Othello's heroic status is conveyed chiefly by his rhetoric, a style of speech aptly called "the Othello music."2 No one else in the play (or in any other play) speaks the way Othello does. His language is extravagant and exotic; it is the vehicle for conveying the narrative of his colorful, romantic past; it is the source of his personal attraction, the instrument that wins Desdemona's heart and assures his triumph over Brabantio before the signory. Although Othello professes ignorance of the subtleties of oratory - "Rude am I in my speech" (I.3.81) - that claim is a performative tactic. His defense of his marriage (I.3.76-170) is poetic, stirring, and rhetorically dazzling, a narrative of a narrative of narratives. Othello tells the senators (and the audience) the story of his telling Desdemona the stories of his life, and the romantic, beguiling style is built with the staples of poetry: colorful imagery ("tented field," "deserts idle"); poetic patterns founded on doubled consonants and vowels ("sold to slavery," "hills whose heads touch heaven"); repeated words, often at the beginning of lines ("of most disastrous chances, Of moving accidents . . . Of hairbreadth scapes . . . Of being taken by the insolent foe"; "She gave . . . She swore . . . She wished . . . She thanked . . . She loved"); seductive rhythms grounded in repetition and formal balance ("Her father loved me, oft invited me, Still questioned me the story of my life From year to year"); exotic diction ("anthropophagi"). The speech comes to rest on a pair of gracefully poised lines, a sentence in which the symmetrical rhetoric captures the sympathy between the lovers and forbids objection: "She loved me for the dangers I had passed, And I loved her that she did pity them." The Moor belongs in a very small class of extraordinary, distinctive speakers, including Falstaff, Hamlet, Macbeth, Cleopatra, and perhaps Coriolanus.
Othello's command of such expressive gifts not only makes him charismatic but also signifies extraordinary imaginative reach. In first greeting Desdemona on Cyprus, he sets their joyous reunion in a context of passion and fatal risk: "If after every tempest come such calms, May the winds blow till they have wakened death!" (II.1.184-85). Such extremity characterizes the great aria in which Othello imagines Desdemona's infidelity as the immediate undoing of his world: "O, now forever Farewell the tranquil mind!" (III.3.347-48). The soaring lament draws its poetic energy from its colorful images, the rhythms of reiterated words, the musical echo of repeated vowels, and other verbal patterns typical of this famously compelling voice. Audible through the middle of the third act, this heroic register serves as the benchmark for measuring the hero's tragic collapse, as we hear his language degenerate into the vulgar, misogynist, and even bestial style of Iago. The poetic extravagance sounds again in the last scene, now shaded with a cosmic despair: "Blow me about in winds! roast me in sulphur! Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!" (V.2.280-81). Relying on such flamboyant rhetoric to make his earthly exit, he conjures up "Arabian trees," "Their medicinable gum," and, "in Aleppo once, . . . a malignant and a turbaned Turk" (V.2.350-53). The powerful beauty of Othello's language is Shakespeare's instrument for delineating the contours of his heroic persona - courage, integrity, professional confidence, absolute commitment to duty, sacred faith in his wife. "Perdition catch my soul But I do love thee! and when I love thee not, / Chaos is come again" (III.3.90-92): the patterns of those three lines reveal the connection between the exalted speech and the radically simplified conception of fidelity and love.
His verbal authority and charisma permit Othello to compete with his antagonist for theatrical authority. Iago is Shakespeare's third longest role, behind Hamlet and Richard III, and except for the eleven-line "scene" in which a herald reads a proclamation and the few private moments when Desdemona and Emilia prepare for bed, Iago is onstage in every scene. The role of Othello, while not so lengthy, still has more lines than any other of Shakespeare's tragic heroes except (again) Hamlet. The two major women's roles are distinctive and memorable also, and even Cassio appears in all but three scenes. This enumeration of lines and entrances helps to establish a major structural principle: Shakespeare has concentrated the audience's attention on these major figures, permitting no diversion or escape but requiring unrelieved scrutiny of this core group of characters. We come to know them as complex dramatic persons, but through them we are also allowed access to a realm beyond character. As Verdi put it in a letter written while he entertained the offer to compose Otello, "It is quite possible that [Shakespeare] might have come across a Falstaff of some kind; but it's most unlikely that he ever met a villain quite so villainous as Iago, and he could never have met women as angelic as Cordelia, Imogen, or Desdemona, etc. Yet they are so true."3 As Verdi perceived, Shakespeare's Iago and Desdemona are so theatrically potent because they are carefully observed persons ("so true") who at the same time stand symbolically for something beyond themselves ("villainous" / "angelic"). The composer's remarks also identify the antithetical method to which Shakespeare always subscribes, as well as the form of antithesis specific to this play, the contest between hell and heaven for the soul of the hero.
