Medieval Film Club: Othello

Not actually a ‘medieval’ play (it is set in the second half of the sixteenth century, during the wars between Venice and the Ottoman Empire), William Shakespeare’s Othello (1603–4) presents, nevertheless, more than a few elements which support its inclusion in this list. Throughout the play, ‘honest’ Iago seems to be at Othello’s side, and so close is their bond that some critics have seen them as aspects of a single personality, locked in a combat that replays the psychomachia of the medieval Morality plays, in which allegorical representations of vice and virtue fought for possession of the soul. Instances like Iago telling Roderigo ‘Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago: / In following him, I follow but myself’ seem to be not only an ‘oddly gnomic formulation’ but perhaps a demonstration of the connection. Because plays that present temptation require a subject to be tempted (whereas in Prudentius’s Psychomachia the battle was only between the sins and vices), we sometimes have, as Helen Cooper has put it, the ‘rather illogical effect by which someone’s psychological attributes can be represented alongside the person’ himself or herself. Cooper has extended this analysis to Desdemona herself, who would, in effect, be Othello’s ‘good angel’: ‘darkness and light’ would then refer mostly to ‘hell and heaven’ (Iago and Desdemona), with race entering the play only as an ‘ironic third term’, by which the ‘upright and noble black man’ is deceived into ‘acting the black villain’. Another ‘medieval connection’ resides in the fact that Shakespeare’s knowledge of Africa (presented here and there throughout the play) may derive not only from Pliny the Elder’s (AD 23–79) Natural History but from an acquaintance with the Travels of Sir John Mandeville (c.1357).

Orson Welles (1915–1985) directed his Othello between 1948 and 1951. The film – the first feature he made without Hollywood studio funding – was plagued by financial and logistical problems from the beginning, and sometimes the director had to leave the locations to raise more money (for example by acting in other films). When the murder of Cassio was scheduled to be shot, the costumes had not arrived, and Welles improvised by filming the sequence in a Turkish bath. Some scenes were begun in one location and had to be finished in another. Welles chose to start the film with a scene which is not in the play: the bodies of Othello and Desdemona are carried in a state funeral, and Iago is lifted inside a cage, all this along an ancient citadel in Essaouira/Mogador (Morocco). One critic suggested that Iago might be ‘a by-product of an already twisted world’, as if ‘he had been in that cage all along’. Welles might agree. During the film, we see the cage several times: when Iago refers to ‘the net that shall enmesh them all’; after Cassio’s murder at the baths; after Desdemona’s murder. Another recent critic wrote of the film that it is ‘bold and beautiful and rough and sloppy all at the same time, yet it grabs us by the throat and won’t release its stranglehold until the final frame’. It won the Palme d’Or in Cannes in 1952 (as a Moroccan entry). Welles plays the title role and the Irish stage actor Micheál Mac Liammóir (1899–1978) plays Iago in his only filmed dramatic role. The score was provided by Francesco Lavagnino (1909–1987), who later also scored Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (Spain and Switzerland, 1965).

Part of the Medieval Film Club, for more information please visit the Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies website.

This screening is open to all and free to attend. No booking required.

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