ABSTRACT
From stage productions as well as the so-called film classics, audiences had been accustomed to seeing monolithic Othellos proportioned along the lines of the savage grandiloquence of the Burge-Dexter (Olivier) production or reverberrating with the sheer epic scope of the Orson Welles. Such expectations —which undoubtedly originate in a director’s desire to accommodate the exotic hyperbole of this play’s title figure-would seem, a priori, to have made even the idea of a made-for-video Othello oxymoronic.1 But in 1981 Jonathan Miller’s rendition, made for the BBC/Time-Life series, gave us just that-an Othello consciously domesticated to the medium of television’s 21-inch expectations.
