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John Kani as Othello at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg

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Abstract

Seeff’s second case study, Janet Suzman’s production of Othello in 1987, investigates the implications of casting a Xhosa in the title role. Seeff argues that Suzman both saw and occluded Kani’s “difference” as a Xhosa. She grasped Kani’s challenge in a language that was not his mother tongue; Kani responded by according Othello the status of a Xhosa warrior chief, a member of a people never enslaved, with access to an ancient tradition of Xhosa storytellers and bards. Kani never sinks into the hyper-emotionalism that causes many contemporary black actors to shun the role. By combining aspects of Xhosa culture foreign to white South Africans, Kani infused the role with a Xhosa sensibility at just the very moment when white power was beginning to fracture.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Rohan Quince, Shakespeare in South Africa: Stage Productions During the Apartheid Era (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 104–105 for Phyllis Klotz’s “theater-in education” production of Othello, which starred the very “first” black actor, Joko Scott, in the title role.

  2. 2.

    Since its inception in 1976, The Market Theatre has had multi-racial audiences. Audience composition for Othello varied according to the day of the week. On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday evenings, the audience was 70% white; Thursday evenings, the audience was 50–50; and on Friday and Saturday evenings, it was 90% black, because, as John Kani explained, black South African wage-earners are paid every Friday. Whites avoided the theater on the weekend for that reason. John Kani, interview Market Theatre, Johannesburg, January 2010.

  3. 3.

    Hilary Semple, “Othello: An Historic Milestone,” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 1 (1987): 67.

  4. 4.

    See Adele Seeff, “Janet Suzman’s Othello at the Market Theatre,” Shakespeare Bulletin 27, no. 3 (2009): 377–98, reprinted in Shakespearean Criticism, vol. 139 (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2011). In that paper, I explored the implications of Suzman’s rhetoric in her many interviews, lectures, and responses to critics on reviewer discourse and on the reception of the production itself. Theorizing the former is of interest—Suzman is an easy target—but production succeeds on its own dramatic terms. See also Natasha Distiller, “Authentic Protest, Authentic Shakespeare, Authentic Africans,” Comparative Drama 46, no. 3 (2012): 339–54; and Jonathan Holmes, “‘A World Elsewhere’: Shakespeare in South Africa,” in Shakespeare Survey 55, ed. Peter Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002), 271–84.

  5. 5.

    John Kani, Interview. Market Theatre, Johannesburg, January 2010.

  6. 6.

    Ania Loomba, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 48.

  7. 7.

    Ania Loomba, “Shakespeare and the Possibilities of Postcolonial Performance,” in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 121–37. See 130.

  8. 8.

    It is important to note that the imbongi (the bard) and the storyteller are not the same. Both, however, are verbal artists—as is Othello. Both may refer to social circumstances. The ibongi can tell a story. Harold Scheub says, “There never was a story without a poem, and there never was a poem without a story,” and I use this text in support of my argument. See Harold Scheub, The Poem in the Story: Music, Poetry, and Narrative (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 24.

  9. 9.

    Laurie Maguire, Othello: Language and Writing (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 44–45.

  10. 10.

    Maguire’s example is drawn from Othello, 1. 2, where Iago uses sexual terms to describe Desdemona and Cassio responds by using Petrarchan language. See 45.

  11. 11.

    The Immorality Act, which proscribed any sexual contact across ethnic groups, had been repealed in 1985 but a public display of sexual passion such as Suzman represented in her production would have been shocking to audiences. See also Tanner Lecture II, 280–81, for Suzman’s identification of Iago with “extreme Afrikanerdom’s very own icon, Eugene Terre’Blanche … blunt … military … brutal and racist … proposing miscegenation as a sin, and … purporting to be trustworthy.”

  12. 12.

    See Tess Salusbury and Don Foster, “Rewriting WESSA Identity,” in Under Construction: Race and Identity in South Africa Today, ed. Natasha Distiller and Melissa E. Steyn (Johannesburg: Heinemann, 2004), 93–109, for their comment that the English language confers on the speaker the privilege of whiteness. (A ‘WESSA’ is a white English-speaking South African.)

