Othello Read online

  Othello

  Уильям Шекспир

  The RSC Shakespeare

  Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen

  Chief Associate Editors: Héloïse Sénéchal and Jan Sewell

  Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro, Dee Anna Phares

  Othello

  Textual editing: Dee Anna Phares

  Introduction and “Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater”: Jonathan Bate

  Commentary: Héloïse Sénéchal

  Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Esme Miskimmin

  In Performance: Karin Brown (RSC stagings), Jan Sewell (overview)

  The Director’s Cut (interviews by Jonathan Bate and Kevin Wright):

  Trevor Nunn and Michael Attenborough

  Playing Iago: Antony Sher

  Editorial Advisory Board

  Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director, Royal Shakespeare Company

  Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK

  Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia

  Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature, Université de Genève, Switzerland

  Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan

  Jacqui O’Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company

  Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA

  James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, USA

  Tiffany Stern, Professor of English, University of Oxford, UK

  CONTENTS Introduction

  Venice

  “The Moor”

  Iago and OthelloAbout the TextKey FactsThe Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of VeniceTextual NotesQuarto Passages That Do Not Appear in the FolioScene-by-Scene AnalysisOthello in Performance: The RSC and Beyond

  Four Centuries of Othello: An Overview

  At the RSC

  The Director’s Cut: Interviews with Trevor Nunn and Michael Attenborough

  Antony Sher on Playing IagoShakespeare’s Career in the Theater

  Beginnings

  Playhouses

  The Ensemble at Work

  The King’s ManShakespeare’s Works: A ChronologyThe History Behind the Tragedies: A ChronologyFurther Reading and ViewingReferencesAcknowledgments and Picture Credits

  INTRODUCTION

  VENICEFor Shakespeare’s original audience, the title The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice would have instantly suggested a meeting of the familiar and the strange, of East and West. “Venice” was synonymous with European sophistication, “Moor” with the atmosphere of the Orient. Yet the short Italian novel on which the play is based makes little of the Moor’s status as an outsider. Written by Giraldi Cinthio, it was one of a series of exemplary stories concerning marital infidelity. Its purpose was to show how “it sometimes happens that without any fault at all, a faithful and loving lady, through the insidious plots of a villainous mind, and the frailty of one who believes more than he need, is murdered by her faithful husband.” In Venice, a Moor, dear to the Senate because he has served the interests of the republic in battle, marries a virtuous lady called Disdemona. The Venetian lords decide to change the guard in Cyprus and the Moor is chosen as commandant. Disdemona insists on going with him; they arrive safely in Cyprus (no storm, no Turks). The Moor’s ensign or standard-bearer falls in love with Disdemona, who does not reciprocate. The ensign assumes that this is because she is in love with his superior, the corporal. His love for Disdemona turns to hate and he decides that if he cannot have her, nor should the Moor. He accordingly plots to make the Moor jealous of the corporal, thus destroying them both.Venice was notorious for the number and openness of its courtesans, and the laxness of its wives. It was the pleasure capital of Europe, a city of sexual tourism. Cinthio’s Disdemona, however, is “impelled not by female appetite but by the Moor’s good qualities”: she is an atypical Venetian woman. Shakespeare intends his Desdemona to be regarded in the same way, even as the men in the play exploit the stereotypical image of Venetian women. Iago pumps up Rodorigo’s desire on the quayside with talk of female lechery and he plays on Othello’s fear that his wife might revert to type, reminding the Moor that Venetian women are habitual sexual deceivers:I know our country disposition well:

