The Untitled Othello Project: Theoretical Implications of Untitling

Abstract

This essay analyzes The Untitled Othello Project (UOP) created by Keith Hamilton Cobb. Originating out of conversations around his play American Moor and coinciding with George Floyd’s murder and the period of racial unrest and reflection in the United States, UOP is a transformative approach to Shakespeare studies around issues of pedagogy and performance. Rooted in Cobb’s frustration with systemic racism and exclusion in the capitalist American theater as depicted in American Moor, UOP applies a method called “untitling”, a collaborative and reflective process of dismantling and reimagining Shakespeare’s Othello beyond its origins. This essay examines UOP’s interdisciplinary methods. As a collaborator and witness to UOP residencies at Sacred Heart University, I argue that the untitling methodology deploys phenomenological hermeneutics, reparative reading, and critical pedagogy, drawing on Ricoeur, Sedgwick, Boal, and Freire in the context of recent developments in critical race studies, especially through scholars of RaceB4Race and #shakerace. The untitling process requires slow, collective readings of Othello, focusing on identity, language, and the racist, patriarchal, and ableist social constructs propping up Shakespeare’s play. By inviting diverse voices—including actors, scholars, students, and audiences—to the table, UOP privileges the human beings in the room over the canonical text. UOP resists universalizing readings of Shakespeare’s play and, with a spirit of inquiry, encourages collaborative authority to lift up marginalized perspectives. This essay establishes UOP within the context of Shakespeare performance pedagogy, seeking to define its affordances for humanities study at the college level.

1. Introduction

In 2021, playwright and actor Keith Hamilton Cobb embarked on a project to “untitle” Shakespeare’s play Othello. His frustration with the speed, greed, and racism of the American theatrical economy is exemplified in his two-person play, American Moor (2015–2019) (Cobb 2020). He found that to wrestle with the racist implications of Shakespeare’s text, he needed to interrogate The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice himself. As an actor and a playwright, Cobb structured his interrogation through collaboration and engagement beyond the traditional theater process, which rehearses for three to five weeks, makes hasty decisions, and rushes to production. In this endeavor to chart a new way of theater-making, Cobb sought collaborators. Jessica Burr, the artistic director of Blessed Unrest Theatre Company, joined Cobb to create the Untitled Othello Project (UOP) ensemble. Cobb called the collaborative interrogation, “Untitling”, which is a process of slowly reading through Shakespeare’s play with a group of people. “Untitling” recognizes that Shakespeare’s plays encode and transmit deeply racist, sexist, and ableist ideas that any assemblage of people will recognize within themselves.

Cobb is not ready to argue that the play should not be performed, as scholars such as Ayanna Thompson and others have suggested (Thompson 2019). He may come to that conclusion, but not without rigorous untitling. This act requires modern readers to look for Othello without the “Moor of Venice” as the definition of a character. By dislocating the moniker from the man, Cobb calls for a radical re-vision of Shakespeare studies in which we search not for the exaltation of human nature, but the human being freed from the trappings and webs of oppressive structures. As a collaborator and witness to UOP at Sacred Heart University, I argue in this essay that the process of untitling Shakespeare offers readers, students, scholars, teachers, and audiences an opportunity to resist and re-frame discourses of power and authority that marginalize. Eschewing a universalizing and hagiographic reading of Shakespeare, “untitling” offers scholars and artists an opportunity to explore canonical texts by valuing the humanity of the groups of people studying, performing, and writing about these texts above the texts themselves.

To define and understand the mission to “untitle” as a larger project, this essay engages theories of phenomenological hermeneutics in conversation with theoretical developments in RaceB4Race and #shakerace and turns to Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s reparative reading to articulate the method of untitling. In earlier writing on UOP, “Table Work as Antiracist Spirituality: Reflections on Untitled Othello, Embodied Pedagogy, and Spiritual Productivity”, colleagues Charles A. Gillespie, Rachel E. Bauer, and I analyze the experience of hosting UOP at a Catholic university. The essay “offers a theologically informed framework for thinking about UOP’s table work as a model for an embodied pedagogy that invites an antiracist spirituality” (Gillespie et al. 2023, p. 66). In contrast, this article examines the method of untitling from the intersection of pedagogy and performance in Shakespeare studies.

Shakespeare scholars have long grappled with teaching texts that are both readerly and performance based (See Turchi and Thompson 2016; Worthen 1998; Desmet and Iyengar 2003; Whipday 2023). Institutions centered on Shakespeare such as the Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare’s Globe, and The Folger Library provide resources, templates, and teaching programs to facilitate education from “page to stage”. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s development of “rehearsal room pedagogy” and “Stand up for Shakespeare” practices generate significant research demonstrating how embodied reading and active pedagogy enhance students’ understanding and inclination toward reading complex texts (Lee et al. 2019). Cobb’s untitling process, while engaging practices of the rehearsal room (dramaturgy and tablework), insists on interrogating the oppressive structures of Shakespeare’s text as a starting point. At a lecture at the Folger Library, Kim Hall articulated the spirit in which Cobb wrote and performed American Moor:

The actor’s response to the slings and arrows of outrageous microaggressions—some of you all have been on a campus!—is a Fanonian desire for authentic communication, indeed, communion, but here, using a mutual love of Shakespeare to break down false assumptions about race and Blackness. The actor seems to say, “If I am Othello, then let me tell you who Othello is and who I am. We can figure out this play (and the predicament of race) if you would only talk to me.”