  13. 13.

    See Janet Suzman, “Othello—A Belated Reply,” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 2 (1988): 90–96, esp. 94, for her comment that Desdemona and Cassio are “out of the same drawer”—“two young people of the same class.”

  14. 14.

    After 1990, schools, formerly segregated by skin color and language spoken in the home, were opened to students of color, and this led over time to a flattening of linguistic hierarchies.

  15. 15.

    See Ian Smith, “We Are Othello: Speaking of Race in Early Modern Studies,” Shakespeare Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2016): 104–24, for an illuminating discussion of whiteness “as a fully realized racial category” in Othello (107). This entire 2016 issue of SQ pertains to a discussion of Othello.

  16. 16.

    See Tanner Lecture II, 289, for Kani’s frustrated outburst, “Where’s the Pontic sea? Where the Propontic, the Hellespont? Why them? What do they mean? Why marble heaven? – it’s not made of stone. … Damn my bloody education! Damn effing Bantu Education! I was never allowed to learn an effing thing! How the eff am I supposed to know what all this is about?”

  17. 17.

    The first run-through of the play had to be postponed; police had surrounded Soweto with roadblocks because of a funeral there.

  18. 18.

    See Tanner Lecture II, 281, for Suzman’s comment on the disparity in size (in addition to speech patterns) between Kani and Richard Haines, the actor who played Iago. “John Kani is smallish, compact: My Othello was going to side with Alexander, Napoleon … [I]t was Iago, alias Eugene Terre’Blanche, that I wanted to be large – as comfortingly large as a Boer general—and in six-foot Richard Haines I had found just the fellow.”

  19. 19.

    Othello, 1.2.21–22. All references are taken from William Shakespeare, Othello, The Moor of Venice. The Oxford Shakespeare, ed. Michael Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

  20. 20.

    Othello, 1.1.136.

  21. 21.

    Suzman, “Othello—A Belated Reply.” See esp. 95. See Jonathan Holmes, “‘A World Elsewhere’: Shakespeare in South Africa,” 277, for his comment that Suzman “seems to be claiming a kind of return to origin for the production.” This provocative essay is marred by some curious errors, not the least of which is the misrepresentation that “Jews were ghettoized by successive South African governments” (274).

  22. 22.

    Othello is anything but “rude” in his speech. He is, to use Michael Neill’s word, “orotund” or is characterized by, to cite Kermode, “orotundity.” However, in Suzman’s response to the theater critics, she explained that she had meant that Kani’s speech was “rude” because English was his second language.

  23. 23.

    Tanner lecture II, 276.

  24. 24.

    Suzman, “Othello—A Belated Reply,” 95.

  25. 25.

    Tanner Lecture II, 274.

  26. 26.

    Ibid., 274.

  27. 27.

    Ibid., 287, for Suzman’s awareness of Kani’s initial difficulty with iambic pentameter.

  28. 28.

    William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. Gerald Eades Bentley (New York: Penguin, 1958), 17.

  29. 29.

    John Kani, Interview, Market Theatre, Johannesburg, January 2010.

  30. 30.

    Missionaries introduced the Xhosa to Western choral singing. Among the best known Xhosa hymns is the South African national anthem Nkosi Sikele’ iAfrika (God Bless Africa), composed in 1897 by a schoolteacher, Enoch Sontonga. A Xhosa written literature was established in the nineteenth century with the publication of the first Xhosa newspapers, novels, and plays. Stories, legends, and praise songs provide accounts of Xhosa ancestral heroes.

  31. 31.

    This form of essentialism is tied to the privilege of a classical British dramatic training designed to achieve a “monolithic Shakespearean voice.” See Susan Bennett, Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past (London: Routledge, 1996), 42. This expectation has changed on the British stage, Ian McKellen’s Northern accent being a notable example. In South Africa at time of writing, indigenous accents are valued on the stage. Any attempt to assume a received pronunciation would be discouraged. See Quince, Shakespeare in South Africa, for his review of South African critics’ responses to Kani’s “accent” and “clarity of diction,” 107–10. One could argue that Kani implicitly resisted the “British” English associated at the time with speaking lines from Shakespeare’s plays.

