On Othello
On Othello: The Essays
By Anna Karnedy
Part 1: Something Vital: The Importance of the Audience in Othello
It is possible to watch Othello from your couch. Myriad film versions feature the same plot and language as Shakespeare’s original text. In 1995, Oliver Parker directed one with Laurence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh (as Othello and Iago, respectively) that received critical acclaim and praise for its style and strong performances. However, when someone tries to adapt a Shakespeare work to film, something will always be missing, no matter how good it is on a cinematic level. And that missing piece is you. In Othello, the audience is an integral part of the play. The audience is a character whose reactions and presence affect the other characters onstage, and no amount of impressive camerawork can replace that. There is too much distance between you and the other characters when you are sitting at home watching Laurence Fishburne on your television. Othello is meant to be performed on the stage. There are many moments throughout the play that prove that.
In this production, with the stage in the center of the theater and the audience surrounding it, those in the front row are so close to the action that they can reach out and touch the actors. This makes the audience’s presence all the more noticeable during the pivotal moments of the show. In Act I Scene III, when Othello is describing how he and Desdemona fell in love, he is trying to convince not only Brabantio but everyone in the audience that their love is real. André Holland, as the Moor, will be looking to each and every one of you, and you will be forced to decide if you believe him, even when Jeremy Irons, as Brabantio, is pleading with you not to.
Your presence becomes even more important in the third scene of Act II. When Iago is left alone onstage, he gives the audience a direct address. He reacts to the judgment he can feel from all of you by stepping down from the stage and arguing, “what’s he, then, that says I play the villain, when
this advice is free, I give and honest, probal to thinking, and indeed the course to win the Moor again?” Iago knows that the audience is the only character who is truly aware of the extent of his plan, but as a master manipulator, he will still try to get you on his side during this soliloquy. He will try to convince you that he is not evil because he is being honest and his advice is actually helpful.
The fact that the audience is the only one with the knowledge of Iago’s true nature remains important as Act IV begins. When Othello falls into an epileptic seizure, you may feel compelled to scream, ‘She’s faithful! This is all Iago’s doing!’ because a man’s descent into agony will be happening only feet away from you. That feeling—present in more places than just here—would not be as strong if you were watching it on a television screen.
The audience has been a critical part of Othello long before this production. In her essay, “Different Othellos and Contentious Spectators: Changing Responses in India,” Nandi Bhatia compares the response to an 1848 stage production of Othello in Calcutta to a 2006 Bollywood adaptation entitled Omkara. In the descriptions of the two works, Bhatia makes it clear that the 1848 stage production was far more resonant. She contextualizes how “at the moment of expanding political and cultural imperial sway over the colony, the responses of viewers, reviewers, and officials to the 1848 Othello confirmed the tensions operating under asymmetrical relations of power” (159). The audience in Calcutta’s (a mix of native Indians and colonial Europeans) reactions to the play were influenced by the political shifts in India at the time, making said reactions all the more visceral. Bhatia even quotes one audience member, who wrote in a letter, “at last we crept inch by inch, and people began to wonder if their seats were kept for them. How full it must be…” (157), and a newspaper review which said that, “if the indulgent applause of the audience is to be taken as a criterion of success, Baboo Baishnavacharan Addy, can have no cause to complain” (158). Bhatia exhibits how the 1848 audience was a vibrant part of the production, and a key reason why that production remains so memorable over 150 years later.
The 2006 film, on the other hand, while appreciated for its “cinematic quality,” lacks the “paradigm of imperialism [or] liberation agendas that may have marked other radical stage interpretations” (169-70). The film changed so much from the original play that “any reference to racial power-play, that is central to the original text, disappears” (171). Othello’s translation onto the screen in Omkara did not necessarily create a bad film, but Bhatia shows that it lost something vital that the 1848 production clearly possessed. And I think that vital missing thing was a live audience.
