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Shakespeare's Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice
Shakespeare's Tragedy of Othello the Moor of Venice Author:William Shakespeare General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1903 Original Publisher: American book company Subjects: Othello (Fictitious character) Drama / Shakespeare History / General Literary Criticism / Shakespeare Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or... more » missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: APPENDIX Was Othello A Negro ? In Furness's " New Variorum " edition of Othello, -- which we may be sure gives an abstract of everything of importance on this as on all questions connected with the play, -- some seven pages are devoted to "Othello's Colour"; but the subject appears to have attracted little attention until the present century. The tradition of the stage made the Moor black. Quin (who retired from the stage in 1750), according to a writer in the Dramatic Censor (1770), played the part "in a large, powdered major wig, which, with the black face, made such a magpie appearance of his head as tended greatly to laughter"; and he came on " in white gloves, by pulling off which the black hands became more realized." Edmund Kean seems to have been the first to dispute this old tradition. Hawkins, in his life of the actor (quoted by Furness), says : " Kean regarded it as a gross error to make Othello either a negro or a black, and accordingly altered the conventional black to the light brown which distinguishes the Moors by virtue of their descent from the Caucasian race. . . . Betterton, Quin, Mossop, Barry, Garrick, and John Kemble all played the part with black faces, and it was reserved for Kean to innovate, and Coleridge to justify, the attempt to substitute a light brown for the traditional black." Coleridge, as Hawkins intimates, was the first of the critics to take ground against the old stage practice. In commenting upon the epi...« less