‘To Make the Situation Natural’: Othello at Mid-Century

Abstract

In 1907 the Prisko Gallery in Vienna offered for sale an ‘Othello and Desdemona’ by Veronese. In the painting a blonde woman in Renaissance dress tries to stave off an attacking man, about to stab her with a knife upraised in his right arm — a distinctly white man, with red hair in fact. Othello? A white man who stabs his victim? In fact throughout the nineteenth century Othello did routinely stab Desdemona on the stage. It was a way, discovered in the eighteenth century, to solve the problem of Othello’s lines immediately after the stifling: ‘What noise is this? Not dead? not yet quite dead? / I that am cruel am yet merciful, / I would not have thee linger in thy pain,’ (V. 2. 86–8). The ‘So, so’ that followed covered the thrust. Julie Hankey, the editor of the brilliant Plays in Performance text of the play, explains that theatrically ‘the wound served the double purpose … being both reviving (as good as a leach) and fatal’.¹ But though he did frequently stab, the nineteenth-century Othello always stabbed in black face — actually, after Edmund Kean, more in tawny face. So it comes as no surprise that the painting now seems to be a ‘Tarquin and Lucretia’ by Titian. Nevertheless, even allowing for the upraised dagger as clue, we still want to ask: what could both Othello and Othello have come to mean in the nineteenth century if by 1900 the hero might be blanched?

‘To make the situation natural I must either have made her a bad woman […] or him a jealous, treacherous, selfish man.’

(G. B. Shaw, ‘A Dressing Room Secret’ (1910)