Mark Colvin. OK, so thanks for coming to this lecture. First in a series called Approaching Shakespeare and they're all on specific plays.
The first one is on Othello. Next week, I'm gonna to talk about Henry, the fifth in third week.
I want to talk about measure for measure in fourth week and then to talk about Macbeth.
And the superstitious can stay at home that day. Fifth week, The Winter's Tale.
In each of the lectures, I'm going to aim to approach a specific critical question about the play.
And in doing that,
to demonstrate different methodological approaches and different kinds of material you might bring to bear on your Shakespeare work.
And my hope then is that the lectures will give you some kind of a toolkit for approaching the other plays that I'm
not talking about and ways that you might push through the sometimes overwhelming body of Shakespeare criticism.
I'm actually not. Mostly I think I've stuck to this.
I'm not mostly telling you or trying to tell you what to think about the play, or even particularly to give you my own readings,
but rather to plot how you might put together an argument about Shakespeare
by any Shakespeare play and what kinds of evidence you might use to do that.
I do hope some of you will come back to the subsequent lectures, but the lectures will, as I said, will be on I tunes.
Hello, if you're listening to it on iTunes. That's a weird kind of prolapsed this moment, but that's the evidence that really is life lecture,
small love so you can listen to it when it's more convenient to you.
But it would be nice for me if some people do come to hear it live. Okay, so let's start with Othello and the umbrella topic.
The umbrella question on this play that I've chosen to focus on is the question, what is the significance to the play of Othello's race?
What's the significance of the play of Othello's race? I'm going to start by thinking about the play's title page.
Othello is probably written in about 60, you know,
three sixteen oh four just at the time of James's accession to the English throne and around the time when Shakespeare's company,
the Lord Chamberlain's men, are taken under the king's patronage and they become the king's men.
We'll come back to the significance, I think, of the dating of Othello in a minute.
Dating Othello is rather dangerous. That's a joke as well. Okay.
Okay. That was an unscripted joke. Even the play is not, however, printed until 16 22.
The title of the play, then, is The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice.
The more of Venice, I think, is a kind of oxymoron, an oxymoron is a literary figure very important to the play Othello.
There are lots of examples of it, perhaps most prominently in that phrase, honesty, Argo that we keep getting so, so, so solemnly.
So the more of Venice is a kind of oxymoron. A more is not of Venice, a more cannot be of Venice.
And in some ways I think we could see the whole play exploring this paradox of a man who both is and is not of Venice.
The parallel with The Merchant of Venice is rather interesting,
I think that play The Merchant of Venice is entered into the Stationers Register with a double title.
The Merchant of Venice or The Jew of Venice. And in that case, the two titles are syntactically equivalent.
But I think they make quite different use of the word of the merchant can be of Venice.
And as Shylock finds out in the trial scene, a Jew can never be of Venice as an equal under the law, a citizen and so on.
Looking at the title pages of Shakespeare's plays in print. It's a really fascinating insight into the development.
Both of his reputation so early plays in print by Shakespeare.
Don't have his name on them later plays do and so do some plays we think not to be by Shakespeare.
So there's a sense that Shakespeare's name sells plays even if rather than identifies them.
By the time Othello is published posthumously in 16 22, Shakespeare dies sixteen sixteen.
The preface to the reader tells us the author's name is sufficient to vent his work.
And if you look at title pages, you can also see what might be a have been attractive to their first readers or audiences,
particularly in long descriptive titles. You can see all the early printed quartos of Shakespeare's plays.
A Quarto is a small, cheap book made by folding a piece of key pieces of paper in it into quarters, two folds, hence quarto.
So these are small, cheap, unbound pamphlet like publications of individual plays,
and some of Shakespeare's plays are published, published in this format during his lifetime.
You can see all those early printed quartos digitised very well, digitised freely online at the British Library.
If you Google British Library, Shakespeare Quartos, you'll get the link.
So let's go back to that title. More is a word with dense associations, two meanings.
As the OED online tells us, jostle one is geographical.
The more is an inhabitant of North Africa, Mauritania, present day Morocco and Algeria.
The second meaning, which is associated but not entirely identical with this one, is a more general designation.
More meaning. Muslim. Much critical ink has been spilt on whether we ought to understand Othello as an ethnically marked inhabitant of North Africa,
the noble Arab captured in context a contemporary image of the BARBREE ambassador to London in sixteen hundred.
