Reading Shakespeare’s Stage Directions

Abstract

Everyone in Othello calls its main character 'Moor' at some point in the drama. Brabantio, Roderigo, the Senators, Montano, Cassio, Lodovico, Emilia, and Desdemona all use the term of address, often when Othello is present, and it is not only Iago for whom it is a more common appellation than Othello's own proper name. His derogatory language in the opening scene, however, establishes an association of the name 'Moor' with the accusation of sexual transgression: 'your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs' (1.1.117-9). The play's double title, printed prominently as a running head across both the 1622 and 1623 editions-'The Tragedy of Othello The Moore of Venice'-thus has its counterpart in the divided form of address for its main character within the dialogue. One aspect of both texts, however, is almost entirely consistent in how it designates Othello: the stage directions. Throughout the First Folio text, stage directions always use the name 'Othello', just as his speech prefix is the standard 'Oth.' Characters in the play may perform the renaming that shifts Othello from individual to type, that's to say, but the apparatus of the play as printed in 1623 does not. The quarto of 1622 is also consistent in the speech prefix 'Oth.', and largely uses the name 'Othello' in its stage directions, with three distinctive exceptions. When Othello and Desdemona leave the Venetian courtroom in 1.3, Othello promises 'but an houre | Of loue, of worldly matters, and directions, | To spend with thee' (Shakespeare 1622: D v). It is an early example of what Michael Neill has explored as 'the obscure erotic fantasies that the play both explores and disturbingly excites in its audience' (Neill 1989: 390): an explicit textual concatenation of race and sex in the evocation of their offstage bed, already obscenely foregrounded in the play's imagination by Iago in his opening charivari. It is therefore particularly striking that the exit stage direction in the quarto reads 'Exit Moore and Desdemona' (Shakespeare 1622: D v). The racial transgression that so titillates the play is underlined by its first example of a shift in the stage direction from name to type. Summoned to the Duke's war cabinet, the military general enters with his name; exiting for a stolen hour honeying with his Venetian bride, he has become 'Moore'. It is therefore not surprising, perhaps, that the next time such a shift in address occurs is at an analogous moment. Drawing Desdemona back to their chamber after the disturbance of Cassio's brawl, with the reassuring 'All's well now sweeting | Come away to bed', Othello is again 'Moore' in the exit stage direction (Shakespeare 1622: F2 v). What Neill dubs the play's 'scopophile economy' is further excited by the play's own pornographically inspired anonymity, the use of a 'perverted erotic stereotype' of 'Moor' (Neill 1989: 396). The third and final such stage direction example is, inevitably, in the play's last scene, with the marriage bed, decked with wedding sheets and with the body of De...