Othello (2 page)

As Shakespeare adds the Turkish context to the story that was his source, so he takes away the simple motivation of being in love with Disdemona that Cinthio gave the ensign. Jealousy over the matter of promotion is sufficient explanation for the first part of Iago’s plot, whereby Cassio’s weakness for the bottle leads to his being cashiered. But why does Iago then go so much further, utterly destroying the general on whose patronage he depends? Othello asks the question at the end of the play: “Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil / Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body?” But Iago refuses to answer: “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. / From this time forth I never will speak word.” It sounds like a deliberate challenge to the audience to work it out for themselves.

No one has risen to that challenge better than the early nineteenth-century critic William Hazlitt, who regarded the love of playacting as the key to Iago’s procedure (“Othello,”
Characters of Shakespear’s Plays
, 1817):

Exactly because he is scriptwriter, director, and stage villain rolled into one, Iago is an astonishingly compelling presence in the theater. And he is given the largest part. It would have been easy for him to dwarf the other characters, as the bad brother Edmund sometimes seems to dwarf his good brother Edgar in
King Lear
. Shakespeare’s challenge was to make Othello rise far above Iago’s other dupe, Rodorigo. To be reduced to a gibbering idiot over the matter of a misplaced handkerchief is to be duped indeed. But the mesmerizing effect of the poetic writing is such that we never think of Othello as foolish or laughable, not even in the temptation scene of the third act in which Iago twists every word, every detail, to the advantage of his plot. Instead, we turn the Moor’s own phrase back on to him: “But yet the pity of it, Iago! O, Iago, the pity of it, Iago!”

Desdemona inspires our pity not because she is pitiful, but because her courage in going against her father’s will, in following her husband to the far frontier of the Venetian empire in Cyprus, and in generously speaking out for Cassio, becomes the cause of her death. Othello inspires our pity because he also inspires our awe, above all through his soaring language. For the Renaissance, the twin powers of rational thought and persuasive language,
oratio
and
ratio
, were what raised humankind above the level of the beasts. The tragedy of
Othello
is that Iago’s persuasive but specious reasoning (you’re black, you’re getting on in years, Venetian women are notoriously fickle…) transforms Othello from great orator to savage beast.

According to the critic A. C. Bradley, in his highly influential book
Shakespearean Tragedy
(1904), Othello’s description of himself as “one not easily jealous, but being wrought, / Perplexed in the extreme” is perfectly just: “His tragedy lies in this—that his whole nature was indisposed to jealousy, and yet was such that he was unusually open to deception, and, if once wrought to passion, likely to act with little reflection, with no delay, and in the most decisive manner conceivable.” This is not to say that susceptibility to manipulation is Othello’s “tragic flaw.” For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, to call a play “the tragedy of” such and such a character was to make a point about the direction of their journey, not the hardwiring of their psychology. “Tragedie,” wrote Geoffrey Chaucer, father of English verse, “is to seyn a certeyn storie, / As olde bookes maken us memorie, / Of hym that stood in greet prosperitee, / And is yfallen out of heigh degree / Into myserie, and endeth wrecchedly.” The higher they climb, the harder they fall: tragedy is traditionally about heroes and kings and generals, larger-than-life figures who rise to the top of fortune’s wheel and are then toppled off.

It is a structure saturated with irony: the very quality that is the source of a character’s greatness is also the cause of his downfall. This is why talk of a “tragic flaw” is misleading. The theory of the flaw arises from a misunderstanding of Aristotle’s influential account of ancient Greek tragedy. For Aristotle,
hamartia
, the thing that precipitates tragedy, is not a psychological predisposition but an event—not a character trait but a fatal action. In several famous cases in Greek tragedy, the particular mistake is to kill a blood relative in ignorance of their identity. So too in Shakespeare, it is action (in Othello’s case, over-precipitate action) that determines character, and not vice versa.

In Shakespearean tragedy, the time is out of joint and the lead character is out of his accustomed role. Hamlet the scholar is happy to be presented with an intellectual puzzle, but unsure how to proceed when presented with a demand to kill. Othello the courageous soldier, by contrast, relishes decisive action but is insecure among “the wealthy curlèd darlings” of the Venetian state. Imagine Othello in Hamlet’s situation. He would have needed no second prompting. On hearing the ghost’s story about his father’s murder, he would have gone straight down from the battlements and throttled King Claudius with his bare hands. There would have been no tragedy. Now imagine Hamlet in Othello’s situation. He would have questioned every witness, arranged for Desdemona to see a play about adultery and watched for a guilty reaction. Her innocence would have become obvious and, again, there would be no tragedy. The tragedy comes not from some inherent flaw but from the mismatch of character and situation.

