***************merl |an (m) whiting; hairdresser; blackbird; white crow************************

*************loufoque (f) cranky, daft******************

chapel |et (m) rosary; onions; string; series chapel |et (m) rosary; onions; string; series

chant (m) singing; song; chant; canto

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.

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