Carl Ludwig Friedrich Becker’s Othello Tells the Stories of His Adventures ca. 1880) accessed here

Carl Ludwig Friedrich Becker’s nineteenth-century visual depiction of the context in which Othello and Desdemona’s courtship flourished, itself involving the narration of Othello’s own personal history, is striking for more than only rendering so visible and vivid what is only narrated in Shakespeare’s play. The white imagination behind this rendering of a Black memory, more importantly, interprets this moment in a way which speaks to its viewers’ prejudices and anxieties as well as to those of Shakespeare’s own historical moment. The painting depicts Othello in the process of responding to Brabantio’s insistence that his Black friend share his personal history with him: Brabantio, Othello informs the gathered senators in the play’s third scene, ‘Still questioned me the story of my life.’[1] The visually imagined Othello is captured in the middle of his performance, frozen in a moment in time, delineating his past experiences, adventures, and conquests, ‘the battles, sieges, fortunes’, which he had encountered as a soldier ‘From year to year’ (1.3.131). While the aspect of Othello’s speech most commented on by critics and students of the play tends to be the marvels and wonders to which he refers (‘the cannibals that each other eat, / The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders’ (144-6)), the speech also, equally importantly, makes reference to Othello’s traumatic encounters. These include ‘most disastrous chances, / Of moving accidents by flood and field, / Of hair-breadth scapes i’ th’ imminent deadly breach, / Of being taken by the insolent foe / And sold to slavery’ as well as ‘of my redemption thence,’ presumably in the form of conversion to Christianity (135-9). Brabantio’s insistent, endless demands (‘still’) for access to Othello’s personal history trigger traumatic memories. While Becker’s pictorial depiction of this remembered event does not include the Senate scene, Shakespeare’s play has Othello relive and re-perform this moment again in act 1, scene 3. In this scene, Othello, finding himself accused of theft and witchcraft and facing potential punishment according to the ‘the bloody book of law’ (68), remembers for the benefit of his white, privileged audience, the speech he had made to that original white audience (Brabantio and his daughter when the ‘house affairs’ allow the latter). The static pictorial rendition of this memory gestures, literally in Othello’s own raised arm, to the world beyond, to the history and the lands which lie outside the physical and symbolic boundaries of Brabantio’s house, synecdochically imagined in the painting as an interior room filled with objects associated with comfort, wealth, and pleasure and suggestive of leisure time and status: musical instruments, books, embroidered cushions, a Turkish carpet, and an expensive tapestry. The painting captures anxieties Shakespeare’s play also engages with: what lies behind a ‘maiden’s’ bashful look? Desdemona, ensconced and snuggled against her father’s chest, has a dreamy look about her: could a father ever have access to a daughter’s inner thoughts and dreams? Othello is positioned closer to the outside world: the sky is visible behind him as are architectural features in the background. His liminal status as an outsider (a ‘Moor’) and an insider (Venice’s most trusted and capable general) in the world of Venice is neatly captured by this positioning. Anxieties triggered by the implications of his liminality are firmly laid aside through the distance the painter creates between white audience and Black narrator as well as the lack of eye contact among the group, though Othello seems to be trying to establish such contact.

I use this painting and the dramatic moment in Shakespeare’s play it captures as a window into early modern, and modern (Othello’s ‘still’!), expectations of Black readiness to unfold and narrate personal histories which could also, like Othello’s, include traumatic experiences. Othello’s mildly objecting ‘still’ registers a sense of exhaustion with this entitlement to one’s history and perhaps irritation at white indifference to the emotional damage that reliving one’s trauma could cause. However, this is the only hint the play allows into Othello’s inner thoughts and feelings about this encounter. The early modern stage offers an almost identical exchange which allows the Othello-figure, in reality, a disguised white duke, to articulate the exhaustion hinted at in Shakespeare’s play. In John Webster’s The White Devil, Francisco, the Duke of Florence, aiming to uncover truths about the murder of Isabella, the wife of Vittoria’s lover Brachiano, decides to disguise himself as a Moor and infiltrate the court. Presenting himself as Mulinassar, a Moorish soldier, Francisco is questioned exactly as Othello was. One of his white interrogators urges: ‘How is’t, brave soldier? O that I had seen / Some of your iron days!’, adding: ‘I pray relate / Some of your service to us.’[2] However, unlike Othello, ‘relate,’ this Moor does not. Pretending modesty, Francisco, as Mulinassar, declines to perform at (white) demand: ‘’Tis a ridiculous thing for a man to be his own chronicle: I did never wash my mouth with mine own praise, for fear of getting a stinking breath.’ Marcello, the other white interrogator Francisco faces, first admonishes him playfully: ‘You’re too stoical’ (5.1.101). Then he evokes ducal authority both to articulate his feeling insulted by the ‘Moor’ denying him access to a Black personal history and, more provocatively, to suggest that it could lead to this history being extracted anyway from him by coercion. ‘The Duke,’ he threatens, ‘will expect other discourse from you’ (5.1.101). The play, however, does not stage the interrogation Marcello threatens, proceeding to reward Francisco’s disguise with the opportunity and means to take revenge on the corrupt and adulterous duke. It is, of course, important to contextualise Francisco’s denying white interrogators access to his supposedly Black history within the fact that he is not a ‘Moor’ at all. Under the (literal) Black mask/cloth he wears to impersonate early modern ideas of Blackness lies the actor’s white body which grants him the authority and confidence to choose whether to give or deny access.[3] Othello, while also another white actor in disguise, is not acknowledged in Shakespeare’s play as such. He fully co-operates with his white interrogators not once, but twice, reliving his history for their benefit, and revisiting both the triumphs and the traumas of his past.