(Hall 2016b)

Hall recognizes Cobb’s search for a communion around a love of Shakespeare that also challenges persistent, damaging ideas about race and identity. This desire for authentic communication drives all the conversations around UOP and enables students and everyone at the table to contribute to the project.

Throughout this essay, I will refer to the Untitled Othello “ensemble”, “room”, “project”, “assemblage”, and “group of people”. These metonymic terms for the group represent a cornerstone of the method. To understand the dynamics of the untitling room, I will propose a few ways of reading/knowing that inform UOP: hermeneutics and collaborative reading as examined by Ricoeur; reparative reading following Sedgwick; and reading with theater/critical pedagogy, as developed by Boal and Freire. Nora Williams’ essay “Incomplete Dramaturgies” aligns with the untitling methodology through its acknowledgment that “Performance reactivates the politics and prejudices represented in these plays in a contemporary context” (Williams 2022, p. 1). David Sterling Brown’s scholarship and presence as dramaturg in the beginning of the residency profoundly impacted UOP. Throughout the essay, I provide qualitative evidence from students’ reflective and analytical writing, as well as from the archival transcripts of the UOP residency at Sacred Heart University and the as-yet-unfinished draft of the Untitled Othello script.1 To describe the process of untitling that we witnessed during a three-year residency at Sacred Heart, I will weave the conversations captured from 2021 to 2024 with the ongoing process of untitling Othello which still continues and evolves.

2. Collaborative Reading

The untitling process is first a commitment to reading together. Reading collaboratively with UOP requires an engagement with critical race studies and #shakerace. UOP is a project born from American Moor which challenged the American white theater business and the white academic establishment in conversation with scholars of #shakerace (Adams 2021; Hall 2016a; Dadabhoy 2020; Little 2023). Cobb’s script of American Moor, residing in the Folger Library, sparked the idea of collaboration in university settings.2 At the first residency of UOP at Sacred Heart University, actors, students, scholars, and administrators sat at a u-shaped table. The proceedings were recorded, sometimes “zoomed” to other colleges, and livestreamed for anyone who wanted to watch. Cobb’s description of the untitling process opened the first day of the residency at Sacred Heart University:

I want to take the names off everything that has anything to do with this play so that we can rename them all as we see them, and as we understand them. For us. Names once spoken are imbued with power. The naming of things, people’s stories, ideas. It gives each individual a power to identify them and to define them for others.

(UOP transcript, 29 November 2021)

Students who took part in UOP at Sacred Heart participated in a slow, close reading of the play with an eye toward performance, but without the pressures of performance so that decisions about identity, meaning, and value could be held up and looked at from many different viewpoints.

From the beginning, Cobb and David Sterling Brown pointed to the paradox of creating a “safe” space to read a deeply uncomfortable text. In fact in his scholarship on pedagogy, Brown rejects the idea of a “safe” space in favor of productive discomfort in which students can be supported to have difficult discussions and face complex issues (Brown 2024). Throughout the residency, students were part of contentious discussions around Othello. How could it be otherwise as the human beings around the table tried to figure out questions of performance, such as whether Emilia gives the handkerchief willingly to Iago or whether he violently rips it from her hand? The readers in the room debated this moment. More like the spect-actors, described by Augusto Boal, some leapt to the defense of a victimized Emilia and others saw her as complicit in the white supremacy and internalized misogyny that dooms Othello and Desdemona.

In untitling Othello, the project is building a community of interpretation. UOP is nurtured by the interdisciplinary dialogue and connections across campuses and departments that the Sacred Heart residency provided and that other universities and scholarly associations continue to support.3 Ricoeur’s Interpretation Theory posits the relationality of hermeneutics that corresponds to untitling, “Understanding a text then, is only a particular case of the dialogical situation in which someone responds to someone else” (Ricoeur 1976, p. 22). Making meaning in the untitling process requires community and relationships. The dialogue among participants drives the project forward. Not only is UOP in conversation with Shakespeare scholars and students in traditional Shakespeare classes, but with a multiplicity of voices.

During the residency at Sacred Heart University, classes in Catholic studies, theology, history, social work, and psychology joined world literature, writing, and theater classes. We livestreamed with classes at the University of Maryland and Weber State, and their students took part in untitling with students, scholars, and the ensemble at Sacred Heart. Charles A. Gillespie’s expansive application of Ricoeur’s principles to “just pedagogy” speaks to the way UOP lived on our campus as an interpretive community that encompassed the university at large. Writing about how Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of shared reading guides a just pedagogy, Gillespie explains: “Every course lives within a wider university ecosystem, one that encompasses support staff (from instructional technologies to custodial services and food), administration, entertainment, athletics, and an array of disciplinary departments and professional schools” (Gillespie 2020, p. 38). The involvement of the university ecosystem in the project of untitling widened the interpretive community. Hosting the UOP ensemble entailed caring for their food, housing, and transportation. These factors incorporated the project (body and mind) within the fabric of the university, as security guards helped figure out the logistics of getting the ensemble on campus, and IT staff members negotiated complex zooming/livestreaming/motion capture cameras. Untitling Othello was a campus-wide endeavor.

Reading and renaming Shakespeare’s Othello as a collaborative process requires privileging the people in the room over the text. Their questions, stories, commentaries, reactions, and responses are part of the project. The residue of past conversations now sticks to the reading of Othello, and members of UOP and observers/participants carry new meanings and possibilities forward. As Ricoeur explains, “The sense of a text is not behind the text, but in front of it. It is not something hidden, but something disclosed. What has to be understood is not the initial situation of discourse, but what points to a possible world” (Ricoeur 1976, p. 87). What points to a possible world is the collaborative, creative energy of readers and interpreters around a common text with a set of concerns.

