Othello: The State of Play 9781408184776, 9781408184561, 9781472577955, 9781408184547

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The Arden Shakespeare State of Play Series
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Contents
Series Preface
Notes on Contributors
Introduction 1 Lena Cowen Orlin
1 Othello, Theatre Boundaries, and Audience Cognition Laurie Maguire
2 ‘All’s One’: Cinthio, Othello, and A Yorkshire Tragedy Lois Potter
3 ‘Speak[ing] Parrot’ and Ovidian Echoes in Othello: Recontextualizing Black Speech in the Global Re
4 Othello’s Black Handkerchief Ian Smith
5 Two Faced: The Problem of Othello’s Visage 121 Ambereen Dadabhoy
6 Eloquent Barbarians: Othello and the Critical Potential of Passionate Character 149 Lynn Enterline
7 Making Ambition Virtue? Othello, Small Wars, and Martial Profession 177 Ja mes Siemon
8 Othello’s Consummation 203 David Schalkwyk
9 Othello’s Double Diction 235 Robert N. Watson
10 Shakespeare’s Nobody 257 Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld
Index

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Othello

THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE STATE OF PLAY SERIES General Editors: Lena Cowen Orlin and Ann Thompson Macbeth: The State of Play, edited by Ann Thompson Othello: The State of Play, edited by Lena Cowen Orlin Further titles in preparation

Othello The State of Play Edited by Lena Cowen Orlin

Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Editorial matter and selection © Lena Cowen Orlin, 2014 Lena Cowen Orlin and the contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-4081-8454-7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

CONTENTS

Series Preface  vii Notes on Contributors  viii

Introduction  1 Lena Cowen Orlin

1 Othello, Theatre Boundaries, and Audience Cognition  17 Laurie Maguire

2 ‘All’s One’: Cinthio, Othello, and A Yorkshire Tragedy  45 Lois Potter

3 ‘Speak[ing] Parrot’ and Ovidian Echoes in Othello: Recontextualizing Black Speech in the Global Renaissance  63 Robert Hornback

4 Othello’s Black Handkerchief  95 Ian Smith

5 Two Faced: The Problem of Othello’s Visage  121 Ambereen Dadabhoy

vi CONTENTS

6 Eloquent Barbarians: Othello and the Critical Potential of Passionate Character  149 Lynn Enterline

7 Making Ambition Virtue? Othello, Small Wars, and Martial Profession  177 James Siemon

8 Othello’s Consummation  203 David Schalkwyk

9 Othello’s Double Diction  235 Robert N. Watson

10 Shakespeare’s Nobody  257 Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld Index  281

SERIES PREFACE The Arden Shakespeare State of Play Series Editors: Lena Cowen Orlin and Ann Thompson This series represents a collaboration between King’s College London and Georgetown University. King’s is the home of the London Shakespeare Centre and Georgetown is the home of the Shakespeare Association of America (SAA). Each volume in the series is an expedition to discover the ‘state of play’ with respect to specific works by Shakespeare. Our method is to convene a seminar at the annual convention of the SAA and see what it is that preoccupies scholars now. SAA seminars are enrolled through an open registration process that brings together academics from all stages of their careers. Participants prepare short papers that are circulated in advance and then discussed when the seminar convenes on conference weekend. From the papers submitted, the seminar leader selects a group for inclusion in a collection that aims to include fresh work by emerging voices and established scholars both. The general editors are grateful for the further collaboration of Bloomsbury Publishing, and especially our commissioning editor Margaret Bartley. In the Series: Macbeth, edited by Ann Thompson Othello, edited by Lena Cowen Orlin

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Ambereen Dadabhoy is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Harvey Mudd College, where she teaches courses on Shakespeare and early modern literature. Her research focuses on the representation of religious and racial difference in early modern English literature, investigating how such differences are embodied and then circulated in various early modern discourses, particularly on the stage. She has held a faculty position at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul which fostered her research investments in Anglo-Ottoman encounter and exchange. Her current book project is ‘The Ottoman Caesars of Rome: Reorienting Translatio Imperii in Early Modern English Literature’. Lynn Enterline is Nancy Perot Mulford Professor of English at Vanderbilt University and author of Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (2012), The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (2000), and The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (1995). This essay is part of the book she is currently writing, ‘Epic Discontent: on the Critical Potential of Passionate Character in Tudor England’. Robert Hornback is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Oglethorpe University. He has published widely on the early modern comic in journals such as Shakespeare Studies, English Literary Renaissance, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Studies in English Literature, Shakespeare International Yearbook,



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Sixteenth Century Journal, Early Theatre, and Comparative Drama, as well as in collections such as The Blackwell Companion to Tudor Literature, Henry IV: A Critical Guide, and Drama in Post-Reformation England. Having authored The English Clown Tradition from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare (2009), he is currently completing a book on early blackface comic traditions and their relation to a transnational proto-racism. Laurie Maguire is Professor of English at Oxford University and a tutorial fellow of Magdalen College. She is the author, editor, or co-author of nine books on Shakespeare and Renaissance drama. Her most recent books are Thirty Great Myths about Shakespeare (co-authored with Emma Smith, 2012) and Othello (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2014). Lena Cowen Orlin, Professor of English at Georgetown University, is also Executive Director of the Shakespeare Association of America and past Executive Director of the Folger Institute. She is author of Locating Privacy in Tudor London (2007) and Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (1994); editor of two anthologies, The Renaissance: A Sourcebook (2009) and Elizabethan Households (1995); and editor or co-editor of six essay collections. She is also co-editor, with Russ McDonald, of The Bedford Shakespeare, out this year. Her current book project is ‘The Private Life of William Shakespeare’. Lois Potter is Ned B. Allen Professor Emerita of the University of Delaware and currently a Visiting Professor at King’s College, London. Apart from Shakespeare, her research interests have included plays in performance, theatre history, the English Civil War, and Robin Hood. She has edited The Two Noble Kinsmen for the Arden Shakespeare (1997) and Pericles for the forthcoming Norton Complete Works, as well as four essay collections. Other publications include A Preface to Milton (1971), Secret Rites and Secret Writing (1989), a

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study of royalist literature 1641–1661, books on the theatre history of Twelfth Night (1985) and Othello (2002), and The Life of William Shakespeare (2012). She has frequently reviewed plays. Her current project is an updating of her Arden edition. Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld received her PhD from Rutgers University and is an Assistant Professor of English Literature at Pomona College, where she teaches courses on early modern poetry, prose, and drama. Her work on questions of form, style, and epistemology has appeared in or is forthcoming from ELH, English Literary Renaissance, and Modern Philology; she is currently completing a book manuscript on figures of speech in humanist pedagogy and poetics entitled ‘Indecorous Thinking: Poetic Figures and the Production of Knowledge in Early Modern England’. David Schalkwyk is Academic Director of Global Shakespeare, a programme sponsored by Queen Mary, University of London and the University of Warwick. He was previously the Director of Research at the Folger Shakespeare Library and Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly. Among his publications are Hamlet’s Dreams: The Robben Island Shakespeare (2013), Shakespeare, Love and Service (2008), Literature and the Touch of the Real (2004), and Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (2002). He is at work on ‘Love’s Transgression in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries’. James Siemon is Professor of English at Boston University. He is the author of Shakespearean Iconoclasm (1986) and Word Against Word: Shakespearean Utterance (2002); he has edited Christopher Marlowe’s Jew of Malta (New Mermaids  1994, rev. 2009), Shakespeare’s Richard III (Arden, 2009) and Julius Caesar (Norton, 2014); and he has written numerous articles on early modern English drama and culture. He is currently editing  Shakespeare Studies, and he is working on two monographs, one devoted to early modern English



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keywords and another to social distinction in early modern English drama. Ian Smith, Professor of English at Lafayette College, is the author of Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (2009). He has published on Shakespeare, early modern drama, and postcolonial literature and is currently working on a book titled ‘Fabricated Identities: Racial Cross-Dressing on the Early Modern Stage’. Robert N. Watson is Distinguished Professor of English and Associate Dean of Humanities at UCLA, and holds the Neikirk Chair for Educational Innovation. His books include Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (2006); The Rest is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance (1999); Ben Jonson’s Parodic Strategy: Literary Imperialism in the Comedies (1987); Shakespeare and the Hazards of Ambition (1984); and the forthcoming Throne of Blood. He is also editor of Volpone (2003); Every Man In His Humour (1998); Critical Essays on Ben Jonson (1997); and the forthcoming Ben Jonson: Four Plays.

Introduction Lena Cowen Orlin

On 11 October 1660 Samuel Pepys went with two friends to the Cockpit Theatre, where they saw The Moor of Venice. The play was ‘well done’, Pepys observed, but what he especially remarked was that the ‘very pretty lady’ who sat near him ‘called out’ in distress ‘to see Desdemona smothered’. This was the first of many instances in which the reactions of individual audience members have become part of the communal experience of stagings of Othello. The most extreme is probably Stendhal’s report of an 1822 production in Baltimore, when an American soldier shot at the actor in the lead role.1 There is no comparable record of women hoping with Lear that Cordelia is still alive, or of men intervening to prevent the death of Hamlet. What is it about Othello that provokes so intense a level of audience engagement? The essays in this volume advance many ideas about the play’s ability to unsettle us.2 In ‘Othello, Theatre Boundaries, and Audience Cognition’, for example, Laurie Maguire refers to the work of Edward Bullough on aesthetics: ‘what, he asked, is the ideal balance between audience involvement in a play and their emotional distance from it?’ Bullough postulated that drama should be poised between the over-distancing of intellectual detachment and the under-distancing of total identification, and he cited Othello as a play that underdistances. What he meant is that some audience members can lose awareness of the boundaries that usually separate the real from the fictional. That this is an aesthetic fault is arguable,

