The introduction to Shakespeare’s Othello ought to come with a trigger warning, “Welcome to Hell.” For Hell is where the play takes us—as well as its unfortunate tragic hero—as surely and dependably as it has taken theatre-goers and readers for the past 400 years.
I had the great good luck to see the new Broadway production of Othello this past weekend, starring the legendary Denzel Washington as the betrayed and beleaguered Venetian general and Jake Gyllenhaal as Iago, his Satanic nemesis who brings him to ruin. The production has been making headlines as much for the exorbitant price of the tickets as for its star power. The day of the performance I attended, some tickets were selling for $4,000. I paid $199. (I mentioned my great good luck.) Nevertheless, whatever the price one pays—and despite the recent snub of the actors and the production as a whole by the Tony Awards nominating committee—the star power cannot be denied.
Shakespeare & Dante
It is a long way from Jacobean England to Broadway. Many things have changed since November 1, 1604, when the play was first performed at Whitehall Palace in London, but one thing that has not changed is human nature. As I watched Iago work his poison on the unsuspecting Othello in Saturday’s performance, witnessing the slow-burn chemistry between these two gifted actors heat to the point of explosion, I kept thinking of the dark genius of Shakespeare, what a master he was at portraying the volcanic power of hatred and jealousy and the ways in which we are all, horrifically enough, subject to that power.
Iago’s irrational hatred of Othello prompts him to weave a web of lies that ensnare the man who is his military superior, engender unfounded suspicion of his wife Desdemona, to whom he has been newly married, and goads him into killing her, the person he loves best in the world. The play that begins with a wedding celebration (albeit a fraught one) ends two hours later with a series of shocking betrayals, multiple murders, and a heartrending suicide—from the heaven of love to the hell of hatred in two hours’ time.
It is surely no accident that I also kept thinking of Dante. In his Divine Comedy, the Medieval Catholic poet reserves the lowest circle of the Inferno for betrayers. Unlike the sins of passion, committed by people in the upper circles—lust, gluttony, sins of appetite—treachery is a sin of the will and a perversion of the intellect, a sin that the betrayer chooses freely to commit, and its object is often the deliberate destruction of another soul. Betrayal is cold and calculating, premeditated and planned to inflict maximum pain on its woeful victim. While it is unlikely that Shakespeare ever read Dante, whose work was not translated into English until after his death, both writers were theologically on the same page in portraying treachery as the primordial sin, the one that tempted Eve to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge and got us all kicked out of paradise. One betrayal begets another, and we all are the worse for it.
An Othello of Our Own
Director Kenny Leon’s 2025 reimagining of Othello is urgent and timely. Set in “the not too distant future,” as the stage supertitle announces at the start of the play, the setting feels authentic and familiar. This is not the romantic, timeless Venice of many classic productions of the play: it is our contemporary world—a dystopia that has been rocked by war, has survived an attack by enemies who have been repulsed by an army (which seems eerily akin to the U.S. Marine Corps), headed by Othello, a capable and storied general who is different from the mostly white population he defends in that he is black. In Shakespeare’s original play, Othello is a Moor from Africa, whereas in Leon’s production he is no mysterious foreigner from an exotic country—he is African American.
The moment Washington steps on the stage, he owns it. His Othello, like the world he finds himself in, is a man of our own time. He moves and gestures and speaks like a self-assured, twenty-first-century African American man, rather than a classic regal Shakespearean hero. Compare Anthony Hopkins’s performance in the 1981 film production by the BBC or even Lawrence Fishburn’s performance in Oliver Parker’s 1995 film, wherein we see very capable actors setting aside their own identities in order to inhabit the traditional idea of who seventeenth-century Othello was—a general who is detached from the men he commands, courtly, decorous, distant.
Instead, Washington claims Othello as a version of himself and makes the audience feel as if he belongs to us and our moment. He is friendly and familiar with his soldiers, including his ensign, Iago. This has particularly interesting resonances, especially when it comes to matters of race. Othello is the outsider and The Other in Venice and in the world of Leon’s play, secretly—and sometimes openly—despised by the white civilians who benefit from his military prowess. Washington brings the racism of our own culture and time to bear on Othello’s story, and the complicated ways in which African Americans must negotiate the racist social structures and world they live in.
Yet Othello is not only about race. The primary dramatic and thematic focus is on how easily human beings—even the most upright and virtuous among us, as Othello surely is—can be corrupted by evil. One of the reasons evil prospers, in Shakespeare’s time, Dante’s, and our own—is that it is so attractive. “And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light,” Scripture warns us (2 Cor 11:14). Cue Jake Gyllenhaal’s masterful portrayal of Iago, perhaps Shakespeare’s most complex and compelling portrait of evil, even amid his impressive gallery of rogues.
