Shakespeare's day to the Interregnum Othello was written for and performed by the
King's Men, the playing company to which
Shakespeare belonged, and the 1622 Quarto notes on its title page that the play was "Diuerse times acted at
the Globe, and at
Black-Friers, by his Maiesties seruants". These two theatres had very different features—the former a large outdoor theatre accommodating an audience of 3,000; the latter a private indoor theatre that sat around 700, paying higher prices—and the style of playing would have adapted to these different conditions. The play was performed at
Court by the King's Men on 1 November 1604, and again in 1612-13 as part of the celebrations for the
Wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V of the Palatinate. The title role was originally played by
Richard Burbage, whose eulogies reveal that he was admired in the role. Moorish characters were conventionally played in turbans, with long white gowns and red trousers, with the actor's face darkened with lampblack or coal. The original Iago was likely
John Lowin.
Restoration and 18th century All theatres were closed down by the
Puritan government on 6 September 1642. Upon the
restoration of the monarchy in 1660, two
patent companies (the
King's Company and the
Duke's Company) were established, and the existing theatrical repertoire divided between them,
Othello being allocated to the King's Company's repertoire. These patents stated that "all the women's parts to be acted in either of the said two companies for the time to come may be performed by women". The first professional acting appearance by a woman on the English stage was that of Desdemona in
Othello on 8 December 1660, although history does not record who took the role.
Margaret Hughes is the first woman known to have played Desdemona. In Restoration theatres, it was common for Shakespeare's plays to be adapted or rewritten.
Othello was not adapted in this way, although it has often been cut to conform to current ideas of decorum or refinement. These cuts were not limited to removing violent, religious or sexual content, but extended on different occasions to removing references to eavesdropping, to Othello's fit, to Othello's tears, to the first 200 lines of the fourth act, or to the entire role of Bianca. Among seventeenth- and eighteenth-century actors praised for expressing the nobility of the Moor—and fully exploring the degrading passions which lead to the brutal murder he commits—were
Thomas Betterton and
Spranger Barry. A review of the latter by John Bernard expressed how Barry's Othello "looked a few seconds in Desdemona's face, as if to read her feelings and disprove his suspicions; then, turning away, as the adverse conviction gathered in his heart, he spoke falteringly, and gushed into tears." The first professional performances of the play in North America are likely to have been those of the
Hallam Company: Robert Upton (
William Hallam's advance man) performed
Othello at a makeshift theatre in New York on 26 December 1751; and religious objections to theatre led the Hallam Company to perform
Othello as a series of "moral dialogues" at Rhode Island in 1761. Although not performed in Portugal until the nineteenth century, the play holds the distinction of being the first of Shakespeare's works to have reached a Portuguese-speaking country, possibly at the request of a Portuguese reader, in 1765.
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." portraying Othello in 1896. 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."
20th century Othello was performed in the
Shimpa style in Japan in 1903 by
Otojiro Kawakami, resetting the location of Cyprus to Taiwan, which was then a Japanese colony. In 1930
Stanislavski directed a production of Othello for the
Moscow Art Theatre, which was influential in the development of his
system. The performance was directed remotely, by letter, while Stanislavski recovered from illness in France. The most significant theatre production in
wartime America featured
Paul Robeson as Othello. Robeson had previously played the role in London in 1930 with a cast including
Peggy Ashcroft,
Sybil Thorndike and
Ralph Richardson, and would later take the role for the
RSC in 1959 at Stratford-Upon-Avon.
Margaret Webster's 1943 Broadway production was considered a theatrical landmark, with Robeson (in the words of Howard Barnes) "making the Moor the great and terrible figure of tragedy which he has so rarely been on the stage."
José Ferrer played Iago and
Uta Hagen Desdemona. Taking the Broadway run with its subsequent tour, the show was seen by over half a million people.