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and perceptions may differ depending on whether one is the spectator experiencing profound emotion at the Cockpit or the actor whose arm is shattered by a bullet in Baltimore. But Maguire, seeking to understand provocations for underdistancing, suggests that Othello sets boundary breaching in motion because, in a play in which so many actions are theatricalized, Desdemona is herself a boundary breacher. Othello initially portrays her to us as an audience member at the performances of his life story. By the time we meet her she has stepped across the threshold of a tropological stage and fallen in love with the character he represented there. Her boundary confusion, and Othello’s susceptibility to boundary confusion, carry on through the play, in Maguire’s telling infecting the audience as it unfolds. At the end Othello, in her words, ‘resurrects the distancing boundaries of theatre only to cross them’, re-enacting on his own body the murder he once executed on a ‘turbanned Turk’ (5.2.351). When Desdemona crosses the divide between, on the one hand, the ‘real’ life so concisely evoked in the wayward pull of her ‘house affairs’ (1.3.138) and, on the other, the ‘story’ life so enthrallingly abstracted in Othello’s report to the Venetian senate, she becomes ‘half the wooer’ (1.3.176). Via courtship and marriage, says Maguire, she ‘initiates a comic structure’. It may be that generic mutability is also at the heart of the matter of Othello. As is by now generally recognized, the play greets us as a comedy, with Othello and Desdemona overcoming the impediment of the patriarchal blocking figure Brabantio. This action, though, occupies just the first act, and by the fifth act we have been translated into a tragedy that ends with five deaths, the lovers among them. Lois Potter has a theory for how the generic mash-up happened. In ‘“All’s One”: Cinthio, Othello, and A Yorkshire Tragedy’, she suggests that Shakespeare may have begun by writing what has descended to us as the last three acts, perhaps with the idea that a collaborator would add the first two, perhaps thinking that the three acts should stand alone as a short play. A short Othello could have been presented with one or

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two others in a composite entertainment of differing actions linked by a common theme; the precipitate Yorkshire Tragedy suggests that one such theme might have been marital jealousy. Positing what may have been the earliest instance of audience intervention, Potter further speculates that Shakespeare found from performance that ‘his story demanded fuller treatment’. There may yet remain a trace of the short play’s lost reception history in the tendency of modern productions and films to ‘begin before the beginning’ by showing us Desdemona before Shakespeare does, that is, before her third-scene arrival at the senate, as if even the added prehistory comes still too tardily for us. In other words, the opening scenes ‘fill a psychological need for readers and spectators’, says Potter, but incompletely. To imagine the first act as an interpolated one is more clearly to see how it elevates Othello into a charismatic hero and makes Desdemona, too, a figure of power and self-possession. It is also to suppose that compositional stutter-steps help account for the play’s characterologic inconsistencies and plot implausibilities. A Yorkshire Tragedy, notably, has a lengthextending first scene that also feels like an add-on. If Potter’s creation myth is true, and if Shakespeare wrote backwards to satisfy Othello’s first receptors, this may help account for the puzzles of action and timing, as well as tone, that were then to bedevil them – and us. Even the early comic elements of this generically unstable play are multifold, reverberating between the romantic, as the couple proclaim their love publicly and poetically, and the farcical, as Othello’s greater age and Desdemona’s parental ‘deception’ set the stage for intimations of cuckoldry. In ‘“Speak[ing] Parrot” and Ovidian Echoes in Othello: Recontextualizing Black Speech in the Global Renaissance’, Robert Hornback introduces another perspective on the play’s tonal mix by locating the title character in a pan-European tradition of clown comedies, with black-faced fools represented through pidginized dialect, witless repetition, and other linguistic barbarisms. Here, too, there is boundary crossing, not only because Othello’s likely barbarism is belied

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by his mesmerizing rhetorical skill in the senate scene but also because, while he later falls into inarticulacy, so also do Cassio and Emilia. The word ‘fool’ is not reserved to Othello but is deployed fairly indiscriminately across the play. And while the plot may propel Othello into exhibiting the characteristics of the stereotypical African gull, it must also be acknowledged that Cassio, Emilia, and, especially, Roderigo out-gull him. In the end, Hornback argues, Othello recovers his eloquence in a manner that deconstructs the proto-racialized logic of speech in other plays from the period; it evokes Ovid’s Metamorphoses more strongly than their coarse lampoons. Doing so, Othello removes one more field of predictability from the way in which its audiences might have tried to make sense of colour and character. Uncertainty of tone was also an issue for Thomas Rymer, who published the earliest critical evaluation of the play thirty-three years after Pepys filed his theatre review. ‘There is in this play some burlesque, some humour and ramble of comical wit, some show, and some mimicry to divert the spectators’, wrote Rymer, ‘but the tragical part is plainly none other than a bloody farce without salt or savour.’ Rymer’s Short View of Tragedy extends to 182 pages, a full sixty of them devoted to Othello, with plot summary and extracts mediated by his bitingly sarcastic commentary. Rymer’s censure is so irresistibly quotable that his opening tribute has proven eminently forgettable: ‘From all the tragedies acted on our English stage, Othello is said to bear the bell away’ – that is, to carry off the prize as top drama. This is a notable acknowledgement of the play’s long popularity. (In fact, when the theatres reopened in 1660 it was the first of Shakespeare’s tragedies to be performed again.) But what we instead take away from Rymer is his scorn at encountering so much ado, so much stress, so much passion and repetition about an handkerchief! Why was this not called the Tragedy of the Handkerchief? … Had it been Desdemona’s

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garter, the sagacious Moor might have smelt a rat; but the handkerchief is so remote a trifle, no booby on this side Mauritania could make any consequence from it. With ‘booby’ Rymer invokes the world of racialized caricature Hornback has recovered. Rymer cannot comprehend how it could have ‘entered into our poet’s head to make a tragedy of this trifle’ (nor, it is implied, of this protagonist).3 In the present volume, the handkerchief is the furthest thing from trivial. The rehabilitation of Othello’s most notorious stage property began with Lynda E. Boose’s influential essay of 1975, which imagined white linen embroidered with red strawberries as a symbolic stand-in for Desdemona’s wedding sheets and thus, in the words of Ian Smith, as an emblem of ‘capillary or virginal blood and white flesh’.4 Smith, however, takes issue with the idea that the handkerchief was necessarily of bleached linen. It is described in the play as ‘dyed in mummy’ (3.4.76), a black bituminous substance encountered in contemporary medical discourse. In ‘Othello’s Black Handkerchief’, Smith shows both that there is good evidence for black handkerchiefs in the period and also that white actors were sometimes garbed in black cloth in order to portray dark-skinned characters. Accordingly, the handkerchief is an extension of a stage personage that was as likely to have been established by textiles as by cosmetic paint. Maguire points out that there is a ‘matrilineal’ and a ‘patrilineal’ account of the handkerchief (3.4.57–8 and 5.2.214–15), but both are authored by Othello, and Smith gives us another way of understanding why the handkerchief should be identified with Othello more than Desdemona. It is implicated, as Smith shows, in a material notion of black subjectivity that was emergent in the public theatre, that would come to inform the Atlantic slave trade and colonial economies, and that has provoked not only the Baltimore soldier – ‘It will never be said that in my presence a cursed Negro would kill a white woman!’ – but also racialized responses and commentary ever since.

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For Smith, the connection between Othello and the handkerchief is further confirmed by its ‘African provenance’ in the matrilineal pedigree: it belonged to an Egyptian, who gave it to Othello’s mother as a charm to bind her husband to her. From there it descended to Othello, along with her maternal instruction that he should bestow it on his future wife. Or so we hear when, after having denied in the first scene that he practised witchcraft on Desdemona, Othello then recounts a magical backstory that he withheld from her until it could fully release its menace. The genealogy of the handkerchief exoticizes the Venetian war hero, and not just as a North African. ‘I find Ottoman imperial stories and practices haunting the entirety of the play’, writes Ambereen Dadabhoy, bringing what has seemed marginal to the centre. In ‘Two Faced: The Problem of Othello’s Visage’, she relates Othello’s stealing away of Desdemona to the ‘slavery and concubinage of European women in the Ottoman seraglio’; in this context, Othello’s gift evokes the sultan’s habit of tossing his handkerchief to ‘his chosen odalisque’ of the night. This is to say, if it needs saying, that Othello works on its audiences at levels other than that of plot. There, the Moor is presented to us as Venice’s best hope against the Ottoman threat. In the deep reaches of the play’s cultural anxieties, however, he is also as Other to it as any Ottoman, relating his exotic encounters, spell-casting with a handkerchief sewn by a sibyl, and, finally, self-identifying with the ‘turbanned Turk’. Dadabhoy has a new explanation for how early spectators may have understood him to occupy what Homi Bhabha calls a ‘space of splitting’. A fourteenth-century Ottoman sultan imposed on his conquered territories the tax policy known as devşirme, whereby Christian boys were co-opted, forcibly converted, and trained as elite soldiers to live out split subjectivities of the sort Othello seems to inhabit. By the sixteenth century, Europeans were telling themselves, in ‘negation and denial’, that Christian tribute children were the main source of Ottoman might. Westerners also enjoyed stories of the resistant nature of identity, as embodied in the tale of

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Ottoman conscript George Castriot. Castriot defected when he had the chance and turned his military training against his former abductors. With Castriot, the fact that ‘the repressed is always ready to return’ is palliative; his re-turn is occasioned by what would have been seen as right-thinking intentionality. Othello’s story subverts Castriot’s in the most ominous of fashions, not only because the assimilation that does not hold is a European one but also because his ‘barbarous’ native identity subdues the ‘civilized’ identification he has evidently willed. Smith recalls the significance of the handkerchief in Norbert Elias’s description of the ‘civilizing process’ in post-medieval Europe; it was linked to new disciplines of shame regarding sexual behaviour, bodily functions, and table manners.5 This reminds us that all of Othello’s original audiences confronted their own issues of assimilation to rising standards, no matter their individual origin stories, because it was an age of unprecedented social mobility, economic expansion, globalized trade, proliferating commodities, and broader-based literacy. Lynn Enterline, who is also concerned with civilizing processes, points out that the word ‘barbarism’ had a domestic use in the period: it was a term of disgrace attached to poor speakers of Latin in the grammar schools. In ‘Eloquent Barbarians: Othello and the Critical Potential of Passionate Character’, she finds a new way of describing the broken-backed structure of the play with reference to early modern pedagogical practice: the first act is Virgilian and later acts are Ovidian. The civicminded Virgil was the preferred poet of the grammar schools, which had been established to train up an educated citizenry, and Enterline describes Othello’s senate scene as Virgilian in two respects. First, Othello’s trial by rhetoric is analogous to the testing methods of the schoolroom; second, following the approved process of imitation, he tells a life story that mirrors Virgil’s Aeneid. With his eloquence he defies barbarism in both its meanings, the non-European and the unlettered. But from there, as Hornback has already intimated, it is all Ovid, the poetry of nation and duty giving way to the poetry of emotion

