The Sultan and the Queen

by Jerry Brotton

  Her father loved me, oft invited me,

  Still questioned me the story of my life

  From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes

  That I have passed.

  I ran it through, even from my boyish days

  To the very moment that he bade me tell it,

  Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,

  Of moving accidents by flood and field,

  Of hair-breadth scapes i’ th’ imminent deadly breach,

  Of being taken by the insolent foe

  And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence,

  And portance in my traveler’s history,

  Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,

  Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven,

  It was my hint to speak. Such was my process,

  And of the cannibals that each other eat,

  The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads

  Do grow beneath their shoulders. This to hear

  Would Desdemona seriously incline.58

  The speech has shades of Tamburlaine in its high-flown rhetoric—the young Othello sounds as if he could have fought for the Scythian emperor—but the point is not so much his warriorlike feats as the seductive quality of his storytelling. Othello describes how he was invited by Brabantio to tell the story of his life as a boy soldier (from the age of seven, as he tells the senators). His exotic tales of his travels, including epic battles and encounters with the monstrous races of Anthropophagi (cannibals) and headless monsters enthralled Desdemona.59 If Shakespeare had read Pliny’s fantastical tales of Africa, then he could also have come across reports of slavery, warfare and vast wealth gathered by English travelers like Jasper and George Thomson, who regaled readers back home with stories of gold, unicorns, dwarfs and concubines.

  What is particularly striking about Othello’s speech is his description of how he ended up in Venice. We assume that as a Moor he grew up in Morocco (or what Shakespeare calls “Mauretania” later in the play), but his childhood is a blank. He claims to have been captured “by the insolent foe,” to have been sold into slavery and then to have experienced some form of “redemption.” Intriguingly, for the Elizabethans, “redemption” meant both “delivered from sin” and “freed from slavery”: Othello is bought, set free and offered salvation through the sacrament of baptism to become the first Christian Moor on the Elizabethan stage. This would suggest that the “insolent foe” is the Turk who captured and sold Othello as a galley slave before Christians rescued and converted him. What he does not say is if he was born a Muslim, or a pagan, like many other Berbers in sixteenth-century Mauretania. Whatever the case, the audience is presented with a character who moves with suspicious ease from one religion to another. Having turned away from one religion, might he not just as easily embrace another?

  There were various examples of conversion from which Shakespeare could have drawn inspiration, notably that of Chinano the Turk, baptized at St. Katharine’s Church in 1586 (see chapter 6). There was also the case of al-Wazzan, or Leo Africanus, as described in his book A Geographical Historie of Africa. If, as many believe, Shakespeare read al-Wazzan, he would have discovered that many inhabitants of Mauretania were categorized as “pagans.” Like Othello, al-Wazzan had converted to Christianity after being captured by Christian pirates while returning to Fez from Cairo in 1518. Like Othello his birth name was discarded in favor of a Christian name—and only he knew how far his baptism was genuine. Just seven years later, he returned to North Africa and seems to have reverted to Islam.60 Then there was al-Annuri, another Moor around whose identity contradictory suppositions revolved, someone who spoke well and thought much of himself, but who some claimed was from Fez, and therefore not a “true” Sa’adian Moroccan; indeed, according to al-Mansur, his ambassador was a Muslim-born Morisco, forcibly converted to Christianity, who at some point had reverted to Islam. Whatever his exact origins, al-Annuri offered another example of how religious conversion was accepted as part of the fabric of imperial and diplomatic business.

