Shakespeare

George Ian Duthie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136559648
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1951. 'The book has the sterling qualities of shrewd sense and acumen that mark the 'rational' classical school of Shakespeare criticism.' Notes and Queries 'Professor Duthie's approach is direct and extremely objective. With no axe to grind, he pays impartial court to most of the great schools of Shakespearian criticism.' Cambridge Daily News 'Professor Duthie has much to say that is wise and judicious'. Times Literary Supplement. Contents include: Shakespeare's Characters and Truth to Life; Shakespeare and the Order-Disorder Antithesis; Comedy; Imaginative Interpretation and Troilus and Cressida; History; Tragedy; The Last Plays.

CHAPTER I

SHAKESPEARE’S CHARACTERS AND TRUTH TO LIFE

ONE of the statements most commonly made in praise of Shakespeare is that he is a creator of characters in which the spectator or reader can believe as if they were actual flesh-and-blood human beings existing in the real world of men and women. On the other hand, there are critics who maintain that to approach a Shakespeare play expecting this is a mistake. It has been claimed by some that the characters we encounter in Shakespeare, and the situations, are not in all cases such as we should be likely to encounter in real life.

One of the best known of American writers on Shakespeare, Professor Elmer Edgar Stoll, speaking not of Shakespeare alone, goes so far as to say¹ that “in the greatest tragedies (and comedies and epics too) the situation has been fundamentally improbable, unreasonable.” “What are the greatest stories in the world?” he goes on to ask. “Those of Orestes, Oedipus, Achilles, and Odysseus; of Iphigeneia, Dido, Phaedra, Medea, and Herod and Mariamne; of Tristram and Isolt, Siegfried and Brünnhilde; of the Cid, Faustus, and Don Juan; of Lear, Othello, Macbeth, and Hamlet: all of them embodying situations improbable to an extreme degree. Their improbability,” he continues, “is the price of their effectiveness: such fine and fruitful situations life itself does not afford.”

Now this is a very sweeping statement—that all the greatest stories in the world’s literature are fundamentally improbable, unreasonable. We are concerned here only with Shakespeare, and it will be well to look rather carefully at Professor Stoll’s criticism of Shakespeare. Our space is limited, and we can deal with only one play. I choose Othello, because Professor Stoll calls it “the crucial case.” “Here,” he declares, speaking of Othello, “in its most complete and fruitful, but also most improbable, form, is the situation as I conceive of it; and the relation of character to action; and the supremacy of dramatic effect and illusion over both.”

According to Professor Stoll, Othello is a play concerning a hero who, as a result of suggestions made to him by a villain, becomes thoroughly jealous; but before the villain began to make these suggestions the hero was not of a jealous nature— the reverse. That is to say, “the hero … is a prey to passions foreign (in a sense) to his nature, and is led into conduct to which he is not inclined.” “There can be no question,” says Professor Stoll, “for those who either heed the text or hearken to critical authority, of Othello’s lacking the jealous nature before temptation, and being jealous thereupon without it; and only the transition causes difficulty.”

Stoll holds that the transition is non-realistic—it is not true to life: Shakespeare did not mean it to be true to life, and he knew what he was doing. According to the psychological probabilities of real life, a man who reacted as Othello does to Iago’s insinuations—so immediately, so passionately—would be a man naturally disposed to jealousy, which Othello is not. According to the psychological probabilities of real life, a man free from any disposition to jealousy—as Othello is shown by Shakespeare to be before the temptation—would not react to Iago’s initial insinuations as Othello does. Othello falls a very ready victim to Iago’s hints. Stoll declares that “Othello is made to believe a man whom he has officially slighted, and with whom he is little acquainted, to the detriment of his newly wedded wife and his most intimate friend”— which, if looked at in the light of real life, is absurd. To put the point again, quoting Stoll’s words once more, “the generous and unsuspicious hero, believing a person whom he does not love or really know and has no right reason to trust, … falls, in the self-same scene, without proof of the accuser’s or inquiry and investigation of his own, into a jealous rage, and resolves … secretly to kill the person suspected.”