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and desire. Enterline recognizes that Ovid offered dramatists something more fundamental than story and allusion; he modelled character-making, especially in his representations of passionate women. Registering the irony that female impersonation informed male acculturation, Enterline gives us another framework for understanding the gender collisions of Othello. Desdemona is, after all, ‘our great captain’s captain’, as Cassio says fulsomely (2.1.74); Iago remarks with more venom that ‘Our general’s wife is now the general’ (2.3.309–10). These are worrying characterizations in what Paul Jorgensen has called the ‘military world’ of the play.6 One of the story surprises of Othello is that the threatened Turkish invasion, a crisis that sends Venice’s most valiant warrior to Cyprus, abruptly dissolves into nothing. By the time Othello has landed there he can simply declare: ‘News, friends, our wars are done, the Turks are drowned’ (2.1.201). Desdemona has already overruled the working assumption that she should have remained safe behind in Venice: ‘I did love the Moor to live with him’, she announced to the senators, speaking with ‘downright violence’ (1.3.249–50) and in precise counterpoint to Othello’s observation that the ‘gentle Desdemona’ had inspired him to surrender his ‘unhoused free condition’ (1.2.25–6). Thus, Othello’s first words to her, as they reunite on Cyprus shores, are not ‘my dear love’ but ‘my fair warrior’ (2.1.180). The turn that the play takes in the second act can also be described as a switch from a drama of state to a domestic tragedy. But the label ‘domestic’ has never been an entirely comfortable one, because of the war footing of the first act, the military metaphors of later acts, and the resurrection of alien threats in the persons of Othello and Iago. As Enterline points out, Iago embodies the ‘duplicity, lasciviousness, changeableness, and cruelty’ that Englishmen associated with Moors; as Dadabhoy says, the end of the Turkish invasion leaves Othello as the face of non-European identity. In ‘Making Ambition Virtue? Othello, Small Wars, and Martial Profession’, James Siemon demonstrates that the

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military pretext of the plot exceeds the plot and is more than a pretext. There is an additional received Roman context here, because Siemon describes how ‘early modern martial culture overlapped with civic culture, invoking common classical antecedents’ for both soldiers and citizens and ‘employing related discourses of individual merit and empowerment’. But the opportunities for military advancement were ‘mostly just imaginary’ in the period, as the play may mirror when the crisis with the Turks fizzles out. Elizabethans lacked ‘the big wars / That makes ambition virtue’ (3.3.352–3), suffering instead the small and vexatious latter-day gradations of rank and authority. In Siemon’s telling, Othello is always preoccupied with his occupation, even when it is gone. The narrative of the ‘turbanned Turk’ is not only a crisis of confused identity-formation for him but also a last, futile pitch for professional achievement and, in this, a moment of identity attachment for Othello’s first viewers. Siemon shows that Othello played out before an audience of Othellos and Iagos, strivers in the status wars of early modern England. The character who least connected with Shakespeare’s contemporaries was probably Cassio, the fortunate stranger, whose easy privilege and promotion make Iago hate his person as well as his place. Cassio apparently leapfrogs Iago to become Othello’s lieutenant and then, despite a record stained by derelictions of duty, succeeds the general himself to ‘rule’ in Cyprus. Siemon finds pathos in the professional insult to a man who did the state so much service; others may have felt it, too. Siemon also comes closer to providing a rationale for Iago’s resentments than Coleridge would have thought possible. With the two words ‘motiveless malignity’ Coleridge made probably the most famous critical remark on Othello.7 Just five lines into the play, Roderigo is already questioning Iago’s motivation: ‘Thou told’st me’, he says mistrustingly, ‘Thou didst hold him in thy hate’ (1.1.5–6). One reason we have been sceptical about Iago’s story of being passed over is that in the first scene, when he reports it, it seems that he cares less about advancing his military career than about pleasing

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Roderigo. Moonlighting as a go-between from Roderigo to Desdemona, he has laid claim to the credulous Venetian’s purse so as to finance a feigned courtship. In the play’s first few lines, we witness Iago saying whatever is required to protect his profitable sideline, whether it is to elaborate on a shared resentment of the Moor or to escalate a rhetoric of hate. Roderigo is the first hate-speaker, calling Othello ‘the thick-lips’, so Iago’s characterization of Othello as ‘an old black ram’ in one sense does no more than preach to Roderigo’s racist choir. As always with Iago, however, the malice exceeds its Machiavellian moment, smearing the play with ugly associations that would shape the rhetoric of prejudice for generations to come. And what of Desdemona, for whom a ‘pretty lady’ cried in 1660? In some ways, Iago’s sexism has proved even more insidious than his racism. It is useful to him that the actor/ audience boundary is not the only one Desdemona haplessly crosses. Siemon shows that her advocacy for Cassio would have been read as ‘compromising interference’ in the military sphere, and Enterline says that the institution of education was against her, too; ‘no matter what she says – or rather, the better she is at saying it – the worse for her.’ Included on the tally of death at the end of the play is Brabantio, as Gratiano reports over her corpse: ‘Thy match was mortal to him’ (5.2.203). If Gratiano came from Venice to tell her the sad news, he is too late. ‘It simply adds to the sense’, says Potter, ‘that Desdemona is shut out from her own story.’ This is one source of the poignancy that infuses the earliest of all audience reports from the play. In Oxford in 1610, Henry Jackson wrote that ‘when she was killed she was even more moving, for when she fell back upon the bed she implored the pity of the spectators by her very face’.8 David Schalkwyk locates her tragedy in her mystery. It is not a peculiar mystery but a common one, which is the impenetrability of the human intelligence. On this score, too, Desdemona is unsuspecting and gets things wrong; she believes she can see ‘Othello’s visage in his mind’ (1.3.253). With Iago’s sly inducement, Othello is

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instead fatally obsessed with what the visage conceals of the mind, what can and cannot be seen and known. In ‘Othello’s Consummation’, Schalkwyk describes the handkerchief as ‘a cardinal signifier of the operation of signs in the play: of their capacity for different forms of investment’ as well as ‘their potential promiscuity’ and ‘their paradoxical transparency and opacity’. Othello wants to believe that the meanings of the handkerchief are transparent to him, but he goes too far in willing to it a power of making transparent. Its Egyptian owner ‘could almost read / The thoughts of people’ (3.4.59– 60), and Othello persuades himself that its transferred magic will enable him to read the thoughts of Desdemona. It does not; ‘no degree of magic can abrogate the law that people’s thoughts are their own’, says Schalkwyk. He links Othello’s desire to intercept others’ thoughts with the desire to ‘grossly gape on’ (3.3.398). It is a scopic curiosity the play encourages its audience to share. Arguing that Othello and Desdemona are prevented from consummating their marriage, T. G. A. Nelson and Charles Haines famously responded to doubts that the play seems to go out of its way to inspire through its emphasis, in the second scene of the first act and the third scene of the second, on interrupted nights.9 Nelson and Haines thus attributed Othello’s tragedy to sexual frustration. But Schalkwyk argues that Othello’s errors are better read in terms of Lucretian accounts of love and desire. They map seamlessly onto Othello: the lover, idealizing the beloved, can only be disillusioned; the lover develops a dependency that causes him to neglect his duties and sacrifice his reputation; physical union fails to achieve spiritual integration. On this account, consummation, not non-consummation, causes the most violent and ‘frenzied’ frustration. There is a long tradition of critics blaming Desdemona for her victimization, citing her ‘initiative’ in the senate, her ‘improper’ speculation that Lodovico is a ‘proper’ man (4.3.34), and what M. R. Ridley calls her ‘cheap back-chat’ as she waits for Othello on a Cyprus dock.10 But Schalkwyk understands that these episodes develop the

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contrast between Othello’s ‘hyperbolic’ investment in the relationship and Desdemona’s ‘acceptance of the ordinary’; he can never be satisfied, and she already is. ‘The repartee between Desdemona and Iago that precedes Othello’s arrival, so disturbing to many, should be seen in the context of a de-idealizing view of love’, he observes. The fact is that, no matter the conventional wisdom, as indicators of inconstancy the episodes are misleading. One of Othello’s most crucial misdirections, for Potter, is ‘that most of the play’s puzzles’ concern Desdemona, ‘even though the question that agonizes Othello, her fidelity to him, is the one thing of which spectators can be certain’. Desdemona, Emilia, and Bianca are all be-whored and Desdemona is begrimed; there are many fools and multiple devils; Cassio and Emilia fall with Othello into stuttering repetition; characters imitate and echo themselves and others in both vocabulary and syntax. As has been oft-noticed, much of the language of Othello has a treacherous sameness. But it is also riven by the differences in seeming similitude, as Robert N. Watson establishes in ‘Othello’s Double Diction’. He points out how rich the play is in neologisms, and how often Shakespeare mates the new word to a familiar one to make its meaning clear; in this way the playwright is the teacher as well as Enterline’s taught. Sometimes the pairs are created of Latinate and Anglo-Saxon synonyms (an example is the description of the handkerchief as a ‘recognizance and pledge of love’, 5.2.212). In the play’s yoking of the native and the exotic Watson locates the conjunctions ‘between inward and outward selves, between perception and reality, between passion and deliberation, and between self-assertion and assimilation into the social order’. Othello is identified here as the principal ‘code-switcher’, which is another way at getting at Dadabhoy’s ‘space of splitting’ and Siemon’s ‘paradoxes’ of advancement and disappointment. Watson proves that the hybridity of persons, places, and themes described by so many authors in this volume is written into the very linguistic structures of the play.