  In Venice they do let heaven see the pranks

  They dare not show their husbands: their best conscience

  Is not to leave’t undone, but kept unknown.Visiting Venice in the 1590s, Sir Henry Wotton remarked on the difficulty of distinguishing between whores and virtuous wives on the streets. The presence in the play of Bianca the courtesan (“A housewife that by selling her desires / Buys herself bread and cloth”) is telling in this regard. In the overhearing scene, Othello fails to make exactly the distinction as to which woman, his wife or the courtesan, Iago and Cassio are talking about. Iago’s seemingly casual references to Desdemona’s “appetite” and “will,” his view of Venetian women as sexual beasts, soon cause Othello to be convinced that his wife’s hand is hot and moist, traditional signs of sexual license. The division between wife and whore is horribly dissolved in the fourth act, where home is turned to brothel, and Desdemona twice called “strumpet” and thrice “whore,” culminating in the savage lines “I took you for that cunning whore of Venice / That married with Othello.” Only when he has killed her does he rediscover the true coldness of her chastity—though just because Othello speaks of Desdemona thus, we should not regard her as the icy maiden of Petrarchan poetic tradition. In the scene before Othello’s arrival in Cyprus she proves herself adept in feisty and sexually knowing banter with her male interlocutors. And at the very beginning of the play she has shown extraordinary strength of character in going against her father’s will, eloping with Othello and then insisting on accompanying him to the frontier zone of Cyprus.

  “THE MOOR”Othello is ill at ease with Iago’s language of double entendre because he is an “extravagant and wheeling stranger” who works within a very different poetic register. His verbal sphere is rich in allusion to an exotic other world filled with Arabian trees and turbaned Turks in Aleppo, not to mention “the Anthropophagi and men whose heads / Grew beneath their shoulders.” “Valiant Othello, we must straight employ you / Against the general enemy Ottoman,” says the Duke of Venice early in the play. The audience hears a consonance between the names of the captain-general “Othello” and the general enemy “Ottoman.” This would have been especially apparent if, as is likely, the original pronunciation of the hero’s name was Italianized as “Otello.” Othman was the name of the founder of the mighty Ottoman or Turkish empire, the great rival civilization to Christianity. Othello’s name suggests his origin in the Ottoman territories, against which he is now fighting. The clash of Christian against Turk was one of Shakespeare’s major additions to his source.To Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Turk, Arab, and Moor all represented the Islamic “other,” but they were not necessarily homogenized into a single image of generic “barbarianism.” Arabic culture was frequently associated with learning and civilization, in contrast to the prevailing images of Turk and Saracen. A Barbar could be “brave” rather than “barbarous”: George Peele’s Battle of Alcazar in Barbary, a play based on real recent historical events, has both “a barbarous Moor, / The negro Muly Hamet” and a “brave Barbarian Lord Muly Molocco.” A Moor could help you out in your war against the Turk—or, for that matter, the Spaniard. How you judged the Islamic “other” depended not only on ideological stereotype but also on the particularities of diplomatic liaison and changing allegiance in a world of superpower rivalry. At the end of Alcazar, the evil Moor Muly Mahamet is defeated. The throne of Barbary goes to Abdelmelec’s virtuous brother, who is also called Muly Mahamet and who
was a real historical figure. His ambassador, Abd el-Oahed ben Messaoud, visited the Elizabethan court in 1600 in order to explore the possibility of forming an alliance to conquer Spain with a mixture of the English navy and African troops. Shakespeare’s company played at court that Christmas, so he may have seen the Barbarian delegation in the flesh. The surviving portrait of the ambassador is perhaps the best image we have of what Shakespeare intended Othello to look like.Peele’s play mingled historical matter with a more general sense of the barbarian, the other, the devilish—bad Muly Mahamet surrounds himself with demonic and underworld associations. Audiences would have come to The Moor of Venice with the expectation of something similar, but witnessed a remarkable inversion whereby a sophisticated Venetian is the one who comes to be associated with the devil and damnable actions. So evil is Iago’s behavior that at the end of the play, Othello not only calls him a “demi-devil” but half expects him to have the cloven foot of Lucifer.1. A noble Moor: the Barbary ambassador painted in London, 1600.

