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Chapter 2William Shakespeare, Othello honesty and

difference, men and women

Aims:

1) The study of Othello as a play text through discussion of the themes of love and death and their dramatic embodiment in a selection of key scenes or moments

2) Introduce you to some of the most influential critical debates about the play.

3) Develop further the discussion of 'difference' in terms of race and gender

4) Discuss the genre of the play.

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IntroductionWhat is a 'theme'?

Love: how this theme is introduced in terms of characters' different views of it:

Othello and Desdemona: High-minded and romantic, Iago and Roderigo: physical cynically reductive.

Roderigo comes across more as the desperate young suitor willing to be led, Cassio as the courtly lieutenant, while Iago is the source of the most basic, even obscene version of this human passion.

The word 'love' itself is used and reflected upon differently by different characters, adding to the richness of the text and its meanings in performance.

The theme becomes almost an independent part of what is happening, to the extent that it becomes a system of connected meanings .

YOU HAVE TO FOCUS ON:1) The development of theme as an aspect of character,

plot and language, and the dramatic techniques Shakespeare uses to achieve his ends.

2) The significant critical debates the play has stimulated.

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Act 2: a soldier's (love) life?

Move in geographical setting from a place symbolic of order and control, to a place of confusion and uncertainty.

Iago's soliloquy that concludes Act 1 reminds us of the continuing threat of disorder. As he exclaims in his last words as he departs the stage: 'Hell and Night' will soon bring the dark, 'monstrous' idea he has engendered into 'the world's light' (1.3.392—3).

In Cyprus, there is a movement beyond the civilised and civilising sway of Venice, to a place where the forces of nature are less controlled, and therefore where Iago's sinister plotting has more scope.

If one of the main things that defines Othello is being good at waging war, then the arrival in Cyprus with the news that war has been averted suggests that, like the other soldiers, he is left with nothing to do -perhaps a dangerous thing for any soldier.

Even more important in the context of this play, the trust and loyalty or honour developed between soldiers in the field becomes a potential weakness, which may be exploited by a character like Iago .

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Activity 1

Discussion Othello, Desdemona and lago arrive safely in Cyprus and,

once again, lago ensnares Roderigo in a plot against Othello - but this time through discrediting Cassio, whose gallantry towards Desdemona has suggested to lago how he can use him .

Desdemona arrives before Othello, and while they wait for

him she distracts herself through a bantering, bawdy exchange with lago about the nature of women. Desdemona cleverly matches his suggestiveness without descending to his level.

The storm with which Act 2 opens represents a

premonition as well as a sign: of the instability of the world the characters now inhabit.

For the Venetians, as for the English at the time, the sea was both the source of power and of danger. As if to confirm this, there is a current of sea imagery running through the language of the play

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The differences between Othello's and Iago's views of love become more sharply evident as Act 2 proceeds. For Othello, 'If it were now to die, / 'Twere now to be most happy' (2.1.184-5), and he pratdes happily to Desdemona in anticipation of the delayed consummation of their marriage.

Married love, however, is far from Iago's thoughts as he once more poisons the concept with his insinuations — not only to Roderigo (2.1.209—76) but, crucially for the development of the plot, to Cassio (2.3.12—43).

It is easy to be so absorbed by Iago's performance in Act 2 that one loses sight of Othello, the object of his hatred and envy .

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Activity 2

A simple fact about Act 2 is that for much of the time Othello is absent from the stage. Do you therefore feel the balance of the play at this point is shifting towards Iago? Look especially at Act 2, Scene 3, comparing and contrasting Othello's and Iago's speeches, and looking out for key words and phrases that seem to suggest how we are to understand their characters.

Discussion The balance is shifting towards Iago, despite the references

to Othello in his absence.

For here is where we see Iago's technique of exploiting the weaknesses of those to whom he pretends loyalty coming into its own, as he uses Cassio's drunken rage to destroy the man's position and reputation.

