The Masks of Othello: The Search for the Identity of Othello, Iago, and Desdemona by Three Centuries of Actors and Critics

By Marvin Rosenberg

In what is now considered a classic study, noted Shakespearean Marvin Rosenberg sets out to discover how the complex, troubled characters of the play have been interpreted by actors and critics from Shakespeare's time to the present. Rosenberg’s study of the successive stage editings of Othello—some of them to reduce playing time, others demanded by the taste and moral sense of each new age—provides a running commentary of social and cultural history, and shows how those cuttings affected, as well as revealed, the actors’ concepts of the characters. “Othello” is the most erotic, the most sensual in language and imagery of the tragedies, and its heavily sexual atmosphere, so suitable to the seventeenth century, offended later cultures. The eighteenth century tried to “refine” it, and the nineteenth, particularly the age of Victoria, to refine it even further, but the essential form of the play survived.—From the Dust Jacket.

Contents: Part. 1. The beginning. The actor's share—Othello in the Restoration—pt. 2. The eighteenth century—The eighteenth century actors—pt. 3. The nineteenth century. Kean—Mcready, Fechter, Irving—Booth—Forrest—Salvini—The Victorian Iago—The Victorian Desdemona—pt. 4. The twentieth century. The modern Othello—The modern Iago—pt. 5. Othello and the critics. In defense of Iago—In defense of Othello—In defense of Desdemona—In defense of the play: I—In defense of the play : II—Appendix : A kind word for Bowdler.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Release date: May 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839744334

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THE MASKS OF OTHELLO

The Search for the Identity of Othello, Iago, and Desdemona by

Three Centuries of Actors and Critics

BY

MARVIN ROSENBERG

Table of Contents

Contents

Table of Contents 5

DEDICATION 6

Preface 7

PART I — The Beginning 9

1 — Am I the motive of these tears, my lord? — The Actor’s Share 13

2 — Rude am I in my speech — Othello in the Restoration 22

PART II — The Eighteenth Century 32

3 — My parts, my title, and my perfect soul... — The Eighteenth-Century Actors 35

PART III — The Nineteenth Century 51

4— My blood begins my safer guides to rule... — Kean 55

5 — One not easily jealous... — Macready, Fechter, Irving 61

6 — But being mov’d, perplex’d in the extreme... — Booth 69

7 — My wife! My wife! What wife? I have no wife! — Forrest 76

8 — I’ll tear her all to pieces... — Salvini 85

9 — What’s he then that says I play the villain? — The Victorian Iago 99

10 — Oh, thou weed, who art so lovely fair — The Victorian Desdemona 111

PART IV — The Twentieth Century 115

11 — Can he be angry? — The Modern Othello 117

12 — Knavery’s plain face is never seen... — The Modern Iago 124

PART V — Othello and the Critics 128

13 — Nothing can or shall content my soul... — In Defense of Iago 131

14 — Is this the noble Moor? — In Defense of Othello 146

15 — She will sing the savageness out of a bear... — In Defense of Desdemona 161

16 — O, the pity of it! — In Defense of the Play: I 170

Appendix — Reputation oft lost without deserving — A Kind Word for Bowdler 182

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 191

DEDICATION

For Walter and Dorothy and all the actors and critics

Preface

For some three centuries and a half actors and critics have been trying, in their different ways, to interpret the complex and profound characters of Othello. The actor has searched for characterizations that could be expressed through his physical imagery{1} on a stage, while the critic has tended to explain the poet’s conceptions in terms of their verbal implications. Often the character images proposed by actor and critic have been curiously—even belligerently—different. I hope here to reconcile their differences, and bring together the best interpretations of both.

From the evidence of the play’s stage history I try to describe—as well as words can do it—the work of art in its living form. I search particularly for the look and sound of Othello, Iago, and Desdemona; and for the inner shapes, the character essences, that the look and sound express. It will be a checkered search, for—to take Othello’s case—few players have had the genius completely to fill out the Moor’s mighty image: the rare actors who have succeeded were rare men, their lives often enriched and embittered by pain and sorrow, even by personal crises not unlike Othello’s own. It was not easy to be Othello. Or Desdemona. Or Iago.

