To Be Or Not To Be
...Shakespeare turns fully 180 degrees in his grave. Today, the Shakespeare industry is run by revisionists. For years now, the adaptations which open each Summer’s season have been dominated by a parade of wholly predictable inversions: the past becomes the present, straight characters are turned into gay ones, whites into blacks, men into women. For every play, it seems, there’s somebody with a political ax to grind and the money to do it onstage. Indeed, the trend has gone so far that it sometimes seems as if Shakespeare’s plays continue to be produced solely for the pleasure to be had in systematically flouting a great author’s intentions.
Well and good, some will say. After all, Shakespeare was writing for a sixteenth-century audience with sixteenth-century concerns. Four hundred years have passed and a lot has changed. Who’s to say what sort of play he’d write if he were alive today? It’s an ultimately unanswerable question. Still, it’s interesting to note that, of all Shakespeare’s plays, one in particular seems to have stood the test of time: "Othello." While producers and directors keep themselves busy reworking "Hamlet," "Macbeth," and "Romeo and Juliet" (most recently, as a lesbian tragedy) to suit the tastes of contemporary audiences, they are content to leave the basic plot structure and character assignations of "Othello" intact.
Why do directors so consistently make an exception for "Othello"? Apparently, it’s because there’s nothing to be gained from changing it. Of all Shakespeare’s heroes, Othello — in the original, a Moorish mercenary employed by the regime of Renaissance Venice in its ongoing struggle against the Ottoman Turks — is the only one who is black (or, at any rate, not European). While I look forward to the revisionist production in which a white Othello is cast against an otherwise all-black cast, I’m not going to hold my breath....
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