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Explore the obscenity, danger, and disturbing themes in Shakespeare's Othello. Delve into race, audience reactions, and the historical context surrounding the play.
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‘Obscene’ in Shakespeare • ‘Then for the place where […] I did encounter that obscene and preposterous event {Costard’s wooing of Jacquenetta}…’ (Don Armado, Love’s Labour’s Lost) • ‘O forfend it, God, / That in a Christian climate souls refined / Should show so heinous, black, obscene a deed! [… ] Peace shall go sleep with Turks and infidels…’ (Bishop of Carlisle horrified at prospect of usurpation in Richard II) • ‘We will meet; and there we may rehearse most obscenely and courageously’ (Dream; Bottom getting it wrong)
Obscenity • Preposterousness:
Obscene – a false etymology? • From the Greek ob, ‘against’ or ‘off’, and scaena, ‘stage’. • i.e. The obscene is what should be kept off stage, unseen, un-scened…
Obscene and Preposterous • Don Armado’s ‘obscene and preposterous’; preposterous = inverted; contrary to nature, perverse, monstrous. • Brabantio: ‘For nature so preposterously to err…’ (1.3.63) • Iago remembers the word: ‘If the beam of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most preposterous conclusions…’ (1.3.322-25)
Ob-*****Ob- inherently dramatic prefix: towards, against, in the way of.Also used to form words (chiefly technical and scientific) with the sense ‘inversely, in a manner or direction contrary to the usual’ • Obloquy: abuse, calumny, slander • Obnoxious: exposed to hurt; with later connotation of objectionable, odious • Obnubilate: to darken, dim or obscure – the action of the play begins in darkness; its final scenes move towards nighttime and the putting out of light… • Obmutescence: the state or condition of being willfully mute, speechless • Obscurant: person who obscures something • Obsequious Observation Obsession Obsolescence…
Iago the obscurantist You shall mark Many a duteous and knee-crooking knave, That, doting on his own obsequious bondage, Wears out his time, • Lechery, by this hand; an index and obscure prologue to the history of lust and foul thoughts. • …. take no notice, nor build yourself a trouble Out of his [my] scattering and unsure observance. It were not for your quiet nor your good, Nor for my manhood, honesty, or wisdom, To let you know my thoughts. • Look to your wife. Observe her well with Cassio…
Othello and Audience Affect • ‘assuredly that rare Desdemona, killed in front of us by her husband, although she consistently pleaded her cause eloquently, nevertheless was more moving dead, when, as she lay still on her bed, her facial expression alone implored the pity of spectators’ (Henry Jackson, of a 1610 performance in Oxford) • ‘A very pretty lady that sat by me cried out to see Desdemona smothered’ (Samuel Pepys, 1660)
Many reports of 18th- and 19th-century audiences wept openly: Edmund Kean’s Othello even made Byron cry whilst ‘old men leaned their heads upon their arms and fairly sobbed’. • Of his Stratford Othello, Frank Benson recalls, “A lady wishing to book seats for a second performance came back to the box-office to apologize for her stupidity: ‘Because, of course, as Desdemona died on Monday night there can be no performance given by her on Tuesday’.”
Othello and Audience Affect: Theatre as non-safe space…(‘obscene’ in Law: ‘tending to deprave and corrupt those who are likely to read, see or hear the contents’) • ‘A soldier who was on guard duty inside the Baltimore Theatre, seeing Othello [was] about to kill Desdemona’ intervened to protect her: “It will never be said that in my presence a confounded Negro has killed a white woman!” he shouted, firing a gun and breaking the Othello actor’s arm. (Reported by Stendhal in 1822) • “You damn’d lying scoundrel, I would like to get hold of you after the show is over and wring your infernal neck” (audience member heckling Edwin Forrest’s Iago in 1825; my itals).
