“Can we imagine him so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous Negro plead royal birth – at a time when negroes were not known except as slaves?”
However the Venetian society was known for its ability to allow anyone to rise through the ranks, which enabled Shakespeare to use Venice as the setting and the Moor as the lead. This concept would seem, to a modern audience, rather racist in its language.
Before the audience is presented with Othello, Iago and Brabantio would lead them to the common, negative presumption of a black character through degrading terms and bestial imagery such as ‘the Moor’, ‘thick lips’, ‘Barbary horse’ and ‘old black ram’. When we are presented with Othello, we are able to move away from these negative views and discern for ourselves what he is really like:
‘My parts, my title and my perfect soul
Shall manifest me rightly’
The language and pace of this quote shows us the temperament of Othello’s character. Shakespeare’s use of punctuation and line formation has created this slow yet steady flow of words, this then emphasizes how calm and confident Othello is in his own character. He is a man willing to accept that he is racially different, yet not racially inferior. Unfortunately, at the end of the play he refers to himself as a ‘base Indian’ which makes him still infected by the stereotypes of savagery that have been trailing him throughout the play.
As is done with race, gender in ‘Othello’ mirrors the views of an Elizabethan society, portraying a male-dominant soceity where women are extensions from their fathers and husbands:
‘Look to your house, your daughter and your bags’
‘Faith, he tonight hath boarded a land carrack;
If it prove lawful prize, he’s made forever’
In the Elizabethan period, it is extremely unnatural for a white woman to want a black man.. The very fact of Desdemona’s miscengentistic marriage, both within the script of the play and the societal script of when the play was written, makes her deviant from her gender performance. There is no denial that it is her actions, her transgressions from her gender performance that contributed to her final moments on stage.
Othello’s initial treatment of Desdemona is an encouragement of her gender transgressions, as well as transgressive as his own ‘scripted’ gender performance. None in the gathering of the city fathers even considered asking Desdemona if she voluntarily ran away with Othello, it takes Othello to suggest this ‘radical’ idea. He is also the only one to call her by Desdemona in Act I. Unlike Desdemona, Othello is fully commited to performing his gender correctly (apart from what’s mentioned above), so committed to it in fact that the prospect of being graced with a set of cuckhold’s horns can drive him to a bloody vengeance. Once convinced of Desdemona’s guilt, Othello will stop at nothing to restore his manhood.
The plot of ‘O’ differs from Shakespeare’s original in a number of ways. Whereas ‘Othello’ was set in 1600s Venice, ‘O’ takes place in the modern day at an American high school in South Carolina. In place of Othello, we’re given Odin – a promising African American basketball player. The other characters are also lifted more or less directly from the original. The language has also been changed to satisfy contemporary audiences, which means liberal doses of cursing in a sometimes stilted high-schoolese.
The story, however, remains basically the same. The difference between ‘Othello’ and ‘O’ is thus more a question of context than plot.
The film does not seem to focus on the issue of race. Whenever the issue of race comes up, it is either glibly dismissed:
“You can’t call me a nigger, only I can call me a nigger because I am one” (Odin to Desi)
Or exposed as a non-issue (“That’s so easy.” Emily, in response to Desi’s accusation of racism.) Nor are any of the characters explicitly racist. Tim Blake Nelson bas been eager to downplay the obvious racial overtones of his film. He wrote in an article for New York Times:
“O, like Shakespeare’s original, is a story more about envy than about race, making it no less human, and all the more universal.”
However the film is in fact putting aside the real complexity of race relations in contemporary America. Odin’s insecurity (a source of his downfall) comes from his ‘outsider’, ‘alien’ status. He understands this difference between him and the rest of the society and is very sensitive to it:
“I’m just like you […] my mother was no crack head, I was no gang-banger.”
With ‘O’, Tim Blake Nelson takes a step away from the didactic approach to race.