In another essay on Othello titled “Lust for Audience: An Interpretation of Othello,” Marjorie Pryse argues that the fatal flaw of Iago, Othello, and Desdemona is their need for an audience. Or, as Pryse puts it: “Desdemona’s death and Othello’s tragedy result not from Iago’s machinations, but rather from their own insistence that they be heard” (462). While perhaps not everyone would agree with this reading of Othello, Pryse is right about the importance of having a physical audience. According to Pryse, “without an audience, [Iago] is worth nothing…” because his relationship with the audience, specifically the way the audience becomes his involuntary co-conspirator, is a crucial part of the play. The hatred Iago feels for Othello is partly because he “has refused to listen” to him (461). This is why Iago, in this production especially, spends so much time with the audience, as he finally has people listening to him. The presence of the audience is important to Othello and Desdemona as well, as Pryse writes:
“Othello, Desdemona, and Iago vie with each other for the center of attention: the exigencies of dramatic characters mirror existence in the natural world. The continuing ability to speak in one’s own favor results directly from the power to move his listener” (463).
The profoundness of this concept is lost when there is too much distance between said audience and the players. For Othello, Iago, and Desdemona to be fully realized characters, they need you to be sitting (or, in this case, standing) right there watching them.
In the next few minutes, the play will begin. I ask that you not hold back. When the audience becomes a living, breathing entity that the characters can interact with, the power of Othello comes in full force. Othello will plead for you to believe that he and Desdemona are truly in love. Iago will look you in the eye and tell you that he should not be called a villain. Desdemona will serenade you with the
song her Mother’s maid used to sing. And finally, Othello will ask you to remember him fondly before killing himself.
Whether you are standing in the front row, or seated farther back, the distance between you and your television screen will fall away in the next couple minutes when Benicio Del Toro takes the stage. It is your job to watch every action, listen to every line, and feel every moment. If you immerse yourself in the story, it will become much more meaningful.
Part 2: The Revenge Tragedy: William Shakespeare’s Iago and Park Chan-wook’s Woo-jin
The Oxford English Dictionary defines revenge as “the action of hurting, harming, or otherwise obtaining satisfaction from someone in return for an injury or wrong suffered at his or her hands; satisfaction obtained by repaying an injury or wrong.” Along with Hamlet, The Revenger’s Tragedy, and Antonio’s Revenge, Othello is a famous revenge tragedy. At first glance, Othello does seem to be a basic tale of revenge. Iago plots to hurt Othello because Othello did not make him lieutenant. But is that Iago’s true motive? Are his actions those of revenge, or just pure malice? Is his goal truly to “obtain satisfaction”? Questions such as these necessitate looking further into the so-called ‘revenge’ plot of Othello by comparing it to a modern revenge tragedy: Park Chan-Wook’s cult-classic film, Oldboy (2003).
Oldboy is a complex revenge thriller that follows Dae-su, a man who tries to get revenge on the enigmatic figure, Woo-jin, who imprisoned him for fifteen years without apparent reason. However, that layer of the revenge plot is not the one that I would like to focus on. As the film progresses, the viewer discovers that Woo-jin’s reason for imprisoning Dae-su was a form of vengeance itself. They attended the same high school, and Dae-su caught Woo-jin and his sister engaging in incest. After Dae-su tells other schoolmates about it, Woo-jin’s sister commits suicide out of shame. Since then, Woo-jin has blamed Dae-su for his sister’s death, and imprisoned him as revenge. However, his revenge does not stop with the imprisonment. After releasing Dae-su, Woo-jin hypnotizes him to fall in love with a woman that is then revealed to be his (Dae-su’s) own daughter (that he has not seen in fifteen years). He forces Dae-su to experience the same kind of incestual relationship that led to his sister’s
death. However, importantly, as soon as Woo-jin’s revenge plot on Dae-su is finished, Woo-jin commits suicide. He cannot function now that he has nothing to distract him from the part he played in his sister’s death. The much bigger part he played then Dae-su did.