  Listening to Othello’s enigmatic yet captivating tales of romance, monsters and warfare, the duke is forced to admit, “I think this tale would win my daughter too.” Shakespeare gives his “extravagant” stranger a history so that he stands before us, unlike Iago, as he is and declares: “This only is the witchcraft I have used.”61

  With Brabantio defeated, Othello agrees to travel to Cyprus to lead the “war against the Ottomites.” Having just clandestinely married Othello, Desdemona then pleads successfully to travel with her husband. Brabantio walks out, delivering the valedictory lines:

  Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see:

  She has deceived her father, and may thee.62

  By the close of the first act, with Othello bound for Cyprus, the play looks as though it may end as a comedy. Like so many of Shakespeare’s early comedies, this play has two apparently mismatched lovers facing the wrath of a father and the machinations of a malcontent intent on ruining the relationship. By retreating to another world, like a forest or an island, the ensuing conflict and chaos are resolved and everyone is reconciled. But in Othello, as soon as the action moves to Cyprus, the play swerves away from comedy and irrevocably toward tragedy.

  Upon landing in Cyprus, an advance party of Venetians discover that a “desperate tempest hath so banged the Turks / That their designment halts” and their fleet is scattered. Othello arrives and announces with grandiloquent complacency “our wars are done, the Turks are drowned.”63 It seems as though the Turkish threat was just an awkward plot device to get the protagonists to Cyprus, but Shakespeare transforms the Turk gradually from a military into a more insidious threat. When Iago engineers a drunken brawl between Roderigo and the lieutenant Michael Cassio, Othello intervenes, horrified at their divisions in contrast to the famed Turkish military discipline:

  Are we turned Turks, and to ourselves do that

  Which heaven hath forbid the Ottomites?

  For Christian shame, put by this barbarous brawl.64

  The idea was familiar to many who knew Erasmus’s warning in his essay “On the War Against the Turks”: that if Christians wanted to eradicate the Turk they must first expel from their hearts the “Turkish” traits of ambition, anger, hatred and envy. Yet these are precisely the vices that Iago has unleashed in Cyprus and which he cultivates in Othello as he tries to persuade him that Desdemona has been unfaithful with Cassio.

  As Othello begins to accept this “monstrous” deception, he and Iago take on Turkish traits and become increasingly as cruel and deceitful. The audience know from early on in the play that Iago will destroy Othello in part because the former’s name is the Spanish for James. St. James, or Santiago, is the patron saint of Spain, popularly known as Matamoros—the “Moor-killer.”65 Iago has flirted with the idea that he too might turn Turk, joking with his wife, Emilia, and Desdemona that women are sexually duplicitous “or else I am a Turk.”66 Othello also invites the comparison. Once Iago has convinced him of Desdemona’s adultery, they make a pact to kill her, which Iago fears Othello will renounce. The geographical grandeur of Othello’s response is reminiscent of Tamburlaine:

  Never, Iago. Like to the Pontic sea

  Whose icy current and compulsive course

  Ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on

  To the Propontic and the Hellespont,

  Even so my bloody thoughts with violent pace

  Shall ne’er look back, ne’er ebb to humble love

  Till that a capable and wide revenge

  Swallow them up.67

  Othello’s vengeance is as irreversible as the sea flowing into the ocean. The one he chooses is not accidental. The Pontus, or Black Sea, flows past Constantinople into the Propontis, or Sea of Marmara, before debouching into the Aegean via the Hellespont or Dardanelles. By associating him with the
iconic topography of the Ottoman Empire, Shakespeare adds another layer to Othello’s already complex identity: Moor, convert, pagan, revert and finally murderous raging Turk.

  Even as Othello starts to behave like an Ottoman Turk, Desdemona travels in the opposite direction, until she makes a final extraordinary identification with Barbary. In the fourth act, Othello accuses Desdemona publicly of infidelity and hits her before sending her to her bedchamber with her serving woman Emilia, Iago’s wife. In one of the most poignant and intimate scenes in the whole play, known as the “Willow Song” scene, Desdemona is undressed for bed by Emilia, and they discuss marriage and infidelity. Emilia attacks Othello for slandering Desdemona, but Desdemona defends him, saying “my love doth so approve him”68 that she forgives his anger. Suddenly she remembers a song from her childhood, the “Willow Song,” an old Tudor refrain about a spurned, doomed lover:

