chapter 12

one that loved not wisely

—William Shakespeare, Othello

Before leaving for the concert tour in America in 1929, Robeson began studying the part of Othello. The Moor of Venice, as Shakespeare described him, referred to a dark-skinned person, perhaps an African or an Arab. Robeson believed that Shakespeare meant the Moor to be “Negro,” and had always felt that someday he would act in the play.

Othello is a general in the Venetian Army, secretly married to Desdemona, daughter of a white Venetian senator. When her father finds out, he is enraged. Othello’s ensign, Iago, angry because Othello passed over him for a promotion, seeks revenge. He convinces Othello that Desdemona has betrayed him by taking another lover, and Othello kills Desdemona. Moments before she dies, Othello realizes he’s been duped. Authorities arrive to arrest him and he says,

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

Speak of me as I am….

Of one that lov’d not wisely but too well.

Faced with the shame of having murdered his innocent wife, Othello kills himself.

Robeson said, “I feel the play is so modern, for the problem is the problem of my own people. It is a tragedy of racial conflict, a tragedy of honor rather than of jealousy.” White actors usually portrayed the character by darkening their skin with makeup. But Robeson said, “When a negro does any good work as an actor every one begins to talk of Othello. Of course, I think about Othello, but as a sort of culmination.” “I think I’ll wait till I’ve had more experience in the theatre,” he told Essie.

Robeson in the London production of Othello, with Peggy Ashcroft, 1930

One night, he asked her, “Do you really think I could play Othello now, if I worked at it?”

“I know you can, silly,” she replied.

“All right,” he said, “I’ll do it.” So he signed a contract to star in a London production scheduled for spring 1930.

He would be the first black actor to star in Othello since Ira Aldridge who had performed the role in Europe a century earlier. Aldridge, an African American from New York, had emigrated to England to study acting and further his career.

“Here is a part that has dignity for a Negro actor,” Robeson said later in a film interview. “Often we don’t get those opportunities. My people will be very proud.”

To prepare for Othello, Robeson read all of Shakespeare’s plays. He listened to recordings and studied pronunciation. “I had to work on that very hard,” he said. In a text printed in Old English, Robeson discovered that many words were spelled differently in Shakespeare’s time. “Chance,” for example, was written as “chaunce,” and “demand” as “demaunde,” and had to be pronounced properly.

Robeson thought about the character of Othello in a racial context. “The fact that he’s from Africa is very clear to me,” he said. “Shakespeare posed this problem of a Black man in a white society.” As Robeson told his friend Marie Seton, he imagined Othello “moving like a panther.” Robeson went to the London Zoo and watched the panthers for hours, so he could imitate their movements. As an athlete, Robeson had command over his muscular body, and understood how to use it to express emotion.

The producer cast himself as Iago, Othello’s devious friend, and chose his wife Nellie to be the director. Neither had any experience mounting a Shakespearean play. When rehearsals began in London in April 1930, Robeson knew they were in trouble. Nellie sat in the first row of the dress circle yelling commands through a megaphone.

Essie attended every rehearsal and wrote in her diary, “Nellie doesn’t know what it is all about. Talks of…the ‘flow’ and ‘austere beauty,’ a lot of parlor junk, which means nothing…. She can’t even get actors from one side of the stage to the other. Poor Paul is lost.” All the cast members suffered under Nellie’s incompetent direction. The actors tried to solve the problem by secretly rehearsing at each other’s houses in the evenings.

One time, Robeson asked Nellie a question and she shouted through the megaphone, “Mr. Robeson, there are other people on the stage besides yourself!” Robeson’s costar, Peggy Ashcroft, who played the part of Othello’s wife Desdemona, was horrified by Nellie’s rudeness. Ashcroft was just twenty-two and was thrilled to be performing with Robeson, age thirty-two. “For us young people in England at the time [Robeson] was a great figure, and we all had his records,” she recalled. During rehearsals, Ashcroft became romantically involved with Robeson. “How could one not fall in love in such a situation with such a man?” she said. The drama itself made their affair “inevitable.”

