The character of Othello
The character of Othello
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The character of Othello
In comparison to Iago, the character of Othello is simple. His tragedy lies in this that his whole nature is indisposed to jealousy , and yet was such that 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.
Othello is the most romantic figure among Shakespearean heroes; and he is so, partly, from the strange life of war and adventure which he has lived from his childhood. There is something mysterious in his descent from the men of royal siege; in his wanderings in last deserts & among the marvelous peoples (different nations). And he is not merely a romantic figure; his own nature is romantic. He is the most poetic of Shakespearean tragic heroes. If one recalls Othello’s famous speeches like, “Her father loved me”, “It is the cause”,” Behold- I have a weapon”, he sounds more poetic than any other character. Not only this, his imaginative power is also extraordinary. He has watched with a poet’s eye the Arabian tree dropping their medicinal gum and the Indian throwing away his chance found pearl.
So, Othello in the play is the dark and grand, with a light upon him from the Sun where he was born; but no longer young, & now grave, self-controlled, steeled by the experiences of the countless perils and hardships, at once simple and stately in the bearing (appearance) and in speech, a great man naturally modest but fully conscious of his worth, proud of his services to the state.
The sources of danger in Othello’s character are revealed but too clearly by the story. In the first place, Othello’s mind, for all its poetry is simple. He is not observant. His nature tends outward. He is quite free from introspection, and is not given to reflection. Emotion excites his imagination, but it confuses and dulls his intellect.
In the second place, for all his dignity and massive calm, he is by nature full of most vehement passions. Shakespeare emphasizes his self-control not only by the pictures of First Act but by references to the past. Ludovico, amazed by at his violence exclaims; “Is this the noble Moor whom our full Senet / Call in all sufficient?....”: Othello silences in a moment the night brawl between the attendants and those of Brabantio “Keep up your bright swords/ For the dew may rust them”.
Lastly, Othello’s nature is all of one piece. His trust where he has to trust is absolute. His hesitation is almost impossible to him. He is extremely self-reliant and decides and acts instantaneously. Othello was trustful and put entire confidence in the honesty of Iago, who has been his companion in the military expedition. This confidence was misplaced, and we happen to know it; but it was no sigh of stupidity in Othello. For his opinion of Iago was the opinion of practically everyone who knew him as an honest man. Not trusting him and to be unmoved by his warnings of so honest a friend would have been quite unnatural in Othello. Moreover, Iago does not bring these warnings to the husband who had lived with a wife for months and years but Othello was newly married and could not have known much of Desdemona before his marriage.
Towards the close of temptation scene (Act III, Scene iii), Othello is confused and deeply troubled but not essentially jealous. Here, the source of his sufferings is the wreck of his faith and his love. It is the feeling “If she be false, O then Heaven mocks itself.” When Othello returns (Act III, Scene iii) Iago’s poison has worked and he seems to burn like the “mines of sulphur”. He furiously demands proof and in return hears the maddening tale of Cassio’s dream followed by a lie by Iago that he saw, “Cassio wipe his beard” with the “handkerchief”. The madness of revenge is in Othello’s blood, and hesitation is a thing he never knew. He passes judgment and controls himself to make his sentence a solemn vow.
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The character of Othello
Othello – Inside Out
From: Shakespeare is Hard, but so is Life by Fintan O’Toole
1. Is Othello Stupid?
If you look at the character of Othello in isolation, and in particular if you look at him through the notion of the `tragic flaw', then he is not, for all his facility with words, very bright. He can talk up a storm, but he's not much for thinking. His tragic flaw is jealousy and he carries it around like a crutch, just waiting for someone to kick it from under him. He is manipulated by Iago, a man he didn't even trust enough in the first place to make him his lieutenant, without ever attempting to ascertain facts for himself. Suspecting his wife, he fails to confront her with her supposed infidelity, or to question her alleged lover, or to ask any of the other people who could tell him what's going on. He is driven demented by a handkerchief. He is not tragic, merely pathetic.
As it happens, there is no play in which Shakespeare is less interested in `character' or in the isolated hero than Othello. To take character first, Shakespeare is so little interested in character in Othello, that some of the characters simply don't add up. Take Cassio, for instance. After Othello, Iago and Desdemona, his is the most important role in the play. He is the supposed lover of Desdemona, the cause of the tragic ending. He is also the person who is to be left to clean up the mess, replacing the dead Othello as Governor of Cyprus. Yet basic things about him and his relationship to Othello are utterly inconsistent.