Earle Hyman saw the production numerous times when he was 17 and later recalled "this tremendous excitement - the first African-American onstage to be playing this role ... to all the blacks, he
represented us. It was a moment of great pride." In 1947,
Kenneth Tynan saw
Frederick Valk and
Donald Wolfit play Othello and Iago respectively, and described the experience as equivalent to witnessing the
Chicago Fire, the
Quetta Earthquake or the
Hiroshima Bomb. When
Laurence Olivier performed Othello at the
National in 1964, his sense of "being black", in his words, required him "to be beautiful" with a voice "dark violet - velvet stuff" and a walk "like a soft black leopard". (The filmed version of this production is discussed under "Screen" below.) The play was extremely popular in Ethiopia, running for three years in the mid-1980s at the City Hall Theatre,
Addis Ababa, in
Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin's translation – performed in a static and declamatory style. When
Janet Suzman directed the play in South Africa during
Apartheid in 1988, the performance was passionately politicised, with the racism of several characters—and especially Iago (modelled on
Eugène Terre'Blanche)—foregrounded. The play was highly controversial, the physical contact between the black
John Kani and the white Joanna Weinburg provoking walk-outs and a pile-up of hate mail. White actors continued to dominate the role until the 1980s.
Willard White in 1989 was the first black actor to play Othello at Stratford since Paul Robeson thirty years earlier. A "singular and idiosyncratic" performance of a white actor in the central role was
Jude Kelly's "
photonegative" production for the
Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. in 1997, in which
Patrick Stewart played Othello as white, while almost all other speaking parts were played by actors of African descent. The script remained unchanged as regards the character's race, so the white Othello was, throughout, referred to as black.
21st century At the turn of the century, performances at the
RSC were dominated by their Iagos.
Richard McCabe followed
Simon Russell Beale in portraying misogynistic, embittered
NCOs, older than their respective Othellos: Singaporean director
Ong Keng Sen produced an
intercultural version of the play in 2000: his
Desdemona featured actors, musicians, designers and artists from India, Korea, Myanmar, Indonesia and Singapore, performing in a range of different traditional Asian styles.
Cathy Downes' 2001 production at the
Court Theatre in Christchurch, New Zealand made effective use of a trope (which had had racist overtones when used by earlier European directors) of Othello reverting to his native culture: setting the action in the
Waikato Land Wars, Othello was a British-adopted general leading forces against his own people, until finally bursting into a "terrifying
wero" (a warrior's challenge) before exacting his revenge on Desdemona. A radically different approach was taken in Jette Steckel's 2009 German language production for the
Deutsches Theater Berlin. Although the translation consistently used the word "Schwarze" for "Moor" in the original, Othello was played by the white German actress
Susanne Wolff in a range of different costumes and disguises, including a gorilla suit for part of Act 4—creating a performance in which everything is (in
Ayanna Thompson's words) "conveyed through representational metaphors which render Othello's race less of a stable physical marker and more of a fractured and performative one." A common theme of modern productions of the play is an emphasis on military life. When
Adrian Lester played the role in
Nicholas Hytner's 2013
National Theatre production, a retired army veteran was employed to teach the cast about ranks, comportment and off-duty behaviours. Another 21st century trend exemplified by that performance is to reduce the focus of the play on Othello's race by having other parts played by actors of colour also. And a third is an increasing focus on Desdemona's youth and innocence, at the expense of her strength of character. In 21st century productions, more emphasis has been given to the theme of
domestic violence. Othello's "difference" has been tested in ways other than race. A rare example is
Stein Winge's 2015 casting of a white American actor,
Bill Pullman, as an American Navy man adrift in Norway. The play has provided opportunities for breakout roles for rising black stars, such as
Chiwetel Ejiofor who played Othello at the
Donmar Warehouse in 2008, and for a change of direction for other established stars:
Willard White (see "20th century", above) was better known as an opera singer and
Lenny Henry (see "True Identity" under "Screen" below), who played Othello for
Northern Broadsides in 2009, was better known as a stand-up comedian. When
Antony Sher played Iago for the
RSC, the final moment of the play, before a snap blackout, was for him to look up and stare at the audience. Director
Greg Doran intended this to be strange, enigmatic, open to interpretation. But Sher later wrote that he was always clear about it: in his head the question which always rang out was: ==Screen==