Cobb engages with an ever-expanding group of people with a range of experiences and identities on questions that Shakespeare scholars, teachers, and practitioners have been asking about how to approach his plays. Elisa Oh’s statement of the problem is the most recent of many calls:

My students and I need a critical practice that allows us to analyze the past without perpetuating its harm and a critical stance, particularly as readers of color, that positions us to judge any text that contains aggressively negative representations of our intersectional identities within it.

(Oh 2024, p. 44)

Oh’s critical practice points to a possible world—a world of activist art and re-framing the idea of monuments while acknowledging the impact of Shakespeare as a monument to white supremacy.4 For the Untitled Othello room, the bodies of the participants and students ground the work and speak back to a Shakespeare that Mary Janell Metzger argues has been used as a “tool of racial exclusion” (Metzger 2024, p. 81). Scholars of RaceB4Race and #shakerace reveal the intersections of race within Shakespeare (texts and scholarship) that were rendered invisible for so long by a legacy of interpretation that ignored and belittled racial identity (Chapman 2018; Hendricks 2021; Smith 2022). They hold communities that teach and study Shakespeare accountable for this erasure and diminishment. These readings in critical race theory enable the Untitled Othello room to see Iago’s ability to evade punishment as the “manufactured innocence” of whiteness that Koritha Mitchell describes rather than gloss over the lack of accountability (Mitchell 2018, p. 255).5

When UOP read the first scene of the play, shot through as it is with racist language, the charge of untitling was clear as everyone in the room felt a collective need to take apart and understand the impetus behind the language. The scene challenged the room of UOP during the residency so much that it took two full days to read it. The play begins in media res, “Tush, never tell me”, says Roderigo to Iago. To discover the backstory of that line, the urgency, and the tone of the characters, the actors who were playing Roderigo and Iago improvised the beginning of the scene. Each time Cobb stopped the actors at the line: “What a full fortune does the thick-lips owe/If he can carry ’t thus!” (1.1.72).6 This racist commentary, Cobb argued, is obscured by Shakespeare’s language, but he wanted to make sure that these words landed with the appropriate hostility and racial animus from the white characters. David Sterling Brown asked the white actors in the room, “How conscious are you of your whiteness? Do you think about the harm your language might to do the audience?” Brown asked the practitioners in the room about their method of accessing the racism that would be required to perform this play. He asked: “Where does one go to tap into racism?” Heather Benton, who was playing Emilia, discussed her fear that she would “harm” others (audience members/colleagues) in delivering a line about Othello and Desdemona’s relationship: “She was too fond of her filthy bargain” (5.2.191). Aaron Zook, who was reading Brabantio, explained that he had to rely on the technicalities of the language, otherwise it would be traumatizing. Sarah Goeke, who was playing Bianca, acknowledged that she had not ever had to think about her own whiteness because theatre is generally a “white space and that white space is transparent”. Robert Manning, Jr., who was reading Othello, offered that the white actors were trying to explain what it is to “as an actor, take care of ourselves. To balance using technique versus connecting emotionally” (UOP transcript, 29 November 2021). Cobb and Burr invited commentary from everyone. A white student who witnessed this conversation recounted that she had never thought about the harm that the use of racist language could have on an audience. She had only considered it in terms of interpersonal relations, not in terms of structural interactions or wider systemic oppression.

Even though the project centers on conversations about race and intersectional identities, the invisibility of white dominance still requires management through collaborative efforts. Many of the oppressive structures of racist thinking and misogyny are so difficult to root out and unearth that the UOP room fell into these traps and will continue to do so as the project evolves because the structures are so intransigent. Unlike the actor in Cobb’s play American Moor, a multiplicity of voices in the UOP room were speaking to the racialized language of the play in the hopes that with a collaborative effort those invisible structures would be made visible. Around an extended conversation about the use of the word “Moor” the ensemble interrogated Desdemona’s use of that word in relation to Othello, and they decided to change her line, “That I did love the Moor to live with him”, to “That I did love the Man to live with him” (1.2.283). The actor playing Desdemona, Stephanie Hodge, argued that by reiterating the word “Moor” she would denigrate the nature of her relationship with Othello. This choice developed in response to a deep conversation about racial slurs and how to make the audience understand “Moor”, which Iago and others repeat as a derogatory term. A wider discussion of racial epithets was contentious, especially as the white people in the room reverted to a stance of either racial “invisibility” or discomfort. However, the collaborative nature of the untitling process and its refusal to accept what Vanessa Corredera has called, “racial euphemism”, held the UOP room to account (Corredera 2023b).7 UOP needed (and will continue) to name the operating assumptions and biases not only of individuals, but also of the systems within academia, theatrical capitalism, and Shakespeareana.

In addition to centering the readers in the room, UOP promotes conversations that allow readers to unburden themselves and the text of prior analysis. This is a difficult task especially because untitling with UOP invites scholars with expertise in pertinent areas. Privileging inquiry over expertise or tradition without ignoring these facets of Shakespeare study is a careful balancing act. Vanessa Corredera’s reading of Cobb’s American Moor demonstrates how the play sketches out the contours of UOP: “a single-person mode toward interpreting the play is insufficient. This approach must give way to one that depends on ceding authority and engaging in a dialogue that invites multiple, diverse voices, voices committed not only to questioning what counts as an authentic Othello but also to challenging the concept of Shakespearean authenticity more generally” (Corredera 2023a, p. 195). Cobb’s insistence on ceding authority or what UOP calls a “collaborative authority” yields new conversation and messiness.

