The story of Othello’s American life, showing that the hero’s tragedy is America’s own—from a best-selling writer and expert scholar
While Shakespeare’s Othello, with a Black man as its tragic hero, was first staged in 1604, over two hundred years would pass before anyone other than a White actor in blackface played him. And it wasn’t until Paul Robeson’s star turn in 1943 that a Black actor played Othello on Broadway. Othello’s American life has long been intertwined with that of the nation, a journey marked by slavery, judicial lynching, Jim Crow, and the ongoing struggle for Black equality—a past that some would prefer to whitewash.
In this deeply researched book, James Shapiro retraces Othello’s American afterlife and challenges those sanitizing efforts. Othello was the name of a slave ship that sailed from Rhode Island. It was the name of an enslaved man executed for allegedly participating in a slave uprising in colonial New York. And it was the name Benjamin Franklin chose to call a child he had enslaved. Othello’s American life is a story of triumph as well as tragedy, embodied in the performances of such exceptional Black actors as Ira Aldridge, Paul Robeson, and Denzel Washington.
Drawing on literary, social, political, and theater history, Shapiro shows that Othello’s tragedy is inseparable from America’s own, reminding us of all that remains unresolved in the nation’s history.