But when Othello first comes in, we notice how forceful and commanding he is, shaming his brawling men by exclaiming 'Are we turned Turks' (2.3.161) - ironic, considering he is accused in the play of being a heathen.

'Silence that dreadful bell' he orders (2.3.166), to prevent further disturbance. To locate those responsible, Othello quite naturally turns to 'Honest lago' for a report (2.3.168). This is, of course, deeply ironic: that he should turn to the very man whom we in the audience know is behind it all.

Perhaps not even the most balanced judgement could withstand lago's account of the preceding events, as he expresses regret and appears to try to excuse Cassio while omitting entirely his own role.

lago's ascendancy is confirmed by the exchanges with Cassio that follow, in which the idea arrives in his head that

he should prompt the disgraced soldier to approach Desdemona to plead to Othello on his behalf.

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We can see from this section of the play that lago, the bluff and confident soldier, is shown also to be a consummate actor, devious and controlling towards us, his audience, as well as towards the other characters.

Othello is becoming his victim , although we cannot yet see how the hero's love for Desdemona is going to bring him down and, crucially, our sympathies are being moved towards Othello and then away from him by what we hear and see.

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Act 3: temptation Othello is a domestic tragedy, in the sense that while

matters of state, such as the war with the Turks, are present, especially in the first act, they are marginal to the play's central concern with love, and the deaths which overtake it towards the end.

Moreover, the play has a relatively simple plot, and no sub-plot; that is to say, no shift of attention away from the central characters, and hardly any 'comic relief.

The drinking sequence in Act 2 can be and often is played as comedy, but it has a dark undercurrent, as we know all along that it is part of Iago's plan to undermine Cassio.

Iago lets us know what he is up to, which only makes us more concerned with what is about to happen to the principal characters, the lovers.

Othello is so intensely focused on Othello and Desdemona and Iago's plot to deceive and entrap them.

How we understand the characterisation of Othello and Desdemona, and how we judge their actions.

F.R. Leavis: Othello's love for Desdemona may well seem to be the

centre of the play, as he himself is.

The importance of the Leavis view is that it challenges us to think about how we understand the role of Othello and the play as a tragedy: in particular, how far what happens is the product of the hero's nobility being brought low by the devilish machinations of lago (which shifts the focus somewhat onto lago), and how far he is himself unwittingly responsible for the tragedy.

According to Leavis the tragedy is 'the undoing of the noble Moor by the devilish cunning of lago'.

it was 'external evil, the malice of the demi-devil, that turned a happy story of romantic love — of romantic lovers who were qualified to live happily ever after, so to speak — into a tragedy'.

For Leavis, this is to 'sentimentalise Shakespeare's tragedy and to displace its centre' (the balance between Othello and lago in Act 2 is an issue for debate. )

Too much attention, according to Leavis, tends to be paid to the character of lago and his 'diabolic intellect'.

'The plain fact is that in Shakespeare's tragedy of Othello Othello is the chief personage — the chief personage in such a sense that the tragedy may fairly be said to be

Othello's character in action. lago is subordinate and merely ancillary'

Leavis suggestS that Wilson Knight's view should be understood in a more critical way, as an indication of 'a habit of self-approving self-dramatization' that is 'an essential element in Othello's make-up, and remains so at the very end'.

Iago's 'prompt success' in persuading Othello of Desdemona's alleged treachery is not so much the result of Iago's 'diabolic intellect' as of 'Othello's readiness to respond'. This is central to the Leavis argument:

lago is simply 'a mechanism necessary for precipitating tragedy in a dramatic action'

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Act 3, Scene 3: the temptation sceneActivity 3

What or who is the bait with which lago catches Othello? Notice lago's aside in line 33: what does it indicate is happening onstage?Othello's own suspicious fantasies and insecurities, which eventually allow something as trifling as the handkerchief to become firm proof of Desdemona's alleged deceit, as lago points out (3.3.323-6). How does lago tempt or manipulate Othello so as to enrage him against Cassio and Desdemona? Having thought about your answers to 1 and 2, try responding to this question:By his pretended perplexity at and poisonous interpretation of Cassio's and Desdemona's innocent behaviour, lago insinuates the idea into Othello's mind that they are cheating or, in the language of the time, cuckolding him.