RACE, SKIN AND THE OBSCENE:‘If [Othello] did not begin as a play about race, then history has made it one’(Ben Okri, Nigerian poet and novelist) • Race is not a stable category. The meanings of blackness and whiteness change from culture to culture and with each generation • Over the last 400 years, critics and actors have argued over the geographical and racial origins of Othello. • A vast majority of performances of Othello from 1603/4 to the recent present have featured a white actor playing the title role • This impersonation of a cultural ‘Other’ will always be a political act entailing not only practical decisions (make-up, skin pigmentation, costume) but also assumptions about the psychology, behaviour and morality of non-Whites…
‘Commonsense’ racism • At the end of the sixteenth century racism was not yet organized as a large-scale system of oppressive social and economic arrangements, but it certainly existed in the form of a distinctive and widely shared affekt-complex. Racism in this early prototypical form entails a specific physical repugnance for the skin colour and other typical features of black Africans. […] The physical aversion of the English toward the racial other was rationalized through an elaborate mythology, supported in part by scriptural authority and reinforced by a body of popular narrative. Within this context the image of the racial other is immediately available as a way of encoding deformity or the monstrous. • Michael D. Bristol, ‘Charivariand the Comedy of Abjection in Othello’, in Materialist Shakespeare: a history, ed. Ivo Kamps 1995.
Racist Naturalism • The most degraded of the human races, the Negroes, whose shapes most closely approximate the brute animals and whose intelligence has not grown to the point of arriving at a regular government nor the least appearance of coordinated knowledge… (George Cuvier, Discourse on the Revolutinary Upheavals on the Surface of the Earth, 1812) • Cuvier, Europe’s leading naturalist, designated north Africans as Caucasians; argued that Africans could not possibly have created ancient culture of Egypt
Charles Lamb (1775-1834) in 1811 • Of Desdemona’s wedding with a ‘coal-black Moor’: ‘the Moors are now well enough known to be by many shades less unworthy of a white woman’s fancy’ • I appeal to everyone that has seen Othello played (on stage) whether he did not […] find something extremely revolting in the courtship and wedded caresses of Othello and Desdemona; and whether the actual sight of the thing did not over-weigh all that beautiful compromise which we make in reading.
S.T. Coleridge’s ‘Lectures on the Characteristics ofShakespeare’ (Bristol, 1813) • Argued that convention of black Othello was based on ‘common error’ of ‘mistaking the epithets applied by the dramatis personae to each other, as truly descriptive of what the audience ought to see or know’. References to ‘thick lips’, ‘old black ram’, ‘sooty bosom’ – did not mean that Othello was intended to be a ‘veritable negro’ • ‘As we are constituted, and most surely as an English audience was disposed at the beginning of the seventeenth century, it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro’ • ‘He was a gallant Moor, of royal blood, combining a high sense of Spanish and Italian feeling’ • Influential with critics and actors alike
Edmund Kean (1789-1833 ) • Played Othello from 1814-32; collapsed while playing in 1832 opposite his son, Charles’s, Iago • Introduced lighter make-up, partly so that his facial features would not be obscured, partly influenced by such objections as those of Lamb and Coleridge to a ‘negro’ Othello • Prepared himself backstage by intoning passages from the Koran
Why a ‘tawny’ Othello? • The ‘negro’ signified slavery and inherent inferiority; not appropriate for a Shakespearean hero. • A North African or Europeanized Moor could more easily be imagined to be noble (although still with certain temperamental flaws) • Reduced the scandal of Othello-Desdemona relationship; widespread cultural fear of miscegenation (interracial procreation) • Makes the play less about race per se and more about cultural difference: Othello relapses from his adopted Christianity to the (Muslim) barbarism of his upbringing
The Black Actor as Othello 1 : Ira Aldridge African-American actor (1807-1867), settled and married in England Toured Othello across Europe and Russia: ‘never have I seen an artist so completely identify himself with the person he represents. An actor told me he saw the great tragedian sob for several minutes after he came behind the scenes. The public did not fail to be touched, all wept, both men and women’ (St Petersburg correspondent of Le Nord, 23 Nov, 1858)
Re-Whiting Othello: Edwin Booth (1833-93) William Winter (in Edwin Booth’s promptbook): ‘to make Othello a Negro is to unpoeticize the character and to deepen whatever grossness may already subsist in the subject of the tragedy… expressions of opinion are not statements of fact – and may therefore be disregarded. The persons who call the Moor “thick lips” and “the black Othello” are not his friends…. The Moor should be painted a pale cinnamon colour, which is at once truthful and picturesque’
