Spite and Prejudice: Race and Racism in Shakespeare’s Othello and its Post-Colonial Adaptations

Diplomarbeit

zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades eines Magisters der Philosophie

an der Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

vorgelegt von Michael MÜNZER

am Institut für Anglistik Begutachterin: Ao. Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr.phil. Maria Löschnigg

Graz, 2020

Eidesstattliche Erklärung

Hiermit erkläre ich, dass ich die vorliegende Arbeit selbstständig und ohne fremde Hilfe verfasst, andere als die angegebenen Quellen nicht benutzt und Stellen, die den Quellen wörtlich oder inhaltlich entnommen wurden, als solche kenntlich gemacht habe. Ich habe diese Diplomarbeit weder im In- oder Ausland in irgendeiner Form als Prüfungsarbeit vorgelegt. Die elektronische Version der Arbeit stimmt textlich mit der gedruckten Version überein.

Graz, August 2020, Michael Münzer

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Maria Löschnigg. All throughout my studies, you have been an academic role model. You (re)kindled my love for literature and provided me with the necessary ‘tools’ to pursue this diploma thesis. Since the moment I started writing my thesis, you have had a sympathetic ear for my questions and concerns. I could not have asked for a better advisor. Thank you!

I would also like to thank my family. Mom and Dad, thank you so much for your continued moral, financial, and emotional support – not only in the process of writing my thesis, but all throughout my studies. This accomplishment would have not been possible without you! Opa und Oma, vielen Dank für eure andauernde Unterstützung. Ich hoffe, ihr seid stolz auf mich. Münzer Opa und Münzer Oma, ihr hattet einen großen Anteil daran, dass ich studieren und Lehrer werden wollte. Leider ist es uns nicht vergönnt, den Abschluss meines Studiums gemeinsam zu feiern. Ich weiß, ihr hättet euch sehr für mich gefreut! Marlene, thank you for always believing in me. Your unconditional love and support mean so much to me. I love you!

Last, but certainly not least, I would like to thank Christina, Jakob, and my other ‘partners in crime’. You have made my time at university an absolute treat and I truly appreciate our friendship. I will always cherish those memories.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 The Making of Othello: Historical and Intertextual Influences 6

1.1 Elizabethan ‘Zeitgeist’ in a Venetian Society – The Play in its Historical Context 11

1.2 Foreign Lands, Foreign Peoples: Stereotypes, Preoccupations, and Encounters with the African Continent 13

1.2.1 The Term ‘Moor’ as a Highly Ambiguous Denomination for People of Colour 15

2 Experiencing Othello: Stage Tradition and Receptive History 18

2.1 ‘Black’, ‘White’, ‘Tawny’? ‘Moorishness’ and the Casting of Othello throughout the Play’s Performance History 22

2.2. “What you know, you know”. How Racial Anxiety and Perceptions of ‘the Moor’ Shape(d) the Reception of Othello 28

2.2.1. Othello’s Critical Afterlife from the 19th Century Onwards: (Re)Defining the ‘Moor’ 33

3 What is Said, What is Meant: The Analysis of Racist Discourse in Othello 39

3.1 ‘Let’s agree to disagree’: Interpretations of Race and Racism in Othello 42

3.2. Who is Racist and Why? A Contemporary Reading of Racist Discourse in Othello 45

3.2.1 Black vs. White – ‘Foul’ vs. ‘Fair’: Colour as a Vehicle to Communicate (Racial) Difference 54

4 Post-Colonial Engagements: (Re)Considering Shakespeare’s Othello 56

4.1. Repetition, Resistance, Reinterpretation: A New Othello? 59

4.2. Performative Counter Discourse and Othello on Stage and Screen 65

4.3. Shakespeare and Othello in the ‘Land of the Free’ 72

4.4 “I must write to save my own life” – Exploring the Effects of Race and Sex on African Americans in Harlem Duet 77

4.4.1 ‘The Nightmare and the Dream’ Narrated in Harlem Duet 79

Conclusion 93

Works Cited 96

Introduction

According to Andreas Mahler, Shakespeare’s plays have always tested the limits of early- modern consciousness. Debating societal, gender-specific, and global norms, they rarely provided answers, but rather contraposed ideological attitudes. Towards the end of the 16th century, English drama has become an agency of candour and ambivalence and one could very well make the argument that at least the aspect of ambivalence has carried over to the receptive history of Shakespeare’s plays (cf. Mahler 2018: 318f). Perhaps, it is the equivocation of Shakespeare’s works which has allowed his creative legacy to stand the test of time. Especially his tragedies seem to have frequently ‘struck a nerve’ as they have often responded to contemporary concerns and developments. Mahler explains Shakespeare’s continuing power to impress readers, audiences and critics alike as follows:

Shakespeare ist Theatermann, nicht Ideologe […]. Gerade hierin liegt die Wirkmacht seine Werkes: Nicht in der Überzeugungskraft der Antworten, sondern im steten Angebot erneuter Durchspielbarkeit der Fragen – der Fragen nach Sozialordnung, Geschlechterverhältnis, der Begegnung mit dem Anderen, der Leistung von Fiktion. (2018: 319)

For generations of post-Romantic intellectuals, the “existential prison of Hamlet was the place [which represented] the angst ridden- image of [their] own alienation” (Neill 2006: 1). In the aftermath of World War II, “it was the wasteland of King Lear that provided a mirror for humanity living under the shadow of holocaust and nuclear devastation” (Neill 2006: 1). As the Age of Imperialism seemed to expire and the Empire’s façade, amidst human rights movements and nationalist ambitions, slowly but surely began to crumble, it was Othello which caught the contemporary ‘zeitgeist’. Towards the end of the 20th century and fuelled by progressive and anti-imperial criticism, Neill points out that “critics and directors alike began to trace in the cultural, religious and ethnic animosities of [Othello’s] Mediterranean setting, the genealogy of the racial conflicts that fractured their own societies” (2006: 1). In the words of Edward Pechter, “Othello has become the Shakespearean tragedy of choice for the present generation. [It is] the tragedy that speaks most directly and powerfully to current interests.” (1999: 2)

Unsurprisingly, what Ingrid Hotz-Davis refers to as the “sorgfältig gezeichnete psychologisch ausformulierte Bestandsaufnahme des Entstehens einer Eifersucht und des Zerfalls einer Beziehung” (2018: 470) has inspired the long tradition of reading Othello primarily as a ‘domestic tragedy’. By the 1980s, however, the social and political implications of the play have gained considerable scholarly attention. Ever since, researchers and critics of Othello have

1 been focusing on four main subjects of Shakespeare’s tragedy: global political issues of the late 16th and early 17th century, such as the conflict between Christianity and Islam, the disintegration of feudalism and its norms of behaviour, gender-relations in a patriarchal society, and early-modern-age racism (cf. Schülting 2018: 539). Against the backdrop of the long tradition of (scholarly) engagement with the play, particularly the history of the examination of aspects of race and racism in Othello has been one of surprising briefness. Even though issues of race and racism have resurfaced from time to time throughout Othello’s theatrical and critical afterlife, a noticeable and sustainable treatment of the play’s ‘race theme’ has only come to the fore in contemporary, and especially in post-colonial criticism. Thus, the long-standing absence of scholarly interest in issues of race and racism throughout Othello’s stage, receptive, and scholarly history has to be considered one of the most striking aspects in the engagement with Shakespeare’s Othello – especially in consideration of the play’s highly racist performative and receptive tradition.

Given that Othello undoubtedly responds to issues of race and racism in one way or the other, a possible starting question to an investigation of this aspect in the play could perhaps read as follows: Is Othello racist? This is no question I even dare to attempt answering in this diploma thesis, however, as I personally believe that there is no definite answer to be found. Othello simply does not allow for easy binaries. Virginia Vaughan might have already found the fitting response to an unanswerable question: “I think this play is racist and I think it’s not […]” (1996: 69f). Another important question might be whether it even bears any sense to talk about race in Othello? As Neill points out, “to talk about race in Othello is to fall into anachronism; yet not to talk about it is to ignore something fundamental about a play that has rightly come to be identified as a foundational text in the emergence of modern European racial consciousness […]” (1998: 361). Hence, one finds him/herself in a precarious situation as Othello clearly deals with issues of race and furthermore features characters and speech acts that, by ‘modern standards’, would most definitely be categorized as highly racist. Othello, however, was written and plays in a time when modern categories of race did not exist, and racist or highly prejudiced behaviour against ‘racial Others’ was not (yet) considered problematic. In Shakespeare’s time, Germans were a race, Florentines were a race, and so were ‘Moors’, and each of them possessed certain traits that distinguished them from the English.

As the title indicates, this diploma thesis investigates race and racism in Othello. My goal is to not only deal with the text itself, but also take into account crucial stages in the staging and reception of Shakespeare’s play. My thesis will be founded on three crucial realisations. First,

2

Othello is a product of its time and as such remains firmly located in a certain historical context. Shakespeare lived and wrote at a time when European colonialism was in its relatively early stages, English mercantile and colonial projects were only starting to emerge, and a European racial consciousness began to develop. Second, one aspect of the play which has kept its topicality throughout four centuries of receptive and performative history is the designation of Othello as ‘Moor’. While most of the stereotypes and aspects of race in Othello became anachronistic, as Neill pointed out, the main protagonist’s ‘blackness’ provided the play with permanent ideological and political implications; particularly the aspect of race and racism stands in strong correlation with prevalent attitudes and world views. Even though Othello remains located in its historical context, the implications of Othello’s status as ‘racial Other’ have frequently led to the removal of the play from said context as ‘old’ and ‘new’ stereotypes and racist prejudices against people of colour kept mingling with one another. Third, my discussion of race and racism in Othello cannot be restricted to the play’s textual level. What the characters say and do and how this correlates with the play’s historicity is one thing. However, equally as important are the ways in which the play got charged with meaning throughout various stages in its theatrical and critical afterlife. The engagement with Othello, most importantly its ‘Moorish’ main protagonist, mirrors prevalent attitudes towards race and lays bare racist sentiments in producers, theatregoers, and critics alike. In my analysis of race and racism in Othello, I will therefore not only turn to those issues in the play, but also outside of it.

In my thesis, I do not only want to discuss race and racism in and around Shakespeare’s play, however, but I also want to gain a deeper insight into how post-colonial dramatic adaptations of Othello have engaged with the play and its afterlife. Fuelled by post-colonial criticism, the most sustainable and critical examinations of Shakespeare’s creative and colonial legacy have come to the fore. Again, it is not the (supposedly) semantically fixed text which has received the majority of the attention. Rather, it is the play’s history of ideologically fuelled performances, the marginalisation of Black voices, bodies, and stories on stage(s), as well as the exploitation of Shakespeare as a ‘colonial tool’ to indoctrinate Britain’s colonised subjects and spaces with the Empire’s values, which have become subjects to critical scrutiny. 1 For the

1 Throughout this paper and to ensure that my language is appropriate and free of bias, the terms ‘Black’ and ‘White’ will be capitalised when used to address groups in racial, ethnic, or cultural terms. However, especially in the discussion of Othello’s historical background and its discourse, it shall often prove necessary to go back to the inappropriate and less inclusive use of ‘black’ and ‘white’. When used in quotes, the original spelling shall be retained.

3 discussion of race and racism in and around Othello, post-colonial (re)considerations marked a major caesura in the play’s racist stage and receptive tradition. Therefore, the development of the engagement with race and racism in Othello seems to confirm Mahler’s notion of the “Durchspielbarkeit” of Shakespeare’s plays. Especially post-colonial productions and adaptations of Othello provide ample testimony of the apparent ability of Shakespeare’s plays to ‘reinvent themselves’.

I will start my diploma thesis by providing an insight into the making of Othello. In this chapter, I shall foreground the play’s status as a highly ambiguous intertext and furthermore locate the text in a distinct historical context. Discussing early modern constructions of race, the emergence of stereotypes and prejudices following early encounters with the African continent and the implications and consequences of the term ‘Moor’, the first chapter will also prove crucial for the investigation of Othello’s theatrical and critical afterlife. In the second chapter, I will turn to the play’s stage tradition and receptive history and explore various stages in the casting of Othello as well as the ways in which racial anxiety and racist sentiment(s) impacted the responses to the play. A major focus in this chapter shall be put on the tradition of playing Othello in blackface as well as highly racist reactions to his ‘blackness’. The racist tradition in the engagement with the play and its main protagonist’s skin colour will turn out to be unequivocal until the later stages of the 20th century. It also provides the necessary background for the discussion of post-colonial engagements with Othello. Before doing that, however, I want to investigate race and racism in the text itself. In the third chapter, I will provide a contemporary reading of Othello as well as an analysis of the impact and implications of racist discourse in the play. Discussing blatantly racist slurs such as “black ram” (1, 1, 88) or “lascivious Moor” (1, 1, 127), but also deciphering ‘backhanded compliments’ such as “[i]f virtue no delighted beauty lack, / Your son-in-law is far more fair than black” (1, 3, 289-290), this chapter will allow an insight into the manifold ways in which Othello’s fictitious Venetian society displays racist sentiment that responds to the historical origins of the text. In my fourth chapter, I shall then turn to Othello’s post-colonial legacy. In this substantial chapter, I will discuss aspects and features of post-colonial engagements with the literary canon and focus on (re)considerations of Shakespeare’s play. At the core of this chapter is the discussion of a variety of adaptations of Othello. Dealing with dramatic rewritings as well as revisionist productions and adaptations of the play on stage and screen, this chapter aims at providing an insight into the immense versatility of ‘post-colonial Shakespeares’. I shall conclude the last chapter of my diploma thesis with an investigation of Shakespeare in the ‘Land of the Free’. If post-colonialism is to be understood as a colony’s act of resistance against its hegemonial 4 centre, the United States’ pariah-status in the post-colonial discussion is evident. Still, there are a number of post-colonial adaptations of Shakespeare’s Othello which critically engage with the author’s colonial legacy as well as the racially motivated exclusion of African American voices, bodies, and stories from stage. Thus, some American adaptations of Othello have turned out to be invaluable contributions to the post-colonial canon. One of those adaptations is Djanet Sears’ Harlem Duet (1997) which is one of the most remarkable responses to Othello’s history of ideologically fuelled performances as well as the marginalisation of Black culture(s) in a society and culture dominated by ‘White people’. The in-depth analysis of Sears’ rewriting shall mark the ending point to my investigation of race and racism in Othello and its post-colonial adaptations.

At the end of my diploma thesis will be the realisation that I have merely scratched the surface of what Othello was, currently is, and might one day become. Furthermore, race and racism have turned out to be one of the play’s most ambiguous, but also most important aspects. Even though Othello remains firmly located in a historical context, the play has been in constant flux; as societies and cultures change, so does Othello. Talking race and racism in Shakespeare’s play, one thing seems clear, however, and Ben Okri hit the nail on the head claiming that “if Othello did not begin as a play about race, then its history has made it one” (1997: 729).

5

1 The Making of Othello: Historical and Intertextual Influences

Evidently, the first ever performance of Othello took place on November 1, 1604 in Whitehall. While the original piece dates back to either 1603 and 1604, there are two versions of Shakespeare’s play that are nowadays considered the most reliable and authentic editions of Othello, the 1622 (doubtful) Quarto (Q) and the 1623 Folio (F). Because of substantial changes from Q to F, Othello (just as King Lear and Hamlet) has been classified as ‘doubtful’ by Shakespeare-researchers who suggest that publisher Thomas Wakley, while printing F in 1622, supposedly obtained a manuscript containing a marginally shortened transcript of Shakespeare’s “prompt book” (cf. Gabler 2018: 203f). In the case of Othello, the Folio-version therefore reveals 160 additional lines as well as approximately 1000 wordings that are missing in Q. The most notable differences are, however, Roderigo’s report of Desdemona’s ‘escape’ (1, 1, 122-138), supplementations to Othello’s text expressing his concerns about Desdemona’s faithfulness (e.g. 3, 3, 388-395 or 4, 1, 36-41), her Willow Song (4, 3, 30-51; 53-55; 58-61), and the conviction of Othello and Iago (5, 2, 192-200), which have been added in the Folio version of the play (cf. Schülting 2018: 537f).2 While the differences between Quarto and Folio are far from being negligible and greatly affect the overall impact of the play, one also has to note, however, that for the basic conception of the play and its characters, they are subsidiary.3

A crucial step towards a reconstruction of issues of race and racism in Othello has been the investigation of the play as a multifaceted intertext rather than an ‘unaccompanied’ creative effort by Shakespeare. Tracking the formation history of Othello, Neill notes that “scholars have uncovered extensive traces of Shakespeare’s contextual reading in Othello, especially the play’s historical and geographical detail” (2006: 18). It can be argued, for example, that Cardinal Contarini’s The Commonwealth and Government of Venice (1599) was the main source of inspiration for the political and social organisation of the Venetian republic in Othello. Furthermore, it seems plausible that Shakespeare’s recollection of the Venetian struggle to defend Cyprus against the Turks was inspired by Richard Knolles’s Generall Historie of the Turkes (1603) as well as James I’s Lepanto (1585), a poem “celebrating the Christian naval victory that temporarily saved Cyprus from the Turks in 1571” (Neill 2006: 18).

Similarly, Shakespeare’s choice of a ‘Moorish’ main protagonist was inspired by a pretext from which significant parts and the main premise of Othello’s plot derive from. As this – soon to be

2 Unless indicated otherwise, all quotes are taken from: Shakespeare, William (2020). “Othello, the Moor of Venice”. In: Lutz Walter, ed. Othello. Ditzingen: Philipp Reclam. It is based on M.R Ridley’s New Arden Version (1971). 3 This particularly applies to the exploration of race and racism in Othello. 6 discussed in greater detail – main source makes no “real effort to explore the nature or significance of the [hero’s] difference,” (Neill 2006: 18) however, Martin Orkin even went as far as to assess that Shakespeare completely runs counter to its template’s treatment of the ‘Moor’ (cf. 1987: 172). Therefore, it has most widely been recognized as evident that Shakespeare turned to ethnographic material amassed chiefly from John Pory’s translation of Leo Africanus’ Geographical Historie of Africa (1600) in order to flesh out his main protagonist.4 As Emily Bartels points out, interesting correlations between Africanus and Othello also show in various parallels between the Historie and Othello: “Both are Moors who have travelled extensively in Africa, who have been Christianized and embraced within European society, and who have become Europe’s own very eloquent authorities on Africa” (1990: 435f). At first sight, these similarities might legitimise Africanus’ status as one of Shakespeare’s most important inspirations. Bartels, however, suggests a more careful reading of the seemingly blatant similarities between Othello and its supposed ‘prototype’, adding that “claims for a precise or intended alternation between Africanus and Othello […] seem speculative at best” (1990: 435f). If Africanus’ biography and his Geographical Historie were inspirations for Shakespeare’s conception of setting and character(s) in Othello, they definitely were not his only ones, however. Examining the issue of race and racism in Othello, it must be noted that much of the characters’ implied world view mirrors contemporary social and political views which, according to Edward Pechter, also coincide with “Shakespearean assumptions elsewhere, as in the mostly villainous Moor Aaron in Titus Andronicus, and the mostly endearing Portia in The Merchant of Venice” (2016: 8091).5

As already mentioned, Shakespeare’s choice of a Black main protagonist as well as most of the characters and the basic plot are based on one significant source Story 7 in the Third Decade of Giraldi Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi (1565). The story recounts the fatal jealousy of a ‘Moorish’ captain, who, whilst in Cyprus, falls prey to the envious misdeeds carried out by his Ensign who is being described as “a man of handsome figure, but of most depraved nature in the world” (Cinthio 2016: 8864). As he tries to persuade the ‘Moor’ into thinking that his wife, named Disdemona, has grown to dislike his ‘blackness’ and has been seduced by a Captain (equivalent to Shakespeare’s ‘Cassio’), a purloined handkerchief is supplied as visible proof of her adultery (cf. Schülting 2018: 538). While Shakespeare’s Desdemona never doubts her love for Othello

4 In his Geographical Historie, Africanus stresses the African peoples’ (‘Moors’’) venery and propensity for jealousy, credulity, brutality. These are only some of the qualities that are also attributed to Othello throughout the play, most prominently by Iago, Roderigo and Brabantio. 5 For Pechter, it is particularly Iago’s prejudice which coincides with Shakespeare’s ‘prior assumptions’. 7 or their marriage, Cinthio’s Disdemona guesses her fate and fears that she will serve as an example of the consequences of marrying the wrong man. Also contrary to Shakespeare, Othello and the Ensign plot and perform Disdemona’s murder together, beating her to death and staging her murder as a tragic accident. Afterwards, the Ensign accuses Othello of murdering Disdemona and the previously carried out attack on his Captain. As the story comes to an end, Othello finds himself imprisoned in Venice:

The Signori of Venice, when they heard of the cruelty inflicted by a barbarian upon a lady of the city commanded that the Moor’s arms should be pinioned in Cyprus, and he be brought to Venice, where with many tortures they sought to draw from him the truth. But the Moor, bearing with unyielding courage all the torment, denied the whole charge so resolutely, that no confession could be drawn from him. But although, by his constancy and firmness, he escaped death, he was, after being confined for several days in prison, condemned to perpetual banishment, in which he was eventually slain by the kinsfolk of Disdemona, as he merited. (Cinthio 2016: 9030-9041)

The Ensign, too, receives his ‘just punishment’ as he, after returning to his “own country”, followed up on “his wonted villany” (Cinthio 2018: 9041), ultimately leading to him – likewise Othello – getting punished. After being “tortured so that his body ruptured”, he gets “removed from prison and taken home, where he died a miserable death” (Cinthio 2018: 9041).

“Retaining not only the broad outline of [Cinthio’s] narrative, but a surprising amount of identical detail from Giraldi” (Neill 2006: 25), one might accuse Shakespeare of blatantly ‘ripping off’ the pretext for his own interpretation of a story about the ‘Moor of Venice’. As Neal emphatically argues, however, Shakespeare provided the story with a wholly different ‘colouring’: “Some of the changes he made, especially those involving the characters, are substantial; others, particularly those affecting the plot, may appear relatively insignificant; but their combined effect is momentous” (2006: 25). The first act, for example, is entirely of Shakespeare’s own invention. In Cinthio’s narration, Disdemona’s parents are simply said to have “strove all they could to induce her to take another husband” (2018: 8844). Shakespeare, however, created in Brabantio an outraged father who accuses Othello of having seduced his daughter with forbidden arts, and whose suit appears to fail mainly because of an imminent military crisis and the Venetian state’s desperate need of Othello’s exceptional military competences. Not only Othello’s First Act substantially differs from its main source, but also the murder scene got reworked. Conspicuously, Shakespeare, again, did not seem to remain without inspiration, as Othello’s murder of Desdemona was probably inspired by Geoffrey Fenton’s Certaine Tragicall Discourses (1567). Here, a jealous captain murders his wife in order to ‘prevent’ her from falling in love again after he has passed.

8

Undoubtedly, Shakespeare’s ‘Moorish’ hero was modelled after Cinthio’s Othello. Whereas the main protagonist’s race seems to be of relatively minor significance for Giraldi, Shakespeare re-invented the originally “anonymous and thinly described Moor not only as a Christianized black African, but as a princely warrior who boasts of fetching his ‘life and being / From men of royal siege’ [1, 2, 20-22]” (Neill 2006: 26).6 Overall, Shakespeare’s Othello appears as the much more multi-facetted character, which also stems from a number of ‘exotic details’ about his upbringing and colourful life.7 Retrospectively, and here most scholars tend to agree, one could argue that Desdemona primarily grew fond of Othello because she would “seriously incline” (1, 3, 146) his stories about “the Anthropophagi and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders” (1, 3, 143-145), a reference to Pliny’s first description of the ‘Anthropophagi’, whom he had located in Ethiopia (cf. Neill 2006: 20).

However, Othello is far from being Shakespeare’s only adaptation regarding the conception and constellation of the characters. Not only did he add Roderigo and Brabantio as entirely new characters, but he also reworked Cinthio’s ‘one-dimensional’ Disdemona, Iago, Emilia, Bianca and Cassio. For the issue of race and racism in Othello, all these changes – some of which will be discussed in greater detail in the following chapters – did their due part. One of the most drastic changes, however, was the implementation of Roderigo. In Shakespeare, he occupies the role of “Othello’s foil as well as a necessary interlocutor and dupe for Iago, enabling him to display his vicious intentions to the audience without constant recourse to soliloquy and aside” (Neill 2006: 28f). Furthermore, I would like to entertain the idea that with the addition of Roderigo, Shakespeare ‘outsourced’ the primary motif for Cinthio’s Ensign’s hatred of Othello; in Othello, Roderigo’s unsuccessful wooing of Desdemona becomes a secondary motivation to harm Othello. Through this modification, Shakespeare makes Iago’s actions seem even more despicable, and the xenophobic motives behind them even more obvious. Still, and here Neill notices an important similarity to Cinthio, Iago “admits in an almost casual way to frustrated desire for Desdemona [, …making] Cassio and (above all) Othello the primary objects of his revenge” (2006: 31). Overall, however, Shakespeare’s Ensign is “certainly a more consistent and purposive schemer than his counterpart in Giraldi. What in the original are merely convenient accidents, in Othello become the product of his cunning […]?” (Neill 2006: 32)

One last substantial deviation from the original, in addition to changing the genre, was Shakespeare’s introduction of a more specific time-scheme. While in Cinthio, Othello and

6 In Cinthio’S Gli Hecatommithi, the reader only learns of a valiant and handsome Moor who “having given proofs in war of great skill and prudence […] advanced in the interests of the State” (Cinthio 2018: 8844). 7 According to Neill, a majority of those details can be found in Pliny’s Natural History (cf. Neill 2006: 19f). 9

Disdemona have not only “lived in harmony and piece” (Cinthio 2018: 8844) for an unknown time-span, repetitions such as ‘one day’ or ‘soon after’ also suggest that the events taking place stretched out over a longer period of time. In Othello, on the other hand, the story plays out at such a rapid pace that even the question whether the marriage between Othello and Desdemona was consummated remains uncertain. From the time Othello and his company were forced to leave Venice for Cyprus to Desdemona’s murder, only a few days passed. Evidently, the Third Act begins the day after they reached the island and the murder of Desdemona appears to take place that same night. It therefore seems to bear of any logic that one day after ‘defeating’ the Turkish fleet, Venice has already sent an order recalling Othello from his duties; the news could never have reached Venice in time, nor would the messenger have been able to come back to Cyprus on such short notice. Referring to Othello’s claim that Desdemona “with Cassio hath the act of shame / A thousand times committed” (5, 2, 209-2010) and Emilia’s confession that Iago “hath a hundred times / Wooed me to steal [the handkerchief]” (3, 3, 295-296), Neill also points to a number of remarks that might insinuate that Othello and Desdemona have been married for longer than is made possible by the time scheme. Because of these inconsistencies concerning the temporal frame of Othello, scholars have suggested Shakespeare’s use of a ‘double time scheme’, a trick in order to carry out the simultaneous operation of a ‘short time’ and a ‘long time’ (cf. Neill 2006: 33ff).8

As this brief synopsis of Othello’s formation history shows, Shakespeare was, when writing his play, influenced by a number of pretexts that very likely impacted the (re)creation of his play. Evidently, Othello shows extensive traces of story 7 in the Third Decade of Giraldi Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi (“The Moor of Venice”), which therefore must be considered as Shakespeare’s main source of inspiration. There were, however, a number of other influences that have supposedly shaped the conception of Othello and had a major impact on the treatment and reception of topics such as global political issues of the late 16th and early 17th century, gender relations, or modern-age racism in Shakespeare’s play. As questions of race and racism have emerged as one of Othello’s main premises, connections to its respective pretexts, as well as to contemporary Elizabethan social and political norms, have proven to be an almost infinite source of knowledge for the reconstruction and interpretation of those issues in Othello. In the end, one could argue that Othello is both an exceptional piece of Renaissance drama as well as a remarkable intertext which remains rooted in the social, political and cultural ‘atmosphere’ of

8 The ‘short time’ is represented in the successful execution of Iago’s plan, the ‘long time’ in the development of Othello’s conviction of Desdemona’s unfaithfulness (cf. Neill 2006: 34). 10 its pretexts. Yes, Shakespeare did not write his piece on his own, but in the end, Othello was destined to outlast all its ‘inspirations.’

1.1 Elizabethan ‘Zeitgeist’ in a Venetian Society – The Play in its Historical Context

Within Shakespeare studies the notion was established that to talk about race and racism in Othello is to fall into anachronism (cf. Neill 1998: 361). A contemporary reading of Othello provides more than enough examples of discourse or actions that, based on today’s values, norms and definitions of racism, have to be considered as highly racist. However, attitudes have changed and developed over time and the impact of Othello on 21st audiences and readers is entirely different from how earlier spectators might have perceived and experienced the play.9 In order to fully comprehend the mechanisms behind race and racism in the play, it therefore has to be considered essential to not only perform a thorough discourse analysis of the dramatis personae’s speech acts, but, as a first step, also consider the impact of Othello’s historical background on the play’s discussion of those aspects. Only with knowledge about its historical context, one can profoundly deal with questions such as the following: Does the – openly communicated or implied – xenophobic behaviour of some of the characters stand representative for an Elizabethan or Venetian society? Are issues of race and racism in Othello being shaped by its contemporary society, or is the play itself ‘imposing’ such stereotypes on its unsuspecting audiences, thereby creating stereotypes of race?

As the previous chapter has shown, Othello is a multifaceted intertext that in plot, characters, setting, and themes has been inspired by a wide range of pretexts. It is also, just like Shakespeare’s other ‘late tragedies’ Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, an outstanding example of an early Jacobean drama which explicitly thematizes England’s political and social instability of the emerging 17th century, frictions within society, the precarious economic situation, or the collapse of absolutism (cf. Schülting 2018: 523f). As already mentioned, the social and political implications in Othello have gained considerable scholarly attention since the 1980s. Amongst themes such as the disintegration of feudalism or gender-relations in a patriarchal society, particularly the conflict between Christianity and Islam and early-modern-age racism have received attention from critics and scholars. Using Cinthio as a ‘template’, especially the setting of Othello’s First Act proved to be a testimony to Shakespeare’s genius and there is every reason

9 Thomas Rymer’s highly racist response to a ‘blackamoor’ as Shakespeare’s main protagonist, for example, completely differs from contemporary, ‘race-conscious’ readings of Othello. Thomas Rymer and other ‘notorious’ commenters will be discussed in the second chapter. 11 to believe that he deliberately turned to Venice as starting point of the story. Only here, he was able to achieve the connection of these seemingly disparate issues.

For Shakespeare and his fellow Elizabethans, Venice seemed to be “the most sophisticated and ‘modern’ city on earth” (Hunter 1967: 162). The cosmopolitan city represented a unique social and political environment and was regarded as the ideal city-state, being famous for its wealth, elegance, and political stability. Furthermore, it marked the border between the ‘Western World’ and the Orient and employing foreign mercenaries and keeping up profit-yielding trade relations, it was also perceived a place of forbidden sexuality. When, in the play, Othello the ‘Moor’ and Cassio the ‘Florentine’ were able to climb the ranks of Venetian society despite their descent, they had both profited from the factual increase of ‘porosity’ within Venice’s social hierarchy (cf. Schülting 2018: 539). Generally, Italy was regarded as a place of great virtue and has found its place as a setting for various types of narrations of that period. Being home to some of the greatest thinkers of the time, it received the cultural image as the land of wit, pleasure, and refinement. However, due to the absence of a clearly defined government, the perception of Italy as a distinct country was valid mostly in a cultural sense. Hence, according to Hunter, “Italy as an image was sufficiently remote from England not to enforce immediate and invidious comparisons of national detail; but its way of life was (especially in tragedy) strange enough to force comparisons with English life at a general moral and societal level” (Hunter 1964: 46).