  32. 32.

    I follow here Kani’s own recollections in my interview with him at the Market Theatre, 2010.

  33. 33.

    Scheub, The Poem in the Story: Music, Poetry, and Narrative, 91.

  34. 34.

    Shakespeare, Othello, The Moor of Venice. The Oxford Shakespeare, ed. Michael Neill, 94. His other two actors are Godfrey Tearle and Laurence Olivier. Neill ascribes Robeson’s and Kani’s success as much to their political experiences and the personal heroism of the two men as to their inherent acting abilities. However, the video of Suzman’s production is incontestable evidence of the power and breadth of Kani’s acting repertoire.

  35. 35.

    Suzman, Tanner Lecture II, 293.

  36. 36.

    One South African theater critic, Elisabeth Lickindorf, compared Kani to Kingsley and Olivier: “His Othello [was] more intense and moving than Ben Kingsley’s at Stratford in 1985; skilled control saved his performance from the histrionics that had thrown Laurence Olivier’s film rendering into high-flown and unconvincing hyperbole,” Elisabeth Lickindorf, “The Verse Music of Suzman’s Othello,” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 1 (1987): 70.

  37. 37.

    See Hilary Semple, “Othello: An Historic Milestone,” 69.

  38. 38.

    Suzman, “Othello—A Belated Reply,” 91.

  39. 39.

    Richard Burt, “All that Remains of Shakespeare in Indian Film,” in Shakespeare in Asia: Contemporary Performance, ed. Dennis Kennedy and Yong Li Lan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 73–108.

  40. 40.

    Suzman, “Othello—A Belated Reply,” 91.

  41. 41.

    Within the linguistic hierarchy of vernacular, indigenous languages, isiXhosa is second only to Zulu and is spoken by 16–18% of the population. The first southern African language to establish writing, isiXhosa has the strongest literary institutions of all the African languages in South Africa.

  42. 42.

    Introduced to a Xhosa translation of Julius Caesar in school, he fell in love with Shakespeare then. He actually prefers the Xhosa translation of Julius Caesar by B. B. Mdledle to Shakespeare’s play.

  43. 43.

    In the interview at the Market Theatre, he wondered where the tales of travels came from. Did Shakespeare ever leave England? Could Othello have come from Mauritania? For Xhosa men, the problem of infidelity is the image of another man on top of his wife. That, according to Kani, was Othello’s human frailty as well as the fact that he was “advanced in years,” which made him think that Desdemona could have faked her wedding night. What a match for the scopic demand Othello makes of Iago.

  44. 44.

    See Angela C. Pao, “False Accents: Embodied Dialects and the Characterization of Ethnicity and Nationality,” Theatre Topics 14, no. 1 (2004): 353–72. She reminds us that the existence of standard [italics mine] versions of languages is as much a political phenomenon as a linguistic one.

  45. 45.

    Virginia Vaughan has observed, in an entirely different context, that Ian McKellen’s Northern accent in his representation of Iago in Trevor Nunn’s production of Othello set him apart from the other characters. Virginia Vaughan, Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

  46. 46.

    See Ian Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 2.

  47. 47.

    Ibid., 2. See also Lynn Enterline, “Eloquent Barbarians: Othello and the Critical Potential of Passionate Character,” in Othello: The State of Play, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 149–75, esp. 151–53.

  48. 48.

    Kim Hall, ed., Othello, the Moor of Venice: Texts and Contexts (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007), 2.

  49. 49.

    Sandra Young, “Imagining Alterity and Belonging on the English Stage in an Age of Expansion: A Reading of Othello,” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 23, no. 1 (2011): 21–29; See 25; See Holmes 274, for his comment that Kani saw his performance as a political act in a political struggle.

  50. 50.

    Maguire, Othello: Language and Writing, 172–73.

  51. 51.

    Here I borrow from Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 238ff.

  52. 52.

