by Emma Smith
Immediately after they leave Claudio, the disguised Duke makes his own proposal to Isabella, that she ‘may most uprighteously do a poor wronged lady a merited benefit, redeem your brother from the angry law, do no stain to your own gracious person, and much please the absent Duke’ (3.1.201–5). In order to snatch this marvellous victory from the unpropitious moment in the plot, he quickly summons into being a new character: ‘Have you not heard speak of Mariana’? (210). Sketching out Mariana’s backstory as Angelo’s jilted fiancée begins to establish the new coordinates of a comic resolution (rather as the entrance of Sebastian in Twelfth Night opens up the solution for that play’s romantic entanglements). Elaborate plots of trickery are associated with comedy, and projecting a tawdry scenario in which Mariana will take Isabella’s place in Angelo’s bed seems a shot in the arm for the reticent Duke, who speaks more and more freely here, when organizing how Mariana will be deployed to resolve the plot, than he has at any point hitherto. Significantly, Isabella is reduced to short statements of assent. The Duke is in the play’s next scene too, this time giving moral instruction to two of the play’s low-life characters and hearing from the irrepressible Lucio some home truths about his own reputation. Lucio contrasts the upright and cold Angelo, who, ‘when he makes water his urine is congealed ice’ (3.1.374), with the humanly carnal absent Duke, who ‘had some feeling of the sport’ (383) and, in a lovely phrase with an obscure suggestion of friskiness, ‘had crochets in him’ (391). Later the Duke prompts his loyal lord Escalus to describe their ruler, and hears himself judged ‘a gentleman of all temperance’ (3.1.494–5). At the end of the scene he delivers a curious, incantatory soliloquy of general wisdom and plot summary, seeming, momentarily, to be in an old folktale or nursery rhyme:
Craft against vice I must apply.
With Angelo tonight shall lie
His old betrothèd but despisèd.
So disguise shall, by th’ disguisèd,
Pay with falsehood false exacting,
And perform an old contracting.
(3.1.533–8)
The Duke’s hyperactivity in resolving the play out of its distinctly un-comic generic doldrums reaches its feverish climax in Measure for Measure’s long final act. He runs on and off stage, alternating speeches in his own person and his friar’s disguise. He prompts the other characters to their lines, arranges them in scenes and revelations, and delivers judgement on their conduct. He threatens Angelo with death, forces him to marry Mariana and then commutes his death sentence; he maintains that Claudio is dead and then reveals him, living and mute; he punishes the loose-tongued Lucio with marriage to his pregnant ‘punk’, Kate Keepdown (5.1.511); he threatens to sack the Provost; he agrees to pardon an unrepentant murderer on death row. The scene lasts about forty-five minutes in the theatre, and its sheer length and demands on the actor playing the Duke are an index of what hard work it is to get the play back on track. This final bravura effort to bring the play under control has to move it from punishment, abandonment and death (the terrain of tragedy) into forgiveness, reconciliation and marriage (the world of comedy). The Duke’s determination to produce a comedy from this generic train-crash runs roughshod over his characters. Like Claudio earlier in prison, Angelo resolutely declares: ‘I crave death more willingly than mercy’ (5.1.475); his last chance for dramatic dignity is to end as the tragic hero of his own play, felled by his fatal flaw of concupiscence. No such luck! He is to take his allotted place, married, in a forced comic ending. Claudio and Juliet are brought together on stage, but given no words to help the Duke’s relentless drive to a happy ending. Nor are brother and sister reconciled after their rift in the prison. The pardoned reprobate Barnardine has no words of repentance or gratitude. Lucio strongly resents his allocation: ‘Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death, whipping, and hanging’ (5.1.521–2); the Duke is clear that his marriage is designedly punitive: ‘Slandering a prince deserves it’ (523). Charlotte Lennox’s description of the play’s content tortured into comedy with which we began is here literalized. The conventional ending of romantic comedy – marriage – here becomes the dramatic equivalent of the torturer’s rack.
