Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.
Good signior, you shall more command with years
Than with your weapons.
(1.2.59–61)
Spotlight
What emerges from the play’s dramatic structure is an awareness of a whole series of developing oppositions and a process of manipulation into which the audience is drawn by being invited to form judgements that the dramatic characters themselves have prompted. Of course, it is the playwright who is manipulating the dramatic characters and audience alike, making available to each different levels of knowledge. This mechanism, which critics have called ‘discrepant awareness’, is a familiar strategy in the comedies where the audience is given information denied to the characters themselves. But in the tragedies, and in Othello in particular, it is a major source of tragic irony in that it allows us to see clearly the errors of judgement that the protagonist is forced into making.
Stereotypes
In Macbeth, as we will see in Chapter 20, there is equivocation. What may have been popularly considered to be ‘foul’ is made to look ‘fair’ and vice versa. Something similar occurs in this play in the interaction of black and white. We also find it in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 147, where the dramatist draws a relationship between darkness, evil, night and hell:
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
(13–14)
Some of this, at first sight at least, might offend modern sensibilities, but putting aside the fact for the moment that Shakespeare was writing 400 years ago, we might ask what he is making of such stereotypical images and contradictions in Othello? What we find is that Shakespeare turns the stereotype, Iago, who in some measure does have a relationship with the Vice figure in medieval drama, into a white exemplar of an evil, manipulative and dishonest individual. The reason for his success for most of the play is that he preys upon fears and anxieties with which his victims identify: Brabantio is anxious about his daughter, as any patriarch would be, and that anxiety spreads fears of miscegenation, a prejudice that lurks underneath the surface of Venice and that Iago mobilizes as he pursues his evil scheme. Similarly, Othello is represented both as a black ‘outsider’ or ‘stranger’ and a ‘Noble Moor’, both of which are stereotypes. Thus the play expresses clear racial attitudes and in that reflection, no doubt, racist tendencies within Elizabethan society, indicated in some of the laws that were passed excluding ‘Moors’ from England.
Scholarship has found, for example, that in 1596 the Queen had ‘ten blackmoors (of which kind of people there are already here too many)’ deported and urged her subjects to give up Moors as servants in favour of their ‘own countrymen than with those kind of people’. Julia Briggs observes that ‘the intolerance of the Queen and her officials is even more distressing in view of the fact that most, if not all, of the Africans in England had been brought over by force rather than choice’ (Briggs, J. [1997: 95–6], This Stage-play World: Text and Contexts, 1580–1625. Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Key idea
Shakespeare dares to expose these prejudices on stage, reversing the norm of his society’s expectation. He places virtue with black, evil with white. In doing so he places naivety and goodness with the outsider and exploitation and offence with the Christian European community, foregrounding the foul-mouthed insults and malign actions of the manipulator, Iago, who is both jealous and vengeful. He is, thereby, questioning the moral norms of his own society and its hypocrisy.
Othello the outsider
Shakespeare would probably have known that the Republic of Venice depended for its defence on mercenary soldiers. Outsiders were appointed because Venice was a trading republic and not a military state. One of the play’s literary sources, a novella, Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi, first published in 1565, stimulated Shakespeare’s imagination, although some elements of Othello are found in embryo in the earlier play The Merchant of Venice. What if a prominent outsider fell in love with a daughter of a member of the Venetian ruling class and eloped with her? If, at the same time, Venice were to be in danger from the Turks, how would the politicians react? Would they support the father of the woman who had eloped or try to appease him?
The hypocrisy of government was as much a subject for theatrical exploitation in Shakespeare’s day as it is now. If necessary, the outsider would be tolerated whatever he had done – and in this play we are never quite sure what he has done since the dramatist implies that the father at first encouraged Othello’s relationship with his daughter (1.3.129f.). Make the outsider ‘black’ and the dramatic potential is even greater. Othello intensifies the theme of the outsider, which Shakespeare had developed before in some of the comedies, most notably The Merchant of Venice, but in that comedy his treatment of that outsider (Morocco) reflects rather badly on Portia. In the later play, Brabantio’s curious treatment of Othello, guided by Iago’s and Roderigo’s insinuation, points towards a deep-seated fear of miscegeny that lies beneath the surface of the claim that Venice was known to be hospitable to strangers.
Craftsmanship
In its craftsmanship, Othello confirms what we have already seen as the underlying structure of problems, journeys, arrivals, complications and silence.
The problem is threefold:
• First, Othello, the outsider, has secretly married Brabantio’s daughter, Desdemona.
• Secondly, the Turks are attacking the Venetian island of Cyprus.
• Thirdly, there is the malevolence of Iago towards the General, allegedly as a result of being passed over for promotion.
The journey takes the protagonist to Cyprus, and to a location on the border between Venice and the Ottoman Empire where the Turkish fleet is destroyed. One problem has been solved but others remain. It is on the Cyprus frontier that Iago develops his plot to destroy Othello with jealousy, and he succeeds to the point where Desdemona is publicly abused and finally murdered. The scene of her death begins with an erroneous self-justification on Othello’s part that involves an appeal for justice but in a nameless cause.