Is lago just a dramatic 'mechanism', as Leavis suggests, whereby Othello's deeper fantasies are brought out? Or is Othello really noble, while lacking the necessary defences against the diabolic mind that defeats him here?

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It has been suggested by the critic Marjorie Garber that: One of the ways lago manages or tempts Othello is by

being an 'echo', turning the meaning of his words against themselves.

lago's apparently innocent repetition of Othello's 'indeed', 'honest' and 'think' is typical of his technique, of pretending to avoid speaking the awful truth so as to protect his master from it, while at the same time ensuring it filters into Othello's mind.

Why is Othello so ready to accept Iago's insinuations? Shakespeare suggests that it is Othello's own insecurity that gives Iago the opportunity to work on his feelings.

Why should the protagonist be insecure? He is the outsider, the 'extravagant and wheeling stranger' (1.1.135) in this community of Venetians, and, as one critic put it, 'portrayed as forever homeless, uprooted, and on the move, incapable — or at least so his enemies contend — of ever being naturalized' (Fiedler, 1973, p. 146).

And he is ethnically different, too. In Act 1, Scene 1, Iago, Roderigo and Brabantio take it for

granted that the marriage between a black African and a white Venetian woman is deeply unnatural

These are the humiliating charges that Othello has to defend himself and his marriage against in Act 1, Scene 3.

This climate of racism the fact that Othello is a middle- aged soldier accustomed to the exclusively male world

of military life and quite unaccustomed to the company of women, then it is not hard to see why he seems predisposed to believe his ensign over his wife .

Othello shows himself to be all too susceptible to such ideas, his insecurities about his race and age and lack of experience with women intensifying a tendency to expect the worst of the opposite sex .

Othello does appear to some extent as the victim of lago's cunning. But Shakespeare also makes it clear how much the hero resembles lago and the other male Venetians in his masculine pride and suspicious distrust of women.

Understand Othello by the aspect of his 'character in action'. It becomes 'action' in the way he behaves towards Desdemona, leading him to the point when, in the opening scene of Act 4, he strikes her (4.1.232).

Moment after moment in this play, we sense the downward slide into violence and death.

The other side of Othello's grand self-image is represented by Iago's lust for destruction.

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Act 4: men and womenA 'new theory' emerged which generated a whole new language of Shakespeare criticism underestimated the power of historical and cultural processes to shape literary texts.

- This new theoretical movement advocated seeing early modern culture as less stable and more contradictory than hitherto, renegotiating the relationship between text and context.

- These thoughts are prompted by noting that in F.R. Leavis's attack on the interpretation of Othello as a heroic figure, rather than a flawed and egotistical one.

In Act 4, the handkerchief she is supposed to have given Cassio becomes a symbol of guilt and betrayal, as Othello's half-crazed condition leads him further and further into incoherence and rage under the masterful direction of Iago

Just as Iago earlier on in the play was eavesdropping on Cassio and Desdemona, so Othello is now reduced to doing the same thing, secretly watching Iago and Cassio and misinterpreting what he sees, and going on to will himself into believing the worst of Desdemona.

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Act 4, Scene 3: the 'willow song'Activity 4

IMPORTANT ABOUT GENDER

Act 4, Scene 3 does not seem to propel the action forward, and so what do you think might be its point, or dramatic function? Does it look ahead to the end? What does it depict?