  My mother had a maid called Barbary:

  She was in love, and he she loved proved mad

  And did forsake her. She had a song of “willow,”

  An old thing ’twas, but it expressed her fortune

  And she died singing it. That song tonight

  Will not go from my mind. I have much to do,

  But to go hang my head all at one side,

  And sing it like poor Barbary.69

  She starts to sing the song of Barbary’s abandonment by her lover but as she comes to the end of the first verse she misremembers its last line: “Let nobody blame him, his scorn I approve— / Nay, that’s not next.”70 It is one of the play’s most devastating moments: Desdemona admits she loves Othello so much she even approves of his public humiliation of her reputation, even though she has done nothing wrong. She alters the song to fit her own circumstances, not only mistaking the last line but also changing the gender of the spurned lover from male to female.71

  For just a moment she becomes her mother’s Barbary maid. “Barbary” suggests the woman came from Barbary, a loyal servant (or possibly slave) of the Venetian state without her birth name—not unlike Othello, the Moor of Venice, and the Barbary horse of Iago’s insults. Desdemona identifies herself as a Barbary maid while Othello has been tempted to turn Turk. They have both undergone a “monstrous” and irrevocable metamorphosis, and within hours both will be dead.

  Once he murders Desdemona and discovers his terrible mistake, Othello turns on the “demi-devil” Iago, to ask why he “ensnared my soul and body.”72 In one of the most chilling couplets uttered by any of Shakespeare’s villains, Iago describes himself as a mute slave, which evokes immediate associations with the Ottomans:

  Demand me nothing. What you know, you know.

  From this time forth I never will speak word.73

  He never speaks again and is led off to be tortured; like another “demi-devil,” his predecessor Aaron, death is too good for him.

  Having realized the tragedy of his situation, Othello prepares to take his own life, but not before he undergoes one final shocking transformation. As the Venetians try to arrest him, he ends where he began, telling a story:

  Soft you; a word or two before you go.

  I have done the state some service, and they know’t.

  No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,

  When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

  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; of one whose subdued eyes,

  Albeit unused to the melting mood,

  Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees

  Their medicinal gum. Set you down this,

  And say besides that in Aleppo once,

  Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk

  Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,

  I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog

  And smote him—thus!

  [He stabs himself.]74

  Ever the fabulist, Othello asks that the Venetian authorities be told one last story of his exploits as a loyal servant of the state. It includes his naive deception at the hands of Iago, and how he lost the precious “pearl” Desdemona.

  Nowhere in this speech does Othello mention his own ethnic identity. He compares himself first to an Indian, and then to a Turk. Both comparisons are riddled with contradictions. His behavior toward Desdemona is like that of an Indian who threw away a pearl richer than all his tribe. “Indian” is the word used in the 1622 Quarto version of the play, but the 1623 Folio version has “Iudean.” It is a crux that goes to the heart of who Othello is. Pliny spoke of the wealth of India and the supposed ignorance of its inhabitants who discarded pearls, though Shakespeare could also have been referring to Native American Indians.

  Most modern editors choose the Quarto’s “Indian,” even though when confronted with cruxes elsewhere their default position is to choose the Folio’s version, as it is seen as the “better,” later text. Racially it seems obvious to align the Moor with an Indian rather than a “Iudean,” or Jew. But, as we have seen, the Elizabethans were convinced that Jews and Muslims were as one in refusing to accept Jesus as the Son of God. The “Iudean” of the Folio could refer to either Judas Iscariot’s betrayal of Christ or Herod’s execution of his wife, Mariamne, both of which make absolute sense as metaphors for Othello’s behavior.75 Which was correct? Did Shakespeare change his mind in revising his text, or did someone else quietly amend it? We will probably never know, but it is striking that this irresolvable crux captures Othello’s overdetermined character, part Muslim, Christian, Jew and even pagan.

