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Wilson Milam on Othello

The first thing you notice when you read Othello, The Moor of Venice is that only the first act actually takes place in Venice. The rest of the play takes place in Cyprus, the island of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Shakespeare puts the action in an exotic locale, a garrison town for the Venetian navy protecting the republic of Venice from the constant threat of an infidel invasion. In beginning to delve into the play, I looked for the historical context. We set the play in 1570, the year before the Turks finally reclaimed Cyprus from the Venetians. We researched the Venetian military, a half conscripted, half mercenary navy, which protected both Venice’s merchant fleets and the republic itself from pirate attacks. Wherever he learned it from, Shakespeare was exact in his use of Venetian military rank: General, Lieutenant, Ancient. We also examined the Venetian social structure: Who is the elite? Who are members of the Senate? Whom does one properly marry to please one’s parents? Understand their social rank and you find the reality of these people and their lives.

Venetian society is alien to Othello. His life has been on the battlefield since as he says: ‘since these arms of mine had seven years’ pith / Till now some nine moons wasted, they have used / Their dearest action in the tented field, / And little of this great world can I speak / More than pertains to feats of broil and battle.’(1.3.85-88) To court Desdemona he chooses Cassio as his guide, someone who is part of and thus familiar with this social milieu, rather than Iago, who is rough hewn, ‘more in the soldier than in the scholar.’(2.1.166)

Shakespeare’s knowledge of Venice was almost certainly second-hand. This made it important to also explore the particular robustness of Elizabethan life and culture. For instance, just as the soldiers in Othello carry swords, so it was customary for Elizabethan gentleman to walk the street armed.

When casting the actor for Othello, I was looking for qualities of leadership and nobleness. There’s a strong spiritual element to Othello’s soldier-ship that reflects the ancient manual The Art of War. The art of the warrior, says Sun Tzu, is to remain unemotional, calm and detached. It is the warrior who does not let himself be affected by the world who wins. Othello begins to lose his way when emotions – the words ‘anger’ and ‘passion’ are used with increasing frequency to describe his behaviour - dictate his actions.

Iago, on the other hand, never lets emotions overtake his reason. When casting Iago, another excellent soldier, I wanted an actor with an earthiness and rapier intelligence. Iago is a renowned Shakespearean villain, but to say he is ‘evil’ would imply he has a world view or philosophy. Iago doesn’t begin with a grand plan. He’s like a jazz musician: somebody changes the key, the tempo, the rhythm, and he goes with it. He does feel slighted about being passed over for promotion and he does suspect Aemila with Othello and Cassio, but Iago also loves the game, the brinkmanship. He’s in it for the riff and he’s a brilliant improviser.

Wilson Milam is the Director of the Globe's production of Othello

Giles Block on the language of Othello

I believe a line of verse corresponds to the amount which we say in one breath. And the rhythm underneath it, the iambic cadence, is our heartbeat. So a line of verse is made up of the two things which keep us going: our breath and our pulse. Each play’s use of verse and prose is singular and gives the play a textual individuality. What Othello does, perhaps more than any other play, is to capture colloquial exchanges in a domestic situation, in streets and bedrooms. Iago’s lines are packed with extra syllables, personal pronouns, and dependent verbs being swallowed together. Some of the lines have fourteen or fifteen syllables rather than the usual ten or eleven. It’s filled with a great variety of rhythms that reflects people talking ‘on the hoof’ in a conversational, street-like way.

With Othello, the extraordinary thing is that it’s just a certain word dropped at the right time which does all of the damage. And they are such simple words. That’s the most remarkable part of the play in terms of text. There are lots of these little things. 'I did not think he had been acquainted with her'(3.3.99) is almost casual and very colloquial. It is still approximately iambic, although it has twelve syllables. You could still find the five stresses if you squash syllables together, but the relaxed quality suggests that Iago is capturing everyday speech rhythms.

Iago’s vocabulary in his verse is quite simple. However, he’s quite a show off in his prose, especially when he’s beguiling Rodorigo. Prose is often about being witty. Iago uses a personal way of speaking to Rodorigo. There’s a pattern in the prose scenes, where he calls him intimately, 'thee' and 'thou'. But towards the end of the scenes, when he starts giving him orders, he uses 'you'. That’s also interesting in the relationship of Othello and Desdemona. He calls her 'you' to begin with, because they’re in a very formal place, and only for a moment or two does he use the intimate form: 'when I love thee not / Chaos is come again.' (3.3.91-2) As soon as Iago gets to work on him, Othello goes back to 'you' – although not exclusively. These little changes are very instructive to actors. It helps them to gauge the emotional temperature change in a scene.

If you count the lines of the play, you will see that something very important happens almost exactly at the middle: the handkerchief drops. This little square of silk drops, silently, with ghastly consequences.

Giles Block advises on text in performance at Shakespeare’s Globe

Dominic Dromgoole on Othello

One late summer afternoon, when I was fifteen, my sister and I got hold of a passage from Othello and started playing around with it. It’s the scene where Iago starts messing around with Othello’s brain [3.3.34]. He does it deftly and with a wickedly quick discretion. The exchanges fly by… Soon after, Othello falls to pieces, babbling spurts of nonsense before he lapses into a trance.