Discussion Act 4, Scene 3 is the melancholy scene in which Emilia,

lago's wife and Desdemona's maidservant, helps Desdemona prepare for bed.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about it is how far it anticipates the end and Desdemona's death scene. It is one of many moments of proleptic irony (or foreshadowing) in the play - a poignant harbinger of doom.

Dramatically, it is a moment of rest, before the headlong rush of Act 5 begins.

What it depicts is an intimate moment between women, contrasting sharply with all the scenes between men, or of women surrounded by and dominated by men.

That the men are all soldiers, courtiers or senators, that is, active in public life, makes the contrast between male and female characters all the stronger.

Yet this is a moment of heightened tension, too, because of its content. It relates the story of Barbary, Desdemona's mother's maid whose lover 'proved mad, / And did forsake her', and who died singing a 'Song of Willow' (4.3.25-6).

The song expresses female despair and longing, and passive acceptance towards the lover: 'Let nobody blame him, his scorn I approve' (4.3.47).

The words and context of the song make us more aware of Desdemona's own tragic situation, in which her lover too has gone 'mad', and she has become the apparently passive victim of his lunacy.

The language of the play has changed once again here, giving us those extraordinarily evocative, individual touches – as Desdemona wonders if the wind is someone knocking and feels her eyes itching, the effect of which is to bring home her human reality (4.3.48-9, 53-4).

These touches also make her death scene, when it comes, all the more moving, generating an even stronger sense of waste.

Emilia's last speech, which is a plea for recognition of women's equal humanity: It challenges the anti-woman sentiments expressed by so many of the male characters . ___________________________________________

IMPORTANT ABOUT GENDER

The shift in perspective from soldierly honour as a matter of concern to the subjects of women's fidelity and attitude to marriage deepens our sense of the moral richness of the play.

Emilia's forthright, unromantic view provides a crucial variation, not only on Desdemona's and Othello's views of love, but also lago's — she, too, can be blunt and down to earth, opposing the lovers' naive idealism with her own realism. However, unlike her husband, she does not envy or despise them for it.

Further, Emilia's lengthy defence of the rights of wives (4.3.81—98) opens up the whole question of how women were treated at the time and later.

For example, the critic and historian Lisa Jardine argues that without Emilia's speech, Desdemona's song of a lover abandoned 'becomes a stylised, emblematic representation of female passivity and culpability'; whereas with the inclusion of Emilia's 'assertive counterpoint' the scene becomes 'one which struggles with female and male responsibility and its limitations and negotiations'.

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Act 5: 'It is the cause': death, difference and tragedy

In early modern drama, including Shakespeare's plays, Italians, Jews, Indians and Africans appear as figures who may be admired, but are more often stigmatised.

During the preceding (sixteenth) century, improving trade links and increasing travel meant a general awareness of the presence of people from continents, races and religions beyond England, Britain and Europe.

The critic Ania Loomba argues that as Europeans 'became increasingly aware of the power, wealth, and learning of other peoples ... this awareness often only intensified expressions of European and Christian superiority'. Questions of difference had long been central to the literature of the Crusades, and to the encounters between Christians, Jews and Muslims in Europe.

[racial attitudes towards Othello] Queen Elizabeth I herself had 'ordered the deportation of "Negroes and blackamoors" from England on the grounds that they were depriving her own "Christian people" of jobs'

Such intolerance was the product of centuries of accumulated ideas about racial hierarchy, but it also overlapped with and was reinforced by ideas of class and gender difference.

Loomba emphasises that with regard to class differences, '[a]ll over Europe, the nobility were often understood as a "race" distinct from ordinary folk ' , and that with regard to gender differences, Europeans distinguished themselves from other races in terms of 'an inversion or distortion of "normal" gender difference, men and women roles

What Loomba concludes is that '[patriarchal domination and gender inequality provided a model for establishing racial hierarchies and colonial domination'.

While we might wrestle with precisely how these various forms of difference and hierarchy were articulated in Shakespeare's society, by simply registering that there were significant racial, class and gender hierarchies , we are alerted to the need to look at how the language of Othello expresses racial, class and gender differences .

