ABSTRACT

“Brutal,” “aggressive,” and “raw” is how fight director John Sipes described the violence he choreographed for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's 1999 production of Othello (Sipes). “Nasty,” “heinous,” and “cold-blooded” characterized the Actors Theatre of Lousiville's 1998 production, according to Drew Fracher, the fight director for that production (Fracher). Mark Booher, who choreographed the violence for the California Shakespeare Festival in 1998, worked to realize the “personal,” “immediate,” and “awful” qualities he found in the violence described in the text (Booher, Sept.). Othello is a violent play. From Brabantio's call for weapons in 1.2 (Arden, 3) to the play's “bloody period” (5.2.355), the dialogue requires at least eleven deadly weapons, eight separate armed confrontations, and two instances of unarmed “domestic” brutality. The Quarto adds stage directions for another bloody armed encounter (5.2.232), and actors and directors have found other opportunities for violence in performance, from Barton Booth's early-eighteenth-century performance (Sprague, 198) to Oliver Parker's 1995 film version (Parker). Samuel Johnson thought the murder scene “not to be endured” (quoted in Hankey, 122), and the turn-of-the-century American critic William Winter suggested that when one leaves the play “you feel as if you had seen a murder or attended an execution” (quoted in Hankey, 1).