Abstract
In his diary entry for October 11, 1660, Samuel Pepys records the following brief impression of that evening’s performance of Othello: “Here, in the Park, we met with Mr. Salisbury, who took Mr. Creed and me to the Cockpit to see The Moor of Venice which was well done. Burt acted the Moor; by the same token, a very pretty lady that sat by me, called out, to see Desdemona smothered.”1 While the performance venue is the Cockpit rather than the Globe, the utterance by Pepys’s fellow theatergoer resonates with Othello’s fraught state after suffocating Desdemona:
My wife, my wife! What wife? I ha’ no wife.
O insupportable, O heavy hour!
Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse
Of sun and moon, and that th’affrighted globe
Should yawn at alteration. (5.2.106-109; emphasis mine)2
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Notes
Qtd in Gāmini Salgādo, Eye-Witnesses of Shakespeare (London: Chatto and Windus, 1975), 49.
In William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare based on the Oxford Edition, 2nd edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: WW Norton, 2008). AU subsequent citations of Shakespeare’s work corne from this edition.
See chapter I.4, p. 64.
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© 2012 Adam Max Cohen
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Fisher, J.B. (2012). Passing for Truth: Wonder Tales and their Audiences in Othello . In: Wonder in Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011626_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011626_15
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