Magic in the Web

Action and Language in Othello

Robert B. Heilman

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813181950
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

In his earlier work on King Lear, Mr. Heilman combined a number of critical procedures to form a new and important approach to Shakespearian criticism. His study of Othello displays the maturity of insight and skill in analysis the years have brought him in developing his critical method. Mr. Heilman takes account of stage effects; he traces out literal and symbolic meanings; he analyzes plot relationships; he examines characters in terms of both their psychological and their moral situations, and style in relation to both character and meaning. He traces some effects due to historical meanings which have now been lost by certain words, and he tries to measure the impact of the drama upon, and its significance for, the modern consciousness.

Mr. Heilman argues that Othello is at once "a play about love" and "a poem about love, " and endeavors to find out how the poetry modifies and even helps determine the nature of the whole. He looks at numerous aspects of "action" (physical activity, psychological movement, intellectual operations) and "language" (speech habits, image types, recurrency in both literal and figurative language), and examines the essentially "dramatic" function of all of these. He finds the dramatis personae interwoven in relationships which may be seen, from one point of view, as "plot" and, from another, as the embodiment of complex themes. He treats Othello and Iago as figures that are not only fitted to a given stage but also represent permanent aspects of humanity-Iago with his "strategies against the spiritual order" and Othello with his "readiness in the victim."

CHAPTER 1

Approach

This is one man’s reading of Othello. I hope it will appear to illuminate some of the parts, and to speculate persuasively about the sum of the parts. If Othello is not the most complex of the tragedies, the problem of its over-all form is still a large one, and he who would account for the creative relationship of a large number of parts must be content if he seems generally to be moving in the right direction. There have been many analyses of parts and some studies of the whole. Here we endeavor to trace out the parts rather fully,¹ to observe their modes of combining, and thus to arrive at a theory of the whole. At best the theory is a cousin of the drama; such wit as the critic may have must follow the witchcraft of the dramatist (to take Iago’s words out of context) from afar. But the cousin may help identify the drama, the wit tell how the witchcraft has gone. At the same time the critic, whatever he imparts, must at various points duplicate and parallel his predecessors² while assaying to be himself; so he runs the double risk of not encompassing the novelty which will absolve him of the suspicion of merely repeating what oft was thought, and of falling into innovations which in some quarters will seem dubious because such things were never thought. He can but hope to convince without simply establishing the accepted, and to achieve a justifying newness without falling into novelty for novelty’s sake.

1. ASSUMPTIONS

The parts which make up the whole are numerous and diverse. Othello is a part. Iago is a part. Iago’s deception of Roderigo is a part. Iago’s remarks on reputation, Desdemona’s incredulity at the sexual misbehavior of wives, Emilia’s revulsion against Iago, Cassio’s drunken babbling are parts. All recognitions and reversals, all thoughts and feelings of characters are parts. The nighttime in which most of the major actions occur is a part. Iago’s use of honesty is a part. All the uses of honesty are a part. All the metaphors of medicine and disease, the images from army life, the language of light and dark are parts.

The point is to keep the idea of the part flexible and inclusive, as a step toward adequate freedom in the description of structure. A view of the parts begotten of a preoccupation with gross anatomy will yield a coarse and constricted account of structure. On the other hand, compiling an unlimited serial list of parts would be futile. The main thing is to be aware of a part in all its relational possibilities.³ Othello’s farewell to arms (3.3.348ff.) is relevant to the specific situation of the moment, to Othello’s personality generally, to Shakespeare’s conception of the modes of response to disaster possible to human beings. Emilia’s picking up of the handkerchief helps advance the action by contributing to Iago’s deception of Othello, but it is also relevant to her character and to Shakespeare’s conception of the modes of wifely devotion and marital relationship (not to mention its relations by contrast with actions of Desdemona and Bianca and of Emilia herself later). The theories of sex which Iago advances to Roderigo are relevant to his purpose of controlling Roderigo, to his modes of thought generally, and to Shakespeare’s awareness of the whole realm of philosophies of love.