In Othello, Shakespeare managed to blend the two spatial, cultural, political, and social spheres that are Venice on the one hand and Elizabethan England on the other. Using the (cultural) image of this cosmopolitan Renaissance-metropolis, he presented his English audiences with a foil to project (racial) themes and fears onto. For the analysis of race and racism in Othello and its historical context, it is therefore essential to not only consider the implications of Venice as one of the settings. Important are also ‘English’ approaches towards ‘the Moor of Venice’ following a period of transatlantic expansion as well as encounters with New Worlds and peoples, which challenged the established perception(s) of reality as well as England’s global status. When Shakespeare wrote Othello, perhaps he himself, but at the very least his audience(s), have already been influenced by ethnographies and travel-reports as well a certain sense of “ethnographic objectivity” (Neill 1998: 366) concerning the ‘exotic’ and foreign.10 As Bernhard Klein points out, “[u]nmittelbarer Kontakt mit ethnischer oder religiöser Fremdheit

10 A foundational text in the emergence of a new ‘global awareness’ was Richard Hakluyt’s infamous catalogue of various “distinction[s] of color, Nation, language [and] condition” (Purchas 1613: 546) that categorized the peoples of the earth. 12 war dabei weniger wichtig als tradierte Klischeevorstellungen” (2018: 33). Hence, on stage, the engagement with religious and ethnic minorities such as Jews or people of colour typically carried a xenophobic undertone. The image of Jewish main protagonists in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta or Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice conveyed persistent antisemitic stereotypes, such as the kidnapping of Christian children by Jews or myths about Jewish ritual murders; such stereotypes were well-established within Elizabethan community. The same applies to Othello, where the image of ‘the Moor’ is neither based on the small number of Africans living in England at that time nor on the reports of English slave traders, but rather on the image of the malicious ‘Moor’ as a sexual, as well as cultural threat, that was being firmly installed in Elizabethan stage tradition (cf. Klein 2018: 33f).

1.2 Foreign Lands, Foreign Peoples: Stereotypes, Preoccupations, and Encounters with the African Continent

The impact of foreigners on community or a culture is affected, obviously enough, both by the opportunities for contact and knowledge that exist, and by the framework of assumptions within which information about foreign lands and customs is presented and received. (Hunter 1964: 37)

In the 16th and early 17th century, (profound) knowledge about the world increased dramatically and at a rapid pace – too rapid for the average Englishman, perhaps. Modern-style maps, new trade contacts and efforts to colonialize the New World created a new ‘physical geography’, a reality which challenged and enhanced traditional conceptions of the world and was “very difficult to accommodate within the sophisticated and complex traditions that form the natural background to literature” (Hunter 1964: 37). Exploring the (Elizabethan) cultural and social engagement with people of colour as one group of ‘foreigners’, one will quickly note that for the staggering discrepancy between what Hunter, in the quote above, calls ‘existing knowledge’ and the prevalent ‘framework of assumptions, Othello provides ample testimony. When Othello premiered in 1604, people of colour were no novelty for they had probably first appeared in London in 1554.11 They were, however, located at the very edge of society, seen more as a curiosity than anything else and extradited to ostracism and persecution.12 In Othello, however, the Black main protagonist is anything else but a curiosity, which is primarily owed to the story’s location in Venice as well as Othello’s demeanor. He opposes the conception of previous

11 Reportedly, five Africans were brought to London that year in order to learn the English language and then help set up trade relations with natives of coastal Africa (cf. Jordan 2000: 35). 12 In 1601, Queen Elizabeth expressed her discontent at the great number of “Negars and blackamoors” (Jones 1965: 12f) in England at that time. 13 coloured dramatic characters, such as Aaron in Titus Andronicus, Muly Hamet in The Battle of Alcazar, or Eleazar in Lust Dominion, who matched most of the early-modern stereotypes of Natives of Africa as barbarous, treacherous, libidinous, and jealous. Still, he was not able to escape the racist image of people of colour (cf. Schülting 2018: 541, cf. Orkin 1987: 167); Iago, Roderigo and Brabantio refer to Othello as “thick lips” (1, 1, 66), “old black ram” (1, 1, 88), “barbary horse” (1, 1, 113) or “lascivious moor” (1, 1, 127). Racist slurs like these, it seems to me, establish a firm connection between the play and an early 17th century “framework of assumptions”. Particularly the overgeneralization and projection of certain qualities onto Othello or people of colour in general correlates with common contemporary stereotypes and prejudices. Conspicuously, however, the prevalent “physical geography – or ‘knowledge about the world’ – has already proven such sentiments to be obsolete. Thus, the prejudices that Othello is met with in the play do not represent the current ‘state of knowledge’, but rather depict a society that is still stuck in their old (and racist) ways.

Problems with race and racism in Othello begin with the main protagonist’s designation as ‘Moor’, which was a term that was commonly being used as an umbrella term for people of colour with different complexions, ethnicities, and implied human qualities. Furthermore, “thick lips” (1, 1, 66) and “Barbary horse” (1, 1, 113) are highly racist stereotypes of people of colour which could locate Othello’s origin in two completely different regions of the world, the sub-Saharan region as well as Northern Africa. Altogether, denominations could suggest at least three different ethnicities for Othello and make aware of the clash between ‘knowledge that (should) exist’ – knowledge of different ethnicities on the African continent – and the established ‘framework of assumptions’ existing in Shakespeare’s time. Dealing with race and racism in Othello’s historical context, the essential questions therefore are: Where did the framework of assumptions concerning people of colour stem from? What attitudes towards ‘Moors’ or people of colour were traditional in English literature?

As already mentioned, English voyagers did not make contact with Africans until 1550, shortly after they touched upon the shores of West Africa for the first time. According to Orkin, Englishmen initially visited the continent “primarily for reasons of trade” (1987: 167) and only in the 17th century started to extensively participate in slave trade, a domain which has been largely dominated by the Portuguese. Elaborating on English contacts with Africans before the large-scale engagement in slave trade, Winthrop Jordan therefore notes that “[it] did not take place primarily in a context which prejudged the Negro as a slave, at least not as a slave of Englishmen. Rather, Englishmen met negroes merely as another sort of men” (Jordan 2000:

14

33). Still, the perception of Africans as merely ‘another sort of men’ would not do justice to the circumstance that the English approached them with an already existing image of what Africans were supposed to be: in fact anything else but a just a novel category of men. It is important to note, however, that their ‘framework of assumptions’ was certainly challenged when engaging with Natives at different parts of the African coast. According to Hunter, “there was a powerful, widespread and ancient tradition associating black-faced men with wickedness” (Hunter 1967: 142). Such a notion can only be regarded as partially confirmed by Englishmen who, though acknowledging a “condition of savagery – the failure to be civilized –” (Jordan 2000: 40), observed clothing, living conditions, government or demeanour as quite diverse. Along similar lines, the association of the African as “lustful creature” (Jordan 2000: 44) was an already well established and rarely questioned ‘truth’ within European literature.13 Quite contrary to the issue of savagery, however, Elizabethan travellers did not seem to experience a deviation from the preconceived image of African people, but rather seized upon and reconfirmed these “long standing and apparently common notions [as they] spoke very explicitly of Negroes as being especially sexual” (Jordan 2000: 44).

Savagery and a distinct sexuality remained two of the most prominent stereotypes within the Elizabethan image of Africa’s coloured population. Furthermore, it is important to acknowledge that especially the notion of the ‘lustful African’ found little to no compensation from English voyagers or writers. Therefore, the engagement with the African continent was generally marked by the reinforcement of (racist) stereotypes rather than the re-evaluation of them, which, in the eye of the impending and extensive participation in slave trade, was a highly ‘convenient’ strategy, one might add.

1.2.1 The Term ‘Moor’ as a Highly Ambiguous Denomination for People of Colour

Southward, men are cruel, moody, mad Hot, black, lean leapers, lustful, used to vaunt Yet wise in action, sober, fearful, sad If good, most good, if bad, exceeding bad (Davies 1878: 13) Perhaps, this poem by John Davis, called “Microcosmos” (1603), provides a fitting representation of the various xenophobic associations of Elizabethan culture and society with

13 Prominent names in the creation of this stereotype are Leo Africanus, who has already been touched on as a central figure in the construction of racist stereotypes within Elizabethan society and a massive influence for the racist sentiment within Othello. Another important ‘indoctrinator’ is Jean Bodin, who, amongst other things, attested that “in Ethiopia, […] the race of men is very keen and lustful […]” (Bodin 1969: 143). 15

Africans. While the previous chapter has dealt with the image of the lustful and barbarous Native, this chapter investigates the, without a doubt, most prominent attribute within the broad register of racist stereotypes and preoccupations, namely the complexion as one of the most conspicuous features of people of colour.

According to Jordan, “[for Englishmen,] Black Humans were not only startling, but extremely puzzling” (2000: 36), and first contacts with sub-Saharan Natives showed that there seemed to be peoples who were even darker skinned than and very different from the already known ‘black’ Northern African ‘Moors’; a phenomenon being ascribed to Southern Africa’s closer proximity to the sun. Subsequently, ‘blackness’ became so generally associated with the African continent that every Native seemed a ‘black man’. Differences in complexion were an important distinguishing factor, however, and in order to separate between inhabitants of the continent, the term ‘Moor’ received an expansion. While ‘Moor’ was still being used for Northern Africans, their southern ‘counterparts’ were interchangeably referred to as ‘Negroes’ or ‘black Moors’ (cf. Jordan 2000: 34). During the 17th century, this distinction became firmly established as means to stress the difference in colour, “partly because Negroes were being taken up as slaves and Moors, increasingly, were not” (Jordan 2000: 34).

The term ‘Moor’ as designation for an ethnic group and collective term for multiple cultural and ethnic groups was common Elizabethan practice. By today’s standards, it has to be considered as highly problematic and also reveals an underlying xenophobic as well as degrading motive. Deriving from the Greek mauros (dark, gloomy, obscure) and associated with moros (dull, stupid), ‘Moor’ could serve as both a ‘racial category’ as well as a marker of religious or geographical affiliation – or even the combination of all three (cf. Neill 2006: 115). As already mentioned, it was a term of racial description insofar, as it could refer “quite specifically to the Berber-Arab people of the part of Northern Africa then rather vaguely denominated as “Morocco”, “Mauretania”, or “Barbary” […]” (Neill 1998: 364), as well as Africans in general. Furthermore, as Hunter argues, ‘Moor’ had no clear racial status but rather was, based on the term referring to ‘Mahomedan’ in the O.E.D and the fact that ‘Barbary’ was not “simply a place in Africa, but also the unclearly located home of Barbarism” (1967: 147), a word for ‘people not like us’ with colour as one distinctive feature (besides religion).

On stage, while commonly framed as evil because of their ‘blackness’ and religion, representations of ‘Moors’ were similarly inconsistent and contradictory. According to Bartels, “the term Moor was used interchangeably with such similarly ambiguous terms as “African,” “Ethiopian,” “Negro,” and even “Indian,” to designate a figure from different parts or the whole 16 of Africa (or beyond) who was either black or Moslem, neither, or both” (1990: 434). Furthermore, the basic distinction between black and white ‘Moors’ found its way onto Elizabethan stages, where ‘black Moors’ such as Aaron in Titus Andronicus “[were] noted for [their] extreme blackness and [were] villainous” (Shaw 1995: 87), while ‘white’ – or ‘tawny’ – Moors’, like the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice, on the other hand, were supposedly of nobler conduct. In etymology and meaning, but as well in society and culture, the term ‘Moor’ therefore was a highly ambiguous denomination and vilification for people of colour which, especially within literary tradition, allowed for various ‘applications’.

17

2 Experiencing Othello: Stage Tradition and Receptive History

Against the backdrop outlined above, Shakespeare introduced his audience to the hero of his latest tragedy, a ‘thick lipped’ (cf. 1, 1, 67) and “lascivious Moor” (1, 1, 127) named Othello. With sexual fear and disgust Othello opens, and even though by the end of Act One the audience gets to learn that the addressee of those slurs is in fact a “great Christian gentleman, against whom Iago’s insinuations break like water against granite” (Hunter 1967: 150), one can only imagine the impact of Othello’s opening passages on its original spectators; even more so when we consider that Shakespeare’s early audiences were probably as much influenced by previous (cultural) engagements with ‘racial Others’ as he has been himself when creating Othello.14 Here, I agree with Pechter’s claim that “any attempt to read people’s minds from four centuries ago is bound to rely on speculation [which] is not universally shared”, adding that “the responses of theatrical audiences do not map exactly onto the beliefs they hold outside the [theatre]” (2016: 8427). I firmly believe, however, that in consideration of the Elizabethan ‘framework of assumptions’ concerning people of colour, there is ample historical and cultural evidence to facilitate a reconstruction of the earliest reception of the play, as well as lay the groundwork for an analysis of changes and continuities in the engagement with topics such as race and racism in Othello.15 Furthermore, one can very well argue that in the earlier stages of Othello’s performance and receptive history, race, let alone racism, did not seem to be an issue for contemporary audiences.16 However, such a notion des not stand in conflict with the idea that race and racism in Othello have always been major concerns, even if not visible at first sight. Is it therefore reasonable to assume that traditional expectations concerning race most likely lead to a premature evaluation of Othello on the audiences’ side? Could one make the argument that by refuting the image of the gross, inferior, disgusting ‘Moor’, Shakespeare might have been able to challenge the audience’s assumptions, and in creating a Moor that was “black in the face yet white and noble in the spirit” (Shaw 1995: 84) managed to astound and perplex his Elizabethan audience?

14 Brabantio’s daughter being “cover’d with a Barbary horse” (1, 1, 111) is one of the play’s most graphic images. The sexual danger of ‘Moors’ is being reinforced throughout the play and correlates with contemporary stereotypes. 15 This assumption follows the approach of a number of highly touted Shakespeare-scholars such as Neill, Hunter, and also Pechter for that matter. 16 Throughout the 17th century, Othello’s race did not seem to be a matter of particular interest for audiences and commenters. However, a drastic change in perception took place towards the end of the century. One of the first to take issue with Othello’s race was Thomas Rymer. Today, he is perceived as the first ‘systematic critic’ of Othello. In his A Short View of Tragedy (1693), he lashed out at Shakespeare’s choice of a “blackamoor” as hero within the setting at hand (cf. Neill 2006: 3). His comments provided a major break in the reception of the play. Rymer and others will be discussed in more detail below. 18

According to Schabert, Shakespeare’s tragedies are likely to evoke, sometimes even require, their audiences’ intense moral engagement (cf. 2018: 259); in the case of Othello, I would further suggest an ideological engagement with plot, characters, and communicated morals and values. Hence, this allows for two possibilities of Elizabethan audiences’ engagement with (race and racism in) Othello that have been discussed extensively in Shakespeare-research. Firstly, there has formed the position that Othello’s early audiences discarded their stereotypical and preconceived image of ‘Moors’ after learning that bodily features and (human) qualities stand in no correlation to each other. This would align with the notion of the ‘ambiguity’, ‘multi- consciousness’ and ‘dialectics’ of Shakespeare’s play(s) – an approach which would “allow for the possibility of negotiating the irreconcilable positions generated by and brought into the performance [by its audiences]” (Pechter 2016: 8537). This would have been the case if the audiences morally and ideologically engaged with Othello and would have reconsidered and disconfirmed the racist depiction of ‘Moors’ in the play; a depiction which was, evidently, largely based on contemporary stereotypes of people of colour.

Other scholars, however, advocate a completely different take, suggesting that “Shakespeare’s spectators came into the [theatre] locked wholly into their own convictions, whether xenophobic or cosmopolitan, and they go out of the theatre locked wholly into the same convictions” (Pechter 2016: 8537f). Here, Pechter also points out that “Othello’s first audiences may have wished to repudiate their first impressions but felt at the same time […] trapped in what they had come to recognize as the malignant bias of their initial response” (2016: 8504). In this instance, the audiences would have either declined to engage their morals and ideologies in order to (re-)consider the actions of the play, or, being caught in the ‘spiderweb’ of their own preoccupations, would not have found the play to differ from their own morals and values, hence not reconsidering them.

Thus, there are (at least) two completely different approaches to tackle questions about Othello’s initial audiences’ reactions. Either the audience felt drawn to Iago’s, Roderigo’s and Brabantio’s viscous and xenophobic insinuations, or to the “exotic stranger that Iago would destroy” (Pechter 2016: 8537). The polar opposition of perceptions that are made possible in Othello speaks volumes regarding the mastery of Shakespeare’s implementation of topics that affected and addressed his (original) audiences: Islamophobic anxieties, “anxiety-provoking strangeness” (Bartels 2008: 16), as well as colour and genetic differences as source of prejudice and discontent. Furthermore, one could argue that this confirms the claim that Mahler put forward, namely that “Shakespeare war Theatermann, kein Ideologe” (2018: 319). Hardly, one

19 will find Shakespeare indoctrinating readers or audiences of Othello with his understanding of race and its implications. Furthermore, he does not (dis)approve of the images Iago, Roderigo, Brabantio and others paint of ‘the Moor’. Therefore, how one approaches the play and its character’s racist thinking is solely based on one’s own ‘moral and ideological compass’. Whether Shakespeare consciously wrote Othello this way will have to remain unanswered, the effect, however, is clear: Othello inevitably becomes what you want it to be, which is a testimony to the tragedy’s power to reinvent itself again and again and respond to its contemporary ‘zeitgeist’.

What Mahler called the “Durchspielbarkeit” of Othello is a big reason why the issue of race and racism, though a main premise in the tragedy since the very beginning, has been in constant flux since the earliest stages of its reception. Besides the analysis of racist discourse in the play itself, there have been two additional aspects which have received extensive scholarly attention in attempts to reconstruct the development of race and racism as main themes in Othello: the casting of Othello and changes to his origin and skin colour throughout the play’s stage tradition, as well as the reception of the ‘Moorish’ character by audiences and critics. Both of these issues directly respond to developments in Othello’s performance history and primarily deal with the construction and interpretation of Othello’s race by actors and playwrights. Therefore, they insofar deal with racism as they, throughout history, evoked strong reactions and laid bare racist and xenophobic ideologies within the play’s audiences, actors, and directors. Hence, Othello’s stage tradition and receptive history must be considered essential components of a thorough analysis of the issue of race and racism in the play.

The first major issue that the following chapter will deal with are the various phases in the casting and conception of Othello. Here, particular attention shall be paid to what Neill called the “long dependence on the fundamentally implausible pretence that the white actor playing the hero was a black man” (2006: 2) and the depiction of Othello in blackface. The tradition of ‘blackfacing’ the White actor playing Othello will be a crucial part of the chapter’s discussion of the play’s theatrical and critical afterlife, particularly because it carried over well into the 20th century and surpassed the mere cultural preoccupation with ‘racial Others’ or the articulation of racial difference. In its essence, the depiction of ‘blackness’ on stage by White actors in blackface stems from renaissance theatre tradition. Even though Africans were present in other forms of cultural display such as civic presentations, Callaghan points out that “neither court nor public theatres employed racial others [and] racial impersonation seems to have persisted alongside the actual exhibition of alien peoples” (2003: 194). Thus, she distinguishes

20 between two poles within the representational spectrum of ‘racial Others’, an approach which applies, in particular, to the depiction of people of colour on stage: First, the mere display of ‘black people’ (exhibition) as objects, “passive and inert before the active scrutiny of the spectator, without any control over [or consent to] the representational apparatus in which they are placed”, and the simulation of ‘negritude’ (mimesis), which “entails an imitation of otherness [… in] the absence of the actual bodies of those it depicts [and therefore] needs no further restriction or containment” (Callaghan 2003: 194).

In the case of Othello, the mimesis of the supposedly African main protagonist is particularly interesting not only because of its long-standing tradition of playing Othello in blackface, but also because of various stages in the depiction of ‘Moorishness’ on stage; clearly, it seems to me, a consequence of both the term ‘Moor’ as a highly ambiguous denomination for people of colour and an umbrella-term for Africans with all sorts of complexions and ethnicities, as well as the unclear status of Othello’s true ethnicity throughout the tragedy itself.17 Othello’s casting underwent various stages as he was (re)presented as dark-skinned sub-Saharan ‘Moor’, but also as fair-skinned and orientalised, more ‘European’, ‘Moor’. Thus, within the play’s performance history, depictions of ‘the Moor’ show various approaches to Shakespeare’s ‘template’ and lay bare contemporary stereotypes of as well as preoccupations with ‘Moors’ or people of colour in general – an aspect which has a substantial impact on the issue of race and racism in Othello.

In chapter 2.2, I shall pick up on the issue of Othello’s depiction on stage and discuss how racial anxiety and perceptions of ‘the Moor’ shaped the reception of the play. As will be shown, changes to the protagonist’s complexion throughout Othello’s stage tradition have carried certain implications and were, hence, accompanied by highly racist responses by critics and spectators alike.18 The main premise in the discussion of this issue is the fact that the experience of the play and its characters depends on “what the audience knows before it comes to experience the play” (Little 1993: 305), a circumstance which can be traced throughout Othello’s performance history. Therefore, Rymer’s attack at the improbability of a ‘blackamoor’ as the main protagonist in Othello is clearly influenced by a contemporary ‘framework of assumptions’ as well as the Renaissance image of people of colour and

17 As already mentioned, “thicklips” (1, 1, 66), “Barbary horse” (1, 1, 113) or “lascivious moor” (1, 1, 127) could suggest three completely different ethnicities for Othello. 18 A ‘black’ Othello, for example, was received as particularly savage and barbarous, a ‘fair skinned’ Othello as more noble and ‘European’, and African American Othellos as particularly shocking and immersive. 21

‘Moors’.19 Along the same lines is Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s attempt to ‘whitewash’ Othello as ‘tawny’ rather than ‘black’, claiming that “it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro” (Coleridge 2016: 10763).20 Some years later, reactions to Ira Aldrige playing the role of Othello, or the first performance of Othello by a Black actor in the southern United States in 1979, which produced “audible gasps from the audience and a string of hate letters” (Neill 2006: 11), should again lay bare racist sentiments within critics and theatregoers.

Focussing on Othello’s performance and receptive history, the following subchapters will reconstruct central stages in the engagement with the play over the last four centuries and thereby show that it is not only the analysis of racist discourse in Othello which has to be considered a key issue in the investigation of race and racism in the play. In the end, “the text of a play”, in the words of Julie Hankey, “is only its starting point, and only in production is its potential realised and capable being appreciated fully” (2005: vii). This principle that can also be applied to Othello, where issues of race and racism are written into the play by Shakespeare, acted into it by its performers, and read into it by the viewers.

2.1 ‘Black’, ‘White’, ‘Tawny’? ‘Moorishness’ and the Casting of Othello throughout the Play’s Performance History

As already mentioned, the cultural engagement with Africa and its peoples, as well as ‘racial Others’ in general, traditionally took place within the representational spectrum of exhibition and mimesis, the first describing the mere presentation of people as ‘objects’, the latter the imitation of Natives in the supposed absence of those who could otherwise represent themselves – a notion that could not be more wrong with regard to the (mis)representations of Africans on stage, who were by far the most numerous ‘racial Others’ in early modern England and present in other forms of cultural display (cf. Callaghan 2003: 193). Nevertheless, on stage the representation of ‘blackness’ by White actors persisted, which was part of a theatrical tradition that developed earlier in the 16th century and included “vizards, long black velvet gloves and leggings of black leather” (Hankey 2005: 11). By the start of the 17th century, however, the mere masquerade of White actors as people of colour proved too superficial, hence the custom

19 As has been shown, such images were established through ethnographic and cultural engagements with ‘foreigners’ from authors such as Leo Africanus, Richard Hakluyt, Christopher Marlowe, or Shakespeare himself. 20 Coleridge might have picked up the idea from Edmund Keane, who, in 1814, premiered his ‘light-skinned’ North African Othello. 22 of painting the face with burned cork mixed with oil, or blackface, was born. As “black skin”, in the words of Callaghan, “persisted as the most conspicuous marker of racial difference despite the burgeoning distinctions between peoples of other races, such as ‘white Moors’, ‘black Moors’ [and] ‘tawny Moors’” (2003: 196), blackface proved to be a practice that made the representation of ‘blackness’ considerably more immersive and striking, and which should carry over well into the 20th century.

A similar trend can be followed in Othello, where the full ‘potential’ of blackface has been used not only depict the main protagonist as ‘black’, but also as ‘Moor’ with different complexions. Subsequently, the casting of Othello has come to be an issue of invaluable importance for the discussion of race and racism in the play’s theatrical, cinematic and receptive afterlife, laying bare different stages in the representation of ‘racial Others’, the apparently unclear status of Othello’s ethnic background, as well as the awareness or rejection of themes such as race and racism in Othello. Following the early modern age norms of depicting ‘Moors’ on stage, it would only seem right to assume that the first actor to play Othello, Richard Burbage (from 1604 to 1618), “would have painted himself as black as possible” (Hankey 2005: 11), a legacy that should outlive his originator by almost two decades. There is every reason to believe that, following the practice that had been established by the original performer of the part, Othello was invariably played in blackface as sub-Saharan ‘black Moor’ throughout the 17th and 18th century. Such a claim receives ample support from Rymer, who was clearly used to seeing representations of ‘the Moor’ as “blackamoor captain” (1693: 88), as well as knowledge of various performances throughout the 17th and 18th century where the main protagonist was featured as ‘black Moor’.21 “The stage tradition”, in the words of Neill, “is unequivocal” (2006: 45).

Against the traditional depiction of Othello as ‘black Moor’ stood intense discussions about Othello’s complexion which gained increasing attention from the middle of the 18th century onwards. According to Schülting, this discussion took place under the pretence of the improbability of bringing Othello’s colour in line with the character’s ‘tragic grandeur’ (“tragische Größe”), therefore indicating that Shakespeare must have originally envisioned his Othello as a fair-skinned Arab (cf. 2018: 544). Such a ‘Moor’ should not step his foot on any English stage until the early 19th century, however, when in 1814, at last, it was Edmund Kean,

21 Consider, for example, Thomas Betterton’s (from 1682 to 1709) or J.P. Kemble’s (from 1785 to 1805) Drury Lane performances of Othello as ‘black Moor’ (cf. Hankey 2005: xi). 23 whose interpretation of Othello provided a caesura to the long-standing tradition of the ‘blackamoor captain’:

In his performance of Othello, Kean got rid of the difficulty arising from the supposed necessity of blackening the Moor’s face, by which much of the play of the countenance on the stage was lost. He regarded it as a gross error to make Othello either a [N]egro or a black, and accordingly altered the conventional black to the light brown which distinguishes the Moors by virtue of their descent from the Caucasian race. Although in the tragedy Othello is called an “old black ram,” and described with a minuteness which leaves no doubt that Shakespeare intended him to be black, there is no reason to suppose that the Moors were darker than the generality of Spaniards, who indeed are half Moors, and compared with the Venetians would even then be black. (Hawkins 1869: 221)

Ostensibly, Kean’s change regarding Othello’s complexion was partially influenced by complaints from audiences who were neither able to see nor hear Kean, a consequence of the “huge enlargements” (Hankey 2005: 37) to Covent Garden and Drury Lane when they were rebuild after both theatres burned down in 1808, respectively 1809. Thus, Kean apparently felt the “desire, in the interests of greater physical expressiveness, not to obscure his features” (Neill 2006: 47).

If practicability played a role in his decision to ‘revamp’ Othello, it was a minor one, however, and the last sentence in Hawkins’ quote might reveal the primary reason to quite literally ‘tone down’ the ‘Moor; Kean’s attempt to orientalise Othello directly responded to ongoing discussions about his true ethnicity and the unclear status of ‘the Moor’.22 Furthermore, being used arbitrarily as an umbrella term for (African) people of colour, the term itself gave enough leeway to arguments against the traditional depiction of Othello’s main protagonist as ‘black moor’. However, as Neill points out, “the language of the play – especially the slurs of Iago, Roderigo and Brabantio – makes it fairly plain that […] it was a black African that Shakespeare had in mind” (2006: 45).23

In the grand scheme of things, the ‘what’ must be considered much more relevant than the ‘why’, however. Undoubtedly, Kean’s innovation proved to be a suitable answer to the prevalent dilemma of Shakespeare’s ‘true’ conception of Othello, and at least in England his decision to play the ‘Moor’ as relatively pale North African seems to “have gradually defused the controversy over the hero’s colour” (Neill 2006: 44). Furthermore, his decision to, quite

22 As already mentioned, the term ‘Moor’ could serve as both a ‘racial category’ as well as a marker of religious or geographical affiliation. 23 While I thoroughly agree with Neill’s observation of the unambiguity of most of the slurs, one still has to recognize the possibility of locating Othello in different regions based on him being referred to as “Barbary horse” (1, 1, 113). 24 literally, ‘tone down’ what once had been a ‘blackamoor’ successfully mitigated what was perceived as the outrageous disproportion between Othello’s “sooty bosom” (1, 2, 70) and Desdemona’s “whiter skin of hers than snow” (5, 2, 4). Thus, Kean’s ‘tawny Moor’ also “[adressed] the racial anxieties stirred up by the tragedy” (Neill 2006: 44f). According to Hankey, “Kean’s interpretation altered in feeling and in certain details over the years [but in about 1817] reached the ideal of the period as expounded by Romantic critics” (2005: 37). In the end, Kean’s highly successful reinterpretation of Othello did not only provide the already mentioned and much yearned for reconsideration of Othello’s ethnic background, but also paved the way for following generations of ‘tawny Othellos’. This new conception was, for about a century and a half, largely effective, “if not in suppressing the racial dimension of the play, at least in reducing it to the point where it could safely be exploited for sensational purposes” (Neill 2006: 48).

Without any shadow of a doubt, Kean’s ‘tawny’, orientalised ‘Moor’ revolutionised the make- up of Othello. The practice of playing him in blackface, however, remained unquestioned as the identification of race as a central issue in the play became almost non-existent. Such a thing should only happen on very rare occasions, when, accompanied by both storms of enthusiasm but also racist outrage (cf. Schülting 2018: 544), Black actors took the stage to perform the main protagonist of Shakespeare’s play. In the 1830s, Ira Aldridge emerged as the first African American actor to perform Othello on a major English stage. According to Hankey, he was unable to “get a serious hearing in [the United States] or in anything but minor and provincial theatres in England” (2005: 53). Even though his stint at Covent Garden got cancelled prematurely, he still managed to come to fame “giving a command performance at the Court Theatre in Potsdam and going to Prague, Cracow and Vienna” (Hankey 2005: 53).24 On stages all over Continental Europe, his ground-breaking performances challenged the perception of who should play Othello and how he should be played. Instead of acting out his role, Aldridge’s performance was highly regarded for the ‘naturalness’ of his performance. Aldridge was not playing Othello, he was Othello. Such a notion also persisted with other Black actors of Othello, as their performances were able to collapse the distance between performer and role (cf. Neill 2006: 50). In England, the uncodified colour bar preventing Aldridge to perform at the prime professional London theatres such as Covent Garden or Drury Lane persisted until 1930, when Paul Robeson “broke it […] in the face of a barrage of racism from the play’s producers and

24 In 1833, he took over Edmund Kean’s role after his sudden death. However, because his performances were not well received by audiences and critics, his run got cancelled after only two performances (cf. Hovde 2017: online). 25 audiences” (Callaghan 2003: 214). As it had been for Aldridge almost a century earlier, racial prejudice in America made it unthinkable for Robeson, too, to perform in America. In London, however, his performances, though targeted by racist attacks, were noted for a ‘naturalness’ reminiscent of Aldridge. Robeson, who reputedly took instructions in the role from Aldridge’s daughter, offered a “conspicuously restrained Othello – no doubt because this eminently political performer was conscious of how easily the role could slide into stereotypical caricature” (Neill 2006: 54). Therefore, Robeson’s performances did not cause the outrage of Aldridge’s more ferocious Othello, who used to “take Desdemona out of her bed by her hair and drag her around the stage before he smothered her” (Siemon 2016: 11875).

