Othello (25 page)
Authors: William Shakespeare
Iagos have varied enormously, but they remain constant in their emphasis on one thing—sexual jealousy. Richard McCabe pointed out:
Iago’s psychosis runs far deeper than mere ambition…Here is a man consumed by professional and personal jealousy to the point of destruction.
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When comforting Desdemona in Act 4 Scene 2, McCabe’s Iago held her in his arms:
the more I played the sympathetic uncle figure, the more repulsive it became…The effect on my Iago, though, was devastating…Many killers prefer not to think of their victims as real human beings as this can trigger a moral sense within them. So I let out a gasp, contorted my body from its customary ramrod erectness, and turned upstage as if to hide the effect my internal conflict was revealing…
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Similarly, in 1989, Ian McKellen rocked Desdemona gently in his arms and stroked her hair as if taking some perverse sexual pleasure from touching the wife of his enemy.
In 2004, Antony Sher’s Iago,
when briefly alone in Desdemona’s dressing room…stealthily kisses a dress hanging in her wardrobe trunk. Women and their sexuality are fascinating, but alien and threatening…
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Conversely, in 1985, David Suchet followed
a Freudian line by implying Iago is deeply in love with Othello and manically jealous of Desdemona. Instead of gloating over the pole-axed, epileptic hero, he stands over him stroking his hair and urging him on to virile revenge… giving us a deeply masculine homosexual prone to sudden, terrifying glimpses into his own iniquity: when he cries “Men should be what they seem / Or those that be not, would they might seem none” he stops short like a man who has peered into the abyss.
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He suggested
a deep vein of fellow feeling with his commander, as if he sought to educate him in manly detachment. It is a deeply human reading of a deeply inhuman character.
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at the death of Othello he makes a last impulsive gesture to embrace the corpse before letting his head fall, as though his own life has now run out…the Satanic element has been suppressed in pursuit of an explanation not really supplied by the text.
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Suchet here again broke with tradition, surprising his audience who expected to see the stony-faced or gloating Iago at the end of the play, demonstrating no remorse or regret, unreadable to the last. In 1989 the effect of Iago’s final stare left the audience chilled with the conviction that they were in the company of a complete sociopath:
here is an arresting final image of the pinioned Iago gazing down on the death-loaded bed, not with any hint of snickering triumph but with a blank astonishment at the havoc he has created. There is no hint of pity. Instead Ian McKellen’s countenance suggests the inhuman detachment and moral vacuum of the murderer surveying his victims.
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THE DIRECTOR’s CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH TREVOR NUNN AND MICHAEL ATTENBOROUGH
Sir Trevor Nunn
is the most successful and one of the most highly regarded of modern British theater directors. Born in 1940, he was a brilliant student at Cambridge, strongly influenced by the literary close reading of Dr. F. R. Leavis. At the age of just twenty-eight he succeeded Peter Hall as artistic director of the RSC, where he remained until 1978. He greatly expanded the range of the company’s work and its ambition in terms of venues and touring. He also achieved huge success in musical theater and subsequently became artistic director of the National Theatre in London. His productions are always full of textual insights, while being clean and elegant in design. Among his most admired Shakespearean work has been a series of tragedies with Ian McKellen in leading roles:
Macbeth
(1976, with Judi Dench, in the dark, intimate space of The Other Place),
Othello
(1989, with McKellen as Iago and Imogen Stubbs as Desdemona), discussed here, and
King Lear
(2007, in the Stratford Complete Works Festival, on world tour, and then in London).