People from marginalised backgrounds continue to have similar encounters insisting on access to their personal histories to this day. Maria Cohut’s reflections on her own experience of being othered, on the basis of her accent rather than skin colour, and questioned about her personal history in England are relevant to my discussion. In in an excellent article for Metro, she writes: ‘‘Where were you born?’; ‘Have you been in this country long?’; ‘And of course the classic, ‘Where are you really from?’’, she opens her article: ‘These are just some of the ways strangers have asked me about my accent.’ Having spent decades in the UK, as she writes, ‘previously unfamiliar places took on the comfort of home, and before long I stopped thinking of myself as “foreign,’’’ a statement with which, perhaps, Othello, Venice’s top general and frequent guest in the house of one of its senators, would have identified. ‘Until, that is,’ she astutely observes, ‘well-meaning’ strangers insisted on reminding me that I, in fact, didn’t belong.’[4] The recent racist incident at Buckingham Palace involving the Black British charity leader, Ngozi Fulani, is another revealing example of the troubling relevance and continuity of the experiences of Black people depicted in early modern texts. Repeatedly and insistently questioned about ‘where she “really came from”’ by the late queen’s senior lady-in-waiting at a Buckingham Palace royal reception, Fulani continued to refuse to give her white interrogator access to her personal history.[5] Fulani, significantly, described this interaction with Lady Hussey as ‘an interrogation.’[6] Black people, however, unlike disguised white dukes, do not get away with denying access to their histories: the encounter, and Fulani’s choice to describe it as what it was, resulted in ‘horrific abuse’ directed at her on social media platforms and in her resigning from her position as chief executive of Sistah Space, the domestic violence charity she founded.[7]

The feelings of entitlement to the histories and pasts of those perceived as other and the attendant feelings of outrage expressed when they refuse to grant such access are visible in early modern drama and are still very much part of our own modern moment. Isn’t it time the interrogation of ethnic minorities’ lives is laid to rest?

References

[1] Honigmann, E. A. J. (ed.), Othello (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1997), 1.3.130. Further references are incorporated in the text.

[2] Christina Luckyj. (ed.), Othello (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), 5.1.95-7. Further references are incorporated in the text.

[3] The early modern stage used various techniques to imitate Black skin, such as black cloth which covered the player’s white body and ‘charred cork mixed with a little oil’. On staging Blackness, see Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (New York: Routledge, 2000), 78; Ian Smith, ‘Othello’s Black Handkerchief’, Shakespeare Quarterly 64:1 (2013), 1-25.

[4] Maria Cohut, ‘You may think it’s innocent, but this question you’re asking is insulting’, Metro, November (2023), available on You may think it's innocent, but this question is insulting | Metro News (accessed on 28.4.2024). The comments the article received are telling.

[5] Andre Rhoden-Paul, ‘Ngozi Fulani: Lady Susan Hussey's race comments were abuse, says charity boss’, BBC, December (2022), available on Ngozi Fulani: Lady Susan Hussey's race comments were abuse, says charity boss - BBC News (accessed 28.4.2024).

[6] Joe Middleton, ‘Ngozi Fulani tells of ‘horrific abuse’ after Buckingham Palace racism incident’, The Guardian, December (2022), available on Ngozi Fulani tells of ‘horrific abuse’ after Buckingham Palace racism incident | Monarchy | The Guardian (accessed 28.4.2024).

[7] Caroline Davies, ‘Charity boss at centre of royal race row steps down over abuse’, The Guardian, March (2023), available on Charity boss at centre of royal race row steps down over abuse | Monarchy | The Guardian (accessed 28.4.2024).