Since a staged play is a public event, performed before a willing audience, the actors’ characterizations were partly products of their times, and to understand their differences we must know something of how a changing society influenced them, as it responded to them. The influences were many, and powerful: mainly because Othello is the most erotic, the most sensual of the great tragedies, and the time came when Anglo-Saxon culture, grown strenuously refined, tried to drive from the text its offensive words and sexual atmosphere, and even threatened the form of the play.

When I have surveyed the stage images of Othello, Iago, and Desdemona, I will turn to the images proposed by the critics. The critics, too, have been creatures of their times, in acquiescence or revolt, they too have differed sharply, and their task has been equally difficult: Othello’s characters make tremendous demands on the emotion and intellect of any who would interpret them, whether in imagination or action. But the rewards are great too, as we shall see.

To all the actors and critics—and reviewers—of Othello this book owes much. But there are some particular debts: to that fine scholar who first introduced me to the tragedy, and who has followed the course of this work, Walter Morris Hart; to the distinguished modern actors who shared with me their artistic insights: Earle Hyman, Sir Laurence Olivier, Anthony Quayle, Paul Robeson, Abraham Sofaer, Wilfrid Walter, and Sir Donald Wolfit; to other actors I have seen in the play, and to those who played in my production of it; to colleagues who read in the manuscript and offered counsel: Arthur Colby Sprague, Moody Prior, Louis Mackay, Charles Shattuck, William Van Lennep, Philip Highfill, John Gassner, and Alois Nagler; and to many scholars alluded to separately in the notes.

I have been generously helped by many libraries, particularly the University of California Library, the New York Public Library, the British Museum, the Birmingham Public Library, the Folger Library, the Harvard College Library Theatre Collection, and the Henry E. Huntington Library—and by the company of Shakespeareans who gather in these places. For financial assistance I am grateful to the University of California Faculty Research Committee, the American Philosophical Society, and the Henry E. Huntington Memorial Library. The help of my wife has been priceless.

I am grateful, too, for permission to print material from my essays in Shakespeare Quarterly, Theatre Arts Monthly, Studies in Philology, Theatre Notebook, Philological Quarterly, PMLA, and English Studies.

Berkeley, California

Marvin Rosenberg

PART I — The Beginning

The Othello character images that actors and critics pursue were created in a curious cultural and theatrical climate. The tragedy was presented, as far as we know for the first time,{2} in 1604, for a London theater invaded by skepticism and sensuality. The time was ripe for the play, with its pervasive sexual atmosphere and byplay, its erotic and despairing language, its bold, anguished images of man and woman contending in love and jealousy. Not by accident was it a leading tragedy—perhaps the leading tragedy{3}—of the early 1600’s.

This was a time for drama of obscene, unendurable realities...revolting images of sexual appetites and activities,{4} for dramas with a fillip of the excessive, the devious, the perverse.{5} This mood had not come suddenly on Elizabethan literature. There had always been, on the one hand, angry or leering satires and bawdy verse and, on the other, the melancholy consolations that told over life’s mishaps and miseries.{6} If the darker mood was less conspicuous during the blooming of the sweet, Platonic sonnet cycles, it flourished in the warm, fleshy Оvidian poems and the searching satires of the late sixteenth century. About 1600 an impulse to question established values{7} erupted in the paper war on society so dogged and biting, so erotic sometimes in its flaying of eroticism, that Archbishop Whitgift burned and banned its essays and drove the energy behind it into other channels—among them the drama. A brutal examination of man’s deepest commitments—personal, marital, sexual—now became an important theatrical fashion. Now Shakespeare’s sexual nausea—or adultery nausea{8}—plays would be written.

