Shakespeare’s Othello; Did King James influence him?

When you look at William Shakespeare’s play Othello, and one looks at when it was written and what was going on at the time a few major things come up. I helped create a timeline that shows the major events of the years that Othello was being written to try and find out what influenced this very race dominant play.  One of them being the death of Queen Elizabeth and the crowning of King James of Scotland.  King James was from Edinburgh, and that is where he lived while he was just King of Scotland. Edinburgh is in East Central Scotland, near the coast.  This exchange of rulers happened in 1603. Othello was first performed on November 1, 1604 but was written in 1602-1603. Just looking at the dates, one can come up with a few questions. Why did it take a year before it was performed? Was there many revisions that were being made? Did Shakespeare stop writing this when the queen died in March? These are all very plausible questions. Through research I have found that there is some very interesting speculation out there on this topic.

Reading Ralph Berry’s article, “Shakespeare under Two Elizabeths”, has proven to speak highly of the reign of King James when it comes to Shakespeare’s play company. Berry states, “Within a few weeks of ascending to the throne, James changed the name of Shakespeare’s company from the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to the King’s Men. That was unprecedented royal favor: Shakespeare had become house dramatist to the premier company in the land” (47). This is a huge achievement because there were always two main companies that performed, and having the king rename one in his favor is a very high honor. The Kings Men also performed more for King James than they did for Queen Elizabeth if one looks at a ten year period. Berry states, “Between 1603 and 1613 the King’s Men played 138 times at court, and average of nearly 14 performances a year. Under various names, the same company had played only 32 times at court in the last ten years of Elizabeth’s reign” (47). They performed over four times more for King James than they did for the late queen. One can assume that from these numbers King James liked Shakespeare’s plays. This could have given Shakespeare some influence on sharing the public’s opinion about foreign and state affairs because Shakespeare had plenty of access to the king.

However, the other sources that I found shed some light on what King James was like as a ruler. Even though James may have liked Shakespeare, Shakespeare didn’t really like the king. Shakespeare knew how to act, and he also knew that he must flatter this new king, but according to Clare Asquith, author of the book Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs & Coded Politics of William Shakespeare, “flattery from Shakespeare came at a price. Like Othello and Lear, the play features a trail of reminders of how very far James had strayed from his own image of the ideal king “(214). One can assume that Shakespeare was fed up with what Kings James was doing and decided to change a few things in Othello and produce others like it to make his criticism known. Asquith states,

“They live in a perpetual dread of losing their property today, their liberty tomorrow, their life the after, as had happened to many.

Like Molin, they did their best to make the strongest possible case for toleration towards the king. Among them was Shakespeare. King Lear is one of his least cautious plays, an unvarnished dramatization of the state of James’s England, a final attempt before the catastrophe of 5 November to awaken the King to intolerable humiliations and sufferings of his Catholic subjects. Here he exchanges the ingeniously coded themes of Othello and Measure for Measure for more direct tactics, doubling up two well-known allegories of the state of England in order to drive home and unpalatable message…”(203).

Reading this one can come to the conclusion that Shakespeare may have changed Othello to be a criticism of the way James was ruling over England. Asquith also infers a few pages later that, “Othello revealed Shakespeare’s renewed interest in the idiom of medieval drama: in Macbeth he goes a great deal further” (218). Apparently James didn’t get the hint in 1604 when Othello was being performed because Shakespeare had to create a play that hit closer to home with Macbeth. This all is because of how King James ruled. He was not a very bending king and that made people fear him and his lack of religious and culture diversity acceptance.

Furthermore, when I was looking into my last article it talked about the Ottoman Empire and how King James dealt with this as a ruler. By reading this article by Intiaz Habib one could make the assumption that Shakespeare transformed Othello to voice his opinions about what was going on with the Ottomans. The Turks were the talk of the town in the early 1600s because of three major things that hit the press. These were “of Robert Carr’s The Majemetane or Turkish Historie in 1600, Richard Knolles’s History or the Turks in 1603, and the republication of a poem by King James titled Lepanto in 1603 to proclaim the new king’s interest in Anglo- Turkish relations” (Habib, 220).  By having all this talk about the Turks it seems only natural that Shakespeare might have been writing a play about one when he started working on Othello originally, but this seems more concrete when we hit the year 1603. Habib tells us that, “James’s initial refusal to sign any trade agreements with the Ottoman regime in 1603 because it was be unbecoming of a Christian prince” (226).  Because of this statement and what we know about how much access Shakespeare’s plays had to King James, one can assume that James did influence Shakespeare’s Othello.

If this can be taken as truth, it brings up a whole other set of questions regarding Shakespeare, his plays, and his power. If Shakespeare did change Othello to meet his needs to criticize the king, then why did he wait only a year to do so? Did Shakespeare really use his time performing for the king as a way to criticize him or was he trying to bring to light other views on these political topics? What was Shakespeare’s agenda? And how carefully did he have to tread in order to stay in the King’s good favor. It has been said above that people feared their lives with this king, so why did Shakespeare take such risks with Othello considering how King James felt about the Turks? More research is needed to answer these questions, but even then how much of it will be fact, and how much of it will be speculation.

 

ASQUITH, CLARE. “Chapter 12: The Powder Keg, 1605-1606.” Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs & Coded Politics of William Shakespeare. 202-222. n.p.: Perseus Books, LLC, 2005. Humanities International Complete. Web. 6 Nov. 2015.

Berry, Ralph. “Shakespeare Under Two Elizabeths.” Contemporary Review 281.1638 (2002): 47. Academic Search Complete. Web. 6 Nov. 2015.

Habib, Imtiaz. “Othello’s “Malignant Turk” And George Manwaring’s “A True Discourse”: The Cultural Politics Of A Textual Derivation.” Medieval & Renaissance Drama In England 26.(2013): 207-239. Literary Reference Center. Web. 6 Nov. 2015