OTHELLO IN UTAH.
Showing How that Tragedy is Intensi-fied Under Mormon Auspices.
At a Mormon theater, not long ago, they played "Othello." Othello was represented as usual but polygamy demanded more than one Desdemona, so there were fifteen Mrs. Othellos for this Moor to be jealous of. The consequence was he grew fifteen times as jealous as any other Othello on the stage, and raved and ranted fifteen times as loud. The actor who undertook the part has been laid up in bed ever since.
In the first place, there were fifteen Bra-bantios clamoring for their daughters, who had eloped and married the Moor. The text had to be changed a little, of course. When brought before the Senators, charged with winning fifteen young women of Caucasian blood by the use of charms, love powders etc., he said:
"Their fathers loved me, oft invited me;
Still questioned me the story of my life.
From year to year; the battles, sieges, fortunes
That I had passed.”
Fifteen mortified and repentant fathers im-mediately regretted that they had seemed to countenance negro equality by inviting the black man to their homes, although be had fought nobly during the war. Then Othello drew a touching picture of the sympathies which his tale excited in the breasts of the fifteen young women; how they would hurry through their housework to listen to it half washing their breakfast things and leaving the chamber work until afternoon. He found at length "a pliant hour," when the fifteen susceptible young women are all together and drew from them a "prayer of earnest heart " that he would give them the story entire in one number, which they got in fragments from day to day. He consented, and often did beguile tears from fifteen pairs of eyes when speaking of some distressful stroke that his youth suffered. Fifteen women-power sighs rewarded his story, and then they swore—fifteen of 'm—
"They wished they had not heard it, yet they wished
That heaven had made them such a man."
They requested him, if he knew of any prom-ising young man of good income who was in love with them, to teach him how to repeat that entertaining yarn of his, and that would woo them. On these fifteen hints he spoke:
"They loved me for the dangers I had passed,
And I loved them that they did pity them—
Here comes the ladies, let them witness it."
Then the fifteen Desdemonas enter, perceiv-ing a divided duty between their husband and their fifteen paternals, but they shake off their papas and cling to the Moor, thus administer-ing a salutary rebuke to the opposers of uni-versal suffrage.
The plot progresses. Iago excites the jeal-ous rage of Othello by pretending to find fifteen pocket handkerchiefs, that the Moor had given his wives, in Cassio's bedchamber. They were neatly embroidered handkerchiefs, with a butterfly in one corner and his initials, "G. W. O." (George Washington Othello), in red.
It was hard to make Othello believe for some time that his fifteen wives had gone back on him, but the silly and treacherous Iago plies his arts so skillfully that the Moor is at length convinced, and resolves to avenge his honor, that had received fifteen deadly stabs, by making himself a widower. This he ac-complishes by smothering his fifteen wives in their fifteen separate bedchambers with fifteen different bolsters, being called before the cur-tain by the enraptured audience at the death of each of the fifteen Desdemonas.