So, can Woo-jin help us better understand Iago? It is interesting to think about Iago deflecting his own self-hatred and shame onto Othello. Like Woo-jin blames Dae-su for something that was truly his own fault, perhaps Iago chooses to blame Othello for not making him lieutenant when he actually blames himself for not being good enough. It is clear in the end of Oldboy that Woo-jin does not
“obtain satisfaction” in exacting his revenge, but does Iago? Is Iago satisfied with Othello’s death? It is important that Iago is the only principal character left alive at the end of Othello. But if there were a sixth act, I would argue that though Iago’s plot succeeded in hurting Othello deeply, he would not have the gratifying feeling of winning. Like Woo-jin, Iago would be forced to face himself without the distraction of revenge, and doing so would certainly not result in satisfaction.
Part 3: The Problem of Emilia: How Should She Be Staged?
Emilia is one of the few characters in Othello who refuses to be pinned down as simply ‘good’ or ‘evil.’ She helps Iago, but does not share his cold malice. She seemingly cares for Desdemona, but says nothing about the handkerchief. She is one of the hardest characters to stage in this play, simply because Shakespeare leaves her motives and alliances so ambiguous. It would be easy to say that she is a cunning woman who helped her husband manipulate his rival, and ruin her mistress’ life in the process. But Emilia deserves more dimension than that. In this production, the wonderful Zoë Kravitz becomes a nuanced Emilia, based on Thomas Bowman’s interpretation of the elusive character.
In his essay,“In Defense of Emilia,” Bowman argues that while the general public considers Emilia “more sinning then sinned against, and her final eloquent defense of Desdemona’s honor and exposure of Othello’s murderous folly but poor amends for her previous tragedy-breeding mischief” (99), they should instead try to understand how “her weaknesses, even though catastrophic in consequence, are human and understandable enough to make her lovable” (104). He lays out this argument by taking all of Emilia’s actions that people cite as reasons she is not redeemable and flipping them on their heads. According to Bowman, Emilia did not steal Desdemona’s handkerchief but only kept it after finding it so that she could copy its embroidery before returning it. And while she makes the “tragic error” of telling Iago that she has the handkerchief, she does not give it to him, but he forcefully takes it (100). Moreover, when Emilia hears Othello and Desdemona arguing about the handkerchief, her experiences with her own jealous husband tell her that the handkerchief is
unimportant and there is something deeper bothering Othello. As Bowman puts it, she might think, “it would be but needlessly disadvantageous to Iago and me, and would cure nothing” if she spoke up about the handkerchief’s whereabouts (101).
The beauty of Shakespeare is that even complete disagreement with Bowman’s interpretation of Emilia does not invalidate it. Shakespeare purposefully leaves gaps in his characterizations that the audience, actors, directors, and readers get to fill themselves. So, if Kravitz becomes a more sympathetic Emilia than you may be used to, reflect on how her portrayal here affects the other themes of Othello. And remember, as Bowman does, that “the last words in her life:
Moor, she was chaste; she lov’d thee, cruel Moor;
So come my soul to bliss, as I speak true;
So speaking as I think, alas, I die.
are Shakespeare’s final and strongest plea for us to judge her sympathetically” (103).
Before writing Emilia off as irredeemable, it is worthwhile to consider if there is true malice behind her questionable actions, and how she reacts when the truth does come to light.
Works Cited:
1. Othello. Dir. Oliver Parker Perfs. Laurence Fishburne, Kenneth Branagh, Irène Jacobs. Castle Rock Entertainment, 1995.
2. Bhatia, Nandi. “Different Othello(s) and Contentious Spectators: Changing Responses in India.” Gramma Journal of Theory and Criticism, Vol 15 (2007), pp. 155-172.
3. Pryse, Marjorie. “Lust For Audience: An Interpretation of Othello.” ELH, John Hopkins University Press, Vol 43, No. 4 (Winter 1976), pp. 461-478
4. “Revenge, n.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/164716?rskey=66Gazx&result=1&isAdvanced=fals e#eid.
5. Oldboy. Dir. Park Chan-wook. Perfs Choi Min-sik, Kang Hie-jung, Yoo Ji-tae. Show East and Egg Films, 2003.
6. Thomas D. Bowman. “In Defense of Emilia” The Shakespeare Association Bulletin, Oxford University Press, Vol. 22 No. 3 (July 1947), pp. 99-104.