  Othello is initially referred to (by Rodorigo and Iago) not by his name, but as “him” and then “his Moorship” and then “the Moor.” Depriving someone of their name and referring to them solely in terms of their ethnic origin is a classic form of racism. In Shakespeare’s other Venetian play, something similar happens with “the Jew.” In early modern English, however, the primary usage of the term “Moor” was as a religious, not a racial, identification: Moor meant “Mohammedan,” that is to say Muslim. The word was frequently used as a general term for “not one of us,” non-Christian. To the play’s original audience, the opposite of “the Moor” would have been not “the white man” but “the Christian.”One of the most striking things about the figure of Othello would accordingly have been that he is a committed Christian. The ground of the play is laid out in the first scene, when Iago trumpets his own military virtues, in contrast to Cassio’s “theoretical” knowledge of the art of war (Cassio comes from Florence, home of such theorists of war as Machiavelli):And I — of whom his eyes had seen the proof

  At Rhodes, at Cyprus and on others’ grounds,

  Christened and heathen…These lines give an immediate sense of confrontation between Christian and heathen dominions, with Rhodes and Cyprus as pressure points. Startlingly, though, the Moor is fighting for the Christians, not the heathens.Again, consider Othello’s response to the drunken brawl in Cyprus:Are we turned Turks, and to ourselves do that

  Which heaven hath forbid the Ottomites?

  For Christian shame, put by this barbarous brawl!Such Christian language in the mouth of a Moor, a Muslim, is inherently a paradox. It suggests that Othello would have been assumed to be a convert. The “baptism” that Iago says he will cause Othello to renounce would have taken place not at birth but at conversion. The action of the play reconverts Othello from Christianity, through the machinations of Iago. In this sense, it is fitting that Iago appeals to a “Divinity of hell” and that Othello acknowledges at the end of the play that he is bound for damnation.The notion of conversion was crucial in the Elizabethan perception of the relationship between European Christianity and the Ottoman empire. The phrase to “turn Turk” entered the common lexicon. Islam was as powerful an alien force to Europeans in the sixteenth century as communism was to Americans in the twentieth. To turn Turk was to go over to the other side. It could happen in a number of different ways: some travelers converted by a process of cultural assimilation, others who had been captured and enslaved did so in the belief that they would then be released. It is easy to forget how many English privateers became Ottoman slaves—on one occasion, two thousand wives petitioned King James and Parliament for help in ransoming their husbands from Muslim captivity.If Shakespeare read all the way through Richard Knolles’ General History of the Turks, one of the books to which he seems to have turned during his preparation for the writing of Othello, he would have learned that once every three years the Turks levied a tax on the Christians living in the Balkans: it took the form of ten to twelve thousand children. They were deported and converted (circumcised), then trained up to become soldiers. They formed a highly feared cadre in the Turkish army known as the Janissaries—there is an elite guard of them in The Battle of Alcazar, while Bajazet’s army in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great combines “circumcisèd Turks / And warlike bands of Christians renegade.” Othello is a Janissary in reverse: not a Christian turned Muslim fighting against Christians, but a Muslim turned Christian fighting against Muslims. Although the captain-general of the Venetian army was always a “stranger,” conversion in Othello’s direction, from Muslim to Christian, was much rarer than the opposite turn.The second Elizabethan sense of the word “Moor” was specifically racial and geographical: it referred to a native or inhabitant of Mauretania, a region of north Africa corresponding to parts of present-day Morocco and Algeria. This association is invoked when Iago falsely tells Rodorigo toward the end of the play that Othello “goes into Mauritania and taketh away with him the fair Desdemona.” Ethnic Moors were members of a Muslim people of mixed Berber and Arab descent. In the eighth century they had conquered Spain. This may be the association suggested by Othello’s second weapon, his sword of Spain.Given that the Spanish empire was England’s great enemy, there would have been a certain ambivalence about the Moors—they may have overthrown Christianity, but at least it was Spanish Catholic Christianity. Philip II’s worst fear was an uprising of the remaining Moors in Granada synchronized with a Turkish invasion, just as Elizabeth I’s worst fear was an uprising of the Irish synchronized with a Spanish invasion. As it was, the Turks took a different turn: in 1570, shortly after the end of the Morisco uprising and Philip’s ethnic cleansing of Granada, they attacked Cyprus.The alliance of European Christians against the Ottomans was uneasy because of post-Reformation divisions in Europe itself. Independent lesser powers such as Venice and England found themselves negotiating for footholds in the Mediterranean theater. Hence the diplomatic maneuvering that brought the Barbary ambassadors to London—and hence also the blow to Venice caused by the loss of Cyprus in 1571. Shakespeare changes history. He sees off the Turk and implies instead that the real danger to the isle comes from the internal collapse of civil society. Venice regarded Cyprus as a key Christian outpost against the Turk, but what happens in the play is that it is turned heathen from within rather than without. There is deep irony in Iago’s “Nay, it is true, or else I am a Turk,” for it is Iago who does the Turkish work of destroying the Christian community. All three major characters invert audience expectation: Othello is a counter-Janissary, Desdemona is—contrary to ethnic stereotyping—a Venetian lady who is not lascivious, and Christian Iago is a functional Turk.Othello dies on a kiss, an embrace of black and white, perhaps a symbolic reconciliation of the virtues of West and East, Europe and Orient, but the public image he wants to be remembered by in the letter back to Venice is of confrontation between Christian and Turk, with himself as the defender of Christianity in Aleppo, a point of eastern extremity in Syria. In smiting himself, Othello recognizes that he has now become the Turk. By killing Desdemona he has renounced his Christian civility and damned himself. He symbolically takes back upon himself the insignia of Islam—turban, circumcision—that he had renounced when he turned Christian. He has beaten a Venetian wife and traduced the state. He has been turned Turk. Not, however, by the general Ottoman but by the supersubtle Venetian, the “honest” Iago.