In the first act, he is said to be a man `almost damned in a fair wife' (l, 1, 20), but in the last three acts he is a sexually active bachelor. In the first act, he doesn't know about Othello and Desdemona. `I do not understand,' he says when Iago tells him that Othello has married. (1, 2, 52) In the third act, though, Desdemona says to Othello that Cassio `came awooing with you' (3, 3, 72) and Othello himself says that Cassio knew of their love `from first to last'. (3, 3, 98) Is he married or not? Has he been Othello's intimate, trusted friend or not? If Cassio's character were of the slightest importance, Shakespeare would at least have made his mind up about such things.
Or take Roderigo, Iago's first dupe. How well does he know Desdemona whom he lusts after for so long? Very well in the first act. He has often been an unwelcome guest in her father's house, and she is probably sick of the sight of him. Yet in the fourth act, he is threatening Iago that `I will make myself known to Desdemona.' (4, 2, 201) And both this and the inconsistencies about Cassio, while they were hardly deliberate on Shakespeare's part, were clearly considered unimportant by him. We know that he revised the play carefully: clearly, having consistent characters wasn't one of his major concerns.
More importantly, Othello simply cannot be considered in isolation from Iago. There is no Othello without Iago: it is Iago who draws out his inner fears and longings, who makes him the character that we see and hear. And the tragedy is not just Othello's, it is also Iago's. Iago is as much a tragic figure as any of Shakespeare's protagonists, as much caught between one world and another, one way of thinking and another. If Iago were given another speech or two at the end of the play, the tide could be changed from Othello to lago, for everything else makes Iago fit for the role of protagonist. He has the soliloquies. He is the one who most reveals himself to the audience. He is the most active character in the play. (Othello, for a hero, is strikingly passive. Hamlet, who is regarded as the archetypal shirker, fights pirates, boards ships, deals with ghosts, directs a play, kills people, has rows in graveyards. Othello suffers, kills and dies.) And Iago also has the longest part, not merely the longest in Othello but the longest part in all of Shakespeare. To see the play as being about a tragic hero called Othello is absurd.
And Othello, anyway, is not a tragic hero in any classical sense. In the first place, he is not a king or a prince or a ruler, as Lear, Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Coriolanus and Macbeth are. And because of this, his personal tragedy does not involve the tearing apart of the state or the order of nature or the universe. On the contrary, he is a servant – a highly important servant, admittedly, but a servant nonetheless. His role is dependent on the state's need for him, and he knows it: `I have done the state some service.' (5, 2, 348) The `other world' is not involved: there are no ghosts or witches and there is no pattern of images creating an imagined universe. His story involves battles and a general threat to the stability of the state, but they are there only to be forgotten, to become irrelevant in the context of the emotional battle that he has to fight with himself.
The world will not be corrupted by his misdeeds and we, as an audience, do not feel that there is anything necessary or significant, never mind inevitable, about his death. On the contrary, it is an adjunct to a terrible mistake, an afterthought to an error. And because the whole world has not been involved in his tragedy, because it is so intensely personal, the tragedy of a victim rather than an active controller of other people's lives, there is no need to restore the social and political order in the end. It has not been destroyed.
This is not to say, though, that there are not great forces whirling around this intimate and intense story of a man and a woman and what can be done to them. In the first place, it is not for nothing that Shakespeare uses the setting of Venice. For Venice, to an Elizabethan or Jacobean audience was a byword for new money, for the new unscrupulous capitalism that was successfully challenging the old European feudal powers. Setting a play in Venice in Shakespeare's time was like setting one on Wall Street now. It told the audience that the context for the action was money, commerce, dynamic capitalism.
What is especially interesting about Venice as a setting for the play, though, is not just that it has this single obvious meaning for a contemporary audience, but that it has a double meaning. As we have seen, Shakespeare's tragedies are concerned with things becoming double, having no fixed single meaning, with opposites melting into each other and things breaking through the definitions that we expect of them. And so it is with Venice for Shakespeare and his audience. Venice is on the one hand a shorthand name for vigorous capitalism and its ability to break through boundaries and mix up things which had previously been well-defined, a racial and religious melting pot looking with one eye towards the Christian civilization of the West and with the other towards the Islamic infidels of the East. Shakespeare himself had already used Venice in this precise sense five years before he wrote Othello, in The Merchant of Venice.
