Desdemona & the Moor

There is a performance instinct that a Desdemona played purely “true and faithful” is not the authentic version. That is not a hot take. It is one of the live arguments about the play, and the text is genuinely on its side.

The scholarly answer is that she is both, and the contradiction is the point. Productions love the shrinking saint, but the woman Shakespeare wrote chooses, in public, in front of the state. Hauled before the Senate, she does not cower; she claims her marriage outright:

I saw Othello’s visage in his mind.

Desdemona · 1.3.288

She calls herself “half the wooer” (1.3.176). She argues for Cassio past the point of prudence. She is frank about her own body in the willow scene. Text lensSo when a production sands her down into a passive innocent, it is making a choice the text resists. Lisa Jardine reads the play’s structure as forcing her back into a stereotype of passivity; Carol Thomas Neely recovers her as part of the play’s active moral center.^[2]The instinct that the “authentic” Desdemona has more will and more desire than the saint has a real home in the criticism.^[3]

There is a great deal to say about the Moor and the race story, and the first thing to notice is the architecture: nearly all the explicit racism arrives in the opening scene, shouted by Iago and Roderigo up at Desdemona’s father, before Othello has walked on or said a word. He is named by his race almost as much as by his name: the word “Moor” rings out fifty-nine times, nearly as often as anyone says “Othello” aloud.^[6]

an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe

Iago · 1.1.97

He is “the thick-lips” (1.1.72) before he is a person. Brabantio can only explain his daughter’s love as witchcraft, because to him a white woman choosing a Black man is unnatural on its face, something “she feared to look on” (1.3.116). The cruelest turn is that Othello, the play’s most dignified figure, eventually takes the racist logic inside himself, reaching for his blackness as the reason his wife must have strayed:

Haply, for I am black…

Othello · 3.3.304

Stage lensThat is why the role is both radioactive and necessary, and its performance history is its own argument. Ira Aldridge played Othello at Covent Garden in 1833. Paul Robeson’s 1943 Broadway Othello ran 296 performances, still the longest run of any Shakespeare play on Broadway. Laurence Olivier’s 1965 blackface film is now taught as a cautionary example of exactly what not to do. And Hugh Quarshie once argued that Othello might be the one role a Black actor should refuse, for fear of legitimizing a racist stereotype, then played it himself at the RSC in 2015 opposite the first Black actor to play Iago there.^[5]

The love can be colorblind. The world the lovers live in never is, and that gap is the tragedy.