by Emma Smith
Crucial to a religious interpretation of the play is Othello’s final long speech, as he is cornered by the Venetian authorities in the chamber where the body of his murdered wife lies on their bed:
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 unusèd to the melting mood,
Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinable 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 circumcisèd dog
And smote him thus.
(5.2.347–65)
It’s a wonderful speech, melodiously orientalist in its catalogue of exotica. And it is a rhetorical performance that encapsulates Othello’s estranged position as both a Moor and ‘of Venice’, the commander of Venetian forces and the unacceptable son-in-law, the Christian citizen’s defender against a malignant Turk, and that turbaned and circumcised Turk himself. Othello compares himself to distant tribes such as the Indian (one early text here reads ‘Judean’) and the Arabian; and then turns his dagger on himself as an alien. Thus the play, and its main character, ends on a fissure, an incompatible religious and ethnic split played out on the impossible identity of its central protagonist, who is destroyed by its unbearable cognitive dissonance.
That’s all true, but what’s complicated is the way this speech establishes Othello as a victim or scapegoat rather than (or at least as well as) a murderer. His dead wife is not mentioned except in the passing metaphor of a discarded pearl, a conventional image for femininity associating it with purity and exchange value, rather than with individuality. Instead, the focus is on Othello. Four first-person pronouns and a breathtaking self-exculpation portray him as ‘one that loved not wisely but too well’ (5.2.353). This is my epitaph, Othello tells the onstage and theatre audience. ‘Speak of me as I am’ (351). Keep talking about me. Look, I am the broken hero of my own play. It’s difficult to reconcile our sympathies at this point: with Othello, abused and destroyed by a racist society, or with Desdemona, dead at the hands of a man she loved and trusted?
Twenty-first-century feminisms have been rightly concerned with the analytical concept of ‘intersectionality’: an understanding of oppression and disadvantage as multi-faceted along lines of class, race, sexuality and gender. As you might by now expect, our contemporary Othello is there already. The plot of the play shows us different outsiders struggling with their own disempowered status in the majority society. Othello’s race may seem the most obvious point of difference, but that shouldn’t obscure others. Iago, for instance, articulates his disdain for Cassio on grounds that we might unpick as based on rank or social status. In the highly stratified world of the military, Cassio is ‘a great arithmetician’ (1.1.18), and ‘Mere prattle without practice / Is all his soldiership’ (1.1.25–6). Iago, by contrast, is a tough squaddie. A world organized by racial categories sees Othello as ‘the other’; one organized by rank – and this sense of personal status may well have been the identity category most significant and pressing to early modern audiences – marginalizes Iago. Both these models of community are closed to the play’s other prominent misfit: Desdemona. Taken from her home in Venice to the garrison at Cyprus, Desdemona is isolated and marginalized. Like Much Ado About Nothing, this play shows how closely the male characters are bonded by military discipline and experiences. Desdemona herself is thus the final outsider: the play’s last terrible scene shows intersectionality not as the property of an individual character but as the shared dynamic of a play that is sympathetically attentive to the destructive internalization of stereotype, wherever it is found. Othello, Iago and Desdemona all struggle to be autonomous selves within the confines of what is expected and assumed about them by others. The flip side of this observation is that the enemy in one context is the victim in another.
At the end of the play, Othello ‘smothers’ his wife in her bed (5.2.92). This literal violence is the culmination of considerable cruelty imposed on Desdemona’s character throughout the drama, which turns her from a spirited and eloquent woman into a passive object in her husband’s own tragedy. She goes from being a person to being a prop. And she goes from a Venetian world in which she has her own story into one in which a male narrative, ‘of one not easily jealous’ (5.2.354), is dominant. It is instructive to see her as a sister to Isabella in Measure for Measure, a play written in the same year as Othello and sharing the same Italian source material. Like Isabella, Desdemona starts the play with her own voice and her own trajectory; like Isabella, she is steadily silenced by an abusive male authority figure; and like Measure for Measure, Othello transforms a proto-comic heroine into a puppet for a male story. Shakespeare’s other related attempts at the story of male sexual jealousy – in Much Ado About Nothing and in The Winter’s Tale – all recast the narrative as comedy, bringing a woman apparently killed by the unwarranted suspicions of her husband back to life along with his renewed faith in her innocence. Othello teases us with a perverse version of this trope. As Emilia forces her way into the bedchamber, the smothered Desdemona revives momentarily to utter a few words of vindication. It is the last gasp of a comic resolution in which the misunderstanding can be rectified and all can be – almost – well. But without any further intervention, Desdemona expires, a tragic victim rather than a comic heroine.
