William Shakespeare And often did beguile her of her tears, When I did speak of some distressful stroke That my youth sufferd. My story being done, She gave me for my pains a world of sighs: She swore ‘twas strange, twas passing strange, Twas pitiful, twas wondrous pitiful: She wishd she had not heard it, yet she wishd That heaven had made her such a man. Paul Robeson and Peggy Ashcroft opened in Othello on this day in 1930 in London. Robeson was the first black actor to play the part in a century. Ira Aldridge, the last one to try it, had his production closed down by the pro- slavery lobby in 1825, and by the critics: “Owing to the shape of his lips,” wrote the reviewer for the Times, “it is utterly impossible for him to pronounce English.” Robeson’s Othello got twenty curtain calls, and though the reviews were mixed, one critic described him as “an oak... a superb giant of the woods for the great hurricane of tragedy to whisper through, then rage upon, then break.” Robeson took the role around the world over the next decades, and took the cause to heart: “The problem [of Othello] is the problem of my own people. It is a tragedy of racial conflict, a tragedy of honor, rather than jealousy.”
Posted on: Wed, 19 Mar 2014 12:48:15 +0000