'Rave, Roar, and Lay About Him Like a Madman'

A friend reminded me of the time many years ago when as a requirement of our Advanced Shakespeare class we attended a screening of Stuart Burge’s 1965 version of Othello in which Laurence Olivier played the Moor in blackface. We had been warned that this was not only Shakespeare, this was Olivier, a certified Great Actor, so we’d better pay reverential attention and mind our manners. Instead, we showed up half-drunk and proceeded to giggle through much of the film. I’m only grudgingly ashamed of our behavior. I see that the New York Times critic at the time, Bosley Crowther, shared at least some of our reaction: “[Olivier] looks like a Rastus or an end man in an American minstrel show. You almost wait for him to whip a banjo out from his flowing, white garments or start banging a tambourine.” I’ve never watched the film again but after almost half a century, whenever I read Othello, as I did this weekend, or even think about the play, an eighteen-year-old’s giggles return.

Othello is the Urtext on the subject of jealousy and the madness of passionate love. Knowing her fate in advance, one can only feel helpless sympathy for Desdemona (played by Maggie Smith, I see, in the Olivier production). Next in line after Othello in the file marked “Jealousy” is a tour de force passage in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy that echoes some of the madness of that emotion:

“Besides those strange gestures of staring, frowning, grinning, rolling of eyes, menacing, ghastly looks, broken pace, interrupt, precipitate, half-turns. He will sometimes sigh, weep, sob for anger . . . swear and belie, slander any man, curse, threaten, brawl, scold, fight; and sometimes again flatter and speak fair, ask forgiveness, kiss and coll [OED: “an embrace around the neck”], condemn his rashness and folly, vow, protest, and swear he will never do so again; and then eftsoons [OED: “afterwards”], impatient as he is, rave, roar, and lay about him like a madman, thump her sides, drag her about perchance, drive her out of doors, send her home, he will be divorced forthwith, she is a whore, &c., and by-and-by with all submission compliment, entreat her fair, and bring her in again, he loves her dearly, she is his sweet, most kind and loving wife, he will not change, nor leave her for a kingdom; so he continues off and on, as the toy takes him, the object moves him, but most part brawling, fretting, unquiet he is, accusing and suspecting not strangers only, but brothers and sisters, father and mother, nearest and dearest friends.”