Still, similarly to Aldridge or other Black actors of Othello, Robeson’s performance once again seemed to erode the lines between actor and role. With what audiences and critics experienced as the collapse of aesthetic distance also came the understanding that Black actors were not acting, but merely playing themselves.25 Based on audiences’ and critics’ common assumption that Black actors’ performances were exceptionally ‘natural’, one could argue that contrary to performances of Othello in blackface, the usually binary opposition in the representational apparatus between exhibition and representation of ‘racial Others’ seems to have blurred, once a Black actor took the stage. What audiences of Othello experienced as ‘naturalness’ in the acting of the (Black) main protagonist, hence, shifted the perception of the actions on stage from the mere mimesis of ‘blackness’. With Black actors, the actions of the character they represented became their own and their performances an exhibition of the ‘savagery’ many audiences thought was innate in people of colour.26

Despite being widely perceived as a “political and artistic milestone, powerful enough to persuade one reviewer [to propose] that no white man should ever dare play the part again”, at least in England “Othello would continue to be the virtual monopoly of white actors for another four decades” (Neill 2006: 56f).27 Thus, also the tradition of blackface continued and took an interesting turn when Laurence Olivier, three-time Oscar winner and regarded as one of the greatest English speaking (theatre and movie) actors of the 20th century, turned his back to the ‘orientalised Moor’ and revived the early modern age roots of depicting people of colour on stage:

25 This is a notion that Callaghan particularly ascribed to Aldridge’s performances (cf. 2003: 209). Based on the criticism that Paul Robeson received, however, I firmly believe that such opinions are also applicable to a broader context and other Black actors’ performances of Othello. 26 This led to a considerable number of Black actors turning down the lead role in fear of being racially stereotyped, ensuing from their immersion in and commitment to the part. 27 An exception to this rule was Paul Robeson’s return to Stratford in 1959 (cf. Hankey 2005: xiv). 26

Olivier was blacked up to the nines, of course. Only the part covered by his jockstrap wasn’t. It took him about four hours to get himself buffed up. Jack, his dresser, put rich tawny-brown-black pancake on his body and buffed it up with silk so that he really shone. Olivier was a master of really looked magnificent. (Whitelaw 1995: 13)

Olivier’s concentration on race reflected a new alertness that was regarded as highly controversial amongst peers and critics. For some, he managed to do what only Black actors were able to achieve before: erasing the aesthetic distance through the overwhelming power of his ‘natural performance’. Others, however, dismissed his performances as dated, tasteless, spoiled with artistic, social, political offensiveness, and critiqued the mimicry of ‘blackness’ with his “eye rolling, pink-lipped, tongue-thrusting coal-black Pappy” (Neill 2006: 59). While the force of his stage-performance was theatrically unmatched since the – by contemporary standards – masterful depiction of the ‘Moor’ by Salvini or Kean, transferring Olivier’s ‘Moor’ to the screen made aware of his blatant exaggeration of the role. “Cinematic close up”, in the words of Neill, “was as unforgiving to the theatricality of his studied ‘African/Caribbean mannerism as it was to the smudge of black make-up that appeared to the cheek of Maggie Smith’s Desdemona” (2006: 59). In what Neill clearly sees a reaction against Olivier’s impersonation of ‘the Moor’ on theatrical stages and movie screens, most Othellos of this period returned to variations of the ‘orientalised Moor’ (cf. Neill 2006: 58ff).

In England, the tradition of ‘blackfacing’ Othello continued until Anthony Hopkins, who, in 1981, became the last White actor to play the role. By then, “blacking up”, according to Hankey, “had become kind of a scandal” (2005: 97). Othello’s casting continued to be a highly explosive issue, however, and when Ben Kingsley took over the role in 1985, “programme notes had to work hard advertising his African-Indian background and his role as Ghandi in the Oscar winning film” (Hankey 2005: 97). Had it been unthinkable to play Othello by anybody but a White actor for over two decades, some 100 years of disagreement about the casting of the role should finally lead to the conclusion that it would be highly inappropriate to not give the role to somebody who did not have to conceal his bodily features to match Shakespeare’s ‘Moor’.

The importance of Othello’s casting regarding the perception of race and racism in the play cannot be underestimated. However, the question of whether Othello is ‘black’, ‘white’, ‘tawny, played in blackface or not, is merely the tip of the iceberg. In terms of its performance, much of the racial dimensions in the play are not only owed to a certain geographical and temporal sphere, but also to an actor’s or director’s subjective interpretation of Othello, as well as the

27 dynamic between the hero and his evil counterpart(s).28 A whole thesis could be devoted to subjective approaches and geographical deviations in Othello’s stage tradition, or to approaches towards casting ‘the Moor’ and its impact on the issue of race and racism in the play. Hence, the fact that most performances of Othello have followed a similar ‘roadmap’ in their casting of Othello seems even more conspicuous. Does not matter the country, the stage, or the time, the theatrical afterlife of Othello as well as the engagement with the main protagonist’s race seems to only feature minor deviations.

Generally, as this chapter has shown, one can depict three major approaches in the casting of Othello: Othello in blackface as ‘black Moor’, Othello in blackface as ‘tawny Moor’, and Othello being played by Black actors. Overall, but especially in England and the United States, the tradition of performing the hero of Shakespeare’s play in blackface has been of remarkable longevity. Even though, by the 1830s, performances of the first Black actors slowly started to gain courtesy as perhaps ‘the right way’ to play Othello, blackface remained the ‘way to go’ until the end of the 20th century. As Callaghan points out, “the practice of blackface went on when there was no practical necessity for serves to demonstrate that the ideological and cultural motor of black impersonation has no alliance with the practical necessity we habitually assume in relation to Renaissance theatre” (2003: 2010). Thus, the long and unequivocal tradition of playing Othello in ‘blackface’ lays bare structures of systemic racism in the societies that staged Othello’s ‘blackness’ throughout the play’s theatrical (and cinematic) afterlife.

2.2. “What you know, you know”. How Racial Anxiety and Perceptions of ‘the Moor’ Shape(d) the Reception of Othello

Othello, in the words of Winthrop Jordan, “loses most of its power and several of its central points if it is read with the assumption that because the black man was the hero, English audiences were indifferent to his blackness”, adding that Shakespeare was “writing both about and to his countrymen’s feelings concerning physical distinctions between peoples […]” (Jordan 1974: 20). Following Jordan’s thought, the ensuing question therefore has to be: What were Shakespeare’s countrymen’s feelings towards ‘Others’ and how did it impact the reception of Othello? As already mentioned, this is a question which lacks a definite answer based on the

28 Olivier, for example, was convinced that “no English actor [in the 20th century] had succeeded in the part [because the] play belonged to Iago who could always make the Moor look a credulous idiot” (Tynan 1966: 2). He added that he was only to play the role given that he did not have “a witty, Machiavellian Iago [but] a solid, honest-to God N.C.O. [non-commissioned officer]” (Tynan 1966: 2) as his antagonist. 28 premise that, and here I completely agree with Pechter, one is not able to ‘read the people’s minds’ from four centuries ago and, therefore, has to rely on speculation. Nevertheless, as I have argued, it is possible to build a well-founded theory on Shakespeare’s original audiences’ reactions to Othello based on contemporary stereotypes as well as the prevalent ‘framework of assumptions’ concerning people of colour. Considering the Elizabethan social and cultural engagement with ‘Moors’, it is therefore possible to narrow down the very early reception of Othello to two eventualities: either Othello managed to challenge and change the recipients’ preoccupations, or the play reinforced the spectators’ image of people of colour, hence not leading to a reconsideration of the contemporary stereotypes.29 In short: the original impact remains to be discussed, while the basic conditions, however, are clear. What I have just described as the uncertainty about the impact of Othello on its original audiences based contemporary images is symptomatic for the receptive history of the play in its entirety. According to Little, ‘blackness’ in Othello is allegorical and works as “Shakespeare’s pretext [to] what the audience suspects it already knows before it comes to experience the play” (1993: 305). Hence, the receptive history of Othello has brought forth a number of different responses that seem to have developed alongside changes to Othello’s stage history as well as approaches towards people of colour in society and culture.

As already mentioned, the lack of early records on Shakespeare’s play does not allow for a definite answer to how Othello, particularly its main protagonist, was perceived. Given the (cultural) engagement with ‘racial Others’ in the historical context, however, it would be implausible to suggest that audiences did not enter the theatre with certain stereotypical views of what would await them; especially when watching a play called “The Moor of Venice”. Hence, they were likely influenced by originary myths that linked skin-complexion to Africa’s proximity to the sun30, as well as by ethnographies from Leo Africanus, Jean Bodin or Richard Hakluyt. Furthermore, they might have been impacted by prior cultural engagements with people of colour such as in Titus Andronicus or The Merchant of Venice, and many other influences that shaped the Eurocentric view of ‘Moors’ as barbarous, illiterate, libidinous, and “good enough only to be used in servitude as the white man’s property” (Shaw 1995: 83). Obviously, the overgeneralizing aspect of this highly racist image of the African continent and its peoples did not in the slightest correspond with the ‘physical geography’ that many

29 A complete change in attitude, according to Little, seems questionable as throughout the play “the audience […] reactively and proactively constructs the significance of race” (1993: 305). Thus, they are not turned into voyeurs by the play. 30 This was perceived as the reason why Africans southern of the Sahara had a considerably darker complexion than the already ‘black’ North African ‘Moors’ (cf. Jordan 2000: 37). 29

Englishmen were aware of. Africans were by far the biggest group within the spectrum of ethnic minorities in England and knowledge about ‘ethnic differences’ within Natives from the African continent already existed. Against this backdrop, one can locate early performances and receptions of the play in a deeply racist and xenophobic society. Therefore, it seems all the more interesting that the interracial love affair in Othello apparently was of little to no interest to Shakespeare’s earliest audiences. In accordance to this notion stands one of the first recorded responses to Othello from Henry Jackson, who, in 1610 after watching the King’s Men perform the play in Oxford, wrote about its powerful impact to move one to tears witnessing Desdemona being slain in front of the audience by her husband (cf. Clayton 1993: 62). His letter is revealing and heavily supports the notion that race was not seen as a (primary) issue in Othello. Especially Jackson’s reference to Othello as mere ‘husband’ drastically differs from what later reviewers felt was necessary to highlight. However, one could very well make the case that it was the image of the dark-skinned murderer standing over his slain wife that made this scene that much more striking to Jackson. Therefore, it would not be too far-fetched to assume that Jackson was at least partially influenced by the stereotypical image of ‘blackness’, even though not explicitly acknowledging Othello’s race as an issue to the play. For mid-century readers, too, the protagonist’s colour apparently did not seem noteworthy. The clergyman Abraham Wright, for example, complimented Shakespeare for his characterization of the roguish Iago and the jealous Othello; similarly, he did not comment on the main protagonist’s ‘blackness’ (cf. Neill 2006: 2). Even though critics and spectators seemed to be thoroughly impressed by Othello throughout the first half of the play’s theatrical afterlife, it is important to note that they are, despite their apparent dismissal of any racial themes in the play, still members of a deeply racist and xenophobic society. Besides ‘blackfacing’ the main protagonist, contemporary proverbs such as “[t]hree Moors to a Portuguese, three Portuguese to an Englishman” (Tilley 1950: 473) show the common attitude towards ‘Moors ‘, whose ‘worthlessness’ joins the ranks of already existing stereotypes connected to people of colour. Still, at this point in the receptive history of Othello, race seemed to neither be an issue in the play, nor evoke racist responses by its commentators.

Such criticism should arise by the end of the 17th century, however, when one of the earliest systematic critics of Othello, Thomas Rymer, unleashed a fierce attack at Shakespeare’s tragedy. In his A Short View of Tragedy (1693), he did not only show himself disgusted over the number of improbabilities within the play – most of them connected to the hero’s ethnicity –, but also did not fail to mention the “perverse stupidity of his contemporaries for liking [Othello] so much” (Pechter 1999: 14). “From all the [t]ragedies acted out on our English 30

[s]tage,” Rymer says in his opening words, “Othello is said to bear the Bell away” (1693: 86). Most shocking for him seem, however, the impropriety of Othello’s marriage to Desdemona, his high social status, as well as other improbabilities that turned what he refers to as “the tragical part” of the play to “a Bloody Farce, without salt or savour” (146):

[Othello] is drawn from a novel, compos’d in Italian by Giraldi Cinthio […] Shakespeare alters it from the original, but always, unfortunately, for the worse. […] With us a Black-a-moor might rise to be a trumpeter, but Shakespeare would not have him less than Lieutenant-General. With us a Moor might marry some little drab, or small-coal Wench: [Shakespeare] would provide him the daughter and heir of some great Lord, or Privy-Councellor: And all the town should reckon it a suitable match. (87-92)

Being changed for the worse, Shakespeare’s “fable” (89) is only useful in providing the following morals:

First, this may be a caution to all maidens of quality how, without their [parent’s] consent, they run away with blackamoors. […] Secondly, this may be a warning to all good wives, that they look well into their linen. […] Thirdly, this may be a lesson to husbands, that before their jealousie be tragical, the proofs be mathematical.

According to Parker, Rymer has been widely “classified amongst the worst fanatics of classicist dogma [for his] grotesque mechanical application of the inappropriate criteria provided by French neoclassical theory” (1988: 18). His analysis of Othello, in the words of Pechter, “[moves] beyond testimony about the play’s shattering impact into analysis based on systematic principles” (2016: 9109). Rymer took these principles from Horace, using, for example, his famous quote “[…] non ut serpentes avibus geminentur, tigribus agni” (88), ‘snakes do not mate with birds, or lambs with tigers’, to express his disgust at the mixed marriage between Othello and Desdemona. In his eyes, Othello fails miserably at fulfilling the requirements of the genre, hence becoming a fable rather than a tragedy. Throughout his evaluation of Othello, Rymer presses the indictment that the play is not only shocking, but also unnatural. In this attitude, Neill recognises a clear connection between “Rymer’s contemptuous attitude towards Africans and the rapid acceleration of the British involvement in the slave trade at the end of the seventeenth century” (2006: 41). Clearly, it seems to me, the vehemence with which he lashes out at the improprieties and improbabilities within Othello is not owed to Shakespeare’s ‘creative and historical inaccuracy’, but rather to the discrepancy between Rymer’s conception of a ‘blackamoor’ and Shakespeare’s ‘Moor of Venice’. This discrepancy, in the words of John Gillies,

31

is partly explained by the institutionalisation of plantation slavery in the New World in the course of the seventeenth century, a phenomenon which (as Winthrop Jordan [, quoted above,] has argued) required a sharp distinction between “Negroes” and other types of “savage” […], and a hierarchisation of difference defining the “Negro” as the lowest of low. (1994: 33)

Therefore, the disgust with which Rymer unleashed at the union of Othello and Desdemona, Othello’s position in Venice’s social hierarchy, as well as the city’s social mobility – things that would be unthinkable in ‘his’ society – also lays bare the racist sentiment on which his derisive attack is built upon.

Against Rymer’s racist criticism of Othello stands the widely recognized notion that the presence of a black hero was perceived as relatively unproblematic all throughout the 17th century and well into the 18th century. Rymer’s distress over the popularity of the play with his contemporaries provides ample testimony of such a theory. In 1694, Charles Gildon composed a noteworthy response to Rymer’s criticism. Debunking what his previous speaker found to be harsh improbabilities in Othello, he commented:

All the reason he gives, or rather implies, for the first improbability is, that 'tis not likely the State of Venice, would employ a Moor, (taking him for a Mahometan) against the Turk, because of the mutual Bond of Religion. He, indeed says not so, but takes it for granted that Othello must be rather for the Turkish interest than the Venetian, because a Moor. But, I think (nor does he oppose it with any reason) the character of the Venetian State being to employ strangers in their wars, it gives sufficient ground to our Poet, to suppose a Moor employ'd by 'em […] Why therefore an African Christian may not by the Venetians be suppos'd to be as zealous against the Turks, as an European Christian, I cannot imagine. (1694: 95-96)

On the claim that people of colour are inferior to white people, he comments:

Now 'tis certain, there is no reason in the nature of things, why a Negro of equal Birth and Merit, should not be on an equal bottom, with a German, Hollander, French-man […] The Poet has therefore well chosen a polite people, to cast off this customary Barbarity, of confining Nations, without regard to their Virtue, and Merits, to slavery, and contempt for the meer Accident of their Complexion. (97-98)

On Rymer’s claim of the improbability of the mixed marriage he notes the following:

After all this, Othello being of royal blood, and a Christian, where is the disparity of the match? If either side is advanc'd, 'tis Desdemona. And why must this prince though a Christian, and of known and experienc'd virtue, courage, and conduct, be made such a monster, that the Venetian Lady can't love him without perverting nature? Experience tells us, that there's nothing more common than matches of this kind, where the whites, and blacks cohabit, as in both the Indies: and Even here at home, ladies that have not wanted white adorers, have indulg'd their amorous dalliances, with their sable lovers, without any of Othello's qualifications, which is proof enough, that nature and custom, have not put any such unpassable

32

bar betwixt creatures of the same kind, because of different [colours], which I hope will remove the improbability of the person. (99-100)

Emphatically, Gildon argues against not only against Rymer’s, in his mind, unfair criticism of Othello, but also his racist attacks. 40 years later, another prominent voice, namely Lewis Theobald, chimed in to defend Othello. In his 1733 edition of Shakespeare, he commented on “Snarler and Bufoon-Criticks” such as Rymer and attempted to “distance himself from the coarse Pleasanatries of [said ‘critic’]” (Pechter 2016: 9142). Thus, the first two centuries of Othello’s performance history exhibit highly ambiguous reactions. For the most parts, the play seems to have been successful and well received by its audiences. Apparently, race and Othello’s ‘blackness’ were of no special importance to them. At the same time, however, Rymer led a small but all the more noisy minority which emphatically criticised Shakespeare’s improbable and scandalous choice of a ‘blackamoor’ as the play’s main protagonist, making aware of the social and cultural racism that certainly shaped their reception of the play.

2.2.1. Othello’s Critical Afterlife from the 19th Century Onwards: (Re)Defining the ‘Moor’

Have most audiences and critics throughout the 17th and 18th century found the idea of a black hero neither problematic nor noteworthy, concerns with Othello’s colour, more importantly his ethnicity, re-emerged towards the end of the 18th century and now received considerably more courtesy amongst viewers and critics. As already mentioned, it was especially the traditional depiction of Othello as a ‘black Moor’ that found major criticism in the eye of an ongoing discussion about the conception of Shakespeare’s main character. In Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the early 19th century brought forth two prominent voices calling for a remodelled, ‘toned down’ Othello. “Extremely revolting”, Lamb finds the “courtship and wedded caresses of Othello and Desdemona” (1909: Online). Similarly, Coleridge shows himself disgusted at the idea of “this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro”, adding that “[i]t would argue a disproportionateness […] which Shakespeare does not appear to have in the least contemplated” (2016: 10763). “Can we imagine [Shakespeare] so utterly ignorant”, he rambles on, “as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth – at a time, too, when negroes were not known except as slaves?” (2016: 10753); a blatant lie as the discussion of Othello’s historical context and early encounters with coastal Africa has shown. Contrary to Lamb, however, Coleridge’s racist attack seems to at least leave some space for a discussion of Othello’s colour: “Roderigo turns off to Othello, and here [in calling him “thick- lips” (1, 1, 63-64)] comes one, if not the only, seeming justification of our blackamoor or negro 33

Othello” (10753). He does not fail, however, to quickly close that ‘argumentative loophole’, exclaiming that Iago calling Othello a “Barbary horse” (1, 1, 108) would contradict Roderigo’s description. “Besides”, he adds, “if we could in good earnest believe Shakespeare ignorant of the distinction, still why should we adopt one disagreeable possibility instead of a ten times greater and more pleasing probability?” (10763) Thus, in the eye of the “common error to mistake the epithets applied by the dramatis personae to each other as truly descriptive” (19763), Coleridge pleads for Othello not being “conceived as a negro, but a high and chivalrous Moorish chief” (10774).

Lamb and Coleridge stand representative for a number of early-nineteenth century commentators who, according to Pechter, “were motivated as much by rhetorical and aesthetic considerations as by their racial beliefs” (2016: 9305). Whereas Rymer found little to no support amongst his peers one and a half centuries earlier, Coleridge’s and Lamb’s highly racist calls for a ‘new Othello’, an Arab rather than an African (cf. Orkin 1987: 182), were considerably better received and shared amongst most critics and spectators of the play. In this context, the casting of Othello also experienced its first major shift when Edmund Kean introduced his audiences to his interpretation of a ‘tawny’ orientalised ‘Moor’; a change that should prove immensely successful. It also dictated the ‘taste’ of theatregoers for at least a century and a half, even though, as Neill notes, some contemporaries of Kean’s showed surprise over the sudden change in the conception of Othello (cf. 2006: 47). In England, Kean’s orientalised ‘Moor’ was therefore able to, at least for the time being, “defuse the controversy of the hero’s colour [as well as] address the racial anxieties stirred up by the tragedy” (Neill 2006: 44).

Similarly, the reception of Othello in the United States of the 19th century shows highly xenophobic reactions, mirroring the contemporary racism that was prevalent in society and culture. According to Neill, it was no rarity that the (White) actor playing Othello found himself being attacked by audiences as the aesthetic distance collapsed and the “boundary between fiction and reality […] dissolved altogether” (2006: 8). In some extreme instances, the aggression with which the actors were met by the audience even led to them being physically attacked. Stendhal recalls one of those events during a performance in Baltimore in 1822 as follows: “a soldier who was on guard duty inside the Baltimore theatre, seeing Othello […] was about to kill Desdemona [,shouted] “[i]t will never be said that in my presence a confounded Negro has killed a white woman!””, as he fired his gun “breaking the arm of the actor who was playing Othello” (1992: 222). Contrary to Stendhal’s recollection are responses to Edwin Forrest’s performances who, according to Pechter, was “one of the memorable American

34

Othellos in the nineteenth century” (1999: 12). He in fact provoked “a refined and young lady” to declare “if that is the way Moors look and talk and love, give me a Moor for a husband” (Rosenberg 1961: 93); it seems to me that this lady would have reacted differently if Othello had been played by an African American actor. Less ‘euphoric’ are the reactions that Charles Macready recorded in his diary during his American tour where he played Othello in blackface and native costume. In his recordings, he wrote down “his horror at the treatment of the slave population […], though [making no] connection between slavery and his own performance” (Callaghan 2003: 213). According to Virginia Vaughan, this is a clear indication that Macready was just like the slave-owning theatregoers: they “could accept a black Othello on stage where they would not welcome a genuine Negro” (1996: 155). While, in England, the introduction of Othello as orientalised Moor progressively defused the ‘colour controversy’, the play’s “potentially dangerous political charge” (Neill 2006: 44) continued the highly controversial discussion of Othello in the United States; especially in the period of Reconstruction after the Civil War, the play sparked huge animosity. The reception of Othello in the United States of the 19th century therefore shows a remarkable ambiguity and diversity ranging from assault, to transfiguration to denial; in 1869, Mary Preston famously declared “Othello was a white man” and called his ‘blackness’ a “stage decoration which my taste discards; a fault of error from the artistic point of view” (2014: 216).

While the political and social turmoil in the United States made it virtually impossible for an African American actor to perform on stage, let alone play one of the biggest roles of the time, also the English stage tradition was, as has been shown in the previous chapter, marked by the relative absence of Black actors all throughout the 19th century. If at all, Black actors were allowed to play at small theatres, where performances of Shakespeare had to include song and dance numbers, “reducing the performance into a kind of burlesque” (Pechter 2016: 9427).31 Hence, performances in smaller theatres served a completely different clientele or, in the words of Pechter, “a different need in the same conflicted clientele” (2016: 9373). Ira Aldridge is one of the most prominent exceptions to that rule, whose stint at the illustrious Covent Garden was owed to the sudden passing of Edmund Kean who collapsed during a performance in March 1833. Aldridge’s promotion was only short-lived, however, as the rest of the run got cancelled after only two performances because his play was not well received by the London theatre scene (cf. Hovde 2017: online). His career continued to grow steadily, however. By the end of the

31 This ‘reduction’ is owed to the fact that prior to the Theatres Act (1843), only Drury Lane and Covent Garden had the patents to present serious ‘spoken drama’. Smaller stages, thus, had to perform adapted versions of Othello. On such stages, ‘Black Othellos’ were a more common sight. 35

1840s, he hit the glass ceiling for Black actors in English theatre and subsequently shifted his focus to Continental Europe; here, his performances on Austrian, German, Hungarian, Russian, and other Eastern European stages should become both despised and celebrated by critics and audiences. According to Lindfors, Aldridge was able to thrill, in some instances also put off, his audiences through his “extreme emotionalism […] rage [and] unbridled irrationalism [of his] loud howls and wild cries” (2013: 224) that made for a “wilder, more untamable performance than that of a European” (2013: 228). Aldridge’s emotional play was one of his most outstanding features. According to Errol Hill, quoting a French reviewer who saw Aldridge perform in St. Petersburg, he was so invested in his part that “[t]he public did not fail to be deeply touched, all wept, both men and women” (Hill 1984: 24).32 Other audiences, however, found the “savage and uncontrolled elements in the passion of his genuine tiger” (Neill 2006: 52) to be unbearable and a direct assault on aesthetic difference: “It murdered and crushed the spirit […] and in place of highest enjoyment, this blatant flesh introduced into art, this natural black Othello, pardon me, only causes revulsion,” (1958: 266) exclaimed a critic (quoted by Herbert Marshall and Mildred Stock) who saw a Russian performance of Othello in 1863. For Aldridge, his unprecedented immersion in the role proved to be a double-edged sword. While some audiences celebrated his performances as the ‘state of the art’ to play Othello, others felt disgusted by the collapse of aesthetic distance and Aldridge’s merely ‘playing out who he is’; for them, his performances showed the savagery that supposedly was innate in every ‘black man’.

Over the course of the 19th and well into the second half of the 20th century, the reception of Othello continued to be vastly influenced by the main protagonist’s complexion. With the slow emergence of Black Othellos, the ethnicity of the actor became another important ‘quality criteria’ for many theatregoers and critics. Furthermore, the discussion about Othello’s race went on, as, for example, the following statement by A.C. Bradley shows: “I will not say that Shakespeare imagined [Othello] as a Negro and not as a Moor, for that might imply that he distinguished Negroes and Moors as we do”, adding that to him it appears “nearly certain […] that he imagined Othello as black man, and not as light brown one” (1919: 198). Orkin here sees a direct connection to earlier critics of the play, such as Coleridge, and shows himself shocked over the fact that such notions did not only carry over into the 20th century, but were also shared by “one of the most influential relatively recent editors of Othello (1987: 183). He

32 According to said reviewer, Aldridge unleashed “a cry of anger or rather the roaring of a wild beast”, had “real tears roll down his cheek” (Hill 1984: 24), and his mouth foaming at the accusations against Desdemona. This once again correlates with the supposed ‘naturality’ of Black actors’ performances. 36 is referring to M.R. Ridley, the editor of the infamous Arden-edition of Othello (1958), who warns of the

[…] confusion of colour and contour. To a great many people, the word “negro” suggests at once the picture of what they would call a "nigger," the woolly hair, thick lips, round and burnt-cork blackness of the traditional nigger minstrel. Their subconscious generalization is […] silly […] There are more races than one, and that a man is black in colour is no reason why he should, even to European eyes, look sub- human. One of the finest heads I have ever seen on any human being was that of a negro conductor […] He had lips slightly thicker than an ordinary European’s, and he had somewhat curly hair; for the rest he had a long head, a magnificent forehead, a keenly chiselled nose, rather sunken cheeks, and his expression was grave, dignified and a trifle melancholy. He was coal-black, but he might have sat to a sculptor for a statue of Caesar, or, so far as appearance went, have played a superb Othello. (1958: li)

Based on this highly racist and not in the slightest clarifying evaluation of how Othello should be depicted, it comes as no surprise that until the last quarter of the 20th century, the issue of Othello’s race remained to be seen as an accident in plot that was to be diminished by playing Othello in blackface as a light skinned North African (cf. Neill 2006: 16). In England, the uncodified colour bar preventing Black actors to play roles in major theatres persisted until 1930, when Paul Robeson “broke it […] in the face of a barrage of racism from the play’s producers and audiences” (Callaghan 2003: 214). Again, the actor’s ‘blackness’ deemed his performances as exceptionally natural, which was not necessarily seen as an advantage as theatre critic James Agate’s comment about Robeson’s performance reveals:

Coming away from the theatre on Monday evening, a lady was heard to say that the performance had seemed to her to be exceedingly natural. Precisely, but according to whose nature? – that of Shakespeare’s Moor or of the player who enacted him? […] The reason that Mr. Robeson failed to be Othello was that he had none of [his] highly civilized quality […]. [T]o ask any negro actor, however great his qualities of mind and heart, to recite Shakespeare’s blank verse would be like asking your bright English schoolboy to jump at once into the silver stride of Racine or Corneille. (1930: n. pag.)33

Other reviewers, however, praised Robeson for his performance, calling him a “superb giant of the woods for the great hurricane of tragedy to whisper through, then rage upon, then break” (Brown 1930: n. pag.). In the Express (1930, May 20), another commenter euphorically exclaimed: “His [art] conquered all. Why should a black actor be allowed to kiss a white actress, I heard people say beforehand. There was no protest of that kind in the theatre” (quoted in Neill 2006: 56). Robeson’s success was not enough, however, to challenge the still standing

33 Agate’s review got published in the Sunday Times on May 19, 1930. The theatre critic James Agate is also known for dismissing Robeson’s performance as “nigger Shakespeare” (Agate 1943: 287). Comments like these reveal his highly racist thinking and provide important context for the evaluation of his comments about Robeson’s performance(s). 37 dominance of ‘blackfacing’ Othello in English theatres. Only by 1981, when “blacking up”, in Hankey’s words, “had become kind of a scandal” (2005: 97), this long-standing tradition of depicting ‘blackness’ in English theatres found its end. Also in the United States, Othello’s race should remain a highly explosive issue.11 years after the civil rights movement formally ended, the sight of an African American Othello kissing Desdemona was still enough to produce “audible gasps from the audience and a string of hate letters” (Neill 2006: 11).

As the discussion of Othello’s stage tradition and receptive history has shown, the play has been highly ‘effective’ in laying bare racist sentiments within its directors, actors, theatregoers, and critics, as well as in projecting racist prejudices, stereotypes, and racial anxieties onto the theatrical stage and the plot of Othello. All the way until the end of the 20th century, it seems, a major portion of the criticism of and racist backlash against the play has been directed at the character of Othello and the artificial or ‘real’ ‘blackness’ that the actor playing him represented. The fact that so many viewers, producers and actors took issue with the casting of the role and charged it with tremendous meaning, hence, remains symptomatic for one issue in the reception of Othello that Schabert pointed out: Shakespeare’s tragedies both evoke and require a strong moral engagement (cf. 2018: 259), to which I shall add on, as has been mentioned before, the ideological engagement. Therefore, the reception of Othello, unsurprisingly, seems to have been swayed heavily not only by preconceptions based on the social, cultural, political and geographical context of the play’s performances, but more importantly by the recipients’ personal ‘ideological and moral compass’ – the ambiguity in the conflicting responses to Othello provides ample evidence to support this theory.