Michael Attenborough
, born in 1950 to a distinguished theatrical family, graduated from Sussex University in 1972 and worked as associate director at the Mercury Theatre, Colchester, from 1972 to 1974. He was artistic director of the Leeds (now West Yorkshire) Playhouse from 1974 to 1979, associate director of the Young Vic from 1979 to 1980, artistic director of the Palace Theatre, Watford, from 1980 to 1983, and director of the Hampstead Theatre from 1984 to 1989, which won twenty-three awards during his tenure. In 1989 he was appointed artistic director of the Turnstyle Group in the West End and then, in 1990, resident director and executive producer of the Royal Shakespeare Company, becoming principal associate director in 1996. In July 2002 he was appointed artistic director of London’s Almeida Theatre. He is also joint vice-chairman of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and an honorary associate artist of the RSC. Originally seen as specializing in directing new writing, he rapidly established himself as a sensual, non-flashy director of Shakespeare’s plays. He directed
Othello
for the RSC in 1999 with Ray Fearon as Othello, Richard McCabe as Iago, and Zoë Waites as Desdemona.
Does Iago lie to the audience? Are we really supposed to believe his accusations about both Othello and Cassio cuckolding him? Also with regard to Iago: his language is full of sexual imagery throughout the play. How much of a clue to his character does that give you?
TN:
The question of yours I feel impelled to start with is whether or not we are “supposed to believe” Iago’s accusations about being cuckolded by Othello and Cassio; in my view, this question comes closest to discovering and defining what Shakespeare is exploring. Shakespeare frequently chose a “theme” on and around which he would compose a complex dramatic debate, after having selected a “story” which could provide him with his necessary range of opportunities. So
Romeo and Juliet
is his play about “Love,” which involves Shakespeare in an equal and necessary exploration of “Hate” and the interconnection of these feelings.
Hamlet
is his play about “Death”—from a ghost returning to address the living, to a bourn from which no traveler returns, to suicide, to a grave littered with decomposing skulls—but it’s a discussion which involves Shakespeare in an exploration too of the will to live, and resolutions of how to live with the knowledge of mortality.
In this way,
Othello
is self-evidently Shakespeare’s play about “Jealousy” but that subject draws him to an equal and necessary investigation of the concept of “Trust.” “Honest” Iago is trusted by his commander, his colleagues, by Rodorigo, by Desdemona and, with misgivings, by Emilia. Iago’s scheme is to stir Othello into jealousy, to increase that jealousy to such an extreme that there can only be violent consequences. But in Shakespeare’s play about jealousy, the most jealous character is not Othello, but Iago.
“Honest” Iago is jealous of the Moor, jealous of Cassio for achieving the promotion Iago hoped for, and jealous of the physical sublimation that marriage has given Desdemona and Othello. His jealousy finds expression in suspicion, bile, and contempt, and accordingly he plays with the idea that both the men he hates have slept with his wife.
Very early on in his writing career, Shakespeare discovered the energy and frisson that derives from a character intent on wickedness, sharing his (or her) intentions directly with the audience. Aaron and Tamora share with us their hidden malevolence, Richard III lets us delightedly into his darkly comic view of life, and so on throughout the canon until
King Lear
, where Edmund capitalizes on engaging our sympathy and support for “bastards.” But the most daring and outrageous use of this device is in the writing of Iago; Shakespeare invites us to see the surrounding world through Iago’s eyes, and therefore to find his willingness to confide in us alluring, funny, and a kind of privilege. We are aware that we are in a dangerous relationship, that we are spending time with somebody whose magnetism is thrilling but who is requiring us to compromise our sense of morality, increasingly with each implicating soliloquy.
MA:
Well, he puts both those accusations of cuckoldry as
possibilities
. I don’t think he swears that it’s happened. It is conjecture, and even if they haven’t, it suits him to believe that they have. So, no, I don’t think he lies to the audience. I think what he reveals to the audience is the scale of his insecurity. I think it’s obvious neither of those things has happened, but it’s not obvious to
him
. It is an imagined truth, but to the paranoid person there’s no difference between imagination and truth. I don’t think he’s lying, I think it suits his paranoia.
