Book contents
- Shakespeare Survey 79
- Shakespeare Survey
- Shakespeare Survey
- Copyright page
- Editor’s Note
- Contributors
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Tables
- Reformation Memory-Work in Late Shakespeare
- Shakespeare’s Late Plays: The Last Rites of Chivalry
- Inflexions of Lateness in Pericles
- Time’s Queer ‘Recoil’ in The Winter’s Tale
- Shakespeare’s Bohemia and Oyeyemi’s Druhástrana: Gingerbread’s Appropriations of The Winter’s Tale
- Held in Silence: Trauma and the Ethics of Response in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Ali Smith’s Summer
- ‘Baseless Fabric’: Prospero’s Other Spirits
- The Figurative Platea: Foolish-Wise Subplotters in The Tempest
- ‘O World, Thy Slippery Turns!’: An Epicurean Coriolanus
- If Biscuits Be the Food of Love: Huntley & Palmers’s Twelfth Night in Little
- Second Thoughts about Othello
- Slow-Motion Rhetoric in Titus Andronicus
- Sensory Shakespeare: Performance Pedagogies and Special Education
- #Shaxrace: Teaching Shakespeare and Race through Performance
- Eco-Shakespeare, Race and Pedagogy: ‘Invasive Species’
- Imitation as a Teaching Technique in The Taming of the Shrew and Erasmus’s Colloquies
- Knowing the Minds of Others: Hamlet and Neurodiversity
- Freetown
- Sexual Shame, Reputation and Early Modern Community Practices: Measure for Measure
- Shakespeare’s Ark: The 1632 Folio
- ‘I Am Set Naked on Your Kingdom’: Hamlet, The Spanish Tragedy and Arden of Faversham
- ‘When I Read Shakespeare I Become Greater’: Flaubert’s Shakespeare
- Of Tempests: Shakespeare, Césaire and the choc en retour
- Hamlet, the Opera
- Avignon Shakespeare: Inheriting the Bard in Contemporary France
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 2025
- Productions Outside London, 2025
- The Year’s Contribution to Shakespeare Studies
- Abstracts of Articles in Shakespeare Survey 79
- Index
Second Thoughts about Othello
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 September 2026
Edited by
Book contents
- Shakespeare Survey 79
- Shakespeare Survey
- Shakespeare Survey
- Copyright page
- Editor’s Note
- Contributors
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Tables
- Reformation Memory-Work in Late Shakespeare
- Shakespeare’s Late Plays: The Last Rites of Chivalry
- Inflexions of Lateness in Pericles
- Time’s Queer ‘Recoil’ in The Winter’s Tale
- Shakespeare’s Bohemia and Oyeyemi’s Druhástrana: Gingerbread’s Appropriations of The Winter’s Tale
- Held in Silence: Trauma and the Ethics of Response in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Ali Smith’s Summer
- ‘Baseless Fabric’: Prospero’s Other Spirits
- The Figurative Platea: Foolish-Wise Subplotters in The Tempest
- ‘O World, Thy Slippery Turns!’: An Epicurean Coriolanus
- If Biscuits Be the Food of Love: Huntley & Palmers’s Twelfth Night in Little
- Second Thoughts about Othello
- Slow-Motion Rhetoric in Titus Andronicus
- Sensory Shakespeare: Performance Pedagogies and Special Education
- #Shaxrace: Teaching Shakespeare and Race through Performance
- Eco-Shakespeare, Race and Pedagogy: ‘Invasive Species’
- Imitation as a Teaching Technique in The Taming of the Shrew and Erasmus’s Colloquies
- Knowing the Minds of Others: Hamlet and Neurodiversity
- Freetown
- Sexual Shame, Reputation and Early Modern Community Practices: Measure for Measure
- Shakespeare’s Ark: The 1632 Folio
- ‘I Am Set Naked on Your Kingdom’: Hamlet, The Spanish Tragedy and Arden of Faversham
- ‘When I Read Shakespeare I Become Greater’: Flaubert’s Shakespeare
- Of Tempests: Shakespeare, Césaire and the choc en retour
- Hamlet, the Opera
- Avignon Shakespeare: Inheriting the Bard in Contemporary France
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 2025
- Productions Outside London, 2025
- The Year’s Contribution to Shakespeare Studies
- Abstracts of Articles in Shakespeare Survey 79
- Index
Summary
More than one eyebrow was raised when it was announced that I had agreed to play Othello for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2015. It appeared that my essay ‘Second Thoughts about Othello’ had been interpreted by some as a kind of manifesto urging self-respecting black actors to reject the role lest they reinforced racist tropes. However, a moderately attentive reading would have made it clear that black actors should continue trying to make sense of a black character written centuries ago by one white man for another white man in blackface makeup for a predominantly white audience.
Information
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- Shakespeare Survey 79Late Shakespeare, pp. 121 - 131Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2026
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