Introduction

13

Maguire traces one further effect of the fact that vocabulary is shared out across Othello: ‘in the theatre we don’t want someone speaking like someone else.… We know who characters are because of the way they speak like themselves.’ This goes to discrepant knowledge as another source of Othello’s disturbing power: what the play allows us to know, what we don’t want to know, what it provokes us to unknow, what it never lets us know – and also where we identify with Othello and Desdemona for what they do not know and where we are distanced from them by what we do. We know, for example, what the end will be, because the play is an exercise in dread rather than suspense. Director Margaret Webster, who in 1943 changed theatre history by abandoning paints and textiles to cast Paul Robeson in the lead, one night heard an agonized whisper from a member of her audience: ‘Oh God, don’t let him kill her … don’t let him kill her.’ In 2013 I encountered a participant in a discussion at the National Theatre, London, who, unlike Webster’s whisperer, knew the plot but didn’t want to know it; she said she had found herself hoping against hope that ‘maybe this time he won’t kill her’.11 Under-distancing is often a matter of unknowing, as was the case for Henry Jackson in 1610, who failed to recall that the Desdemona he pitied was a male actor even as the Baltimore soldier forgot that his ‘cursed Negro’ was a white one. Although the play presents itself as preoccupied with the one thing we can know (Desdemona’s chastity), still it can seem rather to be about all the things we never know. ‘As in “real life”’, says Potter, ‘the characters do not explain things to each other for the benefit of the audience.… It gives the impression that there exists, somewhere, a context in which it all makes sense.’ For Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, this is inscribed in the text. The subject of ‘Shakespeare’s Nobody’ is act four, scene three, generally referred to as the ‘willow scene’. Prevailing interpretations of the episode are tainted by their obsolete gender politics: some readings seem Victorian in their sentimentality, as if Desdemona and Emilia are ‘angels in the house’; others

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appear stuck in a first-generation feminist account of gallant female bonding. Rosenfeld understands by contrast that the scene shows Desdemona once again cast adrift by missed cues. She asks, ‘Hark, who is’t that knocks?’ Emilia says, ‘It’s the wind’ (4.3.52–3). Not only is Emilia’s remark not an answer, it also renders Desdemona’s question unanswerable. As Rosenfeld observes, ‘The knock may or may not occur’. More, the scene is about potentiality, the possibility that there could have been a knocker who might have entered the room – that is, in the recurrent theme of Othello’s reception history, someone who might have intervened. The moment requires us to entertain ‘the possibility that the play could have gone otherwise’ than it does. Rosenfeld turns all the stories of audience intervention on their heads by querying us about the ethics of not intervening. The reports of outcries and whispers, of shooting and under-distancing, appear to chronicle naïve responses. Were they? Or do they witness the essential matter of Othello, a breach in the boundaries that surround moral action and theatre decorum? Rosenfeld describes a production at the National Theatre, London, in 1997, that was directed by Sam Mendes: the misplaced handkerchief was left on stage during the interval. A reviewer observed that it might have been ‘challenging one of us to pick it up and prevent a tragedy’. It worked to make the audience ‘complicit’, says Rosenfeld. Maguire recalls a Royal Shakespeare Company production in 2004: Antony Sher wrote of playing Iago that his director Gregory Doran ‘wanted the moment to be a strange, final aside, enigmatic, open to your own interpretation, but’, says Sher, ‘I was always clear about it myself.… In my head this question always rang out: “You saw what was happening – why didn’t you stop it?”’ Of course, the words Sher said out loud were those given him at 5.2.300: ‘What you know, you know’.

Introduction

15

Notes 1

Pepys excerpted by Gamini Salgado in Eyewitnesses of Shakespeare: First Hand Accounts of Performances 1590–1890 (London: Sussex University Press, 1975), 49. The shooting in Baltimore is reported by Stendhal in Racine and Shakespeare, ed. Pierre Martino for Stendhal, Oeuvres Complètes, new edn, 50 vols (Geneva: Edito-Service, 1970), 37: 15–16. The translation given below is my own.

2

The essays were selected from among those submitted to a double-session seminar on Othello held at the 2011 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America in Boston, Massachusetts. As leader of the seminar, I am grateful to the authors represented here but also to all the other members of the seminar who joined in the discussion of these papers and whose own papers might easily have filled out another collection with a different organizing rubric. One author included in this volume, Robert N. Watson, withdrew from the seminar when his paper was selected for presentation in an Open Submission panel at the Boston conference.

3

Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy … with some reflections on Shakespeare and other practitioners for the stage (London: 1693; Wing STC R2429), 146, 86, 139–40, 145.

4

Lynda E. Boose, ‘Othello’s Handkerchief: “The Recognizance and Pledge of Love”’, English Literary Renaissance 5 (1975): 360–74.

5

Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).

6

Paul A. Jorgensen, Shakespeare’s Military World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956).

7

Samuel Taylor Coleridge quoted in R. A. Foakes, Coleridge’s Criticism of Shakespeare: A Selection (London: Athlone Press, 1989), 113.

8

Henry Jackson quoted in Lois Potter, Othello, Shakespeare in Performance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 5.

9

T. G. A. Nelson and Charles Haines, ‘Othello’s

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Unconsummated Marriage’, Essays in Criticism 33 (1983): 1–18. 10 See, for example, Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of ‘Othello’: The Search for the Identity of Othello, Iago, and Desdemona by Three Centuries of Actors and Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 6, 7. M. R. Ridley, ed., Othello, Arden 2 (London: Methuen, 1958), 54n. 11 Anonymous American audience member of 1943 quoted in Margaret Webster, rev. edn, Shakespeare without Tears (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1955), 66. Unknown audience member at a National Theatre Platform ‘In Conversation with Adrian Lester’, 24 June 2013.

1 Othello, Theatre Boundaries, and Audience Cognition Laurie Maguire

When Desdemona listens to tales of Othello’s adventures and responds with pity and love, we are reminded of the obvious classical precursor for the episode: Aeneas’s narration of the fall of Troy, which affects Dido similarly. Aeneas’s narrative and the ensuing love affair span two books in Virgil’s Aeneid; it is given dramatic form in Marlowe and Nashe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage (c.1588), a play which Shakespeare recalls in Hamlet and uses as source for The Tempest.1 In Marlowe and Nashe’s play, Dido entreats Aeneas to ‘discourse at large, / And truly too, how Troy was overcome’ (2.1.106–7). Aeneas responds with the longest speech in the play (lines 121–288) – an unusual tour de force for a boy actor (whose speeches are usually much shorter). The speech is punctuated only by four one-line interruptions from Aeneas’s auditors with expressions of emotion or petitions for him to continue.2 Like Aeneas, and like other military adventurers who have (and subsequently recount) strange experiences of strange

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peoples in strange lands, who move others by their exploits, appearance and rhetoric, Othello is an epic hero. Critics have long noted that Othello’s identity in his autobiographical tale to Desdemona, like all identity, is performative, a rhetorical construct, projected, packaged, enacted, and that his sense of himself is dependent on his audience’s response. This is the idea we find in Julius Caesar where Brutus says ‘the eye sees not itself / But by reflection’ (1.2.52–3) and in Troilus and Cressida where Ulysses says that no man knows his qualities ‘Till he behold them formed in th’ applause’ (3.3.119). In Othello this leads to the question of traditional character criticism: can Desdemona really know Othello or he her, given that what he presents and she responds to is a performance? When Othello summarizes his courtship – ‘She loved me for the dangers I had passed / And I loved her that she did pity them’ (1.3.168–9) – the Arden editor, E. A. J. Honigmann, ponders in a footnote, ‘How well does he understand her love, or his own?’ This essay will recast Honigmann’s implied anxiety in narrative and theatrical terms. The problem, I suggest, is that Desdemona blurs the storyteller and the story told; she confuses the character and the actor. For a situation which both parallels and contrasts Desdemona’s, a situation in which the domestic female falls in love with the theatrical leading man, we might fast-forward to the twentieth century and enter the world of film. This, in fact, is what Mia Farrow’s character, Cecilia, does in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), set in the 1930s. Having lost her job, Cecilia escapes dullness and dangerous domestic abuse by spending her time at the cinema. One day, after a particularly ugly marital episode, she retreats to round-the-clock screenings of The Purple Rose of Cairo. Her repeat viewings and emotional response catch the attention of the film’s hero, Tom Baxter, who addresses her from the screen, eventually leaving the filmic action to woo her in impoverished Depression-era New Jersey. With considerably more self-awareness than Desdemona, Cecilia analyses her



Theatre Boundaries, and Audience Cognition 19

predicament: ‘I met a perfect man today. He’s fictional; but you can’t have everything.’ For an Elizabethan version of this metatheatrical triangle we might turn to the diary of the law student, John Manningham. While he was a student at the Middle Temple, Manningham kept a diary that covers the year(s) 1602–3. Part diary, part commonplace book, his compilation from London life includes the following anecdote: Upon a time when Burbage played Richard III there was a citizen grown so far in liking with him that before she went from the play she appointed him to come that night unto her by the name of Richard the Third. Shakespeare overhearing their conclusion went before, was entertained and at his game ere Burbage came. Then message being brought that Richard the Third was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third.3 The story is famous for its onomastic joke (obligingly underlined by Manningham’s concluding explanation: ‘Shakespeare’s name, William’) and its comic sexual punch line. But like the stories of Dido and Aeneas, of Desdemona and Othello, of Cecilia and Tom, the (possibly apocryphal) story of the female citizen and Burbage/Richard III raises questions about the boundaries between fictional characters and real-life characters. In this essay I want to explore these boundaries in relation to drama; or rather, I want to approach Othello as a play that explores dramatic boundaries. When Desdemona crosses the boundary between audience and stage to marry the actor-hero, she initiates a tragedy of theatre boundaries gone wrong.

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Theatre boundaries Othello’s vocabulary is self-consciously theatrical from the beginning. The play’s most theatrically aware character is Iago, who is simultaneously a playwright figure, a commedia dell’arte improviser, and a director. Before he directs Othello, he directs Roderigo. In Act 1, he stages Roderigo’s role in the fight with Cassio, instructing him when to ring the bell, cry mutiny, run away. In the play’s first scene we see Iago directing Roderigo how to ‘call aloud’ outside Brabantio’s house: ‘Do, with like timorous accent and dire yell / As when by night and negligence the fire / Is spied in populous cities’ (1.1.73–6). In Oliver Parker’s film (1995), Iago (Kenneth Branagh) is clearly dissatisfied with Roderigo’s performance in 1.1. Roderigo’s call, ‘What ho! Brabantio, Signior Brabantio ho!’ has insufficient urgency or gusto for Iago, who takes over the performance. The ensuing dialogue is staged with Iago supplementing Roderigo: Iago’s lines, delivered from behind a post, are heard by Brabantio as though they are Roderigo’s. (Roderigo gasps in amazement at the risqué language he is made to utter: ‘tupping your white ewe’.) In the Laurence Olivier film of the National Theatre production (1965) Iago hides behind Roderigo to vocalize him. These productions amplify a tactic which typifies Iago throughout: he ventriloquizes others. Othello’s first words in the play are actually spoken by Iago: for, “Certes”, says he, “I have already chose my officer” (1.1.16–17)4 This, of course, is simply a direct quotation. But it foreshadows what Iago will do to Othello: ventriloquize him. Iago echoes Othello (3.3.103–10) and then Othello echoes him (4.1.1–5), and then Othello speaks with Iago’s vocabulary and syntax (4.1.35–43). This habit is not confined to the Iago/Othello