Everyone in the room at the residency noticed the messiness. There were arguments about when to stop the progress of reading the play to interrogate certain biases, and there were controversies over who had the authority to speak. For example, when the UOP room spent a week focusing on the female characters in the play and the directors asked male actors to pause before commenting, was this practice just? True to the UOP process, the room analyzed, discussed, and debated the request. Students who took part in these conversations described the “passion” the ensemble members exhibited—the “disputes” and the “reconciliations”. They valued being part of a controversial and measured conversation (Reflections, Course Winter 2023, 17th Century Literature). Human beings try to assert authority, but, in the untitling process, the authority is never unquestioned. From the outset, Jessica Burr described the self-interrogation necessary to build the world of the play: “un-naming everything first is fascinating because then we can choose our own value systems; I think this is clearly the more difficult road; it will force us all as individuals to question our own processes of thought and value and status” (Untitled Othello Residency, 21 November 2021). The process of untitling requires the individuals reading together to avoid traps of confirmation bias and of self-congratulatory understanding or learning. This is not to say that during the residency the project succeeded in this goal at every turn, but it continues to be an abiding principle of this work. Also, the debate and analysis in the UOP room (described by students as “tense, but respectful”) benefit our students’ humanities study.

3. Reparative Reading

Another layer to the process of untitling as developed by UOP and the sprawling assemblage of students, scholars, family members, observers, and virtual and in-person audiences is a drive to reparative reading practices. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s formulation of reparative reading in relation to paranoid reading seems particularly apt for the untitling process. Sedgwick critiques what Ricoeur identifies as a hermeneutics of suspicion as critical stance arguing that this kind of criticism leads to a paranoid position which sees violence and oppression as a pre-condition. Paranoia fixates on exposure and demonstration. When considering an approach to Shakespeare’s Othello, the ability to see and expose oppressive structures is essential, but what the untitling process asks is more akin to the turn that Sedgwick makes to the reparative. One recognizes the racism and misogyny, but, in untitling, one asks whether there is a way to illuminate and mend this, to produce a “better piece of theater”?

Cobb’s choice of the term “untitling” is instructive and complicated. The etymology of the word “title” and its undoing signal the stakes of reparative reading. To title something implies to label, to inscribe, to name, to give ownership (Oxford English Dictionary n.d., “Title (n.) (v.)”). To untitle Othello is to remove the labels and inscriptions, to free the text from a critical and performance tradition. However, like Sedgwick’s reparative reading, the untitling process recognizes that the tradition and paranoid readings remain and can be mined for knowledge. Sedgwick advocates for a critical practice that seeks “the many ways in which selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (Sedgwick 2023, p. 150). This kind of reparative reading is generative, and so often, in the untitling process, the exposure of pain led to an innovation or creation of something new.

Nora Williams engages these questions of pain and creation around Shakespeare’s texts in a way that informed UOP, as the ensemble read and discussed her article “Incomplete Dramaturgies”. Williams argues that Shakespeare’s plays have built-in oppressive structures of misogyny, racism, ableism, and classism that can be reproduced in a harmful way in performances, even with the best intentions of working against those structures. At the heart of UOP is the desire to move away from or at least to acknowledge and wrestle with those structures rather than perpetuate them. This is at the center of the reparative reading, but also the sticking point of the process. The ensemble takes seriously Ayanna Thompson’s assertion that Shakespeare’s Othello might not ever be able to be performed without harming the audience. Williams argues that “to put on a Shakespeare play in a way that speaks back to its cultural capital and power that Shakespeare wields, you might have to gut it first: tear out its insides and rearrange them to get to something new” (Williams 2022, p. 17). At the opening of the UOP draft are the words: “This ain’t done ….” The fifth act of the UOP draft of the play has three endings; none is entirely satisfactory to anyone in the ensemble, but each brims with possibility. As a pedagogical practice, the untitling process allows students, scholars, and actors alike to struggle through the text, the proffered readings, interpretations, cuts, and even casting suggestions that the room of people can imagine and entertain as possibilities through collaborative reading and discussion.

Scholarship around the pedagogy of Shakespeare invested in social justice and anti-colonial practices recognizes how alternative world building applied to Shakespeare can re-invigorate and re-imagine the study of Shakespeare. UOP is in conversation with these practices. As Carla Della Gatta writes, “Creativity and Out-of-the-Box thinking are key components of social justice because they push forward the recognition and interplay of diverse groups” (Della Gatta 2019, p. 6). Structuring the untitling process as inclusive of race, ethnicity, gender, discipline, and professional roles creates a liberatory relationship to Shakespeare’s text. Amrita Dhar’s essay “On Shakespeare, Anticolonial Pedagogy, and Being Just” explores her own personal relationship to Shakespeare’s texts and teaching Shakespeare, underscoring the “creative and regenerative possibilities of politics and art” and the work with her students to “take things apart and put them back together in new and thought-provoking ways” (Dhar 2024, p. 39). In the UOP room, ensemble members, students, and faculty from a range of disciplines dissect and reconstruct the text as if in a humanities laboratory.

