Three Faces of Othello

“I do not shrink from saying that I wish this tragedy had never been written,” wrote Howard Furness, nineteenth-century editor of Othello. “The pleasure, however keen or elevated of the poetry of the preceding acts does but increase the unutterable agony of the closing scene.” Of the final moments, Samuel Johnson said, “I am glad that I have ended my revisal of this dreadful scene. It is not to be endured.” During a performance in Baltimore in 1822, a soldier on guard duty, seeing Othello about to strangle Desdemona, drew his gun and fired at the stage, breaking the arm of the actor playing the Moor. In contrast, a “refined and lovely young lady,” having seen the great American tragedian Edwin Forrest in 1836, declared “if that is the way Moors look and talk and love, give me a Moor for a husband!”

Few of Shakespeare’s plays have stirred such conflicting emotions. Powerful poetry and a tightly wound structure leave the audience no time to catch its breath. But for all its textual impact, any production hinges on the performance of the title role itself. Unless Othello inspires swoons, tears, or gunshots, the play is lost.

While there can be no single way to play any Shakespearean character definitively, two dichotomous approaches to the Moor have dominated the production history of Othello. In the nineteenth century, audiences preferred either a dignified, lyrical Moor or a passionate, sensual one. For the former they applauded the great American tragedian Edwin Booth; for the latter, the Italian superstar Tommaso Salvini.

Edwin Booth was doubly marked by tragedy. First, from a young age he was burdened with the care of his hard-drinking actor father, Junius Brutus Booth, who while playing Othello once had to be restrained physically from killing the actress playing Desdemona. Second, Edwin’s brother, also an actor, assassinated Abraham Lincoln.

In 1869 Booth undertook the role that had driven his father to such extremes. Earlier in the century, Edmund Kean (whose performances inspired Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s comment “like Shakespeare in a lightning storm”) offended Victorian sensibilities with his Romantic explosions, and so the theatrical world longed for a more polished Moor. Booth delivered. According to critic William Winter, “His impersonation was poetic. He made it felt and understood that Othello loves Desdemona with a certain awe and adoration of her heavenly beauty, and in a spirit of humble self-negation. When the night of horror comes, and in the awful calm of despair that has succeeded to frenzy the wretched man must kill what he loves beyond his hope of heaven, it is as an act of inexorable justice, and not as an act of murder, that the blow is struck.”

Refinement was the hallmark of Booth’s Othello. He was unfailingly respectful to Brabantio even in the face of drawn swords, and upon his arrival in Cyprus did not kiss Desdemona, for, in Booth’s own words, “heart throbs are better than kisses. Holding Desdemona clasped to his breast, Othello feels the quick beating of her heart against his own.” Yet all was not happiness at that first meeting, for the lines “If it were now to die, ‘Twere now to be most happy” were uttered in low, foreboding tones. When the moment came for the murder, he did not merely strangle his lady, “he slides a dagger under the bedclothes, with face averted; when it touches the victim he is shaken like a reed. As inch by inch the steel enters the body of Desdemona, we are horrified by the spectacle of suffering in the man,” as the World reviewer put it.

Although hailed by many as “the best of the present generation,” Booth had his detractors. He was small, and many felt that he lacked the physical presence to successfully bring off the great warrior. The Herald put him down as “the worst Othello we have ever seen outside an amateur performance, resembling a young Jesuit student – calm, cultivated, even subdued with a lachrymal tone that made the address to the Senate sound like the well-delivered appeal of an elderly schoolboy begging off a flogging.” Perhaps in view of these criticisms, Booth eventually switched roles with Ned Adams, to universal praise. According to the Daily Star, “We don’t like Booth’s Othello, but go and see his Iago if you have to be carried on a litter.”

