Iago as the Racist-Function in Othello

Abstract

Ayanna Thompson has publicly discussed her role as “Othello Whisperer”: she is called in to help Black actors struggling with playing the role of Othello. The reason Black actors struggle with performing this role is because it was not written for them: rather, Othello is a play for white people about how they feel about how Black men are treated. Othello’s early identification as the only Moor in the play marks him for unequal treatment and destruction and, to avoid feeling white guilt over watching this unfair treatment of a Black man, Iago is offered as a scapegoat to give white, middle-class, liberal audiences someone to blame for Othello’s fall, a role I call the “racist-function.” Continuing to (re)produce the play in this manner allows the white audiences for which it is intended to avoid recognizing their own complicity in structural antiblackness. This article traces how the racist-function has changed and evolved over time to meet the needs of white liberal audiences by first analyzing how the text is structured in the Folio and Quarto editions, then demonstrating how later stage and film productions have continued to center whiteness, including case studies of Nicholas Hytner’s 2013 National Theatre and Iqbal Khan’s 2015 RSC stage productions.