For working criticism, the broad categories of the parts whose relatedness is to be observed are two: plot and poetry. We might again find our metaphor in Iago’s words and speak of the wit and witchcraft of the dramatist: the conscious designing and articulating; and the mysterious endowing of many parts—especially the poetic language—with dramatic value and meaning far in excess of the minimal logical requirements of the occasion: the magic in the web. This is less a theory of composition than an effort to suggest different aspects of the play that are only theoretically separable. Let us put it another way. If love is what Othello is “about,” Othello is not only a play about love but a poem about love.⁴ It has parts which interact in the mode of “pure” drama—people having such and such an effect on each other, irrespective of whether they communicate in verse, prose, or pantomime; it also has parts which interact in the manner of a poem. Again, this is a theoretical separation: the characters have such and such an effect by means of the words they speak; and conversely, an analysis of the words they speak involves the student regularly in a consideration of the “action” and interaction of the speakers. Yet when the dramatist has his characters speak in poetic language, he vastly complicates their communication with each other and with us. Figure, rhythm, poetic order do not merely make “more vivid” or “heighten” a literal prose statement that is otherwise unchanged; they constitute a fundamentally different statement by the introduction of the nuance, overtone, feeling, association, implication, and extension characteristic of them; in other words, by subtly carrying us beyond the finiteness, one-dimensionalism, and contextual restrictions of the pure statement determined only by the strict logical requirements of the immediate situation. When Othello summons Desdemona and dismisses Emilia, “Leave procreants alone . . .; / Cough or cry hem if anybody come. / Your mystery, your mystery!” (4.2.28-30), he not only dismisses Emilia, accuses Desdemona of infidelity, and betrays his own insane bitterness, but he converts the marriage into a brothel arrangement in which all three are involved, and by so doing establishes imaginative lines of connection with the role of Bianca and particularly with the Iago philosophy of sexual conduct. If we take all the lines of one character out of context and consider them as a unit, we have always a useful body of information; but if, when we study Iago’s lines, we find that he consistently describes himself in images of hunting and trapping, we learn not only his plans of action but something of his attitude to occasions, to his victims, and to himself; and beyond that there is fixed for us an image of evil—one of those by which the drama interprets the human situation. When Othello says he threw away a “pearl,” we recall that Brabantio, in acceding to Desdemona’s departure, called her “jewel”; when Desdemona says she would rather have lost her purse than the handkerchief, we recall that Iago, who has stolen the handkerchief, has spoken of stealing a purse; we spontaneously make these connections, and, even if we go no further, our reading has brought forth linkings that cannot be expunged; but we often do go further, and seek out the formal order that is exemplified in these images that leap out of their own contexts and carry our imaginations into other parts of the play.⁵ When to these we add many other instances in which poetic language, functioning doubly or triply, takes us beyond specific moments of action into others and on into general areas of character, feeling, and thought, we find that we have an immensely complicated verbal structure with which we must come to terms—the “poem about love,” as I have called it. We are trying to describe what Traversi called “a new kind of dramatic unity.”⁶

A play written in poetic form is simply not the same kind of literary work as a play written in prose; if one could imagine Othello translated into prose, it would be a different thing. This is true whether one is speaking of action or structure or meaning. The words put into a character’s mouth, whatever immediate purposes of communication with other dramatis personae they may serve, are also the author’s means of communicating with or “working on” the reader. The style is the character, of course. But the choice of one image or another sets off one kind or another of association, interconnection, possibility of meaning; a chosen metaphor is not simply a neutral alternative, an ingenious transposition of a hypothetical literal statement which was prior to it; it is a unique definition of character, action, or theme, and it enters into the structure of meaning, which would be different if the metaphor were not present.⁷ When Iago calls his false statements to Othello “poison,” he exhibits the intellectual clarity required for self-identification and the moral callousness necessary to accept the identification. But when he also calls what he has told Othello “medicine,” he uses a much more vibrant and exciting metaphor, one by which the author “says” vastly more to the reader: aside from expressing Iago’s sardonic delight in an action which seems to be one thing but is another, it brings into focus the vast irony of Iago’s frequent resemblance to the physician in his dealings with others, and the general state of affairs so often set forth in images of disease and disability; thus it is part of a “poetic” construction that deals vividly with the theme of evil. Suppose Iago had spoken only of his “tales” or “lies.”

