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Scene Study prepares you to perform key scenes for your theater class or audition. We've got all the information you need for a great performance.
Excerpt from Act 1, Scene 3 Monologue: Othello
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Understanding the Given Circumstances
- Othello is a soldier in the Venetian military. He has served with distinction and has achieved a high rank and the respect and trust of the Duke of Venice.
- Othello is also a Moor, a term used in Renaissance England to identify a person of North African, Middle Eastern, or Spanish descent. More generally, people used the term to refer to anyone with dark skin and associated with Islam. Therefore, the word “Moor” identifies Othello as different from/other than Venetians who were white and Christian.
- This scene takes place in the Duke’s council chamber, where the political elites in Venice have decided to ask Othello to go to Cyprus to help defeat the Turks there. Othello’s audience, therefore, is white and Christian.
- Brabantio, an important nobleman in Venice, sidetracks the discussion when he demands justice. He claims that Othello bewitched and kidnapped his daughter Desdemona and demands an annulment of the marriage.
- In this speech, Othello tells Brabantio and the political leadership of Venice exactly how he wooed Desdemona. In doing so, he attempts to clear his name and reputation and obtain permission from the Duke of Venice to take his new wife on his next military mission.
Blocking and Movement
In theater, blocking is the process of planning the actors’ physical movements and positions. Be sure to show respect and establish trust when working with scene partners. As you prepare to block this scene, ask yourself the following questions:
- Othello is speaking in public, in front of the most important people in his world. How can you physically engage the audience to convey this?
- At the heart of this speech is a tale of seduction through storytelling. Othello tells his audience how he captivated Desdemona, speaking of his own painful history and beguiling adventures in strange lands. Desdemona is not yet present in this scene, but Othello shows his audience her reaction to him: her sighs, her tears, what she said. How might you convey the part of Desdemona?
- Othello speaks of the Anthropophagi, who feast on human flesh, and of men whose heads “grow beneath their shoulders.” How can you embody these creatures in the storytelling process?
- Brabantio is also a member of the audience. He is Desdemona’s father and Othello’s harshest critic. How would you engage with Brabantio throughout the speech? Do you make eye contact? Do you stay far away or draw near to the primary target of this message?
Historical Context
Part of Brabantio’s outrage is due to the secrecy of Othello and Desdemona’s elopement; part of it is related to Othello’s perceived otherness. The concepts of “Blackness” and even “race” were different in Shakespeare’s time than they are today (or might be in the future). Nevertheless, Othello’s skin tone and other physical features set him apart in the play and give him an “outsider” status.
Racial anxieties obsess the characters in the play. Much of the tension takes form in a paranoid insistence that Othello does not belong in Venice: he is not one of the powerful Venetian men he addresses. For example, Brabantio’s belief that the only way his pure daughter would agree to marry Othello was if Othello had used some kind of “conjuring” or “mighty magic” to bewitch her.
Othello combats this racialized othering with a dramatic, two-pronged rhetorical strategy. First, he creates sympathy for himself, telling of his heroic past: being sold into (and escaping from) slavery, having many near-death experiences, and traveling to fantastic places. Desdemona felt pity for him and so did his Venetian audience. Then, in a masterstroke, he describes even more strange people than he: cannibals and misshapen people who seem to have no necks. Compared to them, Othello is as “civilized” as any Venetian nobleman. The “other” has found another “other” to other.
Full Act 1, Scene 3 Monologue: Othello
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