The extent to which questions of difference are raised in the play is part of what makes it both rich and satisfying as a theatrical experience, as well as leaving in our minds matter for serious reflection:

As we have seen, men's perceptions of women, and women's of men, are as much at issue in this play as

considerations of race or colour, prompted by the interracial marriage at its centre.

Discussing questions of gender and race in relation to the play may seem particularly up to date, but they have been present for a very long time, if not from the beginning of the play's performance history.

This is precisely because Othello as it has come down to us is so centrally about how such questions affect love and, in this play, bring about death.

Rymer saw Othello as little more than a sorry farce, but he clearly touches on issues of race and gender, as well as class and genre.

Desdemona's handkerchief, the apparently trivial object that becomes the fatal focus of Othello's jealousy.

The view of tragedy: According to Aristotle's Poetics, the tragic hero is a great

man who falls from prosperity to misery and death through an 'error' of judgement (from the Greek hamartia, often translated as 'flaw').

if, like Rymer you felt that a 'blackamoor' was an inappropriate hero, on the grounds of race or class, and his error of judgement a matter apparently so trivial as that of misinterpreting the whereabouts of his wife's handkerchief, then you might indeed have felt neither pity nor fear at the outcome.

This is all part of what makes the play a domestic tragedy; it also touches on the question raised by Leavis and others of whether Othello is heroic or admirable enough for his fall to be truly tragic .

Act 5 is the key. Here, the issues of genre as well as of difference come to fruition, although without being totally resolved by the deaths that follow.

A tense and dramatic opening scene, in which Cassio is wounded by Roderigo, who is stabbed and killed by Iago, leaves the audience in a state of high expectation.

It parallels the opening of the play, revealing the mortal end of the intrigue set in motion then.

The next and final scene seems at first to move unbearably slowly, as the climax arrives and the tragedy is played out in multiple deaths.

Again, every line of the text bears close consideration, but let us look at a few moments of this last scene, with issues of 'difference' primarily in mind.___________________________________________

Act 5, Scene 2: endings

He already imagines his wife resembling one of those marble figures of deceased aristocrats one can see in churches, anticipating not just her death, but the time thereafter.

His stature as tragic hero is at issue here; Othello addresses a larger world beyond the one in which he is at the moment, but we might well feel that this is to the detriment of any remaining sense of the human reality of his wife.

Othello is referring to the 'cause' or reason for what he is about to do, his wife's alleged infidelity.

That Othello addresses his soul suggests he is referring his 'case' to a higher authority, a divine court, where he expects the act he is contemplating to be judged.

It also implies that he sees his role in relation to his wife as that of both judge and executioner .

This highlights once more the paradox of Othello's character: is he a deluded, self-important fool, or a noble hero brought down by circumstance?

The Leavis view leans towards the former interpretation. For those that accept it, Othello's apparent concern for

justice as the play moves towards the end - what Leavis calls Othello's 'noble self-bracing to a sacrifice' - appears as self-deception .

So his last speech before stabbing himself becomes, as Leavis suggests, 'unmistakably self-dramatization - self-dramatization as un-self-comprehending as before'.

Do you accept this? Or do you prefer the interpretation that emphasises his nobility - 'An honourable murderer, if you will, / For naught I did in hate, but all in honour' (5.2.292-3), words that might suggest a level of self-awareness, while highlighting the central paradox of his character?

For Marjorie Garber: Shakespeare's time was one of great historical changes

and social anomalies', including the presence of black men and women living in London, and women of all social ranks arguing for greater independence.

Othello, she argues, 'records and responds to a world in crisis, a crisis figured in part through emergent categories like race, class, gender

This world is represented in the play in terms of a symbolic geography contrasting the Christian, 'civilised' and ordered world of the city of Venice, and the disorderly world of Cyprus, itself a kind of borderland beyond which may be found the cannibals and sorcerers Othello refers to in his speeches.