Theatre Boundaries, and Audience Cognition 21

dyad. In Act 1 the Duke says to Brabantio: ‘Let me speak like yourself’ (1.3.199). It is an odd phrase, and has perplexed editors. Arden 3 gives us two alternative glosses: let me speak ‘by giving advice or, as ideally you would speak’ (1.3.200n). But the clarity of Honigmann’s Arden gloss underlines the oddity of the Duke’s actual phrasing. In the theatre we don’t want someone speaking like someone else. Identity is, as Joel Altman, Giorgio Melchiori, Peter Holland, and others have demonstrated, rhetorically constructed. We know who characters are because of the way they speak like themselves.5 In the scene in which Iago first plants suspicions in Othello’s mind, he does so simply by echoing: othello iago othello iago othello iago othello



Is he [Cassio] not honest? Honest, my lord? Honest? Ay, honest. My lord, for aught I know. What dost thou think? Think, my lord? Think, my lord! By heaven, thou echo’st me. (3.3.103–9)

By Act 4, the linguistic positions are reversed. Scene 1 begins as follows: iago Will you think so? othello Think so, Iago? iago What, To kiss in private? othello An unauthorized kiss! iago Or to be naked with her friend in bed An hour or more, not meaning any harm? othello Naked in bed, Iago, and not mean harm? (4.1.1–5) Now it is Othello who is echoing Iago. A. D. Nuttall writes: ‘Iago is so close to the Moor’s ear, has insinuated himself

22

OTHELLO: THE STATE OF PLAY

so deeply into Othello’s very thoughts, that one can hardly tell which speaker says which words.’6 The play’s anxiety about the border between self and Other being an indistinct boundary is reified in language. In Othello identities merge because language conflates them. Desdemona is ‘our great captain’s captain’ (2.1.74); ‘Our general’s wife is now the general’ (2.3.314–15). This linguistic expression of a positive, marital inseparation, the two-in-one of marriage, is confused by language because one of these phrases, spoken by Cassio, is a compliment; the other, spoken by Iago, is pejorative. In a violation of theatrical rules, characters’ identities are not kept apart in this play. Another thespian nightmare occurs in Othello when characters have premature entrances. Desdemona arrives in Cyprus seven days before she’s expected (contrast the play’s source in Cinthio, where all the characters arrive together because they have travelled on the same boat).7 Bianca enters in Act 4, not on cue, to berate Cassio. Cassio’s first words to her are: ‘What do you mean by this haunting of me?’ (4.2.147) – in other words, ‘What are you doing here? I wasn’t expecting you’. In several stage and film versions, Roderigo’s entrances are unexpected and take Iago by surprise; the direction gives the strong feeling that Roderigo should not be there, and Iago is driven to improvise. At the end of the senate scene, Kenneth Branagh’s Iago turns to the camera, clearly on the verge of a soliloquy, only to be prevented by Roderigo (‘Iago!’ [1.3.302]). The same happens again, after Iago’s soliloquy, in 2.3: Iago is taken off guard by Roderigo’s entrance (‘How now, Roderigo?’ [2.3.357]). This is also true of the BBC film throughout, where Roderigo shows up to ask Iago awkward questions at awkward times.8 And even Desdemona gets lines out of sequence in the willow song, interrupting herself with the (self)directorial correction, ‘Nay, that’s not next’ (4.3.52). The characters are scripted as actors in a play; Carol Rutter comments: ‘Othello is a play that assigns parts with obsessive (if controversial) discursive particularity.’9 So too the plot (which is itself a plot of plots and improvisations) is insistently



Theatre Boundaries, and Audience Cognition 23

coded as theatrical. The gulling of Roderigo is a rehearsal for the gulling of Othello. Othello’s voyeurism parallels our own as spectators. Both Desdemona and Roderigo speak after they’ve technically been pronounced dead: Desdemona revives (impossibly) after being strangled; Roderigo ‘spake / (After long seeming dead)’ (5.2.327–8). These are both physiological miracles and amateur dramatic errors. Character motivation is also relevant to the play’s theatrical tropes. This is, crucially, a play in which key actors have no motive. Iago’s lack of motive is famous. But Othello also merits attention because of the way in which his speeches repeat nouns like ‘cause’ and ‘motive’ and because of his obsession with finding the causes of things: ‘who began this?’ (2.3.178). Critics and actors often ponder Emilia’s motive for stealing the handkerchief. We associate motive with twentieth-century Method acting, but recent work by Lorna Hutson, James McBain, Tiffany Stern, and Simon Palfrey has shown how this is also a crucial component of Elizabethan acting – whether you locate it, as Hutson and McBain do, in the influence of legal rhetoric or, as Stern and Palfrey do, in the ontological questions forced upon the Elizabethan actor who received only his own part plus a one- to three-word cue. Stern and Palfrey see this as an existential help rather than a practical hindrance: the lack of context and the brevity of the cue force the actor into complex questions about the relation of cue to speech and of part to whole. Hutson has argued that the rhetoric of judicial narrative, taught in schools, encouraged orators and lawyers to focus on character and motivation (these are key components of all legal thinking from trials to the detective novel) and that this fed into sixteenth-century drama. McBain develops her argument by demonstrating that motive is so well established as a dramatic essential by the mid-century that it can be parodied (as in, for example, Gammer Gurton’s Needle).10 Thus, long before Stanislavski, motive is an important theatrical ingredient. In Othello Shakespeare takes it away. (Contrast his source in Cinthio, where Iago’s motive is clear: his love for Desdemona

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turns to hate because she shows no interest in him.) It is no wonder that characters in Othello spend so much time trying to work each other out: Shakespeare has removed a theatrical essential. The play’s theatre vocabulary also includes the spectator. One of the interesting things about spectatorship is the paradoxical nature of its interest in the actor-character: we want to interact with the hero – to be in his world, his life – but we also want to be the hero. Gender is not relevant: a female spectator can want to be the hero’s wife and she can simultaneously want to be the hero himself. Desdemona’s language registers this audience doubleness: she ‘wish’d / That heaven had made her such a man’ (1.3.162–3). Made a man like that for her (where ‘her’ is dative)? Or created her as an action-hero (where ‘her’ is accusative)? The grammatical ambiguity registers perfectly the audience experience where the answer is: both. When Desdemona crosses the boundary from the audience to the fiction with her romantic interest in Othello, she initiates a comic structure. Almost all the inductions or plays-withinplays which show spectators interacting with a player are comedies.11 It is customary to view Othello as a tragedy that begins as a comedy, but the location of this comic opening is usually seen either in the elopement (a conventional comic plot) or the January-May marriage (conventional cuckold comedy). I think the generic problem begins when Desdemona can’t keep audience and actor separate. Once this theatrical boundary is crossed, every other theatrical boundary falls. No one in this play understands genre. Desdemona’s artless and loving repetitions when she petitions Othello for Cassio’s reinstatement flout every conduct book rule for the dutiful wife and take her into the comic territory of the nagging shrew: My lord shall never rest, I’ll watch him tame, and talk him out of patience; His bed shall seem a school, his board a shrift. (3.3.22–4)



Theatre Boundaries, and Audience Cognition 25

If she is in a comedy acting a shrew but does not know it, Iago knows he’s in a comedy (he’s writing it, he’s directing it) but, as Douglas Bruster observes, Iago does not know the rules of the comic plot he is creating: that comedy does not do death.12 If the tragedy begins when/because Desdemona crosses the boundary between audience and play, it ends in the same way when Othello blurs the boundary between drama and life. Othello tells a story about what he did to someone in Aleppo and then identifies himself with that someone as he ‘smote him – thus’ (5.2.356). A grammatical third person becomes a physical first person; ‘him’ in the narrative is now inseparable from ‘myself’ in the present. Othello resurrects the distancing boundaries of theatre only to cross them. And between Desdemona’s theatrical boundary-crossing at the beginning and Othello’s at the end, every other theatrical boundary falls: genre collapses, language collapses, identity collapses – and always in the same way: two separate things become one. In 1912 a Cambridge don in Modern Languages, Edward Bullough, wrote a seminal article on aesthetics.13 Bullough was interested in the concept of what he called ‘Psychical distance’: what, he asked, is the ideal balance between audience involvement in a play and their emotional distance from it?14 Spectators need to be sufficiently distanced to know they’re at a play – they must not ‘run on stage to stop Othello from strangling Desdemona’15 – but not so distanced that they lose empathy. For Bullough, drama (and the aesthetic experience) needs Distance – but the least amount of Distance you can have without losing Distance altogether (‘the utmost decrease of Distance without its disappearance’). The ideal play operates on the boundary between total identification and intellectual detachment. Go too far in one direction and you get over-distancing – which produces the impression of improbability or artificiality or absurdity (Bullough’s examples here are farce and melodrama); go too far in the opposite direction and you get under-distancing. The mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream foresee both these problems in ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’. They think the audience will imagine

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that what it sees is real (under-distancing); but they also think that that audience will not imagine what it cannot see (over-distancing). So they overcorrect in both directions and inadvertently destroy the delicate balancing act which drama requires – a balancing act dependent, Bullough argues, on the audience’s bipartite vision, its awareness of boundaries: ‘we know a thing not to exist but we accept its existence’ (113; emphases original). We know cognitively that it is representation but we respond emotionally to it as mimesis. The antinomy of distance, Bullough reminds us, is a property of the viewer and not of the work of art; it therefore differs for each spectator because we all have different distance thresholds. (Not everyone wants to make a sexual assignation with Burbage.) The chief risk to Distance in drama, Bullough observes, is the body of the actor.16 This is a risk that no other art form encounters, not even bodily-related ones like dance or sculpture. Bullough’s work on the body, Distance and the audience/actor boundary is helpful in understanding the breached theatrical boundaries I have surveyed above in Othello. What is interesting about Edward Bullough’s 1912 argument about distance, offered as an intervention in aesthetics, is that it was adopted by twentieth-century economists trying to understand how to enter foreign markets. They used it to negotiate the subjectively perceived cultural differences between ‘home’ and ‘foreign’, between ‘self’ and ‘other’ – exactly the terms of current race criticism in early modern drama and Othello. It is customary to view Othello as a play about Self and Other. I am suggesting that it understands those categories as theatrical rather than racial: that the plot originates not in a white woman marrying a black man but in an audience member falling in love with an actor-character. It is interesting that Edward Bullough gives as an example of audience underdistancing a hypothetical instance of a spectator intervening in Act 5 of Othello (so do those philosophers influenced by Bullough, such as David Fenner; see note 15). As it happens,