Very easy to find online. Shakespeare's company performed at court during the time of that embassy.
And so they may well have seen these visitors from North Africa or whether the epithet black when he Argo sneers
sneeringly says We will drink the health of black Othello or his description that an old black rum is topping your white.
You coupled maybe with Rodrigo's description of thick lips,
whether this cluster of associations is supposed to suggest the racial typing of sub-Saharan Africa.
Of course, this distinction, whether Othello is an Arab from North Africa or a black man from sub-Saharan Africa.
This distinction is no more innocent now than then. For generations of earlier critics who were brought up on the inferiority of black
slaves in America and the inferiority of the colonised peoples of the British Empire.
The question of what kind of more Othello was was crucial to the sympathy that
the play might generate and therefore crucial to the whole notion of tragedy.
Put basely a black Othello at a dark, racially marked black, Othello was less sympathetic and therefore less tragic than an Arabic one.
And a lot of what I'm saying about Othello is deeply enmeshed in the racial ideologies and
prejudices of critics writing about the play in which I think I would include ourselves.
So the arguments that Othello is sympathetic have tended to identify him as a noble mayor of North Africa.
Arguments that find him less sympathetic have tended to link that with the idea that he was, as he was intended as a black man, a Negro.
Thomas Rimer writing at the end of the 17th century.
Rimer are white. MVR is one of the first critics of a Shakespeare.
Substantial critics of the Shakespeare play. He's writing about Othello and he doesn't like it.
He calls the play the tragedy of a handkerchief and a bloody farce.
Therefore, something unworthy of the designation of tragedy.
And this idea about the play's genre. This is the theme I'm going to come back to later in the lecture is inseparable
from his view that the fact that they have a black hero is very improper.
He derives from the play, the false morality. This may be a caution to all maidens of quality.
How, without their parents consent, they run away with Blackmore's.
So did Shakespeare intend Othello to be a Muslim? I don't know the answer to this question.
I don't think we can answer the question, but I think there are some different ways we might investigate it.
The first two aren't going to take up is firstly a close reading of the play itself and secondly, a reading of Shakespeare's sources.
We might feel that to return to the text of the play is always the answer.
The way to answer any literary question. But that turns out here as very often to be a rather difficult manoeuvre.
There are very few references to Othello's religion in the play,
although those Zahraa may suggest he's intended to be a Christian convert who uses the phrase by heaven,
in fact, as the only character in the play to use that phrase by heaven. He accuses his brawling soldiers of having turned Terk.
And he bids Desdemona pray before he murders her.
Jago vows to make him renounce his baptism and some productions notably that by Start By and starring Laurence Olivier,
have marked Othello's decline as a visible turning from adopted Christianity.
Olivier has a fellow rip, a prominent cross.
He's been wearing around his neck at the point of this religious reconversion or conversion back to Islam.
There are lots of problems, of course, implicit in that interpretation where Christianity equals self-control,
rationality, lucidity, Islam equals madness, murder, insane rage and so on.
You can see snippets, some of them quite long, of Olivier's Othello on YouTube,
although I can't vouch for the legality of their having been put there.
That's a disclaimer I choose. They know all about intellectual property and I choose crucial to this religious interpretation.
Then is Othello's last long finals final speech soft you a word or two before you go?
I have done the state some service and they know it. No more of that.
I pray you in your letters when you shall. These unlucky deeds relate.
Speak of me as I am nothing extenuate nor set down or in malice then.
Must you speak of one that loved not wisely, but too well of one not easily jealous,
but being wrought perplexed in the extreme of one whose hand like the base Indian
through a pearl away richer than all his tribe of one whose subdued eyes,
albeit unused to the melting mood, drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees them a discernable gum sat you down this and say besides that
in Aleppo once where a malignant kind of turbaned Turk took of the nation and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumciser dog and smote him.
Thus, it's a fabulous speech, a wonderful example of that exotic lyricism.
Famously dubbed the Othello music by Jean Wilson Night, and which tells us something about the overall quality of the play's rhythms and registers,
which might be something you'd want to follow up, perhaps by Verdi's opera Otello or the just musical Catch My Soul as a sideline.