On May 30, 1930, the play opened at the Savoy Theatre. Robeson was “wild with nerves,” wrote Essie. Her own hair “went gray in a patch” as she watched the final days of rehearsal. Nellie placed the actors far back from the audience where they couldn’t be heard. For the climactic final scene, which takes place in Othello and Desdemona’s bedchamber, Nellie put the bed in a dark corner of the stage, so the emotional impact was lost. She allowed the set designer to create a huge four-poster, which made such a racket when it was hoisted into position behind the curtain that the actors told the stagehands not to move the bed until they had finished their lines.

To make matters worse, Nellie insisted that Robeson wear an Elizabethan costume of tights and doublets in Act 1 instead of a Moor’s robes. The costume was true to the time when Shakespeare had written the play, but it wasn’t right for the tragedy. On opening night, Robeson was stiff and subdued. He said he “started off with my performance pitched a bit higher than I wanted it to be.” Yet, by the final scene when he killed Desdemona and then stabbed himself, he moved the audience with his passion.

The “frenzy of applause subsided” only after twenty curtain calls. “Robeson! Robeson! Speech! Speech!” shouted the audience. He stepped forward and said, “I took the part of Othello with much fear. Now I am so happy.”

Reviews for Robeson ranged from raves to lukewarm praise. Some critics hailed him as “magnificent” and “remarkable.” Others described his performance as “disappointing.” Many agreed that he had played the role as a “thoughtful, kindly man, civilised and cultured,” rather than as a “great soldier.” Ashcroft received “glowing notices.” But critics slammed the producer and director for their appalling production. “They caught the hell they so well deserved,” noted Essie. After the stinging reviews, the producer who had played the part of Iago “fled like a frightened rabbit” and turned his part over to his understudy.

Robeson focused on improving his performance. “He has been working steadily at his part,” wrote Essie, “and some changes have been made in his costumes, so that he is 100 percent better.” Nevertheless, the show did not attract a wide audience and closed six weeks after opening. For the next few months, the company toured outlying cities.

Robeson understood the criticisms about his acting technique. Yet he told a reporter that taking the role had liberated him. “Othello has taken away from me all kinds of fears, all sense of limitation, and all racial prejudice,” he said. “Othello has opened to me new and wider fields; in a word, Othello has made me free.” Thirteen years later, he performed Othello on Broadway in New York with a deeper understanding of his character. The final monologue was added to his concert program of spirituals.

When reporters asked Ashcroft how she felt about being kissed “by a coloured man” in some scenes, she replied, “Of course I do not mind! I see no difference in being kissed by Paul Robeson and being kissed by any other man. It is just necessary to the play. For myself I look on it as a privilege to act with a great artist like Paul Robeson.” There was a difference, though, because of their feelings for one another.

When Essie discovered a love letter from Ashcroft to Robeson, she was furious. Humiliated. She stormed off to Territet, Switzerland, to join her mother and son. Essie had sent them there for the baby’s health. Paul Jr., at age two and a half, had become terribly sick with tonsillitis and stomach cramps during the run of Othello, and Essie had thought the Swiss mountain air would be good for him.

Now she wrote angry, bitter letters to Robeson. He was touring the English provinces with Brown in a new kind of concert program. One half consisted of scenes from The Emperor Jones, and the second part was devoted to spirituals and a song by Beethoven. He wanted freedom as an artist and in his personal life. Essie accused him of being a cheating husband, “a rotten parent,” and “a dishonest artist.”

“He must have been lying to me for five years,” she wrote. “I am surely a jackass if ever there was one.”

Although the future seemed uncertain, Essie developed into a glamorous independent woman in the early 1930s. She won praise for her acting with Robeson in a silent movie—Borderline—filmed before he performed in Othello.

Robeson responded calmly. He wrote that he was sorry she had read the letter. “I must have a certain amount of privacy in my life,” he explained. He suggested that he and Essie remain apart for a while. She could stay in Switzerland and he might come to visit her and Paul Jr. before leaving on a scheduled concert tour. “Love to the boy,” he added. “Do tell me about him and how he’s going along. Of course I’m interested.”

Robeson was primarily concerned with his career and their financial situation. “We’ll need every penny, and I’ll be so busy with my work, I’ll not be able to see much of you,” he wrote. “I am in a period of transition…. I would like to get on with my work…. Let’s hope all will come out right.”

Robeson’s letter made Essie livid. She wrote that he was “secret, mean, low.” Would she end their marriage? After years of loving him, taking care of him, supporting him in every way to develop his potential and further his career, Essie faced a crisis.