38

3 What is Said, What is Meant: The Analysis of Racist Discourse in Othello

I fully agree with Julie Hankey when she says that “the text of a play is only its starting point, and that only in production is its potential realised and capable of being appreciated fully” (2005: vii). However, it seems conspicuous to me that in the (scholarly) engagement with Othello, racism in the play did not only fail to be the starting point, but apparently no point of ‘real’ interest at all. As the previous chapter has shown, the main concern in the discussion seems to have been Othello’s blackness and a number of (racist) implications that came with his complexion. What is now commonly acknowledged is that, in Othello, issues of race and racism are written into the play by Shakespeare, acted into it by its performers, and read into it by the viewers. Suggesting parity between them and their influence on issues of race and racism in Othello would seem short-sighted to me. Yet, in terms of the prominence they received throughout various phases in the (scholarly) engagement with those aspects, the analysis of racist discourse seems to have dropped off drastically compared to analyses of the play’s theatrical and critical afterlife. In simpler terms: the speech acts in the play seemed to be of no special interest for a long time, while the mere depiction of Othello’s ‘blackness’ on stage proved enough to evoke fierce replies as well as reactive-responses.

The discussion of race and racism in Othello throughout its stage tradition and receptive history has shown the following: the play, its performances and their reactions to it seemed to have primarily been focussed on visual input and on what was seen on stage.34 Hence, to say that the play is infused with issues of race is without a doubt justified.35 The questions that have not yet been answered, however, are how what happens in the play itself – mainly through speech acts, but also through the plot – impacts the issue of race and racism in Othello? What is ‘achieved’ through the text? What are the characters saying? What are the intentions and implication of the racist insinuations that no character in Othello seems to be able to withdraw from? What do they mean? Is the play itself racist after all? Particularly with the latter question also renowned scholars seemed to have to struggled with, as Virginia Vaughan’s following statement reveals: “I think this play is racist and I think it’s not […] [T]he discourse of racial difference is inescapably embedded in the play just as it was embedded in Shakespeare’s culture and our own” (1996: 69f).

34 In his enlightening essay “Unproper Beds: Race Adultery and the Hideous Othello”, Neill suggests that what could not be seen on stage might, perhaps, be equally as important (cf. 1989. 383-412). 35 Particularly in consideration of the staggering amount of racist insinuations on the ‘type of blackness’ of the painted actor playing Othello, the actors ‘own blackness’, or Shakespeare’s choice of a Black main protagonist to begin with. 39

Vaughan makes aware of something fundamental when engaging with the textual sphere of race and racism in Othello: the play is firmly located in a very specific social, historical, and cultural context; the investigation of Shakespeare’s many (possible) influences and intertexts heavily supports this notion. Influenced by ethnographic and cultural material, he did not only create his ‘own’ fictitious Venetian society that, in the eye of an interracial marriage and the apparent social mobility of a ‘Moor’, was able to express shocking racism, but also represented a precise snapshot of the xenophobic world-view(s) prevalent in Elizabethan England.36 In such a setting, Schülting is convinced, Othello struggles to (spiritually) locate himself in either the occident or ‘the Other’. Towards the end of the story, he has internalized Iago’s racist stereotypes to such a degree that he himself questions that Desdemona would be capable of loving somebody like him, even though Desdemona’s love for Othello was founded on the exoticism and mystique that his stories about Africa or the handkerchief represented (cf. 2018: 540ff).

Just as Othello fails to locate himself, his character conception is highly ambiguous, which can have a major impact on the analysis of racist insinuations in Othello. As already mentioned, Shakespeare’s conception of his play’s main protagonist was largely based on Cinthio’s model, but also got fleshed out with sources such as Africanus, Pliny, or Hakluyt. Hence, Berry argues that he was not constructed as “a member of a particular society but a composite ‘African’, a synthesis of details drawn from Leo’s descriptions of both ‘tawny’ and ‘black’ Moors” (1990: 316f). Othello, in his words, is a testimony to Shakespeare’s “resistance both to negative stereotyping and abstract universalizing” (1990: 316f). Therefore, the composition of the character of Othello directly responds to what 16th century engagements with ‘racial Others’ and people of colour, in terms of prejudices and stereotypes, have brought into national culture. According to Hunter, Othello was fitted into a “received image of what was important” (Hunter 1964: 40). Thus, not only the conception of Othello and all the other characters, but also the play’s plot and its discourse, were heavily influenced by Shakespeare’s engagement with and connection to 16th century culture, society, and history. As a consequence, the historical context is a major shaping factor in the creation of Othello. The (racist) stereotypes that readers and audiences of the play are confronted with respond to an early-modern European racial consciousness and were, as Hunter also did not fail notice, received wholly differently back then than in the 19th century or today (cf. 1990: 40).

36 According to Shaw, “genetic differences amongst humans have always been a source of prejudice, discontent and other evils. […] Interracial marriages are often frowned upon in some societies, and a great fascination exists for interracial marriage of the black and white combination” (1995: 84). 40

This assessment leads me to the second part of Vaughan’s quote and the idea that the reception of the play and the engagement with Shakespeare’s narration is also very much dependent on the contemporary background of the reading or the performance. Of course, it is possible to put Othello, its plot, characters, and speech acts in a certain historical context. In its analysis, however, the play is being measured against the context in which the respective reception or analysis is taking place in. This is a circumstance that, it seems to me, particularly impacts the engagement with the racist discourse in Othello and an issue that heavily depends on the recipient’s own ‘moral and ideological compass’. Orkin, for example, acknowledges racist sentiment in the play, but because it is largely confined to Iago, Roderigo and Brabantio, whose actions are continuously challenged and discredited throughout the play, argues that the play is not racist: “In its fine scrutiny of the mechanisms underlying Iago’s use of racism, and in its rejection of human pigmentation as a means of identifying worth, the play, as it always has done, continues to oppose racism” (1987: 188). However, based on two flaws in Orkin’s argumentation, as Neill points out, others have been reluctant to define Othello as an anti-racist play quite as emphatically as Orkin did: firstly, he “fails to explain why so many critics […] should have been seduced into dangerous mis-reading” and secondly, his claim is “founded on assumptions about the transhistorical significance of ‘race’ that are open to significant question” (Neill 2006: 121). Quite contrary to Orkin’s take stands the position of Doris Adler and others, who recognize a racist subtext in the ways also the ‘non-racist’ characters in Othello use colour as a powerful vehicle to drive the discourse and correlate things associated with ‘blackness’ with something negatively charged. This approach takes into account discourse that is omnipresent throughout the play and far more nuanced than the blatant racism that Orkin located in the utterances of characters such as Iago, Roderigo, and Brabantio.

Adler’s and Orkin’s theories are only two examples that make aware of the argumentative space that the analysis of (racist) discourse in Othello allows. Just as has been shown in the investigation of Othello’s stage tradition and receptive history, the discussion of the play on a textual level allows for ‘subjective evaluations’. Othello, as I have argued, inevitably becomes what you want it to be, or, in the words of Pechter: “Focusing on race and gender (and on class, ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality too, […]) the play talks about exactly what we want it to talk about, but then tells us exactly what we do not want to hear” (1999: 6). In the following chapter, I will hence provide both a discussion of Othello’s interpretive history, where I shall deal with various analyses of racist discourse in the play, followed by a contemporary reading of race, racism and racist discourse in Othello.

41

3.1 ‘Let’s agree to disagree’: Interpretations of Race and Racism in Othello

Vaughan’s response to Othello – “I think this play is racist and I think it’s not […] [T]he discourse of racial difference is inescapably embedded in the play just as it was embedded in Shakespeare’s culture and our own.” (1996: 69f) – brilliantly pinpoints one of the core-issues in the scholarly engagement with the racial dimensions of Shakespeare’s play. It would be problematic to assume, against one’s better judgement, that Shakespeare’s contemporaries and generations of critics and recipients following them were incapable of attitudes that we today might identify as racist. At the same time, however, it would be a gross misunderstanding to assume a congruency between ‘their’ prejudices and our own (cf. Neill 2006: 125). Hence, as Neill points out,

any attempt to read back into the early modern period an idea of ‘race’ based on post-Enlightenment taxonomy is doomed to failure. To talk about race in Othello is to fall into anachronism; yet not to talk about it is to ignore something fundamental about a play that has rightly come to be identified as a foundational text in the emergence of modern European racial consciousness […]. (1998: 361)

The geographical and temporal discrepancy between approaches towards and understandings of race and racism, thus, created a vast ‘argumentative space’ that scholars and critics alike were challenged, but also encouraged to fill. As a consequence, responses to what Little recognized as the “three structural elements of Shakespeare’s play” (1993: 306) – Othello’s ‘blackness’, the interracial marriage to Desdemona, her assassination – and the overall engagement with race and racism in Othello became both an ‘interdisciplinary effort’ as well as a ‘hopeless’ quest to find ‘truths’ on a matter which will not allow any.

Martin Orkin, who I already referenced at the beginning of this chapter, provided one of the more frequently and controversially discussed interpretations on the racial dimensions in Othello. In his essay “Othello and the ‘plain face’ of Racism”, he advocates for Othello as a play which, “in its rejection of human pigmentation as a means of identifying worth […,] as it has always done, continues to oppose racism” (1987:188). He bases his argument on the idea that the blatant racism that particularly Iago, but also Roderigo and Brabantio display, is being constantly discredited by the play and its actions. Even though, in the words of Orkin, “no evidence emerges in the detail of the language to suggest that [the Venetian court] share[s] a hidden racist disapprobation of Othello”, Orkin nonetheless acknowledges that there are indeed speakers besides the three named above, who “appear to refer to or draw upon racist discourse. These include the Duke, Desdemona, and even Othello himself” (1987: 170f). One could very well make the argument that the fact that also ‘non-racist characters’ in the play seem to draw

42 from such discourse, or rather fail to reject the accusations and racist insinuations brough forth, considerably weakens Orkin’s claim.

Michael Neill, who emerged as one of the most prominent critics of Orkin’s ‘revisionist reading’ of Othello, repeatedly responded to the shortcomings of his fellow scholar’s interpretation. Not only, as already quoted above, does he “[fail] to explain why so many critics […] should have been seduced into dangerous mis-reading” (Neill 2006: 121); Neill also offers his criticism at Orkin’s emphatic claim that the play ‘opposes racism’. Instead of doing just that, Neill is convinced that the play

engages its audiences in a conspiracy to lay naked the scene of forbidden desire, only to confirm that the penalty for such exposure is death and oblivion. […] It doesn’t ‘oppose racism’, but (much more disturbingly) illuminates the process by which such visceral superstitions were implanted in the very body of the culture that formed us. (1989: 412)

Another point of criticism stems from Orkin’s use of the term ‘racism’ in the context of Shakespeare’s alleged disapproval of such ideologies: “It would no more have been possible for Shakespeare to ‘oppose racism’ in 1604, than for Marlowe to ‘oppose anti-semitism’ in 1590: the argument simply could not be constituted by those terms” (1989: 393), Neill points out. Now, and here I have to come to Orkin’s defence, he himself suggested that the term ‘colour prejudice’ might be better suited for the discussion of Othello in the 16th and 17th century.37 Still, as Neill argues, Orkin’s interpretation remains to be in question as it was “founded on assumptions about the transhistorical significance of ‘race’ that are open to significant question” (2006: 121).

Perhaps, Orkin stands out from other interpreters of Othello because he so emphatically exclaimed what others either did not dare to do or were ‘not able’ to do. He is, however, only one out of a number of scholars who attempted to fill the ‘argumentative space’ that Othello, for the discussion of racial themes inside the play, provides. At the beginning of this chapter I have called interpretations of Othello an ‘interdisciplinary affair’. Indeed, what is conspicuous about scholarly engagements with racial dimensions in the play is the fact that almost every interpretation is based on the fruitful exchange between literary studies and other ‘sciences’. In attempts to reconstruct Othello’s formation history, the (original) impact of the play on its highly diverse audiences, or the social, political, and cultural circumstances as a major shaping

37 To be historically exact and because the term ‘racism’ only developed in the beginning of the 20th century, many scholars, prefer to use ‘colour prejudice’ when referring to attitudes that, by modern standards, would qualify as racist. In his essay, Orkin uses those terms interchangeably as “[t]he one implies, if does not always lead to, the other” (1987: 168). 43 factor of racism both inside and outside of the play, a close engagement between historical and cultural studies has developed.38

For most scholars, it seems, social, cultural, and literary history were the most reliable sources to supplement their interpretations. There have, however, also been extensive engagements with gender studies and psychology, which provided a wholly different point of view for the discussion of race and racism in Othello. Janet Adelman, for example, provided a highly insightful psychoanalytic exploration of the relationship between Othello and Iago and how Shakespeare’s antagonist inflicts racist behaviour onto the other characters. For her, Iago is a master at splitting others. In his seduction of Othello, he ‘introduces’ him to the world of self- alienation, as well as self-contamination: According to Adelman, “Othello becomes a toxic object inside him,” (1997: 133) who, towards the end, experiences “his own blackness as a contamination” (1997: 144). Marjorie St Rose is another scholar who, without dismissing it, took Othello out of its historical context and interpreted the dynamics of the play that, in her words, are shaped by both “the oppressive ideology of patriarchy [as well as] that of racism” (2002: 25). Analysing the language in the play, St Rose does not only recognise traces of apparent racism, but in many statements also an implied misogyny. For her, Iago’s highly racist ‘warning’ “even now, very now, an old black ram is tupping your white ewe” (1, 1, 89-90) devalues both Othello as well as Desdemona:

Iago’s abuse in such inflammatory statements […] is certainly directed at Othello’s race in an attempt to arouse deeply ingrained fears of miscegenation in the audience. But more than this is operating here. This abuse, though directed at Othello as a black man, is also aimed at Desdemona as a woman. “Tupping” degrades her by figuring her as an object which has something done to it; she is not an equal participant in the act of sex. (2002: 27)

If Othello becomes the victim of racism, Desdemona inevitably shares his fate. As her love makes her a pariah in the eyes of her father and her society, she is both extradited to and dependant on Othello; she is left in his power, so to speak. In the end, St. Rose concludes, Othello is “as unable to escape from his blackness as from his ‘man-ness’” (2002: 32).

These researchers are only representative examples of the extensive research on interpretations of the racial dimensions in Othello. What they do, however, is make aware of the variety of approaches and viewpoints taken in order to work on the text and decode its meaning. “Othello”, in the words of Pechter, “remains in many ways a strange play, lodged in a past

38 Neill even went as far as calling Othello the first work in English to engage with ‘racial feeling’ in the eye of its firm embeddedness in “the very period in English history in which something we can now identify as racialist ideology was beginning to evolve under the pressures of nascent imperialism” (1989: 394). 44 whose beliefs and assumptions are not easily accommodated to our own” (1999: 3). Perhaps, this is one reason why the repeated engagement with the play has productively brought forth a number of different results and discussions; or, as Pechter also points out: “Interpretations always admit the possibility of disagreement” (1999: 175). The discussion of Orkin’s essay and its shortcomings in the analysis of the implications of racist discourse in the play’s stands exemplary for this claim. Different interpretations do not necessarily have to lead to disagreement, however, as the apparent coexistence of analyses of Othello’s identity and its impact of the play have shown: while Schülting argues that Othello’s lack of an ‘ontological identity (“ontologische Identität”) ultimately led to the internalization of Iago’s racist stereotypes and doubts that Desdemona could love a ‘black man’ (cf. 2018: 540f), Adelman notes that by Iago ‘whispering poison’ in Othello’s ear, he became “so self-divided that he can take arms against himself, Christian against Turk, literalizing self-division by splitting himself graphically down the middle” (1997: 128).39 Bartels, on the other hand, sees in Othello “neither an alienated nor assimilated subject, but a figure defined by two worlds, a figure […] whose ethnicity occupies one slot, professional interests another, compatibly” (1997: 61). For her, Othello is the possessor of a “dual, rather than divided, identity” (1997: 61).

At the beginning of this chapter, I made the claim that interpretations of the racial dimension in Othello are both an ‘interdisciplinary effort’ as well as a quest for ‘truths’ where there are none. The engagement with Orkin’s theory, but also the coexistence of different approaches to Othello’s identity or the impact of racist discourse in the play, so one could argue, support this claim. Othello, just like most pieces of literature or art, does not allow for objective interpretations, but merely subjective evaluations that might, if they stand the test of critical (re)considerations, turn into a consensus view. Thus, Othello’s interpretive history is impacted as much by the fruitful discussion of various theories, as by ‘utilization’ of the argumentative space that enabled them.

3.2. Who is Racist and Why? A Contemporary Reading of Racist Discourse in Othello

“[N]ow sir be judge to yourself, whether I in any just term am affin’d / To love the Moor” (1, 1, 38-39), Iago (re)assures Roderigo of his hatred of a yet to be named man. What the audience is very much aware of from this point on, however, is his race. It is a distinguishing

39 For Schülting, Othello’s ‘inner conflict’ is manifested in his affiliation with both Christianity and as a fierce enemy of the Turks as well as the African continent and the fantastic tales about the continent (cf. 2018: 541). 45 characteristic which, it seems, Iago and Roderigo consider much more important than the name their enemy owns. As the discussion of the origin and use of the term ‘Moor’ in the play’s historical context as well as its stage tradition and receptive history has shown, it was a highly ambiguous denomination for people of colour. Therefore, also the textual analysis of Othello cannot ignore the significance of this term, and one is confronted with the same question that also playwrights, stage directors and critics of the play have grappled with: What race does Othello have? And a possible follow-up question which especially applies to the language of the play: Is the racist discourse that Iago, Roderigo, and Brabantio display shortly after Othello’s designation as a ‘Moor’ a grotesque overgeneralization and arbitrary application of racist stereotypes, or a direct response to his appearance? Neill points out that the slurs that especially those three characters use clearly suggest one thing, namely that Shakespeare intended his hero to be a ‘black’ African (cf. 2006: 45). In the following analysis of racist discourse in Othello, I will thus follow what has become the consensus view about Othello’s race and assume him to be a ‘black Moor’. Or, in the words of G.K. Hunter: “Shakespeare intended his hero to be a black man – that much I take for granted” (1967: 139).

Right away, this assessment influences the reading of the play. On a street in nightly Venice, Shakespeare introduces Iago and Roderigo as the main propagators of racist discourse in Othello. Discussing the elimination of ‘the Moor’, who Roderigo refers to as “thicklips” (1, 1, 67), they decide to awake Brabantio, a senator of Venice and father of Roderigo’s love interest. In their attempts to arouse him and stir animosity, they fall back on highly racist discourse: Iago exclaims “Even now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe; arise, arise […] or else the devil make a grandsire of you” (1, 1, 88-91), adding that Brabantio will have his daughter “cover’d with a Barbary horse” (1, 1, 110-111) and creating the image of Othello and Desdemona “making the beast with two backs” (1, 1, 116). Similarly, Roderigo locates her in “the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor” (1, 1, 127). In their attempts to rile up Brabantio, Iago’s and Roderigo’s discourse stands out because of its shocking racism. Calling the yet to be named Othello ‘thick lips’, ‘black ram’, ‘Barbary horse’ and ‘lascivious Moor’, they do not only directly draw attention to the dark complexion of his skin and his bodily features, but also frame him as stereotypical ‘black Moor’; he is ugly, lustful, of savage nature and driven by feral instinct(s).40 Distinctive in their “violently eroticizing and racializing report” (Adelman 1997: 125) is the dehumanization of the ‘black man’ and the interracial ‘love-act’. Standing out is also their use of ‘erotic stereotypes’ and binary oppositions – the “fair daughter” (1, 2, 123) and the

40 As already pointed out, ‘Barbary horse’ is one of the few slurs which opens the possibility of Othello not being a black African as it would geographically locate his ethnicity in Northern Africa. 46

“lascivious Moor” (1, 1, 127) – in order to evoke sexual anxieties and create the image of something unspeakably adulterate. Both racial insults, ‘black ram’ and ‘Barbary horse’, are certainly directed at his complexion and aim at the arousal of “deeply ingrained fears of miscegenation in the audience [as well as in Brabantio]” (St Rose 2002: 26). The graphic image of ‘the white ewe’ being ‘tupped’ is revealing: just as Othello, Desdemona is being dehumanized as the ‘unholy union’ between them is supposedly taking place. Furthermore, Othello’s ‘tupping’ of Desdemona degrades her as an unequal participant of sex, as St Rose’s gender-conscious reading of this scene suggests (cf. 2002: 26). As the ‘black ram’ defiles the ‘white ewe’, or the ‘black’ man violates the ‘white’ woman, the graphic descriptions of the love-act between Othello and Desdemona are not only being portrayed as grotesquely unnatural, but also imply the sexual danger of ‘Moors’, which joins the ranks of the highly racist and stereotypical image of people of colour that Iago and Roderigo create in the opening stages of the play. This image stands in close correlation to the Elizabethan ‘portfolio’ of racist stereotypes, as the investigation of the play’s historical context has shown.

“This accident is not unlike my dream” (1, 1, 143), Brabantio bursts out at the outrageous claims that Iago and Roderigo have brought forth. Quickly, he supposes, however, that Desdemona must have fallen prey to “charms / By which the property of youth and maidhood / Maybe abus’d” (1, 1, 172-174), and only shortly after, he unleashes a fierce attack at Othello, accusing him of bewitching and stealing his daughter: “O thou foul thief, where hast thou stow’d my daughter? / Damn’d as thou art, thou hast enchanted her” (1, 2, 61- 62). It defies all logic, he rambles on, that Desdemona, who “shunnd / The wealthy curled darlings of our nation,” (1, 2, 67-68), would suddenly “[r]un from her guardage to the sooty bosom / Of such a thing as [Othello]” (1, 2, 70-71). He therefore must have “practis’d on her with foul charms / Abus’d her delicate youth with drugs or minerals / That weakens motion” (1, 2, 74-75). Othello, he concludes, is “an abuser of the world, a practiser / Of arts inhibited” (1, 2, 78-79).

Contrary to Roderigo and Iago, who throughout the play would only unleash their racist attacks at Othello when he is not present, Brabantio is the only character, besides Emilia, who directly addresses him. His outburst is revealing. Referring to Othello as ‘thing’, emphasizing his ‘sooty bosom’, and insinuating that he is a ‘practitioner of foul arts’, his slurs stand in close correlation to the stereotypes that Iago and Roderigo have just previously established. Brabantio’s racist attack is interesting because his outburst at Othello is instigated by outsiders and totally opposes the relationship he had with him before; as Othello later mentions: “Her father lov’d me, oft invited me” (1, 3, 128). Viewing Othello as a professional soldier, he had nothing but affection

47 for him. However, “[f]orced to consider him in a more intimate relationship”, Shaw points out, “he is trapped in the cultural stereotype of the black man as ugly, cruel, lustful, and dangerous” (1995: 87). Envisioning his daughter in the clasps of a ‘lascivious Moor’, ‘black ram’ and ‘Barbary horse’, Iago and Roderigo confront him with the stereotypical sexuality and animality that is allegedly innate in people of colour, and which should also carry over to Brabantio’s grandchildren, as Iago foreshadows that “[y]ou’ll you’re your nephews neigh to you; you’ll have coursers for cousins, / and gennets for germans.” (1, 1, 111-113)

As the second scene of the first act ends, Brabantio decides to call upon the Duke to condemn Othello of Desdemona’s bewitching. His last words are highly interesting: “Mine’s not an idle cause, the duke himself, / Or any of my brothers of the state, / cannot but feel this wrong, as ‘twere their own. For if such actions may have passage free, / Bond slaves, and pagans, shall our statesmen be” (1, 2, 96-99). The subtext of this statement allows for the following interpretation: obviously, Brabantio feels assured that his cause will not fall on deaf ears, which is partly owed to his social status. More importantly, however, this quote, it seems to me, implies that the match between Othello and Desdemona – or rather Othello’s enchantment of Desdemona – is as outrageous for him as it is for his ‘brothers’, whose loved ones could also fall prey to the ‘foul charms’ of ‘black’ men. Hence, at least the highly racist stereotype of the sexual danger of ‘Moors’ does not merely seem to be Iago’s, Roderigo’s, and Brabantio’s pipe dream, but deeply ingrained in Venetian society’s consciousness. “Othello’s action in eloping with Desdemona”, Pechter notes, “has in effect transformed Venice from the protected and protecting center to a vulnerable outpost overrun by infidels” (1999: 36).

“Here comes Brabantio and the valiant Moor” (1, 3, 47), the First Senator exclaims and arguably provides the first break from the previous conjunctions of the term ‘Moor’ with its racist stereotypes – all of a sudden, the ‘lascivious Moor’ is no more. Interestingly, however, the term is still used as racial designation. Brabantio and ‘the valiant Moor’ appear in front of the Senate, not Brabantio and Othello. Even though the Duke refers to Othello by his name – “valiant Othello” (1, 3, 48) – immediately after the Senator announces their appearance, the initial statement still implies a differentiation based on skin colour and fittingly, Othello should refer to the senators as “approv’d good masters” (1, 3, 77) later. In front of the Duke, Brabantio doubles down on the racist accusation of Othello’s enchantment of his daughter: Desdemona, he says, has been “abus’d, stol’n from me and corrupted, / By spells and medicines, bought of mountebanks” (1, 3, 60-61). He also questions that she, “a maiden never bold of spirit, / [could] fall in love with what she fear’d to look on?” (1, 3, 98) For Brabantio, this is “[a]gainst all rules

48 of nature” (1, 3, 101). With “practices of cunning hell” (1, 3, 102) and “mixtures powerful o’er blood” (1, 3, 104), Othello must have “wrought up on her” (1, 3, 106). Once again, the unnatural match between the ‘black’ Othello and ‘white’ Desdemona is the most striking image that Brabantio creates. Implied in this statement is also that he does not see Othello as human, but a ‘what’, playing ‘foul charms’ on Desdemona. Apparently, she herself found his ‘blackness’ revolting or was at least scared of him. Thus, Brabantio ascribes her love to witchcraft because “he cannot believe that she could otherwise overcome the horror of Othello’s blackness” (Berry 1990: 321).

“Othello, speak, / Did you by indirect and forced courses / Subdue and poison this young maid’s affections?” (1, 3, 110-111), the Duke encourages the culprit to respond to Brabantio’s accusations where he confirms that he has indeed, in a sense, becharmed Desdemona – not by means of ‘foul magic’, however. It was the story of his life, and fantastic narrations of “the Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders” (1, 3, 144) that “Desdemona would seriously incline” (1, 3, 146). “With a greedy ear”, so Othello, Desdemona would “devour up [his] discourse” (1, 3, 149-150) and give him for his pains a “world of sighs” (1, 3, 158). “She loved me for the dangers I had pass’d, / And I lov’d her for she did pity them” (1, 3, 167-168), Othello ends his plea. Throughout his stories, Othello does not only create himself as ‘mysterious outsider’, the references to slavery and Plinian monsters also firmly locate him within the spectrum of Elizabethan stereotypes of people of colour. Othello’s declaration is also interesting as it allows, according to Schülting, for the interpretation that Desdemona’s love is, paradoxically, based on the racist stereotypes as she falls in love with the exoticism and mystique of Othello. (cf. 2018: 543)

After hearing both parties, the Duke does not judge prematurely – I think this tale would win my daughter too, …” (1, 3, 171) – and even Brabantio seems surprised with the plea. “I pray you hear [Desdemona] speak, / If she confess that she was half the wooer, / Destruction light on me” (1, 3, 176-177), he desperately attempts to swing the verdict in his favour. As Desdemona acknowledges Othello as her husband, she also offers one of the play’s most interesting readings of racist subtext. Declaring obedience to “the Moor my lord” (1, 3, 188) and that she “did love the Moor” (1, 3, 248), the use of the term ‘Moor’ in this context stands out again for its application not as a racist denomination but a racial designation that is still charged with tremendous meaning; one cannot but to feel reminded of Iago’s, Roderigo’s and Brabantio’s definitions of ‘Moors’. Even more interesting is the circumstance that she refers to Othello only by his first name after applying a ‘patina of whiteness’ onto his ‘black face’ – “I

49 saw Othello’s visage in his mind” (1, 3, 253). This quote can be read as the implied confirmation of Brabantio’s claim that Desdemona ‘feared to look at Othello’. For Berry,

this implicit denial of physical attraction shows that Desdemona tries to separate Othello’s essential humanity from his appearance, but it also shows that she is insensitive to and disquieted by the insinuations that there is something unnatural in such a love. She does not say that she found Othello’s blackness beautiful, but that she saw his visage in his mind. (1990: 321)

Desdemona does not love Othello because he is a black man, but despite his ‘blackness’, and only after bestowing a ‘spiritual whiteness’ onto Othello’s ‘black face’, her love can tear down the colour barrier.

Her quote also stands in close correlation to the Duke’s attempt to placate Brabantio: “If virtue no delighted beauty lack, / Your son-in-law is far more fair than black.” (1, 3, 289-290) Once again, this quote reveals racist sentiment and is not at all – after Iago’s, Roderigo’s, and Brabantio’s display of blatant racism – to be read as the redemption of Venice’s society as not ‘that racist’. In the eye of the impending Turkish attack on Cyprus, Othello’s qualities are desperately needed. His absolution in the eye of Brabantio’s suit is primarily based on Venice’s intentions to send him into the battlefield, not on the denial of the racist accusations brought forth. While the ‘termination of the employment’ between Brabantio and Othello has led to his racist attack, the senate still depends on him, hence not letting themselves get carried away with a premature conviction or racist attack themselves. Orkin argues that throughout the play, “no evidence emerges in the detail of the language to suggest that [the senate shares] a hidden racist disapprobation of Othello” (1987: 169). Yet, it is only Othello’s virtue and military qualities that make him, in the eyes of the Venetian senate, as valuable as a ‘white’ person, or perhaps not ‘as black’ as his colour might let one assume. Only Othello receives retribution and gets ‘awarded’ a ‘metaphorical whiteness’; “the black-skinned Othello is exonerated as being metaphorically white”, Adler points out (1974: 252). The ‘common black man’, however, so one could argue, is still perceived as inferior, savage, and lust driven. The subtext therefore depicts ‘fair’ and ‘white’ as beautiful and virtuous, ‘black’ as foul, ugly, evil, and afflicted with the highly racist and stereotypical image of ‘Moors’.

The first act of Othello reveals a deeply racist society and especially Desdemona and the Senate make aware that racism in the play and its characters is a far more nuanced matter than the highly racist slurs by Iago, Roderigo, and Brabantio might have initially suggested. What has appeared more clearly, however, is that the open display of racist philosophies is initiated by the personal sensitivities of those three. Brabantio’s grotesque and racist attacks in the eye of

50 the interracial marriage between Othello and Desdemona threatening his status allow for a first glimpse at Venice’s societal racism. Only in front of the Senate and implied in Othello’s absolution, one really manages to grasp the dimensions of structural racism in the play; even though Othello is being framed as a “great Christian gentleman, against whom Iago’s [, Roderigo’s, and Brabantio’s] insinuations break like water against granite” (Hunter 1967: 150). In fact, however, both the Duke’s defence as well as Desdemona’s display of affection reveal racist implications and invite for a highly interesting reading of racist subtext(s) in Othello. The Duke defends Othello solely based on the premise that the state depends on his military qualities in order to defeat the Turkish fleet. Desdemona, on the other hand, does not fall in love with Othello because “of the totality of whom he is (including his being a black man)” (St Rose 2002: 26), but because of his exoticism and qualities of mind. Subsequently, both the Senate as well as Desdemona apply a ‘patina of whiteness’ onto Othello which sets him apart from other ‘Moors’. However, the racist image of ‘Moors’ as ugly, savage, lustful ‘creatures’ still remains an essential part of Venice’s social consciousness. Othello does not only identify himself as ‘pariah’ in such a society, apologising for his ‘rude speech’ (cf. 1, 3, 81) and locating himself in a world full of battles, sieges, and Plinian monsters. He also remains an outsider as a Black person that does not only contradict the common stereotypical image, but also as a ‘black man’ in a society that technically does not value ‘Moors’ as equivalent participants of society. He is, in fact, the “extravagant wheeling stranger, / Of here, and every where” (1, 1, 137-138) that Roderigo described him as.

