by F. R. Leavis
O misery, say
O, beware, my lord, of jealousy,
and use the word 'cuckold'. In ninety lines Othello is saying Why did I marry a
The explanation of this quick work is given plainly enough here:
lago: I would not have your free and noble nature Out of self-bounty be abused ; look to't: I know our country disposition well; In Venice they do let heaven see the pranks They dare nor show their husbands; their best conscience Is not to leave't undone, but keep't unknown.
Othello: Dost thou say so ?
lago: She did deceive her father, marrying you;
And when she seem'd to shake and fear your looks, She loved them most.
Othello: And so she did.
There in the first two lines is, explicitly appealed to by lago, 1 Othello's ideal conception of himself: it would be a pity if He let it be his undoing (as it actually was—the full irony lago can hardly be credited with intending). And there, in the last line we have the noble and magnanimous Othello, romantic hero and married lover, accepting as evidence against his wife the fact that, at the willing sacrifice of everything else, she had made with him a marriage of romantic love. lago, like Bradley, points out that Othello didn't really know Desdemona, and Othello acquiesces in considering her as a type—a type outside his experience—the Venetian wife. It is plain, then, that his love is composed very largely of ignorance of self as well as ignorance of her: however nobly he may feel about it, it isn't altogether what he, and Bradley with him, thinks it is. It may be love, but it can be only in an oddly qualified sense love of her: it must be much more a matter of self-centred and self-regarding satisfactions—pride, sensual possessiveness, appetite, love of loving—than he suspects.
This comes out unmistakably when he begins to let himself go; for instance, in the soliloquy that follows lago's exit:
She's gone; I am abused, and my relief Must be to loathe her. O curse of marriage, That we can call these delicate creatures ours, And not their appetites! I had rather be a toad, And live upon the vapour of a dungeon, Than keep a corner in the thing I love For others' uses.
1 Who has described Othello [I, i, 12] as 'loving his own pride and purposes.'
Even the actual presence of Desdemona, who enters immediately upon the close of this soliloquy, can avail nothing against the misgivings of angry egotism. Pointing to his forehead he makes an allusion to the cuckold's horns, and when she in her innocence misunderstands him and offers to soothe the pain he rebuffs her. The element of angry sensuality is insistent:
What sense had I of her stol'n hours of lust ?
I had been happy if the general camp, Pioners and all, had tasted her sweet body,
It is significant that, at the climax of the play, when Othello, having exclaimed
O blood, blood, blood,
kneels to take a formal vow of revenge, he does so in the heroic strain of the 'Othello music*. To lago's
Patience, I say; your mind perhaps may change, he replies:
Never, lago. 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 wide and capable revenge
Swallow them up. Now, by yond marble heaven,
La the due reverence of a sacred vow
I here engage my words.
At this climax of the play, as he sets himself irrevocably in his vindictive resolution, he reassumes formally his heroic self-dramatization—reassumes the Othello of'the big wars that make ambition virtue'. The part of this conscious nobility, this noble egotism, this self-pride that was justified by experience irrelevant to the present trials and stresses, is thus underlined. Othello's self-idealization, his promptness to jealousy and his blindness are shown in their essential relation. The self-idealization is shown as blindness and the nobility as here no longer something real, but the disguise of an obtuse and brutal egotism. Self-pride becomes
stupidity, ferocious stupidity, an insane and self-deceiving passion* The habitual 'nobility' is seen to make self-deception invincible, the egotism it expresses being the drive to catastrophe, Othello*s noble lack of self-knowledge is shown as humiliating and disastrous.
Bradley, however, his knowledge of Othello coinciding virtually with Othello's, sees nothing but the nobility. At the cost of denaturing Shakespeare's tragedy, he insistently idealizes. The 'feelings of jealousy proper', he says (p. 194),* are not the chief or deepest source of Othello's suffering. It is the feeling, "If she be false, oh then Heaven mocks itself;" the feeling, "O lago, the pity of it, lago !"* It is Shakespeare's tragedy of Othello that the man who exclaims this can exclaim three lines later, when he next speaks [IV, i, 204] :
I will chop her into messes* Cuckold me!
Again, three lines further on he says:
Get me some poison, lago; this night. I'll not expostulate with her, lest her body and beauty unprovide my mind again: this night, lago.
This surely has some bearing on the nature of'the pity of it': to equate Bradley's knowledge of Othello with Othello's own was perhaps unfair to Othello.