There were, as always, other fashions. Happy plays were still produced, particularly in the public playhouses. It was mainly for the sophisticated, anti-Puritan society oriented to the court, as it slipped from Elizabeth’s tired hands into James’s inept and greedy ones,{9} that England’s playwrights began to write their bitter drama, full of tainted humanity and dressed in striking metaphysical and sensual imagery: so in the private coterie theaters the repertory would be much more jaded, more perverse.{10} Yet, since a company like Shakespeare’s had often to provide entertainment that could please the court as well as the playgoing public—which was itself growing more sophisticated—the Globe’s list too would include, besides its sunnier plays, sharp satire, cynical treatment of sexuality, and dark tragedy.

Othello belongs to this time—and we shall see how readily Shakespeare used contemporary materials in the play—but it is distinguished from the run of Jacobean angry drama, as it would be distinguished throughout its theater history, by its enormous compassion. The evil in humanity, the doubts, the despair, and the violence are strongly projected in the chief character images; yet, as they are treated, it is almost as if Shakespeare had deliberately adapted this brutal murder tale to dare himself to find sympathy in the farthest extreme of human error.{11} By contrast, Cinthio’s original is a forbidding sermon. His unnamed Moor officer marries a beautiful Venetian woman, Disdemona, against the wishes of her parents. The Moor’s Ensign loves the lady but, unable to win her affection, persuades the Moor that she and a Captain are having an affair. The Moor and the Ensign lure Disdemona from her bed, beat her to death with a stockingful of sand, and shrewdly make the violence look like an accident. They are not at first suspected; later the conscience-stricken Moor expels the Ensign from his company, and the Ensign informs on the Moor. The Moor, under torture, will not confess and is sent to banishment, where Disdemona’s relatives kill him; the Ensign goes on to more villainy, is tried, tortured, and dies a miserable death. The story’s moral is explicit: the Moor and Disdemona should never have married. Shakespeare, in transmuting this vendetta-morality into a tragedy of compassion, spared none of its horror and guilt. The play probes far more deeply into the fearful I and malign motives of men; its three chief characters do grave—the gravest—wrong; and yet, plunged as they are into an atmosphere of sensuality, betrayal, and terror, to murder, lie, and scheme, they have yet persistently commanded the involvement and pity of their audiences. Herein would lie a crucial question for critics and actors seeking the true images of these characters: how can—and often, for the critics, why should—three such wrongdoers as Othello, Desdemona, and Iago win, so surely, so much care and compassion?

1 — Am I the motive of these tears, my lord? — The Actor’s Share

From the beginning, men wept at Othello. A rare review from 1610 tells how, when Shakespeare’s company went down to Oxford to play the tragedy, the actors drew tears not only by their speech, but also by their action. Indeed Desdemona, though always excellent, moved us especially in her death when, as she lay on her bed, her face itself implored the pity of the audience.{12}

So Shakespeare’s own actors achieved an effect that would be many, many times repeated: they moved an audience beyond attention and involvement to compassion, and drew tears. How did the playwright do it? What was his artistic design? Centuries of critics and actors have tried to answer; and in their answers the outlines of the essential character problems may be seen.

First, the problem of Othello. Basically, it is this: how can he be both noble and a murderer? What kind of sympathy, what empathy, can he evoke? His act of killing is somewhat less calculating, less brutal, than that of Cinthio’s Moor; but there is still calculation and brutality in it, and the playwright’s vision in him of man’s murderous passion is far more terrifying than anything in the original. Is the Moor who commits his crime, on Iago’s I urging, as noble as he—and everyone else—says he is? Or, to consult some critics, is he perhaps an insecure, oversexed soldier, experienced in adultery—with Emilia, among others—who is more than ready, even eager, to believe wrong of his wife? Is he a self-deceived impostor, fooling himself as well as all the others? What about his romantic tales: the antres vast, the cannibals, and the men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders? Or the magical handkerchief—protected by a witch’s curse—woven by a Sybil from hallowed silk dyed in an ancient liquor made of maiden’s hearts? Is this all lying and boasting? When he stops the brawling night clash with Brabantio, when he puts down the riot in Cyprus, does he command, or bluster? Then Iago deceives him—too easily? Is he a fool? Is he a neurotic eager to be deceived? Once deceived, and his surface disintegrates, what is to be made of the violence that erupts from the cellar of his being? The turbid sexual fantasies that sweep him into his trance? The stormy assaults on Desdemona, and then the killing? Is this I the inner shape of a barbarian? Of Anyman? What is the meaning of his dark skin?