  IAGO AND OTHELLOAs Shakespeare adds the Turkish context to the story that was his source, so he takes away the simple motivation of being in love with Disdemona that Cinthio gave the ensign. Jealousy over the matter of promotion is sufficient explanation for the first part of Iago’s plot, whereby Cassio’s weakness for the bottle leads to his being cashiered. But why does Iago then go so much further, utterly destroying the general on whose patronage he depends? Othello asks the question at the end of the play: “Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil / Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body?” But
Iago refuses to answer: “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. / From this time forth I never will speak word.” It sounds like a deliberate challenge to the audience to work it out for themselves.No one has risen to that challenge better than the early nineteenth-century critic William Hazlitt, who regarded the love of playacting as the key to Iago’s procedure (“Othello,” Characters of Shakespear’s Plays, 1817):Iago in fact belongs to a class of character, common to Shakespeare and at the same time peculiar to him; whose heads are as acute and active as their hearts are hard and callous… [He] plots the ruin of his friends as an exercise for his ingenuity, and stabs men in the dark to prevent ennui… He is an amateur of tragedy in real life; and instead of employing his invention on imaginary characters, or long-forgotten incidents, he takes the bolder and more desperate course of getting up his plot at home, casts the principal parts among his nearest friends and connections, and rehearses it in downright earnest, with steady nerves and unabated resolution.Exactly because he is scriptwriter, director, and stage villain rolled into one, Iago is an astonishingly compelling presence in the theater. And he is given the largest part. It would have been easy for him to dwarf the other characters, as the bad brother Edmund sometimes seems to dwarf his good brother Edgar in King Lear. Shakespeare’s challenge was to make Othello rise far above Iago’s other dupe, Rodorigo. To be reduced to a gibbering idiot over the matter of a misplaced handkerchief is to be duped indeed. But the mesmerizing effect of the poetic writing is such that we never think of Othello as foolish or laughable, not even in the temptation scene of the third act in which Iago twists every word, every detail, to the advantage of his plot. Instead, we turn the Moor’s own phrase back on to him: “But yet the pity of it, Iago! O, Iago, the pity of it, Iago!”Desdemona inspires our pity not because she is pitiful, but because her courage in going against her father’s will, in following her husband to the far frontier of the Venetian empire in Cyprus, and in generously speaking out for Cassio, becomes the cause of her death. Othello inspires our pity because he also inspires our awe, above all through his soaring language. For the Renaissance, the twin powers of rational thought and persuasive language, oratio and ratio, were what raised humankind above the level of the beasts. The tragedy of Othello is that Iago’s persuasive but specious reasoning (you’re black, you’re getting on in years, Venetian women are notoriously fickle…) transforms Othello from great orator to savage beast.According to the critic A. C. Bradley, in his highly influential book Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), Othello’s description of himself as “one not easily jealous, but being wrought, / Perplexed in the extreme” is perfectly just: “His tragedy lies in this—that his whole nature was indisposed to jealousy, and yet was such 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.” This is not to say that susceptibility to manipulation is Othello’s “tragic flaw.” For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, to call a play “the tragedy of” such and such a character was to make a point about the direction of their journey, not the hardwiring of their psychology. “Tragedie,” wrote Geoffrey Chaucer, father of English verse, “is to seyn a certeyn storie, / As olde bookes maken us memorie, / Of hym