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Othello was first produced in 1604. Throughout the next twenty years or so, the play was staged on an almost continual basis. By some historic accounts, it was in the 1630s, that one of the first roles played by a female on England's professional stage was that of Othello's Desdemona. The first real African-American person to play the title role of Othello was Ira Aldridge. Prior to this, white actors used ''blackface,'' a type of makeup, when playing African-American roles. For almost forty years, from 1826 until 1865, Aldridge continued to act out this role all over Europe but not in the United States, the country of his birth. In 1865, while playing Othello and in the midst of the fourth act of the play, Aldridge died on stage. It would not be until 1943 that an African-American man, Paul Robeson, played Othello in the United States. Although the play was a Broadway success, it displeased segregationists. However, according to Michael Neill, in his essay ''Othello and Race,'' one critic was so moved by the power of Robeson's performance that after seeing Robeson play the role of Othello, he stated ''that 'no white man should ever dare play the part again.'''

Although Othello has been a major hit with audiences, mostly due to the dramatic plot, some critics have not responded well to the play. For example, George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), himself a dramatist, wrote in 1907 that he thought Othello was ''pure melodrama.'' As recorded in A Casebook on Othello, Shaw's essay, ''Othello: Pure Melodrama,'' goes on to state that ''There is not a touch of character in it that goes below the skin; and the fitful attempts to make Iago something better than a melodramatic villain only make a hopeless mess of him and his motives.'' However, even Shaw could not help but praise Shakespeare's gift of words. Shaw continued by stating that despite these flaws, the play ''remains magnificent by the volume of its passion and the splendor of its word-music, which sweep the scenes up to a plane on which sense is drowned in sound. The words do not convey ideas: they are streaming ensigns and tossing branches to make the tempest of passion visible.''

Over the production history of this play, critics have argued which role, Othello's or Iago's, was the most dramatic. Actors have switched from one role to the other, trying the character's voice on, trying to decide the same thing. Probably in no other play of Shakespeare's is it so difficult to decide which role dominates the other. In his essay, ''The Noble Othello,'' A. C. Bradley chose to focus on Othello, whom he calls the ''greatest poet of them all,'' referring to the strong lines that Shakespeare wrote for this character. Despite Othello's linguistic abilities and his confidence in his speech, Othello has many dangers to face. He is noble but vulnerable. Bradley wrote. ''Othello's mind, for all its poetry, is very simple. He is not observant. His nature tends outward. He is quite free from introspection, and is not given to reflection. Emotion excites his imagination, but it confuses and dulls his intellect.'' Other reasons for Othello's vulnerability, according to Bradley, are that ''his trust, where he trusts, is absolute. Hesitation is almost impossible in him. He is extremely self-reliant, and decides and acts instantaneously.''

Elmer Edgar Stoll, writing in his essay ''Othello: Tragedy of Effect,'' praises Shakespeare for his creation of the protagonist Othello. Stoll states that Othello is made the grandest and noblest of Shakespeare's lovers; and it is only through Iago's overwhelming reputation for honesty and sagacity, the impenetrableness of his mask together with the potency of his seductive acts, that he [Othello] is led astray and succumbs. ''For the highest tragic effect it is the great and good man that succumbs.'' T. S. Eliot in his essay, ''The Hero Cheering Himself Up,'' also praises Shakespeare by examining Othello's last speech of the play. The speech, Eliot states, exposes Othello's lack of humility, through Shakespeare's great ability to understand human nature. ''What Othello seems to me to be doing in making this speech is cheering himself up. He is endeavouring to escape reality, he has ceased to think about Desdemona, and is thinking about himself. Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of oneself.'' Eliot then concludes: ''I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this bovarysme, the human will to see things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare.''