It is unlikely, in Stoll’s view, that such a man as Othello is made out by Shakespeare to be would in real life believe the wrong person in this way. “No doubt,” he writes, “proof of the falseness of the loved one might lead a trustful child or man to be suspicious generally; but into suspicion Othello is precipitated, without proof. And it is only … by means of a specious and unreal psychology that he is made incapable of distrusting the testimony which his nature forbids him to accept, to the point of distrusting the testimony and character of those whom both his nature and their own forbid him to discredit. ‘His unquestioning faith in Desdemona is his life,’ says Sir Walter Raleigh—in so far that he immediately forsakes her and turns wholly to Iago!”

The tragedy of Othello, then, according to Professor Stoll, centres in a great improbability. A hero of great nobility of character, unsuspicious, not in the least prone to jealousy, falls an instant victim to the insinuations of a man whom he has far less reason to trust than he has to trust the people against whom the insinuations are made: nevertheless, contrary to all real-life probability, the hero becomes immediately jealous—a man pre-eminently free from jealousy becomes on the instant markedly jealous. And Professor Stoll, emphasizing this central improbability, points out the distinction between real life on the one hand and dramatic art on the other.

A play—at any rate a Shakespeare play—is not necessarily a sequence of events that would be likely to occur in real life: it does not necessarily involve consistent real-life psychology. And much unsound criticism has resulted, Stoll claims, from critics taking fiction for fact. “They turn the impossibilities into possibilities, and the poetry into prose; … their ears are caught by the weaker accents, not the stronger.” What Shakespeare is concerned with is “not primarily the image of life but an illusion, and, as its consequence, a greater emotional effect than the mere image of life can give.” Shakespeare asks of his audience what Coleridge called “that willing suspension of disbelief, for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.”

But many critics have taken his plays—and many still do— as if they were entirely concerned with trains of events and with psychological developments in actual life. “The trouble with Shakespeare criticism,” says Stoll, again, “is that it has been prompted and guided by the spirit of literalism. The play has been thought to be a psychological document, not primarily a play, a structure, both interdependent and independent, the parts mutually, and sufficiently, supporting and explaining each other; and the characters have been taken for the separable copies of reality.”

What are we to say of Professor Stoll’s theory of Othello?

There is no doubt that Iago has no sooner begun his attack on Othello’s peace of mind than Othello becomes discomposed. Iago’s attack begins at III, iii, 35. Iago and Othello have entered and observed Cassio and Desdemona in conversation. Cassio goes out, and, before Desdemona joins the newcomers, the following piece of dialogue takes place:

Iago. Ha! I like not that.
Othello.What does thou say?
Iago. Nothing, my lord: or if—I know not what.
Othello. Was not that Cassio parted from my wife?
Iago. Cassio, my lord! No, sure, I cannot think it,
That he would steal away so guilty-like,
Seeing you coming.
Othello.I do believe ‘twas he.

(III, iii, 35–40)

It seems clear the Othello is already uneasy. Iago has but just begun his suggestions, and Othello has already fallen a victim to them. Othello’s tone is surely one of unhappiness. Desdemona comes up, and in a moment she is asking Othello to call Cassio back: he replies:

Not now, sweet Desdemona; some other time.

(III, iii, 55)

He is disturbed: she is still “sweet Desdemona”, but he is unhappy: the germ of suspicion is already within him. And as the remainder of the scene proceeds we see Iago continuing his crafty wiles, and we see Othello in a variety of moods. He speaks of how he loves Desdemona: he insists that he must have proof before he will doubt her. But on the other hand he does doubt her, his peace of mind is shattered, and at some points he speaks with terrible passion.

