Olivier’s Othello

We have the book of words to Othello, not the play. And we guard it as, in 2300 A.D., some museum might guard the shooting script of City Lights, a work of the celebrated Chaplin, though the work itself (committed to acetate) was destroyed in the Scythian raids of the late twentieth century.

We do well to. guard our book, as the only clue to Shakespeare’s intentions we have. Its words cohere, certainly, an intricate expressive fabric. But we have not the actors moving, have little clue to the rituals of their moving (what does “Enter Othello and attendants” mean?), have no idea even how black the Moor was painted. People knew such things as late as 1670, but dimly, dimly; no one had seen them since the late 1640s, before the Puritans closed the theaters and kept them closed long enough for the tradition to die. It is one of the most tantalizing omissions in history, that no Londoner, confronted by the new indoor stage of Charles II, with its proscenium arch, was moved to write down how things were once done out of doors on the apron stage with boy-women and upper platforms, in the time of James or Charles I. No one; not any one; or if anyone did, his journal has not survived. And we are totally ignorant.

HK

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Hugh Kenner

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We have the book of words to Othello, not the play. And we guard it as, in 2300 A.D., some museum might guard the shooting script of City Lights, a work of the celebrated Chaplin, though the work itself (committed to acetate) was destroyed in the Scythian raids of the late twentieth century.

We do well to. guard our book, as the only clue to Shakespeare’s intentions we have. Its words cohere, certainly, an intricate expressive fabric. But we have not the actors moving, have little clue to the rituals of their moving (what does “Enter Othello and attendants” mean?), have no idea even how black the Moor was painted. People knew such things as late as 1670, but dimly, dimly; no one had seen them since the late 1640s, before the Puritans closed the theaters and kept them closed long enough for the tradition to die. It is one of the most tantalizing omissions in history, that no Londoner, confronted by the new indoor stage of Charles II, with its proscenium arch, was moved to write down how things were once done out of doors on the apron stage with boy-women and upper platforms, in the time of James or Charles I. No one; not any one; or if anyone did, his journal has not survived. And we are totally ignorant.