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Othello_intro_essay_20.html
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<p> </p><p>The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, by William Shakespeare</p><p><u>Othello</u> is one of a string of masterful tragedies that Shakespeare wrote between about 1599 and 1608, and it is for this group of plays (<u>Julius Caesar</u>, <u>Hamlet</u>, <u>Othello</u>, <u>King Lear</u>, <u>Macbeth</u>, <u>Antony and Cleopatra</u>, and <u>Coriolanus</u>) that he is acknowledged to be the greatest playwright in the English language. Yet while <u>Othello</u> has a clear and interesting plot, two phenomenal characters, a heartbreaking final scene, and incredibly moving poetry, and although it is by far the most exciting of the tragedies, it is usually either <u>Hamlet</u> or <u>King Lear</u> that is considered to be Shakespeare’s greatest play.</p><div> </div><p>Those of us with an appreciation for what we might call the aesthetics of the unbearable (I’m thinking of television shows like “The Office” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” where it’s difficult to bring yourself to watch what’s unfolding on the screen) will have a special fondness for <u>Othello</u>. Iago’s plot produces an unremitting anxiety in the audience that is, I think, unparalleled in Shakespeare’s work. The three issues most central to this anxiety are not that different from those that provoke anxiety in us today, especially when political leaders are involved: they are race, sex, and religion. </p><div> </div><p>The most celebrated critique of Othello is by Thomas Rymer, who wrote his <u>Short View of Tragedy</u> in 1695. After describing the plot of the play, he lays out the “morals” of the play: “First, this may be a caution to all Maidens of Quality how, without their Parents consent, they run away with Blackamoors. Secondly, this may be a warning to all good Wives, that they look well to their Linens. Thirdly, this may be a lesson to Husbands, that before their Jealousie be Tragical, the proofs be Mathematical.” </p><div> </div><p>Shakespeare probably wrote <u>Othello</u> in late 1601 or 1602, immediately after <u>Hamlet</u> and before <u>King Lear</u>. A translation of Pliny’s <u>History of the World</u> that appeared early in 1601 almost certainly provided him with many of the details of Othello’s alien and exotic early life (for more on this, see Kenneth Muir, <u>The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays</u> (1977)). There’s also a record of the play being performed at court on November 1, 1604: the play had to have been written in between these two dates.</p><div> </div><p>Very few of Shakespeare’s plays are fully original stories. The source material for <u>Othello</u> is a short story in Giraldi Cinthio’s <u>Hecatommithi</u> (1565), in which “a Moorish Captain takes to wife a Venetian lady [named Disdemona], and his Ensign accuses her to her husband of adultery; he desires the Ensign to kill the man whom he believes to be the adulterer; the Captain kills his wife and is accused by the Ensign. The Moor does not confess, but on clear indications of his guilt he is banished; and the scoundrelly Ensign, thinking to injure others, brings a miserable end on himself.” (For a translation of Cinthio, see Geoffrey Bullough’s <u>Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare</u>, vol. 7.) Shakespeare invented the whole Roderigo plot, but more importantly, he compressed and concentrated the action, and turned the flat Disdemona, Moor, and Ensign into the vibrant Desdemona, Othello, and Iago.</p><div style="text-indent:.5in"> </div><div>RACE</div><div style="text-indent:.5in"> </div><p>But why write a play about a Moor in the first place? And what, exactly, is meant by the word “Moor”? And what associations would Shakespeare’s audiences have had with Moors? In the Christmas season of 1600-1601, Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, performed at court while Queen Elizabeth hosted the Moorish ambassador to the King of Barbary—this encounter may have been what inspired Shakespeare to revisit Cinthio.<span> </span>The word “Moor” was used to refer both to lighter-skinned North Africans and darker Africans. While Aaron the Moor in <u>Titus Andronicus</u> was “coal-black,” Cleopatra also refers to herself as black, so the word “black” alone doesn’t tell us anything. There was a portrait painted of the Moorish ambassador that clearly depicts him as an olive-skinned North African, but that is no evidence that Othello was meant to be so. While the debate about Othello’s origins remains open, his skin color is clear: Othello was white. That is, the actor playing Othello in Shakespeare’s company was white, as were all the actors. The part was played in blackface makeup, as it was also played by Lawrence Olivier, Orson Welles, and any number of other white actors. (For more about the cultural history of blackface and colorblind casting, see Ayanna Thompson’s <u>Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance</u>.)