While the setting changes from Venice to Cyprus with the Second Act, the diverse emergence of racism and the latent xenophobic undertone which has been established in the First Act remains unabated. The engagement with Othello and his ‘blackness’ ranks on a scale from “warlike Moor” (2, 1, 27) and “worthy governor” (2, 1, 30) to “devil” (2, 1, 225) and “dull Moor” (5, 2, 226). Iago once again resurfaces as the most striking instigator of racist discourse, who, in his persecution of Roderigo, draws from stereotypes that depict ‘Moors’ as devilish and hideous creatures and an unfit match for Desdemona. With the statement “These Moors are changeable in their wills” (1, 3, 347-348), Iago pledges that Roderigo should still have his fair shot at Desdemona’s love at the end of the First Act. Noticeably, Iago’s attitude changes once reaching Cyprus and his racist attacks at Othello focus as much on Othello’s ‘blackness’ and what it connotes (ugliness, lack of manners, lasciviousness), as on Desdemona’s realization of her ‘ideological roots’ which should lead to her rejection of Othello:

Her eye must be fed, and what delight shall / she have to look on the devil? When the blood is / made dull with the act of sport, there should be again to / inflame it, and give satiety a fresh appetite, liveliness in / 51

favour, sympathy in years, manners and beauties; all / which the Moor is defective in; now, for want of these re- / quir’d conveniences, her delicate tenderness will find ( itself abus’d, begin to heave the gorge, disrelish and abhor / the Moor, very nature will instruct her to it, and compel / her to some second choice. (2, 1, 224-233)

Against Iago’s prediction, Desdemona should not fall out of love with Othello, even though she notices fundamental changes in Othello’s character; “My lord is not my lord, nor should I know him, / Where he in favour as in humour alter’d” (3, 4, 121-122). Despite her unconditional love for her “noble Moor” (3, 4, 22), jealousy has covered his ‘spiritual whiteness’ with a veil of ‘blackness’. Desdemona now sees a very different ‘visage in Othello’s mind.’ Interestingly, however, this realization came but shortly after Desdemona declared Othello unable to feel jealousy when she exclaimed: “I think the sun where he was born / Drew all such humours from him” (3, 4, 26-27). Despite her enduring love, Desdemona, just as in the First Act, is unable to fully escape their society’s racist ideologies. While previously implied through silent acceptance, her response to Emilia’s question whether Othello is jealous is revealing and displays a correlation to the Elizabethan stereotype of the sun as the cause for the ‘Moor’s blackness’.41

The jealousy that Desdemona feels is so ‘untypical’ for Othello is being amplified by him experiencing his own ‘blackness’ as weakness in the cultural world(s) of Venice and Cyprus. From the very beginning of the play, he takes on the stereotype of the ‘less civilized’ African: “Rude am I in my speech, / And little blest with the set phrase of peace” (1, 3, 81-82). In act three, he ultimately senses a connection between his ‘blackness’ and his apparent inferiority, which becomes the main reason why he thinks Cassio was able to cuckold him. With the lines “Haply, for I am black, / And have not those soft parts of conversation / That chamberers have, or for I am declin’d / Into the vale of years, – yet that’s not much – / She’s gone, I am abus’d and my relief / must be to loathe her” (3, 3, 267-272), Othello once again touches on his rude speech. Even though Othello has declared himself inferior to ‘white people’, he has not yet reduced himself to the animal that Iago and Roderigo have made him out to be. Being convinced of Desdemona’s adultery, however, he reflects on himself wholly differently: “A horned man’s a monster, and a beast” (4, 1, 62), Othello proclaims to which Iago responds that “there’s many a beast then in a populous city, / and many a civil monster” (4, 1, 63-64). Othello calling himself

41 Desdemona, however, primarily uses this stereotype to explain his character which could also be read as her taking the “darkness of her husband’s skin as a positive sign of virtue” (Orkin 1987:174). 52 a ‘beast’ shows a striking resemblance to the highly racist image of people of colour that has been established by Iago and Roderigo as well as the image of Othello’s “savage madness” (4, 1, 54) when he suffers from his epileptic fit. This plays right into Iago’s hands whose oxymoronic conjunction of the civil and the monstrous can be directly applied to Othello; according to Neill, the “Moor’s ’civil’ veneer” combined with his “bestial essence [which] constitutes a double violation of nature” (2006: 142).

Despite Shakespeare’s separation of Othello from the racist fictions associated with his colour, Othello ends up strangling Desdemona in cold blood. It is this act that established the play’s last racist attack as Emilia, torn by grief and anger at the death of Desdemona, calls Othello “devil” (5, 2, 133), as well as “dull” (5, 2, 226) and “cruel Moor” (5, 2, 250). Emilia’s racist outburst is interesting because up to Desdemona’s murder, she is one of the few characters in the play who never alludes to Othello’s race. For Berry, however, her “cynical attitude towards men has apparently masked her revulsion against Othello’s blackness” (1990: 220). Framing Othello as stupid, savage and devilish, she makes use of the already well-established stereotypes of ‘Moors.’ Hence, her racist attack, one could argue, once again is a testimony to racist ideologies being far more than the ‘issue’ of a select few, but a omnipresent aspect within a whole society.

Throughout the play, racism appears in many shapes and forms, projecting Elizabethan stereotypes and cultural engagements with people of colour on a fictitious Venetian society; thus, Othello is definitely a product of its time. “It is Iago’s special triumph”, Neill points out, “to expose Othello’s color as the apparent sign of […] monstrous impropriety” (1989: 408). It is also Iago, whose overt racist baiting instigates most of the racist discourse in the play and proves sufficient to lay bare the structural racism prevalent in the play and its society: either in luring Roderigo into his intrigue against a sub-par enemy, or in riling Brabantio up against his son-in-law, leading to the Senate, Othello and Desdemona being forced to respond to his highly racist allegations and hereby showing that they are not free of such sentiment themselves. However, the covert racism that the statements of the Senate, Desdemona, Othello, and later also Lodovico expose, is particularly revealing of the deeply racist society that Othello takes place in.42 Still, in such a society, it is Iago, who “most adroitly pushes Othello towards the (re)discovery of his black origins” (Little 1993: 316). Interestingly, as Berry points out, “Othello never defends his blackness; nor does he defend the religion or culture that lies behind

42 Lodovico exclaims: “Is this the noble Moor, whom our full Senate / Call all in all sufficient? This the noble nature, / Whom passion could not shake? Whose solid virtue / The shot of accident, nor dart of chance, / Could neither graze nor pierce?” (4, 1, 206-264) 53 him” (1990: 323). Rather, Othello begins to experience the drawbacks of his origin (his ‘rude speech’ as well as other self-proclaimed and imposed (racist) stereotypes) as a disadvantage against his ‘opponent’ Michael Cassio, and his ‘blackness’ as a stain in a predominantly ‘white’ society.

3.2.1 Black vs. White – ‘Foul’ vs. ‘Fair’: Colour as a Vehicle to Communicate (Racial) Difference

‘Blackness’ (re)emerges as a highly ambiguous and problematic category throughout the play, and it is not merely Othello’s ‘bodily blackness’ that is being used to communicate racial difference and inferiority. In her highly interesting essay “The Rhetoric of Black and White in Othello”, Doris Adler points out five explicit denotations of ‘black’ and ‘blackness’, four of which can contribute to the reading of race and racism in the play: Firstly, ‘black’ is used as colour designation, when Othello, for example, is being framed as a ‘black ram’ (1, 1, 88) or ‘black devil’ (cf. 5, 2, 133). Secondly, it is used to designate a ‘Moor’, as in “the black Othello” (2, 2, 29). Thirdly, ‘blackness’ is being used to “denote the soil and filth of grime” (Adler 1974: 249), as evident, for example, in: “Her name […] is now begrim’d and black” (3, 3, 386-387). Lastly, the colour ‘black’ and ‘blackness’ are used to denote the morally foul, as in “blackest sins” (3. 3. 334), “black vengeance” (3, 3, 447) (cf. Adler 1974: 248f). ‘Whiteness’, in turn, constitutes the binary opposition to the filth and inferiority that its ‘black counterparts’ suggest. The “white ewe” (1, 1, 89) is being defiled by the “black ram” (1, 1, 88) and Desdemona’s “whiter skin of hers than snow” (5, 2, 4) appears in stark contrast to Othello’s dark skin. Furthermore, the colour white denotes cleanness and the state of being unsoiled, as well as a sign of virtue – “If virtue no delight beauty lack, / your son-in-law is far more fair than black” (1, 3, 289-290). As a consequence, “whiteness”, according to Adelman, “only emerges as a category when it is imagined as threatened by its opposite” (1997: 130).

The language of ‘black’ and ‘white’ has a substantial influence on racist discourse in the play, and especially the dynamic between bodily and metaphorical ‘blackness’ creates a highly ambiguous field of tension. Othello’s ‘blackness’ in appearance and the negative connotations to his complexion strongly correlate with the Elizabethan view of African men and furthermore constitute a strong racial designation. The slurs of Iago, Roderigo, and Brabantio are driven by racist stereotypes and combine both the bodily and the metaphorical. Othello is being framed as bestial, ugly, lascivious, an unnatural match for a European, ‘fair lady’, a practitioner of forbidden arts, as well as a being of volatile and savage nature. Interestingly, however, only 54 those with “self-serving reasons have viewed Othello as metaphorically black” (Adler 1974: 254). The Senate and Desdemona, for example, grant Othello a ‘metaphorical whiteness’. He is “valiant” (1, 3, 47 & 48), while Desdemona sees his ‘white visage’ in her mind (cf. 1, 3, 253). Othello is an exceptional case – he can be both, bodily ‘black’, while ‘white’ in spirit.

Throughout the play, the ‘blackness’ of a character is commonly being ascribed by other protagonists and is not at all a stigma which can only be attributed to the ‘black’ Othello. In such a way, Othello creates in Desdemona a “whore” (4, 2, 74), whose skin like “fair paper” (4, 2, 73) stands in stark contrast to her inward foulness. For him, Desdemona is “false as hell” (4, 2, 40), a “black weed” (4, 2, 69) and a “fair devil” (3, 3, 478) – an oxymoron that Othello coins to characterize his wife, and an insult which is especially interesting, because he himself is commonly referred to as the ‘devil. However, while “Othello may be the devil in appearance […,] it is the ‘fair’ Iago who gives birth to the dark realities of sin and death in the play” (1967: 151), Hunter notes. Interestingly, the characterization of Iago does not take place within the realm of characters, but primarily through the action in the play which affiliates “Iago with darkness and the demonic” (Adelman 1997: 130). Only in one instance, Othello calls Iago a “demi devil” (5, 2, 299). Just as Othello has felt he has been deluded by Desdemona’s fair skin, it is Iago’s ‘white’ skin, which conceals his spoiled, ‘black’ character until the very last moments of the play. “I am not what I am” (1, 1, 65), Iago correctly predicted at the beginning of the play.

In Othello, ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ are not to be reduced to means of merely describing the protagonists’ appearance. Rather, colour is being used as a powerful vehicle to connote racial difference and describe certain human qualities. Throughout the play, ‘black’ is exclusively ascribed to negativity, immorality, and bestiality, and the ideological connection between ‘blackness’ and its meaning(s) takes place in manifold ways. Furthermore, it appears in close correlation to the racist society that the play is located in, and in which ‘black people’ are as frowned upon as the qualities that their skin colour allegedly connotes. The ways in which the play allocates spiritual ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ allows for a more nuanced discussion of race and racism in Othello, especially since the negativity that the colour black insinuates does not necessarily have to correlate with a person’s complexion.

55

4 Post-Colonial Engagements: (Re)Considering Shakespeare’s Othello

Some 100 years after Christopher Columbus landed on the shores of what he hoped to be the Asian continent, Shakespeare lived and wrote at a time when European colonialism was still in its relatively early stages and English mercantile and colonial projects were only starting to emerge. As the discussion of Othello’s making and historical context has shown, these developments certainly influenced his works, and thus, as Tobias Döring notes, intertwined his creative legacy with the formation of the ‘British Empire’:

Zum einen fällt [die Entstehung seiner Werke] um 1600 nicht nur zeitlich mit den frühmodernen Expansions- und Kolonialbestrebungen zusammen; solche politischen Unternehmungen bilden nicht lediglich den thematischen Hintergrund für einige Shakespeare- Texte, sondern arbeiten als diskursive „Kon-Texte“ (F.Barker/P.Hulme) unmittelbar an der Bedeutungsproduktion und gesellschaftlichen Wirkungsmacht der Dramen mit. (2018: 682)

Especially Shakespeare’s engagement(s) with ‘racial Others’ and the conception of his ‘Jewish’, ‘Moorish’, and ‘savage’ characters are afflicted with the stereotypical images that manifested before and throughout England’s imperial experience(s). Of this circumstance, Othello’s status as a powerful intertext provides ample testimony of; Shakespeare’s play certainly mirrors an evolving Elizabethan consciousness.

As I have argued in my contemporary reading of the play, Othello’s ethnicity labels him a pariah in a predominantly White society. In such a setting, Loomba illustrates, “Othello moves from being a colonized subject on the terms of a white Venetian society and trying to internalize its ideology, toward being marginalized, outcast, and alienated from it in every way until he occupies his true position as its other” (1989: 48). As my reading, but especially the discussion of Othello’s making has also shown, the play’s Venetian setting conceals a fictitious society which is, ideologically, deeply connected with Elizabethan England. Therefore, the play does not only represent a distinct culture and society, but also responds to a developing national identity; an identity being “linked with colonial and imperial imperatives”, Fischlin and Fortier note (2000: 11). Partly owed to its tremendous success and the establishment of a ‘Shakespeare- industry’, Othello, amongst some of Shakespeare’s other ‘classics’, became an essential part of what Döring calls England’s ‘colonial education policy’ (cf. 2018: 682). During the colonial period, Shakespeare, hence, in the words of Loomba and Orkin, became the “quintessence of Englishness and a measure for humanity itself” (1998: 1). Furthermore, his works were being instrumentalised to perform ideological work, both, as they prefaced, “by interpreting his plays in highly conservative ways […] and by constructing him as one of the best, if not ‘the best’,

56 writer in the whole world” (1998: 1). Shakespeare’s works justified England’s alleged status as the pinnacle of civilisation and subsequently became, together with their author, “a prime signifier of imperial cultural authority” (Tompkins 1996: 15) all over the ‘Empire’, most prominently, however, in its new colonies.

According to Maria Löschnigg, it hence comes to no surprise “that his person as well as his plays have become the centre of post-colonial revisionary texts” (2013: 17). Metaphorically and etymologically, the term ‘post-colonialism’ could suggest a periodisation of history as a “series of stages along the epochal road from the ‘precolonial’, to ‘the colonial’ [and] to the ‘postcolonial’” (McClintock 1995: 10). In this case, the term would be used as a definitive subject, however, and therefore dismiss or even ‘wipe out’ the varied histories of so many colonised societies before, during and after their annexation. Thus, taking the term ‘post- colonial’ literal seems problematic. Loomba and Orkin also argue that implied in such an interpretation of the term, “the hierarchies of colonial rule are reinscribed in the contemporary imbalances between ‘First’ and ‘Third’ World nations”, which arises the justified question whether “once-colonized countries can be seen as properly post-colonial [or not]” (1998:15). Therefore, as Stuart Hall asserts, the ‘post-colonial’ is not “one of those periodisations based on epochal ‘stages’, when everything is reversed at the same moment, all the old relations disappear for ever and entirely new ones come to replace them” (1996: 247).

Post-colonialism, in Alan Larson’s words, is a “politically motivated, historical-analytical movement [which] engages with, resists, and seeks to dismantle the effects of colonialism in the material, historical, cultural-political, pedagogical, discursive, and textual domains” (1992: 156). According to Gilbert and Tompkins, it has a distinct political agenda, provides responses to European imperial aggression and is said to “dismantle the hegemonic boundaries and the determinants that create unequal relations of power based on binary oppositions such as ‘us and them’, ‘first world and third world’, ‘white and black’, ‘coloniser and colonised’” (1996: 2). In an English context, post-colonialism would designate the charged relationship between the empire’s hegemonic centre, London, and its colonized spaces. As Döring points out,

[d]er umstrittene Begriff „post-colonial“ […] bezeichnet grundlegend das Spannungsverhältnis zwischen dem hegemonialen „Zentrum“ London, das seine Repressions- und Repräsentationsmacht auch sprachlich und diskursiv ausübt, und der von ihm bestimmten „Peripherie“, die sich unterordnen und kulturell assimilieren muss oder aber durch oppositionellen „counter-discourse“ zur Wehr setzen kann. (2018: 682)

57

What Döring refers to as ‘counter discourse’ has become the primary anti-imperial tool for post- colonial writers and artists. ‘Counter discourse’, or rather ‘canonical counter discourse’, to quote Helen Tiffin who coined this term, aims to categorize the products of the “artistic and literary decolonization [which involves] a radical dis/mantling of European codes and a post- colonial subversion and appropriation of the dominant European discourses” (Tiffin 1987: 17). It refers to texts and performances which take up characters or basic assumptions of British canonical texts, such as Othello, and reveals as well as exposes them, subverting the pretext for post-colonial or progressive purposes. In the representational spectrum of post-colonial drama, there are two ‘counter discursive modes.’ Löschnigg points out that “we can basically distinguish between performative counter discourses which aim at revisionist performances of the script on the one hand, and active (oppositional) rewritings of the original on the other” (2013: 18).

In the following subchapters, I will discuss Shakespeare’s post-colonial legacy, starting with rewritings of Shakespeare’s Othello and the concept of ‘canonical counter discourse’ as well as its criticism as a (too) narrow concept for post-colonial engagements with the canon. In chapter 4.1, I shall also investigate how the case of Othello refutes the exclusiveness and applicability of the counter discursive model and provide examples of ‘non-conform’ engagements with the play, which have become parts of the post-colonial canon. Furthermore, I will discuss the ‘field of tension’ that categorizations of post-colonial engagements with Shakespeare into ‘adaptations’, ‘rewritings’, and ‘appropriations’ have created. In chapter 4.2, I will, focussing on the second half of the 20th century, engage with performative counter discourses to Othello on stage and screen. In this chapter, a major focus shall be put on revisionist productions and adaptations of the play, the introduction of multi-ethnic casts, as well as the potential of theatre as an “anti-imperial tool” (Gilbert, Tompkins 1996: 1). Then, I will continue my analysis of Shakespeare’s post-colonial legacy with an investigation of the United States’ special status in the post-colonial discussion. The ending point to this substantial chapter on Shakespeare and post-coloniality will be an analysis of an Othello rewriting set in the United States, namely Djanet Sears’ play Harlem Duet (1997). In this last chapter, I will put a particular focus on the ways in which the text captures the ‘Black diasporic experience’ and enters into the dialogue with its pretext.

58

4.1. Repetition, Resistance, Reinterpretation: A New Othello?

During the colonial period, Shakespeare represented the quintessence of Englishness and his works were ‘exploited’ to perform ideological work in the Empire’s colonies. Therefore, his person became a major point of interest for post-colonial writers, and his works the centre of what Löschnigg called “post-colonial revisionary texts”, a category of appropriations of classical European texts which “has come to be subsumed under the generic term of ‘canonical counter discourse’” (2013: 17). “Post-colonial counter discursive strategies”, according to Helen Tiffin who coined this term, “involve a mapping of the dominant discourse, a reading and exposing of its underlying assumptions, and the dis/mantling of these assumptions from the cross cultural standpoint of the imperially subjectified ‘local’” (1987: 23). It refers to texts and performances which take up characters or basic assumptions of (British) canonical texts, such as Othello, and reveal as well as expose them. Aiming at the “[destabilisation of] the power structure of the original text” (Gilbert, Tompkins 1996:16), the pretext gets subverted for post- colonial or progressive purposes. ‘Counter discourse’, Gilbert and Tompkins add, “seeks to deconstruct significations of authority and power exercised in the canonical text, to release its strangle-hold on representation and, by implication, to intervene social conditioning” (1996: 16).

Within counter discursive engagements with the colonial legacy of European classics, the active (oppositional) rewriting of Shakespeare’s ‘originals’ has, besides performative counter discourses which shall be discussed in the following chapter, established as a major category in the representational spectrum of post-colonial drama. Perhaps, rewriting has come up as the most inclusive term for written post-colonial engagements with Shakespeare. Döring points out that “[bei ‘post-kolonialen Werken‘] handelt es sich stets um ein Wechselspiel von Nachahmung, Ablehnung und Appropriierung, zusammenfassend treffend als ‘Rewriting’ zu bezeichnen, weil dieser Terminus beide Aspekte, die Wiederholung und den Wiederstand ausdrückt” (2018: 683). This term therefore condenses the opposing concepts of adaptation and appropriation, whose primary difference are the political implications that they (do not) convey. Adaptations are rather neutral and involve “the addition of new material alongside substantial cutting and rearrangement” (Kidnie 2009: 3). According to Linda Hutcheon, an adaptation is simultaneously “an acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works, a creative and interpretive act of appropriation/salvaging [as well as] an extended intertextual

59 engagement with the adapted work” (2006: 8). 43 Even though Hutcheon’s definition contains the act of ‘appropriating’, it is important to consider that the appropriation of a pretext fundamentally differs from the adaptation, which primarily refers to acts of cutting or re- arranging a pretext. One of the major differentiating factors and of particular importance for the discussion of post-colonial counter-discursive engagements is, however, the political element that appropriations, according to Löschnigg, always convey (cf. 2013: 18). This circumstance, one could argue, also elucidates the strong link between ‘appropriations’ and ‘canonical counter discourse’ as the term implies the political resistance that is the primary aspect of this concept.

Shakespeare’s role in the discussion of post-colonial ‘counter discourses’ is not to be underestimated. He is not only one of the world’s most prominent writers, but his works have also become the backbone of the British literary canon. Most importantly, however, his works have been exploited for the indoctrination of the Empire’s colonised spaces and its peoples with ‘English’ values and ideologies. Thus, England closely follows what could be described as the ‘European colonial model’ whose key feature, in the words of Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins, “has been the exertion of European authority over non-white peoples” (1996: 206). Therefore, the emphasis on race in post-colonial drama or other engagements with the literary, artistic, and ideological canon comes to no surprise. Of particular interest for post-colonial writers have become texts, whose engagement with marginalised or excluded ‘Others’ expose their ideological implications. In ‘revisionary texts’ of such Shakespearean works, figures like Aaron, Caliban, or Othello receive the primary focus of the action, hence challenging the structure of authority and positions of power from their pretexts (cf. Döring 2018: 683). It is, however, also the case of Othello which has raised justified reconsiderations of the exclusiveness of Tiffin’s model for post-colonial engagements with the canon. For Löschnigg, the issue with post-colonial criticism is the “tendency to categorize adaptations of canonical texts […] in terms of an either/or paradigm, either as oppositional with regard to the source texts, or as “evocations of a colonialist or neo-colonialist mentality” [(quoting Kapadia 2008: 1)]” (Löschnigg 2013: 18). Such an approach would then “[promote] a binary construction that restricts our understanding of Shakespeare’s iconicity as it continues to evolve through the appropriations of and references to his texts” (Kapadia 2008: 1). As Kapadia points out,

43 Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier even went as far as defining adaptations as a “performance practice [which] can involve both radical rewritings, and a range of directorial and theatrical practices” (2000:17), arguing that, in the words of Kidnie, “any modern or historical production of Shakespeare, whether theatrical, critical, or editorial is an adaptation” (2009: 5). However, such a terminology would empty the method of adapting of its meaning by suggesting a synonymous relation to ‘production’. 60 however, it is exactly his iconicity, which constitutes a “fluid signifier in an increasingly inter- , intra- and multi-cultural discourse” (2008, 1, 17).

Othello is a text which is neither semantically nor ideologically fixed. Even though it remains rooted in a distinct historical context, interpretations of meaning have been constructed outside of the play, as the discussion of Othello’s receptive, stage, and interpretive history has shown. Shakespeare was influenced by contemporary ideologies. He is, however, a practitioner of the theatre rather than an ideologue (cf. Mahler 2018: 319); the ambiguity in his play’s reception throughout different stages in their theatrical and critical afterlife provides ample testimony of the non-binary status of his works. One could even go as far as to assume the absence of any type of ideological ‘stance’ in Othello and subsequently declare that the recognition of an ‘imperial agenda’ in the play is an alienation or misunderstanding. While Othello itself does not (d)evaluate or indoctrinate, as many critics claim, a comprehensible (anti-)racist tradition has established because recipients and critics of the play felt (dis)approved in their own ideological views or the racism that is being displayed in its discourse. Othello, one could argue, merely represents the racism prevalent in an Elizabethan society and never forces its reader to view such ideologies as right or wrong. Hence, Löschnigg observes that what is contested and critically questioned in post-colonial engagements with Othello, such as Toni Morrison’s Desdemona (2012), is not the source-text itself, “but rather the history of ideologically fuelled performance practices and politically biased criticism” (2013: 19). If anything from Shakespeare is countered, she adds, it is the “ideologically biased reception of these pre-texts” (2013: 32).

However, the concept of post-colonial counter-discursivity is not only misleading because it is based on a supposedly ideologically and semantically fixed pre-text, which Othello clearly is not. Elaborating on Shakespeare in post-colonial drama, Joanne Tompkins, referring to Tiffin’s concept of ‘canonical counter discourse’, claims that the fundamental aim of post-colonial drama “is to dismantle colonial authority and its effects in [favour] of articulating an identity that is both distinct from and equal to that of the imperial centre” (1996: 15). Shakespeare’s plays, she adds, “are fractured, fragmented, reworked, revised, and deconstructed to demythologize [his imperial cultural authority]” (1996: 15). The term that is frequently used to categorize such deconstructions is ‘appropriation’. As I have argued, this term has a strong semantic connection to ‘counter discourse’ because both imply a strong political element. In his discussion of the terminology of appropriation, Jonathan Bates states that he “prefer[s] the term ‘appropriation’ because it suggests greater activity on the part of the appropriator […] and

61 because it has stronger political overtones than ‘accommodation’” (Bate 1989: 5). Thomas Cartelli, who extensively engaged with the problematic terminology of ‘appropriation’ and its connection to the concept of (canonical) counter discourse, reads Bates comments as follows: “Through these formulations, Bate effectively defines the act of appropriation as a self- conscious activity engaged in for an at least implied political purpose” (1999: 16). Cartelli later notes that such a terminology does not only suggest ‘self-constituted agency’, but also allows for additional associations of the term with abduction, adoption, and most strikingly theft (cf. 1999: 16). Cartelli here coincides with Fischlin’s and Fortier’s interpretation of the term, who define appropriation as “a hostile takeover, a seizure of authority over the original in a way that appeals to contemporary sensibilities steeped up in a politicized understanding of culture” (2000: 3).

The definition of the term appropriation, it seems to me, naturally fits the counter discursive agenda. However, the aggressive and politicised traits that such a terminology implies, has some essential shortcomings when it comes to categorizations of post-colonial engagements with the canon. “An appropriation”, according to Löschnigg, “can ideologically counter its pre-text only when the pre-text itself constitutes an ideologically unambiguous and stable discourse” (Löschnigg 2013: 31). This is, however, something that Othello cannot provide; it never could. Thus, Cartelli suggested what Parmita Kapadia calls “a corrective against the potency of the counter discursive model” (Kapadia 2008: 4). In his approach, Cartelli attempts to diversify appropriations by creating three sub-categories: First, the ‘confrontational appropriation’ which “directly contests the ascribed meaning or prevailing function of a Shakespearean text in the interests of an opposing or alternative social or political agenda” (Cartelli 1999: 17). Second, the ‘transpositional appropriation’ which “identifies and isolates a specific theme, plot, or argument in its appropriative objective and brings it into its own, arguably analogous, interpretive field to underwrite or enrich a presumably related thesis or argument” (1999: 17). Third, the ‘dialogic appropriation’ which “involves the careful integration into a work of allusions, identifications, and quotations that complicate, ‘thicken,’ and qualify that work’s primary narrative line to the extent that each partner to the transaction may be said to enter into the other’s frame of reference” (1999: 18). Even though this categorization would allow for a more nuanced classification of post-colonial appropriations of Shakespeare, Löschnigg points out, however, that it “is still based on what Kapadia refers to as the “presumed Immutability” [2008: 5] of the source text” (Löschnigg 2013: 31). Cartelli ‘attaches’ sub-categories to the term appropriation and hereby and extents the term’s meaning considerably. However, he fails to recognize the diversity and ambiguity of the appropriations’ colonial pre-texts. Still, Cartelli’s 62 model must be considered an important step towards a more inclusive engagement with post- colonial appropriations.

In the eye of discussions over the applicability of the model of canonical counter discourse, the shortcomings of the (too) narrow definition of Tiffin’s model remains one of the most important issues. As already mentioned, Tompkins illustrates the functions of canonical counter discourse as follows: “[to] dismantle colonial authority and its effects in [favour] of articulating an identity that is both distinct from and equal to that of the imperial centre” (1996: 15). Shakespeare’s plays, she adds, “are fractured, fragmented, reworked, revised, and deconstructed to demythologize [his imperial cultural authority]” (1996: 15). However, such a definition stands in stark contrast to the ambiguity of post- colonial rewritings of Shakespeare. In fact, as Löschnigg points out, there are many examples, where Shakespeare’s “pretext’s basic framework of signification is […] neither undermined nor dismantled” (2013: 19). Therefore, the limitations of the counter discursive model are, yet again, misleading. Consider, for example Murray Carlin’s Not Now Sweet Desdemona (1969). Carlin’s play imagines an African production of Othello with a Black West Indian – Jamaican (cf Hankey 1995: 83) – Othello and a South African Desdemona. As they rehearse parts of their respective roles from Shakespeare’s classic, they debate the “significance of the tragedy for contemporary race politics” (Neill 2006: 12). Politically, Löschnigg notes, the play “must be seen foremost against the backdrop of a systematic occlusion of the racial dimension in Shakespeare’s tragedy” (2013: 30). However, even though the play urges an Afrocentric reading of ‘the Moor’, as Neill points out, it “ultimately falls short of ‘decolonizing’ Shakespeare […], since it accepts the premise of a mysteriously ‘universal’ Shakespeare” (1998: 175). Interestingly, Carlin himself supports Neill’s claim. In his introduction to Not Now Sweet Desdemona, he writes that Shakespeare “knew everything” (1969: 1); later in the play, his Othello bursts out that “The age of Imperialism had begun. And William Shakespeare – genius that he was – understood and foresaw all the problems (1969:32).