I'd advise any of you who is here because you're studying Shakespeare for the finals paper to use your work on Shakespeare,
really to write about things you know about you're interested in if you've been
dying to write about children's literature or manga comics or cinema or theatre or,
I don't know, literature, American literature or advertising or something. I mean, Shakespeare does give you a chance to do all of those things.
And that's a much better technique for approaching this paper than grinding
beautifully through Shakespeare's ideas of kingship or some old stuff like that.
You know, try and translate your play to your strengths. So back to that big speech.
It's a speech that captures Othello's complicated position. He is of Venice, as we had in the title.
He is its defender against the turbaned Turk, but he is also the Turk himself.
The gesture of killing that Turk is turned on himself in his suicide.
I took by the throat the circumciser dog and smote him thus stage direction.
He kills himself. So the play and its main character ends on a fisher, an incompatible religious ethnic split,
which we might think of as having taken the life of its protagonist.
It's striking that that final speech doesn't at all mention except in grandiloquent and exotic sized terms of value.
The pearl richer than all his tribe. The speech doesn't at all mention the small matter of the murder of his wife.
And to your fellow critics, most notably, perhaps T.S. Eliot, have been exasperated by the extreme self-centred ness of this final speech.
Eliot's famous comment is that this is a fellow cheering himself up.
Well, seems more interesting to me is that the self in that phrase, cheering himself up is actually much more problematic than Eliot allows.
Any sense of a unified self seems to have been lost in this parable of multiple outsiderness.
Instead, the interweaving of military and marital narratives which were going to come to later here.
It here returns to the end of the play, the fatal bedchamber, very small, enclosed, claustrophobic scene.
Remember, Amelia is knocking on the door outside trying to get in.
And there's this terrible sense of claustrophobia about this, this scene in the bedchamber.
In Othello's words, the bedchamber expands out into a huge geopolitical realm in which Christians and Muslims are fighting in various flashpoints.
In his speech, it's Aleppo, the multicultural port of Aleppo. Elsewhere in the play, it's Venice or Cyprus.
If you know Cyprus now, you'll know it's still a divided island.
And still, because of its historic but both its strategic importance in the Mediterranean,
but also that the fight over whether it's part of Christendom or the Ottoman Empire.
So in some ways, I think is a fellow a Muslim is a question the play asks rather than answers.
I think that's probably going to be the case with a lot of the questions that critics ask about Shakespeare plays.
Are questions which are generated by the plays rather than answered by them and are contingent answers are always going to be ways of thinking,
actually thinking about the question. It might therefore be interesting to view Othello alongside other conversion narratives in contemporary drama.
There are a set of Turk plays collected by Daniel Vett Curse, which might be maybe good to look at.
And those of you, again with an eye to the exams, may be reassured to know that markers of paper, too,
are always keen for candidates to play Shakespeare in the context of early other early modern dramatists,
and particularly if you can do it away from some very routines or gestures we don't really want.
The Spanish tragedy in Hamlet is just too, too common. We don't really want the job of Malta and the Merchant of Venice again to comment.
It's something with lots of people have done.
And I want to encourage you to try and step out a bit and do some things which are which are more unexpected.
And thinking about Turk plays, the three Turk plays collected by Vicas might be a way to do that.
We all know how forbidden it is to try to deduce an author's intention from his works.
And we also know that like many forbidden things, it's very tempting to try to do so if you're a secret authorial intentions junkie.
The acceptable methadone version of this habit is a study of Shakespeare's sources.
We're going to come back to these in later lectures, particularly when I get to The Winter's Tale in fifth week,
and that I want to try and complicate the idea that Shakespeare is in control of his source material.
There's often a way in which the source material retains a kind of ghostly hold over the play.
However much Shakespeare seems to have changed it.
But what I want to say today is that firstly, looking up Shakespeare's sources is really easy.
They're pretty much all gathered together in Geoffrey Bullock's big, big series of books, narrative and dramatic sources of Shakespeare.
So that's Bullock B, you double O, you G.H. Narrative and dramatic sources of Shakespeare,
which which exists in Oxford in about 100 hundred copies, as it should be quite easy to find.
You can also look at it a very. What I find not a very helpful interface on the Arden Shakespeare database, which you can get to via solar.
So Bullett gathers together the acknowledged sources for Shakespeare's plays and he lists Cluster's Them byplay.
