In the modern theatre concern with type-casting paradoxes of judgment have evolved. One is the issue of race- and gender-neutral casting. A version of the latter reverses the involuntary “boy playing a girl” which convention imposed on Elizabethan players, so that we find its opposite: a female Falstaff, Richard II, Hamlet, Lear, or Prospero. This reversed impersonation of men by women was notably successful with audiences when Charlotte Cushman played Romeo in 1846 and the procedure evolved to Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet, and lately to Fiona Shaw’s praised role as Richard II. On the other hand, we still hear of successful boys’ impersonation of young women, echoing Pepys’ praise of Kynaston, as seen in Edith Evans’ enthusiasm for the Katherina Minola of Lawrence Olivier. [see image]

Such recent counter-casting contrasts with the other modern tendency to cast Shylock and Othello from actors with the same ethnic character as the roles (as in Peter Hall’s use of Dustin Hoffman in The Mechant of Venice). These choices occur presumably because other races’ mimicry of ethnic traits might seem too condescending. After Nonso Anozie had played Othello in Cheek by Jowl’s Othello of 2004, he wrote: “I am black, so I have for free, all of those things that white actors had to spend time working on before getting to grips with the story of the play and Othello’s relationships with the other characters.” (Dobson, 89) However, he also accepts that Elizabethan society diverges radically from ours (88), and in Othello it is Iago who consistently projects any Elizabethan racist view of Othello’s character to further his ends (e.g. I.i.126), not Cassio or Desdemona, or even the Duke (I.ii.288-90). By contrast, our modern race-consistent casting reinforces the identification of the actors and the roles as apt representatives of historical victims in our modern world, and this reinforcement may alter the balance of an earlier author’s intent. With Shylock, perhaps, this may have been to display the tragic fact that mistreatment may distort any victim’s own behavior into viciousness. Alternatively (in Othello’s case) one might regrettably ascribe to a character’s race what the playwright sees as a more universal failing, a sinister effect of implied “type-casting.” After all, in other Shakespeare plays, Angelo in Measure for Measure is just as much a legalist as Shylock, and in Merry Wives of Windsor Mr. Ford is no more African than Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, but they share Othello’s jealous over-reactions. Thus we might be less troubled by Petruchio’s treatment of Katherina if we have just seen in the Induction that she is to be acted by a lively boy, so we might be more distanced about the emotional extravagance of Othello if his behavior is not reinforced by an actual victim of racism of African descent such as Ira Aldridge or Paul Robeson. Similarly, Kozintsev’s fragile Lear to the contrary, King Lear should not be played (indeed cannot be, if he is to carry the dead weight of Cordelia) by any one close to being an octogenarian, thus avoiding the involuntary sympathy for age that might compromise our detachment from Lear’s hysteria. We might defer our sympathy until the point when he transcends such ageism. Bellowing on stage is wasteful of energy.