Given that Don Pedro's substitute (and suspect) wooing of Hero for Claudio takes place while he is masked--as well as Branagh's lavish climax, which just barely records the Don's isolation from the happy denizens of the villa as the camera cranes over the ever-expanding nuptial festivities--it becomes difficult not to color Beatrice's rejection of the black Don as evidence of the film's covert perception of racial difference and its significance. And it is a perception that runs precisely counter to Branagh's avowed intention to offer an inclusive, all-encompassing instantiation of Shakespeare.

Stewart’s presence, while it guaranteed the staging of a great deal of public interest, could not do the same for its conceptual plausibility. As I have already suggested, there were scattered snickers from the audience at Stewart’s intoning “Haply for I am black”; yet the reaction, surely unintended on the director’s and actor’s parts, cannot simply be blamed on the audience’s lack of imaginative sophistication. To accept the undeniably pale Stewart as black demands that the power of the script’s fiction—what I’ve already termed the authority of the Shakespearean text—override all the cues to the contrary that the actor playing Othello is not black, nor is he making any somatic attempt to impersonate blackness, vexed, indeed, as that possibility would be. Acceptance demands a rarefaction and idealization of the site of viewing perhaps unlikely ever to have been achieved by any audience at any time, but certainly not to be achieved when part of the point of casting Stewart is presumably his fame, either as a mass-culture icon, or as a British Shakespearean actor.