Theatre Boundaries, and Audience Cognition 27

performance history offers more examples of audience interruption of Othello than of any other Shakespeare play. In 1660 Samuel Pepys tells how a lady near him cried out when Desdemona was smothered. In 1825 a man in the front row called Iago a ‘damn’d lying scoundrel’ and offered to meet him after the show to break his neck. In 1822 in Baltimore a soldier on guard duty in the theatre shot the actor of Othello, saying: ‘It will never be said in my presence a confounded Negro has killed a white woman.’17 These stories can be multiplied. Audience members, I suggest, are responding to the play’s own confusion of boundaries. In 1976 Marjorie Pryse argued that Othello is a play about competition for audience.18 Her use of audience is etymologically literal: one who listens. From Iago’s use of mediators to petition Othello for promotion (which falls on deaf ears), to his frustration at Roderigo’s failure to listen (‘’Sblood but you’ll not hear me’ [1.1.4]), to Desdemona’s attentive hearings of Othello, to her listening to Iago at the quayside and then to Cassio in private (he asks Emilia ‘give me advantage of some brief discourse / With Desdemona alone’ [3.1.53–5]), the play erodes the hero’s narrative power to attract hearers. Desdemona gives audience elsewhere. For a protagonist whose (marital) identity is constructed as rhetorician and commander of audience, this is a challenge to his self-presentation as romantic hero. Desdemona’s indiscriminate audition prepares the way for Iago to take over Othello’s role as storyteller. Iago narrates (and perhaps re-enacts) Cassio’s dream;19 he invents (and stages) a narrative of the handkerchief. It is now Othello who ‘with a greedy ear / Devour[s] up [Iago’s] discourse’ (1.3.150–1). As Pryse observes, Iago uses the same witchcraft that Othello had used: language. In Pryse’s formulation, the play is a competition between Othello and Iago for audience. In production history it is also a competition between the Iago actor and the Othello actor for which is the star part. Ian McKellen notes of his experience playing Iago in 1989:

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As Iago confides the truth to the audience (as always in Shakespeare), they are privy to his deceit and the gulling of Roderigo, Cassio, Desdemona and Othello himself. It is an unfair advantage and early on Willard [Willard White, playing Othello] accused me of trying to get the audience on my side against him. I explained that I didn’t need to try – Shakespeare had organised it [emphasis added].20 Julie Hankey’s production history of Othello notes the temptation for Iagos to upstage their Othellos; Othello may be the tragic hero but Iago has the longer role, more soliloquies, and direct addresses to the audience. Thus the thespian relationship between Othellos and Iagos starts to parallel the play’s plot. Playing Othello in the eighteenth century, Samuel Foote was grateful that his Iago, Charles Macklin, ‘understood his subordinate position’ (the phrasing is Hankey’s).21 Iago is doubly kept in his place, subordinate as character and as actor: subordinate in the play to Cassio’s lieutenancy, subordinate in the company because he’s not the titular hero. Where is the boundary here between play world and real world?

Audience cognition Storytelling and drama have one important thing in common: they rely on auditors filling in gaps. Narrative and mimetic presentation do not occur in real time.22 Speakers and writers streamline, omit, imply, edit; auditors complete the story by filling in the lacunae. To reception theorists from Hans Jauss to Wolfgang Iser, literature is a system of gaps. It is about the relationship between what is present in the text and what is absent from it, a relationship that it is the responsibility of the reader to negotiate, providing continuity and connection (at the most basic level: of character), coordinating viewpoints, and bridging gaps. In a process of literary entelechy, tangents and diversions are transformed, fragments joined, blanks filled



Theatre Boundaries, and Audience Cognition 29

in. Reading is about turning parts into wholes; it ‘trigger[s] synthesizing operations in the reader’s mind’.23 This, in fact, is how all perception works. In hearing, auditors do not receive every sound transmitted by the speaker but fill in gaps according to logic (deafness is when the gaps outnumber the received words, making the auditor incapable of completing the sense). In night driving, the brain connects remarkably little visual data into a road, a bend, a hill. Iago is a cognitive psychologist. He knows how perception works generally and how, specifically, Othello responds. Othello cannot tolerate gaps; he hastens to fill them in. He tells Iago that ‘to be once in doubt / Is once to be resolved’ (3.3.182–3). Presumably this is why Iago conducts the kind of plot he does, relying on incomplete sentences and tantalizing suspensions of reaction. The temptation scene of 3.3 is a superb example of Iago’s tactics. It begins, after Desdemona’s exit, with the half-line, ‘My noble lord – ’ (3.3.93). Iago addresses Othello but fails to continue, prompting Othello’s encouragement, ‘What dost thou say?’ Later, Iago’s casually dismissive ‘but for a satisfaction of my thought, / No further harm’ (3.3.96–7) leads Othello to inquire about the ‘thought’; Othello’s frustration is fuelled by Iago’s subsequent echoes and evasions. Iago’s gaps are everywhere, not just in words but in silence. When John Ford revised Othello as Love’s Sacrifice in the 1620s, the Duke (Ford’s Othello figure) confronts D’Avolos (his Iago figure) directly, summarizing his tactics: Did not I note your dark abrupted ends Of words half-spoke? Your ‘wells, if all were known’? Your short ‘I like not that?’ Your girds [gibes] and ‘buts’? Yes sir, I did. Such broken language argues More matter than your subtlety shall hide. (3.3.5–9)24 ‘Abrupted ends’ and ‘broken language’ need to be completed. A form of gap-filling known as Theory of Mind is

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of particular interest in relation to Othello. This is the term for the daily human activity of mind-reading – when we imagine what someone is thinking or desiring, when we supply the subtext to their statement, when we anticipate. Humans are able to imagine others’ intentions over an extended number of levels (this ability is known as multi-level intentionality): X thinks that Y wants Z to believe that A intends B to suspect that … . My italicized verbs indicate the layered stages of intentionality. I stop here at a fifth level of intentionality; coincidentally that is the upper limit of what the human brain can handle.25 This sophisticated kind of mind-reading develops at a very early age (it is present in children by the age of five; it seems to be lacking in autistic children). Othello turns Theory of Mind into plot. Iago wants Othello to believe that Desdemona loves Cassio. But it does more than this: its dialogue foregrounds the process of mind-reading: iago And, good lieutenant, I think you think I love you. cassio I have well approved it, sir. (2.3.306; emphasis added) iago My lord, you know I love you. othello I think thou dost. (3.3.119–20; emphasis added) The irony in both these quotations is that Iago makes characters think they ‘know’ things. The entire play is structured round Iago’s ability to manipulate Theory of Mind – and Othello’s inability. It is worth noting here that Shakespeare villains are very good at Theory of Mind and that the protagonists are poor. Think of the witches’ skill in ambiguity versus Macbeth’s; Edmund’s subtlety versus Lear’s or Gloucester’s; Iago’s ability versus Othello’s. The exception is Hamlet, who has too much Theory of Mind – he ‘scans’; he projects; he considers the ghost’s intentions or the consequences of killing Claudius



Theatre Boundaries, and Audience Cognition 31

at prayer – and the result is stasis. The stasis in Othello is different, not of plot but of cognition. Iago’s manipulation of Othello leads the hero to a cognitive impasse. From thinking and knowing that Iago loves him, Othello becomes reduced to the following: I think my wife be honest, and think she is not. I think that thou art just, and think thou art not. (3.3.387–8) He does not know what to think. Of course, before cognitive psychology, literary criticism had other terms for multi-level intentionality: ambiguity, plurality. Ambiguity is key to Othello, as to most drama (if Iago is an outright villain, he holds no interest for us). But it is also key to plot: Iago is able to entertain ambiguity, keep plural options in play, improvise, watch and see, live in the moment. Othello cannot and does not. Cognitive theory is helpful in seeing how this play works on the characters and how the play works on us. For if Iago knows how to press Othello’s cognitive buttons (‘to be once in doubt is once to be resolved’), Shakespeare knows how to press ours: Othello closes down options but we keep them in play. That is inevitable in theatre (we see the ambiguity Oedipus fails to see not because we are cleverer than Oedipus but because we know we are in the world of theatre where ambiguity is king). In Othello Shakespeare guides audience attention along a chain of different embedded intentionalities in which we note how Iago works (mobilizing ambiguity) and how Othello fails to see how Iago works. The play’s larger project is epistemological, forcing us to question the basis on which we know (or think we know) anything, the way we draw (or jump to) conclusions. The play gives us two narratives of the handkerchief, for instance (Iago invents a third). We know that Iago’s is pure fiction. But Othello’s accounts of a matrilineal (3.4.57–70) and patrilineal (5.2.214–15) origin for the handkerchief contradict

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each other. How do we adjudicate? Three women in the play are each, at some time, called whore (Desdemona, Bianca, Emilia). We know that one is not (Desdemona). Bianca (whose names suggest purity) is designated a courtesan in the cast list but, as Valerie Wayne points out, in the early modern period this noun refers to a woman who has lost her virginity as well as one who is a prostitute.26 Which is Bianca? We have only Iago’s word for it that Bianca is ‘a housewife who by selling her desires / Buys herself bread and clothes’ (a description, moreover, that he gives only to us in soliloquy and not to anyone else in the play [4.1.95–6]). Bianca herself simply complains that Cassio has not had supper with her for a week, which sounds cosily domestic (3.4.172–6). Cassio is dismissive of her (‘the bauble’: 4.1.134) but this reaction is part of his binary attitude to women (we first hear him idolizing and deifying Desdemona).27 When Iago suspects Emilia ‘with the Moor’ (4.2.147–9) does he have good or nugatory grounds for suspicion? Is her confession that she would ‘make her husband a cuckold to make him a monarch’ a fantasy or a fact (4.3.74–5)? To whom is she referring when she says she knows ‘a lady in Venice would have walked barefoot to Palestine for a touch of [Lodovico’s] nether lip’ (4.337–8)? The point is not that these questions are decisively answerable but that this play makes it very difficult for us to know anything. One of the ways it does this is by fracturing the verb ‘to be’. Iago says ‘I am not what I am’ (1.1.64); ‘Were I the Moor I would not be Iago’ (1.156). In 4.1.270–2 he tells Lodovico that ‘He’s [Othello’s] that he is: I may not breathe my censure / What he might be; if what he might, he is not, / I would to heaven he were!’ In an earlier tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, such cryptic comments would have earned a crisp dismissal: ‘Riddling confession finds but riddling shrift’ (2.3). In Othello such riddles are the play’s currency. It is small wonder that Othello is reduced to the cognitive and linguistic impasse quoted above: ‘I think my wife be honest, and think she is not. / I think that thou art just, and think thou art not’ (3.3.387–8).



