by Park Honan
While exploiting folk-motifs in that story, Shakespeare develops a remarkable heroine who is poor, of low rank, intelligent, and nervously intense. For reasons purely of rhythm, he calls her both 'Hellen' and 'Helena' in All's Well's Folio text. But he introduces her in scene i as Helena, the name of the third-century saint who in legend, as the daughter of a British prince, wed a Roman emperor and discovered the True Cross. Beltramo in Shakespeare's play becomes an immature, easily led, but not quite unpleasant young Bertram, Count of Roussillon. For his good heart, Bertram is admired by his mother the Countess, the King, Lafeu, and others. The impasse is not sentimental but psychological and sexual. Helena, who is worthy, craves the physical love of Bertram, who, as a ward of the King, feels revulsion in being made to wed her. That carries one back into the author's days of Venus and Adonis, and indeed Southampton's career and Shakespeare's Sonnets meet in Bertram's dilemma. As a defiant
-308-
royal ward, Shakespeare's patron had once yearned for war before becoming the Earl of Essex's General of the Horse in Ireland. The play's hero flees to Italy, where in a pointless war he wins credit as a General of the Horse before his moral decline.
Bertram's psychology is developed realistically, so that his duplicity, vanity, and confusion are apparent even at the end of Act V. All along, he resembles the lovely youth of the Sonnets, admired or adored whatever he does. He is no worse than a rash, unbridled child for the Countess. For the French King he is a 'proud, scornful boy'. For grudging Paroles, he is 'sweetheart' and 'a foolish idle boy' or a 'lascivious young boy'. 21 Certainly, the parallels with a former patron are not very close. Bertram is made to marry as Southampton was not, and the author is not known to have based a portrait, in any poem or drama, on one living model. Nonetheless, the English ward system which victimized Southampton has an approximate counterpart in the French King's command to marry, and Bertram -- like the fickle boy in 'A Lover's Complaint' -- is probably compounded from imagination and life.
With antecedents in plays dating from Two Gentlemen to Twelfth Night, Helena has a relation to Henley Street piety. She is the most overtly religious of heroines, despite her wit in bantering over her virginity with bawdy Paroles. The author's values were 'derived from the culture of his Warwickshire ilk and diverged significantly from the received ideas of both city and court', Germaine Greer has argued, and it follows that Shakespeare did not think of 'constancy as a psychosexual characteristic allied to masochism'. 22 No doubt he believed in constancy, whether or not the theatre or his own brothers overwhelmed him with examples of it. In the 'bed trick', which appears in both Measure for Measure and All's Well (and derives from Boccaccio), a legitimate bed-mate substitutes for a male's fancied lover. So the feckless Bertram sleeps with his Helena, whom he takes to be the virgin Diana. The 'bed trick', of course, underlines lust's reductiveness, and the author uses it with a kind of ironic trust, even with a script writer's relief, as if satisfied that a night in bed might not solve problems in life, but could solve an intractable problem on stage. And it works. Who doubts that? Certainly an audience, watching a
-309-
production of All's Well, can be made to feel that Bertram needs Helena, or that, at least, he is ripe for reform. Their marriage need not be a bleak hell, but then their incompatibility is chiefly dramatized in five acts. For Shakespeare at about 40, spiritual redemption might be a dream unrelated to the facts of any complex, realistically seen human dilemma. But he gives a convincing inwardness to a rough folk-story, thanks to what Robert Smallwood rather large-heartedly calls the 'infinite care and subtlety, 23 with which he handles his earthy materials. Helena's role has not proved to be easy to act, but she takes one as close to the ideals of Elizabethan piety as any other figure in the dramatist's entire works.
The 'plumèd troops'
Lately stage tragedies had helped to fill seats at the Globe, and Marston's and Thomas Heywood's tragic works were popular. Hamlet clearly drew crowds, and Heywood's realistic domestic tragedy A Woman Killed With Kindness, acted at the rival Rose theatre early in 1603, had a relation to the Globe's own great domestic tragedy about a black man who murders his wife -- The Moor of Venice, which we know today as Othello.