In any case, this association of strong sensuality with ugly vindictive jealousy is insistent in Shakespeare's play:
Now he tells how she plucked him to my chamber. O, I see that nose of yours, but not that dog I shall throw it to. [IV, i, 140]
I would have him nine years a-killing. A fine woman! a fair woman! a sweet woman! [IV, i, 181]
'O lago, the pity of it, lago !': it is plain here that 'fine', 'fair' and 'sweet' apply, not to Desdemona as a complete person (the immediate provocation is lago's remark, 'she gave it him and he hath given it [the handkerchief] his whore'), but to her person in abstraction from the character of the owner, whom Othello hardly, at this point, respects. And the nature of this regret, this
tragically expressed regret, bears an essential relation to the nature of the love with which Othello, however imaginatively and Romeo-like, loved Desdemona. That romantic idealizing love could be as dubiously grounded in reality as this is an essential condition of the tragedy. But Bradley's own idealizing is invincible. He can even say (p. 197) :
An ineradicable instinct of justice, rather than any last quiver of hope, leads him to question Emilia.
That's no doubt how Othello would have put it; but for the reader—the unidealizing reader—what the questioning of Emilia [IV, ii] shows in brutal, resolute, unrestricted predominance is the antithesis of any instinct of justice.
With obtuseness to the tragic significance of Shakespeare's play goes insensibility to his poetry—to his supreme art as exhibited locally in the verse (it is still not superfluous to insist that the poetic skill is one with the dramatic). This is Bradley's commentary on Act V, Sc. ii:
The supposed death of Cassio [V,i] satiates the thirst for vengeance. The Othello who enters the bed-chamber with the words,
It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,
is not the man of the Fourth Act. The deed he is bound to do is no murder, but a sacrifice. He is to save Desdemona from herself, not in hate but in honour; in honour, and also in love. His anger has passed; a boundless sorrow has taken its place; and
this sorrow's heavenly: It strikes where it doth love.
Even when, at the sight of her apparent obduracy, and at the hearing of words which by a crowning fatality can only reconvince him of her guilt, these feelings give way to others, it is to righteous indignation they give way, not to rage: and, terribly painful as this scene is, there is almost nothing here to diminish the admiration and love which heighten pity. (p. 197.)
That again, no doubt, is how Othello (though as for satiated thirst, he says at line 74,
Had all his hairs been lives, my great revenge Had stomach for them all)
would like to see it. But Bradley,
in the speech he quotes from, misses all the shifts of tone by which Shakespeare renders the shifting confusion of Othello's mind. For it is a speech one might have chosen with the express view of illustrating that subtle command of tone which marks Shakespeare's mature art, and which makes the poetry of Othello so different in kind from that of Romeo and Juliet, and the two dramas consequently incomparable.
It opens with the accent of a contained holy revulsion, the containing power appearing as inexorable, impersonal justice:
It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul!
Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!
It is the cause.
Now comes a shrinking back from the deed:
Yet I'll not shed her blood, Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow And smooth as monumental alabaster.
Tenderness here quite clearly is that characteristic voluptuousness of Othello's which, since it is unassociated with any real interest in Desdemona as a person, slips so readily into possessive jealousy. Now the accent of impersonal justice is heard again—
Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men
—but the accent is so clearly unrelated to any effectual motive in Othello that the concern for justice, the self-bracing to noble sacrifice, appears as self-deception. Next come misgivings over the finality of the deed:
Put out the light, and then put out the light:
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me: but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume. When I have pluck'd the rose
I cannot give it vital growth again,
It must needs wither: I'll smell it on the tree.
Tenderness here is less specifically voluptuous sensuality than it was earlier, but we nevertheless remember:
Get me some poison, lago; this night. I'll not expostulate with her, lest her body and beauty unprovide my mind again: this night, lago.
[IV, i, 208]
And there is in Othello a curious and characteristic effect of self-preoccupation, of preoccupation with his emotions rather than with Desdemona in her own right:
0 balmy breath, that almost dost persuade Justice to break her sword! One more, one more: Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee, And love thee after: one more, and this the last. So sweet was ne'er so fatal. I must weep,
But they are cruel tears: this sorrow's heavenly; It strikes where it doth love. She wakes.
When she is awake and so is no longer a mere body, but a person, it is not sorrowful love or noble self-bracing to a sacrifice that she becomes aware of in Othello:
Alas, why gnaw you so your nether lip ? Some bloody passion shakes your very frame: These are portents.
Moreover, though Othello says
1 would not kill thy unprepared spirit,
actually he refuses her the time to say one prayer.
When he discovers his mistake, his reaction is an intolerably intensified form of the common 'I could kick myself :
Whip me, ye devils
From the possession of this heavenly sight! Blow me about in winds! roast me in sulphr! Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire! O Desdemona! Desdemona! dead! Oh! Oh! Oh!
But he remains the same Othello; he has discovered his mistake, but there is no tragic self-discovery. The speech closing with the lines just quoted is that beginning
Behold, I have a weapon,
one of the finest examples in the play of the self-dramatizing trick. The noble Othello is now seen as tragically pathetic, and he sees himself as pathetic too :
Man but a rush against Othello's breast, And he retires. Where shall Othello go ?
He is ruined, but he is the same Othello in whose essential make-up the tragedy lay: the tragedy doesn't involve the idea of the hero's learning through suffering. The fact that Othello tends to sentimentalize should be the reverse of a reason for our sentimentalizing too.