As many problems are found in Desdemona by actors—and especially by critics. How different she is from Cinthio’s pious Disdemona, who fears that I shall prove a warning to young girls not to marry against the wishes of their parents, and that the Italian ladies may learn from me not to wed a man whom nature and habitude of life estrange from us. Desdemona declares her faith in marriage to the death, and even in a faint reprise beyond it. Yet she too is partly responsible for the catastrophe. She has taken the initiative in marriage, has virtually proposed to Othello; she has deceived her father, has eloped against his wishes with a man of another race and color. She is certainly not proper; and she too is touched with the erotic ambience of the play: when she listens to Iago’s rowdy jokes on the Cyprus quay, when she lets Emilia discuss the virtues of adultery, in her love play with Othello, and in her undressing and bedroom scenes. She meddles in her husband’s business, presses him to reinstate his dismissed officer—presses him at the worst moment, when he most needs understanding. Finally, she lies to him, and destroys their hope of love. Is this quite a heroine? Or, as some critics have suggested, is she perhaps to be scorned for her filial ingratitude, for her lies, for her forwardness, for her spinelessness? Is there something unnatural in her love? Does she deserve what happened to her? Conversely, is she perhaps the very essence of goodness? A symbol of divinity? A Christ figure? Can any of this explain why audiences would weep for her, as they did at Oxford?

Most complex of all for actors and critics is the Iago problem. This villain is much more dangerous than Cinthio’s. He not only betrays the Moor and the Captain (Cassio); he injures everyone in his vicinity. How can so evil a man be plausible? How can he win the confidence of so apparently noble a man as Othello? And more important, what is his motivation? Why should any man hurt others so much? Is he simply a dramatic mechanism? A symbol of the devil? The devil himself? Or is he in fact a good man who has been provoked to revenge by wrongs done him? Was he unfairly denied promotion by Othello? Cuckolded by him? By Cassio? Why is his language so charged with erotic allusions: the lascivious wordplay directed at Brabantio, at Roderigo, even at Desdemona; the insidious, then blatant images of carnality, nakedness, and intercourse with which he overwhelms Othello; and, most of all, the brooding sexual fantasy that pervades his soliloquies? Does he really lust after Desdemona? Is he driven by a repressed homosexual attachment to Othello? Finally, how can a character who does so much wrong involve audiences so deeply in his fate?

The scanty theater record in Shakespeare’s time gives us only part of the answers to these character problems. But we could not hope to know all, even if the Jacobean acting experience were whole before us. Shakespeare, wise in his craft, must have known when he provided the great characters for his actors that even he could not begin to realize their ultimate form until his young man-Desdemona, and Burbage as Othello, and someone—Lowin?—as Iago came on the stage and lived out the language. And these actors could provide only one glimpse; for again the playwright must have known that the human instrument on which he played was a variable one: that even in his own lifetime, someone of different height, weight, size, voice, temper than Burbage might play Othello, and though the core of the character would be the same, it might be manifested in different tones, with new insights into meaning, and still be a true Othello.

Here is a central point—that actors can bring personal interpretations to these characterizations. Critics often look for a I single pattern for the big roles—a one real Othello, or Iago, or Desdemona. In support of this approach, a school of formalists argues that acting in Shakespeare’s theater must have been so conventional that only one fixed visualization of a character was possible—a visualization projected in a formal, non-naturalistic, even operatic or balletic style;{13} the players did not try to be the characters, they only let the lines tell what the character was: Given two actors of equal talent, each would be able to perform the same speech in exactly the same way, apart from differences in voice and personal appearance.{14} To accept this is to believe the actors were not actors at all, as we know them, but puppets—and indeed a formalist once called them exactly that.{15}

If the first Othello, Iago, and Desdemona were such puppets, then every subsequent actor who brought his own intuitions to the roles—and every great one did—was unfaithful to the playwright’s form. Certainly later Othellos differed sharply in style and personality and originality of interpretation. Though they were all masters of technique, they labored through inspiration as well as method to penetrate the humanity of the Moor, to be him while acting him, and they were proud to the point of competitiveness (as critics too are) over the authenticity of their interpretations. Why, then, were the master artists for whom Shakespeare wrote willing to subdue their great talents to stock patterns? And to play Othello, say, in one formal way? Since it is my thesis that an actor of genius can bring illumination to the characters in Othello, we must consider whether Shakespeare intended his play for so sterile an acting instrument as the formalists say.

Their strongest argument builds on a deduction: to play Desdemona—and the other women’s roles—Shakespeare had to use a boy actor, from whom he could not hope to get naturalistic acting; hence all acting must have been impersonal, patterned.{16} This is far from fair to the boy Desdemona who drew tears at Oxford, or to the nameless others who played this and the other great feminine characters of the day. They were not, as they sound, little boys; many were well past boyhood, and in legal documents of the time were sometimes called young men. Some were mature men; two who played women’s parts in 1635 were at least twenty-four, perhaps as old as twenty-eight.{17} From the Restoration come further hints: Colley Cibber tells how Charles II complained of the lateness of a first curtain, only to be fairly told that the queen had not shaved yet.{18} There was probably much jest, but not all jest, in the prologue spoken before the first appearance of a woman as Desdemona:

For (to speak truth) men act, that are between,

Forty and fifty, Wenches of fifteen;

With bone so large, and nerve so incomplyant,

When you call Desdemona, enter Giant.{19}

Many of these adult male actors of women’s parts were artists in their own right. They introduced to the stage some of its most powerful women’s characters. Of the Restoration’s famous Kynaston—described by Pepys as clearly the prettiest woman in the whole house{20}—John Downes wrote: It has been disputable among the judicious, whether any woman that succeeded him so sensibly touch’d the audience as he.{21}

In special theaters in our major cities today, skilled men actors play women’s parts—though the parts are usually so shabby, so cheap, the context so special, that the players seem to be mocking themselves. Their audiences often receive with a nervous embarrassment what was taken for granted by the Jacobeans—except those of Prynne’s Puritan persuasion. Men who wanted to act like women then must have seen the stage as a kind of natural home. I do not mean to suggest that most—or even many—of Shakespeare’s boy actors were homosexual, though there may well have been some truth in Prynne’s furious assaults on the sodomiticall theater. On the stage they were simply part of the play. Note again the report on Othello at Oxford: as [Desdemona] lay in her bed, her face itself implored the pity of the audience. The illusion is complete: the observer does not comment on the actor playing the part—it is Desdemona who is to be pitied. And note this: it was the great Burbage’s own company, but what is remembered is the emotion conveyed by the player of the woman. Do we need to doubt that the actor of Desdemona could communicate the true passion Shakespeare demanded of him without formalizing or symbolizing his actions to disguise age or sex?

Some mocking speeches have been pointed out by formalists to prove that actors were stilted and conventional rather than creatively natural. Thus in Othello Iago mocks a stage cliché: What’s he then that says I play the villain? And thus Buckingham, in Richard III:

Tut, I can counterfeit the deep tragedian,

Speak, and look back, and pry on every side,

Tremble, and start at wagging of a straw,

Intending deep suspicion. Ghastly looks

Are at my service, like enforced smiles...(III, v. 5){22}

What better proof that good acting was anything but such hackneyed stuff! How secure Shakespeare must have been in the creativity of his Iago and Buckingham to make them allude to the stereotypes of second-rate actors! Of course there were second-raters; there are always hacks where there is art. We have our own hacks; George Jean Nathan described one, a well-known actress, in her routine for panic—and note its family resemblance to Buckingham’s histrionics:

Panic: rapid looks to left and right, nervous paddling of thighs, wild brushing of hair up from ears, more rapid looks from right to left, execution of a few steps of the rhumba, and rapid inhalations and exhalations as if uncomfortably anticipating the imminent approach of a glue factory.{23}

Here, as in Shakespeare, the criticism of hack acting clearly implies that natural acting is known and valued. True, in Othello the playwright did occasionally dictate bits of business: Othello gnaws his nether lip in rage. But this does not mean that the business was rigidly patterned. A formalist tells us firmly: Joy was expressed by cutting capers, because in Chapman’s Charlemagne an actor cuts capers to show he is unaffected by bad news.{24} Othello, then, would caper at his meeting with Desdemona at Cyprus? The mind reels at the thought. The Charlemagne business was a bit Chapman thought would suit this character in this action, and sometimes such universal sign language does convey the emotion demanded. Eugene O’Neill has Mildred Douglas in The Hairy Ape biting her lip angrily; Wilde has lips chewed to shreds in The Ideal Husband; so Shakespeare has Othello gnaw his lip—but we need not assume therefore that any of them expected their players to act like puppets.{25}

In Shakespeare’s time the playwright wanted his actors to play a part as if the Personator were the man Personated.{26} What else did Stanislavski want? In Othello the lines and the characterization clearly call for this kind of natural assumption of the humanity of a role. It may well have differed in degree from what we think of as natural, but not in kind. Shakespeare’s time, like ours, attacked rhetorical, inflated, artificial performance, and praised as natural what seemed recognizably close to human behavior, what conveyed, in the close—almost arena-like—quarters of the period’s theaters:{27}

Things never done, with that true life,

That thoughts and wits should stand at strife

Whether the things now shown be true,

Or whether we ourselves now do

The things we but present (Ram Alley, Prologue).{28}

Of course natural acting did not mean then, as it was sometimes to mean to nineteenth-century Othellos, a studied reproduction in all characters of commonplace details of everyday life. The actor creates not a person but an art object that distills the playwright’s vision of humanity in the form of a recognizable dramatic personality. Clearly Shakespeare’s players understood that in their art different character designs were communicated differently: Brabantio’s servants did not behave as the Duke did; the clown, joking, was not like Iago joking. Othello behaved as Roderigo never could. At a more important level, the complex characters varied within themselves as they met different situations. Thus the tremendous challenge Shakespeare presented to the actor who played Desdemona: at first a young girl, braving her father’s anger for love; then an amorous bride; then a wife, humorously tending her husband’s affairs; then a wronged, frightened woman; and at last, a desperate mortal, fighting for her life. Shakespeare depended on the boy who played so many parts in one to convey through the lines and action a continuous personality design in which all the changing moods could cohere.

This essential contribution of the actor is a hard fact for the formalist to accept. Back of the formalist attitude, clearly, is a wishful preconception: that Shakespeare must be fixed, immutable, not subject to the variable of theater interpretation. T. S. Eliot said this in its raw form: I rebel against most performances of Shakespeare’s plays because I want a direct relationship between the work of art and myself, and I want the performance to be such as will not interrupt or alter this relationship any more than it is an alteration or interruption for me to superpose a second inspection of a picture or a building upon the first.{29}

But this is to deny the art form that made the plays what they are. In the theater for which Shakespeare wrote, the great words were only one part of a larger imagery that had to be expressed through a physical personality. The formalists say the players simply let the lines tell what the character was—but what do the lines tell us the character is? What is Othello, for instance? What two scholars agree? Yet these scholars are only seeking what Shakespeare expected the actor to find: a frame of reference in which the character’s experiences may be organized.{30} The critics who were to solve Othello’s character problem by writing him down a braggart, puffed up with self-delusion, managed with an easy stroke of the imagination to frame a context for the hero’s every act. The actor must not only seek such a center for the Moor; he must create an art object in which every gesture, every vocal and facial sign, confirms the wholeness and meaning of the design. This is the only way Othello can be fully known. Clearly, from the critical arguments over his nobility, or lack of it, his true quality cannot be found simply in the lines; it lies in how the lines