A noteworthy example is also Djanet Sears’ Harlem Duet (1997), which introduces a Black female character named Billie, who Othello abandons for the White Desdemona. Temporally and spatially, Sears relocates the action to Harlem, New York, in 1860/62, 1928, and “the present” (1997).44 Harlem Duet is a prequel to Shakespeare’s Othello and engages with slavery, the marginalised African American society, dominant figures in the American civil-rights

44 The first plot strand stretches over two years from 1860 to 1862. It is featured in three scenes: In the scenes two and eight of Act One, the action takes place in 1860, in scene three of the Second Act, the action shifts to 1862. 63 movement as well as the social and political implications of Othello’s marriage to the White (Desde)Mona. More importantly, however, Harlem Duet, is a “rhapsodic blues tragedy [which] explores the effects of race and sex on the lives of people of African descent” (Sears 1997: 15). Against counter-discursive ‘policy’, Sears also does not demythologize Shakespeare’s authority, but acknowledges being haunted by Othello, Laurence Olivier in blackface, and Othello “being the first African portrayed in the annals of western dramatic literature” (Sears 1997: 15). Furthermore, the play features a number of Shakespearean names, themes, motifs, and imagery. With the resolution of Sears’ play then comes the realization that “Sears is not ‘writing back’ to Shakespeare as much as she is being written back to by Shakespeare” (Kidnie 2009: 85).

Carlin is a post-colonial writer, whose work, according to Löschnigg, cannot be “deemed confrontational with regard to [their source’s] negotiation of race” (2013: 21). In my opinion, Djanet Sears could very well be added to this ‘category’.45 Writers like Carlin and Sears are not dismissing the long tradition of racist (mis)interpretations or Shakespeare’s status as a canonical author, whose creative legacy got appropriated to perform ‘ideological work’ in the Empire’s colonised spaces. Rather, they project the internal contradictory structure of their pre-texts onto their “own newly contextualized but not necessarily contrasting fabric” (Löschnigg 2013:18). Hence, such rewritings do not correspond with the formal ‘rules and regulations’ of post- colonial counter discursive appropriations. They do not “directly contest […] the ascribed meaning or prevailing function of a Shakespearean text in the interest of an opposing or alternative social agenda” (Cartelli 1999: 17).46 They also, by no means, let Shakespeare’s text slip “out of focus in favour of [their] localised playtext” (Tompkins 1996: 16). They are, however, becoming essential parts of a post-colonial literary canon which calls for “a corrective against the potency of the counter discursive model” (Kapadia 2008: 4).

Based on the ambivalence of post-colonial engagements with Shakespeare’s texts, the model of canonical counter discourse must be considered as too narrow of a concept. Particularly the case of Othello and his post-colonial rewritings provides ample testimony of the problematic categorizations that this model suggests; a model which is largely built on the assumption of easy binaries and invariable ideological and political implications in its post-colonial ‘appropriations’, their pre-texts, as well as the pre-texts’ source texts. As Löschnigg points out,

45 Similarly, she does not challenge the Shakespearean pretext, but takes issue with its history of ideologically fuelled performances and the canonical marginalisation of African (American) bodies, voices, and stories in (American) theatre. 46 This is the central function of Cartelli’s confrontational appropriation 64

Shakespeare studies and post-colonial criticism are overdue in their collective (re)consideration of the function and potential of the “combination and hybridization of two different cultural systems” (2013: 33) that post-colonial adaptations of the canon undoubtedly represent. Therefore, she rightly, it seems to me, proposes a new approach towards Shakespeare- rewritings – one, which “exchanges notions of counter discursivity with notions of textual and cultural reciprocity” (2013: 18).

4.2. Performative Counter Discourse and Othello on Stage and Screen

Resistance against and engagements with Shakespeare’s colonial legacy did not only happen in terms of rewriting his classics. On the theatrical stage and on screen, revisionist performances of Shakespeare and other representatives of the ‘colonial canon’ have provided powerful examples of these mediums’ politicality. In a post-colonial context, such engagements demonstrated the potential of the theatre and became what Gilbert and Tompkins described as an “anti-imperial tool” (1996: 1). Even though they refer to theatrical productions in their statement, one could make the argument that, especially from the second half of the 20th century onwards, representations of Othello on the movie screen have been just as potent in their possibilities to challenge the play’s racist receptive and critical tradition, as means to represent anti-imperial sentiments, or to get in touch with their source. In the following chapter, I will discuss Othello’s on post-colonial stages and screens. Doing so, it shall prove necessary to (re)consider the play’s lasting racist tradition in performance and reception, before focussing on the second half of the 20th century as perhaps the period in the engagement with Othello, when revisionist post-colonial performances and an ‘anti-imperial agenda’ have become most noticeable and sustainable.

As the discussion of Othello’s stage tradition and receptive history has shown, the play has primarily been read as a domestic tragedy until the later stages of the 20th century. It has, however, always been about more than the tragic murder of an innocent wife by her husband. From the very early stages in the reception of Othello, the husband’s ‘blackness’ was one of the play’s most conspicuous features and suitable to express strikingly racist reactions. In Othello’s stage and receptive history, a racist tradition in the engagement with the play has, thus, developed and was based, according to Little, not on the action or the discourse in the play, but on “what the audience [knew] before it [came] to experience the play” (1993: 305). ‘Blackness’ in Othello, he adds, is allegorical. (cf. 1993: 305). Henry Jackson’s critique after seeing a performance of the play in 1610 provides the earliest authentic response to Othello. Even 65 though he refers to Othello as a mere ‘husband’ (cf. Clayton 1993: 62), and in his recollection therefore drastically differs from what later critics felt was necessary to comment on, it would be unrealistic to assume that he was not in the slightest affected by the image of the dark skinned murderer standing over his slain wife. It is very likely that Jackson was at least partially influenced by the racist ideologies prevalent in England’s contemporary society, even though not explicitly acknowledging Othello’s race as an issue to the play. Such criticism should arise under Thomas Rymer towards the end of the 17th century. His fierce and racist outburst directed at the gross improbabilities in the play did not only establish him as the first systematic critic of Othello, but it also meant the start to a racist tradition in the engagement with the play which should carry over well into the 20th century. In similar fashion, Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge established themselves as the most notorious commenters of the 19th century, critiquing the “extremely revolting courtship and wedded caresses of Othello and Desdemona” (Lamb 1909: Online), or expressing their disgust at the idea of the Venetian lady falling in love with a “veritable negro” (2016: 10763).47 Their comments fall in line with a break in what Neill referred to as the unequivocal tradition of playing Othello as a ‘black moor’ (cf. 2006: 45). This tradition began with Richard Burbage who played Othello from 1604 to 1618 and likely attempted to paint “himself as black as possible” (Hankey 2005:11).

From 1814 to 1833, Edmund Kean’s ‘tawny Moor’ was able to stir down the racial anxieties raised by the play as well as dictate the casting of the role for the next century and a half (cf. Neill 2006: 48). The racist reception of Othello continued, however, and also found its way to America. In the United States, the play’s “potentially dangerous political charge” (Neill 2006: 44) also led to racist attacks and even physical excesses, as the boundary between fiction and reality sometimes seemed to dissolve altogether. Ultimately, the racist engagement with the play carried over to the 20th century and was again on display in M.R. Ridley’s infamous and strikingly racist introduction of the Arden-edition of Othello (1958). As chapter 2.2 has shown, there have, of course, also been critics of such racist notions. However, hey seem to have been, a small minority as the consensus-view on the play was built upon the (mis)conceptions of commenters the likes of Rymer, Lamb, Coleridge, or Ridley.

47 As the discussion of the play’s receptive history in chapter 2.2 has shown, their comments must be read in the context of ongoing discussions about Othello’s ‘true race’. This debate started towards the end of the 18th century and led to reconsiderations of the character’s casting as well as the introduction of Othello as a ‘tawny’ ‘orientalised’ ‘Moor’. Their comments, however, show a striking resemblance to the ‘criticism’ that Rymer brough forth over a century earlier (1693). Thus, it seems to me, they can be read as the continuation of a racist tradition in the reception of the play which started in the late 17th century. 66

If post-colonial engagements are to be understood as acts of political and cultural resistance against imperial forces and their ideological indoctrinations, the reception of Othello has to be considered only one point of interest besides the tradition of casting Othello as a White male who gets ‘blackened up’ before the performance starts. In theatre, according to Gilbert and Tompkins, “the body is a major physical symbol [and capable of offering] a multifarious complex and meanings” (1996: 203). The body, they add, “signifies through appearance and its actions” (1996: 203). Therefore, one could argue, also the absence of bodies can be an important sign. In the case of Othello’s casting, the shortage of authentic ‘black bodies’ on stage stands representative for the history of racially motivated exclusion of Black actors from major stages.48 Othello, quite literally, was a White man. As Dympna Callaghan’s discussion of the lasting tradition of playing Othello in ‘blackface’ has shown, the exclusion of Africans and other ethnic groups on stage is by no means related to any sort of absence of their ‘bodies’ in England or practical necessity (cf. 2003: 192ff). Rather, their marginalisation was a conscious decision which is manifested in the long-standing tradition of the mimesis of ‘blackness’ and the imitation of ‘otherness’ (cf. Callaghan 2003: 194). Hence, while Othello’s colour changed from ‘black’ to ‘tawny’ and b(l)ack again, the ‘Moorish’ outside always concealed the White character on the inside.

The racially motivated exclusion of Black actors on English stages was particularly visible when, against all odds, such an actor was able to play Othello. In 1833, only the sudden death of Edmund Kean allowed Ira Aldridge to perform in Covent Garden. His stint was only of short duration as his performances were not well received, however (cf. Hovde 2017: online). The reception of his performance is replicated in the responses that Paul Robeson received some 100 years after Aldridge. Standing out from their acting was a sense of ‘naturalness’ which some perceived as a unique feature of Black actors’ performances. Others, however, perceived this aspect of their acting as a gross exhibition rather than art (cf. Callaghan 2003: 209). Thus, also the representational mode of their performance changed from the mimesis of ‘blackness’ by a White actor to the exhibition of ‘blackness’ by an actor who allegedly incarnated the savagery that Iago, Roderigo, Brabantio attested and that many thought was innate in people of colour. As the Black actors on stage seemed to become Othello, the collapse of aesthetic

48 As I have discussed in chapter 2.1., the exclusion of Black actors on major stages must be stressed because the colour bar that prevented them to perform on stages such as Drury Lane or Covent Garden – with exception of Ira Aldridge in 1833 – persisted until Paul Robeson broke it in 1930. However, this does not mean that ethnic minorities have not been able to get roles on smaller theatrical stages, where performances of Shakespeare had to be reduced into “a kind of burlesque” (Pechter 2016: 9472). Prior to the Theatres Act (1843), only Covent Garden and Drury Lane had the patents to perform ‘serious spoken drama’. Subsequently, Black actors were excluded from performing ‘unadapted’ versions of Othello. 67 distance fuelled a number of highly racist responses. Many critics questioned the capability of such ‘savages’ to play Shakespeare and called the naturality of their performances an unfit match for a dramatic performance. Even though Robeson managed to crack the glass ceiling preventing Black actors to play the role of Othello on England’s major stages, ‘blackfacing’ remained the state of the art. With Orson Welles (1952) or Laurence Olivier (1965), whose return to a darker skinned ‘black’ Othello was both celebrated but also criticised, ‘blackface’ Othellos were also represented on movie screens. Even though their film-adaptions collided with a developing revisionist movement, it took until 1981 and Anthony Hopkin’s TV appearance as ‘blackface’ Othello for this tradition to end. As can be seen, the casting of Othello provides ample testimony of the conscious exclusion of certain social and ethnic groups from stages and screens. Furthermore, the responses to Black actors explicate the racially motivated rejection of the Empire’s disenfranchised and colonised subjects’ (cultural) participation.

The historical background to the engagement with Othello on stage and screen can help to grasp the play’s interest and significance for post-colonial cultures and artists, who have been particularly interested in aspects of its racist and non-inclusive performance and receptive history. The principles from post-colonial rewritings therefore also seem to be applicable to post-colonial theatrical and cinematic engagements with Othello. What is contested and questioned is not the action of Shakespeare’s play itself, but rather “the history of ideologically fuelled performances and politically biased criticism” (Löschnigg 2013: 19). As Sabine Schülting points out, attempts to break with Othello’s racist tradition have been nourished by post-colonial criticism from the 1980s onwards. Here, she notices two major trends: the demand for authentic performances of Othello by casting Black actors in the leading role, as well as the closer examination of the ‘binarity of black and white’ (“schwarz-weiß-Binarität”) by casting Black actors and actresses for characters that the play did not initially label as ‘Moors’ (cf. 2018: 544f). Both trends can fall under the category of performative counter discourse, aiming at revisionist performances of the original script (cf. Löschnigg 2013: 18).

The casting of the play in a post-colonial context is influenced by two primary motivations: resistance against the tradition of ‘blackfacing’ Othello, and the challenging the play’s perception of race. No White actor had performed Othello since Hopkins’ TV appearance in 1981. As “blacking up”, according to Hankey, “had become kind of a scandal” (2005 :97), the time seemed ripe for the overdue break in the racist tradition of Othello’s casting. Even though a Black actor playing Othello might be seen as a mere change in production, its relevance for

68 the post-colonial movement is not to be underestimated. 49 Especially in consideration of the longevity of ‘blackfacing’ the character, post-colonial productions should be seen as more than just wishes for ‘authentic performances’, but also important statements in a century featuring decolonization(s), the fight against apartheid in South Africa, Civil Rights struggles in America, or the spread of Black Power philosophies. Thus, ‘authentic productions’ could be interpreted as direct rejections of and engagements with Othello’s ‘colonial past’. Furthermore, such performances are powerful statements against the alleged supremacy of White actors and peoples that was implied in the depiction of the main protagonist in blackface as well as the criticism that Aldridge’s and Robeson’s performances received.

In 1987, Janet Suzman’s multi-racial production of Othello was said to display “transhistorical immediacy” (Neill 2006: 63). Given the political and social circumstances in South Africa, the play was appropriate to describe “the utter tragedy of our country” as the play “addresses the notion of apartheid four hundred years before the epithet was coined – and rejects it”(Suzman quoted in Neill 2006: 63).50 With apartheid still in place and the law against interracial marriage only being repealed for two years, Hankey points out, the production was “loaded with political context” as apartheid “turned Othello into protest theatre” (2005: 93).51 Suzman’s Othello achieved (world) wide prominence and particularly her play’s actuality contributed to the growing popularity of Othello (1987) outside of South Africa. In England, however, the “overwhelming pressure to cast only black Othellos” (Neill 2006: 64) ironically led to the disappearance of Othello from the main stages for eight years. In 1997, and with David Harewood in the leading role, Sam Mendes brought it (back) to the National Theatre in London (cf. Hankey 2005: 100) where his rendition was accompanied by criticism over the lack of what Hankey referred to as “two-way colour-blind casting” (2005: 102); Mendes replaced the initial candidate for his Iago – Adrian Lester, the son of Jamaican immigrants – with Russel Beale, a White actor. From 1981 onwards, English performances and productions of Othello kept their proximity to the new standard and, apart from the obligatory Black Othello, remained rather conventional in their assignments of the main role. In England, the play, thus, remained fairly

49 Even though the casting of a Black actor as Othello meant a major break in the play’s racist stage tradition, this step should be considered rather as a change in production as opposed to an adaptation, which, according to Fischlin and Fortier, “refigures the source” (2000: 10). 50 This the conviction of Janet Suzman and John Kani, the South African (Xhosa) actor playing Othello (cf. Neill 2006: 63). 51 The political implications of Suzman’s Othello were magnified as Kani did not only look, but, as his first language is not English, he also sounded drastically different from his Black British or American peers. In the social and political context of the play’s performance(s), this circumstance certainly made the interracial marriage played out on stage (and later also on screen) an even more precarious issue (cf. Hankey 2005 93). 69 neutral as far as the engagement(s) with the play’s ‘racial theme’ and its colonial legacy were concerned.52

While (revisionist) productions of Othello had the potential, but not always the ultimate urgency, to embrace the play’s pressing racial theme, adaptations of the play have gained considerably more attention for the ways in which they engaged with or even deconstructed their source. On post-colonial stages and screens, adaptations of Othello often stood out for their casting of Black actors and actresses for roles other than just Othello. Thus, they also substantially differ from productions of the play which merely assigned Black actors for the main role. As Schülting points out, the introduction of multi-ethnic as well as ‘partially-Black’ or ‘all-Black’ casts was effective in questioning Othello’s “schwarz-weiß Binarität” (2018: 545), but also in engaging with the play’s afflicted theatrical and critical afterlife. As a result of the ‘blackening’ of parts or the entirety of the play’s White cast, Othello’s own ‘blackness’ seemed less of an “extraordinary and inexplicable exception” (2005: 107), Hankey points out.

In post-colonial theatrical adaptations of Othello, Iago turned out to be one of the most frequently modified characters. As Iago’s ‘whiteness turned black’, his racial bigotry and subsequently also his manipulation of Roderigo and Brabantio often were ridiculed. In part to counter the notion that Othello behaves as he does because of his race, but also “to suggest a natural affinity between him and Othello” (Hankey 2005: 107), Hugh Quarshie’s and Sue Dunderdale’s Greenwich-production (1989) matched its Black Othello with a light-skinned Black Iago. As Quarshie points out, their adaptation turned Iago into “a man subject to infinite aspiration, not regulated by moral codes, cultural tradition or racial solidarity, but impelled by his imagination and intellectual curiosity” (1999: 21). In 1999, Hal Scott’s Othello also featured a Black Iago (André Braugher). Furthermore, his play got ‘enhanced’ by the introduction of a Black Emilia (Franchelle Stewart-Dorn). A “solidarity of sorts” seemed to be one of the major points in Scott’s adaptation as “both Othello and Iago raised their arms in a Black power salute and during the fit at 4.1, Iago […] held Othello in his arms” (Hankey 2005: 108). One of the most unexpected racial experiments with the play was Jude Kelly’s photo-negative Othello (1997). In her adaptation, not only Iago and Emilia, but the entire cast was Black; the only exceptions were Othello, played by Patrick Stewart, Bianca, Montano, and a number of

52 Jude Kelly’s 1997 photo-negative production of the play, in which Patrick Stewart as White Othello faced an “entirely black world” (Neill 2006: 64), even resulted in the absolute neutralization of the play’s racial theme (cf. Neill 2006: 64ff & Hankey 2005: 108f). Her adaptation of the play will be discussed in more detail in the following paragraph. 70 secondary characters such as Cypriot walk-ons or Brabantio’s servants. In an interview with the Washington Post, Kelly explains her ideas as follows:

What’s fascinating for me is that you have 22 African- American actors on stage who know what racism is about and one white British actor […] who has never experienced it the way they have. So the images flip back and forth. What it all means, I think, will depend very much on the color of the person who’s watching it. (Washington Post, November 12 1997, quoted in Hankey 2005: 108)

While Kelly severely adapted the character conception in terms of their skin colour, the speech acts remained the same. Thus, crucial passages for the reading of race and racism in Othello turned into an oxymoron; a Black Iago uttered his racist lines about the “black ram” (1, 1, 88) to a Black Brabantio, while a White Othello admired the “whiter skin of hers than snow” (5, 2, 4) of his Black wife. The reviews to Kelly’s Othello were mixed. While Neill notes that audiences adjusted “readily enough to the reversed valencies of black and white” (Neill 2006: 67), Hankey points to a number of disappointed reactions after the play’s racial derogations ended up meaning- and harmless with Patrick Stewart being the addressee of them; for some, Stewarts White skin mocked the consequences of the racist description of a ‘thick lipped moor’ (cf. 2005: 109). Perhaps, the ambiguity in the audiences’ reactions shows that the play polarized and challenged audiences to examine their own assumptions and expectations.

This short discussion of post-colonial productions and adaptations of Othello has shown the play’s potential to politicise the action in favour of a revisionist, race-conscious subtext. In England, “a cadre of classically trained black actors had begun to make the propriety to cast white actors in the role of Othello a controversy” (Neill 2006: 64). Perhaps the classical training of those actors, many of which had close familial roots to the Empire’s formal colonies, helps to explain why ‘authentic productions’ of Othello remained rather conservative and often even neglected the play’s ‘racial theme’.53 However, productions such as Janet Suzman’s South African Othello showed the capabilities of the play as a post-colonial revisionist ‘tool’. Thus, there seems to be a conspicuous discrepancy in the engagement with the play between the former Empire’s motherland and its colonised spaces, where the play has had a political charge by nature. Besides revisionist productions of Othello, adaptations of the play established as a second major category in the post-colonial staging and screening of the play. Featuring multi- ethnic casts or ‘turning black to white’ and vice versa, adaptations such as Kelly’s Othello (1997) turned into racial experiments with a play that was, until post-colonial reconsiderations,

53 Examples of such ‘classically trained’ Black actors are David Harewood, whose parents emigrated from Barbados, Ray Fearon, who was born in London in 1967 to Jamaican parents, Willard White, who was born in Jamaica (Kingston), or Joseph Marcell, who emigrated from St. Lucia. 71 stuck in a mono-perspective performance and receptive history. In Othello, Iago insinuates that “these Moors are changeable in their wills” (1, 3, 347-348). As post-colonial engagements have managed to politicise Othello and bring it ‘up to date’, one could make the claim, however, that it is in fact the play itself which is changeable in what we want it to express. “Shakespeare”, in the words of Graham Holderness, “is here, now, always, what is currently being made of him” (1988: XVI).

4.3. Shakespeare and Othello in the ‘Land of the Free’

In the post-colonial discussion, the United States of America occupy a special place. It is not only their comparably early independence from the Empire (September 3, 1783), but also the fact that nationalist ambitions were initiated and realised by the (former) colonisers themselves, which have raised questions whether the United States are truly ‘post-colonial’ or not. The European settlers were never colonised subjects in the strict sense of the word, but rather appeared as suppressors of first a native, later also an enslaved African American population. Therefore, the working-mechanisms behind America’s nationalist movement are wholly different from aspirations for independence that arose in Britain’s colonies in the Caribbean or Africa. In those places, such attempts were initiated and supported by a supressed indigenous population – the truly colonised subjects – and carried out considerably later towards the middle and end of the 20th century. However, as Cartelli points out,

any notion of post-coloniality [applied] to the U.S. experience in the nineteenth century will need to be clearly differentiated from ongoing struggles of contemporary ‘Third World’ societies to contend with the material legacies of colonialist exploitation, and will need to account for the development of colonizing impulses within America itself. Yet […] the nineteenth-century U.S. struggle for social, cultural, and political self-definition serves, in many respects, as a proving ground for more recent efforts to establish a sense of national identity in such postcolonies as Nigeria, Kenya, Trinidad and Jamaica, Australia and New Zealand. (1999: 6)

Critics of an application of ‘post-coloniality’ onto the United States insist that the United States, even though once a British colony, are not to be considered post-colonial because of the ‘neo- imperial agenda’ concealed behind their perception of their ‘world responsibility’.54 For Gilbert and Tompkins, it is “the political and military might that the [U.S.] wields in its role as global ‘super-power’ [,which] has long since severed its connection with the historical and cultural

54 According to Edward D. Said, “no matter what the United States does, [its] authorities often do not want it to be an imperial power like the others it followed, preferring instead the notion of ‘world responsibility’ as a rationale for what it does” (1994: 285). 72 marginality that the other former colonies share” (1996: 7). Therefore, the United States are not to be included in the post-colonial discussion.

Despite the ambiguity over the United States’ status as a ‘postcolony’, as far as post-colonial cultures are concerned, America ‘matches the standards’. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin state that

[the United States’] relationship with the metropolitan centre as it evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic for post-colonial literatures everywhere. What each of these literatures has in common beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics is that they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre. It is this what makes them distinctively post-colonial. (1989: 2)

As already pointed out, Shakespeare was the backbone of the British literary canon, occupying a primary role in the indoctrination of the Empire’s colonised spaces and its peoples with ‘English’ values and ideologies. Thus, his works, amidst nationalist aspirations, naturally became a focal point of criticism. Resistance, as Cartelli points out, had formed against Shakespeare’s alleged “anti-democratic bias [as well as his] consistent positioning as ‘author’ of ‘the father to the man in America’ and, hence, as virtual founding father […]” (1999: 2). In 1787, Peter Markoe, a poet and playwright educated in England before coming to America in 1775, rejected the colonial claim of Shakespeare’s works in favour of the notion of his universality and asserted that “the ascendant nation of America [is] Shakespeare’s true home” (Hackett 2009: 96). 55 In his “The Tragic Genius of Shakespeare; An Ode”, he writes: “[…] Monopolizing Britain! Boast no more / His genius to your narrow bounds confin’d; / Shakespeare’s bold spirit seeks our western shore, / A gen’ral blessing for the world desing’d, / And, emulous to form the rising age, / The noblest Bard demands the noblest Stage” (Markoe 2014: 12f).

Perhaps, it is exactly the American rejection of an ‘English Shakespeare’ in favour of one located in his ‘true home’ which explains the significance of both the person as well as its works for American culture. This significance seems odd, however, as Michael Bristol points out that

55 Schabert dates Markoe’s poem in 1770, thereby supporting her claim that rejections of Shakespeare’s colonial claim took place prior to the civil war (cf. 2018: 619). This is, however, a dating that is frequently being dismissed. Hackett, for example, dates his poem “as early as 1787” (2009: 96), a notion that is again confirmed in Shapiro, who too dates the poem in 1787 (cf. 2014: 13). For my discussion of post-colonialism in an American context, the exact temporal placement of Markoe’s poem is to be considered a secondary issue, however, and shall, thus, not be pursued any further. 73

Shakespeare’s centrality in American culture might be construed as a kind of anomaly in that it entails respect and admiration for an archaic world- consciousness deep inside the American project of renovatio. Why should a society whose founding actions entail radical separation from all institutions of hereditary privilege be devoted to a writer whose primary themes are the pathos of kinship and the decline of the great feudal classes? (1990:2)

Well into the 19th century, often severely adapted performances of Shakespearean tragedies as burlesque or farce enjoyed great popularity amongst American audiences and even after the United States declared their formal independence from the Empire, English actors frequently travelled American stages.56 Therefore, as Schabert points out, American performances often resembled ‘English patterns’: “[A]merikanische Aufführungen orientieren sich an englischen Inszenierungen und Aufführungstechniken” (2018: 619). With the emerging nineteenth century, however, ‘local’ stars such as Henry Hacket, Edwin Forrest, or Edwin Booth began to frequently compete with their English rivals. Edwin Forrest, who, according to Edward Pechter, was “one of the memorable American Othellos in the nineteenth century” (1999: 12), showed continuous efforts to “free the American stage from continued reliance on foreign sources by sponsoring […] a contest for prize plays written by and about Americans” (Cartelli 1999: 35) in 1828. As perhaps the fiercest adversary to the anglicization of American theatre(s), his continued rivalry with the English actor William Charles Macready culminated in the turmoil of the Astor Place riot in 1849.57 Levine Lawrence describes the Astor Place riot as “a struggle for power and cultural authority within theatrical space, [and] simultaneously an indication of and catalyst for the cultural changes that came to characterize the United States at the end of the century” (1988: 68).

The clash between Macready and Forrest is symptomatic for the stressed relationship between ‘post-colonial’ America and its former motherland. Still, the success of Shakespeare’s plays in the United States – and, therefore, also the remaining presence of an English culture – paints the picture of a relationship which is marked by dialogue rather than discord. As Shakespeare

56 Shakespeare’s popularity appears in stark contrast to what Cartelli called America’s “declaration of […] literary independence” (1999: 33), which was the endeavour of transcendentalist authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson or Walt Whitman; “[g]enius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence […]. English dramatic poets have Shakspearized for over two hundred years” (2015: 86), Emerson writes in his The American Scholar (1837). Bristol, however, notes that “it does not seem to have occurred to [Emerson] that the Shakespearization of America might entail a concurrent Europeanization of America, a recapture of the emergent social project of American democracy and self-government by supposedly abandoned modes of traditional privilege and domination” (1990: 129). 57 William Charles Macready has already been discussed in chapter 2.2.2. He was known for his performances of Othello where he played the main role in ‘blackface’ and native costume. Noteworthy are also his diary-reports, in which he recalled “his horror at the treatment of the slave population […], though [making no] connection between slavery and his own performance” (Callaghan 2003: 213). 74 conspicuously remained a central part to the post-independence United States, commonalities between America and England were particularly visible in the engagement with Othello, which, in terms of performance and reception, mirrored and even exceeded the racist European tradition.58 Mary Preston’s claim that “Othello was a white man” (2014: 216) correlates with Coleridgian rejections of a “veritable negro” (Coleridge 2016: 10763) on stage and similarly to the European tradition, ‘blackfacing’ Othello as an ‘orientalised Moor’ was the state of the art in the 19th century. The tremendous political implications of the play were displayed in the occasional eruptions of violence during performances of Othello, or the long refusal of Black actors to perform on American stages.59

The long rejection of Black actors on American stages is represented in the example of Ira Aldridge, who was unable to “get a serious hearing in [America]” (Hankey 2005: 53) and thus decided to move to Europe. In England he only managed to get tenures at smaller theatres, the exception being his short stint at Covent Garden in 1833 where he replaced Edmund Kean after he collapsed on stage (cf. Hovde 2017: online). Aldridge’s career continued to grow steadily after leaving England and shifting his focus to continental Europe, his ‘natural performances’ on Austrian, German, Hungarian, Russian, and other Eastern European stages became both despised and celebrated by critics and audiences. Some 100 years later Paul Robeson, who was also unable to start his career in America, was finally able to break the colour barrier preventing Black actors from performing at the major English stages. His performances were still met with racist reactions by audiences and critics as he was, similarly to Aldridge, unable to break free from the stigma of his ‘natural performance’. Robeson still had a lasting impact on the American theatrical landscape as he left Othello “in the hands principally of black actors – notably Earle Hyman in the 1950s and James Earl Jones in the 1960s and 1970s […]” (Hankey 2005: 89).

It was not until the mid to late 20th century that the racist tradition in the American engagement with Othello began to be (re)considered more thoroughly and sustainably. As a culturally and politically marginalised African American community slowly started to find its political and

58 This fact is primarily owed to America’s history in the engagement with both its Native American, but especially its African American population. Slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, and marginalisation amidst and after the 20th century civil rights movement are only a few reasons why Othello, a play with a Black main protagonist, has had a particularly lasting political charge in the United States. 59 Stendhal provides a recollection of one of the most notorious instances of such violent escalations: while on guard duty inside the Baltimore theatre during a performance of Othello (1822), a soldier drew his gun as Othello attempted his murder at Desdemona and screamed “[i]t will never be said that in my presence a confounded Negro gas killed a white woman!” (1992: 222). The soldier then fired a shot at the White actor playing Othello and injured his arm. 75 cultural voice(s) during and following the American Civil Rights movement, rewritings and adaptations of the play represented ‘voices’ of resistance. Dealing with issues of race and racism or capturing the ‘African American experience’, such adaptations received a new and decidedly political function. Thus, also the engagement with Othello drastically changed. As issues of race and racism have become pressing subjects in the United States, American productions, adaptations and rewritings “have gone out of their way to make race into the central theme” (Hankey 2005: 107). In this regard, the United States’ reconsiderations of Othello wholly differ from English engagements with the play, where such efforts have been largely absent in favour of ‘authentic’, but yet conservative, productions.

