This aspect of Iago was crucial to my interpretation. I totally reject Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s reading of the role, where Iago is simply possessed by some kind of “motiveless malignity.”9. Antony Sher as a morbidly “jealous” Iago with Amanda Harris playing Emilia as a “boozy, flirty army wife” in Gregory Doran’s RSC production at the Swan Theatre in 2004.
Some have found a homoerotic strain in the play—or at the very least a sharp contrast between the intense all-male world of the army and the domestic/feminine sphere introduced by Desdemona. Was this a productive approach for you?As a gay man I’ve never found any homoerotic strain in the play. I suppose the theory comes from the sequence when Iago tells of sleeping next to Cassio one night, and Cassio becoming aroused, and kissing Iago. I think this is just Iago in rabid, tabloid-journalist mode, trying to paint Cassio in the most salacious colors imaginable. I also wonder if the Iago-as-gay idea comes from a time when gay equaled evil. Hollywood did this for a while: the bad guy was always some twisted faggot. (Now it’s changed: the bad guy is just played by a British actor.)
What are your recollections of working on the great “temptation” scene in the middle of the play, where Iago seems to infect Othello with his language, as if transferring the “monster” in his own mind into Othello’s?One of the greatest episodes in all of Shakespeare is Act 3 Scene 3: the so-called “jealousy scene,” when Iago convinces Othello of Desdemona’s unfaithfulness. Apart from brief appearances by Desdemona and Emilia, it is a colossal two-hander (in playing time, it lasts about half an hour), during which both the characters and the actors have to slug it out tirelessly, in an extremely explosive situation. It would only take one wrong move from Iago, or someone to overhear and expose his lies, and the whole maneuver would backfire, and lead Othello to make a murderous attack on Iago rather than Desdemona. Or what if Desdemona didn’t drop her handkerchief halfway through, providing Iago with the one piece of visual evidence which will, eventually, in Othello’s eyes, clinch the case? One of Greg Doran’s preoccupations as a director is to constantly seek out what he calls “the crossroads”—those moments when the action might suddenly go a different way. He wants the audience to sit up sharply, wondering if this story is as familiar as they thought. You can’t act tension or danger onstage without providing some of the real thing, in terms of spontaneity and invention. The great South African actor Sello Maake Ka-Ncube (Othello) and I played the Act 3 Scene 3 crossroads for all they were worth, and each night it felt like a wild rollercoaster ride, without either of us quite knowing who would reach the other end safely or in command.
What do you make of Iago’s refusal to speak at the end? Iago’s vow of silence at the end is, I think, a very simple matter. Arising from a very complex one. He himself can’t explain what happened; any more than a psychopath can say, “I did it because of that.” Whatever it is that Iago suffers from—let psychiatrists call it “sexual jealousy” or Coleridge “motiveless malignity”— the man has been on a tremendous drug rush, fueled by weird chemicals in his own brain, and now it’s over. The only appropriate response is his final statement: “what you know, you know: / From this time forth I never will speak word.” Shakespeare leaves a powerful mystery there, like he does in all his best plays—questions, not answers, about human behavior.
SHAKESPEARE’S CAREER IN THE THEATER
BEGINNINGSWilliam Shakespeare was an extraordinarily intelligent man who was born and died in an ordinary market town in the English Midlands. He lived an uneventful life in an eventful age. Born in April 1564, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glove-maker who was prominent on the town council until he fell into financial difficulties. Young William was educated at the local grammar in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where he gained a thorough grounding in the Latin language, the art of rhetoric, and classical poetry. He married Ann Hathaway and had three children (Susanna, then the twins Hamnet and Judith) before his twenty-first birthday: an exceptionally young age for the period. We do not know how he supported his family in the mid-1580s.Like many clever country boys, he moved to the city in order to make his way in the world. Like many creative people, he found a career in the entertainment business. Public playhouses and professional full-time acting companies reliant on the market for their income were born in Shakespeare’s childhood. When he arrived in London as a man, sometime in the late 1580s, a new phenomenon was in the making: the actor who is so successful that he becomes a “star.” The word did not exist in its modern sense, but the pattern is recognizable: audiences went to the theater not so much to see a particular show as to witness the comedian Richard Tarlton or the dramatic actor Edward Alleyn.Shakespeare was an actor before he was a writer. It appears not to have been long before he realized that he was never going to grow into a great comedian like Tarlton or a great tragedian like Alleyn. Instead, he found a role within his company as the man who patched up old plays, breathing new life, new dramatic twists, into tired repertory pieces. He paid close attention to the work of the university-educated dramatists who were writing history plays and tragedies for the public stage in a style more ambitious, sweeping, and poetically grand than anything that had been seen before. But he may also have noted that what his friend and rival Ben Jonson would call “Marlowe’s mighty line” sometimes faltered in the mode of comedy. Going to university, as Christopher Marlowe did, was all well and good for honing the arts of rhetorical elaboration and classical allusion, but it could lead to a loss of the common touch. To stay close to a large segment of the potential audience for public theater, it was necessary to write for clowns as well as kings and to intersperse the flights of poetry with the humor of the tavern, the privy, and the brothel: Shakespeare was the first to establish himself early in his career as an equal master of tragedy, comedy, and history. He realized that theater could be the medium to make the national past available to a wider audience than the elite who could afford to read large history books: his signature early works include not only the classical tragedy
PLAYHOUSESElizabethan playhouses were “thrust” or “one-room” theaters. To understand Shakespeare’s original theatrical life, we have to forget about the indoor theater of later times, with its proscenium arch and curtain that would be opened at the beginning and closed at the end of each act. In the proscenium arch theater, stage and auditorium are effectively two separate rooms: the audience looks from one world into another as if through the imaginary “fourth wall” framed by the proscenium. The picture-frame stage, together with the elaborate scenic effects and backdrops beyond it, created the illusion of a self-contained world—especially once nineteenth-century developments in the control of artificial lighting meant that the auditorium could be darkened and the spectators made to focus on the lighted stage. Shakespeare, by contrast, wrote for a bare platform stage with a standing audience gathered around it in a courtyard in full daylight. The audience members were always conscious of themselves and their fellow spectators, and they shared the same “room” as the actors. A sense of immediate presence and the creation of rapport with the audience were all-important. The actor could not afford to imagine he was in a closed world, with silent witnesses dutifully observing him from the darkness.Shakespeare’s theatrical career began at the Rose