That marriage might be punishment rather than reward is the upshot of the Duke’s manic generic stage-management. It is an end to the comedy that is indeed an end of comedy. Measure for Measure is post-romantic in its unflinching depiction of a disconnect between tone and form. It places un-comic characters in an un-comic settings and then works overtime to bring them to a comic conclusion. How much do you want a comedy? Shakespeare seems to be asking, and how far will you go to get one? At the play’s queasy conclusion, the Duke attempts a cheerful tableau of romantic comedy, lining up his couples for a final smiling snapshot. But there is nothing to laugh at here: Claudio is silently traumatized by prison and self-loathing; Mariana has committed herself to a man desperate to escape her; Kate Keepdown gets no say at all in being palmed off on Lucio; and as for Isabella – she is abused and manipulated throughout this sequence of reversals and fiats by the Duke, who then tries to coerce her into marriage. Like the contemporary play All’s Well that Ends Well, the end of Measure for Measure shows us that a comedy is more than its ending.
CHAPTER 14
Othello
Interviewed by the apartheid state police about his performance of Othello at the Market Theatre, Johannesburg, in 1987, the black actor John Kani defended a number of interpretative choices in his passionate scenes with Desdemona, played by the white actor Joanna Weinberg. The police chief accused him of piggybacking on Shakespeare to foment ‘a communist plot to attack the State’s racial segregation policies. You people deliberately broke the Immorality Act on stage, in front of a white audience, who were disgusted by all the love and kissing scenes you put in the play.’ Recalling this brave production, directed by Janet Suzman, Kani later identified Othello as ‘a play that is woven into the struggle for equality in South Africa’, and its title character ‘one of the most important roles for an African’. He added, ‘Even today, Othello still makes people uncomfortable.’ He located his own particular discomfort with the play in the character of Iago, who is alive and resistant at the end of Othello: ‘that bothers me, that Shakespeare leaves racism alive in some way’. For Kani, both Shakespeare’s play and Suzman’s apartheid-era production were on the side of racial equality, on the side of the central couple whose love, temporarily at least, crosses a racial divide. Suzman’s was the necessary Othello for its time and place, just as the Othello burlesques that flourished around abolitionist controversies in early nineteenth-century England, Paul Robeson’s New York performances during the Second World War, and the 2015 Royal Shakespeare Company production that cast both Othello and Iago as black, were the necessary versions for theirs. In its ongoing encounters with changed racial and sexual politics, Othello has always been able to transform itself.
One of Shakespeare’s most extraordinary claims on our modern attention is the capacity of his plays to anticipate our contemporary worldview. To some extent, of course, this is confirmation bias: we are taught that Shakespeare is humanely and timelessly relevant and therefore we are primed to discover it in his works. But it also seems to be an intrinsic quality of his opaque characterization, capacious plotting and ambiguous poetry. Shakespeare’s gappy dramaturgy appears to allow a particular space for us, now, with our current concerns hatched in a world far from the narrow London streets and wooden stage boards of his early modern imagination. This sense of a Shakespeare ‘not for an age’, as his contemporary Ben Jonson confidently predicted in 1623, ‘but for all time’ has done much to reify Shakespeare’s contemporary reputation as a prophet of our age. It also suggests that in part Shakespeare’s appeal is a narcissistic one, reflecting back to us our own anxieties and preconceptions. Shakespeare appeals to us because it is about us. This mirror model of relevance can overemphasize empathic similarity over historical distance. Othello is a vivid example of this tendency. Because attitudes to race, diff
erence and belonging continue to reverberate across our cultures, Othello has been subject to extraordinarily divergent interpretations; because the play has been so culturally significant, it has itself become a founding document in cultural difference and racialized identities. It is already implicated in the formulation of the categories and assumptions that we might want to use to investigate it.