    See Aneta Pavlenko and Adrian Blackledge, eds. “Introduction: New Theoretical Approaches to the Study of Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts,” in Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts (Clevedon: Cromwell Press, 2004), 19. Pavlenko and Blackledge adopt a narrative, dynamic view of identity, in which individuals are always producing themselves, revising themselves, and creating new identities. This is exactly what Othello, as narrator, does throughout the course of the play until the moment of his death.

  53. 53.

    Toni Morrison’s Adaptation of Othello, entitled Desdemona, makes clear that Desdemona falls in love with his representation of himself and never learns who Othello is. He may not know his true self. See Toni Morrison, Desdemona (London: Oberon Books, 2012).

  54. 54.

    See Enterline, “Eloquent Barbarians,” 154, for her comment that the play interrogates the grammar school’s methods for achieving eloquence by giving “classically inflected voices and emotions” to characters historically excluded from training in rhetoric: women. Before the Senators, Desdemona displays rhetorical skill.

  55. 55.

    See Barbara Hodgdon, “Race-ing Othello, Re-EnGendering White-Out,” in The Shakespeare Trade: Performances and Appropriations (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 45.

  56. 56.

    See Ian Smith, “Othello’s Black Handkerchief,” in Othello: The State of Play, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin, 95–120, for a carefully argued case for a handkerchief worked in black silk thread.

  57. 57.

    Maguire, Othello: Language and Writing, 69.

  58. 58.

    Cited by Scheub, The Poem in the Story, 23, for a description of how children learn to tell stories by becoming caught up in the patterning rather than the linear drive of the story itself.

  59. 59.

    Scheub, The Poem in the Story, 118; See also Harold Scheub, Story (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1998); Harold Scheub, Shadows: Deeper into Story (Madison: Parallel Press-UW-Madison Libraries, 2009); Jeff Opland, Xhosa Oral Poetry: Aspects of a Black South African Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); A. C. Jordan, The Wrath of the Ancestors (Johannesburg: AD Donker, 1968); Jeff Opland, ed. and trans., Abantu besizwe: Historical and Biographical Writings, 19021944 (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009); and Yvette Hutchison, “South African Theatre,” in A History of Theatre in Africa, ed. Martin Banham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 312–79, who has a section (315–30) on oral performance, including song.

  60. 60.

    The “malignant and turbaned Turk” in 5.2.352 is the obvious example of using a fantasy to explain a present reality.

  61. 61.

    Scheub, The Poem in the Story, 3.

  62. 62.

    I am indebted to Laurie Maguire’s analysis of Othello’s rhetorical figures in the play for my exploration of Kani’s performance under Suzman’s careful direction. See esp. 23.

  63. 63.

    See Albert B. Lord, “Characteristics of Orality,” Oral Tradition 2, no. 1 (1987): 54–72, esp. 68, for an example: “What is Wider Than the Blue Sea? / What is Longer Than a Green Field? / What is Swifter Than a Gray Falcon?”

  64. 64.

    See Robert N. Watson, “Double Diction and Othello’s Dual Identity,” in Othello: The State of Play, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin, 235–55.

  65. 65.

    Othello, 1.3.169.

  66. 66.

    Othello, 1.3.80.

  67. 67.

    See Harold Scheub, Shadows: Deeper into Story, for a discussion of the layers of meaning—shadows of stories—that originate in stories worldwide over time.

  68. 68.

    See Scheub, The Poem in the Story, 89.

  69. 69.

    Suzman, “Othello—A Belated Reply,” 93.

  70. 70.

    See Michael Neill, Othello, note on l.255 in 1.3; See also Norman Sanders, ed., The New Cambridge Shakespeare, Othello (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), note on 253 in 1.3. Commenting on the fact that “rites” could also mean “rights,” Sanders notes that the choice depends on one’s interpretation of Desdemona’s character as “(1) a girl so modest that she would not dream of saying in public that she desires Othello sexually, or (2) a girl who is frank and open.” See Sanders, Introduction, 27, for his description of Desdemona as someone whose “sexuality is squarely faced and emphasis is laid upon her sensual attraction to Othello.” This “is a part of her nature that makes her so powerfully attractive to all the men in the play.”