Whether Heywood's work preceded or followed Othello, the two dramas were similar enough in kind to compete. Shakespeare's late tragic period' had its commercial causes, but the exigencies of commerce nevertheless led to the display of his full intellectual maturity in Othello as in Hamlet. In recent months, the petty, ubiquitous nature of social evil had not been lost on him in London. He made use of nearly all of his experience that we know about even as he studied the public's attitudes. To many Londoners, the optimism over King James's accession had begun to seem fragile. Thousands of workers and 'masterless' souls looking for work streamed into a rich, beckoning English capital, but the natural order of things punished the optimistic, liberated self. In Measure for Measure, the naïve, the innocent, or the misled -- the 'Dizies' and 'Master Capers' of the day -- linger in prison. Coming into London itself were hundreds of girls and young women including two, whom we know about, from the poet's own
-310-
Stratford-upon-Avon. Elizabeth Evans 'went to a house of ill reporte in Moore lane' and to another 'house in Islington', one finds in London's Bridewell archive today. (These cases were recorded shortly before 1604.) One Joice Cowden said that she had gone with 'the said Elizabeth to schole togither at Stratford uppon haven', and George Pinder, who was born at Stratford, deposed what he knew as follows:
George Pinder borne on Stratford uppon the haven saith that [he] knew her father [of] Stratford uppon haven being a cutler [and] that the saide Elizabeth was borne there. he further saith [that he] hath known the said Elizabeth Evans about this citye three or foure yeares and he hath heard a a verye bad reporte of her and. . . her friendes are verye poorc and not of that abilitye to maintain her ( 1 Feb. 1597/ 8-7 Nov. 1604, Bridewells prison). 24
On Bankside, near the Globe and the Rose, were more than a few Elizabeths and Joices. What relation did they have to the new reign's promise? Shakespeare may never have seen Elizabeth or Joice, but it is not so certain that their milieu is absent from Othello. The privileged, the gifted, the well-disciplined, and the successful, too, might seem to be at the mercy of hostile, impersonal forces, and the worthiest soul might suffer the most. In comedies, he had sketched modern evils, although the grief, anxiety, and pain in As You Like It or Much Ado About Nothing are partly assimilated and partly evaded in their comic plots. In Hamlet and then in Othello, he uses tragic form in an exploratory way to appeal to the deep awarenesses of theatre-goers, involving an audience in what they know of their lives.
At the same time, each of his mature tragedies involves a broader, more general questioning as if to compensate for the artificiality of the play. He is concerned with the possibility of telling valid truth on stage, with testing his medium, even with clearing his head, and his ambiguous feelings about his profession are involved. He adheres to no formula, but relies as in Othello upon unusual beauty of form and language, complex designs, and on the illuminations of extreme suffering. Alert to his troupe's needs, he made Othello unusually rich in texture and strong in pathos. Arguably it was planned soon after Hamlet, in which Ophelia's role was taken by a boy actor who sang well. The same boy, very talented, may also have acted Desdemona
-311-
who (in Othello's quarto text) sings her Willow Song in Act IV. Observing that Desdemona does not 'sing' in the play's Folio text, one critic takes this as a sign that Othello followed Hamlet quickly to take advantage of a musical boy before his voice cracked. 25
Perhaps so. But that is not sufficient evidence to date the play, and many boy actors sang and played the lute. Shakespeare wisely trusted his own 'little eyases'. A boy could shatter an audience even in his silence. Indeed when Othello was later taken to Oxford in 1610, a scholar noted in Latin that Desdemona 'in her death moved us even more greatly, when lying in bed she
implored the pity of the spectators with her face alone'. 26
The year 1604 had been busy for the King's players. In the summer they were called to Somerset House to attend the Constable of Castile and his 234 gentlemen who had come over to sign the Spanish Peace. Shakespeare and eleven of his fellows, as low-ranking Grooms of the Chamber, were then made to wait on the party for eighteen days, from 9 to 27 August, and were paid just £21. 12s. od. for their pains. Each actor received 2s. per diem, or just what the King paid to his ordinary yeomen of the guard. It was only after this unrewarding time that Othello was played at court on 1 November 1604. The work may lightly compliment King James in noticing his interest in Venice's war against the Muslim Turks. Shakespeare had been under few illusions about the court's munificence, and he had planned a sharply affecting drama which would last in repertory. He apparently viewed his main source -- again a tale by Cinthio -- with extreme patience and a lack of self-assertiveness. One suspects that he bided his time so as to put many things to use; but after modifying a given story, drawing amply from his past work and visualizing new scenes, he wrote with that quickness which Ben Jonson, Heminges, and Condell recall. He probably revised his text, but even in the mature tragedies he leaves confused time-schemes, blatant contradictions, changed names, 'ghost' characters who loom up to be forgotten by the author, and other minor faults.
