Performing Ot(h)ello: Verdi, Salvini and the Stage Manual

Abstract This article retraces Giuseppe Verdi's Otello (1887) to the great Italian mattatori (star actors), particularly Tommaso Salvini (1829–1915), whose ground-breaking performances of the Moor of Venice, in a translation by Giulio Carcano, coincided with the time when Verdi and his librettist, Arrigo Boito, were collaborating on their Otello. The grandi attori enjoyed a reputation for realistic immediacy and impulsiveness readily associated with cultural stereotypes about Italy's perceived ‘otherness’. In the ethnographic context of nineteenth-century Italy, it is argued here that the actors’ interpretation of Shakespeare's Moor not only synthesised the multilateral cultural threads of the Jacobean Othello, but also partnered this racial alterity with a new dramatic language, which went on to influence Verdi's opera and prompt book, and, ultimately, to perpetuate an exoticised ‘brand’ of Italian artistic culture on stage at a time when Italy was fashioning its own national identity.