  71. 71.

    See Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986), 125, for his comment that Desdemona embodies power when she persuades the Senate to allow her to accompany Othello to Cyprus. She has assumed here two patriarchal prerogatives: the power to marry herself and the power to speak the law. Consequently, she must be punished for these violations of patriarchy.

  72. 72.

    Hodgdon, “Race-ing Othello: Re-Engendering White-Out,” 45–46. This is an elegantly written essay but its assumption that there was a predominantly white audience at the Market Theatre, on which part of her argument rests, is not borne out by Suzman in “Othello—A Belated Reply,” 95–96, or by John Kani in his interview. See note 2 in this chapter. A record number of black South Africans attended the production on Friday and Saturday nights and, for many of them, it was their first time in a theater.

  73. 73.

    Desdemona initiates a passionate kiss just before they exit at 1.3.296, “Come Desdemona, I have but an hour/ of love, to spend with thee.”

  74. 74.

    Hankey has noted the sensuality between the couple in Suzman’s staging two scenes later in 2.3.8–10, “Come, my dear love, / The purchase made, the fruits are to ensue:” See Julie Hankey, ed., Othello, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 170.

  75. 75.

    Some critics complained that Haines was overpowering but, in spite of his crude boorishness, and in spite of his malicious power which the text accords him, Kani’s nobility could not be extinguished. Only he himself could dismantle Othello. See Michael Venables, “This Othello Is Iago’s Play,” The Citizen, 18 September 1987.

  76. 76.

    Edward A. Snow, “Male Anxiety and the Sexual Order of Things in Othello,” English Literary Renaissance 10, no. 3 (1980): 384–412. See also Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning; Lynda E. Boose, “‘Let It Be Hid’: The Pornographic Aesthetic of Shakespeare’s Othello,” in “Othello: New Casebooks, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin (Houndsmill Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 22–48; Michael Neill, “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello,” in Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 237–68; and Sarah Hatchuel and Natalie Vienne-Guerrin, eds., Shakespeare on Screen: Othello (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

  77. 77.

    See Snow, “Male Anxiety,” 391–93.

  78. 78.

    In 1982, Kani performed opposite a distinguished white Afrikaans actress in a production of Miss Julie. Their first kiss prompted about 200 members of a 70% white audience to walk out of the theater. In similar vein, Kani recalled that the cast of Othello hid the hate mail addressed to Joanna Weinberg (Desdemona). John Kani Radio Interview, “John Kani, a Conversation,” 13 April 2005. http://www.abc.net.au/queensland/stories/s1344576.html. Accessed December 2008.

  79. 79.

    Boose, “‘Let It Be Hid’: The Pornographic Aesthetic of Shakespeare’s Othello.”

  80. 80.

    Ibid., 35.

  81. 81.

    One South African theater critic described the production as an “impressive visual experience” because of its technical excellence in terms of lighting and sets. See Karoly Pinter, “Some Technical Notes on Suzman’s Othello,” Shakespeare in Southern Africa 1 (1987): 71.

  82. 82.

    Ben Okri, “Leaping Out of Shakespeare’s Terror: Five Meditations on Othello,” in A Way of Being Free (London: Phoenix House, 1997), 72.

  83. 83.

    Suzman, Tanner Lecture II, 289. We may recall that Bantu Education’s explicit aim was to create a permanent labor force with a minimum education. Furthermore, Bantu Education mandated some hours of instruction in Afrikaans, the origin, as we have seen, for the Soweto children’s riots in 1976.

  84. 84.

    Ibid., 292.

  85. 85.

    Ibid., 293.

  86. 86.

    Hodgdon, “Race-ing Othello,” 48.

  87. 87.

    See James R. Siemon, “‘Nay, That’s Not Next’: Othello, V. ii. in Performance, 1760–1900,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37, no. 1 (1986): 38–51.

  88. 88.

    Suzman, “A Belated Reply,” 95.