The symbolic method is epitomized in the two contestants struggling for possession of Othello: Iago and Desdemona. When Othello was first performed, the Tudor morality plays were still attracting English audiences (although in London they had mostly been superseded by more sophisticated fare), and those plays feature the temptation of the hero by two competing angels, the good and bad, or an angel and a devil. No doubt recalling Christopher Marlowe's evocation of the morality tradition a decade earlier, when a good angel and a bad angel counsel Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare explicitly associates his villain and heroine with this theatrical pattern. The plot takes the form of a psychomachia, a battle between angelic and demonic forces for spiritual control of the main character. Othello stands between his ensign ("ancient") and his wife; he moves, during the course of the third act, from Desdemona to Iago, from heaven to hell, from faith to depravity. In representing this movement the poet develops a network of terms and images that sustains our awareness of hell and demons, of a spiritually charged cosmic struggle. The word "heaven" is heard with exceptional frequency (although in some cases in the folio text it serves as a euphemism for the censored "God"). "Hell" (or some form of it) sounds more frequently in Othello than in any other play, and if, as may be the case, Shakespeare's actors pronounced the title character's name as "Ot-Hello," the demonic noun reverberates even more frequently and meaningfully.
The horrified onlookers recognize Iago as a demonic figure, a "hellish villain," at the play's end, but from the beginning Shakespeare depicts his methods as infernal, largely by means of the character's diction. In one of his first speeches Iago presents himself as a kind of anti-Creator, negating the biblical Yahweh's "I am what I am" in his "I am not what I am" (I.1.64). Iago ensnares Cassio with the aid of alcohol, personified several times as a "devil" that poisons the brain, and he intoxicates Othello's imagination by "pour[ing] . . . pestilence into his ear" (II.3.344). His sermon to the shamed Cassio is "Divinity of hell!" (II.3.338). The most striking manifestation of a demonic nature is Iago's profound hatred, a negative energy that expresses itself variously as envy, cynicism, and misogyny. In lecturing Roderigo on the need for self-restraint, he espouses a doctrine of fierce naturalism, reducing all human experience to the physical, the mechanistic. As he sings in the drinking song, "man's life's but a span" (II.3.67). Women in general are animalistic ("wildcats"); Venetian women in particular are deceitful and sexually voracious. Othello, like all Southern foreigners, is "changeable," "an erring barbarian." To Iago's ear the "Othello music" is no more than "bombast circumstance" (padded rhetoric) and "fantastical lies." Emotion and romantic sentiment he dismisses as ridiculous. The act of love, entirely without spiritual dimension, is merely bestial: "a lust of the blood and permission of the will," "the beast with two backs." Reason is the key to sanity and balance, says the sociopath.
