“Where should Othello go?”

High schools are, in many ways, the perfect setting for reimagining Shakespeare plays. Like Shakespeare’s works, schools are self-contained worlds; they have their own rules, hierarchies and cultures, and events that might seem trivial to someone on the outside – the betrayal of a friend, an upcoming sporting event – can attain a monumental significance to those within. Characters in Shakespeare have a tendency to abstract and grapple with their emotions as if they’re something foreign to them – whether it’s Othello saying, “think’st thou I’d make a life of jealousy?” or Richard III lamenting “O coward conscience, how dost thou afflict me”. Meanwhile, teenagers at high school are often caught experiencing new emotions – romantic love, jealousy, pangs of conscience – and, similar to those characters in early modern drama, don’t know quite what to make of them. For both, emotions can seem less a part of everyday experience and more like novel viruses which have the potential to grow, mutate and wreak havoc in those they infect.

It is perhaps no wonder then that since the 1990s there has been a proliferation of films transferring Shakespeare from the stages of The Globe and Blackfriars to the corridors of American high schools, with films like 10 Things I Hate About You (1999), She’s the Man (2006) and Get Over It! (2001). However, there’s a question of whether these films, churned out by Hollywood studios, belong more to the realm of mass-produced pop culture than to the venerable tradition of adaptations of the Bard’s works. Indeed, critic Richard Burt has dubbed such films “Shakesploitation flicks”, remarking that they “dumb down Shakespeare in fulfilling manufactured preteen fantasies about being popular (romantically successful) in high schools”. While Burt’s analysis is a bit reductive (and I know plenty of people who will vehemently argue the merits of both 10 Things and She’s the Man), he has a point: these films’ engagement with their source text can be seen as, at best, no more than the transposition of a few plot points and, at worst, just a cynical marketing gimmick that masks what is essentially another teen flick. It appears then that the dramatic potential of a genuine dialogue between the plays of Shakespeare and the high school experience has gone largely untapped. That said, there is one film which, despite appearances, does genuinely attempt such a cross-time dialogue – Tim Blake Nelson’s 2001 film O.

Known to most as the actor with a distinctive southern drawl from films like O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Holes, Tim Blake Nelson is also a playwright, classics major and filmmaker, producing films of understated brilliance like the holocaust drama The Grey Zone (2001), and the southern gothic crime comedy, Leaves of Grass (2006). Nelson was initially reluctant to take on the project of directing O but after reading the script (inspired by writer Brad Kaya’s own experience of being the only black student at high school) Nelson accepted, warning producers that it “would not be ‘Othello’ for music television”, it would be a serious film that wouldn’t shirk from the play’s violence or condescend to its young adult audience.

O moves Shakespeare’s tragedy from the cloisters of Venice to the quad of Palmetto Grove Academy, a fictional prep school in Charlestown, South Carolina. The film shadows the original play closely, depicting the events that unfold when Odin (Mekhi Phifer), the school’s star basketball player, is manipulated by the coach’s son Hugo (Josh Hartnett) into believing that his girlfriend Desi (Julia Stiles) is cheating on him. The war between Venice and the Ottoman Empire that hangs over the original is replaced by the school’s desire to win the state basketball championship. Nelson takes this parallel seriously and he shows the school mobilised in a state of war-like fervour over its sporting success. He depicts chanting crowds of students, a coach (played by Martin Sheen) who berates the players, and a dean who appears interested in little else than the silverware that the team brings home. At Palmetto Grove, basketball’s ceremonial significance means it eclipses all other achievements. Characters like the overweight Roger, and the academically bright Hugo are marginalised by this culture and the film offers this felt marginalisation, and the social envy that accompanies it, as key motivations for the characters’ heartless actions.

The biggest victim of this militarised sporting culture though is Odin himself. Here Nelson’s film builds on and finds a contemporary application for one of central themes of the original – that veneration does not mean acceptance. In Shakespeare’s text, Desdemona’s father Brabantio appeals to the Duke of Venice to intervene after his daughter’s elopement with Othello. Brabantio expects full sympathy from the Duke, confidently stating: “any of my brothers of the state, cannot but feel this wrong as if ‘twere their own”. Brabantio’s fraternal appeal falls on deaf ears, however, as the Duke is much keener to make use of Othello’s military prowess to see off an impending invasion and he pardons Othello and Desdemona. Nonetheless, Brabantio’s initial response still stands in the play as the cultural norm: a Moor cannot marry a Christian girl; Othello is merely the exception that proves the rule.

This dynamic is mirrored in Odin’s exceptional place at Palmetto Grove. Odin, the school’s only black student, is not from a privileged background like his peers but has been funded through the prep school due to his basketball ability. Odin is constantly reminded of his exceptional circumstances; from the Dean’s tacit references to his having had run-ins with the police, to even the coach’s refusal to suspend him when he acts out violently on the court. Indeed, his placement at the school is so nakedly down to his sporting prowess, so baldly motivated by the school’s own desire for sporting achievement, that his position within it is not, and never can be, one of acceptance. As with Othello, it’s Odin exceptional status that betrays the rule: black students do not belong at such an ‘elite’ institution.

Odin’s fictional situation bears a resemblance to that of the two boys portrayed in the 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams (Steve James) which follows their lives as they are similarly selected and sponsored through a US private school. While this is a seemingly fortunate opportunity for the two boys and potentially means the difference between a college education and not, Hoop Dreams illuminates how this is hardly blind philanthropy from the school and shows how coldly the system can operate: when one of the boys’ parents can no longer afford the subsidised tuition, the school, not impressed by his flagging performance, forces his parents to go into debt to keep him there. As Roger Ebert said in his review of the documentary: “the morality here is clear: St. Joseph's wanted Arthur, recruited him, and would have found tuition funds for him if he had played up to expectation”. It is just such a cut-throat environment in which Odin finds himself in O – while Odin is hailed by the coach and cheered from the stands, his position at the school always remains tied to his success on the court. It is ultimately this precarious position that Hugo takes advantage of, appealing to his ‘insider knowledge’ as he informs Odin about what’s really going on with his girlfriend Desi. In doing so, he leads Odin down a path made possible by his circumstances as Odin begins to doubt not just his girlfriend but the motives of all those that surround him. Though the vertiginous nature of Othello’s decline sometimes perplexes readers and audiences, Odin’s disbelief that those around him have his interests at heart ultimately makes perfect sense in his context – the tragedy of the film is that this doubt and insecurity end up manifesting themselves in violence towards the innocent Desi.

Despite the film’s strengths, one reason why O has never seemed to receive much critical acknowledgement is its departure from the language of the original. As Burt says, “late nineties Shakesploi flicks […] leave the language almost entirely behind”, while a review in the New York Times disparagingly referred to O as a “colloquial adaptation”. Such remarks set up a dichotomy between those ‘legitimate’ adaptations that retain Shakespeare’s language and those ‘illegitimate’ ones who leave it behind. This fetishisation of Shakespeare’s words is a markedly modern phenomenon; Restoration playwrights had no qualms rewriting what they often viewed as Shakespeare’s imperfect compositions, albeit sometimes to amusing effect as in Nahum Tate’s 1681 ‘happy ending’ King Lear. More recently were the many Shakespeare adaptations made for silent cinema, such as Buchowetzki’s expressionist 1922 Othello, which relegated the language to expositional inter-titles and focused far more on visuals, atmosphere and physical acting.  

Changing and updating the language can, paradoxically, allow for a more thorough and sustained engagement with the text. While O takes the plot, unremitting claustrophobia, and gravitas of Shakespeare’s original, the freedom to change the language means that these elements can be used to directly comment on issues specific to its setting. Odin's final speech can make open references to the racial stereotypes that have plagued him rather than leaving it to the audience to try and tease out these parallels. Meanwhile, in adaptations which update the setting but not the language, such as Simon Godwin’s 2017 flashy production of Twelfth Night, the act of contemporising can end up feeling arbitrary and more like Shakespeare in fancy dress. Ultimately, what Nelson loses in not retaining the language, he gains in being able to create a film that is more accessible, dramatically engaging and outwardly political than if he’d stuck to the script. It’s worth noting that Shakespeare’s Othello, adapted from Giraldi Cinthio’s 16th century Italian novella, was itself the result of such a translation.

In his essay ‘What is the contemporary’, the philosopher Georgio Agamben asserts that contemporariness is “a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it”.  With O, Nelson adhered to his own time by creating a slick, star-studded high school film, but what makes his work truly contemporary is his engagement with a Jacobean tragedy which provides a distance that allows Nelson to productively explore some of the darker aspects of his own time. Indeed, Nelson was acutely aware of the number school shootings that happened in the years preceding O and this context heavily informed his film which does not shy away from depicting teenage violence. Far from trivialising or sensationalising this violence, however, Nelson depicts it in its truly shocking light through the lens of personal tragedy. In an article published after the film's release, Nelson recalls being struck in his research by the deeply personal motivations of teenage perpetrators of acts of violence; “ostracism in several cases, a love triangle in another and friction at home in still another”. His adaptation explores this emotional terrain as it tackles causes of alienation, as well the workings of complex emotions like jealousy and envy. In doing so, Nelson’s film seeks to not only enhance its audience’s engagement with a canonical work of literature but to show how such literature can be an effective tool for understanding one’s own inner turmoil, with the hope that such literacy may well help prevent future acts of senseless violence.   

At the nadir of Othello’s downfall, as he is left with naught but the outcome of his actions and the naked facts of his deception, Othello asks in the third person, “where should Othello go?” His isolation is complete, and his death soon follows. As a text though, Othello will continue to have an afterlife as long as there is a vibrant tradition of creatively adapting it to suit the concerns of the present. To paraphrase Agamben, with adaptations like Tim Blake Nelson’s O, it is as if the past, touched by the shadows of the present, has acquired the ability to respond and shed light on the darkness of the now.

Fred Warren is a writer, filmmaker and founding member of Chasing Cow Productions who graduated from the University of Exeter in English.