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THE BLACK OTHELLO
[[italics]] by Margaret Webster [[/italics]]
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DICK BURBADGE, leading man at The Globe and London's matinee idol of the early Sixteen-hundreds, had not played all of Shakespeare's star parts, from  Richard III to Hamlet, for nothing. He must have known pretty closely what to look for, when he started to work out the details of his make-up and physical appearance as the Moor of Venice. Even before rehearsals started, before he had a chance to talk the matter over with his author, the text of the play was plain enough. "Black," was the reiterated adjective; "begrimed and black"; "thick-lips," "sooty bosom." Shakespeare's intention must have seemed plain enough to any straightforward reader.

     Besides, Burbadge was familiar with the black-face dancer of Elizabethan vaudeville, the Morisco, the 'Negro or Moor,' from whom the ubiquitous Morris-dancers derived their leaping antics and jingling bells. He was presumably not unacquainted with the 'Moors' of Elizabethan literature and drama, the Blackamoors, a term widely and loosely used to designate equally Ethiopians, Egyptians, Gold Coast negroes and inhabitants of the North African 'Barbary' shores. He must have concluded quite simply that Shakespeare meant a black man from Africa――that huge, dark continent, that region of "antres vast and deserts idle," of "cannibals" and "Anthropophagi," whose coasts the hardiest mariners of Western Europe had risked their lives to chart, whose vast, mysterious hinterland was still an unknown world.

     At all events, unworried by ethnological exactness, Burbadge played Othello, and played him black; of this we have contemporary indications. If Shakespeare protested, or had different ideas, no word of the difference of opinion has come down to us. For more than two hundred years Burbadge's successors, poor simple souls, followed the original example; until Edmund Kean of London's Drury Lane, that same Edmund Kean who shattered theatrical tradition by playing Shylock in a black wig instead of the prescribed red one, appeared as a pale Othello, a coffee-colored Othello, what the enlightened Nineteenth century had learnd to mean when it referred, accurately enough, to a 'Moor.' This change was hailed by Colerdige, the great writer and essayist, as a most "pleasing probability." Here, at last, was the authentic 'Moor'; Roderigo's "thick-lips" epithet was merely a "wilful confusion," and the other textual evidence might be dismissed on various assorted grounds.

     What with Kean's acting genius and Coleridge's critical cogency, the controversy was off to a flying start, and commentators have made the most of it ever since. "Tawny" says one; "black," snaps another; "a half-caste," describes the great Fechter's rendering: "an animal, tropical black," is another writer's analysis. Says George Lewis: "Othello is black; the very tragedy lies there; the whole force of the contrast, the pathos and extenuation of his doubts of Desdemona, depend on his blackness." While Mary Preston of Maryland, writing in 1868, roundly states: "We may regard the daub of black upon Othello's visage as an EBULLITION of fancy, a FREAK of imagination...the single blemish on a faultless work. Othello was a WHITE man." One critic, more moderate than the rest, most sensibly concluded: "The point which the Poet emphasizes so often and so strongly is the difference of race between him (Othello) and Desdemona....This fact is sufficient for all dramatic purposes; to ascertain the exact shade of his skin may be left to those who have leisure to play with probabilities."

     This temperate judgment, however, was acceptable to neither side. Historical evidence was invoked: "In the ages of her splendour, Venice was thronged with foreigners from

[[image: black and white photograph of Margaret Webster writing notes]]