So it couldn't really be easier, except that by definition,
Bulloch leaves out the things that don't seem to have influenced Shakespeare's writing of the play.
In some ways, what's been left out is often the most interesting thing.
What makes Shakespeare look down for? I don't want that in my play.
So it's worth sometimes going back from Bulloch to the complete sources, which will be on PEBO.
Now, Shakespeare's main source for Othello is the Italian prose writer Geraldo Chinh.
Theo c i. N t h i. Chin FiOS series of stories, which is called Hecate Timothy Hecate.
Timothy was published in fifteen sixty five. He also uses this source for another play.
He's writing at the same time as a fellow. Measure for measure. And I'm going to come back to that later in this lecture.
And in more detail in third week in Jim Theos story from which Shakespeare takes Othello, none of the characters except Desdemona.
She's called. Desdemona is named. We have a character called More Shakespeare's Othello.
Captain Shakespeare's Casio and an Enson. Shakespeare's Iago.
We might pause for a minute on the way.
Shakespeare names his central protagonist to see if it bears on this question about the significance of Othello's race.
We don't actually know where he gets the name Othello, but it may draw on the name for l'eau, which Ben Johnson gives to another jealous husband.
But this time in a comedy, every man in his humour. We know Shakespeare to have acted in, every man in his humour.
This lineage of Shakespeare gets something of the name Othello from Perello in every man in his humour.
This suggests that what's important about Othello is that he's jealous, not that he's black.
Whatever black means. So he becomes a type of a jealous husband rather than a type of a more jealousy is not a racial identity.
Irrational jealousy is not a particular quality of Maus in Shakespeare's own work.
Aaron Black, character in Titus Andronicus has lots of flaws, but sexual jealousy is not one of them.
Neither Klaudia in much ado about nothing nor lay on Teis in The Winter's Tale.
Both of whom are husbands who fall prey to a manic jealousy about their wives fidelity.
Neither of those is racially marked. So that possible connexion to everyone in his humour brings up a kind of comic structure,
maybe underpinning Othello, which I was going to come back to.
It may be that Shakespeare intended his name Othello, perhaps with a hard t Otello to recall Otterman,
a play with a name we do get in the play Ottoman Turk and thus to reiterate his otherness, perhaps giving him a first name.
I hesitate to say a Christian name is a way to humanise and to individuate Othello.
He is a person, not a type. He's a type in Cynthia's story.
He's just called more. Although we then have to notice that the person in the play who mentions Othello's name most is Othello himself,
and that every other character, including Desdemona, calls him more more than once.
For Chinta, though, the unnamed moor is both marked and unmarked by his race.
There's one interesting thing about the source, the source material in Cynthia.
We hear that the More and Desdemona live in happiness after they're married in Venice for many years, they have a period of a happy marriage.
There's nothing intrinsically catastrophic about their relationship in the source.
Actually, I think there is in Shakespeare's play. Let's look at how Shakespeare structures act.
One scene, one of Othello to try and push that point again.
How problematic he sees the relationship between Othello and Desdemona.
Act one, scene one of Othello is a night scene with the Argo and Rodrigo rousing the sleeping senator rebundle
here with Korth revelations about his daughter Desdemona having eloped with the more romantic ends,
that opening scene arranging a party of officers to apprehend her.
And the more they're going to be tipped off as to their whereabouts by Rodrigo.
The second scene of the place is a fellow talking to a Jago who is disingenuously warning him about Briganti as anger,
a party with lights approaches Othello in the argot. And naturally, we assume that this is Bourbon Theo's posse come to get him.
But no, it's the Duke's servant summoning Othello for a conference about Cyprus in the next scene.
These two stories come together. Two things have happened. One, the elopement of a daughter without her father's permission.
And in this story, Othello is potentially at fault. In the other, an attack or a feared attack on Cyprus by the Turkish fleet.
Othello is potentially the saviour is the solution to the problem rather than its cause.
A sardonically rhyming exchange makes the play's equivalence between the elopement between the moor and the Venetian,
on the one hand, and the threat to the Venetian property by the Turks on the other.
The Duke tries to cheer Bramante up after he hears that Desdemona has willingly chosen Othello for her husband rather than being bewitched.
He urges him to accept the inevitable. When remedies are passed, the Greeks are ended by seeing the worst, which are late on hopes depended.