Theatre Boundaries, and Audience Cognition 33

Language is our usual way of ‘knowing’ – yet Othello constantly undermines our confidence in its own medium. Othello is a play about the ruptured nature of reference. This is simultaneously Iago’s ontology (‘I am not what I am’ [1.1.64]), his tactic (‘men should be what they seem’ [3.3.129]) and his goal (‘turn her virtue into pitch’ [2.3.355]). When Othello says ‘I think my wife be honest, and think she is not’, linguistic and epistemological chaos is come again. Iago’s cryptic last speech – ‘What you know, you know’ (5.2.300) – is as tantalizing dramatically as it is unhelpful cognitively and linguistically (it collapses in on itself). In 2009 the actor Simon Russell Beale addressed the topic of gap-filling in a lecture to the British Psychoanalytic Society. For him, acting is ‘three-dimensional literary criticism’ and actors ‘lead the audience through a detailed thought-through argument or series of arguments’. To this end, ‘it is essential … to clarify and distil the line of thought in an individual character’s head before one begins to explore other emotional areas’. But he adds an important caveat which allows the actor to play gaps – and the audience to fill them in: There are times when, after narrowing options as far as possible, the most valuable course of action in performance is to leave things be, as it were to let motive, intention, a particular emotional state, remain muddied, even selfcontradictory. In any case, the observer, each individual audience member, determines what is seen and understood – a sort of theatrical uncertainty principle.28 Productions often exploit this. Richard McCabe describes how his Iago concluded Michael Attenborough’s production for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1999: Our production ended in a tableau, with the three dead bodies in the foreground and myself at the rear of the stage, heavily guarded and with my back to the audience. As the lights went down, I would turn slowly and regard

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the bodies in profile, with a deliberately neutral expression in my face. This, as I discovered through the run, was regarded variously as being sorrowful, triumphant, bewildered or empty – which shows how an audience will supply any ambiguity with an interpretation.29 Antony Sher makes a similar observation about his Iago in Gregory Doran’s 2004 RSC production but in this instance, although the director wanted ambiguity, it was the actor who was clear about the meaning of Iago’s confrontational stare at the audience: In our production, Iago was left in a sitting position after Othello wounded him; handcuffed, head bowed. Then after Lodovico’s closing couplet, and just before a snap black out, we had Iago suddenly look up, confronting the audience with his eyes. Greg wanted the moment to be a strange, final aside, enigmatic, open to your own interpretation, but I was always clear about it myself. The dangerous wordsmith may be silent, but in my head this question always rang out: You saw what was happening – why didn’t you stop it?30 This brings us back to where I began – with an audience crossing a boundary. Sher may have given his audience an accusatory look here, challenging their passivity, but earlier in the same essay, describing Iago’s relations with the audience, he writes: ‘Throughout the run, I waited for the performance when someone would stand up and shout, “Stop it!”’ (64). This is a play that invites audience intervention – whether in Bullough and Fenner’s hypothetical example, in Sher’s anticipation, or in its long production history. And this may be because Othello is a self-consciously theatrical tragedy, dramatizing what happens when one audience member, Desdemona, crosses the boundary from audience to drama.



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Conclusion Bullough’s aesthetic theory implies that something has gone amiss when an audience member breaches a boundary between the real world and the fictional world. The performance history of Othello bears this out, as in the examples above of challenges to the Iago- and Othello-actors. So too does the history of comedy, where failure to distinguish between real and fictional worlds is usually an error with comic effect and parodic criticism. We see this in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Moonshine’s bathetic summary of his role in response to repeated interruptions from the courtly audiences (5.1.247–9) and in Bottom’s correction of Demetrius’s assumption that ‘Wall’ must help bury the dead (‘No I assure you; the wall is down that parted their fathers’ [5.1.337–8]).31 By way of conclusion I want to probe Bullough’s theory a little more by contextualizing it in Shakespeare’s career. As we shall see, crossing boundaries is a Shakespearean staple; the question then becomes, how or why does Othello use this staple differently?32 From the start of his career Shakespeare draws our attention to the fact that his plays are representations. He does this in a number of ways. One is by creating comic characters who cannot tell the difference between a play and the real world or who cross the boundary between the two. In Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the courtly spectators enter into corrective dialogue with the amateur players. In The Taming of the Shrew Christopher Sly does not know what a comedy is and, in the related comedy, The Taming of A Shrew, he interrupts the dramatic action to prevent Vincentio being sent to prison.33 Another technique is to call attention to the fact that the characters and events belong in a fiction. Fabian’s remark in Twelfth Night is the most cited in this regard: ‘If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction’ (3.4.128–9). Other similar remarks include Edmund’s

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observation in King Lear that Edgar’s arrival is as neat as if he were in a play (1.2.134), Paulina’s statement in The Winter’s Tale that Hermione’s survival, ‘Were it but told you, would be hooted at / Like an old tale’ (5.3.116–17), and the Choruses in Henry V and The Winter’s Tale who remind us that because we are in a theatre they can cross seas and years only with the help of our imagination. A third technique is to use the vocabulary of the theatrical. References to cues, forgetting lines, stage costumes, Vice figures and other theatrical trappings and traditions appear in many plays (my selective list comes from Othello, Coriolanus, Henry IV Part 2, Henry IV Part 1).34 For Bullough, Distance diminishes emotional response. In the Shakespeare canon, however, this may not be the case. Being reminded that Hermione’s resurrection is the stuff of fiction paradoxically overrides its own distancing effect and helps activate the emotions of wonder or the associations of miracle. Bullough’s antinomy of distance also depends on the author finding a perfect balance between cognition and emotion so that audiences suppress the knowledge that they are watching a play. Shakespeare, it seems, does not want us to suppress that knowledge; Othello simply pushes this technique to an extreme. The critic who has done most to foreground the distinction between ‘author’s pen and actor’s voice’ is Robert Weimann, whose book of that name, like his essay on ‘bifold authority’, argues that Elizabethan drama gains its performative power by staging the gap between written text and performed representation, between author and actor.35 The relationship between these two different entities is characterized ‘not by antagonism but confluence and collaboration’.36 Robert Hornback extends Weimann’s observations, taking the argument beyond the 1590s and foregrounding a Shakespearean aesthetics of ‘contrarieties’ and ‘grose indecorum’ (186). Hornback’s point is that Shakespeare did not subscribe to the neoclassical aesthetics that critics like Sidney promulgated – and that, by implication, Bullough holds. Sidney’s protests



Theatre Boundaries, and Audience Cognition 37

about lack of verisimilitude include objections to the mixing of genres (kings and clowns), violation of the unities, and anything ‘absurd in sense’ – anything that transgresses boundaries. But for Hornback, boundary-crossing is what makes Shakespeare Shakespeare. In opposition to Bullough, Hornback argues that Shakespeare ‘seems to be trying to increase the “distance” between the stage fiction and the audience’s inclination to believe it as real or true’. Paradoxically, however, Shakespeare can turn on a sixpence and, at a moment of emotional distancing, create audience sympathy. After all, Hippolyta concludes the Bottom-baiting with the heartfelt ‘Beshrew my heart but I pity the man’ (5.1.279).37 Thus, where Bullough has a simple binary – we know a thing not to exist but we accept its existence – Shakespeare introduces complex multi-intentionality. In Hornback’s qualification of Bullough, Shakespeare insists that a thing does not exist because he reminds us that it is unbelievable, but he requires us to believe it because of, or in spite of, the fact that it is so very unbelievable. This is not quite multilevel intentionality of the Dunbar kind described on page 30, but it comes close; and it shows Shakespeare playing with our minds in the way Iago does with Othello’s. But whereas Iago manipulates Othello’s suspension of disbelief negatively, making him envision a brazen world of infidelity, Shakespeare manoeuvres our suspension of disbelief positively, creating golden worlds of restoration or reconciliation or justice. But there is more to ‘contrariety’ in Othello. Let us return to boundaries and boundary-crossing. A. D. Nuttall writes that Othello is the tragedy of ‘a hero who went into a house’. Tony Tanner says something similar: Othello is ‘all at sea in a house’.38 That is indeed part of the problem: Othello is a military man, has lived his life in camps until ‘nine moons wasted’ (1.3.85), an ‘extravagant and wheeling stranger’ (extravagant: someone who travels outside the usual confines, from the Latin vagare, to travel [1.1.134]). In Venice he travels into new territory: domesticity, marriage, the house.

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But, pace Nuttall and Tanner, that is not the real problem. The problem is, as Patricia Dorval observes, that Othello makes Iago his doorkeeper. Iago swears by Janus – the Roman god of gates and doorways, whose symbolic double-faced head faces in opposite directions.39 Iago’s space is the liminal. He is and is not in love with Desdemona: Now I do love her [Desdemona] too; Not out of absolute lust… (2.1.292) and he is and is not cuckolded by Othello: it is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets H’as done my office. I know not if it be true… (1.3.378–9) Throughout the play he faces in two directions: he appears honest, acts deceitfully. He controls the play’s thresholds – of genre, language, and meaning. He patrols the play’s linguistic boundaries and he controls interpretation. When Othello demands ‘proof’ of Desdemona’s infidelity (3.3.194), Iago promises to lead Othello to the ‘door of truth’ (3.3.410). Tanner rightly queries the phrase: why only to the door? (521). The answer is that Iago is the doorkeeper, the one who polices the boundary between truth and non-truth. Thus audiences – and the play’s characters – cannot help but cross boundaries: the play is controlled from within by the arch boundary-crosser, the Janus-figure Iago. He manipulates the boundary between comedy and tragedy, between innocuous and suspicious behaviour, between innocent and compromising language, between fact and fiction (within the world of the play and outside the play). It is to his influence that spectators are responding when, like Desdemona, we/they confuse the worlds of life and drama.



