Chapter 2

Othello in Spain (1802–1844)

Othello was premiered in Madrid in 1802. The text used was not a translation of Shakespeare’s tragedy, as was held in certain writings, but a rendering of Jean-François Ducis’s French neoclassical version. The play met with immediate success and ran until 1844, both in Madrid and Barcelona. Although the number of performances diminished in the 1830s and 1840s, this did not affect its fame. On the contrary, other plays of similar or related content lived off it and fed back into the Othello myth in turn. These were: Rossini’s opera Otello, premiered in Barcelona in 1821 and in Madrid in 1822, the comedy Shakespeare enamorado [Shakespeare in love] by Alexandre Duval, translated and adapted for the Spanish theatre, and the anonymous parody Caliche, both first staged in Madrid in 1828. The three ran till at least 1844. In fact, the Othello story became so well-known in Spain that it was used politically in 1839 in a Madrid daily newspaper against a rival newspaper. This chapter will examine the Spanish translation of the French neoclassical adaptation and the aspects in which it departed from the latter. It will also discuss the success of the play and the way in which its presence on the Spanish stage gave rise to a critical debate on the tragedy, both as written by Shakespeare and as adapted neoclassically by Ducis. Lastly, it will consider the extent to which the opera, the comedy and the parody contributed to the popularity of Othello in Spain and to its early reception in general, as well as assess its political use in the press as indicative of the fame achieved by the play at the time.