The robt that smiles steal something from the thief. He robs himself that spends a bootless grief.
People, people in early Shakespeare's plays often rhyme and rhyme.
Blank verse. What's blank about blank verses that it doesn't rhyme. But there are exceptions.
Lots of exceptions to blunt verse and Shakespeare's in Shakespeare's work, including rhymed verse like this.
Early in Shakespeare's career, people can use and end rhymed verse like that that I've just read quite seriously.
But by this point it sounds sing-song as it does to us now.
It sounds insincere or it sounds old bumper sticker, kind of a kind of philosophy which isn't really fit fit for the complexities of the world.
So the Duke's trying to tell a yo, you know, just cheer up about it.
We can sound anything so long as we're so cheerful and bright. Pantyhose Reply is very telling.
So let the Turk of Cyprus as beguiles. We lose it not so long as we can smile.
Buntin says that the loss of his daughter is like the loss of Cyprus.
You can see that Othello is a really interesting linchpin in both these this domestic story and this more military one that the
elopement of Desdemona and Othello is a microcosm or a metaphor for a broader geopolitics is hinted at but never developed.
Or to put that point another way, it's hard to know whether the conflict between Venice and the Turk is the background for a domestic tragedy,
which is really about a marriage is what Othello is really about a marriage which breaks down,
or is the marriage a metaphor for a crucible,
for a broader discussion about the savage incompatibility of Christian and Muslim in the play's imagination?
So which is foreground and which is background?
We might just look at one more aspect of the soul story to try and focus on Shakespeare's particular telling of this story.
And that's the role of the AGA. We all know the cliché of the Argo's motiveless malignity, motiveless malignity, as Coleridge put it.
The fact that he argues it's many excuses for his behaviour. Othello slept with Amelia.
He Yalgoo has been passed over for promotion. But these never seem to offer sufficient or logical causes for the destruction that he brings about.
He offers only an obstinate silence.
What you know, you know, when Othello asks him, demand that demi devil, why he has thus ensnared my soul and body.
This is an excellent example of what Stephen Greenblat in a readable book,
a biography of Shakespeare called Will in the World Within the World, calls Shakespeare's strategic opacity strategic opacity.
And by that, he means that Shakespeare purposely makes motivation opaque.
Where in the sources it was clear that Shakespeare strips out explanations and substitutes questions for answers.
The opening of King Lear is a good case in point. If we read the earlier play King Lear al e i.
R one of Shakespeare sources for the play, we can see there that Lears love test is explicitly prompted by the death of his wife,
his own feelings of mortality, his concern about his daughters without a mother to look after them.
But Shakespeare avoids this kind of prologue and begins his play already with that ominous division of the kingdoms and makes therefore,
Lear's motivation a question to be explored rather than a fact to be conveyed in Othello.
The motivation of the Argo is clearly removed from what Shakespeare found in his sources in Chinh Theo The End Inside,
Jago professes himself in love with Desdemona and its being in love with Desdemona.
That prompts his behaviour throughout the story.
If we take this away, the evidence that Yalgoo, the clear statement in the other Iago, the younger character, is in love with Desdemona.
That may be just a slight vestige of that in that flirtation between Iago and Desdemona on the key side,
as they wait for Othello to come back to Cyprus, which is a scene people have found.
Critics have found very uncomfortable.
They don't want a flirty Desdemona, as if that doesn't quite fit somehow the innocence they want to preserve, which is an odd, odd, odd problem.
But if we take away this motivation, we have Iago in any Arga.
His motivation is famously opaque. Perhaps it allows that race is part of his hatred of Othello.
I do hate him. Yalgoo announces in the play's first scene.
And there is something unsettling,
perhaps about the simultaneous attractiveness of Iago and the suspicion that his activity may be racially motivated.
The play may draw us unwittingly into racist assumptions about Othello by its clever creation of closeness and sympathy with the argot.
The figure who talks to us and draws us in and its maintenance of distance from Othello
was a very lofty and aloof figure who never really acknowledges that we are there.
I've discussed some of these ideas more length in my book for the writers in their work series, where I've argued partly for the sake of it,
since we don't often do this, that Othello is a deeply racist play and could hardly be otherwise.
But you'll be entirely welcome to to argue with that. But perhaps here is time to consider the possible significance of Iago's name.
