ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about the earliest accounts of Othello in performance which bear witness to its emotional power. In 1610, when the King's Men did the play at Oxford, Henry Jackson was struck by the boy actor's playing of Desdemona. Samuel Pepys reports that at a 1660 performance at the Cockpit a very pretty lady that sat by me, called out, to see Desdemona smothered. It was Kean, great as Iago as well as Othello, who popularized the witty-charmer villain, displacing the earlier Colley Cibber mode of wickedness on full display. In the thoughtful evaluation reprinted in this volume, Hazlitt wonders if Kean's "gay, light-hearted monster" is not perhaps jolly and unconcerned. In the great nineteenth-century rivalry of Othello characterizations, Booth epitomized poetic refinement in grief, inner depths rather than grand playings out; Salvini also displayed considerable range but awed audiences with his towering passion.