The Glamour of Evil
From the moment Gyllenhaal takes the stage at the opening of the play, he wins our sympathy. His Iago is immensely likeable—young, brash, funny, and at the moment miffed with Othello for having passed him over for a promotion, having given the role of lieutenant to fellow-soldier Michael Cassio. “I know my price. I am worth no worse a place,” Iago proudly states, thumping his chest, and for all we know, he is right. We have not met Othello yet, so how are we to judge? He goes on to make fun of Othello, mimicking Washington’s voice and signature speech as he quotes the general’s response to his objections to being passed over, “I have already chosen my officer.” In the course of his conversation with a fool named Rodrigo, whom Iago will play like a violin to bring about his own evil ends, Gyllenhaal lays bare Iago’s plan to get his revenge on Othello—yet he manages to make the decidedly ignoble sentiments Iago expresses sound more like righteous anger than underhanded treachery: “Were I the Moor / I would not be Iago. / In following him, I follow but myself / . . . I am not what I am.”
In Gyllenhaal’s capable hands, Iago slowly emerges as the kind of Luciferian hero/villain we see in Milton’s Paradise Lost—confident, self-determining, justified in pursuit of what he believes is rightfully his—the kind of brooding, moody bad guy we are supposed to hate but secretly love. (As William Blake once quipped, Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it,” seduced by his own Satan.) The audience cannot help but be taken in, a fact demonstrated by the laughter Gyllenhaal’s lines drew from the audience throughout the play, including some that were not meant to be funny—or, if they were, only in the darkest way. Among these are racial epithets, some of the ugliest lines in the play, as when Iago warns Desdemona’s father that his daughter has eloped with Othello, “Even now, now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe.” The fact that the audience at the Barrymore Theatre—a diverse mix of black and white theatre-goers—laughed at even these hate-filled lines suggests a kind of irresistible quality in this Iago, and if we are seduced by his charm, it is inevitable that Othello will be seduced, too.
Just as Washington has set aside the playbook in his performance of the role of Othello, Gyllenhaal parts company with tradition, as well. In the BBC production mentioned earlier, the brilliant Bob Hoskins plays nemesis to Anthony Hopkins’ majestic Othello. Hoskins plays Iago as a classic underling: his accent is a rough cockney English, in contrast to Hopkins’ noble speech. He is stout and short of stature, and his diminutive size as he stands next to the much taller Othello suggests the difference in their moral stature, as well. Hoskins’s Iago is not personally attractive in the way that Gyllenhaal’s is, especially compared to the general he serves. Contrast this with the Washington-Gyllenhaal matchup, wherein both men, who stand about six feet tall, are of equal height.
At the start of the play they seem to be equals, despite their difference in rank; however, as the play goes on and Iago works his poison on Othello, Washington seems to grow smaller. He is often bent over in pain, physically wracked with jealousy, and at one point writhes on the floor and suffers a stress-induced seizure as Iago feeds him lies about Desdemona’s supposed infidelities and sexual trysts. He also seems to age before our eyes. One of the triumphs of Washington’s performance is that the seventy-year-old veteran actor seems much younger than his years at the start of the play, and then he gradually morphs into an old fool who ought to have known better than to marry a young wife and to put faith in the stories told by a snake on the make. Gyllenhaal runs circles around him, and as much as we pity Othello, we cannot help but admire his betrayer’s ingenuity.
The Rest is Silence
As the play ended and we were leaving the Barrymore, along with the crowds of ecstatic fellow theatre-goers, Othello’s last agonized speech still ringing in our ears, my companion turned to me and said, “It makes you wonder why the play isn’t called Iago.” These were my thoughts exactly and have been the thoughts of others, as well. (As critic Harold Bloom once stated, it may be Othello’s tragedy but it is Iago’s play.) I was troubled by the fact that I found myself thinking about Iago’s last words instead of Othello’s, his cruel refusal to tell Othello why he has betrayed him so horribly: “Demand me nothing; what you know you know: / From this time forth I never will speak a word.”
Iago’s silence is the open, unanswerable question that we are left with at the end of the play, and speaks more eloquently than Othello ever can. When confronted with the existential question about the nature of evil, the garrulous Iago can say nothing. Language for him has served only as a vehicle for deception and deceit—he is incapable of speaking truth. The virtuous Othello is an open book, whereas Iago is the enigma, the mystery, the darkness we want to get to the heart of. He haunts us, long after the play is over. At the beginning, Denzel and Othello take charge of the stage, but in the end it is Gyllenhaal and Iago who own it.