With Measure for Measure and Othello, Shakespeare seems to be in a period of conscious generic experimentation. Having written ten comedies during the first decade of his career, he is pushing the possibilities of the genre in Measure for Measure, and he is also building his tragedy on comic frameworks in Othello. There are many aspects of comic structure in Othello. Iago is a version of the witty servant, a type from the comic playwright Plautus, and often depicted on stage laughing at his own diabolic cleverness. W. H. Auden called him ‘the joker in the pack’, a version of Iago played memorably in film by Bob Hoskins: the BBC television adaptation ends with his mirthless laugh echoing through the empty room. Iago seems a figure of improvisatory flair rather than a malign plotter: he uses what the characters inadvertently offer him to weave ‘the net / That shall enmesh them all’ (2.3.352–3). Part of his attractiveness is his clever plotting, but intricate plotting has tended to be a feature of comedy rather than tragedy. Ever since the eighteenth century, when an early and unimpressed reader called Thomas Rymer was scornful about the ‘Tragedy of the Handkerchief’, the world of Othello has been seen to be domestic rather than cosmic. Even Othello thinks there should be some heavenly anger at the death of Desdemona – ‘Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse / Of sun and moon’ (5.2.108–9) – but no. There is nothing more or less than this. At one level, despite Othello’s elevating rhetoric, this is the tediously ordinary story of a man murdering his partner because he thinks she has been unfaithful: ‘Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men’ (5.2.6).
Stage-managed intrigues make Othello believe Cassio is discussing Desdemona when he is in fact talking about Bianca; the handkerchief is a comic prop. These aspects align the play’s dramaturgy less with the ineffable workings of fate and more with the energetically human interventions of, say, the characters in Much Ado who are determined to bring the unwilling lovers Beatrice and Benedick together, or the dropped letter purporting to be from Olivia with which Malvolio is snared in Tw
elfth Night. Elsewhere in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the figure of the jealous husband, paranoid about cuckoldry and over-interpreting the most innocent of details to corroborate his desperate fantasies of his wife’s infidelity, is firmly comic. Act 1 of Othello is a miniature comedy of lovers overcoming differences or circumstances to be together in spite of the blocking figures (discussed in Chapter 9 on Much Ado). Verdi’s opera Otello does away with the whole of the first act, beginning instead with the storm which brings the couple to Cyprus – it’s a neat interpretation of the opening as an extended storm which, in Twelfth Night and in The Tempest, ushers in a comic calm. Perhaps this is what the contemporary playwright Thomas Heywood was thinking about when he distinguished between comedy and tragedy: ‘comedies begin in trouble and end in peace; tragedies begin in calms and end in tempest.’ A father who does not approve of his daughter’s romantic choices – that’s how A Midsummer Night’s Dream begins. But all these indicators turn out to be deceptive. This is a comedy that goes horribly wrong. It is a tragedy cruelly created out of comedy’s greatest human insight: that the individual is incomplete without their partner and thus forever vulnerable to them.
CHAPTER 15
King Lear
An early performance of King Lear is recorded on the titlepage of its first edition – before King James I at the Palace of Whitehall. On Boxing Day. It’s a curiously bleak choice for the festive season: King Lear is perhaps Shakespeare’s most desolate tragedy. It retells the biblical Book of Job, but without the ultimate redemption that rewards Job’s acceptance of the many trials to which God subjects him. It’s a perverse Cinderella story complete with innocent young princess and two ugly sisters, but one in which our heroine, rather than being whisked off to the ball, is instead savagely mown down by that pumpkin coach, drawn by mice coachmen of the apocalypse. Shakespeare’s story of filial ingratitude and self-interest takes a heavy toll. At the end of the play, not only Lear but also his daughters Goneril, Regan and Cordelia lie dead; so, too, do Gloucester and his son Edmund, and even, apparently, the Fool. It is an unremitting story. In ancient Britain, life’s a bitch (not to mention your daughters), and then you die.
Because of this gloomy trajectory, King Lear has been an object lesson in attempts to understand the ethical value of Shakespearean tragedy. Just as Terry Eagleton uncovers from the two millennia of tragic theory since Aristotle only the bathos that ‘no definition of tragedy more elaborate than “very sad” has ever worked’, so too the critical history of King Lear circles around the question ‘How sad is this play?’ Since the earliest recorded engagement in the seventeenth century, readers and critics, including, as we’ll see, Shakespeare himself, have been attempting to excavate something positive or optimistic as an antidote to the misery of the play. Broadly, these responses trace three movements: 1) Shakespeare’s play is just too cruel; then 2) Shakespeare’s play is actually quite hopeful at the end; and thence 3) No, it really is cruel, but so is life. Related to this is Lear’s historical place in ideas of Shakespeare’s canon. For the nineteenth century, Hamlet was identified as Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, as clever, modishly alienated men saw themselves reflected in its cerebral and isolated protagonist. But as the twentieth century unleashed its mad cruelties at Passchendaele, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, King Lear insinuated itself in the cultural imagination instead. The play registered as the ultimate modern tragedy of desolation in which, as the Duke of Albany recognizes, ‘Humanity must perforce prey on itself, / Like monsters of the deep’ (4.2.32.19–20). Changing attitudes to this play tell us something about ideas of tragedy, about what we want from our Shakespeare, and from art more generally. Beginning his book Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? with this perennial question, A. D. Nuttall traced the shift from art as moral to art as provocation: ‘It is now virtually unimaginable that a reviewer of a new play should praise it by saying that it offers solace or comfort. Conversely the adjective “uncomfortable” is automatically read as praise’: the newly cruel King Lear whispers its siren song of nihilism into our willing postmodern ears.