Though based on Cinthio's tale of jealousy, Othello is a drama about morality plays, about reputation and male seduction, and, in a subtle way, about an acting troupe. Out of such threads as these its
-312-
love story, with Iago's defeat of the hero and heroine, is tightly woven. Faults in the weave are not noticeable to an audience, and the play -written with immense assurance and skill-- is the most poignant of his tragedies. Critics often forget its action's ugly sordidness, since the whole effect is one of unusual beauty and the story is simple. (One might tell it in two sentences: when Cassio in Venice is promoted to a lieutenancy over an ensign's head, the ensign, Iago, vows an opportunistic revenge against the newly married Othello and the rival. At Cyprus, tricked by Iago into believing that Desdemona and Cassio are lovers, Othello kills first his wife and then himself, but the trickery comes to light so that Cassio is promoted and Iago is left to face trial and torture.)
The simplicity of that action, without a sub-plot, allows Shakespeare to develop the psychological interest of a few main figures. He works up a soldier's milieu, with its interactions, motives, and emotional intensities, even as he dramatizes love's betrayal. Often he draws on older plays, such as Marlowe Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, and The Jew of Malta. Behind the verbal music of the Moor's talk one is aware of Tambulaine's music, and behind Iago's candour with the audience are comic addresses of the villain in Jew of Malta. Even behind the intent, homoerotic exchanges of Othello and Iago, one senses the eerie league between victim and tempter in Doctor Faustus.
There are other echoes of more recent dramas. Iago resembles a satirist in a Jonson play, with the difference that he uses his percipience not to mock but to destroy. Othello also is made up of rich overlays from the author's own experience in comedy. An officer who woos a lady under her father's nose, weds her in secret, and impresses a Senate before sailing off to be governor of Cyprus might be a romance hero. Even the seas favour Othello by drowning the Muslim Turks. He prospers in all ways until Cassio is cashiered (in Act II, scene iii), and he is then in the dilemma of the cocu imaginaire. The cuckold of comedy is a topic of mirth, but here and elsewhere the poet evades this. With care he develops the theme of a villain plotting against a marriage, already used lightly, of course, in Don John's efforts to cross Claudio and Hero in Much Ado.
Iago may be like a 'Vice' in a morality play, but what Coleridge
-313-
called his 'motiveless malignancy' has a realistic beginning. Jacobeans had no difficulty in understanding a grievance over patronage denied. 'Three great ones of the city', Iago tells Roderigo in scene i,
In personal suit to make me his lieutenant,
Off-capped to him. . .
I know my price, I am worth no worse a place.
But he, as loving his own pride and purposes,
Evades them
for 'Certes,' says he,
'I have already chose my officer.'
And what was he?
One Michael Cassio
That never set a squadron in the field
Nor the division of a battle knows
Mere prattle without practice
(1. i. 8-25)
This is pellucid and telling, but a good reason for disliking is buried as Iago thinks of other reasons, and his gnawing hatred is epitomized in racial slurs. The Moor's blackness becomes a frame of reference for nearly all that is said of him. Othello is explicitly referred to as 'thicklips', or as a 'barbary horse', or has a 'sooty bosom', or is 'the lascivious Moor'. Prejudice leaps like an infection to old Brabanzio, the Senator, when Iago shouts that 'an old black ram I Is tupping your white ewe'. Racism even infects a shamed Othello, who declares that his name is 'black As mine own face.' (1. i, 111. iii. 392-3).