As compelling as Iago is, Shakespeare gives him a worthy counterpart in Desdemona. Theatrically and tonally, her femininity makes her especially welcome
in a play about soldiers in a military outpost. Her open simplicity counterbalances Iago's concealed perversion. This innocence appears in her candor before the Venetian Senate, when she politely but firmly defies her father and frankly confesses her physical and emotional attachment to her husband. It is most apparent in her naive pleading for Cassio. Shakespeare emphasizes her otherworldly purity by lingering over the bedtime chat between the two women (IV.3.10-104), a conversation in which Desdemona is shocked at Emilia's cavalier sexual code. Her unshakable devotion to her murderous husband, especially her effort to exonerate him by blaming herself with her last breath, has left many readers and spectators incredulous. But such unworldly innocence is a necessary pole in the symbolic structure of the play. Othello's "fair warrior" of Act Two becomes his "fair devil" of Act Three and then "false as hell" in Act Four. In the end, although the victory of evil is not total - Iago will be punished - the embodiment of good, the "heavenly true" Desdemona, lies mute and lifeless. The annihilation of such purity is a source of the play's tremendous emotional power, the effect that led Dr. Johnson to declare, "I am glad that I have ended my revisal of this dreadful scene. It is not to be endured."4
The clarity of Shakespeare's dramatic oppositions should not, however, blind us to the subtlety with which his characters are drawn. Onstage Iago's cloven foot is concealed, and Desdemona's halo a little tarnished. For one or two fleeting moments we are invited to feel Iago's pain at Othello's professional rejection of him: the hardworking veteran has been passed over in favor of the college boy. But most of the time his villainy is glaringly obvious to us and invisible to the rest of the cast. They see something quite different. "Honest Iago": Othello uses the epithet ten times, Cassio twice, and Desdemona once. Each of these references delivers an excruciating ironic charge, and a precondition of such an ironic effect is that the term be spoken innocently, without a hint of irony. To those around him, Iago is the blunt, reliable soldier, the helpful fellow to whom people routinely turn in time of crisis. Roderigo, Cassio, Desdemona, and Othello all confide in him and seek his aid. In Act Four, Iago prudently rebuffs Lodovico's confidential query at Othello's rage, as if to preserve his reputation for discretion: "It is not honesty in me to speak / What I have seen and known" (IV.1.271-72). The amount of time we spend alone with Iago, the privileged view we get of his diseased mind, is calculated to repel us, and morally we are repelled; but such intimacy nevertheless creates an ironic affinity between villain and audience. Shakespeare links us to his villain by modifying the method developed for Richard III, and this theatrical attachment secures an intellectual bond that ensures complicity.
Shakespeare's presentation of Desdemona is just as complex and unusual. Innocent victim though she be, she is also a strong-willed, independent young woman, one who commands all the forms of courtliness and social repartee. But while it may pain us to admit it, this heroine is capable of surprising insensitivity, even hardheadedness. Having resolved to plead for the dismissed Cassio and to help restore him to Othello's favor, Desdemona neglects such vital conditions as context, timing, and reception. Or to put it less flatteringly, she makes herself into something of a pest. Despite her husband's reluctance and his manifest attempts at polite evasion - "Not now, sweet Desdemon; some other time. . . . No, not tonight" (III.3.55-57) - she perseveres in demanding to know when Othello will receive Cassio and hear his apology. That request, as she artlessly observes, is as much a favor to Othello as it is to Cassio, and yet in the tragic environment such innocent persistence, as Iago knows, is self-destructive and potentially fatal. Her oblivious innocence makes itself heard when, after Othello's brutal accusations, she unwittingly undermines her own purity of mind with an unconscious pun: "I cannot say 'whore.' / It does abhor me now I speak the word" (IV.2.161-62). As Iago admits, devils are adept at arranging "heavenly shows," and by the same ironic token it seems impossible that a poet with Shakespeare's ear, taking the name of his heroine from Cinthio's "Disdemona," failed to note the "demon" lurking in "the divine Desdemona."
This shading of character extends to the rest of the cast. The good-looking and fortunate Cassio not only has a weak head for wine, but the veritas released by the vinum discloses an unlovely vanity and arrogance about his rank, particularly a sense of entitlement. Even the gullible Roderigo attracts a moment of sympathy in his ignominious death. Emilia boldly defends Desdemona at the cost of her own life, but she is tainted by her lie about the handkerchief. Her defense of female desire and denunciation of masculine cruelty are exceedingly welcome when they finally come (IV.3), and yet she declares herself amenable to adultery under the right circumstances. Emilia's casual attitude toward infidelity helps also to complicate the character of the third woman in the cast. Although Iago calls Bianca a "whore," she seems to dote wholeheartedly on Cassio, and the significance of her name (bianca = white) not only complicates our reading of her character but enriches the imagistic texture of the play. When she protests to Emilia that she is "no strumpet, but of life as honest / As you that thus abuse me" (V.1.123-24), there may be some justice to the claim, given that we have just heard Emilia say she would sell her body for the right price. As the main plot makes clear, hasty judgments about who is a whore can be fatal.