  89. 89.

    Richard Madelaine, “Putting Out the Light: A ‘Snuff’ Variant?” in Shakespeare: Readers, Audiences, Players, ed. R. S. White, Charles Edelman, and Christopher Wortham (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1998), 207–19.

  90. 90.

    Ibid., 207.

  91. 91.

    G. Blakemore Evans, ed., Macbeth, Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 5.5.3. This sense of “snuffing it” is used colloquially today.

  92. 92.

    Madelaine, “Putting Out the Light,” 207. He cites, as examples, The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Changeling, ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and The Atheist’s Tragedy. He notes the connection between the “snuff” genre and the Elizabethan use of the term “dying.”

  93. 93.

    Ibid., 210.

  94. 94.

    See the widely quoted passage by Henry Jackson cited by Michael Neill in his Introduction to Othello, 9.

  95. 95.

    Earlier in 3.3.285, when Othello rejects Desdemona’s desire to bind his forehead with the handkerchief, he is almost brutal with her when he says, “Come, I’ll go in with you.” Kani performs this sequence as if his wife’s offering to bind his head has aroused him sexually.

  96. 96.

    See esp. 4.1.172–97: “I’ll not expostulate with her, lest her body unprovide my mind again.”

  97. 97.

    Simon Palfrey, Doing Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), cited by Maguire, Othello: Language and Writing, 144.

  98. 98.

    See Edward A. Snow, “Male Anxiety,” 412 for an illuminating note on the variants, “Indian” in Q and F2, and “Judean” in F1, which Snow suggests reveal a different side of Othello. “Judean” suggests the self-conscious conversion to Christianity and his spiritual investment in Desdemona. According to Snow, “Judean” makes him guilty of a betrayal which nothing can expiate: a Judas-kiss. Certainly, his speech at 5.2.276, “Whip me, ye devils,” suggests his own sense of his damnation.

  99. 99.

    See Neill, Othello, note 358 on 397.

  100. 100.

    Palfrey, Doing Shakespeare, cited by Maguire, Othello: Language and Writing, 64.

  101. 101.

    I am using the term, “South Africanized” to avoid any charges of essentializing “Africa,” of which I hope I am not guilty. White South African critic Hilary Semple’s account of audience responsiveness is corroborated by the record number of blacks in the audience on weekends (see note 71) and their enthusiasm, as evinced by Kani in his interview with me.

  102. 102.

    Semple, “Othello: An Historic Milestone,” 69.

  103. 103.

    Linckindorf, “The Verse Music of Suzman’s Othello.” See esp. 71, for her description of Kani as an “Othello of rare maturity and dignity.” Suzman chose the Folio’s “Judean.” Michael Neill devotes a lengthy note in his Appendix F (iii) to the difficulties this crux poses. See 464–65 of his edition.

  104. 104.

    Bart Van Es, Shakespeare in Company (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 229–30.

  105. 105.

    Ibid.

  106. 106.

    See Robert Hornback, “‘Speak[ing] Parrot’ and Ovidian Echoes in Othello: Recontextualizing Black Speech in the Global Renaissance,” in Othello: The State of Play, ed. Lena Cowen Orlin, 63–93, for an extended exploration of black speech in the global Renaissance and Shakespeare’s deployment of it to challenge binary proto-racial logic in Othello.

  107. 107.

    Robert J. Gordon, “Iago and the Swart Gevaar: The Problems and Pleasures of a (Post)colonial Othello,” in The Shakespearean International Yearbook, vol. 9, ed. Graham Bradshaw, Tom Bishop, and Laurence Wright (Farham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 131–51.

  108. 108.

    Hodgdon, The Shakespeare Trade, 249, n. 62.

  109. 109.

    See Kyle Grady, “Othello, Colin Powell, and Post-racial Anachronisms,” Shakespeare Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2016): 68–83, for his view that post-racial discourse hides and perpetuates racism.

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Seeff, A. (2018). John Kani as Othello at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg. In: South Africa's Shakespeare and the Drama of Language and Identity. Global Shakespeares. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78148-8_5

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