manifest (probably darkened via the “oil of hell”), the script codes Othello un-
mistakably as “black.”^18 The term has always been a misnomer, a category of
coloredness rather than an actual skin color. Still, as a feature more visible
than, say, the Jewishness of Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, or the Scythian heritage
of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, or even the morally incriminating deformity of
Shakespeare’s Richard III, Othello’s blackness announced a unique and in-
eluctable difference between English audiences and the hero with whom they
were being newly encouraged to identify.
Long since, that blackness has proven a particular sticking point in main-
stream theater and film, both dominated, as we well know, by white, Anglo-
American casts.^19 Witness how long it would be before “a black American,”
Paul Robeson, would breech the color barrier and would “play Othello to a
London audience in a major theater” (in 1930 ) or to an American audience on
Broadway (in 1943 ).^20 Witness, too, more recent, schizophrenic productions
which play up Othello’s ethnicity at the same time as they play down or
stereotype his “blackness”—recalling the color anxiety embedded in the once
vexing question of whether to stage the Moor as African (black) or Arabian
(nonblack). In Orson Welles’s 1952 film, for instance, Othello is Moroccan;
but the experimental lighting universalizes and neutralizes the color of his
(and everyone’s) skin by correlating changes in passions and perspectives to
changes in hue.^21 In Laurence Olivier’s stage and screen performances of 1964
and 1965 , Othello is presumably West Indian, though reviewers saw him also
as West African; yet Olivier’s makeup (“Max Factor 2880”and “Negro No. 2 ”)
mimicked “white stereotypes of blackness,” as Barbara Hodgdon has sug-
gested, and provoked an apocryphal anxiety that his skin color could wipe off
onto “white” characters, as it apparently did.^22
The plays which preceded Othellocreated no such problem, no such split
in ideology or performance, precisely because their Moors did not double as
heros. Even if Titusbrings the Moor uncomfortably close to home, Aaron is
an unrelenting and unredeemable villain, his soul and his role “black like his
face.” Although in Lust’s DominionEleazar has one legitimate foot on Span-
ish soil through a noble marriage, another of his body parts is condemnably
“injointed” with the “lascivious” Queen Mother of Spain.^23 And while Al-
cazarinsists, in its historical frame, on the majesty of the legitimate Moroc-
can line, the revenge plot proffers the tragic antagonist Muly Mahamet,
whose atavistic histrionics confirm and entrench his villainy. If these plays
play conservatively into biases against blackness at the same time as they at-
tempt to come to more complicated terms with the Moors’ relation to
160 chapter seven