But on the other hand, Venice is also a byword for exotic vices and unbridled passions, a part of the Italian vogue, the craze for setting plays in Italy which had been raging since the end of the sixteenth century in the English theatre. In this competing stereotype, it was the land of the atheistic, amoral political theorist, Machiavelli, of intriguing intrigues and perfidious poisoners. It was a place full of tight political plots and loose women. Around 1599 English playwrights discovered that they could write about corrupt courts, cynical rulers, religious leaders who preached purity and practised promiscuity, and society ladies who treated their hankies with more care than their wedding vows. They could do all of these things without getting hanged, drawn and quartered - provided they set such plays in exotic Italy, so different, of course, from our own dear sceptred isle.
Faced with this choice of connotations for his chosen setting, Shakespeare typically uses both. It is essential to the story that Venice, dynamic, open and unbound by feudal traditions, allows a man of the `wrong' colour and of no social standing in a Christian republic, to become an important figure in the state. Othello's ascent from actually being a slave (1, 3, 137) to being entrusted with the security of one of the world's great trading powers, is a kind of social mobility, based solely on his skills as a soldier, that was a new, tenuous possibility in Elizabethan England, and absolutely unthinkable in any feudal society.
Venice is a place where black and white are literally no longer opposites, where pragmatic, commercial values are threatening what would previously have been absolute distinctions. And it is interesting that no Venetian, even Othello's deadliest enemies, however racist they may be, ever suggests that a black outsider should not be allowed to lead the Venetian forces. Everyone accepts that he is the best man for the job, even those who are so bigoted that the sight of Othello's black skin makes them want to throw up. There is a meritocracy at work that is so strong that it forms a good part of Iago's hatred of Othello.
At the same time, though, Shakespeare also makes use of the second stereotype. Iago, most obviously, is a version of the Machiavellian villain, though one who grows to a complexity well beyond his origins. The undisguised sexuality which runs through the play is made possible by its exotic setting. The quickness with which the characters are roused to passions of all sorts is a way of using the Italian stereotype. And, of course, the assumption running through the play that infidelity in women is the norm rather than the exception depends upon the same association of Italy with sexual vice.
The doubleness of these connotations of the setting in Venice - dynamism and decadence, openness and intrigue, commercial virility and sexual vice - is reinforced by the fact that the play both is and is not set in Venice. It opens in Venice, is essentially bound up with the city all the way through, but moves after the first act to the never-never land of Cyprus. Shakespeare makes use of the free state, the new money and the new man, but at a distance, giving himself room for ambivalence about its force and its consequences. If the context begins as the great force in history which Venice represents - broadly, the replacement of feudalism by capitalism - that context narrows as the play goes on to the war within an intimately connected set of minds. The war doesn't make sense without the greater context, but it has its own dynamics, the byzantine tensions of sex and race. For Othello is the story of the way in which external things - politics, culture, prejudices - become internal, become part of the most intimate details of a man's thoughts and feelings.
2. Black and Tan
The most obvious thing about Othello has also been, in the way that the play has been taught and interpreted, the least obvious. Othello is black, but Othello, a man who engages our sympathies more immediately and more directly than any other Shakespearian tragic protagonist, could not, in a long tradition of criticism of the play, possibly be black. How could a black man be so noble, so engaging, so obviously capable of such delicacy of feeling? There are two ways of dealing with this. One is to deny that Othello's blackness has anything much to do with the play. The other, by the vehemence with which it insists that Othello could not really be played as black on the stage, disproves the first, showing by its very racism the centrality of the colour of Othello's skin to the play as a whole.
Even at the end of the century in which Othello was written, Thomas Rymer found it utterly implausible: a `blackamoor' could not have risen to be anything higher than a trumpeter and could not have married a woman other than `some little drab'. All of the most important critics of the nineteenth century, the time when so much of what we take to be accepted wisdom about Shakespeare's tragedies was laid down, are creepily racist about Othello. Coleridge says that we should make the best of a bad job and play Othello as merely brown, for, `It would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable Negro.' Charles Lamb, in a wild fit of tolerance, suggests that perhaps Desdemona is not `altogether to be condemned for the unsuitableness of the person whom she selected as her lover'. A. C. Bradley feels that it would be better to play Othello as tanned rather than really black, since otherwise a civilized audience would be disgusted at the sight of him: perhaps if we saw Othello coal-black with the bodily eye the aversion of our blood, an aversion which comes as near to being merely physical as anything human can, would overpower our imagination . . .'