Often, valuable contributions to the post-colonial canon have come from African American authors and playwrights such as Liz White; her dramatic movie-adaption of Othello (1960) features an all-Black cast and explores the “idea of difference among black people” (Hankey 2005: 107).60 There have, however, also come up a number of (dramatic) rewritings of Shakespeare’s Othello which have relocated, refigured, and reconsidered their source and made it fit an American context. In the following (sub)chapter, I will introduce and analyse one of them, namely Djanet Sears’ Harlem Duet. In my discussion of Sear’s play, I will – as I have done in my contemporary reading of Othello – investigate the play’s engagement with race and racism. Doing so, I shall focus on three aspects which, it seems to me, allow for a particularly fruitful exploration of those themes: the plot and its characters, imitation and inversion of the source, and ‘voices summoned from the past’. 61

60 Contributions to post-colonial reconsiderations of Othello by White American writers have, for example, come from Charles Marowitz. In his An Othello (1974), he rewrote Shakespeare’s play in the context of the Black Power movement. Iago is cast as a Black radical, “who is made to challenge Othello as the model of all blacks who, by capitulating to the values of the white world, offer themselves as scapegoats of racial bigotry” (Neill 2006: 12). Marowitz, according to Hankey, “utterly demystifies Othello, removes all sense of strangeness and romance [, taking away] his love for Desdemona and hers for him” (2005: 84). Another noteworthy example is Jude Kelly’s photo-negative Othello (1974). Although she is not American herself, the performance took place in Washington DC. Washington DC with its majority Black population proved a “fruitful place for this project […]. [The] issue of race and racial difference is actively part of this city’s dialogue, all the time, every single day […] it concerns people deeply, not just intellectually” (Hankey 2005: 109), an article in the Washington Post (November 12 1997) quotes. 61 As I have also done in my contemporary reading of Othello, I will focus my analysis of the discussion of race and racism in Harlem Duet on the play’s textual level. Of course, performances and productions of Harlem Duet have had a substantial impact on the ‘experience’ of the play. Thus, performances Harlem Duet shall be considered sporadically, for example when directly contributing to my discussion or race and racism in the play. A more detailed account on the impact(s) of various performances on the play is provided in: Kidnie, Margaret Jane (2009). Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. New York: Routledge. 70-88. 76

4.4 “I must write to save my own life” – Exploring the Effects of Race and Sex on African Americans in Harlem Duet

Djanet Sears’ Harlem Duet (1997) is the sequel to her highly acclaimed play African Solo (1990), a play narrating Sears’ “search for a place in white-dominated Canada, using as tools the pop culture that surrounds her […] and the re-discovery of her spiritual past on a visit to Africa” (Tompkins 1993: 35). Sears is a Caribbean-Canadian playwright, actor, and director. She was born in London to a Jamaican mother and a Guyanese father; her family moved to Saskatoon when she was a Teenager. Her biography might make her appear like an odd choice to include into a discussion of American post-coloniality and rewritings of the canon. However, the location of her play in New York and its discussion of African American femininity, masculinity as well as race and racism in America of the past and present firmly locate the play in a fitting context. Sears chose to set the play in this location because she wanted an “urban setting that would resonate for all North Americans, and because given that the play is an excavation of the question of importance of race, those boiling points appear to be more tangible in the U.S. than [in Canada]” (Djanet Sears quoted in: Swerkstrom et al. 2004: 4). Harlem Duet premiered in Toronto at the Tarragoon Extra Space in 1997. In 2006 the “professional implications of this particular Shakespearean intervention were heightened” as Djanet Sears became the first Black playwright to “have her work performed at the prestigious Stratford Festival of Canada, and the first black director in the festival’s fifty-three-year history to lead the first all-black cast of actor” (Kidnie 2009: 71).

In the prefatory essay to Harlem Duet, called “nOTES oF a cOLOURED gIRL”, Djanet Sears explains that for her, writing for theatre has become a political act, an act of self-fulfilment, and a ‘lifesaving’ measure:

23 I have a dream. A dream that one day in the city where I live [Toronto], at any given time of the year, I will be able to find at least one play that is filled with people who look like me, telling stories about me, my family, my friends, my community. For most people of European descent, this is a privilege they take for granted.

24 Like Derek Walcott, I too have no choice. I must write my own work for the theatre. I must produce my own work, and the work of other writers of African descent. Then my nieces’ experience will almost certainly be different from my own.

30 For the many like me, black and female, it is imperative that our writing begin the recreate our histories and our myths, as well as integrate the most painful experiences […] In a very deep way, I feel like I am in the process of giving birth to myself. Writing for the stage allows me a process to dream myself into existence. 77

31 In a recent clinical study at Duke University researchers found that racist comments can not only lead directly to an overworked heart, but the internal stress caused by racism was found to tear the lining of blood vessels. I must write to save my own life. (Sears 1997: 14f)

On the back blurb of the printed version, Harlem Duet is being described as a rhapsodic blues tragedy and the prelude to Shakespeare’s Othello. It is, however, more than a mere background check on the ‘out of place’ and ‘disoriented’ subject we already got know as Shakespeare’s Othello. Primarily, it is aimed at ‘destroying a ghost’; “[…] Shakespeare’s Othello had haunted me since I was first introduced to him. Sir Laurence Olivier in black-face. Othello is the first African American portrayed in the annals of western dramatic literature. In an effort to exorcise this ghost, I have written Harlem Duet” (1997: 14), Sears explains in her essay.

Margaret Kidnie reads the rationale for writing Harlem Duet as an act of resistance against Othello’s “canonical, and in Sear’s eyes, disturbing treatment of African identity that had persistently haunted her professional career as a dramatist and actor” (Kidnie 2001: 29). Indeed, Sears’ emphasis on the problematic nature of Laurence Olivier’s ‘iconic’ performances and the canonical treatment of Othello as a representative of the ‘African continent’ is telling.62 As Dympna Callaghan points out,

[the] uphill struggle for black representation in elite culture and, perhaps more crucially, for recognition of the capacity of people of African ancestry to engage in mimetic performance should not be underestimated. […] Othello dramatizes the possible consequences of not excluding the racial other from the community and so presents the dazzling spectacle of someone who is […] both monster and man. Yet, even as it does so the play reenacts the exclusionary privilege on which such representations were founded. Othello was a white man. (2003: 214f)

In Harlem Duet, Djanet Sears responds to this uphill struggle and more importantly to the play which, for her, has represented it. In her play, Othello becomes a Black man played by a Black actor who lives in a Black community. In this setting, Othello, according to Fischlin and Fortier, is “dealing with the effects of having been ‘not exclude[ed]’ from the ‘community,’ where community becomes a highly charged code word for white culture as an arbitrary index against which one is (problematically) measured for inclusion or exclusion” (2000: 186). Sears, thus, “overturns the white stage tradition of having Othello played by a white person […] in

62 Laurence Olivier was one of the most famous Othellos of the 20th century. In his depiction of the main protagonist, he returned to the old tradition of playing him as a dark-skinned ‘black Moor’. His concentration on race reflected a new alertness that was regarded as highly controversial amongst peers and critics. For some, he managed to do what only Black actors were able to achieve before, namely erasing the aesthetic distance through the overwhelming power of his ‘natural performance’. Others, however, dismissed his performances as dated, tasteless, spoiled with artistic, social, and political offensiveness, and criticised the mimicry of ‘blackness’ with his “eye rolling, pink-lipped, tongue-thrusting coal-black Pappy” (Neill 2006: 59). 78 blackface” (Fischlin, Fortier: 2000: 286) in the same way that she overturns Othello’s emphasis on Othello’s strangeness to White culture.63 Harlem Duet is an answer to Othello’s exploitation as a colonial ‘tool’, the racially motivated exclusion of ‘Black bodies’ from stages and screens, as well as the history of racist interpretations of the play. “As a pre-history to Othello” Kidnie points out, Harlem Duet “gives voice to otherwise occluded voices and writes back to a professional stage history […] that tells of African exclusion from Western theatre […and] breaks with a particular cycle of racial and sexual prejudice, destabilizing the action of Shakespeare’s work” (2009: 71). With Harlem Duet and not Othello’s but Billie’s story, “[t]he exorcism begins” (Sears 1997: 15).

4.4.1 ‘The Nightmare and the Dream’ Narrated in Harlem Duet

As the name implies, Harlem Duet takes place in the famous Manhattan district, more precisely at the corner of Malcom X and Martin Luther King boulevards. The exact location of Harlem Duet’s action unmistakably hints at the immense importance of this place for the play. Harlem is much more than an arbitrarily chosen setting or a mere toponym; of capital importance is what Harlem stands for. In his autobiography, Malcom X remembers the gravitational power of what the main characters in Harlem Duet described as “Africatown” or a “sea of Black faces” (57) as follows: “New York was heaven to me. And Harlem was Seventh Heaven!” (1965: 89) Throughout the play, the “symbolic heart […] of American black culture” (Fischlin, Fortier 2000: 286) reappears as a crucial symbol for the African American struggle for cultural, social, and political independence and acceptance. Of particular importance, it seems to me, is the artistic and political movement of the Harlem Renaissance.64 As perhaps “the most influential movement in African American literary history” (Hutchinson 2019: online), the Harlem Renaissance is not only featured in one of the play’s three time periods, but also frequently

63 Othello’s strangeness to the White (Venetian) society is being emphatically and openly communicated throughout Shakespeare’s original, Fischlin and Fortier point out (cf. 2000: 186). It seems to me, however, that the idea of Othello’s ‘blackness’ as something strange is also being displayed in the engagement with the play on stage, screen, and in reception. As the discussion of the play’s historical background, as well as its stage tradition and receptive history has shown, for predominately White audiences, ‘blackness’ was equivalent to strangeness and for most, the knowledge that the actor who represented this ‘blackness’ was in fact White was a ‘safety net’. The reluctancy to (re)evaluate the tradition of ‘blackfacing’ as well as frequent disturbance of White audiences over Black actors’ ‘natural performances’, it seems to me, stands representative for Othello’s strangeness to a racist White culture that does not only appear in the play, but more importantly also outside of it. 64 George Hutchinson describes the impact of the Harlem Renaissance (c. 1918-37) as follows: “Embracing literary, musical, theatrical, and visual arts, participants sought to reconceptualize the ‘Negro’ apart from the white stereotypes that had influenced black peoples’ relationship to their heritage and to each other” (2019: online). The Harlem Renaissance, he adds, was an attempt to break free from “Victorian moral values and bourgeois shame about aspects of [African American life] that might, as seen by whites, reinforce racist beliefs” (Hutchinson 2019: online). 79 being referenced to through soundscapes that precede many of the scenes.65 As Peter Dickinson points out,

Sears work might be situated within a comparative discussion of the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement of 1920’s and 1960’s New York, concentrating in particular on Harlem Duet’s dialogues with the poetry, drama, and criticism of Langston Hughes [and others]. (2002: 193).

Langston Hughes’ poetry is, perhaps, one of the most noticeable references in terms of a direct connection to the artistic movement of the Harlem Renaissance. Already in the prefatory essay of Harlem Duet, Djanet Sears touches on the importance of Langston Hughes’ poetry for her creative work.

“There are a great many times when I forget. I forget why I’m doing this. […] So I have the following words by Langston Hughes from “Notes on Commercial Theatre”, on my wall, just above my desk, for those times when I most need reminding.

SOMEDAY SOMEBODY’LL STAND UP AND TALK ABOUT ME, AND WRITE ABOUT ME – BLACK AND BEAEUTIFUL AND SING ABOUT ME, AND PUT ON PLAYS ABOUT ME! I RECKON IT’LL BE ME MYSELF!

YES, IT’LL BE ME. (Sears 1997: 15)

The lines of Langston Hughes’ poem fittingly capture Djanet Sears motivation behind writing and fighting for ‘African American representation’ in American culture and theatre. Furthermore, they closely correlate with the endeavour for cultural independence and acceptance that fuelled the Harlem Renaissance. In Harlem Duet, Hughes’ poetry is referenced in the last scene of the play which is preceded by “[a] beryline blues improvisation of “Mamma’s Little Baby” […] alongsinde a reading of the Langston Hughes poem “Harlem”” (114). The very first line of Hughes’ poem “What happens to a dream deferred?” perfectly fits the context of the play and poses the exact – perhaps rhetorical – question that the play’s main protagonists Billie and her former husband Othello struggle with. What happens if their dreams

65 For the discussion of and emphasis on aspects of race and racism in Harlem Duet, voices from prominent African American figures are frequently used devices throughout the play. However, they do not only correlate with the Harlem Renaissance. The impact of the play’s polyvocality will be discussed in more detail below. 80 remain unfulfilled? As Harlem Duet grapples with that question, Billie’s and Othello’s dreams, again and again, start and end in Harlem, at the corner Malcom X and Martin Luther King boulevards. Not only the streets, but especially their name givers’ warring perspectives on America remain a crucial part all throughout the play. Martin Luther King examined America and saw a dream. Malcom X suggested that this dream would turn into a nightmare before it was over. At the end of the play, Billie’s dream should indeed prove to be deferred, if not shattered to pieces. What happens to Othello’s dream, will perhaps be answered in Shakespeare’s Othello.

Set in late summer, Harlem Duet stretches across three distinct time periods; the action takes place on the eve of the American Civil War in 1860/62, during the Harlem Renaissance in 1928, and the late 1990s (“the present”). These time-zones are not arbitrarily chosen, but represent crucial stages in the social, political, and cultural emancipation of African Americans in the United States and, thus, also mark the characters’ developments from slave(s) to citizen(s). For Sears, “using three time periods was very important. It gave the depth that I wanted. It supported many layers of the play, of the language, and of the contradictions about race” (Knowles 1998: 25). As the action of Harlem Duet fluctuates between these different eras, the play’s “anti-linear structure”, in the words of Elizabeth Gruber, “emphasizes the continuity between past and present – which may be one of the play’s most pointed political arguments” (2008: 351). Immense political implications also derive from audio recordings of “landmark moments in African-American history” that, “accompanied by blues music performed by cello and bass” (Kidnie 2009: 80), open each scene.66 Amongst other clips, the spectators hear passages from Martin Luther King’s famous speech at the March on Washington, Marcus Garvey’s “oral address on the need of African Americans to return to Africa” (39), Malcom X elaborating on the “nightmare of race in America and need to build strong Black communities” (25), phrases from the emancipation Proclamation or the Declaration of Independence, Christopher Darden’s request to O.J. Simpson to try on the bloodstained glove, or Paul Robeson speaking about not being able to find acting roles in the U.S. and fortunately getting offered a contract to play in England. In one way or the other, the recordings always speak to the ‘tenor’ or the historical context of the scene they precede. Furthermore, they “provide a historically resonant counterpoint to the dramatic action, implicitly extending the scope of Billie’s and Othello’s

66 Being titled a ‘rhapsodic blues tragedy’, the significance of blues music to Harlem Duet is evident. For Sears, “that phrase talks about my cultural ties, my history. […] In Harlem Duet I wanted a tension between European culture and African American culture. I used blues music, but I […] wanted blues music for a cello and a double bass. But double bass and cello says chamber music. So the blues creates that tension, its’s beautiful and it has that drama implicit in it” (Knowles 1998: 29). 81 argument from a private to a public forum, weaving into their ‘duet’ other voices, other histories” (Kidnie 2009: 80). In Harlem Duet, polyvocality, thus, is crucial ‘device’ for Sears to step into a dialogue with African American history and the Black diasporic experience.67

Harlem Duet opens with a Prologue set in 1928 and introduces two characters, a man named Othello and an unnamed woman. Furthermore, a crucial prop appears as “She” learns that her partner loves another woman – a White woman.

SHE: You love her.

HE: Yes. Yes. Yes.

(He wipes his face with a towel. She stares at the handkerchief laying in her bare hand.)

She: Is she White?

(Silence.)

Othello?

(Silence.)

She’s White.

(Silence.)

Othello …

(She holds the handkerchief out to him. He does not take it. She lets it fall at his feet. After a few moments, he picks it up.)

As Kidnie points out, the Prologue provides the first clue that “this drama might speak in some way to Shakespeare’s work […] when the woman addresses her unresponsive partner by name” (2000: 72). It is, however, not only the unresponsive partner, named Othello, which sets up a first link to a Shakespeare. Equally as important, one could argue, is the (re)appearance of the handkerchief as a crucial prop. If Harlem Duet is to be read as the prologue to Othello, the handkerchief would appear for the first time. Realistically, however, one already knows about what should happen in Shakespeare’s play. Therefore, the handkerchief, quite literally, (re)appears as readers and audiences are able to turn to a Shakespearean ‘future’ in order to satisfy questions about the relevance of the handkerchief as a token of Othello’s love. In other

67 The connection to the historical context is particularly noticeable in the scenes set in the 1860/62 time strand, being introduced by readings from the Emancipation Proclamation (Act One scene two) or the Declaration of Independence (Act Two scene three) as well as Paul Robeson talking “of his forbears, whose blood is in the American soil” (62) (Act One scene six). These soundscapes stand in clear correlation to the main protagonists’ status as slaves, as well as to the scenes’ temporal setting shortly before and during the American Civil War. 82 words: one already ‘knows what happens next’. Both acts, the unnamed woman confronting Othello, who is, perhaps, too ashamed to answer and the return of the handkerchief, provide the first important adaptation from Shakespeare’s original. Giving back the handkerchief to Othello is a highly symbolic act, especially in consideration of what should happen with it later. In Harlem Duet, the cuckolded (Black) wife returns the handkerchief to Othello after his betrayal. In Shakespeare’s ‘sequel’, this very handkerchief is given to Desdemona and, after being lost, serves as evidence for Desdemona’s cuckolding of Othello, which becomes the primary motive for her murder. The handkerchief therefore speaks to both a Shakespearean past and future. Already in the prologue, Sears establishes a dynamic in the engagement with Othello, which sets up Shakespeare’s text as a “barely visible (but nonetheless significant) backdrop to dissolution of [Othello’s and his first wife’s] relationship” (Fortier, Fischlin 2000: 287). A relationship of exchange between Othello and Harlem Duet is being established.

From this point on, Harlem Duet shifts across the three different time zones, narrating the tragic dissolution of Billie’s and Othello’s marriage in each of those three scenarios. As Kidnie points out, “each of the narrative strands shares with the others certain common features: a love affair between Othello and Billie, a strawberry spotted handkerchief, inter-racial desire and the politics of such desire in American culture, and violent marital breakdown” (2001: 33). Across three parallel plot lines, the crisis recognizably remains the same, leading to recurrent moments between the seemingly independent strands. In Harlem, Othello, again and again, abandons his first wife Billie for a White woman. Given the historical context of the respective plot lines, the basic conditions behind Othello’s break-up with Billie are still noticeably different from one setting to another and, according to Kidnie, therefore “undermine the possibility of organizing the fragments into a coherent whole” (2009: 76). In the earliest plotline set in the 1860s, shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War, the two former slaves “Her” and “Him” are planning a new life for themselves in Canada.68 Their dream ends in a nightmare, however, as

68 Interestingly, it is “Him” who proposes an escape to Canada: “My wife. My wife before I even met you. Let’s do it. There’s a war already brewing in the south. Canada freedom come” (35). Throughout Harlem Duet, Canada, more precisely Nova Scotia, continuously reappears as the promised land and an escape from a life suffering under slavery. However, as Kidnie points out, “[t]he presentation of Nova Scotia as a Black homeland is complicated […] by the actual, and troubling, history of the African-Canadian experience over the past three centuries” (2001: 38). The positive image of Nova Scotia as ‘Black homeland’ dates back to the War for Independence, when the first free Black community in Canada set up; it was assembled of slaves who defected to the British. Later, they were relocated to the Maritime provinces (cf. Walker 1992: 11f). Black Loyalists were not granted the rights of British subjects, however, as Walker describes that “[in] many ways their life as freemen was not altogether different from the life of slavery that they had left behind. As share-croppers, indentured servants or subsistence day-labourers they were still completely dependent upon the white people and the subject to the whims and prejudices of their white employers” (1992: 57). In Harlem Duet, the utopian image of Nova Scotia as a refuge for African Americans attempting to escape slavery is, therefore, “the source of qualified optimism, conjuring up a rich and uniquely Canadian history of Black identity and multicultural 83

“Him” announces that he cannot leave “Miss Dessy”, the White woman for whom they work, because she needs his protection when her father goes to war. In 1928, the height of the Harlem Renaissance, “He” is offered “the leading role in a production of Shakespeare’s Pericles” (Kidnie 2009: 76) by Mona, whom he subsequently falls in love with. Again, he decides to abandon his Black wife, now identified as “She”, and their plan to build a future in the prospering ‘Black neighbourhood’ of Harlem fails. In the third plot line, the “present tense” which represents the late 1990s, the action jumps as Billie has already been left by Othello who only returns to what has been their marital home to collect some personal belongings and recapitulate the highs and lows of their relationship. Previously, he had left Billie for Mona, one of his White colleagues at Columbia University. Hence, the main premise of the Black wife’s abandonment by her husband in favour of a White woman noticeably remains the same. The main characters, however, undergo a major development across the three plot strands; they receive their names. Billie and Othello are being identified as “Her” and “Him” in 1860/62 and “She” and “He” in 1928, their ‘names’ thus “changing in accordance with transforming political circumstances, […and recording] the movement from slave to citizen” (Gruber 2008: 351).69 Additionally, the recognition that the same actors portray Billie and Othello in all three settings “creates the sense that we are witnessing a single story stretched across time [and] contributes to his impression of narrative unity” (Kidnie 2001: 33).70

A sense of ‘narrative unity’ created through recurrent moments in the plot(s) of Harlem Duet is complicated by the way(s) Billie’s and Othello’s marriage deteriorates across the respective time strands. In 1862, Othello is hanged, in 1928, “She” slits his throat with a razor, and in the present, Billie “is admitted into a psychiatric ward while Othello exits their former apartment to place a call on his cell phone to another member of faculty, Chris Yago” (Kidnie 2009: 76). Therefore, the timelines are related but ultimately remain separated. Additional complexity to the plot is achieved as the three stories “operate in counterpoint to each other” (Dickinson 2002: 191). Following the prologue, the story is being narrated in a chronological but time-delayed order across the time strands set in 1860/62 and the present. While these timelines ultimately

relations that emphasizes, in particular, the importance of African-Canadian community” (Kidnie 2001: 39). 69 Othello’s White wife also undergoes such a transformation, being identified as “(Miss) Dessy” in 1860/62, and Mona in all other scenes. At first sight, this name is a mere reference to Shakespeare’s Desdemona. However, given “Her’s” and “Him’s” status as slaves, implied in the historical context and absence of their names in the 1860/62-plot strand, the name “Miss Dessy” carries additional meaning. The title ‘Miss’ was an essential part of racial etiquette which required Black servants to address their owners by specific titles. Miss was used by slaves to address a White woman on more intimate terms. Thus, “Miss”, so one could argue, clearly designates her as the owner of “Her” and “Him”. 70 The fact that Billie and “She” are indeed the same person is being addressed in the script: “Billie emerges. We recognize her as the woman in the prologue” (29). Similarly, Othello is being recognized as “the man in both 1860 and 1928” (47). 84 remain separated, they follow the action’s ‘natural order’ from point A to point B. Act One scene two takes place in 1860 as “Him” and “Her” declare their love for each other and decide to flee to Canada in the eye of the impending war in the South; as “[a] token … an antique token of our ancient love” (35), “Her” also receives the handkerchief from “Him”. In scene six of the same Act, this time strand is featured again as “Him” is called upon to declare his love for Miss Dessy as well as his unwillingness to leave her: “I love you. It’s just… She needs me. She respects me. Looks up to me, even. I love you. It’s just… When I’m with her I feel like… a man” (63). In scene three of Act Two, this time strand is picked up again. Now set in 1862, “He” is found with a rope around his neck, dead. It remains unclear whether he was the victim of a lynch mob, committed suicide, or was killed by “Her”.

The 1860/62 and contemporary time strands proceed in a chronological but shifted manner over the course of the play. Especially in the First Act, as Dickinson points out, the “syncopated rhythms established between [these timelines] build in intensity throughout [the action]” (2002: 191). However, throughout Harlem Duet, the 1928 plot strand never follows the ‘natural order of events’. In scene eight of the First Act, the rhythm in the interplay between the time strands set in 1860/62 and the present is being interrupted for the first time. After the action built up momentum over the first seven scenes, scene eight features a sudden break and “She” standing over the lifeless body of “He” while holding a “straight-edged razor in her bloodied palms” (72). Later in Act Two, this plotline is picked up again, and “reverses itself, unspooling backwards […] so that by the end of the play HE is still very much alive” (Dickinson 2002: 191). This break in the chronology in scene eight of the First Act creates one of the play’s most impressive interplays between past and present. Scene seven suddenly ends with Billie silently staring at Othello as he lectures her on the differences between Black and White feminism, his preference of White over Black women, as well as his distress over Black womens’ prejudiced and negative image of Black men (cf. 68-71). Billie’s silence in the eye of Othello’s monologue is telling and can be seen as a “negative phrase signalling that something remains to be said, but lacks, as yet, means of expression” (Kidnie 2001: 32). The awareness that Billie has a response she is not able to express is brought home in the abrupt disruption of Othello’s harangue and the transition to the anachronistic scene set in 1928 which features a dead “He” and “She”, who represents Billie, holding a bloodied razor. For Kidnie, “the abrupt and disturbing shifts in context and tone between scenes seven and nine throw into relief the strategies according to which each character pursues conflict resolution: whereas Othello enforces his views through verbal domination, Billie resorts to physical violence” (2001: 32).

85

In Harlem Duet, verbal domination and physical violence are Othello’s and Billie’s ‘last resorts’ in an ongoing dispute which is most accurately fleshed out in the present-day setting. Set in a renovated brownstone apartment at the corner of Martin Luther King and Malcom X boulevards, Othello’s occasional return to what had been their marital home kickstarts a series of duet-like scenes in which Billie and Othello rehearse the highs and lows of their marriage as well as “the history and politics underscoring Othello’s decision to leave Billie for a white woman” (Dickinson 2002: 190). As Billie’s separationist position clashes with Othello’s politics of integration, their discussions turn into an exploration of “competing views within a shared conceptual framework” (Kidnie 2009: 75). However, as their ‘philosophies’ shade into an obsession with skin colour on the one hand, and the utter rejection of categories of race on the other, their disputes ultimately turn out to be unsuccessful attempts to “speak across incompatible paradigms of race relations […]” (Kidnie 2009: 75).

“I’m so tired of this race shit, Billie” (55), Othello exclaims after an extensive discussion on the causes and consequences of as well as possible solutions to systemic racism in America. Being criticized by Billie for his turn towards the White community and his rejection of affirmative action, which she views as his attempt to get ‘White people’s’ respect, Othello shouts: “Wrong again! White respect, Black respect, it’s all the same to me” (55). Othello firmly beliefs that “[l]iberation has no colour” (55) and feels affirmed by Martin Luther King who “[a]fter all that he’d been through in his life, […] could still see that at a deeper level we’re all the same” (54). Billie’s immediate answer “I’m not the same” (54) vividly shows the complete lack of common ground in their dispute. Interestingly, they seem to agree on the basic conditions, as Billie and Othello both acknowledge the history of slavery, racism, and segregation in the United States. However, while Othello wants to move on from this history, Billie is neither able nor willing to do so.

Othello sees himself as a “member of the human race” (55) and strictly “refuses as inadequate an identity that tries to define him as a member of a disadvantaged racial minority” (Kidnie 2009: 73).

I am not minor. I am not a minority. I used to be a minority when I was a kid. I mean my culture is not my mother’s culture – the culture of my ancestors. My culture is Wordsworth, Shaw, Leave it to Beaver, Dirty Harry. I drink the same water, read the same books. You’re the problem if you don’t see beyond my skin. If you don’t hear my educated English, if you don’t understand that I am a middle class educated man. I mean, what does Africa have to do with me. We struttin’ around professing some imaginary connection for a land we don’t know. Never seen. Never gonna see. We lie to ourselves saying, ah yeh, mother Africa, middle passage, suffering, the Whites did it to me, it’s the White’s fault. Strut around in

86

African cloth pretending we human now. We human now. Some of us are beyond that race shit- Spiritually beyond that race shit bullshit now. I am an American. The slaves were freed over 130 years ago. In 1967 it was illegal for a black to marry a White in sixteen states. That was less than thirty years ago … in my lifetime. Things change Billy, I am not my skin. My skin is not me. (73f)

Othello clearly positions himself against race and, as Kidnie points out, argues that “African history and black personhood have been disentangled through education […] and that both are less personally defining than a cultural ‘American-ness’” (2009: 73). Othello’s promotion of a colourless society also serves as an explanation for his love of Mona. Similarly to Shakespeare’s Desdemona, who was able to see beyond Othello’s ‘blackness’ (“I saw Othello’s visage in his mind” (1, 3, 253)), Mona is able to see in Othello more than just a Black man; “She really sees me” (54), Othello explains to Billie. Thus, “leaving Billie”, in Kidnie’s words, “also represents for Othello a break with the stifling personal limitations he feels as a Black man in a relationship with a Black woman” (2001: 30).

The Black feminist position as I experience it in this relationship, leaves me unrecognized as a man. The message is, Black men are poor fathers, poor partners, or both. […] You don’t support me. Black women are more concerned with their careers than their husbands. […] Yes, I prefer White women. They are easier – before and after sex. They wanted me and I wanted them. […] To a Black woman, I represent every Black man she has ever been with and with whom there was still so much to work out. […] I did not leave you, your mother, or your aunt, with six babies and a whole lotta love. I am a very single, very intelligent, very employed Black man. And with White women it’s good. It’s nice. Anyhow, we’re all equal in the eyes of God, aren’t we? Aren’t we? (70f)

Othello’s highly emotional and passively aggressive outburst at Billie in scene seven of the First Act is fuelled by what he feels to be unfair prejudices against Black men by the Black feminist movement. His attacks are, however, also directed Billie’s and their relationship. In Othello’s eyes, Billie denied him from ‘lifting the curse’ that has been put on Black masculinity and which restricts him from becoming a member of a society that does not operate within the boundaries of ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ (any more). White women, in Othello’s mind, “are not prejudiced by these particular gender assumptions” and are therefore “better able to support and encourage his ambitions” (Kidnie 2001: 30f). While Billie has restricted Othello from reaching his ‘full potential’, Mona embodies “the promise of what he might achieve as something precisely other than a black man” (Kidnie 2009: 74).

Othello’s rejection of categories of race and the idea that skin colour and identity stand in no correlation to each other receives fierce criticism from Billie: “The skin holds everything in. It’s the largest organ in the human body. Slash the skin by my belly and my intestines fall out” (44). Othello’s promotion of a ‘colour neutral’ society stands in stark contrast to Billie’s 87 recollection of ancestral heritage and her awareness of an American history that is afflicted with a tradition of racial injustice and a dominance of ‘White culture’. As Gruber points out, “Billie’s grief over being betrayed is intensified by her conviction that racism is affirmed rather than challenged by Othello’s preference for a White woman” (2008: 353). In Billie’s eyes, Othello has sold out Black culture in an effort to gain White respect. For her, Othello has become “a black man afflicted with Negrophobia” (66) and the equivalent of what Magi describes as Black man who tries to “White wash” (66) his life; “Booker T. Uppermiddleclass III. He can be found in predominantly White neighborhoods. He refers to other Blacks as ‘them’. His greatest accomplishment was being invited to the White House by George Bush to discuss the ‘Negro problem’” (66).

According to Dickinson, “Billie […] channels her pain and anger into a complex dissection of race and sexuality as they relate to black masculinity” (2002: 190). In the wake of Othello’s abandonment, Billie’s focus on race and possible implications of her own (and Othello’s) ‘blackness’ and Mona’s ‘whiteness’ does not only throw of Othello, but also her sister in law, Amah, and her landlady, Magi. “She never used to be like that, you know, about colour”, Amah notes, to which Magi responds: “Guess it ain’t never been personal before” (31). Nurtured by the grief over Othello’s impending marriage to Mona, Billie’s separationist position turns into a stubborn obsession with skin colour. Eventually, Billie’s “anti-white racism” (Fischlin, Fortier 2000: 287) even gets rejected by her family and closest friends:

BILLIE: He’s going to marry her… Officially…

MAGI: I know… I know. Remember, what goes around comes around. Karma is a strong and unforgiving force.

BILLIE: I haven’t seen it affect White people much.

