Othello

Critical Essays

Susan Snyder, Susan Snyder

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317525608
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literature
• Categoría: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare

Originally published in 1988. Selections here are organised chronologically looking at both theatrical commentary and literary criticism. The organisation brings out the shifts in emphasis as each generation reinvents Shakespeare, and Othello, by the questions asked, those not asked, and the answers given. Chapters cover the theme of heroic action, Iago's motivation, guilt and jealousy, and obsession. Some entries from the world of theatre delve into the portrayal of the Moor, Desdemona and Iago from the 1940s on. Authors include A. C. Bradley, William Hazlitt, Ellen Terry, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Helen Gardner and Edward A. Snow.

Edward A. Snow

Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Things in Othello

DOI: 10.4324/9781315722658-15

We see the ground whereon these woes do lie,

But the true ground of all these piteous woes

We cannot without circumstance descry.

(Romeo and Juliet, V.iii.179–81)¹

What puzzles the watchman of Romeo and Juliet might doubly confound the audience of Othello. In perhaps no other Shakespeare play is there such a sense of discrepancy between the visible and the true ground of things. By the end of the play even the language of cause, motive, and reason has become suspect. “It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul;/Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars,/It is the cause” (V.ii.1–3): the mind speaks like this not to make its motives transparent but to keep them obscure. The insistence on “cause” is here an incantation, not an act of inquiry or discovery but an intense, distracting assertion.

More than Othello’s particular madness is implicated in this abuse of reason. Repression pervades the entire world of Othello. The first note of the play, sounded three times in quick succession, is refusal of knowledge: “Never tell me”; “‘Sblood, but you’ll not hear me”; “If ever I did dream of such a matter,/Abhor me” (I.i.1–6). Denial recurs in Othello’s opening line—“‘Tis better as it is” (I.i.6)—and remains present throughout the action as a kind of epigrammatic refrain.² Though Othello would see the truth, this texture of disavowal determines the limits of what can become visible for him.

Even at the end of the play, in a context of apparent revelation, the final gesture is on the side of repression: “The object poisons sight;/Let it be hid” (V.ii.364–65). And it is not just any object that is to be hidden but the “tragic lodging” of the wedding bed—the place of sexuality itself, seen even in its legitimized form as inimical to nature and generation. The restoration of order at the end of the play thus institutionalizes the voice that speaks in the dream Iago invents for Cassio—“Sweet Desdemona,/Let us be wary, let us hide our loves” (III.iii.419–20). In the same way, the anticipation of future clarification from Iago—“Torments will ope your lips” (V.ii.305)—reveals the complicity of the forms of justice (and the “satisfaction” society seeks through them) in the dark and vicious place from which Iago’s own villainy issues—“Yet again, your fingers to your lips? Would they were clyster pipes [enema tubes]³ for your sake!” (II.i.176–77). The directions for Iago’s torture reconstitute society in terms of the same impotent dialectic of violence and repression that caused its rupture: Iago, bleeding but not killed, is reassimilated as a tormented refusal to speak; Cassio, wounded in the thigh and “maim’d forever,” is installed as authority and charged with enforcing the “censure” of the “hellish villain” imprisoned within. We are left with the prospect of the state now fruitlessly serving its turn on Iago (its “cunning cruelty” is to “hold him long,” just as Iago had claimed to “hold” Othello in his hate), blindly revealing in itself the evil it seeks to discover, isolate, and punish in its victim.

There is neither transcendence nor catharsis in Othello, although false appearances of both abound. The source of evil cannot even be named from within the play, much less exorcised from it. The melodramatic focus on Iago’s “villainy” at the end of the play (the word and its cognates appear eighteen times in the last two hundred lines) conveys frustration and bafflement, not moral understanding. Terms of judgment such as “villain” and “damned slave” (V.ii.242–43) have no explanatory force at all, except insofar as they unwittingly betray their origin in the same hierarchically engendered malice that produced Iago’s villainy.

Cassio’s exclamation, “O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil!” (II.iii. 281–83), provides a clue to how the language of diabolic agency works everywhere in the play. Iago is really only the name and local habitation of an invisible spirit within Othello and the texture of his world as well. Othello’s frustrated command, “Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil/Why he hath thus ensnar’d my soul and body” (V.ii.301–02), elicits only the laconic assertion “What you know, you know” (addressed to everyone present, not just Othello), followed by withdrawal into the silence where this inaccessible knowledge persists. The play itself answers our own demand for a scapegoat by tacitly posing a more difficult vision of agency, in which the answer to the question “who hath done this deed?” is always both “Nobody” and “I myself” (V.ii.123–24).

The problem of Iago’s motivation is symptomatic of a more general crisis of accountability in an atmosphere where “All that is spoken is marr’d” (V.ii.357). That Iago can articulate his motives with such facility is enough to inspire profound distrust in us. We may not be able to see through these “causes” (or even be sure that there is anything at all behind them), but we sense that we cannot accept them at face value without being manipulated like Roderigo (“I have no great devotion to the deed,/ And yet he hath given me satisfying reasons” [V.i.8–9]). This distrust ultimately extends beyond Iago to every truth based on claims of self-transparency (because of him, the very word “honest” is discredited), and to the entire realm of what is “probal to thinking.” By the end of the play we have been subliminally taught to believe, like Gratiano, only in the truth that is tortured out of its victim.

