Historical and social criticism

Abstract

At first sight it seems a commonsensical approach to ask such questions as, ‘What attitudes — what prejudices — did Shakespeare’s first audiences bring to performances of Othello?’, or, ‘What were the implications of a black hero for Shakespeare and for the audiences who first came to see his play?’, or, ‘What “meaning” had this play for such an audience?’. Yes, the approach is commonsensical enough, but the problems are intractable. First, there was not ‘one’ Elizabethan audience: audiences varied then quite as much as they do now and, although a certain amount of information has been recovered about the kinds of people who went to the public theatres, there is much we don’t know. Secondly, it is important to bear in mind that we cannot fully recover ‘a meaning’, ‘a context’ even for plays of our own day. There is a third important difficulty. The way we may respond emotionally to a character or situation today may conflict with how our knowledge of the past would tell us the author’s contemporaries might be expected to respond. Thus, for Othello, public attitudes to a father’s ‘rights’ over a daughter are very different now from what they were in Shakespeare’s time.