MAGI: Is everything about White people with you? Is every moment of your life eaten up with thinking about them? Do you know where you are? Do you know who you are anymore? What about right and wrong. Racism is a disease my friend, and your test just came back positive. You are so busy reacting, you don’t even know yourself.

BILLIE: No, no, no… It’s about Black. I love Black. I really do. And it’s revolutionary…… Black is beautiful… So beautiful. This Harlem sanctuary…… here. This respite… Like an ocean in the middle of a desert. And in my mirror, my womb, he has a fast growing infestation of roaches. White roaches.

MAGI: Billie?

BILLIE: Did you ever consider what hundreds of years of slavery did to the African American psyche?

88

MAGI: What? What are you?

Billie’s delusion of being stricken with a cancerous infestation of ‘White roaches’ marks the tragic collapse of a mental state which has been in jeopardy since the beginning of Harlem Duet.71 Initiated by Othello’s abandonment, Billie’s downward spiral is caught by the presence and ongoing support of Amah and Magi, who, like Shakespeare’s Emilia and Bianca, “provide Sear’s female protagonist with a form of sisterly solidarity” (Dickinson 2002: 190). However, in the eye of Billie’s struggle against Othello’s verbal domination, the sudden return of another male figure with whom Billie has had a troubled relationship meant the gut punch that (mentally) took her over the edge. “[H]aving to deal both with Othello’s justifications for leaving her and with Canada’s explanations for his prior abandonment of her mother and their family in Nova Sotia”, Billie, in the words of Dickinson, “gives up on academic analysis and rationalizing altogether” (2002: 190).72 Instead, she takes on her girl’s name Sibyl, turns to alchemy, and attempts to poison the handkerchief that belonged to Othello’s grandmother and that he now wants returned.73

I am preparing something special for you… Othe… Othello. A gift for you, and your new pride. Once you gave me a handkerchief. An heirloom. This handkerchief, your mother’s. … given by your father. From his mother before that. So far back… And now… then… to me. It is fixed in the emotions of all your ancestors. The one who laid the foundation for the road in Herndon, Virginia, and was lashed for laziness as he stopped to wipe the sweat from his brow with this kerchief. Or, your great great grandmother, who covered her face with it, and then covered it with her hands as she rocked and silently wailed, when told that her girl child, barely thirteen, would be sent ’cross the state for breeding purposes. Or the one who leapt for joy on hearing of the Emancipation Proclamation, fifteen years late mind you, only to watch it fall in slow motion from his hand and onto the ground when told that the only job he could now get, was the same one he’d done for free all those years, and now he’s forced to take it, for not

71 Shortly after being accused of racist behaviour by Magi, the action changes mid-scene. All of a sudden, Billie is getting caught in a hallucination, reliving herself and Othello buying the apartment in Harlem and jumping the broom. Throughout the play, the act of jumping the broom reappears as an symbolic act of resistance in the eye of marriage being prohibited to slaves – “Think them old slaves had rings? Slave marriages were illegal, remember. This broom is more than rings. More than any gold. [He whispers.] My ancient love” (107). 72 Through the sudden (re)appearance of Canada, personified by Billie’s father, the 1860/62 plot strand receives an obvious connection to the present. For Sears, Billie’s father was a late, although necessary, addition: “I paid for this man to read the part of Canada, the father. But I don’t know why the character came, I just knew he had to be there and I don’t know now how the play could have done without him” (Sears in: Knowles 1998: 26). 73 Here, Billie becomes the Egyptian charmer of Shakespeare’s Othello. Taking on Sibyl as her name, she turns into Othello’s “sibyl” (3, 4, 67) who, in Shakespeare, “in her prophetic fury sew’d the work” (3, 4, 68). In Harlem Duet, the sibyl’s handkerchief, as Dickinson points out, will “eventually bring about [Othello’s] and (Desde)Mona’s demise” (2002: 190). 89

enough money to buy the food to fill even one man’s belly. And more … so much more. What I add to this already fully endowed cloth, will cause you such…… such… Wretchedness. Othe… Othello.

(The contents of the flask have been transformed from violet to clear. BILLIE places the handkerchief onto a large tray. Then with tongs, she takes the hot flask and pours the contents over the handkerchief. She retrieves a vial from the table, opens it.) (75f)

As Kidnie points out, “[t]he past in Harlem Duet never seems ‘over’” (2009: 81). Being infused with the emotions and experiences of Othello’s ancestors, the handkerchief establishes an important link to the past. Furthermore, being passed on from generation to generation, it represents a continuity in (African American) history that Othello, with his rejection of categories of race, treats with contempt. As Billie turns into the ‘mad enchantress’, she seems to follow “Her” and “She” in taking on the role of the homicidal avenger. However, as the murder of Othello seems to be set for triplication with Billie’s attempt to poison Othello, her mental breakdown leads to her being institutionalized in a hospital psych ward. As Billie drifts in and out of coherence, being looked after by her father who vows to support her, Othello walks off into Shakespeare’s world. (Yet) unharmed, he departs for Cyprus, Mona, the handkerchief, and his colleague Chris Yago all in tow.

In “nOTES oF a cOLOURED gIRL”, Djanet Sears declares Harlem Duet a shot at the exorcism of the ghost of Laurence Olivier’s performances in blackface and an attempted response to the exclusion as well as marginalisation of African (American) voices and stories on stage. In Harlem Duet, she turns the tables. With her chorus of Black voices that precede the scenes and her inclusion of different time levels, Sears created an alternative to the theatrical format of the Renaissance tragedy. Harlem Duet continuously confronts the audience with a rich and diverse spectrum of (African) American culture and society, thus challenging stereotypical notions of race. Interestingly, however, Harlem Duet did not turn out to be the utter deconstruction of Shakespeare’s Othello, as Sears continually seems to move the lines between imitating and inverting her source. One of the play’s most conspicuous features are the contextual markers that do not only link Harlem Duet to the plot of Shakespeare’s Othello, but more importantly respond to the play’s history of ideologically fuelled performances as well as its racist stage tradition – the ghost that is up for exorcising. Such a connection is particularly visible in the plot strand set in 1928: “I will not die in black-face to pay the rent. I am of Ira Aldridge stock” (99), Othello (“He”), a Black minstrel performer, exclaims. Three scenes later, “the voice of Paul Robeson speaking about not being able to get decent acting roles in the U.S., and how fortunate he feels to be offered a contract to play OTHELLO in England” (113) introduces “He” 90 as he covers his face in black grease paint, adds white paint to his lips and completes the mask of the minstrel. “He” will still be found reciting Othello, although not for practicing purposes, but as an attempt to justify the marriage to his newly wed White wife, Mona; “It is most true; true, I have married her[…]” (113).74 The omnipresence of Shakespearean names, themes and crucial imagery, such as the handkerchief, strengthens the connection to the source even further, as Harlem Duet, in the words of Fischlin and Fortier, “moves to establish its own revisionist agenda in relation to historical circumstances that have traditionally excluded the representation of black culture from the public stage” (2000: 287).

In Harlem Duet, Othello turns into a contrastive foil as Sears “returns to the issues raised by interracial marriage explored by Shakespeare but sets that debate in revised national and historical contexts, and in exclusively black communities” (Kidnie 2009: 73). While the dominant cultural matrix of the pretext is White European, the dominant cultural matrix of Sears’ ‘rhapsodic blues tragedy’ is the Black community in present day New York. Only in Harlem, Othello is no longer seen as an alien in a world that is usually dominated by White culture and society. A process of alienation is still being initiated, however, as Othello “is dazzled by whiteness and follows it away from the community’s place and space” (Sanders 2000: 558). Thus, Othello turns into an outsider again; both in a Black and a White world.75 Contrary to Othello, Harlem Duet does not focus on the male protagonist, but on Billie, his first wife. Telling the story from Billie’s perspective, Harlem Duet engages with issues that are omitted in Shakespeare and responds to “issues of racial and sexual significance related to the black diasporic experience” (Fischlin, Fortier: 2000: 287) such as slavery, racism, segregation, same- and cross-racial relationships, or affirmative action.

Harlem Duet stages the dissolution of Billie’s and Othello’s marriage across three related, but separated, time strands, and shifts the focus from Othello’s rendering of the impacts of interracial marriages on White culture to the ways in which miscegenation influences Black women. Set in 1860/62 and 1928, the play’s ‘historical’ time strands respond to landmark moments in the journey towards African American emancipation. Furthermore, they help to supplement the main timeline in “showing the historical sweep of the motivations and emotions of its characters as they struggle to deal with the twin variables of race and sexuality in three different temporal moments” (Fischlin, Fortier 2000: 287). The central part of Harlem Duet’s

74 This is only one of many instances in which one of Sears’ characters is found to quote the exact lines from their Shakespearean counterparts. 75 In rejecting ‘his’ community, Othello becomes an outsider for his ‘Black’ peers. However, turning to White culture and society, he also becomes a pariah amongst his White colleagues. 91 plot takes part in the present tense and evolves around the highly charged stand-off between Billy and Othello as well as the question “of whether to live according to a separatist or integrationist racial politics” (Kidnie 2001: 31). As Billie and Othello turn into ‘more radical’ embodiments of Malcom X and Martin Luther King, their lack of a “shared ‘idiom’ by which to arbitrate [their] conflict” (Kidnie 2009: 75) leads to the complete breakdown of their relationship. In the end, the death of Othello, foreshadowed by the 1860/62- and 1928-time strands, does not repeat itself. As a slave, Othello is hanged and as a ‘black minstrel’, Billie slits his throat. However, as a professor of English at the Columbia University, Othello lives on to, quite literally, tell another tale.

“Chris Yago, please” are the last words we hear from Othello as he calls the colleague he, unfairly, some of his White colleagues allege, excelled for the conduct of the department’s courses in Cyprus. To satisfy questions about ‘what happens next’ with Othello, Mona, and Chris, one has to turn to a Shakespearean future. “What is perhaps most unsettling about this moment”, Margaret Kidnie points out, “is the realization that Sears is not ‘writing back’ to Shakespeare so much as she is being written back to by Shakespeare” (2009: 84). In similar fashion, Peter Dickinson concludes that “ [Djanet Sears] proleptically displaces Shakespeare’s Othello from its anterior position in dramatic history so that by the end of Harlem Duet it is no longer clear which of these playwrights is calling and which is responding to whom” (2002: 204). Clearly, Sears’ adaptation triggers a relationship of exchange with its source. Throughout Harlem Duet, Shakespeare’s Othello remains a significant backdrop to Djanet Sears’ exorcism of the past. However, such a process is, as Kidnie suggests, initiated “by making space in a present moment of production for those ghosts to return” (2009: 89).

92

Conclusion

In the process of writing my diploma thesis, I often found myself asking the following question: Where does a discussion of race and racism in Othello start, and where does it end? Now that I have come to the end of my research, I am left with an unsettling realization. As this diploma thesis has shown, Othello is a highly ambiguous intertext that drew inspiration from various sources. For the question(s) I aimed to answer in my thesis, the recognition that Shakespeare ‘Moorish’ hero got fleshed out with literary and ethnographic material, amassed chiefly from Giraldi Cinthio, Pliny, Leo Africanus or Richard Hakluyt, has proven to be of particular importance. Thus, Shakespeare’s fictitious Venetian society clearly responds to early-modern- age constructions of race. Furthermore, the analysis of various speech acts in the third chapter has shown that the racist sentiment, which many of the play’s characters display, closely correlates with a developing Elizabethan consciousness. Interestingly, racism in the play has turned out to be a far more nuanced matter than the blatant racism from Iago, Roderigo and Brabantio initially suggested. As a result, Othello is clearly afflicted with stereotypes and prejudices prevalent in the late 16th century. Hence, a discussion of race and racism in Othello must start with its history of origins. However, finding something close to an ‘ending point’ is considerably more difficult.

One of the most interesting findings, it seems to me, has been the extent to which aspects of race and racism in Othello have surpassed the textual level. The area where such issues have been particularly visible was in the history of the play’s performance and reception. Over four centuries of its theatrical and critical afterlife, Othello turned out to be highly capable of laying bare racist sentiments in theatregoers, critics, and audiences alike. Conspicuously, it was rarely the action of the play which received (racist) backlash from audiences and critics, but the implications of a ‘black’ main protagonist on stage, the degree of his ‘blackness’, and later also the ‘authenticity’ of Black actors’ performances. The second chapter strikingly showed the ways in which certain social and political backgrounds impacted the engagement with Othello. As a consequence, the discussion of race and racism in Othello shifted away from an investigation of those themes in the play, and towards how racist, predominantly White, societies have approached Othello’s race and displayed racist behaviour. Ultimately, this turned out to be one of the most interesting takeaways of the second chapter. Othello does not only feature historically accurate and authentic characters who display racist sentiment(s). As the image of the ‘black(faced)’ main protagonist collided with prevalent attitudes towards race, the play’s character conception also proved capable to lay bare racist ideologies in its audiences.

93

Race and racism seem to appear in every aspect of the engagement with Othello. They heavily impact its making and discourse and are most recognizable in the play’s theatrical and critical afterlife. As I have pointed out in the fourth chapter, these issues have become of utmost importance for post-colonial criticism, which has turned to Othello’s ‘imperial-agenda’. The discussion of Othello’s origins has shown that the play does not only represent a distinct culture and society, but also responds to a developing national identity; an identity being “linked with colonial and imperial imperatives” (Fischlin 2000: 11). Thus, Othello has become a target for revisionary texts and performances of the play. As has been shown, post-colonial rewritings, as well as theatrical adaptations and productions, do not always aim at the destruction of a semantically fixed text, which Othello clearly is not. Similarly, they often do not attempt the utter demythologization of Shakespeare. Therefore, Hellen Tiffin’s concept of canonical counter discourse has proven to be an insufficient and too narrow categorization for the works of post-colonial authors and artists. Often stepping into a dialogue with Shakespeare and his work(s), a considerable number of post-colonial engagements with Othello is not directed at the canonical author himself; rather, they respond to the history of the racially, politically, and ideologically motivated exploitation of Shakespeare’s texts which is, as it turned out, represented in Othello’s performative and receptive tradition. Featuring a Black main protagonist, the play stands representative for the marginalisation of Black voices, stories, and bodies on stages and screens in the Empire, its (former) colonised spaces and other parts of Europe. Besides the exploitation of Othello and other classics as ‘imperial tools’ to indoctrinate the Empire’s colonised subjects and spaces with English values and ideologies, the racially motivated exclusion of ‘racial Others’ from social and cultural participation has turned out to be one of the most important targets of post-colonial (re)considerations of Othello.

Othello has become a “foundational text in the emergence of modern European racial consciousness […]”, Neill notes (1998: 361). As such, it stands representative for the racially motivated exclusion of Black actors and actresses from stages and screens. This exclusion has been particularly visible in the United States, where the play, with its Black main protagonist ‘malfunctioning’ in a White world, has always carried immense political implications. Even though America’s nationalist ambitions and its neo-imperial agenda justified criticism over the United States’ inclusion in the ‘post-colonial discussion’, they represent one of the cultural spaces which proved particularly responsive to revisionist engagements with Shakespeare and his colonial legacy. Towards the end of the 20th century and capturing the African American experience as a social, political, and cultural misfit in a predominantly White society, American

94 adaptations of Othello have turned out to be invaluable contributions to a developing post- colonial canon.

One of the most impressive responses to Othello’s history of ideologically fuelled performances is Djanet Sears’ Harlem Duet (1997). In her play, she sets out to ‘exorcise the ghost’ of Laurence Olivier’s performances in blackface and strives for the recognition of Black (his)stories on stage. Furthermore, she responds to chapters in the United States’ history which are afflicted with racism and the marginalisation of the African American population. While Othello remains an important backdrop to the action of Harlem Duet, the play’s chorus of Black voices and its multi-layered temporal setting fittingly capture “issues of racial and sexual significance related to the black diasporic experience” (Fischlin, Fortier: 2000: 287).

In consideration of Othello’s theatrical and critical afterlife, as well as the post-colonial engagements with the play and its author, I am convinced that we should not talk about one, but in fact many ‘Othellos’. As this diploma thesis has shown, what the play represents is one thing. However, one could make the argument that for the discussion of race and racism in Othello, it is more important what it has been made into. Because Othello is so ambiguous, and because Shakespeare was a man of the theatre rather than an ‘ideologue’ (cf. Mahler 2018: 319), it has been possible to exploit the play for so many different political, social, and cultural agendas. Owed to its ‘Moorish’ main character, Othello has been deeply connected to the history of ‘blackfacing’ White actors. It is also owed to the Black main protagonist that the play has, in one way or the other, often responded to racial anxieties and racist sentiment(s) in audiences and critics. The fact that adaptations of Othello showed capable to advocate for wholly opposite messages provides ample testimony of the mutability of the play. Furthermore, Othello’s ambiguity explicates the potential of (post-colonial) drama to push for revisionist agendas or encourage re-evaluations of issues such as race and racism. At last, I am convinced that one cannot tell the story of Othello and its post-colonial adaptations without talking about constructions of race and institutional racism; they influenced both the making and the discourse of Shakespeare’s play. Most importantly, however, issues of race and racism have resurfaced throughout Othello’s theatrical and critical afterlife. It was particularly these dark chapters in the engagement with a play that, perhaps, was never intended to be about race or politics, which turned out to be powerful calls for post-colonial (re)consideration of Shakespeare’s Othello.

95

Works Cited

Primary Sources Carlin, Murray (1969). Not Now, Sweet Desdemona. Nairobi: OUP. Cintho, Giraldi (2016). “The Moor of Venice”. In: Edward Pechter, ed. Othello: Second Norton Critical Edition. New York: WW Norton & Company. 8811-9054. [KINDLE] Davies, John Sir (1878). “Microcosmos”. In: Alexander Grosart, ed. The Complete Works of John Davies of Hereford. Edinburgh: EUP. 38. Emerson, Ralph Waldo (2015). The American Scholar. United Kingdom: The Perfect Library. [KINDLE] Markoe, Peter (2014). “The Tragic Genius of Shakespeare; An Ode (1787)”. In: James Shapiro, ed. Shakespeare in America. An Anthology from the Revolution to Now. New York: The Library of America. 8-13. Okri, Ben (1997). “Leaping out of Shakespeare’s Terror”. In: Ben Okri. A Way of Being Free. London: Phoenix House. 715-871. [KINDLE] Purchas, Samuel (1613). Purchas His Pilgrimage or Relations of the World and the Religions Observed in All Ages. London: William Stansby [Online] https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e /eebo/A10228.0001.001?view=toc [2020, February 7]. Sears, Djanet (1997). Harlem Duet. Toronto: Scirroco Drama. Shakespeare William (2020). “Othello, the Moor of Venice”. In: Lutz Walter, ed. Othello. Ditzingen: Philipp Reclam jun. Verlag GmbH. X, Malcom, Alex Haley (1965). The Autobiography of Malcom X. New York: Random House Books.

Secondary Sources Adelman, Janet (1997). “Iago’s Alter Ego: Race as Projection in Othello”. Shakespeare Quarterly 48.2: 125-144. Adler, Doris (1974). “The Rhetoric of Black and White in Othello”. Shakespeare Quarterly 25.2: 248-257. Agate, James (1930, May 20). [Review of Paul Robeson’s performance]. The Sunday Times. n. pag. Agate, James (1943). Brief Chronicles. A Survey of the Plays of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans in Actual Performance. United Kingdom: Jonathan Cape. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin (1989). The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge. 96

Bartels, Emily C. (1990). “Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashionings of Race”. Shakespeare Quarterly 41.4: 433-454. Bartels, Emily C. (1997). “Othello and Africa: Postcolonialism Reconsidered”. William and Mary Quarterly 54: 45-64. Bartels, Emily C. (2008). Speaking of the Moor: From “Alcazar” to “Othello”. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bate, Jonathan (1989). Shakespeare Constitutions: Politics, Theatre, Criticism, 1730-1830. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Berry, Edward (1990). “Othello’s Alienation”. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. 30.2: 315-333. Bodin, Jean (1969). Method for the Easy Comprehension of History. New York: Norton. Bradley, Andrew Cecil (1919). Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures in “Hamlet”, “Othello”, “King Lear”, “Macbeth”. London: Macmillan. Bristol, Michael (1990). Shakespeare’s America, American Shakespeare. London and New York: Routledge. Brown, Ivor (1930, May 25). [Review of Paul Robeson’s performance]. The Observer. n. pag. Callaghan, Dympna (2003). “’Othello was a white man’: properties of race in Shakespeare’s stage. In: Terence Hawkes, ed. Alternative Shakespeares. Volume II. New York: Routledge. 192-215. Cartelli, Thomas (1999). Repositioning Shakespeare: National Formations, Postcolonial Appropriations. New York: Routledge. Clayton, Thomas (1993). ‘That’s She that was Myself’: Not-so-Famous Last Words and Some Ends of Othello”. In: Stanley Wells, ed. Shakespeare Survey. 46: 61-68. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (2016). “Comments on Othello”. In: Edward Pechter, ed. Othello: Second Norton Critical Edition. New York: W W: Norton & Company. 10731-10826. [KINDLE] Dickinson, Peter (2002). “Duets, Duologues, and Black Diasporic Theatre: Djanet Sears, William Shakespeare, and Others”. Modern Drama 45.2.: 188-208. Döring, Tobias (2018). “Die postkolonialen Kulturen”. In: Ina Schabert, ed. Shakespeare Handbuch: Die Zeit – Der Mensch – Das Werk – Die Nachwelt. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag. 681-695. Fischlin, Daniel, Mark Fortier (2000). “General Introduction.” In: Daniel Fischlin, Mark Fortier, eds. Adaptations of Shakespeare. A critical anthology of plays from the seventeenth century to the present. New York: Routledge. 1-22.

97

Gabler, Hans Walter (2018). “Der Text”. In: Ina Schabert, ed. Shakespeare Handbuch: Die Zeit – Der Mensch – Das Werk – Die Nachwelt. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag. 192-238. Gilbert, Helen, Joanne Tompkins (1996). Post-colonial Drama: Theory, practice, politics. London: Routledge. Gildon, Charles (1694). “Some Reflections on Mr. Rymer’s “Short View of Tragedy” and an Attempt at a Vindication of Shakespeare, in an Essay directed to John Dryden”. In: Charles Gildon, ed. Miscellaneous Letters and Essays on Several Subjects. London: White-Hart. 64-116 [Online] http://test.quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A42746.0001. 001/1:4.8?rgn=div2;view=fulltext [2020, May 20]. Gillies, John (1994). Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: CUP. Gruber, Elizabeth (2008). “Practical Magic: Empathy and Alienation in Harlem Duet”. Literature Interpretation Theory 19.4: 346-366. Hackett, Helen (2009). Shakespeare and Elizabeth. The Meeting of Two Myths. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hall, Stuart (1996). “When was ‘the Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit”. In: Ian Chambers, Lidia Curti, eds. The Post-Colonial Question. London: Routledge: 242-60. Hankey, Julie (2005). “Introduction”. In: Julie Hankey, ed. Shakespeare in Production. Othello. Cambridge: CUP. 1-112. Hawkins, F.W. (1869). The Life of Edmund Kean: From Published Original Sources. London: Tinsley Bths. Hill, Errol (1984). Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Holderness, Graham (1988). “Introduction”. In Graham Holderness, ed. The Shakespeare Myth. Manchester: Manchester University Press. XI-XVI. Hotz-Davies, Ingrid (2018). “Die Romanzen”. In: Ina Schabert, ed. Shakespeare Handbuch: Die Zeit – Der Mensch – Das Werk – Die Nachwelt. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag. 454-473. Hovde, Sarah (2017, Feb. 17). “Ira Aldridge takes the stage”. Shakespeare and Beyond [Online] https://shakespeareandbeyond.folger.edu/2017/02/17/ira-aldridge/ [2020, April 28]. Hunter, George K. (1964). “Elizabethans and Foreigners”. Shakespeare Survey 17: 37-52. Hunter, George K. (1967). “Othello and Colour Prejudice”. Proceedings of the British Academy 53: 139-163.

98

Hutcheon, Linda (2006). A Theory of Adaptation. London: Routledge. Hutchinson, George (2019). “Harlem Renaissance. American literature and art”. Britannica Online. [Online]. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/event/Harlem- Renaissance-American-literature-and-art [2020, July 4]. Jones, Eldred (1965). Othello’s Countrymen. The African in English Renaissance Drama. London: OUP. Jordan, Winthrop D (1974). The White Man’s Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States. New York: OUP. Jordan, Winthrop D (2000). “First Impressions”. In: Les Back, John Solomos, eds. Theories of Race and Racism. London: Routledge. 33-50. Kapadia, Parmita (2008). “Transnational Shakespeare: Salman Rushdie and Intertextual Appropriation”. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 3.2: 1-22. [Online] http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/781652/pdf [2020, March 12]. Kidnie, Margaret Jane (2001). ““There’s magic in the web if it”: Seeing Beyond Tragedy in Harlem Duet”. The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 26.2: 29-44. Kidnie, Margaret Jane (2009). Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. New York: Routledge. Klein, Bernhard (2018). “England in der Frühen Neuzeit”. In: Ina Schabert, ed. Shakespeare Handbuch: Die Zeit – Der Mensch – Das Werk – Die Nachwelt. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag. 2-46. Knowles, Ric (1998). “The Nike Method”. Canadian Theatre Review 97: 24-30. Lamb, Charles (1909). “On the Tragedies of Shakespeare Considered with Reference to Their Fitness for Stage Representation”. In: Charles W. Eliot, ed. English Essays. From Sir Philip Sidney to Macaulay. New York: P.F. Collier & Son. [Online] https://www. bartleby.com/27/21.html [2020, May 15]. Lawrence, Levine W. (1988). Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lawson, Alan (1992). “Comparative studies and post-colonial ‘settler’ cultures”. Australian -Canadian Studies 10.2: 153-159. Lindfors, Bernth (2013). Ira Aldridge. Performing Shakespeare in Europe, 1852-1855. New York: University of Rochester Press. Little, Arthur Jr. (1993). ““An Essence that’s Not Seen”: The Primal Scene of Racism in Othello”. Shakespeare Quarterly 44.3: 304-324.

99

Loomba, Ania (1989). Gender, Race Renaissance Drama. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Loomba, Ania, Martin Orkin (1998). “Introduction: Shakespeare and the post-colonial question.” In: Ania Loomba, Martin Orkin, eds. Post-Colonial Shakespeares. New York: Routledge. 1-19. Löschnigg, Maria (2013). “Shakespeare’s Post-Colonial Legacy: The Case of Othello”. Anglia 131.1: 17-34. Mahler, Andreas (2018). “Das ideologische Profil”. In: Ina Schabert, ed (2018). Shakespeare Handbuch: Die Zeit – Der Mensch – Das Werk – Die Nachwelt. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag. 295-319. Marshall, Herbert, Mildred Stock (1958). Ira Aldridge: The Negro Tragedian. New York: MacMillan. McClintock, Anne (1995). Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge. Neill, Michael (1989). “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello”. Shakespeare Quarterly 40.4: 383-412. Neill, Michael (1998). ““Mulattos,” “Blacks,” and “Indian Moors”: Othello and Early Modern Constructions of Human Difference. Shakespeare Quarterly 49.4: 361-374. Neill, Michael (1998). “Post-Colonial Shakespeare? Writing away from the centre”. In: Ania Loomba, Martin Orkin, eds. Post-Colonial Shakespeares. New York: Routledge. 164- 185. Neill, Michael (2006). “Introduction”. In: Michael Neill, ed. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1-179. Orkin, Martin (1987) “Othello and the “plain face” Of Racism”. Shakespeare Quarterly 38.2: 166-188. Parker, Fred (1988). “Foul Disproportion: Rymer on “Othello””. Shakespeare Quarterly 17.1: 17-27. Pechter, Edward (1999). Othello and Interpretive Traditions. Iowa City: IUP. Pechter, Edward (2016). “Othello in Its Own Time”. In: Edward Pechter, ed. Othello: Second Norton Critical Edition. New York: WW Norton & Company. 7999-8811. [KINDLE] Pechter, Edward (2016). “Othello” in Theatrical and Critical History”. In: Edward Pechter, ed. Othello: Second Norton Critical Edition. New York: WW Norton & Company. 9062-9974. [KINDLE] Preston, Mary (2014). “Othello”. In: James Shapiro, ed. Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now. United States: Library of America. 210-216.

100

Quarshie, Hugh (1999). Second Thoughts about Othello. Chipping Campden: Printed for the International Shakespeare Association, Clouds Hill Printers. Ridley, M.R. (1958). “Introduction”. In: M.R. Ridley, ed. Othello. London: Methuen. i-lxx. Rymer, Thomas (1693). A Short View of Tragedy. Yorkshire: The Solar Press Limited. [Online] https://books.google.at/books?id=AN4iAAAAMAAJ&printsec= frontcover&hl =de&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false [2020, March 12]. Said, Edward W. (1994). Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. Sanders, Leslie (2000). “Othello Deconstructed: Djanet Sears’ Harlem Duet”. In: Djanet Sears, ed. Testifyin’: Contemporary African Canadian Drama. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. 557-560. Schabert, Ina (2018). “Die Rezeption Shakespeares in Literatur und Kultur”. In: Ina Schabert, ed. Shakespeare Handbuch: Die Zeit – Der Mensch – Das Werk – Die Nachwelt. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag. 602-626. Schabert, Ina (2018). “Die theaterbezogene Kunst”. In: Ina Schabert, ed. Shakespeare Handbuch: Die Zeit – Der Mensch – Das Werk – Die Nachwelt. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag. 239-294. Schülting, Sabine (2018). “Die Späten Tragödien”. In: Ina Schabert, ed. Shakespeare Handbuch: Die Zeit – Der Mensch – Das Werk – Die Nachwelt. Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner Verlag. 523-567. Shapiro, James, ed. (2014). Shakespeare in America. An Anthology from the Revolution to Now. New York: The Library of America. Shaw, Rudolph (1995). ““Othello” and Race Relations in Elizabethan England”. Journal of African American Men 1.1:83-91. Siemon, James R. (2018). ““Nay, That’s Not Next”: Othello, V.ii in Performance, 1760-1900. In: Edward Pechter, ed. Othello: Second Norton Critical Edition. New York: WW: Norton & Company. 11769-12252. [KINDLE] Stendhal (1992). “From Racine to Shakespeare”. In: Jonathan Bate, ed. The Romantics on Shakespeare. London: Penguin Books. 218-237. St Rose, Marjorie (2002). “Race and Patriarchy in Othello”. College of the Bahamas Research Journal 11: 25-33. Swerstrom, Annie, Joelle Nelson, Shelley Prieditis (2004). “Djanet Sears”. Voices from the Gaps. [Online] http://hdl.handle.net/11299/166320 [2020, June 20].

101

Tiffin, Helen (1987). “Post-Colonial Literatures and Counter-Discourse”. Kunapipi 9.3: 17-34. Tilley, M.P. (1950). A Dictionary of Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries: A collection of the Proverbs found in English Literature and the Dictionaries of the period. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Tompkins, Joanne (1993). “Infinitely Rehearsing Performance and Identity: African Solo and The Book of Jessica”. Canadian Theatre Review 74: 35-39. Tompkins, Joanne (1996). “Re-Citing Shakespeare in Post-Colonial Drama.” Essays in Theatre/Études théatrales 15.1: 15-22. Tynan, Kenneth (1966). ‘Othello’: The National Theatre Production. London: Rupert Hart- Davis. Vaughan, Virginia Mason (1996). Othello. A Contextual History. Cambridge: CUP. Walker, James W. St. G. (1992). The Black Loyalists. The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leona, 1783-1870. Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated. Whitelaw, Billie (1995, Aug. 27). “Billie Whitelaw … Who He?”. The Sunday Times. 10+.

102