Carnal sin
Another aspect of the play is the idea of carnal sin. The biblical myth of Adam and Eve is concerned with taking the fruit of the tree of knowledge, thereby bringing original sin – the human capacity for evil – into the world. This is historically associated with carnal knowledge. In recent history, Henry VIII had been obsessed by the need for a male heir. He had married his late brother’s wife and later held that his lack of a son was punishment because of the biblical injunction – in the Old Testament Leviticus 18 – that marriage to a brother’s wife was incestuous.
Like Henry, Claudius, in the play, has married his brother’s wife, after first murdering the King. The Ghost reveals:
Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast,
…
…won to his shameful lust
The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen.
(1.5.42, 45–6)
These are not the same circumstances as those of Henry VIII, of course, but Shakespeare is on dangerous political territory here nevertheless. It is a territory he subsequently exploits with the play within the play that is designed to ‘catch the conscience of the King’ (2.2.607).
There is also here, however, the sense of ‘seeming’ rather than ‘being’, of putting on an act rather than engaging in an ‘action’. We may recall Hamlet’s earlier exchange with his mother, ‘Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems”’ (1.2.76); he does not want to be judged only by appearances. Claudius, by contrast, is presented as being nothing but appearances and for him the mask very rarely slips. He is from the very beginning the supreme exemplar of the professional political hypocrite.
Throughout the play there is a constant flow of images about flesh and physical repugnance relating to carnal sin. For example, when Hamlet tells Ophelia, the woman he claims to love, to take refuge in a nunnery, it is because he thinks women in general ‘jig and amble’, ‘lisp’ and ‘make your wantonness your ignorance’. Some critics have noted that a nunnery may have had the double meaning of ‘convent’ and ‘brothel’, although it is not certain that in Shakespeare’s day the word was used in the latter sense. Hamlet’s assault is obviously misogynistic but also self-referential, since it is an aspect of the fictionally constructed persona, ‘Hamlet’, who is speaking. In his question ‘Why, wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?’ (3.1.121–2), there is disgust with his own sinful humanity, as someone ‘with more offences at my beck [command] than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in’ (3.1.125–7).
To be, or not to be
This self-referential disgust with his own humanity, echoing an abhorrence of ‘man’ as part of his verbal assault on Ophelia, comes immediately after the ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy, (3.1.56f.), in which the question of suicide is placed against Hamlet’s lack of knowledge about the nature and existence of an afterlife. The Reformation had signalled the start of a process of doubt in the established orthodoxy, which was to develop over the next 500 years towards the secularism prevalent in our contemporary society. But in Hamlet’s great soliloquy, doubt is manifested in a fear of what is to come ‘the dread of something after death’ (3.1.78). It demonstrates a confusion of mind, madness even, about the role, purpose and the very being of humanity.
Catholicism and the Reformation in Hamlet
The debates of the Reformation are not far away from the play. Hamlet is littered with the debris of pre-Reformation Roman Catholicism and particularly the seven sacraments, which were signified by the Church as outward signs of inward grace. These sacraments are baptism, confession, communion (the Mass), confirmation, ordination, marriage and extreme unction (last rites). They appear to be referenced in the play in a confused manner, as if laid to waste by war. Old King Hamlet (as lawful king) would have been ‘anointed’ with the holy oils of the sacraments at his confirmation and coronation, but he dies by a poison poured into his ears in what is a parody especially of the last sacrament or extreme unction, when the five senses of the dying person are anointed. Instead of the holy oils being placed on his ears when he is ill and dying, poison is poured into them while he is still healthy.
Claudius’s confession is seen as a travesty of true Christian confession, because he does not believe in repentance and therefore his ‘…words fly up,’ but his ‘thoughts remain below./Words without thoughts never to heaven go’ (3.3.97–8). Even more, the communion cup at the close of the play does not contain ‘in remembrance’ the healing, forgiving blood of Christ, shed on Calvary for the remission of sins, but a further poison, bringing death to those who drink it by accident or design.
The Ghost is one who has died, ‘Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,/…No reck’ning made, but sent to my account/With all my imperfections on my head’ (1.5.76, 78–9). In other words, the late king died without the sacrament of confession, which would have forgiven his misdeeds on earth. He has therefore been sentenced by God to a place of torment – which Catholics referred to as Purgatory, a place where sins could be purged before the departed could progress to heaven. Thus an exposé of residual Catholic doctrine is preserved in the play in order to set up a contrast to Protestantism, which, as David Scott Kastan notes, ‘has no place for purgatorial ghosts…The spirits of the dead do not return, and ghosts claiming otherwise are always a cheat’ (Kastan, D. S. [2014: 126–7]).
