Othello


Let Her Witness It begins with Othello. Hannah Murray’s research has revealed that Mary probably performed Othello’s speech from Act I, Scene 3, which begins “Most potent, grave and reverend signors”. At this early point in the drama, Othello has to stand before the senators of Venice and account for his recent marriage to Desdemona – specifically, his detractors, who include Desdemona’s father Brabantio, want to know how he wooed Desdemona. They suspect witchcraft. Othello acquits himself brilliantly: he delivers a polished speech, which undermines his profession that years on the battlefield have left him ill-suited for oratory, and he courteously emphasises that Desdemona fell in love with him freely.

 

In Othello, Shakespeare was deliberately exploring difference and sympathy, as he did in other works, and with greater subtlety, intelligence, and compassion than some of his play’s interpreters in the intervening centuries. But while his first audiences would have watched a boy play the role of Desdemona, Mary Webb brought arguably unprecedented meaning to Othello’s words. Her mid nineteenth-century interpretations of Shakespeare’s tragic hero provoked and recalibrated questions about race, identity and performance – and about gender.