Othello is the tragedy of a black man in a white world, persuaded that his innocent wife has been unfaithful to him, and prompted by jealousy to murder her. Recent criticism has been preoccupied by the meaning of Othello’s race for the modern academy. Is this a racist play in which a black man is driven to homicidal rage, revealing that his civilization is only skin-deep? Or a plea for a more tolerant society in which Othello and Desdemona’s marriage might flourish? Most contemporary critics have been more comfortable arguing that the play interrogates racism and racist categories, and that it shows us an Othello whose race is significant not because it makes him essentially savage, but because it exposes him to the terrible psychic vulnerability of being an outsider. In these readings, race functions as a social construct – an issue for a society rather than a defect of an individual. We might see that Othello’s own apparent equation of black skin and moral failure – ‘My name, that was as fresh / As Dian’s visage, is now begrimed and black / As mine own face’ (3.3.391–3) – registers his internalization of racist norms in Venetian culture, a society in which he is initially welcome at Brabantio’s house, until he steps over the line and marries his daughter. Characters in the play repeatedly denigrate Othello (the word ‘denigrate’, not coincidentally, comes from Latin denigrare, or ‘to blacken’), or describe him in racial terms. It is made clear to him that he does not belong, so the play reveals, and makes us sympathize with, this isolated outsider position.
But the play’s dramaturgy is marked by its own institutional racism too. In focusing our attention on Iago, rather than on Othello, it makes us complicit in the Moor’s downfall. In giving us, from the very beginning, a clear view of Iago’s malignity, it presents as credulous Othello’s implicit trust in his ensign: we never ourselves experience that blokeish charm of ‘Honest Iago’ (2.3.170 and repeated throughout). This means we observe rather than empathize with Othello’s ‘free and open nature / That thinks men honest that but seem to be so’ (1.3.391–2). A voyeuristic preoccupation with Othello and Desdemona’s sex life structures the entire drama, from the vividly pornographic image of the tupping ‘black ram’ presented to her horrified father (1.1.88), to the final scene in the couple’s wedding sheets with a bed brought onto the stage. It is striking that every time the couple seem to be offstage in bed together, some plot convulsion is manufactured to disturb them. In the opening scene, Iago’s nocturnal rant to Brabantio results in an armed party searching ‘where we may apprehend her and the Moor’ (1.1.179); news of the Turkish armada requires Othello’s ‘haste-post-haste’ (1.2.37) appearance before the consuls; on Cyprus, a drunken brawl between former friends described by Iago as ‘like bride and groom’ (2.3.173) rouses first Othello and then Desdemona: ‘’Tis the soldier’s life / To have their balmy slumbers waked with strife’ (2.3.251–2). The play is fascinated and disturbed by its own spectacle of interracial sexuality as it homes in on the ultimate object of its erotic obsession, that bed. And although Othello is a much more complex character than a previous Shakespearean Moor, the saturnine Aaron in the early tragedy Titus Andronicus, that play is more able to contemplate the fruits of interracial sex. It’s not clear what happens at the end of Titus to the baby born of the relationship between the Moor and his white lover Tamora, but it is a sign of Othello’s more constrained imagination that some critics have even wanted to wonder whether or not Othello and Desdemona ever consummate their relationship – perhaps with the underlying racist feeling that it would have been preferable if they hadn’t.
Let’s look back at how Shakespeare structures the first act of his play to show just how problematic the marriage between his Othello and Desdemona is. The whole of Act 1 takes place at night. In the first scene, Iago and Roderigo rouse the sleeping senator Brabantio with coarse revelations about his daughter’s elopement. In the second scene, Othello is talking with Iago, who is disingenuously warning him about the ‘raisèd father’ (1.2.29). A party with lights approaches Othello, and naturally we, like Iago, assume that this is Brabantio’s armed posse. But no, it is the Duke’s servants summoning Othello for an urgent military conference on Cyprus to which he is ‘hotly called’ (44). In the next scene these two stories come together: in one narrative, the elopement of a daughter without her father’s permission, Othello is potentially at fault; in the other, the attack on Cyprus by the Turkish fleet, Othello is potentially the saviour. A sardonically rhyming exchange makes the equivalence clear: as the Duke tries to cheer Brabantio up after the news that Desdemona has willingly chosen Othello for her husband, he urges him to accept the inevitable. ‘When remedies are past, the griefs are ended / By seeing the worst which late on hopes depended … The robbed that smiles steals something from the thief; / He robs himself that spends a bootless grief’ (1.3.201–8). The sing-song tone of the couplets is patronizing: the very form of the verse here attempts to gloss the disharmony of the transgressive marriage into neatly aligned pairs. Brabantio’s reply is telling: ‘So let the Turk of Cyprus us beguile, / We lose it not so long as we can smile’ (209–10). If I’m to accept the loss of my daughter, then you accept the loss of Cyprus.