However, the references to the sacraments and to purgatory do not make this a Catholic play. Indeed, the Calvinistic Protestant doctrine of predestination appears to be behind what critics have tended to regard as a speech in which Hamlet finally reconciles his earlier doubts. This speech comes in Act 5, Scene 2 when Horatio advises him that, if he doubts the reasons for the wager that Claudius has made in anticipation of the sword fight with Laertes, he should withdraw. Hamlet replies:
Not a whit. We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; it if be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows aught, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.
(5.2.218–23)
Although referencing St Mathew’s Gospel, 10.29, this appears to be taken almost directly from the Protestant reformer John Calvin (1509–64):
‘In Calvinism, God sustains Christians and “with singular providence” cares “for every one of those things that He hath created even to the least sparrow…providence is called that, not wherewith God idly beholdeth from heaven what is done in the world, but wherewith as guiding the stern He setteth and ordereth all things that come to pass.”’
Scott, M. [2015: 33]. Quoting Calvin, J. (1535), trans. Norton, T. (1561, repr. 1599), The Institution of Christian Religion
So, too, Hamlet asserts ‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,/Rough-hew them how we will –’, to which Horatio responds, ‘That is most certain’ (5.2.10–12). In other words, one’s life is predestined. In Calvinism, those who are damned never know that they are but those who are ‘elect’ know that they are because they are always successful. In Hamlet’s continuing doubt and his apparent reconciliation to it, there remains some ambiguity since he never quite resolves the question of the very purpose of life.
Renaissance humanism, political pragmatism and the theatre
Fashionable Renaissance humanism and its attendant description of the conduct of the Renaissance courtier are satirized throughout the play. Renaissance humanism emphasized the primacy of man’s role in his relationship with the universe and his unique identity, privileging his experiences and environment. This, however, is questioned in the play by the affectation of the foppish Osric, with his ornate language and his feathered hat (5.2.81f.), and by the perfidy of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in their attempt to become courtiers by discovering to the King the reason for Hamlet’s unhappiness. In 3.2.297f. Hamlet turns on them for trying to find his ‘mystery’: ‘’Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument
you will, though you fret me, you cannot play upon me’ (3.2.372–4).
Shakespeare emphasizes this dissonance and doubt within the structure described at the start of this chapter, concluding not with philosophical answers but with the political pragmatism of the Norwegian Fortinbras, who asserts his rights within the kingdom once the entire Danish royal family has been eliminated. Claudius’s appeasement policies, based on the foundation of the murder of his brother, have politically failed.
Spotlight
This is a narrative that contains philosophical probing; the questioning of the relationship between morality and mortality, the efficacy of revenge itself in relation to the Christian debate of justice, punishment and forgiveness; the Catholic versus Protestant nature of that debate; the old religion against the new. Shakespeare doesn’t resolve this debate through the many deaths, but rather expands the enigmatic questions that surround them.
One of these concerns Hamlet’s last words, ‘the rest is silence’. What do these words mean? Is it simply that this is the end of the play? Or do the words signify that the resolution of the philosophical problems cannot be offered because they are only known (or not) after death? Or is it an assertion that there is nothing after death? The dramatist leaves us with these questions rather than with answers, and then he has Hamlet’s body placed upon ‘the stage’ for people to witness. What is this stage – a gun carriage, a scaffold or the theatre itself, where tomorrow this great play will be staged again? For Hamlet is not a person but a play, in which Shakespeare exposes questions and sends the audience away debating them. Such is the great artistry of the man.
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Othello (1604)
While The Merchant of Venice raises issues of anti-Semitism and The Taming of the Shrew misogyny, Othello, the Moor of Venice inevitably raises issues of racism when it is performed in the twenty-first century. But racism takes many forms: racism exists within what we think of as the black community and also within the white community, in addition to the racism that pits white against black or black against white. In a modern civilized society we need to talk about, analyse carefully, and thereby expose, individual and institutionalized racism as much as we need to talk about violence, or sexual gender, or religious discrimination.
In June 2015 a new RSC production of Othello opened in Stratford-upon-Avon, directed by Iqbal Khan with black actors playing both Othello and Iago. This production, with Hugh Quarshie playing Othello and Lucian Msamati Iago, re-energized the confrontational nature of a play in which Shakespeare may have deliberately frustrated expectations and through which he displays an unusually clear understanding of the outsider in society. This production was designed as a fresh artistic realization and dynamic interpretation of a performance script written more than 400 hundred years ago.
Louise Wise, in an interview with both actors, noted:
‘This is an Othello in which race relations are turned on their head. With Iago’s skin now much darker than his commander’s, the reasons for the one’s crime and the other’s credulity become so much more intriguing. It’s a definite resetting of the so-called “Othello Music”.’
The Sunday Times, ‘Culture’ section, 24 May 2015, pp. 8–9
In 1998 Hugh Quarshie gave a lecture at the University of Alabama, on which a subsequent paper for the International Shakespeare Association was based, in which he raised an important issue that both the paper, and, more recently, the 2015 production, tackled. He states that black actors should continue to play the role of Othello but asks:
‘Without such casting, is it still possible to stage Othello without endorsing racist conventions? I think we have to accept that Othello is a seriously flawed play. But with some judicious cutting and textual emendation…I think it would be possible to produce a version of the play which shifts the focus away from race and on to character. It might still be impossible to avoid the conclusion that Othello behaves as he does because he’s black; but it might be possible to suggest that he does so…because he is a black man responding to racism, not giving a pretext for it.’