Even the play’s most dramatically satisfying moments of clarification and release work to dissemble the true grounds of its woe. It doesn’t really matter, for instance, whether we accept or attempt to argue with Othello’s final estimate of himself as one who “lov’d not wisely but too well” (V.ii.344): the terms themselves are free-floating euphemisms designed to prevent us from even making contact with what is specific and disruptive in his story, much less understanding what is at stake in it. Likewise Othello’s comparison of himself to the “base Indian” who “threw a pearl away/Richer than all his tribe” (V.ii.347–48): the apparent moment of insight and repentance perpetuates (and invites us to become complicit in) the definition of Desdemona as a valuable object, a private possession that was his either to keep or dispose of.⁴ Even Emilia’s moving, ethically resonant assertion of Desdemona’s chastity after the murder only makes it more difficult to bring into focus the pernicious effects of chastity itself, as a doctrine men impose upon women. That Othello turns out to have been mistaken merely lets the law itself off the hook: we are diverted from a critique of the pathological male obsessions beneath the “just grounds” (V.ii.138) upon which he would have been proceeding (at least according to the spirit of the law) had Desdemona actually been unfaithful to him. Instead of being forced to confront the predicament of every woman caught within a patriarchal society, we can indulge in “the pity of it,” and regard Desdemona as the unfortunate victim of Othello’s “tragic” misconception and Iago’s “motiveless malignity.”

I

Othello, then, dramatizes a false consciousness that shapes both its protagonist and the world of the play. And the play’s attitude toward this méconnaissance is peculiarly Janus-faced. On the one hand it is knowingly complicit in it, all too willing to satisfy its audience’s lust for theater—to give us, for instance, an Iago to provide us with “villainous entertainment” and then serve as a scapegoat for our “filthy purgation.”⁵ In this respect it is one of Shakespeare’s most cynical plays, taking as it does a certain self-consciously impotent pleasure in demonstrating the moral corruption of its audience and its own form, and confirming in the process the resistance to demystification of the material that is its thematic and psychological core. At the same time, the play is uncompromisingly lucid. It treats jealousy not as a given but an object of inquiry, and pursues it beyond superficial explanations to the grounds of human tragedy. If it is more introverted and less expansive than the other tragedies, it is also more unrelenting in its focus, more insistent on bringing to consciousness things known in the flesh but “too hideous to be shown.”

Since the truth Othello poses is so radically at odds with the theatrical spectacle that invites our complicity, it is especially important to approach the play “with circumstance.” When we look for what resists dramatic foregrounding and listen for what language betrays about its speaker, then much of what is so emphatically declared and ostentatiously displayed in the world of the play—Desdemona’s handkerchief is paradigmatic—begins to take on the appearance of a neurotic defense symptomatic of the “cause” it exists to conceal. In the following moment of pseudo-revelation, for example, the violence beneath the surface of the action almost breaks through into direct expression: “Ay, ‘twas he that told me on her first./An honest man he is, and hates the slime/That sticks on filthy deeds” (V.ii.147–49). What Othello says is that Iago is a moral man (the emphasis is on “man” as well as “honest”), and hence a man to be trusted. What his words express, however, is a post-coital male disgust with the “filthy deed” of sexuality itself. And clearly the sexual image rather than the moral sentiment possesses him. Iago does indeed hold him in this hate. That such an image underlies Othello’s self-righteous indignation suggests that the sexual morality he thinks (not altogether wrongly) he has preserved as an “honorable murderer” (V.ii.294) is itself the sublimation of an irrational hatred of its object.

This pathological male animus toward sexuality is a “cause” Shakespeare pursues relentlessly through the play, into the roots not only of Othello’s jealousy but the social institutions with which men keep women and the threat they pose at arm’s length. Time and time again in Othello language condemning adultery both masks and draws authority from an underlying guilt and disgust about sexuality itself. After Desdemona’s murder, for instance, Othello discloses her crime to the witnesses who have gathered: “‘Tis pitiful; but yet Iago knows/That she with Cassio hath the act of shame/A thousand times committed” (V.ii.210–212). At the subconscious level (a subconscious Othello shares with his audience, reinforced as it is by Christian myth and social propriety) the “act of shame” refers not just to the act of adultery but to the sexual act itself.⁶ Cassio, who often “went between” Othello and Desdemona during their courtship, functions similarly in their marriage, mediating as an object of jealousy between Othello and his own sexual guilt. The Clown’s response of Desdemona’s inquiry about Cassio’s whereabouts might serve as an epigraph for Othello’s fantasies about being sexually displaced by him. “To tell you where he lodges, is to tell you where I lie” (III...