It would, of course, be equally outrageous to see Othello as a play about racism in a modern sense. Shakespeare's England was not a multi-racial society or the centre of a multi-racial Empire as it would later become. At the same time, though, Shakespeare was certainly conscious of race. If there was no large black population in his England, there were significant numbers of black people, significant enough for Queen Elizabeth to complain in 1601 of being `discontented at the great numbers of Negars and blackamoors which are crept into the realm'. And we know that Shakespeare was aware of the fear, revulsion and sexual disgust which blackness could invoke in a contemporary audience because he used it quite frequently. Portia in The Merchant of mice is glad to be rid of the Prince of Morocco and `all of his complexion'. The King of Naples in The Tempest is criticized for having married his daughter to the King of Tunis even though the court had pleaded with him not to `loose her to an African'. Hamlet talks of his mother's desire to `batten on this Moor', a pun in which `Moor' is used as the opposite of `fair'. Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus is an atheist and an `inhuman dog'. What is unusual about Othello then, is not that it uses racial antagonisms, but the attitude it adopts towards them. For if, in Titus Andronicus, it is the Moor who is an `inhuman dog', in Othello it is not the Moor, but his tormentor Iago, who is described as an `inhuman dog'. (5, l, 64)
Far from being an incidental detail, the imagery, and even the structure of the play, emphasize the importance of blackness and whiteness, darkness and light, to its effect. The blonde Desdemona's virtue, for example, is to be turned to black pitch by Iago's schemes. The first act and the last act take place in a darkness that is pierced by light, making the contrast, and the intermingling of one with the other, visibly present on stage.
In the first act, the torches of the various groups who rush about the streets of Venice light up the darkness, and Brabantio specifically links these torches in the night with the marriage of the black Othello to his own white daughter:
Belief of it oppresses me already. Light, I say, light! (1, 1, 142-)
And this beginning is balanced by the visual imagery of the ending, with the play's last scene being set in motion by Othello entering the darkness with a light, a light which he again explicitly links to Desdemona's whiteness: `Put out the fight [i.e. the lamp] and then put out the light [i.e. Desdemona].' (5, 2, 7) The play is literally framed by its imagery of black and white.
And at a deeper, psychological level, blackness, or rather the white man's fear of blackness, fuels much of the play's imagery. If the political context of racism has changed since the time that Shakespeare wrote Othello, the psychological context has changed remarkably little, and it is this which gives the play its continuing urgency. Exactly the same mixture of fear and sexual fascination, of a sense of inadequacy that turns into a sense of superiority, still applies 400 years later. The racist Iago constantly links Othello's blackness to animality, comparing his sexuality, for instance, to that of a horse: `You'll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse, you'll have your nephews neigh to you, you'll have coursers for cousins, and gennets for germans.' (1, 1, 113-)
In our own time, this tendency, at once contemptuous and sexually fearful, continues in the white mind. The black psychologist Franz Fanon remarked on how `The negro symbolises the biological ... I have always been struck by the speed with which "handsome young Negro" turns into "young colt" or "stallion".' Fanon found that sixty per cent of white Europeans whom he questioned associated the word `Negro' with `boxer, biology, penis, strong, athletic, savage, animal, devil, sin'. To those around him Othello also brings these images to mind. He is `warlike Othello' (strong, athletic, savage); `an old black ram' (an image of both the animal and the sexual); he is a `blacker devil'. The response to Othello in the play is still the response of many whites to the black man, and the fact that the imagery is unchanged over the centuries shows how deeply Shakespeare connects with the psychology of racism.
The important thing, indeed the crucial thing, for an understanding of what happens in the play, though, is that this racism isn't just the context in which Othello lives. It has entered his mind and his soul. It is an integral part of him, a piece of the outside world which he carries around in his most intimate, private self. It is the connection between the world around him and his thoughts, desires, feelings. Iago is able to influence Othello, not because Othello is stupid, or because he carries jealousy like an original sin stamped on his soul, but because Iago makes this connection. Iago's brilliance lies not in what he puts into Othello's mind, but what he draws out of it. He takes what is already there, and gives it `a local habitation and a name', takes shame and doubt and gives them visible substance.
