Othello

[19] These also include Shakespeare's own earlier plays Much Ado About Nothing, in which a similar plot was used in a comedy,[20] The Merchant of Venice with its high-born, Moorish, Prince of Morocco,[21] and Titus Andronicus, in which a Moor, Aaron, was a prominent villain, and as such was a forerunner of both Othello and Iago.

[27][28][29] Himself a Moor from Barbary, Leo said of his own people "they are so credulous they will beleeue matters impossible, which are told them" and "no nation in the world is so subject vnto iealousie; for they will rather [lose] their liues than put vp any disgrace in the behalfe of their women"—both traits seen in Shakespeare's Othello.

[29] From Philemon Holland's translation of Pliny's Natural History Shakespeare took the references to the Pontic Sea,[31] to Arabian trees with their medicinable gum,[32] and to the "Anthropophagi and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders",[33][34] elements which also featured in the fantastic The Travels of Sir John Mandeville.

[64][65]Or, as the Oxford editor Professor Michael Neill summarises it: Anxieties about the treatment of race in Othello are a recurrent feature of both its critical and performance histories: where they once focused on the supposed scandal of miscegenation, they are nowadays more likely to address the play's complicity in racial stereotyping.

[68] And actor Paul Robeson considered Othello's colour as essentially secondary, as a way of emphasizing his cultural difference and consequent vulnerability in a society he does not fully understand.

[69] In the world of the play itself, Jyotsna Singh argues that Brabantio's—and others'—objection to Othello, a decorated and respected general, as a suitable husband for Desdemona, a senator's daughter, only makes sense in racist terms: reinforced by the bestial imagery used by Iago in delivering the news.

In the nineteenth century, such well-known writers as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb questioned whether the play could even be called a "true tragedy" when it dramatized the inviolable taboo of a white woman in a relationship with a black man.

[90] Martin Orkin's 1987 essay Othello and the "Plain Face" of Racism acknowledges the racist sentiments in the play; but vindicates Shakespeare who confines these views to discredited characters such as Iago, Roderigo and Brabantio.

[111] In contrast, Emilia ("the only real grown-up in the play", in the words of stage director Michael Attenborough[112]) revolts against misogyny, defying her husband Iago's demands three times in the final scene.

[133] In a 1997 production at the Royal National Theatre, the handkerchief fell to the ground immediately before the interval and remained onstage throughout it, as if—as the reviewer Richard Butler put it—"challenging one of us to pick it up and prevent a tragedy.

[188] A review of the latter by John Bernard expressed how Barry's Othello "looked a few seconds in Desdemona's face, as if to read her feelings and disprove his suspicions; then, turning away, as the adverse conviction gathered in his heart, he spoke falteringly, and gushed into tears.

[192] And Hewlett's protégé Ira Aldridge (billed as "The African Roscius") played many Shakespearean roles across Europe for forty years, including Othello at the Royalty Theatre, London, in 1825.

One of the most extreme is related by French novelist Stendhal who reports that at the Baltimore Theatre in 1822 a soldier interrupted the performance just before Desdemona's murder, shouting "It will never be said that in my presence a confounded Negro has killed a white woman!"

Previously, Desdemonas had (in her words) "always appeared to me to acquiesce with wonderful equanimity in their assassination" but Kemble, a passionate feminist and abolitionist, decided "I shall make a desperate fight for it, for I feel horribly at the idea of being murdered in my bed.

[214] Margaret Webster's 1943 Broadway production was considered a theatrical landmark, with Robeson (in the words of Howard Barnes) "making the Moor the great and terrible figure of tragedy which he has so rarely been on the stage.

"[217] In 1947, Kenneth Tynan saw Frederick Valk and Donald Wolfit play Othello and Iago respectively, and described the experience as equivalent to witnessing the Chicago Fire, the Quetta Earthquake or the Hiroshima Bomb.

The play was extremely popular in Ethiopia, running for three years in the mid-1980s at the City Hall Theatre, Addis Ababa, in Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin's translation – performed in a static and declamatory style.

Richard McCabe followed Simon Russell Beale in portraying misogynistic, embittered NCOs, older than their respective Othellos:[229] Singaporean director Ong Keng Sen produced an intercultural version of the play in 2000: his Desdemona featured actors, musicians, designers and artists from India, Korea, Myanmar, Indonesia and Singapore, performing in a range of different traditional Asian styles.

When Adrian Lester played the role in Nicholas Hytner's 2013 National Theatre production, a retired army veteran was employed to teach the cast about ranks, comportment and off-duty behaviours.

[241] Carnival, Men Are Not Gods and A Double Life all feature the plot of an actor playing the title role in Shakespeare's Othello developing murderous jealousy for their Desdemonas.

[251][252] The film was critically panned on its 1955 release (headlines included "Mr Welles Murders Shakespeare in the Dark" and "The Boor of Venice") but was acclaimed as a classic upon its re-release in a restored version in 1992.

[255] Laurence Olivier said that the role of Othello demanded "enormously big"[256] acting, and he incorporated what The Spectator described as his "outsize, elaborate, overwhelming"[257] performance into the film of his National Theatre production.

The film was a financial success, and earned Oscar nominations for each of Olivier as Othello, Maggie Smith as Desdemona, Frank Finlay as Iago and Joyce Redman as Emilia.

[275] And the first decade of the 21st-Century saw two non-English language film adaptations: Alexander Abela's French Souli set the story in a modern-day Madagascan fishing village, and Vishal Bhardwaj's Hindi Omkara amidst political violence in modern Uttar Pradesh.

[278] Adaptations of—or borrowings from—Shakespeare's Othello began shortly after it first appeared, including Middleton & Rowley's 1622 The Changeling, John Ford's 1632 Love's Sacrifice, Thomas Porter's 1662 The Villain and Henry Nevil Payne's 1673 The Fatal Jealousy.

[279] And across continental Europe through most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the play was better known than Shakespeare's in Jean-François Ducis' adaptation and its subsequent translations, in which a heroine renamed Hédelmone is stabbed to death by Othello.

[282] After the Restoration, London Theatres other than the patent companies got around the illegality of performing Shakespeare by allusion and parody, such as Charles Westmacott's Othello The Moor of Fleet Street at the Adelphi in 1833.

[311] But the most notable version, considered a masterpiece with a power equivalent to that of the play, is Verdi's 1887 Otello,[312] for which Arrigo Boito's libretto marked a return to faithfulness to the original plot, including the reappearance of the pillow as the murder weapon, rather than Ducis' dagger.

Its opening track (itself titled Such Sweet Thunder, a quotation from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream)[314] came to stand for Othello telling his tales of travel and adventure to Desdemona, as reported in the play's first act.

[317] Bob Dylan's song Po' Boy features lyrics in which Desdemona turns the tables on Othello, borrowing the idea of using poisoned wine from the final act of Hamlet.