage" (145). There was little room, it seems, for a thoughtful or reasonable Othello on the late-eighteenth-century English stage. However, by the time Kemble revived the play at Covent Garden in 1803-04, playing opposite his famous sister Sarah Siddons, his production was praised as "better than it was ever performed in the memory of the oldest critic" (Shattuck ii).

8In 1814, an even more significant shift in performance tradition occurred when Edmund Kean presented the first of the so-called "tawny" Othellos. Kean gave audiences a light-skinned, North African Othello rather than the black, sub-Saharan Othello they had grown accustomed to seeing. But if Kean's lightened stage makeup challenged established theatrical convention, his reading of Othello did little to destabilize entrenched stereotypes about the savagery of non-Europeans. His was a performance remarkable for its bursts of passion, and writer and critic Leigh Hunt wrote in The Examiner on 8 October 1818 that he "never saw anything that so completely held us suspended and heart-stricken." Indeed, rather than opening a dialogue about the politics of race, Kean's radical break with theatrical custom allowed theaters to stage Othello even as they avoided engaging with increasingly divisive public debates about the moral viability of a lucrative trade in black African slaves that had flourished in England for two hundred years.

9 The innovation of the "tawny Othello" at first unsettled audiences familiar with Kemble's dark-skinned version of the role, but eventually the idea of a scimitar-wielding North African Othello at the mercy of his passions caught on and successfully held the stage in England and the United States for the next hundred years. In the 1840s, Edwin Forrest, the first notable American Othello, brought to the role an animated physicality that prompted comparisons to wild animals, and, although audiences were reportedly sympathetic to Forrest's proclamation that he was proud to be what his biographer called "the impersonator of oppressed races," his Othello seems to have relied on, rather than to have dislodged, persistent generalizations about the relationship of race to temperament and morality. Starting in 1875, Italian-born Tommaso Salvini could play into what had become firmly entrenched stereotypes about the inability of African men to control their innate savagery to perform Othello as a barbarian lurking under a veneer of European sophistication, and at the beginning of the twentieth century Herbert Beerbohm Tree was still playing him as a "stately Arab" whose jealous rage transforms him into a "wild beast" (Hankey 67; quoted in Potter 90).

10 While the practice of casting white actors who "blacked up" to play Othello continued to dominate throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century, a significant challenge to this convention was initiated in 1825 when an American teenager named Ira Aldridge arrived in London and became the first professional black actor to perform the role. His appearance at East London's Royalty Theatre received mixed reviews, and Aldridge left the city fairly quickly to build his repertoire and his experience in England's provincial theaters. Although he would become one of the nineteenth century's better known actors, in the early days of his career Aldridge was billed as the "Gentleman of Colour," and his acting skills were often overshadowed by a preoccupation with his skin color. Some critics dismissed his casting as a marketing gimmick, while others argued that his race made him unsuited for major theatrical roles, including those designated as "Moors." Still others acknowledged the affective power of Aldridge's performances, but, relying on the same stereotypes associating black men with excessive displays of emotion that had led eighteenth-century critics to praise Spranger Barry for his acting skill, dismissed as "natural" Aldridge's ability to embody an Othello so tempestuous that he could wrench audiences from terror to sympathy over the course of a brief scene.

11Rather than trying to downplay his racial difference, Aldridge took advantage of widespread fascination with his background by overwriting his modest beginnings as the son of a New York clerk and claiming instead to be Senegalese royalty. Playbills trumpeting his fictionalized heritage appeared widely and must have resonated especially with those who saw him in the role of Othello, another other man of color who claims descent from "men of royal siege." After almost a decade of touring, Aldridge returned to London where he played Othello opposite Ellen Tree at Covent Garden. Although audiences were mostly enthusiastic, the papers, heavily influenced by a pro-slavery lobby whose financial backing they received in exchange for supportive copy, were hostile to the idea of a black man performing a leading role in a play by the nation's most revered playwright. The Times review was marked by a thinly-veiled racism that constructed Aldridge's accent as "unpleasantly, and we would say vulgarly, foreign" and found his "manner, generally, drawling and unimpressive." The bigotry of other critics was even more overt. The Athenaeum reviewer, for instance, railed against the "blow at respectability" of having a "black servant in the character of Othello- Othello forsooth!!! Othello, almost the master-work of the mastermind." Aldridge did not return to the London stage for some time after this, though his exhilarating style proved popular throughout Europe where he was mostly warmly received, and he continued to perform in the role of Othello until 1865.

