Dramaturgical Resources
2024
Othello
By William Shakespeare
Over the course of the season, our assistant directors and student dramaturgs will be compiling dramaturgical resources relating to each production as it develops. Below are some links to websites which relate to the history of the play, the biography of the playwright, and sites that contextualize and, we hope, shed light on the directorial approach to the dramatic material.
We hope you find these resources of interest.
William Shakespeare (26 April 1564 [baptized] - 23 April 1616)
Othello is one of the twelve tragedies written by the prolific dramatist William Shakespeare. Most scholars agree he wrote 36 confirmed plays and 154 sonnets, solidifying his legacy as the most famous Western playwright of all time. Although there are historical gaps in the story of Shakespeare’s life, we do know his time was spent passing between the English cities of Stratford-upon-Avon, where he was born, baptized, and buried, and London, where he wrote, acted, and put on his plays.
Othello was written between 1602-1604 by which time Shakespeare had gained popularity in the London theater scene. The earliest recorded publication of Othello was in 1622 (two decades after it was first performed), in a type of book called a quarto. Quartos were easily and cheaply made books named for how their printed sheets are folded twice (in half, and then in half again), producing eight pages. The quarto edition of Othello was incomplete, however. A larger publication of Shakespeare’s plays, referred to as the First Folio, contains a version of Othello with 160 more lines than the original quarto. Most modern scripts are a careful selection of lines from both sources.
The inspiration and origin for the plot lies a few decades earlier, in an novel called De Gli Hecatommithi, written in 1565 by Italian novelist Giambattista Giraldi, or Cinthio. Bell Shakespeare out of Australia provides a condensed summary of the play’s origins. The original story of The Moor of Venice in De Gli Hecatommithi is much shorter than Shakespeare’s Othello and focuses on a moral condemnation of the figure of "The Moor" on the basis of his race and religion. The term "moor" (or moro) was originally adapted on the Iberian Peninsula to refer to members of the Muslim population who had resided in the territories of Spain and Portugal until their total expulsion in 1609. T he term "moor," however, came to be a general European reference to individuals with dark complexions, rather than a religious background in Islam since many of the Spanish Moors were from Northern Africa. Although in the present-day. terms like "Moor" or "Moorish" refer to a specific ethnic group residing in Northern Africa, the contemporary connotation for the term in Shakespeare’s time was pejorative and discriminatory.
Racial differentiation and discrimination are a significant part of Othello. A vital part of any production of Othello must contend with how Shakespeare characterizes Othello as a black man in a predominantly white European society and how other characters react to his presence. The concept of race, as we understand it, has drastically developed over the last four-hundred years since Shakespeare. Modern society has come to understand Western racism as a form of systemic discrimination with roots in a cultivated white supremacist power structure, but the audiences of the early 17th century were not as familiar with these ideas. The Royal Shakespeare Company produced a panel for their production of Othello in 2016, diving into comparative perspectives on how ideas of race and racial bigotry effect the staging and execution of the production. There are shorter and longer versions of the panel available for viewing on YouTube.
The performance history of Othello itself also contains a significant amount of racial complexity and subject to discriminatory casting practices. Historically, the character of Othello was frequently (if not exclusively) played by a white man in black-face, a problematic practice which was not done away with until the mid-20th century. The first black man on record to play Othello was James Hewlett in the early 19th century at the African Grove Theater in New York City.
Cinthio (and, subsequently, Shakespeare) set the work in the midst of the Republic of Venice, a port city and multicultural hub of Renaissance Italy. Venice was Italy’s pathway to the rest of Europe, Africa, and even China. With these connections, the state had a significant reputation as a melting pot for Christian and Islamic religious exchange since the Catholic Church’s influence was weaker in Venice. Before the unification of Italy in the 1870s, Italian states were controlled by dukes with their own individual political agendas, much like the one in Othello, who seeks a war with the Ottoman Empire (later to become Turkey) over the island of Cyprus, an island important to the control of trade in the Mediterranean Sea. Although General Othello wins the duke’s war in the play, Venice loses the island of Cyprus to the Turks in 1571.
Shakespeare’s version of Othello vastly expands on Cinthio’s, including far more emphasis on a variety of themes, rather than just the racial aspect. Female empowerment and friendship appear in the play as another layer to the existing story about trust and loyalty. Folger’s Shakespeare Library has an article dedicated to exploring how the characters of Othello's wife, Desdemona, and her attendant, Emilia (also Iago's wife) serve as foils to each other, and how their friendship creates a theme of female strength against the pervasive misogyny in the work.
One important decision made in our production was to cast a woman as Iago (a role traditionally played by a man). This recontextualizes much of the misogynistic language that Iago uses throughout the play and holds potential to create new feminist themes, like difficulty that women face in the workplace. Some of the ways in which this change reinforces or changes the meaning of the text is explored in this article from Folger’s.