G. K. Hunter found the character of Othello very interesting and Shakespeare's creation very dramatic and true to life. In his essay ''Shakespeare and the Traditions of Tragedy,'' Hunter described Othello in this way:

Othello is an underling not because he fails to be a 'master of his fate' but because he is human. Faced by the intensity of total commitment, absolute love, men must be underlings because they are not gods, because they are vulnerable, they mistake, rage, fall down, become comic grotesques, as Othello does when he tries to listen in on Cassio and Iago talking about Bianca. Under such circumstances love for the best of men can be no more than a commitment to the fallible. However heroic the commitment, however true the perception of an ineffaceable goodness, the rot cannot be stopped nor the wrong step redirected. For the quality of faith in another, which is the highest expression of love, is necessarily tragic when the faith is fastened to a frail and changeable object, alias a human being. Othello is simultaneously the most glamorous of Shakespeare's heroes and the most vulnerable; and the simultaneous presence of these two opposed qualities is not used to mark a division in Othello's nature . . . but rather a necessary condition of the heroic presence.

Anthony Davies, writing a historic background of the play for the book The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, wrote that ''Samuel Johnson and William Hazlitt alike praised the rich contrasts between its [the play's] characters and the skill of its design.'' Davies continued: ''Although some 19th-century Americans . . . found the play's depiction of interracial marriage objectionable . . . most 19th-century critics found Othello convincingly noble.''

David Bevington, writing in his essay ''Shakespeare the Man,'' used the play to reflect on Shakespeare himself. Bevington wrote,

We are safe in saying only that a play like Othello must reveal his [Shakespeare's] own intense feelings about jealousy and his humane view of it: the emotional devastation, the self-blindness, the sorrow experienced for failing in this way, the self-accusation, the willingness finally to acknowledge with generosity of spirit that the fault was the man's alone, the need for remorse, and the unwillingness to forgive oneself.

And finally, Bernard Spivack, as quoted in Arthur M. Eastman's A Short History of Shakespearean Criticism, wrote: ''The feeling between [Othello and Desdemona] scales love's loftiest romance and expresses more acutely than anywhere else in the English drama, the refinement of sexual love in the sentiment and literature of Renaissance Europe, the evolution of l'amour curtois to its richest spiritual possibilities.'' Shakespeare was able to do this, Spivack wrote, because of the contrasts that the poet set up in his play.

In a sense their [Desdemona's and Othello's] union is a proposition and the play their battlefield, testing whether love so conceived and dedicated can long endure. But poetry is at work upon the proposition to transform it into sensation, and commentary at its best can only hint at the immediate experience the play gives us of gentle Desdemona and the noble Moor.

References:

Bevington, David, ''Shakespeare the Man,'' in A Companion to Shakespeare, edited by David Scott Kastan, Blackwell Publishers, 1999, pp. 9-21.

Bradley, A. C., ''The Noble Othello,'' in A Casebook on Othello, edited by Leonard F. Dean, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1961, pp. 139-46.

Davies, Anthony, ''Othello,'' in The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 330-33.

Eastman, Arthur M., A Short History of Shakespearean Criticism, Random House, 1968, pp. 350-51.

Eliot, T. S., ''The Hero Cheering Himself Up,'' in A Casebook on Othello, edited by Leonard F. Dean, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1961, pp. 153-55.

Hunter, G. K., ''Shakespeare and the Traditions of Tragedy,'' in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, edited by Stanley Wells, Cambridge University Press, 1997 pp. 123-41.

Neill, Michael, ''Othello and Race,'' in Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's Othello, edited by Peter Erickson and Maurice Hunt, The Modern Language Association of America, 2005, pp. 37-52.

Shakespeare, William, Othello, edited by Marie Macaisa and Dominique Raccah, Sourcebooks, Inc, 2005.

Shaw, G. B., ''Othello: Pure Melodrama,'' in A Casebook on Othello, edited by Leonard F. Dean, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1961, pp. 135-38.

Stoll, Elmer Edgar, ''Othello: Tragedy of Effect,'' in A Casebook on Othello, edited by Leonard F. Dean, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1961, pp. 147-52.

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