The audience’s sense of the reckless speed of Othello’s action is heightened by the play’s clever “double-time” scheme. Looked at from one point of view, the action is highly compressed. The first act takes place in a single night in Venice, as the Senate sits in emergency session upon hearing the news of the Turkish fleet’s sailing toward Cyprus. There is then an imagined lapse of time to cover the sea voyage. The second act begins with the arrival in Cyprus and proceeds to the evening’s celebration of the evaporation of the Turkish threat, during which Cassio gets disastrously drunk. Othello and Desdemona have their second interrupted night in the marital bedroom. The third and fourth acts, during which Cassio intercedes with Desdemona and Iago persuades Othello of his wife’s infidelity, occupy another day, and then the fifth act brings the catastrophe on the third and last night. But looked at from another point of view, the action must take much longer: there has to be opportunity for the supposed adultery, for the business of the handkerchief, and for Lodovico’s sea voyage from Venice. The audience watching a strong production in the theater does not, however, notice the inconsistency implied by this double-time scheme, such is their intense absorption in the rapid unfolding of the plot.

In an essay called “Shakespeare and Stoicism of Seneca,” published in 1927, the poet and critic T. S. Eliot took a very different view of Othello from A. C. Bradley’s:

In the classical tragedy of ancient Greece and Rome, the hero often reaches a state of supreme self-awareness just before the moment of his death. Aristotle called this
anagnorisis
, recognition. This final clarity brings a strange and unworldly sense of satisfaction to the protagonist as he or she faces the end. For Eliot, Othello by contrast remains deluded. His self-dramatization is an evasion that substitutes for the recognition that he has in fact been all too “easily jealous.”

According to this view, Othello is the victim of the very linguistic facility that has won him Desdemona. A contemporary of Eliot’s, the spiritually minded critic G. Wilson Knight, coined the phrase “the Othello music” to describe the unsurpassed lyricism of the Moor’s language. “Rude am I in my speech,” he says back in the first act as he launches into some of the least plain, most richly textured speeches in the English language. Far from being “round unvarnished,” as he claims they are, Othello’s poetic tales “Of moving accidents by flood and field, / Of hair-breadth scapes i’th’imminent deadly breach” constitute the very “witchcraft” that makes Desdemona fall in love with him. “I think this tale would win my daughter too,” remarks the Duke admiringly. Iago’s sinister art is to reduce Othello from this loquacity to the degenerate outbursts of invective that pollute his mouth in the fourth act (“Goats and monkeys!… Lie with her? Lie on her?… Pish! Noses, ears and lips!… Confess? Handkerchief? O devil!”). In the fifth act, however, Othello’s language recovers its former beauty. It is in this sense that Eliot detected something disturbingly “aesthetic” about Othello’s last speeches.

The forms of Shakespeare’s verse loosened and became more flexible as he matured as a writer. His early plays have a higher proportion of rhyme and a greater regularity in rhythm, the essential pattern being that of iambic pentameter (ten syllables, five stresses, the stress on every second syllable). In the early plays, lines are very frequently end-stopped: punctuation marks a pause at the line ending, meaning that the movement of the syntax (the grammatical construction) falls in with that of the meter (the rhythmical construction). In the later plays, there are far fewer rhyming couplets (sometimes rhyme only features as a marker to indicate that a scene is ending) and the rhythmic movement has far greater variety, freedom, and flow. Mature Shakespearean blank (unrhymed) verse is typically not end-stopped but “run on” (a feature known as “enjambment”). Instead of pausing heavily at the line ending, the speaker hurries forward, the sense demanded by the grammar working in creative tension against the holding pattern of the meter. The heavier pauses migrate to the middle of the lines, where they are known as the “caesura” and where their placing varies. A single line of verse is shared between two speakers much more frequently than in the early plays. And the pentameter itself becomes a more subtle instrument. The iambic beat is broken up, there is often an extra (“redundant”) unstressed eleventh syllable at the end of the line (this is known as a “feminine ending”). There are more modulations between verse and prose. Occasionally the verse is so loose that neither the original typesetters of the plays when they were first printed nor the modern editors of scholarly texts can be entirely certain whether verse or prose is intended. Iambic pentameter is the ideal medium for dramatic poetry in English because its rhythm and duration seem to fall in naturally with the speech patterns of the language. In its capacity to combine the ordinary variety of speech with the heightened precision of poetry, the supple mature Shakespearean “loose pentameter” is perhaps the most expressive vocal instrument ever given to the actor.

Othello’s speech at the beginning of the murder scene offers a brilliant controlled combination of the patterns of repetition and variation that are typical of early Shakespearean rhetoric and the mellifluous imagistic invention, expanding from clause to clause, that is characteristic of his mature style:

These beautiful words are being used to justify the ugly impending act of suffocation, the extirpation of that very thing—human breath—which makes beautiful speech possible. It is an extreme example of tragedy’s troubling juxtaposition of violence and the aesthetic, made doubly painful by the cultural associations now attached to the image of a powerful and athletic black man killing his white wife out of sexual resentment.

Shakespeare’s Venetian world is suffused with sexual as well as racial prejudice. Each of the three women in the play is viewed at some point—in Bianca’s case, at all points—as a sexual commodity. And yet the female characters are never passive. They express themselves with vigor and take action into their own hands. Desdemona only becomes a victim when she lies vulnerably asleep. The play does not necessarily replicate the prejudices of its male characters. In a remarkable passage in the Folio text,
*
Emilia lucidly articulates an argument that skewers the double standard of her society: