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There is also an alternative history of Othello, in which the role has been interpreted as an act of out-and-out emancipation. On the one hand, there was a strong tradition on the Elizabethan stage of black characters being played as snarling villains, as in the anonymous revenge tragedy Lust’s Dominion and the playwright’s own Titus Andronicus anxiety about black immigration into Britain was such that Elizabeth I issued several proclamations ordering the expulsion of “blackamoores” from her realm. Shakespeare’s play is both fascinating and perplexing in determining how Othello should be interpreted. (Michael Gambon was one of the last, at Scarborough in 1990). It’s all but certain that Shakespeare’s first Othello was Richard Burbage, a white Londoner even more likely that Burbage would have worn dark makeup, as actors in Britain did until the late 1980s. Black performers were not unknown – John Blanke, perhaps of north African heritage, played the trumpet at the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII – but seem not to have appeared on the public stage. The number of non-white men and women living in early modern London was tiny, perhaps less than one per cent of the population. It is difficult to know what the play’s author might have made of the question. “The more successful you are in depicting the first Othello, this man who is wise, astute, mature, magnanimous, the harder it is to show a man who is persuaded that his wife has committed adultery, and who turns into an obsessive, compulsive, murderous maniac.” “I see it as two halves, almost,” says Quarshie. The tragedy doesn’t make that easy, however. Only by black actors playing Othello can we address some of the racist traditions and assumptions Hugh Quarshie Does it matter that Msamati’s Iago is black? Can he be that, and also an out-and-out racist? Is the play itself even about race?įor much of its history, Othello has provided nourishing fodder for racists: from the queasy arguments of Samuel Taylor Coleridge that it would be “something monstrous” to conceive of Desdemona “falling in love with a veritable negro”, to the grim parodies that circulated in 19th-century South Africa. The casting of the British-Tanzanian actor has thrown up tantalising questions about the dynamics of this most complex and controversial of plays. Quarshie is joined on stage by Lucian Msamati, who will make theatrical history as the first black actor to play Iago at the RSC, and one of only a handful worldwide. “Only by black actors playing the role,” he says, “can we address some of the racist traditions and assumptions that the play is based on.”
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He wasn’t saying that no black performer should ever play Othello rather, that black performers should think long and hard about doing battle not just with the play, but the context from which it springs. When we talk after a long day of rehearsals, he is at pains to point out that things are more complex than his earlier argument suggests. Seventeen years later, Quarshie – who cut his teeth at the RSC in the 1980s and 90s in a number of high-profile roles – is playing the Moor of Venice in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new production of Othello.