SHAKESPEARE IN PRODUCTION

OTHELLO

This second edition of Othello updates the first (Bristol Classical Press, 1987), both chronologically and conceptually. It includes consideration of productions from the last seventeen years, and reconsiders earlier material in the light of more recent critical attitudes. Post-colonial and feminist studies have had an impact on the way Othello is perceived and interpreted. The question of blacked-up/black/colour-blind casting and the significance of white and/or black audiences in different political and racial contexts have recently become much more clearly articulated. In the process, Shakespeare himself has not escaped the charge of racism. Equally, the position of Desdemona has received more focused attention, both as the forbidden object of desire within a racial framework and as a woman in her own right. This edition takes account of these developments in criticism, in the theatre, on film and in the adaptations which set out to interrogate Shakespeare’s text.

JULIE HANKEY is a freelance writer and one of the General Editors of the ‘Shakespeare in Production’ series. She contributed the theatre-historical editions of Richard Ⅲ and Othello, before the series was adopted by Cambridge University Press, and has also contributed articles to Shakespeare Quarterly and New Theatre Quarterly.

SHAKESPEARE IN PRODUCTION

SERIES EDITORS: J. S. BRATTON AND JULIE HANKEY

This series offers students and researchers the fullest possible stage histories of individual Shakespearean texts. In each volume a substantial introduction presents a conceptual overview of the play, marking out the major stages of its representation and reception. The commentary, presented alongside the New Cambridge Shakespeare edition of the text itself, offers detailed, line-by-line evidence for the overview presented in the introduction, making the volume a flexible tool for further research. The editors have selected interesting and vivid evocations of settings, acting and stage presentation, and range widely in time and space.

ALREADY PUBLISHED
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, edited by Trevor R. Griffiths
Much Ado About Nothing, edited by John F. Cox
Antony and Cleopatra, edited by Richard Madelaine
Hamlet, edited by Robert Hapgood
The Tempest, edited by Christine Dymkowski
King Henry V, edited by Emma Smith
The Merchant of Venice, edited by Charles Edelman
Romeo and Juliet, edited by James N. Loehlin
Macbeth, edited by John Wilders
The Taming of the Shrew, edited by Elizabeth Schafer
As You Like It, edited by Cynthia Marshall

FORTHCOMING VOLUMES
Troilus and Cressida, edited by Frances Shirley
Twelfth Night, edited by Elizabeth Schafer

OTHELLO

EDITED BY

JULIE HANKEY

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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http://www.cambridge.org

© First edition Julie Hankey 1987
© Second edition Cambridge University Press 2005

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2005

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typefaces EhrhardtMT 10/12.5 pt. and FormataCond System LATEX 2_e [TB]

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616.
Othello / edited by Julie Hankey – 2nd edn.
p. cm. – (Shakespeare in production)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 521 83458 9 – ISBN 0 521 54236 7 (pbk)
1. Othello (Fictitious character) – Drama. 2. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616. Othello – Criticism, Textual. 3. Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616 – Stage history. I. Hankey, Julie. II. Title.
PR2829.A2H36   2005
822.3′3 – dc22          2004054031

ISBN 0 521 83458 9 (hardback)
ISBN 0 521 54236 7 (paperback)

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

It is no longer necessary to stress 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. Since the coming-of-age of Theatre Studies as an academic discipline, we now understand that even Shakespeare is only one collaborator in the creation and infinite recreation of his play upon the stage. And just as we now agree that no play is complete until it is produced, so we have become interested in the way in which plays often produced – and pre-eminently the plays of the national Bard, William Shakespeare – acquire a life history of their own, after they leave the hands of their first maker.

   Since the eighteenth century Shakespeare has become a cultural construct: sometimes the guarantor of nationhood, heritage and the status quo, sometimes seized and transformed to be its critic and antidote. This latter role has been particularly evident in countries where Shakespeare has to be translated. The irony is that while his status as national icon grows in the English-speaking world, his language is both lost and renewed, so that for good or ill, Shakespeare can be made to seem more urgently ‘relevant’ than in England or America, and may become the one dissenting voice that the censors mistake as harmless.

   ‘Shakespeare in Production’ gives the reader, the student and the scholar a comprehensive dossier of materials – eye-witness accounts, contemporary criticism, promptbook marginalia, stage business, cuts, additions and rewritings – from which to construct an understanding of the many meanings that the plays have carried down the ages and across the world. These materials are organised alongside the New Cambridge Shakespeare text of the play, line by line and scene by scene, while a substantial introduction in each volume offers a guide to their interpretation. One may trace an argument about, for example, the many ways of playing Queen Gertrude, or the political transmutations of the text of Henry Ⅴ; or take a scene, an act, or a whole play, and work out how it has succeeded or failed in presentation over four hundred years.

   For, despite our insistence that the plays are endlessly made and remade by history, Shakespeare is not a blank, scribbled upon by the age. Theatre history charts changes, but also registers something in spite of those changes. Some productions work and others do not. Two interpretations may be entirely different, and yet both will bring the play to life. Why? Without setting out to give absolute answers, the history of a play in the theatre can often show where the energy and shape of it lie, what has made it tick, through many permutations. In this way theatre history can find common ground with literary criticism. Both will find suggestive directions in the introductions to these volumes, while the commentaries provide raw material for readers to recreate the living experience of theatre, and become their own eye-witness.

J. S. Bratton
Julie Hankey

ABBREVIATIONS

PRODUCTIONS

Location is London unless otherwise noted.