We happened to read and talk about Othello the same week we celebrated the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. While the play’s early (white) audiences may not have reacted to the play’s racial dynamics, I cannot, in 21st Century America, read Roderigo, Iago, and Brabanzio’s descriptions of Othello and not think of our nation’s own conflicted relationship to black men and women (#blacklivesmatter). This is a play that asks us to balance the duties of individual and social responsibility. We can lay blame for what happens to Desdemona on Othello alone or even extend the blame to Iago (whatever his real motivation is). But what responsibility does the larger society have for enabling a world where Othello associates the color of his skin with sin?
An example of ways we can simply overlook the play’s racial dynamics: go back through the play and see what characters call Othello by his name. What you’ll notice is that, for some reason, many of them can’t even bring themselves to call him more than Moor.
Over the winter break, I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. Both were worth reading even though I was not the primary audience (I was closer to the object of the authors’ criticism). Coates and Baldwin pointed out things I’m blind to, things I have the luxury of not having to think about, ways in which I have whitewashed certain elements of the past while easily demonizing others. I was reminded of this as I read a little about MLK Jr.’s legacy this year. Now every American can get behind him and his dream, but it’s worth remembering that when MLK Jr. was saying and doing the things that we now celebrate him for, Americans largely disapproved of him. A Gallup poll in 1966 said that a paltry 32% of Americans agreed with what he was saying and doing. That means 63% actively disapproved of what he said and did!
So why is THIS particular Shakespeare play worth reading (and worth performing, albeit in trial form)? It’s a powerful play that manages to make us think about race and responsibility 400 years after it was written. In fact, it’s commentary on these issues is perhaps even more incendiary now than when it was written which is mind-blowing. We don’t have to accept Shakespeare’s representation of Othello as wholly negative or positive. What makes the play worth returning to is the fact that it’s so messy, so filled with possible scapegoats and easy conclusions. And yet it manages to show us the tragic loss of life in many forms: a heartbroken father, a disgraced young man, a cynical but ultimately loving wife, a proud general who began life as a slave but had overcome physical and emotional hardships to become a highly decorated member of Venetian society, and a young woman who died at the hands of the man she deeply loved.
I’ll continue to meditate on this play in anticipation of the trial. If you have thoughts on the way this play matters to us today, please share them with me.