that stood in greet prosperitee, / And is yfallen out of heigh degree / Into myserie, and endeth wrecchedly.” The higher they climb, the harder they fall: tragedy is traditionally about heroes and kings and generals, larger-than-life figures who rise to the top of fortune’s wheel and are then toppled off.It is a structure saturated with irony: the very quality that is the source of a character’s greatness is also the cause of his downfall. This is why talk of a “tragic flaw” is misleading. The theory of the flaw arises from a misunderstanding of Aristotle’s influential account of ancient Greek tragedy. For Aristotle, hamartia, the thing that precipitates tragedy, is not a psychological predisposition but an event—not a character trait but a fatal action. In several famous cases in Greek tragedy, the particular mistake is to kill a blood relative in ignorance of their identity. So too in Shakespeare, it is action (in Othello’s case, over-precipitate action) that determines character, and not vice versa.In Shakespearean tragedy, the time is out of joint and the lead character is out of his accustomed role. Hamlet the scholar is happy to be presented with an intellectual puzzle, but unsure how to proceed when presented with a demand to kill. Othello the courageous soldier, by contrast, relishes decisive action but is insecure among “the wealthy curlèd darlings” of the Venetian state. Imagine Othello in Hamlet’s situation. He would have needed no second prompting. On hearing the ghost’s story about his father’s murder, he would have gone straight down from the battlements and throttled King Claudius with his bare hands. There would have been no tragedy. Now imagine Hamlet in Othello’s situation. He would have questioned every witness, arranged for Desdemona to see a play about adultery and watched for a guilty reaction. Her innocence would have become obvious and, again, there would be no tragedy. The tragedy comes not from some inherent flaw but from the mismatch of character and situation.The audience’s sense of the reckless speed of Othello’s action is heightened by the play’s clever “double-time” scheme. Looked at from one point of view, the action is highly compressed. The first act takes place in a single night in Venice, as the Senate sits in emergency session upon hearing the news of the Turkish fleet’s sailing toward Cyprus. There is then an imagined lapse of time to cover the sea voyage. The second act begins with the arrival in Cyprus and proceeds to the evening’s celebration of the evaporation of the Turkish threat, during which Cassio gets disastrously drunk. Othello and Desdemona have their second interrupted night in the marital bedroom. The third and fourth acts, during which Cassio intercedes with Desdemona and Iago persuades Othello of his wife’s infidelity, occupy another day, and then the fifth act brings the catastrophe on the third and last night. But looked at from another point of view, the action must take much longer: there has to be opportunity for the supposed adultery, for the business of the handkerchief, and for Lodovico’s sea voyage from Venice. The audience watching a strong production in the theater does not, however, notice the inconsistency implied by this double-time scheme, such is their intense absorption in the rapid unfolding of the plot.In an essay called “Shakespeare and Stoicism of Seneca,” published in 1927, the poet and critic T. S. Eliot took a very different view of Othello from A. C. Bradley’s:I have always felt that I have never read a more terrible exposure of human weakness—of universal human weakness—than the last great speech of Othello… What Othello seems to me to be doing in this speech is cheering himself up. He is endeavouring to escape reality, he has ceased to think of Desdemona, and is thinking about himself. Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of oneself. Othello succeeds in turning himself into a pathetic figure, by adopting an aesthetic rather than a moral attitude, dramatising himself against his environment. He takes in the spectator, but the human motive is primarily to take in himself.In the classical tragedy of ancient Greece and Rome, the hero often reaches a state of supreme self-awareness just before the moment of his death. Aristotle called this anagnorisis, recognition. This final clarity brings a strange and unworldly sense of satisfaction to the protagonist as he or she faces the end. For Eliot, Othello by contrast remains deluded. His self-dramatization is an evasion that substitutes for the recognition that he has in fact been all too “easily jealous.”According to this view, Othello is the victim of the very linguistic facility that has won him Desdemona. A contemporary of Eliot’s, the spiritually minded critic G. Wilson Knight, coined the phrase “the Othello music” to describe the unsurpassed lyricism of the Moor’s language. “Rude am I in my speech,” he says back in the first act as he launches into some of the least plain, most richly textured speeches in the English language. Far from being “round unvarnished,” as he claims they are, Othello’s poetic tales “Of moving accidents by flood and field, / Of hair-breadth
scapes i’th’imminent deadly breach” constitute the very “witchcraft” that makes Desdemona fall in love with him. “I think this tale would win my daughter too,” remarks the Duke admiringly. Iago’s sinister art is to reduce Othello from this loquacity to the degenerate outbursts of invective that pollute his mouth in the fourth act (“Goats and monkeys!… Lie with her? Lie on her?… Pish! Noses, ears and lips!… Confess? Handkerchief? O devil!”). In the fifth act, however, Othello’s language recovers its former beauty. It is in this sense that Eliot detected something disturbingly “aesthetic” about Othello’s last speeches.The forms of Shakespeare’s verse loosened and became more flexible as he matured as a writer. His early plays have a higher proportion of rhyme and a greater regularity in rhythm, the essential pattern being that of iambic pentameter (ten syllables, five stresses, the stress on every second syllable). In the early plays, lines are very frequently end-stopped: punctuation marks a pause at the line ending, meaning that the movement of the syntax (the grammatical construction) falls in with that of the meter (the rhythmical construction). In the later plays, there are far fewer rhyming couplets (sometimes rhyme only features as a marker to indicate that a scene is ending) and the rhythmic movement has far greater variety, freedom, and flow. Mature Shakespearean blank (unrhymed) verse is typically not end-stopped but “run on” (a feature known as “enjambment”). Instead of pausing heavily at the line ending, the speaker hurries forward, the sense demanded by the grammar working in creative tension against the holding pattern of the meter. The heavier pauses migrate to the middle of the lines, where they are known as the “caesura” and where their placing varies. A single line of verse is shared between two speakers much more frequently than in the early plays. And the pentameter itself becomes a more subtle instrument. The iambic beat is broken up, there is often an extra (“redundant”) unstressed eleventh syllable at the end of the line (this is known as a “feminine ending”). There are more modulations between verse and prose. Occasionally the verse is so loose that neither the original typesetters of the plays when they were first printed nor the modern editors of scholarly texts can be entirely certain whether verse or prose is intended. Iambic pentameter is the ideal medium for dramatic poetry in English because its rhythm and duration seem to fall in naturally with the speech patterns of the language. In its capacity to combine the ordinary variety of speech with the heightened precision of poetry, the supple mature Shakespearean “loose pentameter” is perhaps the most expressive vocal instrument ever given to the actor.Othello’s speech at the beginning of the murder scene offers a brilliant controlled combination of the patterns of repetition and variation that are typical of early Shakespearean rhetoric and the mellifluous imagistic invention, expanding from clause to clause, that is characteristic of his mature style:It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul: