Reading Race in Othello

In 1989, Christchurch saw a production of Othello in the State Trinity Theatre, corner Worcester and Manchester, with the Pacific actor Nathaniel Lees in the title role. Last weekend, we again saw Lees in Matrix Reloaded.

At almost exactly the same time, audiences at Johannesburg’s Market Theatre were seeing another great film star, John Kani (above), in the same role, the first time an African actor had been cast in the title role opposite a white Desdemona before a multiracial audience in Johannesburg. The reason? In 1949 South Africa had introduced the Immorality Act, which banned mixed marriages and had itself been the subject of a play by Athol Fugard, Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act, which premiered in London in 1974 and in Christchurch soon after. The Act had been repealed in 1985, but the issue remained highly sensitive. Can it be argued that Othello carried the same meaning in Christchurch and in Johannesburg?

Two Ways of Looking at Shakespeare.

The English programme at Canterbury offers courses on Shakespeare at all levels, with a variety of approaches. You can check them out at:

ENGL 107: Shakespeare
ENGL 204: Drama from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century
ENGL 242: Shakespeare on Film
ENGL 336: Early Modern Tragedy

Although we think of him as a classic, Shakespeare only entered the education curriculum during the Nineteenth Century, when critics tended to think of Othello, Desdemona, Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear and so on, as true portraits of human nature, valid for all time and for all places. This way of looking at Shakespeare pictures him as the direct descendant of the great Greek tragedians of two millennia earlier, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, even though Shakespeare scarcely knew these writers even as names. It also leads critics to analyse Shakespeare in terms of Greek belief systems, looking for hubris (arrogance in the face of the gods), hamartia (mistake, error of judgement), peripeteia (reversal of circumstances or intentions), and anagnorisis (moment of self-discovery), even though it’s clear that the Elizabethan playwrights were heavily grounded in Renaissance and Reformation Christianity.

We can relate this attitude to the belief in the autonomous work of art, that great artworks set standards of excellence that work in all places at all times. If Othello works that way, it should have the same effect on all audiences at all times in all places, its value is intrinsic (internal) rather than extrinsic (subject to the market or social attitudes).

The second way, which became more popular in the late Twentieth Century, sees Shakespeare’s characters as put together out of second-hand ideas, derived from other writers, sometimes from other cultures. The theory behind this is that Shakespeare was writing from within the culture of his time, and couldn’t possibly get beyond that to something universal any more than we can hope to. Even Gary Taylor, one of the editors of the Oxford Shakespeare, recently argued that Shakespeare has almost had his day, and is about to be overtaken as the premier English-language playwright (he actually suggests the Nigerian Nobel prizewinner, Wole Soyinka).

We can call this a cultural relativist attitude, that the meaning and value of a text or work of art is dependent on the cultural context in which it is situated. According to this way of thinking Shakespeare comes from a society totally foreign to us: where people believed in the divine right of kings to rule, that women were biologically, socially and naturally inferior to men, and that some races were superior to others. In performance, Shakespeare’s plays had to face competition from alternative mode of entertainment such as bear baiting and public executions.

Othello or Sinbad? Edmund Kean offers an exotic hybrid at Drury Lane in 1814.

The problem with the first reading, seeing Othello as a universal study of nobility and greatness, is that it assumes that belief systems are similarly universal. Shakespeare’s primary source, Cinthio Giraldi, was a Spanish tragedian—but he did not write the story as a tragedy. Why? Until Paul Robeson played Othello in London in 1930, the part was almost always done by white actors blacked up. Why? A London critic in 1930 commented on the number of ‘coloured’ people in the stalls, and counted the number of times Othello and Desdemona kissed. Why?

Even in Shakespeare’s London people from North Africa were numerous; he was quite directly dealing with issues of race in Elizabethan England where, not unlike the England of today, there was a growing black presence of as well as anxiety about these immigrants. (In 1598, for instance, Queen Elizabeth issued a warrant seeking to deport 89 black people). But why are there only four Moorish characters in all of Shakespeare’s works?

Shakespeare’s dramaturgic strategy

We don’t see Othello himself until the second scene. Consequently, the audience’s first impressions of him are derived from reports rather than behaviour. This may seem rather odd. Drama, after all, is a Greek word meaning ‘doing things’, actions, behaviour. We can say that’s the opposite of narrative, which means talking about things, reporting. Yet, when we think about it, virtually any play is going to be a combination of both: we are going to see things done on stage and we are going to hear about things that happen offstage. Greek tragedy was generally constructed around what was called a ‘messenger speech’, a piece of narrative rather than drama. A question arises: what happens if the two don’t agree, if the drama says one thing and the narrative says another, which do we believe?

In the first scene Iago and Roderigo exchange racist insults, and later pass them on to Brabantio, Desdemona’s father. Iago constantly refers to Othello not by name, but as “the Moor” -- constantly reducing him to a racial stereotype: a moment later he calls him “the thicklips”, reducing that racial stereotype even further to a single anatomical feature. Throughout this scene their focus is on blackness (or non-Europeanness) and animality, with a considerable amount of racist sexual innuendo. But is Shakespeare endorsing this racism? We must assume his audience was not troubled by it.

Many playwrights delay the first entrance of their main character. This gives the stars a grand entrance, as in Lear or Hamlet. It also generates an element of suspense or curiosity as to what the characters are really like, as perhaps in Macbeth. What other reasons might a playwright have for such a practice?

To what extent did Shakespeare simply inherit racist and sexist prejudices?

The creation of the character Othello is consistent with the accelerated flow of expanded information exchange that came about through exploratory trade route evolution and world discovery in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. For more detail, see http://www.wesleyan.edu/music/braxton/papers/shakespeare-F.html This has led to the view expressed on that webpage that “the play can also be viewed as the 'O.J. Simpson' parameter of its day”, a contribution to a continuing debate on the assimilation and civilisation of colonised peoples. Is Othello illustrating a race theory of being assimilated into white metropolitan behaviour, or is it the opposite, an illustration of regression?

Is it true that Shakespeare never judges; he just exhibits his specimens of humanity and leaves the audience to judge?

In Shakespeare’s London theatre competed with other entertainment forms which included animal baiting, public executions, and displays of curiosities brought back by explorers and travellers. Included in these were elements of human display; although Moors were common in London, the discovery of the ‘new world’ had included new forms of animals, plants, and forms of humanity, many of which were regarded as the equivalent of what we would now call the ‘missing link’. In Othello, we see a striking race and gender imbalance, and the single black man is regarded as a kind of human exhibit. Is the audience left to make up its own mind about the Moor, or it it subtly organised? In fact, human display already had a long history before Shakespeare. The Cuban performance artist Coco Fusco has listed some instances of this:

Fusco is a highly politicised performance artist whose work often draws attention to the exploitation of indigenous peoples. You can read about it, as well as about her books, at http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/UndiscAmerind.html and http://www.cityofwomen-a.si/2001/coco_fusco.html. Alternatively, you can enrol in ENGL307: Postcolonial Writing, where her work is studied.

But if Coco Fusco were to look at Othello, what would she see? An everyday citizen of London in 1604? Or an exotic specimen of humanity being displayed as an animal curiosity? Isn’t that how Iago and Roderigo view him?

Can the observations we have made about race in Othello also be applied to gender, in the case of Desdemona?

Brabantio describes her:

A maiden never bold,
So still and quiet that her motion
Blush’d at her self; and she, in spite of nature,
Of years, of country, credit, everything,
To fall in love with what she fear’d to look on?
It is a judgement maim’d and most imperfect,
That will confess perfection so would err
Against all rules of nature, and must be driven
To find out practices of cunning hell
Why this should be. I therefore vouch again,
That with some mixtures powerful o’er the blood,
Or with some dram conjur’d to this effect,
He wrought upon her.
(1.3.94--106)

Brabantio says here that for Desdemona, a “fair” young Venetian woman, to fall in love with a Moor is a perversion of nature; the only explanation he can think of is that Othello has used some diabolical magic, some hellish love potion, to enchant her.

But although the stereotypes are different, this is still a very idealised view of his daughter, who is placed on a different kind of pedestal from Othello, but a pedestal nonetheless. Using a term that would become common in film theory in the 1970s, we can say that this representation of Desdemona is the work of the ‘male gaze’, which objectifies and reduces her to an idealised decorative object. Is there any part of the play in which she seems to be more than this, to have a mind of her own?

If Shakespeare’s practice involves manipulating his audience’s prejudices, does that mean he himself was writing without prejudices?

Finally, let’s consider Othello’s delayed entrance. Does he turn out to be a rampant Godzilla, the ravenous animal hybrid mutation that Iago has portrayed? Quite the opposite: he is urbane, rational, and dignified, an ideal pick for New Zealand’s next Race Relations Conciliator. Shakespeare has used Iago to mobilise all the racist prejudices in his groundling audience, and then wrong-foots them by eventually delivering an Othello who is spectacularly different from the expected stereotype. Why?

Any audience has its prejudices, its cultural value systems. Shakespeare’s dramaturgic strategy here is simply to play to those attitudes, to use Iago to rouse the audience’s latent racism and then to expose it as a sordid prejudice. In this way, we experience audience indictment or compromise, the audience finds it is complicit in Iago’s world view. Brecht, the modern German playwright and theorist, said that drama should make audiences aware of themselves as ‘guilty persons sitting at a play’. Can we say that the most forceful effect of Shakespeare’s use of the delayed entrance here is that it forces the audience to take a stand, to commit itself, to accept Iago’s perspective of reject it?

But does this feeling of complicity continue for the whole play? Try to work out for yourself what happens to it in the last act.

--Howard McNaughton (hlink)
with help from Phil Armstrong (hlink)
and the webpages cited.