“Othello” as Tragedy: Some Problems of Judgment and Feeling by Jane Adamson (review)

Reviews 269 film, when Shaw flirted with the notion of allowing a studio to “do its worst” with The Devil’s Disciple, through the grand technicolor pro­ duction of Caesar and Cleopatra. Mixing cinema history, personal anecdotage, and analyses of the Shavian films in judicious proportions, Dukore avoids the twin dangers of purveying mere gossip on the one hand and aspiring after cinematic crypto-profundity on the other. Regrettably, Dukore, though informative about Shaw’s producer, Gabriel Pascal, does not quite succeed in creating a vital portrait of this outsize figure, who appeared at Shaw’s door and somehow induced the great playwright to grant him film rights. Pascal, who seems to have been a living caricature, an embodiment of the mad Hungarian producer of Hollywood legend, was given to emotionally extravagant temper tan­ trums—firing actors one moment and embracing them the next—and financially extravagant outlays, regularly forfeiting his own royalties (despite the money-conscious Shaw’s desperate pleadings) to get funds so he could achieve the films of his dreams. In compensation, Dukore perceptively treats the strengths and weaknesses of Pascal’s films and is informative about their making. We are dismayed, retrospectively, to learn that Shaw had wanted Charles Laughton for Henry Higgins and frustrated at hearing that for Cusins he had suggested, but not insisted on, a then obscure young actor named Alec Guinness, who would undoubtedly have brought to the role that exquisitely fey whimsicality quite beyond Rex Harrison’s more conventional skills. The question of the romanticized ending of the Pygmalion film is thoroughly discussed: utilizing only Shaw’s words, the filmmakers concocted two endings be­ sides the one in the screenplay, filmed all three, and used the least Shavian; Shaw decided not to make a stand on the issue. The screen­ plays themselves suggest the remarkable facility with which Shaw grasped the nature of the medium and was able to adapt his work to it. The best Shavian films remain those made by Shaw’s chosen producer in his own lifetime. The subject of this book is hardly central to Shaw, but those interested in it will find Professor Dukore’s exploration of it most at­ tractive. (A minor concluding note: the captions of photographs on pp. 177 and 209 are reversed, but I suppose few readers are likely to believe that Vivien Leigh in full Temptress-of-the-Nile regalia is, as the caption claims, Stewart Granger thrusting aside a Roman pilum.) ARTHUR GANZ The City University of New York Jane Adamson. “Othello” as Tragedy: Some Problems of Judgment and Feeling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Pp. x + 301. $34.50. Noting that “commentary about Othello in recent decades seems to have become stuck in old ruts, old debates, and circularities,” Jane Adam­ son in a new book-length study presumes to offer a genuinely fresh read­ ing of Shakespeare’s play. She works on the premise that Othello is a 270 Comparative Drama carefully constructed whole and thematically unified, but she disagrees with those of her predecessors (actually most of them) who have con­ sidered it to be unified by the theme of jealousy. She also dissociates herself from the two prevailing interpretations of the central character: A. C. Bradley’s, which would have Othello essentially noble but misled by a diabolical tempter, and F. R. Leavis’s, which would make him an egotist bordering on the criminal. These two divergent views both make Othello considerably larger than life, but Adamson disagrees in this also. She finds Othello more nearly our own size and believes that the details of his action can therefore be more instructive to those of us who are born and live below the level of the heroic. From one end of the play to the other, she says, “Shakespeare explores the ways and means by which people’s thoughts and feelings . . . can become fatally tangled, mutually distorted.” That is, Othello is a play about people everywhere, how they hurt and are hurt by one another; and she believes, moreover, that the examples Shakespeare has offered for our inspection include Iago as well as Othello, Desdemona, Cassio, and Emilia. The greatness of Othello, Adamson declares at one...