12It took until 1930 before American singer and civil rights advocate Paul Robeson became only the second black man to be cast as Othello in a major London production. Directly challenging pernicious associations between blackness and savagery that continued to dominate in the theater, Robeson moved away from readings of Othello as domestic psychological drama and instead presented the play as a tragedy about racial conflict. Robeson's Othello, dignified but finally defenseless in the face of Iago's malignant racism, proved immensely popular with audiences and, increasingly, with critics, and his 1943 taboo- and record-breaking appearance on Broadway opposite Uta Hagen-which marked the first time a black man kissed a white woman on a major American stage-ran longer than any other Broadway performance of Shakespeare.

13It became more common for black actors to perform Othello after Robeson's commercial and critical success in the role, but the blackface tradition that dominated the first three hundred years of Othello's rich performance history proved remarkably resilient. White actors continued to play the part well into the 1960s, including John Gielgud in a much derided 1961 Stratford production directed by Franco Zeffirelli, Laurence Oliver in a legendary 1964 National Theatre production that was turned into a film directed by Stuart Burge the following year, and Michael Gambon in a 1968 Birmingham Repertory Company production set during the Crimean War. Since the 1970s, however, black actors have regularly played Othello in England and the United States, and some notable performances include those by Tony-award winner James Earl Jones, Jamaican-born opera singer Willard White, television's David Harewood, BAFTA award-winning actor Chiwetel Ejifor, British standup comedian Lenny Henry, and, most recently, Adrian Lester, whose performance was broadcast around the world as part of the National Theatre Live project. Other memorable Othellos have included an apartheid-era South African production starring John Kani, an American production featuring black actors Avery Brooks and Andre Braugher in the roles of Othello and Iago, and a "photo negative" production featuring Patrick Stewart as a white Othello among a predominantly African American cast.

15In addition to a rich and varied history on the stage, Othello has had a successful career in film and television. The first English-language film version of the play was Orson Welles' 1952 production. With Welles himself in the title role, Micheál MacLiammóir as Iago, and Suzanne Cloutier as Desdemona, the film presents a psychologically taut exploration of marriage, military life, and racial difference against a starkly shot backdrop of Morocco. Ten years later, the Othello story again found its way onto the big screen, this time as a loose adaptation set in the jazz/beat music world of early 1960s London called All Night Long (1962). Featuring black actor Paul Harris in the central role and shot, like the Welles, in black and white, director Basil Dearden's film follows attempts by jealous drummer Johnnie Cousin (Patrick McGoohan) to destroy the marriage and musical careers of Aurelius Rex (Paul Harris) and his loving wife Delia Lane (Marti Stevens). The film is most notable for musical appearances by jazz greats Dave Brubeck, Charles Mingus, and Johnny Dankworth, but is also of interest for its revision of the play's tragic ending: at the conclusion of All Night Long when Cousin's wife Emily (Betsy Blair) recognizes that her husband's claims about Delia's infidelity are inventions, his machinations are revealed and Aurelius and Delia are reconciled.

16The next full-length film of the play, this one featuring Shakespearean language and characters, was Stuart Burge's Othello (1965), which recorded a version of John Dexter's National Theatre production of the previous year. Featuring strong performances by Maggie Smith as Desdemona and Frank Finlay as Iago, the film is best remembered for Laurence Olivier's legendary blackface presentation of the title character. Olivier's performance, embellished by a wig of kinked dark hair, heavy black stage makeup, and an accent that has been described variously as Nigerian, South African, or West Indian now appears as a grotesque impersonation of blackness but was widely praised at the time for its ostensible authenticity and was greeted with enthusiasm by audiences. His Othello dominates the film throughout, grandly controlling in the opening scenes, relentlessly brutal in its closing moments, and always the sensual victim of Iago's eerily gentle manipulations. Identifying in Iago an anxiety based in repressed homosexuality-a reading that would influence later portrayals of the character by such actors as David Suchet (1985), Ian McKellen (1989), and Kenneth Branagh (1995)-Finlay plays him as a man whose angst about his own nature arouses in him a viciously racist revulsion of his commander.

17A decade later, another musical Othello found its way to the big screen, although this time rock rather than jazz provided the soundscape for a loose adaptation of the play. Based on a stage musical that had had limited tours of the US and the UK a few years earlier, 1974's Catch My Soul again involved All Night Long's Patrick McGoohan, this time in his only venture as a director. The film, set in the New Mexico desert, gave singer-songwriter Richie Havens, known to contemporary audiences for his opening performance at 1969's legendary Woodstock Festival, his first acting role as Othello, the pacifist leader of a hippie commune. Lance LeGault, later known for a recurring role on the 1980s TV series "The A-Team," plays a devilish dropout named Iago. Although the film was panned by critics who found its attempts to integrate Shakespeare's play with contemporary anxieties about race and religion both clumsy and tedious, the soundtrack, which includes memorable tracks by Havens, Tony Joe White, and Jerry Lee Lewis, is now much sought-after by collectors.