Situating the untitling process in the context of a humanities laboratory on a college campus hopefully forestalls the “incomplete dramaturgy” that Williams describes. In other words, because there is no pressure or time constraint to perform this version of Othello, UOP does not need to follow a director’s vision that might be workable for part of a play but ultimately damaging by the end of the performance. In a few examples from the UOP residency, we will see that the drive to repair balanced the exposure of harm. When Desdemona and Emilia arrive on Cyprus in Act 2, Scene 1 of Othello Cassio kisses Emilia and says to Iago, “Let it not gall your patience, good Iago,/ That I extend my manners. ‘Tis my breeding,/ That gives me this bold show of courtesy” (2.1.109–111). UOP spent several hours debating, cutting, emending, and transposing the scene. The conversation about this moment ranged across many ideas: class (Cassio’s invocation of “breeding”), misogyny (Cassio as a “ladies’ man” or demonstrating his authority over Iago through Iago’s wife), female responses to casual sexual dominance, the public nature of the act; shifting cultural attitudes toward greetings, colonialism, and military worlds. The conversation included the way that the actors on the stage would react to Cassio. Would Desdemona have seen the kiss? How would Emilia react—what might be her private reaction versus her public reaction?

Students and the members of the ensemble made suggestions about what material to keep in—where to place the kiss in the scene, for example. We were also privy to the commentary by the actor playing Emilia, Heather Benton, on her reactions to the scene:

And it feels so much more truthful to me in this instance, just through my journey with my own being a woman in this time and place is to feel something offensive and embarrassing and to totally cover it. To totally cover it and bury that. And I’ll deal with that later; it will keep me up at night or stay in my mind for a couple of days. But in the moment I’ll be like, “oh yeah, that’s it. Mm hm. That’s cool.”

(UOP transcript, 12 October 2021)

In order to make Emilia’s discomfort legible, but authentic, the artists and students discussed ways for other characters to “clock” and react to the scene. There was a shared collaborative authority. A director was not telling an actor how to react to a particular scene, and the actor, though she expressed her intuition about her own reaction, was not left to figure all of this out on her own. There was no sense that this moment just had to be “fixed” or made to work so that the ensemble could move on; instead, the responsibility for unpacking that moment and for registering its misogyny was shared. Seeing artists work in this way was incredibly impactful for students, who mentioned repeatedly that they appreciated being part of intense and difficult conversations that left the participants feeling heard and respected.

The sense of shared struggle was most acute in UOP’s engagement with Iago. Throughout the residency Iago’s character exemplified the tension between paranoia and repair—harm and cure. From the first scene in the play, Iago resonates with Sedgwick’s description of the paranoid position. He recognizes and lays the ground for the racist reaction of Desdemona’s father, Brabantio. His depiction of the marriage (“old Black ram is tupping your white ewe”, 1.1.97–98) feeds a paranoid reading of Othello and Desdemona’s relationship—racist, ageist, and Oedipal. Iago exposes and shows off the tainted nature of his thinking in Act 3, Scene 3, “As I confess it is my nature’s plague, to spy into abuses” (171–2). Acknowledging his own reading as paranoid, critical, and liable to negative interpretation, Iago leads Othello to conclusions he would never have drawn. Iago depicts what Sedgwick describes as paranoia’s insistence on display and imitation (Sedgwick 2023, p. 130). He is knowingly performing paranoia for Othello and encouraging him to do the same.

Consistently, the UOP room acted to remove Othello’s gullibility and his misreading of Iago. In this scene Othello describes Iago’s paranoid suspicions the way Iago wants him to see them. In the following section of text, the ensemble excised Othello’s willingness to reflect Iago’s strategies, especially around Othello’s description of Iago’s “honesty”:

IAGO My lord, you know I love you.

OTHELLO I think thou dost.

And for I know thou ’rt full of love and honesty

And weigh’st thy words before thou giv’st them

breath,

Therefore these stops of thine fright me the more.

For such things in a false, disloyal knave

Are tricks of custom; but in a man that’s just,

They’re close dilations working from the heart

That passion cannot rule.

IAGO For Michael Cassio,

I dare be sworn I think that he is honest.

OTHELLO

I think so too.

IAGO Men should be what they seem;

Or those that be not, would they might seem none!

OTHELLO Certain, men should be what they seem.

IAGO

Why then, I think Cassio’s an honest man.

IAGO moves to exit, perhaps by saluting and turning, but OTHELLO is now not going to let this go.

OTHELLO Nay, yet there’s more in this.

I prithee speak to me as to thy thinkings,

As thou dost ruminate, and

Give thy worst of thoughts the worst of words.

(134–155)

The amendments of the UOP script abbreviate the cat-and-mouse game that Shakespeare’s text weaves, giving Othello greater authority in the scene. By not reiterating Iago’s “honesty”, Othello still feeds into Iago’s paranoid reading of Desdemona, but without puffing up this false façade of honesty, truth, and justice. By rejecting the façade of honesty in Iago, the UOP script intentionally dislodges a false association with the audience. Disrupting the dramatic irony that prompts an audience to say to themselves, “We know Iago’s not honest, why doesn’t Othello?” is a strategic goal of UOP and a concept that students and audiences could feel but not resist. Students in the Untitled Othello course we ran concurrently described “laughing with Iago” against their better judgment and appreciated UOP discussions and interventions around this issue.