</p><div style="text-indent:.5in"> </div><p>What’s important about the Moor of Venice is that he is <i>Other</i>; he is different in a marked way from everyone else. He comes from a strange world, a world beyond the reach of his noble Venetian colleagues, a world so different that Desdemona is seduced by tales of its mysteries. Othello considers himself a Venetian and a Christian, but this identification only highlights how different he is from the other Venetians in the play.<span> </span><u>Othello</u> treats the prejudices in cross-cultural communication: just as Europeans saw themselves as mature, calm, and rational (and non-European peoples as childlike, passionate, and lascivious), so Iago sees Othello as “changeable,” easily fooled, etc. For much more about this idea, have a look at the work of Edward Said (<u>Orientalism</u>, 1978), Stephen Greenblatt (<u>Shakespearean Negotiations</u>, 1988; <u>Learning to Curse</u>, 1990), and Tzvetan Todorov (<u>The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other</u>, 1982).</p><div style="text-indent:.5in"> </div><div>SEX</div><div style="text-indent:.5in"> </div><p>The great actor Paul Robeson played Othello at the Savoy Theatre in London in 1930, long before any American company would cast a black actor in the role. The issue, of course, was that he had to kiss Desdemona, and the image of a black man kissing a white woman was the source of a good deal of American anxiety over miscegenation. It’s this same combination of racism and sexual prurience that inspires so many of Iago’s most memorable lines (eg, Othello as an “old black ram tupping [Brabantio’s] white ewe”).</p><div><u> </u></div><p><u>Othello</u> is an exploration of the psychology of sex. Iago is obsessed with sex, most often in an animalistic or bestial way. Othello seems inexperienced and immature (think of how he worships Desdemona). Emilia thinks her husband is cheating on her, and thinks wives should be able to cheat on their husbands. Bianca is a prostitute in love with her customer, Cassio; Cassio toys with Bianca but adores “the divine Desdemona.”<span> </span>Only Desdemona herself seems sexually uncomplicated, unable even to understand what she is being accused of until it is too late.</p><div style="text-indent:.5in"> </div><p>We hear so much about sex in this play—Iago’s indelible image of the “beast with two backs;” Cassio’s wish that Othello arrive safely to “make love’s quick pants in Desdemona’s arms;” Othello’s horrible fantasy that “the general camp…had tasted her sweet body.” By the time the marriage bed itself appears on stage, sex and violence have become so intertwined that the murder of Desdemona—Othello smothering her on a bed—resembles nothing so much as a rape. It is the way sexual jealousy infects the mind that leads to the real tragedy of the play, and Shakespeare describes this so vividly that any of us unfortunate enough to have experienced this emotion will sicken in recall: “By the world, I think my wife be honest, and think she is not…If there be cords or knives, poison, fire, or suffocating streams, I’ll not endure it. Would I were satisfied!” (3.3.386-393).</p><div> </div><p>Stephen Greenblatt’s explanation of Othello’s sexual anxiety is based on the idea of Protestant marital chastity: theologians condemned sexual pleasure, even within marriage.<span> </span>To love one’s wife too ardently, according to St. Jerome, is to commit adultery (for one must love God above all). For more on this, see <u>Renaissance Self-Fashioning</u> (232-254), and, for arguments against Greenblatt, see Susan Zimmerman, <u>Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage</u> (1992).</p><div style="text-indent:.5in"> </div><div>RELIGION</div><div> </div><p>Can we believe what we see? What kind of evidence, and how much of it, is sufficient to prove something? Are there things we should believe in that can’t be seen with the eyes? These questions connect this play to its Christian context within the discourse of the Protestant Reformation. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, England was the site of much (and often violent) religious controversy over the question of whether we can trust what we see with our physical eyes. The central issue was whether the Communion wafer is bread because it looks like bread (as the Protestants believed), or whether the fact that it looks like bread is misleading because it <i>really </i>is the body of Christ (as the Catholics believed).</p><div> </div><p>This idea might seem quite far removed from Iago's anger about not getting the</p><p>lieutenant position, and it is: much of the play, however, is concerned with "ocular proof," so keep an eye out for permutations of this idea, especially as it relates to faith.</p>