Othello in the South Seas: Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Beach of Falesá” as Shakespearean Rewriting

This article reads Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacific novella “The Beach of Falesá” (1892) as a rewriting of Shakespeare’s Othello⁠. There are, in fact, several clues that Stevenson had Othello in mind while travelling in the Pacific, and while working on “Falesá” specifically: once the two texts are compared, a set of structural parallels and thematic convergences appears. While “Falesá” is not strictly speaking an adaptation of Othello, it is, however, an early case of “writing back” to Shakespeare’s text, anticipating the work of several postcolonial and feminist authors. In a first step, I will explore which clues invite this reading to begin with, while also showing that Stevenson’s engagement with Shakespeare is connected to his interest in realism. Secondly, I am going to stress several convergences between the character relations in Othello and those in “Falesá,” detailing how Stevenson translates the character dynamics of Othello into the South Seas, initially focusing on Othello/Wiltshire and Iago/Case. Finally, I will discuss how and why Stevenson, in a few deliberate deviations from Othello, subverts Shakespeare’s tale, with a special focus on Uma and Desdemona.