18No big-screen Othello was released in the 1980s, but Jonathan Miller's adaptation for BBC TV appeared in 1981. Returning to the tradition of featuring white actors in the play's title role, Miller's production stars Anthony Hopkins as a stony Othello whose dark side is gradually nurtured by Bob Hoskins's energetically nasty Iago. Crowded interior shots give this studio production a claustrophobic texture that appears at first to emphasize its personal over its political dimensions, but the film develops a feminist edge as the malevolence of the male characters is increasingly focused on Desdemona (Penelope Wilton) and Emilia (Rosemary Leach), whose love and wit prove woefully inadequate defenses against the forces of patriarchal outrage. Twenty years later, another made-for-TV movie, this time a modern-language adaptation set among senior officers of the London Metropolitan Police, explored the play's intersections of sexism and racism by turning Othello into a taught crime thriller about the death of a black drug addict at the hands of three white police officers. Black officer John Othello (Eamonn Walker) is promoted over white Assistant Commissioner Ben Jago (Christopher Eccleston) as scandal rocks a metropolitan police force, and Othello's wife, Dessie Brabant (Keeley Hawes) becomes the target of neo-Nazi thugs. When Dessie's ostensible infidelity is established using to falsified DNA evidence, she is murdered by her husband who then commits suicide, clearing the way for Jago to be appointed Commissioner. In a moment of triumphant revisionism, Eccleston's Jago closes the film by peering directly into the camera and insisting that the film's events have had nothing to do with race or politics, but only with love. Directed by Geoffrey Sax for Masterpiece Theatre, this stylish production's explicit confrontation of institutionalized bias and its deep cynicism seem even more apt now than they did when the film first aired.

19The years between Miller and Sax's television Othellos produced two Hollywood film adaptations of the play. 1995's Othello was directed by Oliver Parker and stars Laurence Fishburne in the title role, Kenneth Branagh as an engagingly scheming Iago, and Irène Jacob as a beautiful if rather vague Desdemona. This is a visually lush film that emphasizes the stark isolation of its stunning Mediterranean setting and the casual sexism of the masculinist military culture it depicts. Parker draws on the play's lengthy production history, offering knowing nods to memorable moments from earlier stage and film productions, but he also provides innovative touches, adding, for instance, a dream sequence depicting Desdemona's alleged adultery. The film takes full advantage of the camera's ability to approach its subjects unseen and so to draw viewers uncomfortably close to the action. This manufactured voyeurism is then jarringly exposed and exploited by Branaugh's Iago as he peers jauntily into the lens to confide his destructive plans to the viewer. Branaugh's is an Iago disturbing primarily in his ordinariness. There are private flashes of a sinister and brooding habit, but his outward manner is so relaxed, amusing, and temperate that his perfidy seems improbable even as it unfolds. Fishburn's Othello, by contrast, is a commanding physical presence whose unassailable strength-we see him defeat Iago handily as the two fence-foreshadows his eventual descent into violence.

20While Parker employs Shakespeare's language and period costumes, Tim Blake Nelson's 2001 film O is a considerably freer adaptation that exchanges early modern poetry and clothes for more modern patterns of speech and fashions. With a twenty-something cast including Mekhi Phifer as Odin (Othello), Josh Hartnett as Hugo (Iago), and Julia Stiles as Desi (Desdemona), O targets a young audience by engaging with concerns about violence, drugs, and racism in youth culture, school shootings, and sexual violence on campus. Brad Kaaya's screenplay shifts the action from a Cypriot citadel to a private American boarding school, transforms the play's external threat from an Ottoman armada into a rival basketball team, and effects a generic transformation tragic romance to contemporary teen thriller.

21The most recent English-language film version of Othello is Zaib Shaikh's made-for-TV adaptation Othello, the Tragedy of the Moor (2008). Produced for the Canadian Broadcast Corporation and aired both as a radio drama and on television, this self-consciously post-9/11 production presents Italian-Canadian actor Carlo Rota's Othello as a North African Muslim whose ethnic identity determines his relationships in ways that exceed his control. The film offers some interesting performances but its heavily cut text and short runtime prevent it from analyzing in any depth with the ideas about race and religion with which it engages.

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1 The first record of a performance of is an entry in the Accounts Book of Master of the Revels Edmund Tilney noting that on 1 November 1604 "the King's Majesty's players . . . [acted] a play in the Banqueting House at Whitehall called The Moor of Venice [by] Shaxberd."