But herein lies the complication. The actual self-knowledge or anagnorisis occurs only after Desdemona has been killed, and it is followed by the protagonist’s own characterization of the problem in terms of a confrontation between a ‘Venetian’ and a ‘turbaned Turk’. The result is the death of the protagonist by suicide, although the act itself is expressed in terms of the conflict between a ‘Venetian’ and an ‘outsider’. The ‘Hellish’ agent of the destruction, Iago, meanwhile, remains steadfastly silent but it is expected that torture will loosen his tongue: ‘The time, the place, the torture: O, enforce it!’ (5.2.369). Of course, when Iago next speaks, the play will begin again, rather like the tale that Horatio promises to tell at the end of Hamlet: the play advertises its future performances.
Iago’s motivation
There has been much debate, particularly since the early nineteenth century, about Iago’s motive for what he does. Coleridge coined the term ‘motiveless malignity’ to explain his behaviour. But that debate leads us into the Bradleyan fallacy, which endows a fictional character with a human reality. Of course, in rehearsal, actors such as Lucian Msamati try to find a motive for Iago’s scheme. The works of E. A. J. Honigmann may also be useful to actors in the distinction he makes between the ’motiveless malignity’ and the character’s ‘contemptuousness’. He refers to the passage at 1.3.384f.:
…I hate the Moor
And it is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets
He’s done my office. I know not if’t be true,
But I for mere suspicion in that kind
Will do as if for surety.
The speech concludes with:
The Moor is of a free and open nature
That thinks men honest that but seem to be so,
And will as tenderly be led by th’nose
As asses are.
I have’t, it is engendere
d! Hell and night
Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light.
In an unpublished conversation with me, Terry Hands, the director of the 1985 RSC production with Ben Kingsley as Othello and David Suchet as Iago, was quite explicit about his advice. Iago is jealous because he has been passed over for promotion and also because Othello, whom he loves, has fallen in love with Desdemona. In such a theatre-based interpretation, Iago transposes his own jealousy on to the one he loves, driving Othello to distraction and murder. This is a useful example of how a ‘theatre director’ motivates an interpretation from actors.
What may interest us further is that it is the white man, Iago, who is summoning hell and night. The conflict between fair and foul is not initially, or indeed ultimately, between Othello and Desdemona but between Othello and Iago. Shakespeare in this respect may have manipulated Elizabethan racial assumptions and expectations by reversing that which was thought to be evil with that which was assumed to be good on the part of his contemporary audience. The complication arises because Othello initially disregards his skin colour, as does Desdemona, but the action and society force him to become consistent with his appearance as they, or at least one of their number, force him to move from ‘noble Moor’ to ‘black devil’. Both alternatives are kept before us throughout the play, and this division within the figure of the protagonist remains at the end as Shakespeare wrote it. There is racism in this play, just as there is violence in the plays of Edward Bond, which raises tough questions of the audience in exposing and not reinforcing prejudices.
Truth and falsehood
Whether portrayed by a black or a white actor, Iago is created as a manipulative character inviting the spectators on the stage and in the theatre into his confidence, thus setting up a bridge between the fictional world of the play and the extra-theatrical reality of the audience. In this, he certainly resembles the medieval figure of Vice, attracting and amusing spectators, inviting their complicity and diverting them with comedy. Shakespeare has created a confidence trickster that the audience may well find attractive.
There may be critical debate over Iago’s motives, but those he does reveal are always plausible even if they are, sometimes, by his own admission, fanciful. In being taken into his humour, the audiences gradually realize that they too are victims of liking and trusting him. His appeals to them are part of the complex web of suggestion and persuasion that involves questions of proof and the manipulation of evidence; indeed, it is no accident that the play raises issues of ‘truth’ and ‘falsehood’ that the audience cannot fully resolve. For example, what has led up to Desdemona’s elopement? What has her father done to encourage the relationship between her and Othello? Who is Bianca? What is her relationship with Cassio?
In short, the audience is asked to go through the same process of evaluating evidence that Roderigo, Brabantio, Cassio and, finally, Othello are confronted with on stage. There, only the Duke of Venice relies on established fact, withholding judgement about the destination of the Turkish fleet until he has received all the evidence about its strategic movements, and this exemplary behaviour is preceded by two examples (Roderigo and, especially, Brabantio) where the evidence has already been distorted by Iago to have the desired effect on his victims. What happens to them (and later to Cassio) are dry runs for the much more devastating assault on Othello.