Wrestling with Iago’s paranoid readings and the infection of his white gaze on Othello and thus, the play, also creates casting difficulties that reveal the commitment of the untitling process to reparative reading. Though members of the ensemble were assigned roles, UOP maintained flexibility, and the group of people involved in the project both inside and outside of the university spaces was in flux. The most changeable “character” was Iago. Over the course of three years, five different actors played Iago. The re-casting of this character could be glossed over as a result of scheduling, but the truth is that a commitment to the connection between this character and this actor was difficult. As much as actors who played the role asserted their interest in exploring the character, finally all but one gave up.8 A persistent question from students points to the instability of this role. Time and again, students would ask how it feels to play a racist character. They ask this not only of Iago, but of the other characters, Brabantio, Roderigo, Emilia—every white-identified character.

Cobb’s direction to actors reading white parts was to lean into the racist language, not to avoid or soften it. Robert Manning, Jr. (reading Othello) and Cobb discussed at length the number of directors who had claimed that the play was not “about race”. Manning, Jr. described his response: “And I push back. I’m like, well, it’s in the text. But, and I think you [Cobb] and I have talked about this. We’ve heard this from white directors our whole lives with those who say, no, it’s not about that. It’s about this other thing. And I’m like, no, it is about that” (UOP transcript, 29 November 2021). Manning, Jr.’s evidence that the play is about race is found in his very embodiment as a Black man. He knows this to be true because he sees it in the text and feels it in his own experience as a Black man navigating the white dominator’s world. David Sterling Brown, in his book, Shakespeare’s White Others, describes Iago as the white other—what he calls a “hype man” for whiteness, who accesses and energizes anti-Black rhetoric to commit sexual and psychological violence on Othello (Brown 2023, pp. 134–68). Because Untitling requires the “authentic communication” that acknowledges the trauma Iago is inflicting instead of fawning on the “genius” of his manipulation, actors find the required admission and interrogation of racial biases disturbing and somehow choose to avoid it.

In addition to the problem of Iago, UOP addresses the common practice in the rehearsal of Othello of having a room of white interpreters and artists opining on anti-Blackness with one Black actor as Othello. Part of Cobb’s design of the project included the presence and involvement of a Black director (himself), a Black scholar/dramaturg (David Sterling Brown), and a Black actor (Terrell Donnell Sledge) to play Montano, governor of Cyprus. As the project continued, the role of Bianca was filled by a Black actress Tina Harper. UOP ensemble artist Hettie Barnhill created a character called Yejide Medina who had been Barbary in Shakespeare’s text, Desdemona’s mother’s maid. Toni Morrison’s Desdemona influenced thinking about the range of women of color underpinning the text of Shakespeare’s Othello, but in creating the character of Yejide Medina (who, as yet is a non-speaking spectral figure in the project) Barnhill and the ensemble diverged from Morrison’s project (Morrison and Traoré 2012).9 The presence of non-white ensemble members is not a strategy of non-traditional casting, but rather an attempt to foreground a diverse conversation of creative collaboration. As Cobb explains in an interview with Kevin Ewert, another collaborator on the project: “I’m interested in allowing the non-white performers to interpret the characters they enact through their instruments, all individually unique, but made even more so by experiences of race and ethnicity” (Ewert 2022, p. 536). As the characters evolved and the actors’ identities changed, the students in the room and watching the livestream contributed and engaged with the conversation.

In courses that ran parallel to the UOP residencies at Sacred Heart, students participated in the tablework and dramaturgy in a way that was liberatory and reparative. When questions of military hierarchy in Venice occurred in discussions, one student undertook his own research into Venice’s military, creating an organizational flow chart of “Othello’s army”. In these courses, students read American Moor and Toni Morrison’s Desdemona as well as criticism in critical race studies. The ensemble and students in a course on 17th century literature read Ian Smith’s article, “Othello’s Black Handkerchief”, and the discussion around the article influenced the project’s thinking about the representation of the handkerchief and led to the development of Hettie Barnhill’s character (Smith 2013). In response to these experiences, students wrote reflective essays, suggested editing of the text, and researched linguistic origins and performance choices. They were able to model civil discourse on complex and difficult topics. Students even pitched to the UOP ensemble not to cast Iago as a white man. In line with reparative reading, one student presented in a research paper the possibility of Iago as played by a white woman, and another is currently writing an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play with a Black woman in the role of Iago.

The suggestion of having a white woman or a woman of color play Iago led to productive conversations about performing whiteness and performing masculinity. After centuries of white actors performing Blackness, Cobb’s project destabilizes the white, male ability to appropriate other identities and mock or debase them. In Iago, Shakespeare may have been creating a character whose racism was so plain that his audience could identify it, reflect on their association with him, and see him as a cautionary tale. This reading assumes a white, male audience or more accurately, an audience that had been trained to identify with whiteness. Arthur Little, Jr. argues that the early modern theatre taught its audience that they were “white people” (Little 2023, p. 6). Untitling dislodges the notion of the white audience by centering the multiplicity of identities in the untitling room and in an audience. The play in Shakespeare’s time could have included a critique of racism, but only from a “normalized” vantage of a white man. Untitling Shakespeare seeks a reparative vision of the play and also a re-visioning of the diversity of the audience, which makes the communal reading and analysis so essential.