The earliest sustained critical responses to Shakespeare come when his plays are adapted to the newly restored theatres after 1660 (the London theatres had been shut during the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, and were reopened when Charles II returned from France to take up the throne). The Restoration period saw a number of Shakespeare plays reworked to suit the linguistic, structural and moral tastes of the new age. What happened to King Lear in this dispensation is famous and exemplary. Nahum Tate, Irish poet dramatist, and later Poet Laureate, rewrote the play in 1681 as The History of King Lear. Shorter and more cheerful than Shakespeare’s, this version notably reworks the ending of King Lear. Tate leaves a chastened but restored Lear and Gloucester alive at the end, men who have learned from their experiences of doubting those who truly love them. The two faithful children of these parallel fathers, Cordelia and Edgar, are married. Tate concludes with Lear’s invitation to ‘pass our short reserves of Time / In calm Reflections on our Fortunes past, / Cheer’d with relation of the prosperous Reign / Of this celestial Pair’. It’s easy in hindsight to see that these alterations are partly motivated by aesthetic taste and partly by politics. Tate explained that he had alighted on ‘one Expedient to rectifie what was wanting in the Regularity and Probability of the Tale, which was to run through the whole a Love betwixt Edgar and Cordelia’. This also ‘necessarily threw me on making the Tale conclude in a Success to the innocent distrest Persons’: this new narrative thus conforms to artistic norms of ‘regularity’ and to moral norms about how ‘innocent’ characters should be treated. The theme of the king restored to his throne is clearly a major topical theme for Tate, writing in the restored monarchy of Charles II’s reign (seeing how Restoration authors routinely rewrote Shakespeare clarifies that his plays are much more interested in dethroning than restoring kings). Although it’s become a parodic byword for flat-footed historical adaptations of Shakespeare, Tate’s The History of King Lear, like all adaptations, is also a revealing form of criticism. He’s engaged in a more confident or extreme version of what we all do when we read: rewriting the text as we engage with it.
Implicit in Tate’s reworking is the idea that Shakespeare’s original ending, in which Lear bears on stage the body of Cordelia and, heartbroken, dies at her side, is unbearable. His amelioration of that conclusion gained its critical stamp of approval when it was quoted by Samuel Johnson in the General Introduction to his important 1765 edition of Shakespeare’s plays. Johnson is also offended by Shakespeare’s conclusion, which ‘has suffered the virtue of Cordelia to perish in a just cause, contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is yet more strange, to the faith of chronicles’. He therefore endorses Nahum Tate’s century-old adaptation: ‘the public has decided. Cordelia, from the time of Tate, has always retired with victory and felicity. And, if my sensations could add any thing to the general suffrage, I might relate, that I was many years ago so shocked by Cordelia’s death, that I know not whether I ever endured to read again the last scenes of the play till I undertook to revise them as an editor.’ For Johnson, and for the public, Tate’s version was preferable to Shakespeare’s, because it ameliorated the shock of the ending. Johnson firmly locates his objection to Shakespeare’s Lear in the figure of the martyred Cordelia, arguing that Shakespeare has overstepped the boundaries of artistic and ethical expectation, boundaries reinstated by Tate’s reworking. To be ‘so shocked’ by Cordelia’s death is, for Johnson, a reason to abjure the play. For eighteenth-century tastes, Shakespeare’s play was too unwarrantedly cruel, contrary to ideas of justice, artistic pleasure and historical accuracy. The answer to that old chestnut ‘Why does tragedy give pleasure?’ is, in this case – actually, it doesn’t, so let’s rewrite it so that it can.
Inevitably, Dr Johnson’s discomfort at Shakespeare’s King Lear was on precisely the grounds that the next generation found so electrifying. Neoclassical preoccupat
ions with ‘regularity’ and ‘probability’ and the moral obligation to reward virtue and punish vice were swept away by the Romantic embrace of emotional extremity as a version of the sublime. As Edmund Burke wrote in his 1757 treatise on aesthetics, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime, ‘whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling’. That shock that was so unwelcome to Johnson on reading the end of King Lear is here elevated into a state of philosophical and physiological fulfilment; the job of great art is to approach that excess of feeling through its encounter with ‘terrible objects’. Burke observes that ‘there is no spectacle we so eagerly pursue, as that of some uncommon and grievous calamity’. While the theatre retained its preference for Tate’s revisionist Lear, Romantic readers began to rediscover the delicious terrors of Shakespeare’s original.