Studying literature at A-level and beyond requires you to consider different interpretations of a text over time. For a play, the two most obvious ways of doing this are to consider performance history or to look at critical interpretations. This article will demonstrate how these two approaches can be combined to provide a jumping-off point for further exploration of the texts. The two productions we will focus on are Trevor Nunn’s 1989 production of Othello, filmed for television in 1990, and Christopher Luscombe’s 2017 production of Twelfth Night.
In her essay on Othello in the indispensable This is Shakespeare, Emma Smith asks, ‘Is this a racist play in which a black man is driven to homicidal rage, revealing that his civilization is only skin-deep? Or a plea for a more tolerant society in which Othello and Desdemona’s marriage might flourish?’ (Smith 2019, p. 211). The former interpretation is one that dogged the play for many centuries (Thomas Rymer and August Wilhelm Schlegel are two notable examples), while the latter sits more comfortably with more recent and thankfully enlightened times. As Smith puts it, we now see Othello’s race as ‘significant… because it exposes him to the terrible psychic vulnerability of the outsider’ (Smith 2019, p. 211).
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