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Activity 5

With these ideas and perspectives in mind, reread 5.2.337-54. What does the speech tell us about Othello and his position as a black man in white Venetian society?

DiscussionWhat is perhaps most striking about his last speech is that in it Othello presents himself as simultaneously a hero and a villain. How can this be? Because, in effect having internalised the negative attitudes of those Venetians who see him as radically different and unchristian, while also having been honoured by them as noble and Christian, he has become the place where these contradictions cancel each other out in the only way possible - through his suicide:

OTHELLO Set you down this;And say besides that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took by th' throat the circumcised dog And smote him - thus.

He stabs himself (5.2.350-5)

Othello's final gesture means he kills himself just as he once killed a Muslim on behalf of Venice and 'civilisation'; a profoundly ironic gesture, reminding us of his outsider status, while dramatising the contradictions of a society in which identities are shifting and unstable, and doing so more than any other play of the time dealing with differences of race and religion.

Thus, the hero's death by suicide, the end towards which the play has been moving, encapsulates all the contradictions of his position within Venetian society which have in large part contributed to his demise.

As he kills the alien within himself, Othello enacts his role as the outsider striving to belong to a society that will always exclude him.

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Othello is truly remarkable is in the way it associates these differences with gender issues as

well. The repetition of the 'willow song' in the exchange

between Desdemona and Emilia, contrasting the former's passive acceptance of her role as the suffering wife with her maid's forthright insistence on women's claims to equality.

Neither of the women will survive, however. The tragic irony continues: Iago's murder of his wife mirrors Othello's murder of his, their actions summed up by Othello's pathetic line 'why should Honour outlive Honesty?' {that word again), as he gives up all resistance — 'Let it go all' (5.2.244—5). With these lines, Othello seems to retain a certain dignity. Or is this still part of his self-excusing rant — if that is how you see his last lines?

There are further considerations. For all the differences in class and race as well as behaviour and character between Othello and lago, their physical closeness can be suggestive.

lago, of course, may also be thought of as a principal in the play, although by the final scene his power has gone.

There is a line of reasoning about Iago's motivation that detects a hidden homoerotic compulsion, a frustrated love for his manly superior that he must hide from himself, and which therefore generates his rage against the innocent Desdemona, and terrible manipulation of Othello.

There is another level on which issues of race, gender circulate within the play, there remains a residue of uncertainty about Iago, just as there remains an uncertainty about the source(s) of evil in the world.

And this is part of what makes the play an authentic tragedy: it involves a profound moral conflict which draws us in, yet leaves us without any certain resolution to the dilemmas it poses.

As Iago is led off to be tortured at the end, do we feel that justice is satisfied, at least on the level of Venetian society? I do not think so - but I leave it to you to decide for yourself.

Conclusion

Focus on Othello: The themes of love, death and 'difference', focusing on a

selection of key scenes. The most influential critical views, especially those that

focus on Othello as a 'self-dramatiser' (Leavis). Recent productions and approaches despite apparently

having been superseded by our more current concerns with the politics of race and gender (Jardine, Garber, Loomba).

Calling the play a tragedy means that it should end in the death of its central figure or figures and so on, but it also invites us to think about what it means in terms of the kind of moral vision the play proposes.

بالله إال قوة ال الله شاء ماهذا المبيكا لوليتا أختكم بالتوفيق لكم تمنياتي مع

روحي على جارية وصدقة الله خالصلوجه العملدعائكمو تنسونيمن فال والممات الحياة في

العلمية المادة على بالحصول تمتمساعدتيبرنارد ) اخوكم االجر باغي الكتبعندي توفر لعدم

الدعاء( منكم راجيا الخير فعل في حبا شوالملفبأيشكلمن هذا استخدام أحلل ال

ملخصات عمل أو النشر إعادة في األشكال