As soon as he starts to believe that Desdemona may be unfaithful to him, Othello blames the colour of his own skin. `Haply for I am black ... She's gone.' (3, 3, 267-) It is the first explanation he thinks of. Iago is able to undermine Othello's confidence in his wife only because Othello himself cannot suppress the idea within his own mind that Desdemona must be strange and wilful in her tastes to have married him in the first place. Iago plays on Othello's self-contempt, on the innate sense of inferiority which he has absorbed from the racism all around him. Marrying Desdemona may have proved Othello worthy of white love, respect and admiration, but it has not made him white. The very sense of triumph with which he talks of his marriage, his conversion of it into a military manoeuvre with Desdemona as his `fair warrior', shows his need for that acceptance, a need that makes him continually vulnerable to Iago's promptings. He projects that insecurity on to Desdemona - if he is unworthy of her love, then she must be perverse for loving him, and if she is perverse, then she must be unfaithful. He accepts without question Iago's suggestion that Desdemona must be unnatural for having preferred Othello to `many proposed matches / Of her own clime, complexion, and degree'. (3, 3, 234-35) What he hates when he hates her is himself, the image of his own blackness which he sees in her disgrace:
My name, that was as fresh
As Dian's visage, is now begrimed and black As mine own face. (3, 3, 391-)
In her supposed infidelity, he sees the part of himself that he has been taught to despise, the colour of his skin.
3. Under the Skin
Iago understands Othello, knows how to draw out what is dormant in his general's mind, because he shares his fears and his shame. Othello comes to believe that he is being cuckolded because, at some level, he feels he should be cuckolded. Iago has precisely the same feeling. In this, as in so much else, Iago and Othello are brothers under the skin.
Iago is so filled with sexual disgust and hatred of women that he cannot think of either sex or women without thinking of animals. From the first scene of the play onwards, he habitually thinks of lovers as animals, Othello as a ram, Desdemona a ewe: `an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe.' (1, 1, 88-89) Making love is making `the beast with two backs'. (1, 1, 118) Othello, is a Barbary horse, Desdemona, when she is not a lifeless object like a treasure ship (1, 2, 50), is, like all women, a kind of animal, a wild cat or a guinea hen. A married man is a yoked beast of burden. He himself is a spider, Cassio a fly (2, 1, 171), Roderigo a hunting dog (2, 1, 303). He cannot think of sex, or, as the play goes on, of anything else, without draining it of its humanity, making it into something either mechanical or animal.
And the remarkable thing about this disgust is that it is very like Othello's self-disgust. Iago, the cool tormentor of Othello with visions of his wife's adultery, also torments himself with visions of his own wife's adultery. While playing on the self-contempt that allows Othello to believe that Desdemona should be betraying him, Iago is himself prey to the same delusion. And it is a mark of how closely he identifies with Othello that he, Othello's tormentor, imagines Othello to be his tormentor. According to Emilia, Iago has long suspected her `with the Moor'. (4, 2, 151) Earlier Iago himself has told Othello that `knowing what I am, I know what she shall be' (4, 1, 72), meaning that since he himself is a cuckold, he knows that women must be unfaithful. It is a telling phrase, moving as it does from his view of himself to his view of humanity. Like Othello, he moves from the inside out, not from the external world of evidence to the internal world of conviction.
This identification of himself with Othello goes even further in his imagery and in his positioning within the play. In the structure of the play, as we have seen, Othello's blackness and the blackness of the night are identified. Yet it is Iago who makes darkness his proper element, taking the blackness of Othello on to himself. It is he who dominates the three night scenes (1, 1; 2, 3; and 5, 1). And, in a play in which Othello is identified with the Devil, Iago is at pains to take that identification on himself. At every hand's turn he calls on the powers of blackness (`When devils do the blackest sins put on . . .' 2, 3, 342), and believes that he can turn white to black, Desdemona's virtue `into pitch'. (2, 3, 351) The words he uses and the parts of the play he uses them in are calculated to identify Iago with Othello.
So close are Iago and Othello, indeed, that they start to melt into each other. Not only does Iago take on Othello's association with blackness, but Othello starts to take on Iago's characteristic imagery and style of speech. In the early part of the play, Iago and Othello speak differently, not only in the obvious sense that Iago uses much more prose than Othello does, but also in the contrast between Iago's blunt and often coarse style and Othello's stately and deliberate poetic speech. But in the last two acts, as the two minds begin to fuse together, as Iago's words give shape to Othello's thoughts, so Othello starts to sound more and more like Iago.
Like Iago, he starts to turn people into animals in his imagery, conjuring up a world of goats, monkeys, toads, crocodiles, blood-sucking flies and poisonous snakes. Like Iago, he starts to appeal to the devil and fill his speech with diabolic images of Desdemona as `fair devil', `false as hell', `double damned', their bedroom as hell itself. This switching of styles of speech, in which the borders of individual character become completely permeable is at its most dramatic in 4, 1, when Othello is finally persuaded by Iago that Desdemona is unfaithful. Othello's grand verse breaks down into jagged, disordered prose. Iago's prose becomes triumphant verse. The two men are so interlocked that it is impossible to tell them completely apart.
But why does Iago make this destructive identification with Othello? The source of Othello's self-contempt may be his position as a black man in a white society, but what is the source of Iago's? Here again, Iago is a reverse mirror-image of Othello. Othello suffers the uncertainties of having benefited from a new openness in society, a new possibility for a man to achieve high office without social standing. Iago suffers from the precise reverse, from the uncertainties of being wedded to order, degree, a sense of each thing being in its place, in a world where all of these things are being swept away. And Othello is the embodiment of these forces, the living proof of the way in which old distinctions are breaking down. Iago suffers directly from this breakdown, by being denied his place as Othello's lieutenant.
Iago is as close to being a tragic protagonist as makes no real difference. He is closer to a Lear, a Hamlet or a Macbeth than Othello is. Like them, he is caught between an old world and a new one, a medieval set of values and a modern one. Hamlet tries to order an old world, a world of duty and revenge, by new methods, those of the new humanist philosophy. Iago tries to restore an old world, that of order, degree, hierarchy, by new methods, those of ruthless, cynical rationality. He is caught in an impossible contradiction, using injustice to restore justice, lies to restore the truth, a convoluted disorder to create a simple order. In doing so he constitutes a critique of both the old world and the new, his psychotic sense of order discrediting the very notion of order, his perverted rationality destroying the very notion of reason.
Iago explains his immediate motivation right at the start of the play, in his first long harangue to Roderigo. His complaint is that now in these new times, a man is no longer valued by his position in the hierarchy, his place in the social queue:
Preferment goes by letter and affection,
And not by the old gradation, where each second Stood heir to th' first. ;I. I, 3G-)
It is the collapse of feudalism in a nutshell, the replacement of a system built on knowing one's place, `the old gradation', by a more mobile and flexible one. Iago should have inherited the job of lieutenant. Instead, it has gone to Cassio. And Iago's description of Cassio broadens the base of his attack to take in the whole new world, its concerns with money and business on the one hand and its new scientific ideology on the other. Cassio, Iago tells us, is an `arithmetician', a `Florentine' (Florence being famed for its bankers and accountants), a `debitor and creditor' (i.e. a book-keeper), a 'counter-caster' (i.e. a petty accountant). From the one slight to himself, he builds an assault on the whole rising order of society.
And this assault is deepened as the play goes on, becoming fundamental and philosophical. In his lecture to Roderigo in the third scene, he gives his vision of human order and balance, an essentially medieval order in which everything is balanced by everything else, in which emotional forces are kept in their place by reason, and reason by emotions: `If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most preposterous conclusions. But we have reason to cool our raging motions. . .' (1, 3, 319-) This is Iago's guiding principle, but, in dramatic terms, it is already deeply ironic. For this classical vision of the golden mean, of harmony in human conduct, is expounded as part of Iago's plan to dupe Roderigo. It is reason in the service of cynical barbarity, Iago in a nutshell.
This demented use of harmony, balance and order to achieve something violent, cruel and inhuman reaches its climax in Iago's scenario for Desdemona's death. Having used the business with the handkerchief to finally convince Othello of Desdemona's treachery Iago goes on to dictate the manner of her killing. Othello suggests poison, but Iago insists that she should be strangled in the marriage bed. This is objectively against Iago's interests, since Desdemona could be poisoned quietly; without being given the chance to dissuade Othello, whereas strangulation means that Othello has to confront her, risking that `her body and beauty unprovide my mind again'. (4, 1, 200) But Iago insists on it out of his perverse sense of balance and justice. She has, supposedly, sinned against the marriage bed, therefore she must be punished there: `strangle her in her bed, even the bed she hath contaminated.' (4, 1, 202) This is the `old gradation' restored, everything put back in its proper place.
Iago's lunatic sense of order is itself an implicit criticism of the old order, but the play has more explicit things to say about it as well. The whole idea of duty, not as something sickeningly simple in Iago's obsessive sense, but as something complex and double-edged, is introduced early on in the play. Duty, indeed, is one of those things that gets split, becomes divided, in a typically Shakespearean way here. Desdemona, in a scene that Shakespeare would repeat in King Lear and that therefore had particular meaning for Shakespeare around this time, talks of her `divided duty'. Like Cordelia in King Lear, she has duties to her father and to her husband, and the two are incompatible. (1, 3, 179-187) Duty is not absolute, but contingent on human needs and desires. The old order, Iago gradation, has its place, but only so long as it can be accommodated to the proper demands of real people. It is this human factor that Iago leaves out of account.
And it is a contradiction on which he founders. Iago talks of hierarchy and balance, but he sets out to support these things by breaking the very bonds of duty which keep them together. He refuses to see Othello's marriage bonds to Desdemona as proper ones. Othello talks of his `title' as a husband, but Iago talks of the marriage as an act of piracy. (1, 2, 50) Having undermined the husband's title to his wife, he is himself destroyed by having his own title to his wife's obedience revoked by Emilia's moral outrage at what her husband has brought about: 'Tis proper I obey him, but not now.' (5, 2, 202) Ironically, Emilia's act in breaking her duty to her husband and revealing his cruelty, is an act of balance, a restoration of the kind of order Iago was obsessed by. It balances out his earlier breach of the bonds of marriage. Again, as so often in these plays, it is an act with a double dimension a wrong that does right, a good act that is a repetition of a bad one. It is a perfect expression of the ambivalence that is everywhere in the play.
4. Time After Time
Not only does Othello have a double setting (Venice and Cyprus), and a double `hero' (Iago and Othello), it also has a double sense of time. It has been pointed out since the end of the seventeenth century that there is something odd about the way that time works in the play, but not that this oddness is absolutely consistent with what Shakespeare is doing here and in all of the tragedies, making us feel that there are two overlapping worlds present on stage at the same time.
In the first two acts of Othello, there is nothing strange about the way time passes. If anything, what is unusual is how few liberties are taken with time. By and large, in these two acts, the time taken to do something on stage is the time it would take in real life. The only obvious exception is that Desdemona is brought from the inn to the council chamber in the course of Othello's speech describing how he wooed her, a period of no more than two minutes. Even here, though, the fact that Othello's speech, though not particularly long, ranges over many years and many countries, successfully disguises the telescoping. We get used to the idea that there is no difference between the time things take on stage and the time they would take in life.
But we are given a false sense of security about time. The last three acts work in a starkly different way. At one level, the three acts seem like one continuous action, a breathless emotional and psychological wave that breaks on the shore of disaster and then recedes, leaving those who have ridden it beached and forlorn. The whole impression is one of speed, of things happening before there is time to reflect on them, Iago swept along on the perverse pleasure of his own ingenuity, Othello unable to find the calm moment of thought which might save him and Desdemona.
Working against this, though, is a different logic of time which tells us that all of these things are happening slowly, over a long period. Take the handkerchief. At one level, it is an inspired piece of improvisation by Iago, an idea seized on and carried through while his malice is in full flight. At the other level, though, Emilia tells us that `My wayward husband hath a hundred times / Wooed me to steal it' (3, 3, 296-97), giving the impression that the whole thing has been a long-conceived plan that has taken ages to come to fruition. Or even more striking is Othello's sense of how long he has been with Desdemona in the marriage bed. In 3, 3 he talks of her `stolen hours of lust' and of his own nights of ignorance sleeping with her and not knowing her supposed infidelities. (3, 3, 344) But only two scenes earlier he has slept with her for the first time. And the scene which separates these two is of about half a minute's duration. Scene 3, where Othello gives the impression that he has slept with Desdemona many times is effectively continuous with Scene 1 where he sleeps with her first: the action of one is continued directly in the other.
And this sense of there being two different time schemes at work becomes, if anything, stronger. In 4, 2, Othello and Emilia discuss Desdemona's behaviour with words like `ever' and `never', giving the impression that Othello and Desdemona have been married a long time. Othello talks of his wife having committed `the act of shame / A thousand times' (5, 2, 218-19) which is some going if they have really only been together for one night. Similarly Bianca attacks Cassio for having been `a week away' from her, even though, by the other time scheme they have only been together for a day or two. And, during the continuous action between the beginning of Act 3 and the end of the play, action which by one time scheme takes place between one night and the next, the Turkish threat to Cyprus disappears and peace breaks out, the Venetian senate is informed of what's going on, and decides to replace Othello with Cassio, and Lodovico has time to arrive in Cyprus from Venice with the news.
In this brilliant division of time into two different and at times competing logics, Shakespeare dramatizes the core of the play. There is a normal time in which the rest of the world and events unfold themselves in the usual way. But there is also the time of Iago and Othello. Both are out of synch with the times, Iago unable to reconcile himself to the new order, Othello ahead of the times as a man who has power but no status. This sense of the two men being out of their time becomes literal. We feel it and experience it as we watch the play, their fast, passionate time at odds with the normal unfolding of history.
This bold division of time is possible because Othello is a play in which things in general are refusing to stand still, in which hitherto fixed things are turning into their opposites. Most obviously, black and white, the clearest of distinctions, are melting together, both in the marriage of Othello and Desdemona and in the surrounding imagery of darkness and light. Othello himself as someone who is deeply ambiguous in his meaning for others is superbly dramatized in the opening scenes, where one group is seeking to apprehend him as a criminal and the other is seeking to appoint him as defender of the state. He is such a slippery presence, so apt to change his shape in the sight of others, that he is accused of being a magician.
Here again, Iago and Othello are alike. Othello is accused of being a magician and casting spells, but it is Iago who, in his speech, transforms people into animals and, in his plottings, transforms innocent things into `evidence' of unfaithfulness. As Iago and Othello melt into each other, Othello starts to use Iago's language of transformation. Iago's `I would change my humanity with a baboon' (l, 3, 315) is almost repeated in Othello's later `Exchange me for a goat'. (3, 3, 184) And Othello becomes the magician he has been painted as. In his obsessive insistence on the significance of the handkerchief, he makes it into a magical object: `There's magic in the web of it.' (3, 4, 69) So, while Othello doesn't have the ghosts and witches of Hamlet or Macbeth, it does have a sense of the magical and the ritual, of the slipperiness of things being dramatized and contained.
In this, as in so much else, what happens in the play is caught in the middle between an old way of thinking and a new one. The old way of thinking claimed that the whole cosmos was one organic unity and that therefore every part bore a sympathetic relationship to every other. The position of a star could tell you how a man on earth might behave. The look of a man's face could tell you what his mind, his soul, his inner being, were like. But Desdemona breaks with this world-view.
Instead of taking Othello's face, regarded as inferior and ugly by her society, as proof of his inner worth, she chooses to look beyond the external and to see Othello's `visage in his mind'. (1, 3, 252) This should be enough for happiness and it would be if those around her were of like mind, if the new world to which her decision belongs had already fully arrived. But it hasn't. It hasn't arrived for Othello and it hasn't arrived for Iago.
It is precisely this relationship between outward appearances and inner worth that Iago and Othello confuse. They are neither one thing nor the other. If Othello were fully of the old way of thinking, he would stay within his `clime, complexion, and degree'. If he were of the new way of thinking, he would adopt the scientific means of looking at things, which is to move from the external to the internal, from outward evidence to inner conviction about what the evidence means. But he does neither of these things. He breaks with the old way by shifting out of his `proper' position, but he doesn't adopt the new way. Instead of moving from external evidence to internal conviction, he moves from his inner conviction, his conviction that Desdemona must be unfaithful, to the `evidence', the handkerchief and Desdemona's pleading for Cassio. He moves from conviction to evidence and not, as a new humanist would do, the other way round.
The tragic irony here is that all Othello is doing is continuing the good, humane leap of faith that Desdemona has made in choosing him for her husband. She has fallen in love with him because she believes that outward evidence can be overridden by human emotions. And in suspecting her, Othello does the same thing, reading the evidence according to his emotions, allowing the inner feeling to override the outward appearance. This is much more than jealousy, this is a tragic turning of things into their opposites. Her good, human gesture turns into his evil, inhuman action. Her generosity becomes his narrowness. Her act of love becomes his act of self-loathing. Her sympathy becomes his violence. The refusal of things to stay fixed, the ability of things to suddenly change their natures, is what dooms them both.
And the same contradiction bedevils Iago. He at once believes that things should stay the same, that the old gradation should stay in force, and that he can transform everything, people into animals, innocence into corruption. He believes that Othello's outward appearance, his black skin, is sufficient reason to hate and fear him, but in his mind he keeps changing that appearance, imagining Othello not merely as not a black man but as not a man at all. Believing that outward appearances are everything and that they can be manipulated at will, he is undone by the fact that his wife Emilia belies her outward appearance of cynicism and emerges as being ready to die for truth and goodness. Because neither is at one with the outside world, Othello and Iago cannot get this business of inside and outside right. It is a failure that dooms them both.
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