Every so often, perhaps once in a generation, Othello has laid hold of people, primitively, in a way that no other Shakespearean tragedy could hope to do. Women have shrieked and fainted, old men have laid their heads down on their arms and sobbed, young men have lost their sleep and gone about for days in a trance.

– Julie Hankey, 1987

Looking back on Othello from a modern perspective, it can certainly be considered among Shakespeare's most innovative plays. The plot is tight—like a mystery thriller. The emotions are heart-stopping in their intensity. And the motivation behind all the characters' actions, especially that of the title character, are rooted in a tangled web of causation. Throughout history, productions of Othello have changed to reflect not only actors' and directors' insights into the play, but also the pervading social thought of the time. Few other plays have caused as much furor over the actors playing key roles or as much emotional discomfort over the subject at hand. And few other plays—by Shakespeare or any other playwright—have commanded the stage and the imagination of its audiences so persistently over nearly 400 years.

Richard Burbage

Othello, when first performed at the Globe Theatre, followed the great introspective tragedy of Hamlet. Richard Burbage, one of Shakespeare's leading actors, played the title role. Continuing the trend he had begun with his interpretation of Hamlet, Burbage made his Othello more personal, his acting filled with deep emotion. The play obviously appealed to audiences and actors alike, since it continued to be performed after Burbage's death until the Puritans closed the playhouses in 1642.

In 1660, with monarchy restored in England, King Charles II reopened London’s theaters. Attempting to maintain some control, however, he limited the number of new theater companies by creating only two that were "licensed": the King's Men (the vestiges of Shakespeare's own company) and the Duke's Men, owned by William Davenant, Shakespeare's godson. The two companies divided the rights to Shakespeare's plays. As perhaps some indication of the plays' varying degrees of popularity, the King's Men settled for the rights to Othello, Julius Caesar and the three Falstaff plays; the rest were the inheritance of the Duke's Men. Productions of Othello during the Restoration are thought to have resembled those of Shakespeare's time, since many of the actors had once performed as boys with Shakespeare's company prior to the closing of the theaters in 1642.

A special edict from King Charles II allowed women to appear on the English stage for the first time, causing a furor among many of the all-male acting companies, not to mention the more conservative sectors of the population. It was the role of Desdemona that was first played by a professional actress in England. Throughout the Restoration until the late 1700s, Othello was played majestically, usually dressed in a general's uniform, complete with the white-powdered wig that was the fashion of the time. The character of Iago changed during this period as well. Based upon our knowledge of the actors who played the role, it is thought that Iago was originally portrayed with comedic elements to his character. Over time, the villainous aspects of Othello's ensign took prominence.

By the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Othello became a battle flag for the Romantic movement—not "romantic" as we might think of it today, however, for the play fell victim to severe cuts that eliminated all its "indecencies." Rather, the role of Othello allowed the actors to suffer the intensity of a full range of emotions before their audience. Edmund Kean, who played the role in the early 1800s, is considered to have given the greatest English interpretation of his century. Like Burbage before him, Kean showed an inwardness, a preoccupation in Othello. He broke with earlier tradition by using brown, not black, make-up to become the Moor. And he displayed incredible concentration and intensity on stage, making it all the more dramatic when his emotions burst out in rage.

Many theaters on the European continent could not accept Othello, and in fact it was banished entirely from the French stage throughout the 1700s. Shakespeare had the reputation of writing plays that were "abominable, but real." Comic elements in this obviously tragic tale did not adhere to current theories of drama. The so-called "unities" ruled, and tragedy and comedy were never to co-exist in the same text. Cassio's drunken brawl was omitted entirely because drunkenness, viewed as the sole property of comedy, had no place in high tragedy. However, these "abominable" plays that showed too many realities of life were sometimes performed and often had more dramatic results in the audience than on stage. At a performance in Paris in 1822 the murder scene caused such uproar among theatergoers that the curtain had to be brought down. The Frenchman named Ducis who "translated" Othello for the French stage in 1792 (the first year of the Republic) was forced to supply a "happy" ending; in his version, Brabantio rushed on stage and stopped Othello before he could kill Desdemona. Both endings were subsequently published in France.

Ira Aldridge (1821-67), the American grandson of a Senegalese chieftain, was prevented from acting in the United States. That did not stop him from traveling to Europe and playing Othello, among many other roles, in the greatest theaters on the Continent. By the time he toured Europe, Continental audiences once again embraced the full range of emotions in the play. Aldridge was a proponent of naturalistic acting, and was able to bring his audiences to the same emotional peaks as he experienced on stage. As one critic wrote, "After this Othello, it would be an anticlimax to have seen an ordinary Othello again. What abandonment, passion, beauty, greatness, sense ... A Negro from Africa's western coast has come to show me the real Othello" (quoted in Hankey 1987). For all his acclaim in capitals across Europe and Russia, Aldridge was never permitted to perform the role in the United States and died while on tour in Poland.

In England, this grand festival of emotions on stage became less popular. Othello's cruelty and savagery were not easily accepted. The Victorian middle class did not want to see a cruel and sensual Othello, so all allusions to sex were cut from the text. His foreignness was downplayed. The Victorian love for heroes made Othello into a man who had been tempered by the Venetian society; a man with excellent parlor manners. His love for Desdemona was almost completely devoid of any sexual feeling—partly due to restrained Victorianism and partly due to the Victorians' aversion to seeing a black man with a white woman. The nineteenth century screened the murder from its audiences by closing the curtains around Desdemona's bed. Cutting the play to end with Othello's suicide speech, the Victorians wanted to restore tragic propriety to the play's disturbing conclusion.

Across the Atlantic a very different Othello was being performed. In America, a rougher, more violent portrayal was given by Edwin Booth (the famous actor-brother of John Wilkes Booth). Traditionally, Desdemona's death had been played in the center of the stage, with Othello’s back to the audience, masking much of the brutality of the scene. In Booth's production, the bed was moved downstage to the front and side. The audience could focus on Othello's face and see Desdemona's struggles. Through much of the nineteenth century, the play was set in contemporary middle-class interiors. It was only later in the 1800s that the tradition of historical costuming became prevalent.

Uta Hagen and Paul Robeson

Another American, Paul Robeson, brought another dimension to the role of Othello in the early twentieth century. Though a respected actor and singer, Robeson was forbidden as a black man to appear on stage as Othello in the United States. And so, like Aldridge a century before, Robeson went to England. In 1930 London, he played Othello opposite Peggy Ashcroft to much critical acclaim. Not until 1942, after an extensive public relations campaign and a hard search for a white actress who would agree to play Desdemona opposite his Othello, was Robeson able to perform the title role in the United States. Even then the production only toured to theaters above the Mason-Dixon Line, since Robeson refused to play to segregated theaters. Paul Robeson brought a quiet, subdued Othello to the stage, a man who "carried the chains of his race with him as weight" (Hankey 1987).

The twentieth century has seen some of its greatest actors in the role of Othello. Sir Laurence Olivier portrayed him as a man who was the instrument of his own downfall. Orson Welles nearly bankrupted himself producing a film version of the play. The play last appeared on Broadway in 1982, with James Earl Jones commanding the stage with his characteristic dignity and nobility to Christopher Plummer’s Iago and Diane Wiest’s Desdemona.

In 1997, The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C. produced what its Othello, Patrick Stewart, called a “photo negative” production in which the Moor was white and his Venice black. The production’s director, Jude Kelly, said about this non-traditional choice: "I don't think we're trying to make any more major a point than Shakespeare himself was trying to make, we're just making it differently. What's fascinating for me is that you have 22 African American actors onstage who know what racism is about, and one white British actor who may know the effects of racism but has never experienced it the way they have. So the images of racial hostility flip back and forth."

In 1999, Othello returned to the stage of the Royal Shakespeare Company, featuring Ron Fearon as a relatively young title character. The lines that reference Othello’s age were largely cut from this otherwise traditional production. 2007 saw the first Othello at the reconstructed Globe Theatre in London. The production, which featured Eamonn Walker and Zoe Tapper as Othello and Desdemona, garnered acclaim from audiences and critics alike.

The Moor of Venice and his fleet return to Chicago Shakespeare Theater this season after a 13-year absence. In 1995, Paul Butler played the title character under Barbara Gaines’ direction in a production that focused on “the pervasive and incessant clash of two cultures; the story of a man who aspires to belong to a world that is not his own, and who becomes victim to its racism, and to his own deep and monstrous terrors.” (Stagebill, 1995) Performing on stage an original haunting and percussive score composed by Lloyd King were three musicians. In traditional African dress, they represented the cultural memory and ties for Othello with his native land. Now in 2008, acclaimed director—and Artistic Director of Canada’s Stratford Festival—Marti Maraden tackles this great play on CST’s stage, with the formidable Derrick Lee Weeden taking on the title role.

– Contributed by the CST Education Department