We liked the look of this dialogue and raced at it with our usual quick-fire repartee. As we did, funny things started happening. There was delight at the deft annotation of synapse-fast mental speed. It was all comprehensible and made perfect sense, which was a big plus. There was pleasure to be taken in Iago’s rapier irony, and the finger-light touch with which he steers the great boat of Othello’s heart. There was also a surprising sense that we were being controlled, that there was only one way to play this, and that it dictated its own rhythm. We could tinker about with it, but only within its own truth. If we didn’t live within its music, it fell to pieces on us.

It was a summer evening, we were circling around among the apple trees, the light was failing, and as we ping-ponged this dialogue to and fro, meanings started percolating up. Power games, ugly master and commander Pinteresque guff, floated around the language. And as Othello crumbled, his soldiers bombast shrivelling down to a boy’s fear, the fragility of his identity was exposed. His character was a frail mask. By the end of the scene, sanity itself was under strain, and the strength of language to retain a grip on sanity. All this floated up as we did nothing but toss the words into the air and let them conjure their own sour truth. There was no discussion, no ‘goodness, isn’t this interesting’, just this demented high-speed repetition.

I learned more in those two hours than in a year’s teaching. About how to play Shakespeare, keeping it light, and fast, and not signposting intentions, just speaking. About the nature of the subtext, the sewage system that runs underneath all great writing and gives it its own electric tension. About the clumsiness of great dialogue, its scrappy messiness, and how a smooth speech articulating its own meaning is often a terrible one.

Dominic Dromgoole is the Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe. This is an edited extract from his book, Will and Me – How Shakespeare Took Over My Life, Penguin, 2006

Gwilym Jones on the Storm in Othello

Storm scenes in Shakespeare’s theatre would have been startling and spectacular. The sound of thunder, mimicked by drums and rolling cannon balls in wooden troughs, would fill the playhouse, as squibs and rockets in silver casing were set alight to imitate lightning. We do not know if these effects would be used to stage the storm in Othello. No stage directions indicate the noises, but this does not necessarily mean that the tempest, created with language, was not first flaunted with fire.

Shakespeare used storms and shipwrecks to separate characters. The idea is that the characters do not know what has happened to each other; they usually think that they are the only survivors. Of course, this means grief, anguish, loneliness: feelings which councillors often try to assuage with kind words. Iago plays such a role in Othello. The storm has divided the Venetian fleet, and all have arrived in Cyprus with the exception of Othello’s ship. Iago distracts a fearful Desdemona with his witty wordplay until her husband is safe ashore. It is a chance for the ensign to show off his skills and, for once, he is willingly the centre of attention. Although insulting Aemilia, the passage shows Iago at his kindest in soothing Desdemona; paradoxically, when his language is at its most elaborate he is at his most transparent.

Another recurring feature of the sea-storm sees reunited survivors recalling the shipwreck. In the comedies, this is in the final scene; the tragedy of the wreck has become humour, the ultimate resolution remembers the initial separation. The same happens in Othello: 'If after every tempest come such calms,/ May the winds blow till they have wakened death,/ And let the labouring bark climb hills of seas,/ Olympus-high.' (2.1.183-186) The problem is that the reunion comes too early in the play; a space for tragedy remains. This is consistent with the play’s domesticity. Just as Othello and Desdemona survive the laws of Venice, so they survive the raging seas. It takes an internal force to separate them, a force which Iago, the antithesis of the storm, has the simple vocabulary to generate.

Gwilym Jones is at the University of Sussex, completing a D.Phil. on Shakespeare's Storms and works in the research department of Globe Education

Yolanda Vazquez talks about the Elizabethan practice of using cue scripts.

Shakespeare’s actors would have used cue scripts. These are scripts in which only the lines of the character are printed, preceded by their cue. The cues would probably be only the final two feet of the iambic line. The unique thing about cue scripts is that they keep actors listening and engaged in a scene, but they can be very tricky. For example, when Othello is hiding, and Iago and Cassio are talking about Bianca – but Othello thinks that they are talking about Desdemona – in the cue script Othello has to respond several times to Iago’s laughter. It’s easy to confuse which speech follows which laugh.

Cue scripts shows us the ‘moment’, something we tend to lose if we’ve learnt exactly where our lines are in the script. Just as in real life: you listen, you might want to have your say, but you don’t get to speak, so you lift up your energy and you have to bring it down again. You are truly listening rather than acting it. A character that does not have many lines in a scene can switch off onstage, but with a cue script, they will be listening intensely throughout the scene for their cue.

Yolanda Vazquez is a Globe Education Practitioner and actress, who has appeared in many Globe productions including: Adriana in The Comedy of Errors, Hypollita in The Two Noble Kinsmen, Queen Elizabeth in Richard III, Hortensio in The Taming of the Shrew, Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing and Hermione in The Winter's Tale.

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