  It is a conflation that finds its most extraordinary conclusion in the final lines. Othello takes us to Aleppo, the Syrian city where Anthony Jenkinson first met Süleyman the Magnificent fifty years before, where al-Annuri had claimed he was heading, and which today has a very different tragic resonance. Othello has traveled a long way east from his homeland in Barbary, via Venice and Cyprus deep into the Ottoman Empire, into Arabia with its “medicinal” trees, and finally to Syria. The Turk he kills is “turbaned” and “circumcised,” a sign that these are not attributes he shares. If he is not circumcised, then surely he cannot have been born a Muslim. Nor does he share sartorial affinities with the ostentatiously turbaned al-Annuri. But in acting out his stabbing of the Turk, Othello enacts the most remarkable moment of tragic self-division in all of Shakespeare. He has been interpreted as a loyal Christian soldier, atoning for his sins by defending Venice against the Turk and killing the heresy within himself, or as finally embracing his true barbarism as a demonic, murderous apostate, who becomes the raging, violent Turk, the culmination of a generation of plays depicting the Ottomans. He is of course both simultaneously: a profoundly ambivalent figure who embodies so much of Elizabethan England’s contradictory relations with the Islamic world. Here, in the split second of saying “thus,” Othello briefly becomes a Turk.

  Othello was the culmination of more than a decade of the Elizabethan theater’s fascination with Turks and Moors. Just two years earlier Shakespeare had written Hamlet, a revenge tragedy that eclipsed all previous examples and redefined the genre. Othello did something similar in combining every facet of the Muslim characters that had appeared on the stage up to that point. It drew on the bombast of Tamburlaine, the evil of Aaron, the melancholic grandeur of the Prince of Morocco and the raging Turk buried deep within Henry V. The audience, then as now, are not asked to sympathize with Othello, but to delight guiltily in the dreadful prejudices and violent fantasies unleashed by this most ambivalent of characters and by his nemesis Iago, safe in the knowledge that it was, after all, just a performance.

  Although he co
uld not have known it, Shakespeare wrote Othello at the zenith of Elizabethan England’s relationship with the Muslim world, which was about to come to an abrupt end. Queen Elizabeth never saw the play. She died on March 24, 1603, at the age of sixty-nine. She had ruled her kingdom for forty-five years, during which time she had repelled foreign Catholic invasion, firmly established Protestantism as the state religion, established a stable if unwieldy government and expanded her commercial and political interests abroad, nowhere more successfully than in the Islamic world. She was succeeded by her cousin the Scottish Stuart king James VI, who would rule as James I. He was under no illusions that Elizabeth would be a hard act to follow, and that the country he inherited required immediate links to the rest of Europe if it was to have any hope of future prosperity.

  James, guided by Robert Cecil, opened negotiations for peace with Catholic Spain almost immediately. He was eager to bring England back into the economic and political life of Europe after half a century of self-imposed exile. In the summer of 1604, another embassy arrived from the south, but this time the ambassador was Spanish and Catholic. All thought of a Moroccan-English alliance against Spain had passed, as James had no more appetite for waging war overseas. That August, Spanish and English diplomats signed the Treaty of London, ending nineteen years of war between the two kingdoms. It was a tacit acknowledgment—albeit with grave circumspection—of Protestant England’s right to exist within Christian Europe. King James had ended England’s diplomatic isolation from the rest of Europe.

  In that same month Ahmad al-Mansur died of the plague. His three sons fought for the right to succeed him, and the kingdom of Morocco descended into a bloody civil war that temporarily put an end to all diplomatic and commercial relations with England. Elizabeth’s other great Muslim ally, Sultan Mehmed III, had died of a sudden heart attack in December 1603, nine months after her. Mehmed had spent most of his eight-year reign battling unrest abroad and within his troublesome court, with little time to cultivate his father’s alliance with Elizabeth. As the Spanish and English sat down at Somerset House to agree to the Treaty of London, the only visible sign that remained of the Anglo-Ottoman alliance was the large carpet atop the table between them.