Hugh Quarshie (1999: 21), ‘Second Thoughts about Othello’. Chipping Camden: International Shakespeare Association Occasional Paper, No. 7
Approaching the play in this way was what prompted in 2015 a multicultural production which was at times horrific in its representation of contemporary state-authorized tortures that were well beyond the play’s own images of Islamic and Christian cultures, while at the same time offering an interesting portrayal of Emilia, influenced, it would appear, by Indian mysticism. Racism was present within the tensions of the multicultural society that the production depicted. Iago’s motive was made perfectly clear from the opening scene: he had been overlooked and humiliated by Cassio’s promotion and hated both him and the Moor with a deep desire for vengeance. This was no comic Vice figure from medieval drama – as some Iagos in the past have been – but a seriously disturbed man who hated to be touched physically and was obsessive, fastidiously cleansing his hands, rubbing his head, arranging furniture precisely on the stage set and wiping spots from the stage floor. This obsessive conduct grew through the performance. It was a frightening depiction of a man who, in the contemporary world of 2015, might have been at home within the brutally limited so-called Islamic State.
Othello, by contrast, was portrayed by Quarshie as a calm character, too calm perhaps compared to the traditional evaluations of the role, and, predictably, to which his critics clearly objected. Consequently, the ‘madness’ or ‘epilepsy’ scene (Act 4, Scene 1) and the ‘It is the cause’ soliloquy (5.2.1–22) were downplayed, with emphasis placed on the psychological fragility of a figure entrusted with the defence of Venice but who exists within a manipulative society of which Iago is a representative figure. The multicultural dimension on which this production depended insisted on the global nature of conflict manifested within the context of contemporary international anxieties. In other words, Quarshie, with his director and fellow actors, demonstrated that Othello could be relevant in a world where racism remains prevalent in language, culture and attitude and where those who wield power find it impossible to combat evil without practising violence themselves.
The work of the left-wing dramatist Edward Bond at the end of the twentieth century was violent because, as he states, ‘Violence shapes and obsesses our society, and if we do not stop being violent we have no future.’ (Bond, E. [1972: v], Author’s Preface, Lear. London: Methuen). So it is with racism in the multicultural world that is the global village.
Shakespeare’s Othello is about racism and modern productions of the play cannot avoid depicting issues that we confront in our own society. The 2015 production did not succeed entirely in resolving difficulties, but its direction of travel was logical and, rightly, confrontational in its exposure of controversial issues that it was able to develop from Shakespeare’s text.
We can gauge the extent and the complexity of the problem from the following quotation by the feminist critic Catherine Belsey:
‘In written works it matters who addresses whom, in what situation and with what authority. When the works in question are fictional, it matters that we differentiate between the fictional speaker and the text. The views of the villain are probably contrary to what the audience is invited to believe: Iago’s racism and misogyny, for example, should not necessarily be taken for the play’s.’
Belsey, C. (1999: 14–15), Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan
Othello’s credulity
Othello has tantalized critics and audiences with questions through the centuries. How could Othello be so credulous as to be duped through insinuation, and over a handkerchief? What is the motive for Iago’s villainy? What are the politics behind the play? Dramatically, the black general and the white ensign make a powerful visual statement on stage. It is not necessarily the main statement of the play, but it is one indicative of its level of tension, whether it
involves black and black or white and white. Racists and bigots exist, and the list of oppositions they produce is lengthy: for example, Christian and Jew, Protestant and Catholic, Capulet and Montague. Shakespeare exposes in drama how individuals become victims of discriminatory attitudes, of social mores, and we have to judge whether, in the context of our society rather than his, we can interpret and perform them with their tensions as challenging artefacts for contemporary audiences, in what is our own violent, racist world.
Certainly, in Shakespeare’s play, Iago uses the colour of Othello’s skin, particularly in the opening scenes, to promote a prejudicial opinion of the military leader. Shakespeare parodies Iago by placing in his mouth a series of coarse animalistic descriptions of which the following is perhaps the most striking: ‘Even now, now, very now, an old black ram/Is tupping your white ewe!’ (1.1.87–8). This is the language of extreme right-wing fascism and, as we know, such ultra far-right-wing prejudices are still, sadly, to be found within established political opinion in the West. Shakespeare could not have known this but this tension still comes through in the play in modern interpretation and performance. Iago’s gruff, insulting language is in marked contrast to the measured dignified language employed by Othello when, for example, Brabantio comes with others to arrest him. The dignified General politely assumes control:
Shakespeare- a Complete Introduction Page 22