The Spanish saint Iago, from which we get Santiago,
was known as a conqueror of the Moors following one of his famous exploits beating the Moorish army in the 10th century.
Santiago was traditionally pictured on a white horse trampling mauls underfoot.
It's the picture that's on the cover of Larry Maguires. Really good book, Studying Shakespeare.
And that name and those associations which Shakespeare bundles up with the character by calling him Jago,
may give that figure an agenda which needs to be understood as racial.
OK, so so far, I've tried to look at the significance of of Othello's raised by reading the play itself closely and by seeing
where it deviates from its source as a way of trying to pinpoint what Shakespeare thinks is important.
I want now to turn to a couple of other ways of looking at this question, which, by extension, you might use about similar questions in other plays.
Firstly, I want to try and think about each Othello's race in an early modern context and secondly, in a more modern context.
But I also want to complicate the ways those seem to be distinct. Early, modern and modern.
Our interest in history and in historicism is really, I think,
a fig leaf for a kind of presentist narcissism where always writing about our own period,
really even when we think we're being historical, our categories for thinking about race are formed by our own environment quite properly.
And we have a big critical investment in using historical evidence to prove that Shakespeare is uniquely liberal and advanced.
It would be very difficult for Shakespeare to have the position in our culture that he does.
If we were to say, but he's a terrible racist who is a terrible racist playing so much of the material in,
say, Andrew Hadfield's excellent source book on Othello,
which gives documents about early modern Venice and about its sexual mores, which are loose its views of Africans.
They are savages. The treatment of Moors in non Shakespearean drama.
They are wily. This is all used to show how Shakespeare breaks existing stereotypes by making a black character a tragic hero.
The truth, I think, is more complicated. It's hard to find that there is a stereotype of blackness on the stage before Othello and therefore clearly
were in danger of importing or back projecting retrofitting somehow the play with our own later stereotypes.
But if we do want to look at earlier works, you might think about Shakespeare's own Moors Air.
And again, in Titus Andronicus, Aaron has at least as many of the qualities of the Argo as he does of Othello and the Prince of Morocco,
one of Portia's impossible suitors in the Merchant of Venice.
His blackness seems a clear visual shorthand for his unsuitability as a husband
is never going to pick the right casket because he wouldn't be a good husband.
If you want to look at Mor's in other plays, I would have a look at Peel's Battle of Alcazar.
George Peale. The Battle of Alcazar. And finally, on this sort of material, I think I would point to Dymphna Callahans important argument in her book,
Shakespeare Without Women, Calahan, Shakespeare Without Women.
Callahan argues Othello was a white man because since there were no black actors,
Othello's blackness on the early modern stage was always performed rather than essential.
It's always about face paint and a curly wig, not some immutable essence which distinguishes one race from another.
And that historical argument links with more recent disputes about how to perform Othello.
Now a history of white actors playing the role.
More or less Black Dub has been almost entirely superseded by black actors playing Othello,
while other roles in Shakespeare plays may be cast in what the Royal Shakespeare Company calls colour-blind ways.
So that if you see the current production of as you like it in Stratford, Charles, the Wrestler and Duke Senior are both played by black actors.
But there isn't a sense that the character is black. Othello has been segregated from this tendency,
presumably because of the view that race is intrinsic to this character in a way it isn't intrinsic to the majority of parts.
Shakespeare wrote. But one black actor at the Royal Shakespeare Company has questioned this casting consensus.
Hugh Quasi Q you a. R. S S.H. i.e. Hugh Squashy confesses to a nagging suspicion that casting black actors as Othello gives a spurious
credence to the play's depiction of a black man and ends by saying that of all the parts in the canon,
Othello is the one which should not be played by a black actor.
We could address the significance of Othello's race by looking at it in more contemporary terms.
Let's take and just take one example from film, because we're a little bit short of time.
And I take Orson Welles 1952 film, much the best film of Othello in cinematic terms,
the only one you would probably go to the cinema and watch Welles cast himself in the title role.
Well, as a white actor in the title role, but he shoots the whole film in black and white.
There's no obvious attempt in this colour palette to identify him as black.
And in fact, race is of relatively little relevance to his interpretation of the play.
So if you want a version of Othello where race is not important. Have a look at Welles.
Have a look at Welles film.
The cinematography, the choice of black and white film inevitably means that the two colours the play tries to set up as a binary.
You're either black or white. Turn it into shades of grey.
That's what makes it black and white. Film shades of grey.
And it makes the discourse of blackness a poetic, possibly an ethical matter rather than an ethnic one.
Or you might look at there's a famous photo negative version of the play directed by Jude Kelly, where Patrick Stewart, a white actor,
played Othello amid a largely black cast, a flip flipping that racial polarities, or Laurence Fishburne in the Oliver Parker film of 1995,
which casts a prominent black actor in the main role and highlights his otherness by giving him sort of tribal scar markings on his face,
but kind of undermines him by having the best actor, the most confident actor in the film.
Kenneth Branagh as a young girl.
So it's a kind of black black Othello, but one that will not strops so focussed on many of those films that are available to borrow from the faculty.
You might also look at Julie Hanks book, H.A., N.K., why it's a great name for someone writing on Othello in the book Shakespeare.
Shakespeare Chesbrough in Production series. Recent criticism has been preoccupied with the meaning of Othello's race for the modern academy.
Most critics, most current critics would be most comfortable in arguing that the play interrogates racism.
So it's about racism rather than being racist, is it?
You'll see a similar manoeuvre with another uncomfortable play like Taming of the Shrew,
where it becomes a play about sexism, rather, or about misogyny, rather than being itself misogynistic.
So most critics have been comfortable arguing that the play interrogates racism and that it
shows us an Othello whose racist significant not because it makes him essentially savage,
but because it exposes him to the terrible vulnerability of being an outsider.
So race is important to that view view of Othello, not because it makes him behave in a particular way,
but because it makes him vulnerable, because he's an outsider. Against that, though,
we might place the plays strangely voyeuristic preoccupation with Othello and Desdemona sex
life from that vivid image of the black ram to the final scene in the couples waiting sheets,
a bed brought out onto the stage. Not a particularly easy prop to manoeuvre in the early modern theatre.
And so must be important, must be worthwhile to bring out.
It's striking that every time the couples seem to be offstage in bed together, some stage convulsion is manufactured to disturb them.
A kind of coitus interruptus. Jago rants to prevent you.
The Turks set a fleet for Cyprus. The soldiers all get drunk in Cyprus.
The flip the play seems to be fascinated and rather disturbed by this spectacle of interracial sexuality.
In this, we might feel it's actually more inhibited than Titus Andronicus,
which ends with a baby born of the relationship between the more Aaron and his white lover.
It may be a sign of Othello's different possibilities that some critics have
even wanted to wonder whether the couple ever consummate their relationship,
perhaps with the feeling that it would be preferable if they didn't.
It's easier to see this attitude in the criticism of the past.
If you look at the selections at the beginning of the casebook or that those kinds of things where you gasp get snippets of early criticism,
but I think it's probably probably suggests attitudes which are still prevalent in this respect.
The significance of Othello's race must be that it engages with categories. We still find it difficult to talk about.
I've just been at a conference in Shakespeare on France,
where one of my French colleagues told me that she had replaced her set Shakespeare text Macbeth with Othello.
She felt that this would enable her students in France,
a country which is trying to ban the burqa and deport the Roma to discuss issues of race in the play and beyond.
I didn't know really whether to be pleased. I think if you got your racial politics from Othello, you'd probably be even worse than France.
Okay. The final thing I want to talk about is genre.
The critic Frederick Jamieson has made a useful contribution to genre theory by dividing ideas of genre into two categories.
I'm going to go over this quite quickly cause I'm going to do it again.
When we come to measure for Measure, Jemison has two categories and he calls them syntactic.
On the one hand, from syntax, syntactic and semantic syntactic and semantic syntactic ideas of genre are structural.
So the syntax of tragedy, according to Jamison, might be the decline of a significant person catharsis.
Those kinds of things. That would be the syntax of tragedy. Semantic ideas about genre are tonal.
So the semantics of tragedy would be serious, lofty, philosophical, meaningful.
They're all that kind of tonal things we associate with tragedy. Not funny.
Serious. And where genre is being played with.
In Shakespeare. If you're thinking about The Winter's Tale.
If you're thinking about measure, measure Aldo's all's well that ends well.
Whatever problem plays. All those playing with genre in Shakespeare tend to be a clash between syntactic and semantic
properties so that it has the structure of one play and the tonal properties of another.
There's a famous shorthand for ideas of inductive reasoning, beloved of American conservatives.
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck if duck is tragedy.
Stay with me. Othello is a duck, which doesn't really look or sound like one.
Just as measure for measure is a play that sounds and looks like one.
But isn't the proximity of the writing of these two plays and their shared source material helps us to argue maybe that this is
a period of conscious generic experimentation by Shakespeare that having written comedies and histories during the 15 nineties,
he's pushing the possibilities of comedy in measure for measure, and he's drawing on comic frameworks for Othello.
Let me explain a bit more what I mean about the second part of that sentence,
comic frameworks for Othello, the Bedau measure of measure will have to wait for a couple of weeks.
How is Othello like a comedy? There are many aspects of comic structure in Othello.
The witty, clever servant Iago is a figure from the comic playwright Plautus, and he's often depicted on stage laughing at his own cleverness,
memorably dubbed by W.H. Auden, the Joker in the pack, the Joker in the pack.
The anger seems to mark a stage transition from the comic servant figures like lumps like Gobbo in the Merchant of Venice,
or the drama shows in comedy of errors towards figures of more malign agency like them.
Malcontent Bosler and the Duchess of Malfi, which you may have done last year.
Part of the Argo's great attractiveness is his plotting and plotting has tended to be a feature of comedy rather than of tragedy.
So too much plot tends to what happens in comedy rather than tragedy.
And in this, Thomas Reimer's dismissive tragedy of a handkerchief might turn out to be a useful observation.
The oh the stage managed intrigues making Othello believe Cassio is discussing Desdemona when
he's really talking about the anchor and the emphasis on the comic prop of a handkerchief.
These all ally. The play's unfolding less to the workings of chance and the anger of the gods in classical tragedy,
but more and more to the human interventions of characters like the people in much ado about Nothing who want to get Beatrice and Benedick together.
Okay, so in comedies, plots are usually people working hard to make things happen, and that's what happens in Othello.
That's what's comic about the structure of Othello in tragedy.
It's not so usually not quite so much about human agency.
The figure of the jealous husband, which we've already had from Everyman in his humour, is a figure from comedy.
Shakespeare knows that when he uses it in much ado about nothing. And the merry wives of Windsor.
Both of which end in the jealous husband being brought to his senses and a comic resolution.
It's a rule of thumb in Shakespeare, possibly even in life, that the men who think their wives are having an affair never are the ones where they are.
Never know. Othello may flirt with the possibility that the jealous husband will come around at the end,
that things can be resolved in the terrible slowness of the scene in which Othello prepares to and then murders Desdemona.
It seems so spun out and so long so attenuated, as if it's waiting for somebody to come in and stop it.
It's like it's like the woman attacked attached to the railway tracks or something.
Everything slows down at that point because we know that somebody is going to come in and stop it.
I think the place is teasing us with that possibility, although we never get it.
Even Desdemona momentarily returning to life after she has been smothered by Othello may be a last gasp,
as it were, of a comic resolution that maybe it's actually going to be all right.
But she just expires without any further further activity.
Act one of Othello is a miniature. Comedy lovers overcome differences to be together in Verdi's opera Otello.
He does away with the whole of the first act, beginning instead with the storm that brings the couple to Cyprus.
It's a neat interpretation of the opening is all just a kind of extended storm,
which in Twelfth Night and in The Tempest is something which is going to usher in comic.
Calm says something which starts Storm Alley. You think it's going to end in calm.
So does the presence of comedy in this play make the tragedy more or less tragic?
And how does that question of genre to bring us back to my focus for this lecture?
How does that intersect with Othello's race, with Thomas Reimer's scorn that a more could ever be considered a tragic hero?
And with debates about ethnic, geographical and ultimately moral connotations of Othello skin colour.
So in this lecture, I've tried to approach the question of the significance of Othello's race via a range of different methodologies,
comparing it with the source, thinking about other plays by Shakespeare and by his contemporaries through criticism,
through performance, and through a reading of the language and structure of the play.
Next week, I want to try something similar with Henry. The Fifth Ducks strangely recur as well.
Questions of national identity. Just wars in the Elizabethan period and in our own and Shakespeare's relation to the genre of history.
Thank you.