Attending to the audience reaction and disrupting the inclination cultivated over centuries of training the audience to align with Iago, UOP resists traditional comedic conventions. The ensemble struggled over Roderigo’s claim that he would “incontinently kill myself” (1.3.347). They discussed the threat that Roderigo makes and Iago’s rejoinder which is often played comically, “Drown thyself? Drown cats and blind puppies” (378–80). As one of the students in a class called “Untitled Shakespeare” observed, “I loved when Keith explained the act of removing Iago’s comedic relief in a play that is made to be a tragedy” (Untitled Othello Reflection, 10 January 2022). Often played as a comic foil or a dolt, Roderigo in UOP is a more sinister character. By removing the repeated line “Put money in thy purse”, the UOP script disrupts the opportunity for an actor playing Iago to riff off that line. The working script of the UOP text also omits the “clown”, a common Shakespearean injection of levity in his tragedies. In Shakespeare’s text, the clown appears in Cyprus, once with musicians and once in conversation with Desdemona and Emilia. In each scene, UOP replaced the clown with two characters, a “washer woman”, native to the island of Cyprus and a soldier. The inclusion of the clown seemed formulaic in a way that might speak to Shakespeare’s audience, but not a modern, diverse audience. By replacing the clown with a washer woman and a soldier, the UOP text more strongly invokes the military world of the play and the idea of Cyprus as an occupied territory.

Editing and changing Shakespeare for performance always risks losing something else unintentionally, but the untitling process allows time for reflection and reconsideration. For example, before fully cutting the clown, the ensemble read Noémie Ndiaye’s historical analysis of the African association to music in Othello as sharing “new insights into Desdemona’s long history of loving people of African descent and their voices …. an unspoken history of interracial love whose loss is temporarily offset by the reparative energies of musical conjuration” (Ndiaye 2020, p. 244). Rather than rely on the connection between the clown and Morris/Moorish dancers that Ndiaye convincingly elucidates, the UOP ensemble created a character strongly associated with the willow song, Yehide Medina, mentioned above. They sought to reclaim the “reparative energies” that Ndiaye’s historical research accessed. While scholarship can make these associations apparent through writing and analysis, theatrical practices can deploy other tools of movement, vision, sense, and sound to make these connections.

Cobb began the project with the idea that untitling is an act of clarifying Shakespeare’s text for a modern audience, eliminating archaisms or words that actors could “play” through these theatrical tools. In addition to modernizing and refining, the untitling process repairs, especially through the realization of Othello and Desdemona’s love story. Sedgwick (via Melanie Klein’s theory) defines the reparative process as love (Sedgwick 2023, p. 128). As the process has moved forward, the ensemble continues to develop “backstories” of characters that they imagine as an alternative or additive narrative. Cobb, Burr, and members of the UOP ensemble are creating a “prelude” that imagines Othello and Desdemona prior to Shakespeare’s play.10 This creation of material alongside the untitling process (which looks forward to a performance and a performance-oriented script) is reparative reading, but not without challenges.

The reparative turn of UOP rankles as it repairs. Maggie Nelson describes the entanglements of freedom in a way that the Untitled Othello room witnessed and experienced during its residencies and will continue to encounter in future endeavors: “the coexistence of freedom, care, and constraint [are] particularly thorny and acute” (Nelson 2021, p. 9). Alexa Alice Joubin points to reparative adaptations of Shakespeare that reach for a curative, universalizing, or even inspirational reclamation of the narratives (Joubin 2021).11 Mindful that this process occurs within the neoliberal university system, dependent on funding sources and white patriarchal structures of control, UOP and its collaborators (including students), must respond to the work with critical distance and deep analysis. The transcript of the residencies (200+ hours of material) reveals a painstaking approach to the issues the play raises without application of any bandages. The “repair” in the process does not cover over but rather exposes the wounds to the air where other forces of collaboration and imaginative work are invoked and energized.

4. Untitling, Humanities Study, and Theater Pedagogy

UOP maintains that reading collaboratively; exploring, defending, and negotiating rehearsal choices; and attending to the identities of all the people in the room (not dividing between audience and participant) will open the text of Othello to a search for truth that is not universalizing or traditional. As a pedagogical opportunity UOP foregrounds embodied pedagogy and negotiates acts of theater pedagogy. In “The Untitled Othello Project: A Blueprint for Experiencing Theatre in Higher Education”, Bauer, Gillespie, and I describe the “dramatic humanities” as an interdisciplinary field of research that brings together “practices of theatrical knowledge building and performance studies with literary critical skills to create a humanities laboratory” (Bauer et al. 2022, p. 13). The dramatic humanities recognizes that the use of theatre techniques in pedagogy has a longstanding tradition, but it seeks to reclaim rehearsal and performance techniques as tactics for studying of humanities texts in higher education beyond what has been called “rehearsal room pedagogy”. A term used by the Royal Shakespeare Company “rehearsal room pedagogy” is part of what Jennifer Kitchen calls Active Shakespeare pedagogy. Her book Critical Pedagogy and Active Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare links social justice-oriented critical pedagogy with active approaches to Shakespeare that derive from theater pedagogy in a way that resonates with the work of the UOP (Kitchen 2023).12 The untitling process has led us to a desire to lean into humanities skills with theater pedagogy in a way that may parallel, but does not need to include, performance or play-oriented exercises. What the UOP residencies revealed is that students could participate as interlocutors in deeply collaborative and participatory analysis by modeling tablework and dramaturgy, which leads to their own imaginative world building, in addition to real-world practices of interpersonal negotiations.

The spirit of UOP in residency at Sacred Heart University was self-consciously influenced by Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, Paolo Freire’s critical pedagogy, and bell hooks’ pedagogy of community and hope. Boal’s development of community-based theatre practices and the recognition of the spect-actor inform the untitling process. Boal’s insistence on engagement and on the way that the community can change the dramatic action resonates with what we witnessed during the UOP residency:

the spectator delegates no power to the character (or actor) either to act or to think in his place; on the contrary, he himself assumes the protagonic role, changes the dramatic action, tries out solutions, discusses plans for change—in short, trains himself for real action. In this case, perhaps the theatre is not revolutionary in itself, but it is surely a rehearsal for the revolution. The liberated spectator, as a whole person, launches into action. No matter that the action is fictional; what matters is that it is action!