The struggle for Othello's soul is swift and horrific, confined to a single dramatic unit known as the "Temptation Scene" (III.3). In the space of some 450 lines Iago pollutes Othello's imagination, separates him psychologically from his wife, and ensnares the hero's soul. Logic insists that the reversal is too fast, that Othello's surrender to jealous vengeance is not prepared, that such a change of heart in so short a time is impossible. Further, it may strike us as preposterous, as it did Rymer in the seventeenth century, that the fate of Desdemona should hang on something as trivial as a handkerchief, albeit a magical one. These would seem to be pitfalls that any novice in a creative writing course would have the sense to avoid. So rather than assume that Shakespeare didn't notice them, we should recognize that he courted such improbabilities, that he risked telling the story this way because speed and incredulity intensify the horrifying effect of the tragic turn. Critics long ago observed that he conceals the logical impossibilities of his plot by employing a double time scheme in Othello. The Venetians disembark at Cyprus during the day on Saturday, and Desdemona dies on Sunday night. By such a reckoning "a thousand" acts of sexual infidelity would seem unlikely. Yet Shakespeare condenses Othello's undoing into a single implausible episode so as to increase its affective power and enhance its meaning. Speed is an inevitable result of Othello's heroic absolutism - "To be once in doubt / Is once to be resolved" (III.3.179-80) - and the thematic significance of such swift destruction is incalculable. His refusal to compromise, his courage, and his decisiveness are the properties that have elevated him to high rank and led him to Desdemona, but these are the same qualities that destroy him. That is the nature of tragedy, or to quote Othello, "the pity of it."
That Iago tempts Othello to self-destruction almost entirely with words, words artfully arranged and brilliantly delivered, indicates that the villain's skills are precisely those of the playwright who created him. Lying may be regarded as a malicious form of fiction, and Iago's fictions require an acute sense of audience and mastery of histrionic and rhetorical techniques. His manipulation of Roderigo functions as a rehearsal for the more challenging assault on Othello, and he employs similar strategies in both schemes. In his endeavor to corrupt Othello's mind, Iago provokes curiosity by means of oblique statements ("I like not that," III.3.35) and provocative questions. He works his victim psychologically by flattering and then distancing him, pulling him in and pushing him away. One of his most efficient strategies is the appeal to stock characters - the cunning Venetian wife, the handsome seducer - that give Othello an intellectual purchase in the midst of chaos. Perhaps most impressively, Iago spins compelling stories teeming with vivid, salacious pictures, to which Othello's sensitive imagination responds immediately and ferociously:
IAGO
/>
Would you, the supervisor, grossly gape on?
Behold her topped?
OTHELLO Death and damnation! O!
(III.3.395-96)
As his scheme proceeds, Iago distributes his theatrical tactics in ascending order of effectiveness, and by the time he reaches "Cassio's dream" (419-26), that erotic fantasy of refracted pictures and mumbled words, he has reduced Othello's own verbal powers to exclamations and monosyllables: "O monstrous! monstrous!"; "O, blood, blood, blood!" Iago is also the master of detail, a gift revealed in his ability to create a weapon out of a preposition:
OTHELLO What? what?
IAGO
Lie -
OTHELLO With her?
IAGO With her, on her; what you will.
(IV.1.33-34)
Iago supplements his dialogue with a single prop, the handkerchief, but it too is employed in a theatrical scenario. Cassio and Bianca unwittingly perform for Othello, with Iago as director of, actor in, and, a few minutes later, reviewer of the show. Finally, Iago knows his audience: he plays unerringly upon Othello's insecurities about his status as a non-Venetian, as a black man in a white world, as inexperienced in the ways of women.
It has been observed that tragedy when speeded up turns into comedy. By allowing Othello to succumb so quickly, Shakespeare has risked inviting a comic response to this deadly action, and a number of critics have accepted that invitation, notably Shaw with his remarks about the plot as "pure farce." That Othello has so often been smirked at or that Othello has evoked responses proper to comedy is perhaps not surprising. In his furious progress toward self-destruction Othello sometimes resembles a conventional figure of Renaissance comedy, in which sexual jealousy was a popular topic. The butt of the jokes was usually the insecure husband who wrongly mistrusts his wife and consumes himself with jealousy and doubt; eventually, however, some providential force dispels the confusion and happily reunites the virtuous wife and embarrassed husband. Shakespeare's fellow playwrights had created variations on this paranoid male, entertaining audiences with farcical stage business, frenzied language, and the rich theme of self-delusion, of an imagination run wild. In plays such as George Chapman's All Fools and John Marston's What You Will the foolish husband isolates himself in a realm of fantasy, dramatizing his misery in seamy images, hectoring his wife with sarcasm and rhetorical questions, often losing control of language altogether. Shakespeare himself had created such a buffoon several years earlier in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
Othello Page 4