For even, or rather especially, in that magnificent last speech of his Othello does tend to sentimentalize, 1 though to say that and no more would convey a false impression, for the speech conveys something like the full complexity of Othello's simple nature, and in the total effect the simplicity is tragic and grand. The quiet beginning gives us the man of action with his habit of effortless authority:
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 rekte,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice . . .
Othello really is, we cannot doubt, the stoic-captain whose few words know their full sufficiency: up to this point we cannot say he dramatizes himself, he simply is. But then, in a marvellous way (if we consider Shakespeare's art), the emotion works itself up until in less than half-a-dozen lines die stoic of few words is eloquently weeping. With
Then must you speak Of one that loved not wisely but too well,
the epigrammatic terseness of the dispatch, the dictated dispatch, begins to quiver. Then, with a rising emotional swell, description
1 There is, I find, an admirable note on this speech in Mr T, S. Eliot's essay, Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca.
becomes unmistakably self-dramatization—self-dramatization as un-self-comprehending as before:
Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought,
Perplex'd 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.
Contemplating the spectacle of himself, Othello is overcome with the pathos of it. But this is not the part to die in: drawing himself proudly up, he speaks his last words as the stern soldier who recalls, and re-enacts, his supreme moment of deliberate courage:
Set you down this; And say besides, that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took by the throat the circumcised dog And smote him, thus. [Stabs himself.]
It is a superb coup de theatre.
As, with that double force, a coup de thlatre, it is a peculiarly right ending to the tragedy of Othello. The theme of the tragedy is concentrated in it—concentrated in tbe final speech and action as it could not have been had Othello 'learnt through suffering'. That he should die acting his ideal part is all in the part: the part is manifested here in its Tightness and solidity, and the actor as inseparably the man of action. The final blow is as real as the blow it re-enacts, and the histrionic intent symbolically affirms tbe reality: Othello dies belonging to the world of action in which his true part lay.
That so many readers—Coleridge, Swinburne, Bradley, for instance—not belonging to that world should have found Othello's part irresistibly attractive, in the sense that they have preferred to see the pky through Othello's eyes rather than Shakespeare's, is perhaps not after all surprising. It maybe suggested that the cult of T. E. Lawrence has some relevance here. And Othello
is not merely a glamorous man of action who dominates all companies, he is (as we have all been) cruelly and tragically wronged —a victim of relentless intrigue, and, while remaining noble and heroic, is allowed to appreciate the pathos of his own fate. He has, in fact, all the advantages of that last speech, where the invitation to identify oneself with him is indeed hardly resistible. Who does not (in some moments) readily see himself as the hero of such a coup de theatre ?
The exaltation of lago, it has already been suggested, is a corollary of this response to Othello. What but supremely subtle villainy could have brought to this kind of ruin the hero whose perfect nobility we admire and love
? Bradley concludes that
to compare lago with the Satan of Paradise Lost seems almost absurd, so immensely does Shakespeare's man exceed Milton's fiend in evil, (p. 206.)
However, to be fair to Bradley, we must add that he also finds lago decidedly less great than Napoleon. 1 Nevertheless, even if lago hasn't 'intellectual supremacy', we are to credit him with vast 'intellectual superiority*: 'in intellect . . . and in will. . . lago is great' (p. 219). If we ask the believers in lago's intellect where they find it, they can hardly point to anything immediately present in the text, though it is true that he makes some acute and cynical observations at times. The evidence of his intellect is the success of his plot: if he hadn't had an extraordinary intellect, how could he have succeeded ? That is the essential argument. It is an odd kind of literary criticism. 'The skill of lago was extraordinary/ says Bradley, 'but', he adds, with characteristic scrupulousness, 'so was his good fortune'.
Yes, so was his good fortune—until Shakespeare gave him bad. That it should be possible to argue so solemnly and pertinaciously on the assumption that lago, his intellect and his good fortune belong, like Napoleon and his, to history, may be taken as showing that Shakespeare succeeded in making him plausible enough for the purposes of the drama. And yet even Bradley betrays certain
1 ' But compare him with one who may perhaps be roughly called a bad man of supreme intellectual power, Napoleon, and you see how mean and negative lago's mind is, incapable of his military achievements, much more incapable of his political constructions/ (p. 236.)
misgivings. Noting the astonishing (when one thinks of it) contrast between the devilish reality of lago and the impression he makes on everyone (including his wife) 1 except Roderigo, Bradley comments (p. 217):
What further conclusions can be drawn from it ? Obviously, to begin with, the inference, which is accompanied by a thrill of admiration, that lago's powers of dissimulation and of self-control must have been prodigious . . .
There we have the process by which the prodigious lago is created. But the scrupulous Bradley nevertheless records the passing doubt:
In fact so prodigious does his self-control appear that a reader might be excused for feeling a doubt of its possibility.