These days, suggested Goold, "it's actors who are more scrupulous than directors" about pushing a character's scripted age to a more convincing point. There appears to be no record of the name or age of the performer who first played Iago to Richard Burbage's Othello (I'll be delighted if someone posts proving me wrong). Rupert Goold, Lynch's director for that Northampton revival told me: "My memory is that it was Finbar who said we needed to change the '28' line, not me." Goold observed that shorter life expectancy in Shakespeare's time meant the tragedy's original audiences would have regarded 28 as "at least 10 years older than we do". In 2003, at Northampton's Royal Theatre, 44-year-old Finbar Lynch's Iago stated that he'd been around for "six times seven years" – as did Tim McInnerny, who was already 50, at Shakespeare's Globe in the summer of 2007 the group of American undergraduates I accompanied to Bankside made much of McInnerny's receding hairline, but reckoned he could still pass for 42. And fair enough: he doesn't look a day over 35 – nor is he the first actor to have aged Iago for credibility's sake. On the page, Iago maintains that he is 28, telling Roderigo in Act I, Scene iii: "I have looked upon the world for four times seven years." (Twenty-eight, if your mental arithmetic is feeling rusty.) West, who turned 42 as his Crucible run ended on 15 October, tweaked this to "five times seven years". ![]() Watching Dominic West's superb performance as Shakespeare's consummate deceiver, Iago, at the Sheffield Crucible recently, I heard him slip in an extra falsehood not usually found in the text: in this production, the villain even "lied" about his age.
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