If I have said more about the parts that interact in the manner of a poem than about those which interact in the manner of a drama, it is simply that the latter are more familiar in the critical tradition. As terms for the two categories of structure (other students may discern other structural principles as inherent in the materia dramatica) I have so far used “plot” and “poetry.” But these are not quite satisfactory, partly because willy-nilly they suggest a polar separation of elements that function integrally and that can be split apart only for critical inspection, and partly because to some readers “poetry” apparently means only “lyric” and therefore analysis of the poetic language of a play appears to reduce drama to lyric. But it should be evident, from the examples already cited and from the chapters that follow, that the poetic language of Othello is “dramatic”—in that it “works” or “acts,” in relation to a given scene or episode, in relation to a character generally,⁸ and in relation to areas of feeling and suggestion, of idea and theme, and of meaning that the drama is concerned with.⁹ I will therefore use the term “verbal drama” for poetic language, or, more generally, for all the effects traceable, initially or finally, to what characters “say” and how they say it; and the term “actional drama” for what characters “do.” These terms, alas, do not solve all the problems. For one thing, neither applies properly to matters of setting, properties, and costume, which are not necessarily passive or static¹⁰ (and whose active influence one might call “circumstantial drama”¹¹). More important, “doing” and “saying” are not always properly distinguishable; saying is often a very important way of doing. Further, “verbal drama” sounds pretty flat; but I prefer to have a very inclusive term and to avoid the confusion entailed by the use of “poetic drama,” since the latter will primarily mean any drama written in verse. Again, “actional drama” may savor of tautology; but that risk I am willing to run for the sake of having the word drama in both phrases and of thus indicating the functional analogy and the structural coalescence of word and act. Actional drama and verbal drama work in collusion; both are imaginative languages, each potentially ambiguous and polysemous; they are fused in a harmonious structure of meaning. The play about love and the poem about love, though they have different structural foci, are one; they are Othello. For understanding its composition this “one” may be thought of as an organization of dramatic structures which, if not discrete entities, may be theoretically discriminated as objects of contemplation. After this preliminary comes critical synthesis, a formidable task. One cannot aspire to solve finally the problem of the fusion of actional and verbal drama; one can derive a certain solution from the text and hope that it is convincing. The magic in the web of Othello does not yield easily to rational accounting.¹²

Our business with the poetry or the verbal drama is, then, with its constructive or formative role. It is a subject that has not been much treated, except, at a virtually sterilizing distance, by vast editorial explications of a glossarial and syntactical sort, until recent years. One may speculate that one reason for its neglect is that Aristotle does not treat the subject adequately; what he says in the Poetics about language is limited and pedestrian and does not provide an approach to intrinsic aspects of Greek drama that are now beginning to be understood.¹³ But it is no longer necessary to defend the position that poetic language is integral and not merely a convention, a traditional embellishment, or, in Hereward T. Price’s phrase, a “detachable ornament”¹⁴ that is conducive to a quotable charm and beauty; that it is not simply another vehicle of expression, chosen as a matter of taste, for getting to the same place that prose would carry one to, but a formal element that helps determine what the play becomes. In his study of Shakespeare’s use of imagery generally, Professor Clemen remarks that in the tragedies the images become “an inherent part of the dramatic structure,” resembling “a second line of action . . . and providing a ‘counterpoint’ to the events on the stage,” and that in some tragedies Shakespeare “continually thought in images which are charged with symbolic meaning to such a degree that we could not understand the tragedy’s significance and import without a proper understanding of its image-patterns,” and speaks of the imagery as expressing “symbolically correspondences and interrelations which underlie the real action and often contain the essential meaning of the play.”¹⁵

“Correspondences and interrelations” brings us to a characteristic of Shakespeare’s verbal drama which the preceding paragraphs have alluded to a number of times—its notable repetitiveness, of images and likewise of abstract words. After Emilia has three times incredulously asked, “My husband?” Othello demands, “What needs this iterance, woman?” (5.2.150). We all must play Othello to Shakespeare’s Emilia: “iterance” forces itself upon us as a critical problem. The dramatist cannot conspicuously repeat words and rely upon figures of the same class (e.g., clothes, military life) without catching our eye and raising a question about what goes on. We are hardly likely to attribute this recurrency to the artist’s carelessness or failing resourcefulness or to stop at description—an inert lexicon of repetitions. When editors devotedly multiply cr...