Booth continued playing Iago until he retired from the stage, and on at least one notable occasion he played it to the Othello that most typified the opposing school – Tommaso Salvini. Where Booth was decorous, Salvini was playful and loving, where Booth was stately, Salvini was bombastic, and where Booth was a sacrificial priest, Salvini was an elemental force of nature. For an audience lulled by the lyricism of Booth, Salvini’s Othello blew through the theatrical world like a hurricane. Most remarkably, he played the part all over the world and never once performed the part in any language other than Italian, regardless of the language the rest of the cast spoke.

Salvini began his performance in a light, gay mood, deflecting Brabantio’s complaints with a gallant laugh. Quoting Desdemona in the Senate, he impersonated her voice and mannerisms. Later, as Desdemona begged for Cassio’s reinstatement, he listened to her indulgently as he tried to finish his paperwork and finally consented with a loving smile.

But as the tragedy ground onward, Iago awakened his fury. In the temptation scene, he nearly throttled the tempter, kicking him and throwing him to the floor in a manner described by William Winter as “using Iago as a floor-mop.” In the scene in which Lodovico gave him the letter, Salvini struck Desdemona not just with the letter, as previous Othellos had done, but full in the face with his hand. For the final confrontation in the bedroom, he manhandled Desdemona, “grasping her neck and head with his left hand, knotting his fingers in her loose hair, as if to break her neck.” Finally, he thrust her upstage and perpetrated the horrible deed behind drapery.

Salvini was called everything from “Italian bandit” to “butcher” to “lurid horror.” Even Boston critic Henry Clapp, a Salvini devotee, said that his treatment of Desdemona went beyond the pale. “He consumes her with his gaze; his senses riot over her. There is complete absence of spiritual affection or sympathetic communion. This merely physical demonstration is unpleasant, unredeemed by something higher.” The Galaxy did not mince words: “You hate Salvini’s Moor and are impatient for his death, as you might be for the death of a mad dog let loose in the streets.” But to his partisans, there could be no better Othello than this zealous Italian. “The depth, the nobleness, the consistency, the passion, the visible, audible beauty of it. … The perfect Othello is here,” said one of his greatest champions, Henry James.

Such was the state of the grieved Moor throughout the nineteenth century. Performing a fiery, Salvini-like Moor were such actors as Edmund Kean, Edwin Forrest, and Charles Fechter, while William Macready and Henry Irving shared Booth’s approach to the role. Not until 1930 did something new come along. Already internationally renowned as a singer, Paul Robeson had scored a hit in London with The Emperor Jones when he announced that he would play the Moor to a young Peggy Ashcroft’s Desdemona. Robeson spent nearly a year studying both the text and the historical context, and went to great pains to learn British pronunciation so as not to conflict with the rest of the cast. The production was a smash, and there was immediate talk of transferring it to Broadway.

The distance to cross, though, was wider than the Atlantic. No black man had ever played Othello with a white cast in America before (Ira Aldridge, the famous nineteenth-century black actor had to go to England to play the Moor), and many doubted whether the audience would accept him. Not until 1942 was Robeson engaged to play the role at home, first in a series of tryout runs and then in New York. The production premiered in August at the Brattle Street Theatre in Cambridge, to unanimous acclaim.

A large man possessed of a powerful stage presence, Robeson was “a massive creature, physically powerful, with the gentleness that often accompanies great strength,” opined Rosamund Gilder in Theatre World. Robeson’s voice, which had been heard on radios all over the world and won him great honors for “Old Man River” in Showboat, seemed his greatest asset. It had an incredible range and a luxurious smoothness that went far beyond simply delivering meaning and brought out every musical nuance in Shakespeare’s text.

According to the New York Times, Robeson “gave to the role a majesty and power that had seldom if ever been seen on the American stage.” The New York Journal-American said, “I’d not be surprised if thanks to the magnificent performance of Paul Robeson in the title role, we fortunate New York playgoers were not seeing the real ‘Othello,’ the Moor of Venice William Shakespeare actually had in mind.” Robeson, fully possessed of both dignity and power, poetry and passion, thus transcended the opposing traditions of Othello by uniting them in one triumphant performance that smashed social barriers as it ascended the heights of theatrical achievement.

Kyle Brenton is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard.