by Harold Bloom
Enter Othello and Attendants
CASSIO Lo, where he comes!
OTHELLO O my fair warrior!
DESDEMONA My dear Othello!
OTHELLO It gives me wonder great as my content
To see you here before me! O my soul’s joy,
If after every tempest come such calms
May the winds blow till they have wakened death,
And let the labouring bark climb hills of seas,
Olympus-high, and duck again as low
As hell’s from heaven. If it were now to die
’Twere now to be most happy, for I fear
My soul hath her content so absolute
That not another comfort like to this
Succeeds in unknown fate.
DESDEMONA The heavens forbid
But that our loves and comforts should increase
Even as our days do grow.
OTHELLO Amen to that, sweet powers!
I cannot speak enough of this content,
It stops me here, it is too much of joy.
And this, and this the greatest discords be [They kiss.]
That e’er our hearts shall make.
IAGO [aside]
O, you are well tuned now: but I’ll set down
The pegs that make this music, as honest
As I am.
OTHELLO Come, let us to the castle.
News, friends, our wars are done, the Turks are drowned.
How does my old acquaintance of this isle?
Honey, you shall be well desired in Cyprus,
I have found great love amongst them. O my sweet,
I prattle out of fashion, and I dote
In mine own comforts. I prithee, good Iago,
Go to the bay and disembark my coffers.
Bring thou the master to the citadel,
He is a good one, and his worthiness
Does challenge much respect. Come, Desdemona;
Once more, well met at Cyprus.
Act 2, Scene 1
Othello senses that his happiness has reached its apex and can only decline. Contentment floods the Moor, but he will never have such comfort again, as he plainly fears. Desdemona, always the epitome of humane maturity, speaks instead of comforts that should increase even as her days and years with Othello will grow. The kiss they exchange is their last moment of harmony, with Iago standing by and prophesying his destruction of their mutual music. The rigors of the double plot will manifest a different mode of music, one in which the strings are false.
Othello, who says he has found in his love for Desdemona a new principle of order, ironically prophesies the advent of a new chaos, though he has no intimation that its architect will be Iago. He makes explicit that he is not jealous by nature, and we believe him, but Iago is the very daemon of jealousy. Othello’s heroic resistance to suspicion of his wife’s virtue cannot survive Iago’s skill at suggestion. His inmost pride, which is his sense of military greatness, strains and then gives way:
I had been happy if the general camp,
Pioneers and all, had tasted her sweet body,
So I had nothing known. O now for ever
Farewell the tranquil mind, farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troops and the big wars
That makes ambition virtue! O farewell,
Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, th’ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war!
And, O you mortal engines whose rude throats
Th’immortal Jove’s dread clamours counterfeit,
Farewell: Othello’s occupation’s gone.
Act 3, Scene 3
This stirring passage would seem to have haunted Ernest Hemingway, who is prophesied in “the big wars.” We accept Othello’s military sublime because he has kept it so scrupulously apart from the camp of peace, and yet I hear almost the accents of a boy in this dirge that sadly bids farewell even to cannons. His desperation becomes a direct and dangerous threat to Iago when the Moor demands ocular proof that his love is a whore. And yet this provokes Iago to fresh dramatizations of his insinuations. Even in Shakespeare I do not know of a scene so dramatically wrought as the one Iago directs, in which a diabolic ritual is enacted as a kind of black Mass:
OTHELLO O that the slave had forty thousand lives!
One is too poor, too weak for my revenge.
Now do I see ’tis true. Look here, Iago,
All my fond love thus do I blow to heaven:
’Tis gone!
Arise, black vengeance, from the hollow hell,
Yield up, O love, thy crown and hearted throne
To tyrannous hate! Swell, bosom, with thy fraught,
For ’tis of aspics’ tongues!
IAGOYet be content!
OTHELLO O blood, blood, blood! [Othello kneels.]
IAGO Patience, I say, your mind perhaps may change.
OTHELLO Never, Iago. Like to the Pontic sea
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne’er keeps retiring ebb but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellespont:
Even so my bloody thoughts with violent pace
Shall ne’er look back, ne’er ebb to humble love
Till that a capable and wide revenge
Swallow them up. Now by yond marble heaven
In the due reverence of a sacred vow
I here engage my words.
IAGODo not rise yet [Iago kneels.]
Witness, you ever-burning lights above,
You elements that clip us round about,
Witness that here Iago doth give up
The execution of his wit, hands, heart,
To wronged Othello’s service. Let him command
And to obey shall be in me remorse
What bloody business ever.
OTHELLOI greet thy love
Not with vain thanks but with acceptance bounteous,
And will upon the instant put thee to’t.
Within these three days let me hear thee say
That Cassio’s not alive
IAGOMy friend is dead,
’Tis done—at your request. But let her live.
OTHELLO Damn her, lewd minx: O damn her, damn her!
Come, go with me apart; I will withdraw
To furnish me with some swift means of death
For the fair devil. Now art thou my lieutenant.
IAGO I am your own for ever.
Exeunt.
Act 3, Scene 3
Iago has many ironic master-strokes, but I am particularly delighted by “Do not rise yet.” With diabolic brilliance, Iago kneels by his captain-general’s side and invokes “you ever-burning lights above,” but he means those below. In the variable exchanges between the many-minded Hamlet and the wretched Claudius, a fourth-rate Machiavel who is adroit only at poisoning, Shakespeare inaugurated a dialogue of a master self-otherseer and a contriver with no capacity for self-otherseeing. That is a prelude to this astonishing encounter between the superb self-otherseer Iago and the heroic but blind Othello, who becomes capable of self-otherseeing only in his death scene.
Soft you, a word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know’t:
No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you
speak
Of one that loved not wisely, but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinable gum. Set you down this,
And say besides that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turbanned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog
And smote him—thus! [He stabs himself.]
Act 5, Scene 2
Associating himself with Herod the Great, who had his own most beloved of wives, Mariamne the Hasmonean, executed on false charges, Othello knowingly places himself in the worst of company. And yet his suicidal speech is carefully balanced and profoundly just. For the first time in his life, he is capable of seeing himself as he would someone else, and of exercising his normally superb judgment upon his own tragedy. It is a grand recovery, but hopelessly belated. The aesthetic effect is enormous, and the human poignance virtually unbearable.
Edgar and Edmund:
Agonistic Dramatists
THE FIRST QUARTO of King Lear (1608) has a title page that gives us a crucial insight into that vast drama:
M. William Shak-speare:
HIS
True Chronicle Historie of the life and
death of King LEAR and his three
Daughters.
With the unfortunate life of Edgar, sonne
and heire to the Earle of Gloster, and his
sullen and assumed humor of
Tom of Bedlam:
One would hardly know from most scholarly criticism of King Lear that Edgar is much the most important figure in the drama after the great king himself. No Shakespearean person has been so absurdly neglected and misinterpreted as Edgar. Except for Lear, he is given more lines to speak than anyone else in the play. I myself do not find useful the accounts of King Lear that center upon its supposed “double plot,” if only because Shakespeare’s creative furnace fuses together the tragedies of Lear and his three daughters, and of Gloucester and his two sons. Of these five in the younger generation, Edgar rather than Edmund or Cordelia is the most central. Though the legendary King Leir was succeeded by King Edgar only after some intervening reigns, Shakespeare closes the play with a despairing Edgar reluctantly ascending the throne of Britain.
I have now written so many commentaries on Edgar that I am able to calm down when I encounter most available interpretations. One celebrated critic assured us that Edgar was a “weak and murderous character,” which is perhaps worthy of placement with T. S. Eliot’s judgment that Hamlet was “an aesthetic failure.”
Edgar and Edmund have to be read antithetically in relation to each other. Their lives finally converge in a death-duel that renders Edmund the Bastard a mortal wound at the hands of the half-brother he has wronged and, by an irony savage and just, transformed from a gullible youth into an inexorable avenger.
Edmund, like his precursor Iago, is a dramatist who composes with the lives of everyone else in the play. Unlike Iago, who is a great improviser and a tactical genius, the even more formidable Edmund is a brilliant strategist who has plotted his own rise to power by exploiting his intellectual superiority over everyone else in this tragedy of tragedies.
Edmund, when we consider his crimes against humanity, is nevertheless surprisingly attractive, because of his candor and clarity in self-otherseeing:
GLOUCESTER These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of Nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature finds itself scourged by the sequent effects. Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces, treason; and the bond cracked ’twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the prediction—there’s son against father. The King falls from bias of nature—there’s father against child. We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves. Find out this villain, Edmund; it shall lose thee nothing. Do it carefully.—And the noble and true-hearted Kent banished, his offence honesty! ’Tis strange, strange!
Exit.
EDMUND This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the stars, as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves and treachers by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star. My father compounded with my mother under the dragon’s tail and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. Fut! I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.
Enter Edgar.
Pat he comes, like the catastrophe of the old comedy. My cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o’Bedlam.—O, these eclipses do portend these divisions. Fa, sol, la, mi.
Act 1, Scene 2
Edmund’s sprezzatura, his studied carelessness, is meant to remind auditors and readers of Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528, and available in English from 1561 on), where this kind of nonchalance is commended as aristocratic behavior. But Edmund does it in a fiercely ironic mode, founded upon his bitterness at the stigma attached to his own bastardy. Edgar’s entrance so arouses his brother’s high theatricalism that Edmund casts himself as a traditionally melancholy villain, and his brother, the legitimate heir of Gloucester, as a victim, one of the inhabitants of the great stage of fools. Particularly uncanny, since Edgar cannot hear him, is Edmund’s prolepsis of what will be Edgar’s primary disguise in the play.
Edgar moves through the play from one agony to another, the terrible sufferings of both his godfather, Lear, and his father, Gloucester. Edmund’s pleasure in working out his intricate drive to power is clearly an aesthetic satisfaction to him, even as his dramatic skill in limning his night-piece approaches the best achieved by any rival Jacobean dramatist. And yet Edgar is also a dramatist, in his case a desperate one, who at least tries to fail better, in a mode that influenced Samuel Beckett. Tracing his pilgrimage could begin with his taking on the disguise of Tom of Bedlam:
I heard myself proclaimed,
And by the happy hollow of a tree
Escaped the hunt. No port is free, no place
That guard and most unusual vigilance
Does not attend my taking. While I may scape
I will preserve myself, and am bethought
To take the basest and most poorest shape
That ever penury in contempt of man
Brought near to beast. My face I’ll grime with filth,
Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots
And with presented nakedness outface
The winds and persecutions of the sky.
The country gives me proof and precedent
Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,
Strike in their numbed and mortified bare arms
Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;
And with this horrible object, from low farms,
Poor pelting villages, sheepcotes and mills,
Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers,
Enforce their charity. Poor Turlygod, poor Tom,
That’s something yet: Edgar I nothing am.
Act 2, Scene 2<
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The negative zest here has its own eloquence and is a portent of the fearful price Edgar will pay for his downward path to wisdom and survival. The playgoer and reader should begin with the realization that Edgar is himself of a near-royal family and stands fourth in line to the throne after Lear’s three daughters. His self-abnegation in going down through the very bottom of the social scale is overt and extreme. The Earl of Kent, banished under sentence of death should he return, disguises himself as Caius, a peasant, who offers himself to Lear as a servant and is accepted. Eventually, Edgar too will pretend he is a peasant, and as such bludgeons to death the horrible Oswald when that henchman of Goneril and Regan threatens to kill the blinded Gloucester. Something intensely histrionic as well as self-punishing in Edgar has him begin his disguised trek as a roaring beggar released from Bedlam, hospital for the insane.
I have already ventured that Edgar is the most underestimated character in all of Shakespeare’s invention of the human. The same critic who dismissed him as “weak and cowardly” goes on to suggest that Edgar’s long delay in revealing himself to Gloucester is founded upon his desire to remain perpetually a little child. I mention this because, though I find it absurd, it has been very influential, even upon R. A. Foakes, the otherwise astute editor of the Arden edition of King Lear. What Shakespeare instead shows us is the painful development of a stubborn hero who endures and ultimately cuts Edmund down. And yet Edgar is an enigma, and his staging of his own mode of self-overseeing adds to the difficult distinction of Lear’s tragedy.
Consider the extraordinary gift that Edgar displays as an actor in his portrayal of a wandering Tom of Bedlam:
Who gives anything to Poor Tom? Whom the foul fiend hath led through fire and through flame, through ford and whirlpool, o’er bog and quagmire; that hath laid knives under his pillow and halters in his pew; set ratsbane by his porridge, made him proud of heart, to ride on a bay trotting horse over four-inched bridges, to course his own shadow for a traitor. Bless thy five wits, Tom’s a-cold. O do, de, do, de, do, de: bless thee from whirlwinds, star-blasting and taking. Do Poor Tom some charity, whom the foul fiend vexes. There could I have him now, and there, and there again, and there.