Now it must be allowed that he has not been jealous before this scene, nor is there any suggestion that he has ever been prone to jealousy. During his wooing of Desdemona he was assisted by Cassio who “went between us very oft” (III, iii, 100), and there was apparently no question of jealousy. Do we then have a transition from non-jealousy to jealousy which is improbable in terms of real life? I do not think so. Before the beginning of Iago’s temptation of Othello the idea of jealousy had never occurred to Othello spontaneously, for admittedly he is not naturally jealous: nor had it been suggested to him by any disinterested person. It is true that Brabantio had said:

Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see:
She has deceived her father, and may thee.

(I, iii, 293–4)

But Othello might easily decide to pay no attention to this: after all, Brabantio was disgruntled, to say the least. (His words might of course sink down into Othello’s subconscious mind, to reappear in his conscious mind later on at a critical moment.) I would suggest that, in terms of real life, there is nothing improbable about the following. Othello is not himself predisposed to jealousy, and no disinterested person suggests the idea of jealousy to him before III, iii, 35. But at that point Iago begins to suggest the idea to him. Now Iago has a widespread reputation for integrity. Again and again he is called “honest” by people who know him. His reputation for honesty is repeatedly emphasized by Shakespeare. There is therefore good enough reason for Othello to feel inclined to believe Iago; and there are reasons which might well make him feel qualms of doubt concerning Desdemona’s fidelity after someone apparently disinterested had suggested the conception of jealousy to him.

I have already suggested that those words of Brabantio— “She has deceived her father, and may thee”—not heeded at the time by Othello in his conscious mind, might have sunk into his subconscious mind, the idea to reappear with sinister force in his conscious mind later. And there are other considerations which might well conspire to make him jealous once the keynote had been sounded by “honest” Iago. Othello is a Moor—his skin is black—those with whom he associates are of a different race and colour, and some of them look down on him. The angry Brabantio speaks to Othello of “the sooty bosom of such a thing as thou” (I, ii, 70–1), and later he speaks of Desdemona having fallen “in love with what she fear’d to look on”, this being “against all rules of nature” (I, iii, 98, 101). Invoking the facts of real-life psychology, one might well suggest that Othello might have had a deep-rooted inferiority complex on account of his race and colour: he might well himself wonder sometimes how Desdemona could have brought herself to love him: and he might have a subconscious fear that she would easily enough fall out of love with him and transfer her affection to one of her own race. This fear might remain entirely subconscious until the idea of jealousy had been implanted in him by an apparently reputable person.

Again, Othello is distinguished by a sense of humility quite apart from any question of race. He is a soldier: he is not skilled in the arts of peace. “Rude am I in my speech”, he says (I, iii, 81), “And little bless’d with the soft phrase of peace.” On this ground, too, he may from the beginning feel, deep down within himself, that he has little to offer Desdemona—that she may not find him congenial for very long. And again, he is not a youth: he is middle-aged. At III, iii, 265, he speaks of himself as “declined into the vale of years.” Here again he may have a subconscious fear right from the start that Desdemona will tire of him and find that she wants a younger man for her lover. All these considerations rise to the surface of his mind after the temptation has begun:

Haply, for I am black
And have not those soft parts of conversation
That chamberers have, or for I am declined
Into the vale of years,—yet that’s not much—
She’s gone. I am abused; and my relief
Must be to loathe her.

(III, iii, 263–8)

After the temptation has begun, Iago speaks to Othello of how “In Venice they do let heaven see the pranks They dare not show their husbands” (III, iii, 202–3)—that is, he exploits the fact that Othello, being of an alien race, may feel that he does not know the habits of the Venetians very well. Further, Iago refers to Desdemona as one who “did deceive her father, marrying you” (III, iii, 206); and he speaks of how unnatural it is for a woman to marry one of an alien race (III, iii, 228 ff.).

Professor Stoll thinks that a noble man like Othello would naturally trust rather the wife who meant so much to him than Iago, a person he had much less reason to trust....