It is impossible to separate a performance of Othello from where we are now and from what is happening in contemporary America. It’s a lot to unpack, each time, not to mention you bring your own history of trauma and systemic racism and micro-aggressions to the stage, every night. Is this production playing up the angry Black stereotype? What is this production’s point of view on race? Often, you are the only Black actor in this show and it’s incredibly taxing to navigate. As a Black actor, considering the role, you have to examine the messaging of every moment. More so, many of the heralded white actors who have performed the title role throughout history, hint to getting in touch with something primal when trying to capture Othello’s rage. Othello has a long production history of blackface. Then, realizing his heinous act, kills himself. Othello then has to go on a journey that perplexes him to the extreme, so that he murders his own wife. Needless to say, the amount of trauma he has experienced is almost unfathomable.įinding space for that to live in you, as an actor, is quite taxing. A man of “royal siege” who was sold to slavery, freed, traveled in the military and rose through the ranks. This is the world Othello finds himself in.
It is only when Desdemona testifies, quite bravely, that Othello is exonerated. More important, the senators of Venice entertain this accusation as a legitimate possibility. Absurdly, Othello is accused of corrupting Desdemona with magic, witchcraft and foul potions. “Thou hast practiced on her with foul charms/abused her delicate youth with drugs or minerals/that weakens motion,” Brabantio declares after he learns of the elopement of Othello and Desdemona.
#Racism in othello skin#
It wouldn’t be until Carolus Linnaeus publishes “Systema Naturae,” that Europe starts to classify the races based on skin color. The idea of race is not how we see it today. In England there is great bewilderment about “Blackamoores” and the hue of our skin with scholars theorizing the proximity of the sun or religious figures pointing to the curse of Ham to explain Blackness. Then again, this is also a time when the slave trade is in its infancy. Certainly, there is evidence of Blacks in Elizabethan England marrying and owning land.
If you look at the world in which Shakespeare is writing, the idea of racism doesn’t even exist. The answer to that question isn’t so simple. And every time we start back on the road to Venice and Othello, we find ourselves asking the same question: Is this a racist play, or a play about racism? It is a storied role, a mountain tackled by the likes of James Earl Jones and Paul Robeson (following hundreds of years of Laurence Oliviers and John Gielguds in blackface). Studies in English literature, 1500-1900, 34(2), 341-356.Between the two of us, we’ve played Othello five times. "Proper" men and "fallen" women: The unprotectedness of wives in Othello. race, and writing in the early modern period (pp. Othello's identity, postcolonial theory, and contemporary African rewritings of Othello. Making a woman and other institutionalized diversions. “Instruments of some more mightier member”: The constriction of female power in Measure for Measure. Unproper beds: Race, adultery, and the hideous in Othello. Fathering herself: A source study of Shakespeare's feminism.
L., Jr., “An essence that’s not seen”: The primal scene of racism in Othello, Shakespeare Quarterly, 44(3), 304-324. The women's voices in "Othello": Speech, song, silence. «That catastrophe is a nuptial»: The space of masculine desire in Othello, Cymbeline, and the Winter's Tale: Shakespeare and sexuality.
Patriarchy and jealousy in Othello and the Winter’s Tale. Othello: The erring barbarian among the supersubtle Venetians. Obeying the time in Othello: A myth and the mess it made*. Ovid and the mature tragedies: Metamorphosis in Othello and King Lear. CLIO: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History, 22(3), 221-238.īate, J. Race and the spectacle of the monstrous in Othello. The rhetoric of Black and White in Othello.