The sexual imagery is probably the biggest clue of all. The play is about Iago’s jealousy. Like poison poured in the ear, he poisons Othello with language, with persuasion. He’s so clever with language, and it’s fascinating that as Othello turns, he starts talking like Iago: “goats and monkeys” and in the “brothel scene” [Act 4 Scene 2] when he talks about “a cistern for foul toads,” it could be Iago talking.
7.
Ian McKellen as “Honest Iago” in Trevor Nunn’s 1989 production at The Other Place with Michael Grandage as Rodorigo.
But the reason I say that it is the most important clue is that I suspect Iago’s biggest insecurity is sexual, even bigger than his professional insecurity. Shakespeare couldn’t be clearer; we get the biggest, clearest window into his personality from Emilia. When she talks very emotionally in that key speech in Act 4 Scene 3 it’s clearly all about her relationship with Iago. We get a picture of a man who knocks her around, who’s cruel, who’s staggeringly jealous, and who is promiscuous with whores. In a way, he has the same kind of emotional immaturity as Othello, but he’s twenty times cleverer, more devious and more malicious. But the nature of jealousy, the springboard, the flower bed from which jealousy happens is clearly insecurity. We would know that. We become jealous in our own relationships because we’re insecure about ourselves. I think Iago’s sexual insecurity is absolutely huge. What his language portrays is a fascination with sex, but also disgust. He never talks about it beautifully. He talks about it in ugly, animalistic, bestial, purely sexual terms—he
never
talks about love. And that’s why I think it’s the biggest clue of all.
Since Paul Robeson played the part of Othello, race has been a big issue for the play, in terms of both casting and interpretation. Where did you stand on this?
TN:
Ours was the first RSC production, and possibly the first in England since Paul Robeson at Stratford, to cast a black artist in the title role. As director, I could not possibly have gone ahead with the production if I had failed to find the casting of an artist of color to play the central role. The days of the acceptability of white actors wearing black makeup had gone by the end of the 1970s, even though there were few candidates in those days who were qualified by experience or training to provide the authenticity that roles like Aaron and Othello so clearly demanded.
I was very fortunate to encounter the magnificent Jamaican-born opera singer Willard White at Glyndebourne, when we worked together on Gershwin’s epoch-making and culture-defining
Porgy and Bess
. It was clear to me that Willard was as much an extraordinarily imaginative and daring actor as he was a uniquely mellifluous bass-baritone. So, yes, Paul Robeson revisited, though it wasn’t until after we had opened
Othello
that I realized that Robeson had actually been the last black artist to play the part in England. I reasoned with Willard that if he was ever to play Othello, it would have to be in the theater because Verdi’s account of the role makes him (unaccountably) a tenor, and Willard, as I said, is a glorious bass-baritone.
MA:
One of the things that I profoundly disagree with is Coleridge’s statement about Iago’s “
motiveless
malignity.” I think what Shakespeare actually does is to provide so many motives—some of them fantastical, some of them made up, some of them paranoid, some of them real (like, for example, Cassio’s promotion)—that race becomes one of a number of factors. I think the play is not about Othello’s jealousy, but about Iago’s jealousy; the fact that this black chap has succeeded both sexually and professionally faster than he has is simply another element of that. Yes, Iago is a racist. Yes, Brabantio turns out to be a racist, having sat around the fireside happily with Desdemona and Othello. But it’s clearly not a fully racist society in Venice: they’re very proud of Othello. I suspect there’s a degree of making a virtue of necessity: he’s clearly the most able soldier and therefore they have to accept him, but there’s no sense of an incipient racism there; nor indeed from any of the other characters like Rodorigo or Cassio. I think the point about racism is how it fits with Iago’s make-up, personality, neuroses. One of the extraordinary things about Shakespeare’s writing is that he managed to grasp hold of several stereotypes—which we still wrestle with four hundred years later—and render them human. The Jew in Shylock, color in Othello, and indeed women; he expands and humanizes the whole notion of being a Shrew. And so while he does grasp the issue of racism, I don’t think it’s a play
about
racism.