Even when audiences reflect on Othello’s tragic error in accepting Iago’s story about the whereabouts and destiny of Desdemona’s handkerchief as proof of her infidelity, they remain divided both within and outside the frame of the illusion that Shakespeare has created. William Empson, in his essay ‘Honest in Othello’, noted over 50 uses of the words ‘honesty’ or ‘honest’ in the play. (Peter Davison’s count in The Critics Debate is 56 [1988: 50].) This repetition, as Empson suggests, allows the words to accumulate irony, similar to the way in which Mark Antony’s subtle manipulation of his onstage audience in Julius Caesar (1599) in the ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ speech (3.2.74f.) gradually undermines the case that Brutus has already made for the murder of Caesar. Othello contains a further twist to this rhetorical subtlety since the audience, unlike the characters, having been taken in by Iago, come to realize just how hollow the epithet ‘honest’ is when applied to the character. Of course, all the manipulation is Shakespeare’s, as he creates an engagement with but eventual withdrawal from Iago’s character.
Who is the protagonist?
One issue that has interested critics, commentators and theatre practitioners alike is the question of who the protagonist is in Othello. Is it Iago or Othello, or both? Martin Wine discusses the relationship between the two characters in twentieth-century productions:
‘We cannot be sure how Iago was played in Shakespeare’s day. Possibly he…was hissed and booed as a Machiavellian villain. But there seems no doubt that Richard Burbage’s Othello, remembered and praised long after his death, was not too small for the Globe stage. We do not know who his Iago was.’
Wine, M. L. (1984: 66), Othello: Text and Performance. London: Macmillan
A balance has to be found to sustain the relationship between the two characters across the entire play. Some Iagos have tried to dominate the play through their humour and their studied intimacy with the audience. Some have been kept down by ‘star’ performers in the role of Othello. When balance is lost, so are integrity and coherence. This balance permits us to think of Othello as a play involving a fall, through manipulation. Shakespeare exposes a love being led to destruction, with the protagonist-turned-murderer asking pitifully, ‘Where should Othello go?’ (5.2.271). There is nowhere for him to go. It is Iago, ironically, who takes a vow of silence: ‘From this time forth I never will speak word’ (5.2.303). He is, as Greenblatt says, ‘cut off from original motive and final disclosure. The only termination possible in his case is not revelation but silence’ (1980: 236–7). Silence is silence but the causes of silence vary. As Wine succinctly puts it, Iago’s retreat into silence places him ‘once and for all outside the pale of humanity’ (1984: 35).
Spotlight
In contrast to his treatment of Iago, Shakespeare almost parodies his tragic creation of the Moor, who calls for quiet before embarking on a rhetorical tour de force: ‘Soft you, a word or two before you go’ (5.2.338). The ‘Soft you’ calls for the audience’s attention as much as it does for that of the characters on stage:
Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely, but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe;
(5.2.342–8)
The protagonist here gives an epilogue before killing himself. Shakespeare is still tempting us to question, to judge. Do we agree or disagree? Is this what we have witnessed? Is this a perverse judgement that Othello turns upon himself as a means of rectifying the murder he has committed? Is this justice? Of course, in dramatic terms the active protagonist cannot be allowed to sink into inactivity. Othello’s ending is a dramatization of the main conflict in the play, and it is one that is geographically located on a frontier between the ideal republic (Venice), which, as in The Merchant of Venice, falls a little short of the ‘ideal’, and her hostile adversary (the Turks):
And say besides that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turbanned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by th’throat the circumcised dog
And smote him – thus!
(5.2.352–6)
Shakespeare portrays Othello, the outsider, as acting for Venice to the last, executing himself as he had done her traditional ‘malignant’ enemy. We may wonder if, through the machinations of the Iago character, Shakespeare may have been prompting us to consider still whether this fictional m
an was himself a victim of the Venetian state or whether, as he claims, a figure who ‘loved not wisely but too well’. In a world still riven by racial and religious conflict, it is for us to decide and for us to reconsider, as it will be for the generations that follow.
19
King Lear (1605–6)
In our journey through Shakespeare’s plays, we have now come to the play that many consider to be his finest achievement, King Lear. It is a play widely regarded today as one of the most significant works of art in Western culture. It emphasizes a more extreme version of Hamlet’s ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ (Hamlet, 3.1.58), boldly placing them on stage as an expression of the precarious realities of experience.
If we begin to interpret the play, however, through, for example, Aristotelian theories of audience reaction (catharsis), we have to take care that we do not obscure the difficulties that are not fully or satisfactorily resolved at the end. Are we offered anything to offset the bleakness of the play’s vision, and is all restored in the conclusion to some sort of ‘balance’?
Modern materialist criticism, as exemplified by Terry Eagleton, Malcolm Evans or Terence Hawkes, provides different radical perceptions of the play. John Drakakis notes that Eagleton’s materialist approach, for example, is one where ‘King Lear generates a rhetoric which devalues language’. It thereby ‘introduces a contradiction into the process of sign production whereby language is urged to surpass material reality at the same time as it is contained by it’ (Drakakis, J. [1996: 388–9]).
Shakespeare- a Complete Introduction Page 23