In contrast with its vague role in The Merchant of Venice, racist feeling here is treated with a moral lucidity. That allows for indirection and aesthetic effect, and one crucial difference between the Merchant and Othello is that plays such as As You Like It and Hamlet, which seem to draw on memories of a domestic past, have come in between. In any case, Shakespeare is better able to use a biblical symbolism which had begun to impress him in youth. What is stunning in Othello
-314-
is that there is no gap, no dividing line of any kind between his aesthetic and moral interests or pressures. Othello is a black Everyman, victimized by light's betrayer, Judas, and there are other biblical strands in the design. A central irony is that low racist slurs, springing from Iago, take for their object a Moor who is dignified, unselfish, and troubled by sensuality in marriage. Prizing what he confusedly calls Desdemona's 'chastity', Othello declares that she saves him from chaos. 'Excellent wretch!' he tells her,
Perdition catch my soul
But I do love thee, and when I love thee not,
Chaos is come again.
(111. iii. 91-3)
Othello's 'Chaos' is a region of lawless passion and anarchy. It is a frame of mind, but it is also a place, even such a city as engulfs Elizabeth and Joice of Stratford and their sisterhood. It is the Shoreditch and Bankside brothels. It has a relation to the city actor and the soldier. The army and the stage after all had much in common. Shakespcare in Othello shows us the code-heavy relationships of soldiers on Cyprus who, like actors, have their own rituals, taboos, and male bonding. The army and the stage were both glamorous by 1602, and indeed Burbage had a popular following that might have done credit to Sidney or Essex. In their all-male groups at a slight remove from society, the soldier and young actor were about equally ready to view women as hazards.
Knitting the male troop together is a latent homoerotic feeling, so strong that Iago can allude to it usefully. 'I lay with Cassio lately', says the ensign to confirm the Moor's suspicion of Desclemona's adultery. At night Cassio, supposedly, kissed Iago's lips hard, as if plucking up kisses by the roots, and 'lay his leg o'er my thigh', and sighed, and kissed, and then cried ' "Cursèd fate, I That gave thee to the Moor!"' (111. iii. 418-30). Enacting a parody of the marriage rite, the hero and villain exchange words fit for a bride and groom.
The Moor's feeling for the tempter is in part disturbingly homoerotic, and at Cyprus, in Iago's presence, the general is implicitly hostile not simply to Desdemona but to the female sex. And yet
-315-
Othello's talk is natural for the careerist who raises his vocation as a prime standard of value. No dialogue by Shakespeare thus far is more subtle than that between Iago and Othello in Act III, and in the midst of their collusive intimacy the hero degrades his wife. The aural grandeur of his phrases, or the ' Othello music' as Wilson Knight called it, overrides
one's sense of Othello's sick ease in wishing that Desdemona's sweet body had been tasted by the entire camp, pioneers and all, 'so I had nothing known'. What is achingly intense is his need for self-definition. 'O, now for ever', he cries with the air of an actor, extolling painted scenery,
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!
(111. iii. 352-9)
That glorification of war might have been felt excessive at any time, but especially in the reign of rex pacificus. The Moor's display of his soul need not qualify one's sense of his dignity, nor cause one to admire him less. Shakespeare keeps both hero and heroine at a slight remove, so that an audience does not identify with them but observes and sympathizes. Iago is always closer to us than Othello, and yet the villain despite his banality has a mythical aspect.
What are the author's affinities with his characters? Desdemona is warmly humanized through her minor, calamitous indiscretions, her defiance of Brabanzio, and loving zeal for the Moor, but she remains opaque. One knows her less well than Gertrude or Lady Macbeth, Goneril and Regan, or even Cleopatra. The author might have found hints in his own temperament for his calculating, rational, improvising, and half-comic Iago, as well as for the self-dramatizing Moor, but he sees both objectively. The play has a flawless structure of feeling and yet Othello and Iago, as modern theatre history shows, can be played in many different ways. Othello renews itself in productions