The Black Actor as Othello 2 • "Shakespeare meant Othello to be a Black Moor from Africa, an African of the highest nobility of heritage. From Kean on, Othello was made a light-skinned Moor because the West had since made Africa a slave center and the African was pictured only as a slave.” • PAUL ROBESON (in England played the role in 1930 and 1959)
The ‘black-face’ or ‘tawny Moor’ tradition continues, 1950s to the present
American Ballet Theater, Metropolitan Opera House, New York, 2015 • I HOPE YOU WILL SIT DOWN WITH ME AND ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN TO ME, IN PERSON, WHY YOU BELIEVED IT WAS A REMOTELY GOOD IDEA TO NOT ONLY CAST OTHELLO WITH A LIGHT-SKINNED BRAZILIAN BALLET DANCER, BUT TO ALSO PAINT HIS FACE BROWN! I SAT IN THAT AUDIENCE ON TUESDAY ANTICIPATING A LOVELY EVENING WITH MY WIFE AT THE BALLET. OTHELLO IS ONE OF MY FAVORITE PLAYS AND I WAS LOOKING FORWARD TO EXPERIENCING THE BALLET VERSION. I WAS NOT LOOKING FORWARD TO BEING INSULTED. I WAS NOT LOOKING FORWARD TO A JIM CROW PRODUCTION OF OTHELLO IN 2015. I LEFT AFTER THE FIRST ACT AND I WILL NEVER ATTEND ANOTHER ABT PRODUCTION FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE {LETTER FROM ROBERT MANNING JR.}
The Contamination Anecdote • SMUDGE IMAGE
With every ardent act Othello becomes white and with every osculation* Desdemona becomes black. Othello’s racial economy turns out to be a zero-sum game, in which there can only ever be one moor[…] in theatrical practice, either Desdemona or Othello is black, or both, but not neither. There is a definite quantity of blackness in the play that must be distributed across the bodies of Othello and Desdemona. In these anecdotes, the blackness has to go somewhere, hence the obsession with restricting it to its proper body, to preventing it from spreading, particularly to the body of the white woman playing Desdemona. (Paul Menzer, Anecdotal Shakespeare, 2016) • *a term in geometry that describes the place where two curves or surfaces come into contact
The White Actor as Othello: Patrick Stewart and ‘photo-negative’ production Washington DC, 1997 "When an all white or mostly white audience watches a black Othello, the reaction can be liberal but patronizing. This production is a deliberate attempt to reverse that situation, to make a white audience experience some of the feelings of isolation and discomfort that black people experience all of the time in their lives." - Director Jude Kelly
THE WHITE ACTRESS AS OTHELLO – BERLIN 2011:Okay, there are two headlines to choose from here: 1) I’ve just seen the best production of Othello I’ve ever seen. 2) I’ve just seen a production of Othello in which Othello is played by a white woman in a gorilla costume. (Andrew Haydon, 15 Feb 2011)
The full costume is deployed at the moment when Othello thinks he’s learnt of Desdemona’s infidelity. As a symbol of, well, it’s very much in the eye of the beholder, but it’s such a loaded bit of symbolism it seems to clearly suggest an “animal rage” which no one else in the play displays. And to associate that rage with a particular animal. And a particular animal which has a history of being used as a racist symbol. Which is an uncomfortable thing to put on stage. Even though here it is very clearly as much a comment on the play’s, of Shakespeare’s construction of a “Black man”.It’s incredibly disturbing. I mean properly, electrically uncomfortable. Because as ways of pissing about representing race on stage go it’s pretty full on. It’s confronting the audience with a question about how “Black” characters are constructed by white writers in the baldest imaginable terms. • http://postcardsgods.blogspot.com/2011_02_01_archive.html
The Black Actor as Othello 3 • ‘When a black actor plays a role written for a white actor in black make-up and for a predominantly white audience, does he not encourage the white way, or rather the wrong way, of looking at black men, namely that black men, or ‘Moors’, are over-emotional, excitable and unstable, thereby vindicating Iago’s statement, ‘These Moors are changeable in their wills’ (1.3.346)? Of all the parts in the canon, perhaps Othello is the one which should most definitely not be played by a black actor.’ HUGH QUARSHIE (speech at University of Alabama, 1999: Quarshie has never played the role on stage to this day, but did play it on audio)
Dameion Brown couldn’t have imagined two years ago, when he was doing a life sentence in the state prison at Solano, that he’d be making his professional acting debut on a summer night in 2016 in the starring role of “Othello” at Marin Shakespeare.One of 12 children from Jackson, Tenn., Brown, who was paroled last year, spent 23 of his 48 years behind bars for harshly whipping three of his five young children and permanently disabling one of them in what a jury found to be torture. He has maintained it was an accident because of negligence.
