Othello
19th century

Paul Robeson's iconic performance (see 20th Century, below) was not the first professional performance of the title role by a black actor: the first known is James Hewlett at the African Grove Theatre, New York, in 1822. And Hewlett's protégé Ira Aldridge (billed as "The African Roscius ") played many Shakespearean roles across Europe for forty years, including Othello at the Royalty Theatre, London, in 1825.

There are stories of extravagant audience reactions to the play. One of the most extreme is related by French novelist Stendhal who reports that at the Baltimore Theatre in 1822 a soldier interrupted the performance just before Desdemona's murder, shouting "It will never be said that in my presence a confounded Negro has killed a white woman!" The soldier fired his gun, breaking the arm of the actor playing Othello.

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Othello was regarded as the most demanding of Shakespeare's roles: it is considered a part of theatre legend that Edmund Kean collapsed while playing the role, and died two months after. Leigh Hunt saw Kean's Othello in 1819, describing his performance in The Examiner as "the masterpiece of the living stage". Before Kean, the leading exponent of the role had been John Philip Kemble who played a "neoclassical hero". In contrast, Kean presented Othello as a man of romantic temperament, and uncontrollable passion. It was also Kean who initiated the so-called "Bronze Age of Othello" by insisting that "it was a gross error to make Othello either a negro or a black" and thereby commencing a stage tradition of using lighter makeup rather than blackface. An advantage of this change was that the actor's facial expressions could be more clearly seen.

Critics have naturally focused on the two central male roles. But Emilia becomes a powerful role in the final act. Indeed Charlotte Cushman 's Emilia was said to upstage Edwin Forrest 's Othello in 1845. And when Fanny Kemble played Desdemona in 1848 she changed the performance tradition. Previously, Desdemonas had (in her words) "always appeared to me to acquiesce with wonderful equanimity in their assassination" but Kemble, a passionate feminist and abolitionist, decided "I shall make a desperate fight for it, for I feel horribly at the idea of being murdered in my bed."

In 1848, Othello was produced by Barry Lewis at the Sans Souci Theatre in Calcutta. The casting of the white "Mrs. Anderson" opposite the dark-skinned Indian Baishnav Charan Auddy led to controversy, to polarized reviews, and to a fiasco on the opening night when half of the cast, military men, were prohibited from leaving barracks by order of the Brigadier of Dum Dum.

For Tommaso Salvini and Edwin Booth the role of Othello was a career-length project. Salvini always played the role in Italian, even when acting alongside a company performing in English. His conception of the role was of a barbarian with savage and passionate instincts concealed by a thick veneer of civilisation. Konstantin Stanislavski admired, and was greatly influenced by, Salvini's Othello, which he saw in 1882. In My Life in Art, Stanislavski recalls Salvini's scene before the Senate, saying that the actor "grasped all of us in his palm, and held us there as if we were ants or flies". Booth, in complete contrast, played Othello as a restrained gentleman. When Ellen Terry played Desdemona she commented on how much Booth's style helped her: "It is difficult to preserve the simple, heroic blindness of Desdemona to the fact that her lord mistrusts her, if her lord is raving and stamping under her nose. Booth was gentle with Desdemona."

Booth was also an acclaimed Iago, and his advice to actors of the role was: "to portray Iago properly you must seem to be what all the characters think and say you are, not what the spectators know you to be; try to win even them by your sincerity. Don't act the villain."

Stanislavski himself first played Othello in 1896. He was dissatisfied with his own performance, later recalling "I was able to reach nothing more than insane strain, spiritual and physical impotence, and the squeezing of tragic emotion out of myself."
language:response_language[German]