That the elopement of Desdemona and Othello is a microcosm, or metaphor, for a broader geopolitics is hinted at but never developed. Should we see these lovers as caught in a wider conflict not of their own making – a cross-cultural Romeo and Juliet, or a bourgeois Antony and Cleopatra? Is the conflict between Venice and the Ottomans an exotic background for a domestic tragedy about the violent breakdown of a marriage, or is the marriage the crucible for the broader discussion about the fundamental and savage incompatibility of different cultures in the play’s imagination?
Shakespeare wrote the part of Othello for the same leading actor who played Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth and numerous other roles: Richard Burbage. An anonymous elegy on Burbage’s death in 1619, which plays with the idea that now all his roles have finally died with him, mentions among them ‘the grieved Moor’. Othello’s passionate decline would have given the virtuoso Burbage a chance to show off his talents: another obituarist observed ‘no man can act so well / This point of sorrow’. We know from evidence relating to other contemporary entertainments that various prosthetics were used on stage to create the illusion of blackness, including woolly wigs and face paint. That Othello is racially different from the rest of the cast on the stage would have been an important element of the visual experience of seeing the play performed, and it is also made prominent in the early printed editions, which carry the prominent subtitle or alternative title, ‘The Moor of Venice’.
‘Moor’ is a word with dense historical associations. Two meanings jostle. One is geographical: the Moor is an inhabitant of Mauritania in North Africa (present-day Morocco and Algeria). The second, associated but not entirely identical with this, is a more general religious designation – Moor meaning ‘Muslim’. Much critical ink has been spilled on whether Shakespeare intended Othello to be understood as an ethnically marked inhabitant of North Africa, like the noble and exotic Arab trade delegation of Barbary ambassadors who visited the Elizabethan court in 1600, where Shakespeare, performing with the Chamberlain’s Men, may well have encountered them. An alternative is that the repeated epithet ‘black’ – Iago’s ‘black ram’ or his sneering toast to ‘the health of black Othello’ (2.3.28–9) – coupled with Roderigo’s description of ‘thick-lips’ (1.1.66) – suggest later racial typing of sub-Saharan Africans. Critics trying to pin this ethnography down often had an ulterior motive: for generations of readers brought up on the implicit inferiority of black people in America and of the indigenous populations of the British Empire, the question of
which kind of ‘Moor’ Othello should represent was crucial to the sympathy we were to feel for him, and thus to the whole notion of tragedy in the play. Arguments that Othello was more the noble Moor of North Africa were implicitly tied with arguments about his sympathetic character; arguments that he was recognizable as a black man, a negro, tended historically to find him less sympathetic. Clearly this tells us more about racial attitudes now than then. It is impossible to pin down what Shakespeare might have had in mind, and also irrelevant: what is striking is the way Othello’s race has continued to matter in new and disturbing ways.
Part of Othello’s discomforting charge in the twenty-first century is the connotation of Islam, the primary meaning of the designation ‘Moor’. There are very few references in the play to Othello’s religion, although those there are may suggest that he is a Christian convert. He uses the phrase ‘by heaven’ (e.g. 2.3.197; 5.2.67), particularly when he accuses his brawling soldiers of having ‘turned Turks’ (2.3.163), and he bids Desdemona pray before her murder. Iago vows to make him ‘renounce his baptism’ (2.3.334), and for some productions Othello’s decline into jealous inarticulacy is figured as a visible turning away from his adopted Christianity. Laurence Olivier, for instance, had Othello rip a prominent cross from his neck at the point he turns renegade. It’s easy to see how this problematic symbolism works: Christianity is associated with self-control, social integration, lucidity, rationality; Islam with madness, isolation and murderous rage. In an essay on the play published only weeks after the attack on New York’s Twin Towers, Jonathan Bate saw how contemporary ‘battle-lines reinflect those of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean, waging the forces of global capitalism against the imperatives of Islamic fundamentalism’ and concluded that ‘few literary questions will be more significant than that of how best to interpret and perform this play’. Othello has found a new and edgy topicality, as Cyprus again features as a base for Western military action in the Middle East.