Commentary: Must Laurence Olivier’s blackface Othello be banned? I showed the film and wasn’t canceled

Last spring I included in my Shakespeare on Stage and Screen syllabus the 1965 film of “Othello” starring Laurence Olivier in blackface.

You might be wondering why I’m freely acknowledging my academic crime. But if my conscience isn’t clear — and whose can be? — it remains open for inspection.

Unlike composer Bright Sheng, who was compelled to step down from his class at the University of Michigan for showing the Olivier film, I have neither been assailed for racial insensitivity nor held up as a casualty of cancel culture.

I didn’t expose my students at the California Institute of the Arts to the film because I thought it was “one of the most faithful to Shakespeare,” as Sheng, whose class was focused on Verdi’s opera adaptation, told the New York Times. I’m not sure what “faithful to Shakespeare” even means. A film faithful to Elizabethan stagecraft or to an idea of Shakespeare that arose from a later theatrical tradition? Or perhaps just more textually in line than Verdi’s brilliant opera? Who can say? In any case, it was appropriate