(Boal 1979, p. 98)

Boal’s program of theatre practices includes techniques (mostly in the form of play, games, and a range of performances) for theater-makers. Although untitling does not appropriate Boal’s activities, the intention of his practice is felt in the ensemble of people engaged in reading the text. For scholars and educators observing and participating in the act of untitling, Paolo Freire’s concept of education as building “knowledge through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, and hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, on the world and with each other” (Freire 1970, p. 72) resonates throughout the process. bell hooks’ exhortation to resist the authoritarian rule of the classroom, to care for students, and to value and encourage their voices and interpretations underpins the activities of the untitling process. But hooks cautions that the college classroom can still be a “mini-country governed by … autocratic rule” (hooks 2003, p. 102).13 By inviting students to the table, encouraging hospitality, shared conversation, and serious inquiry, UOP inspires students to feel more empowered in their educational experiences.

The following three excerpts from students’ commentary on their experiences resonate with the goals of critical pedagogy:

I also felt oddly mature (even as a twenty-year-old), as I was sitting and being involved in big decisions. Having them genuinely care about our input made the process much more interesting.

Not only did this experience enhance my learning on Othello, but it truly showed me that learning is not always in a classroom. I gained more meaningful knowledge and openness in the UOP room than I have in any classroom.

The actors would always consult with us on our interpretations and opinions. It really made the students within the class feel valued. Everyone’s opinion was important, and the actors really valued listening to the students which I thought was cool.

(Student Reflection, Course Winter 2022, 17th Century Literature)

The words that students consistently use in their experience with Untitled Othello center on care, communication, value, interpretation, openness, and respect. By engaging students as interpreters with actors, scholars, and critics, UOP fosters a community of learning, even if it is sometimes provoking and challenging.

Cobb’s goal to search for a “better piece of theatre” coincides with the educational spirit of inquiry and the deployment of text-based theatrical pedagogy in a way that is qualitatively different from some modes of teaching practice through performance.14 First, students as audience and interpreters of Shakespeare performance (as observed on stage or film) is not a goal of the project. Instead, UOP focuses on working through and imagining a performance without the pressure of a production calendar, thus producing an immersive educational experience with a text. Second, the practice of studying Shakespeare through theatre games, prompts, and activities (especially unanchored from a particular text) is not a goal of the project or dramatic humanities. Third, students did not model performance as an outcome of any courses associated with UOP as conceived at Sacred Heart University.15 Rather, their participation fuels their own humanities research projects, reflective writing, analytical essays, and close reading. Finally, the goal of untitling is not to study the historical practices of the early modern stage.

Untitling uses the methodology of dramaturgy and tablework, close reading, and a search for performance choices attentive to the structures of identity that manage the characters and narratives in the play. Untitling is also oriented toward what Ayanna Thompson and Laura Turchi describe as “advanced learners”.16 Thompson and Turchi parse the approaches to Shakespeare pedagogy from fun, active Shakespeare activities of the early grades to pedagogy that seeks to “combine the pleasures of socially collaborative activities with heightened expectations for critical analysis” (Turchi and Thompson 2016, p. 1). By modelling close reading, editing, and rehearsing, untitling engages students in critical analysis through high-level conversation about choices in the play. It invites and encourages the people involved to think reflectively about their own identities and relationships to the world.

Archiving the conversations around the project also creates further opportunities for humanities study. Charles A. Gillespie’s essay “Sustainable Canon: Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and Theatre” articulates the benefits of theatrical interpretation and the historical archive of UOP, “Theatrical interpretations are always reflexive: performative interpretations add an excess of meaning and (trans)form the interpreter as a subject”, and he maintains that performance histories and script interpretations “stick” to both the texts and the interpreters (Gillespie 2022, p. 161). The recordings, transcripts, journals, student assignments, and reflections all contribute to the legacy of Shakespeare’s Othello. The public nature of the residencies and the continuation of its work, which has already yielded and anticipates further writing and research, contributes to what Gillespie calls a “sustainable canon”. Essential to the “untitling process” is the idea that what makes this canon sustainable is its unfinished nature, that to “monumentalize” or concretize Shakespeare makes the texts inaccessible and unsustainable.

As UOP goes forward, so do more projects of untitling (other plays, other playwrights) and untitling-inspired research and writing. Cobb and Burr’s work on untitling has extended to other plays at other universities, including Twelfth Night, The Tempest, and Timon of Athens. The untitling process on Othello has led to the creation of ancillary projects around the development of other characters. Cobb and Burr are currently collaborating on a play that imagines the nine moons before Shakespeare’s play begins, the meeting of Othello and Desdemona and Othello’s role in Venice. Like American Moor, this new play, in addition to the Untitled Othello script and archive, may become part of the sustainable canon of Shakespeare that lives and breathes with contemporary audiences and students. In the UOP version of Shakespeare’s Othello, Desdemona uses the Spanish-influenced “Oteyo” for Othello’s name. This name evokes Othello’s origins and the couple’s intimacy. Students universally embraced this small but important change. One wrote: “I appreciated this change. It made it seem like the room was more open to diverse identities. It made Shakespeare seem less black and white”.