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Notes 1

Most critics see a connection between Dido and Hamlet. Although in 1982 Harold Jenkins wrote cautiously that the player’s speech in Hamlet ‘seems to echo [Dido] at one or perhaps two points, though I think not more’ (Jenkins, ed. Hamlet, Arden 2 [London: Methuen, 1982], 479), for James Shapiro that is precisely the point: the speech recalls Marlowe’s play and style without specifically citing it (James Shapiro, Rival Playwrights: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare [New York: Columbia University Press, 1991], 131). Although The Tempest is often cited as one of Shakespeare’s sourceless plays, its affinities with Dido are so many and obvious that Dido merits being designated a source (Maguire and Emma Smith, ‘“Widow Dido”’, forthcoming). Quotations from Dido come from Complete Plays and Poems of Christopher Marlowe, ed. E. D. Pendry and J. C. Maxwell (London: Dent, 1976). For the date I follow Martin Wiggins, ‘When Did Marlowe Write Dido, Queen of Carthage?’, Review of English Studies 59 (2008): 521–41.

2

The one-line interruptions cannot be explained as prompts to help the Aeneas-actor structure his narrative as, with only one exception, they are exclamations of emotion. The exception is a question – ‘Ah, how could poor Aeneas scape their hands?’ (2.1.220) – which is of structural help to the actor.

3

Diary of John Manningham, ed. John Bruce (London: J. B. Nichols, 1886), 39.

4

I am grateful to Mamoru Takano for this observation.

5

Joel Altman, The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Giorgio Melchiori, ‘The Rhetoric of Character Construction: Othello’, Shakespeare Survey 34 (1981): 61–72; Peter Holland, ‘The Resources of Characterization in Othello’, Shakespeare Survey 41 (1989): 119–32; James L. Calderwood, ‘Speech and Self in Othello’, Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 293–303.

6

A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 280.

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7

Honigmann prints the relevant portion as Appendix 3. It is also printed in Michael Neill’s Oxford Shakespeare edition of Othello (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), Appendix C.

8

Antony Sher points out that although Iago is a puppeteer, ‘his puppets are living, breathing people; they might talk to one another at the wrong moment. … And so we sought every opportunity to almost trip up Iago. Unless he is walking a tightrope everything becomes too easy’ (Antony Sher, ‘Iago’, in Performing Shakespeare’s Tragedies Today: The Actor’s Perspective, ed. Michael Dobson [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006], 64, 65).

9

Carol Rutter, Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage (London: Routledge, 2001), 148.

10 Lorna Hutson, ‘Forensic Aspects of Renaissance Mimesis’, Representations 94 (2006): 80–109; James McBain, Early Tudor Drama and Legal Culture, unpublished D.Phil. thesis (University of Oxford, 2007), chapter 5; Simon Palfrey and Tiffany Stern, Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 11 Hamlet is the obvious exception, although many critics have noted this tragedy’s affinities with comedy, not least in the equivocations of the pun-hungry hero. But I wish to emphasize my choice of verb – interacting – as there is a crucial difference between interrupting (as Claudius does) and interacting as does Christopher Sly in The Taming of a Shrew (1594). 12 Douglas Bruster, ‘Teaching Othello as Tragedy and Comedy’, in Peter Erickson and Maurice Hunt, eds, Approaches to Teaching ‘Othello’ (New York: Modern Language Association, 2005), 106. Cf. Emma Smith, Othello, Writers and their Work (Horndon, Devon: Northcote House, 2005), 73–89. We might also note that Iago is not good at endings (Desdemona accuses him of a ‘most lame and impotent conclusion’ at 2.1.161). 13 Edward Bullough, ‘“Psychical Distance” as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle’, British Journal of Psychiatry 5 (1912): 87–118. 14 Distance can be spatial (studio versus amphitheatre), temporal (medieval ecclesiastical art versus today’s contemplation of it in a secular setting), or emotional. It is this last with which I am concerned.



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15 This example comes from the philosopher David Fenner in 2004 who applies and develops Bullough’s theory; but Bullough instances Othello too. David E. W. Fenner, ‘In Celebration of Imperfection’, The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38 (2004): 67–79. 16 He itemises the several ways drama deals with this: language, for instance (especially verse); costume; mise en scène; shapes of stages and sizes of theatre (the evolution of Distance, he argues, is closely tied to the history of staging). 17 These examples come from Julie Hankey, ed. Othello, Plays in Performance, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 17, 4–5. Of the last example she notes wryly that wife-murder is clearly tolerable until it crosses the colour bar. 18 Marjorie Pryse, ‘Lust for Audience: An Interpretation of Othello’, ELH 43 (1976): 461–78. 19 Ian McKellen’s Iago acted out his narrative in Trevor Nunn’s production for the Royal Shakespeare Company (Stratfordupon-Avon 1989; film 1990). 20 ‘Othello’ at http://www.mckellen.com/stage/othello/index.htm (accessed 28 February 2013). 21 Hankey, 27. 22 This is the problem confronted, in different genres, by Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy (who writes with anguish of the way his material expands simply because he is a year older, thus giving him more life to narrate) and by modernist stream-ofconsciousness writers. 23 Wolfgang Iser, How To Do Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 66. 24 John Ford, Love’s Sacrifice, ed. A. T. Moore, Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). 25 Robin I. M. Dunbar, ‘Why Are Good Writers So Rare? An Evolutionary Perspective on Literature’, Journal of Cultural and Evolutionary Psychology 3 (2005): 7–21. 26 Valerie Wayne, ‘The Sexual Politics of Textual Transmission’, in Thomas L. Berger and Laurie E. Maguire, eds, Textual Formations and Reformations (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 179–201. Susan Snyder first challenged

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Bianca’s designation in ‘Othello: A Modern Perspective’, in Othello, ed. Barbara A Mowat and Paul Werstine, New Folger Shakespeare Library (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 287–98. 27 The Marketplace Theatre (Johannesburg) production, directed by Janet Suzman, dresses Bianca as a prostitute with exposed breasts. In Oliver Parker’s 1995 film, she is a local Cypriot prostitute, frequenting the military camp, and enthusiastically rutting with Cassio al fresco; the next day he neither recognizes her nor remembers her name. In the BBC film (1981), by contrast, Bianca is an elegantly dressed lady-in-waiting at court. 28 Reprinted in National Theatre programme for Timon of Athens, 2012. 29 Richard McCabe, ‘Iago’, in Players of Shakespeare 5, ed. Robert Smallwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 210–11. 30 Sher, p. 69. 31 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks, Arden 2 (London: Methuen, 1979). 32 The material in the following paragraphs is indebted to Robert Hornback’s generous and helpful response to an earlier version of this essay, and to subsequent discussion and correspondence. 33 A Shrew is in some way derivative from Shakespeare’s The Shrew. Following careful collation of the two texts, Stephen R. Miller argues that the Kate plot is linguistically derivative from The Shrew but the subplot of her sister and her suitors is a deliberate revision of The Shrew, with the aim of bringing Shakespeare’s comedy into line with the popular class-based comedy of Robert Greene. See the Introduction in Stephen R. Miller, ed., The Taming of A Shrew; The 1594 Quarto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Although The Shrew does not contain all of Sly’s interruptions in A Shrew and fails to complete the Sly framework, it is likely that these omissions are for practical rather than artistic reasons: the paucity of actors required to cover both parts of the play.



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34 Anne Righter’s Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London, 1962) was the first to analyse theatrical references in Shakespeare’s plays. 35 Robert Weimann, Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and ‘Bifold Authority in Shakespeare’s Theatre’, Shakespeare Quarterly 39.4 (1988): 401–17. 36 Robert Hornback, ‘“Grose Indecorum”, “Contrarietie”, Vice-Descendants and the Power of Comic Performance: Weimann and Shakespeare among the Neoclassicals’, in The Shakespearean International Yearbook 10: Special Section, The Achievement of Robert Weimann, ed. David Schalkwyk, Graham Bradshaw, and Tom Bishop, 184. 37 Robert Hornback, personal communication. 38 A. D. Nuttall, 279; Tony Tanner, Prefaces to Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 530. 39 For an analysis of Iago’s association with Janus see Dorval’s careful review of ‘threshold aesthetics’ in Oliver Parker’s 1995 film of Othello: ‘Shakespeare on Screen: Threshold Aesthetics in Oliver Parker’s Othello’, Early Modern Literary Studies 6.1 (May, 2000): 1–15, URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/06-1/ dorvothe.htm (accessed 23 March 2013). The article that she refers to in footnote 2 as forthcoming, ‘Double-Faced Guardian of Doorways and Thresholds in Shakespeare’s Othello’, seems never to have been published.

2 ‘All’s One’: Cinthio, Othello, and A Yorkshire Tragedy Lois Potter

Some 450 lines of the text of Othello have already been spoken when Desdemona makes her first entrance, yet those who know the play from stage and film versions are unlikely to be aware of this fact. Oscar Ashe in 1906 was apparently the first to open his production with the elopement of Othello and Desdemona, watched by Iago and Roderigo, and many other directors have used some version of this choice.1 The Orson Welles film (1952) shows the couple’s wedding, again watched by Iago. In the Othello films of Sergei Yutkevich (1955) and Oliver Parker (1990), Desdemona is the first major character to appear. Yutkevich, indeed, begins his film with Desdemona’s dreamy recollections of Othello’s life story, making it clear what induces her to elope; Parker shows her running through the streets of Venice on her way to her lover. Even where a production retains the original opening, it has become relatively common to bring Desdemona on stage at

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the beginning of 1.2, a silent, loving presence. In short, despite general recognition of the brilliance of the in medias res opening, there seems to be an equally general desire to begin before the beginning, and to let the audience see the heroine as soon as possible. The object of showing the events that motivate the play’s first few minutes is, of course, to get rid of much of the bewilderment caused by the unexplained ‘this’ and ‘him’ and ‘such a matter’ of that dialogue (1.1.3, 5, 9, 25). As Edward Pechter puts it, spectators have to work hard simply ‘in order to determine what the play is about’.2 When they see their own bewilderment repeated in Brabantio, they can at last achieve something like the state of superiority to the characters that they prefer, since they know, as Brabantio will never know, the names of both the men who are shouting from the shadows. However, even with close listening, it is hard to process the information that the old man receives, since Iago and Roderigo deliberately give it in the most confusing possible way (Iago wants it to sound like a cry of ‘Fire!’ – not information, but an incitement to panic). Brabantio’s later questions to Roderigo open up more possibilities. ‘How got she out?’ (1.1.167) presupposes that her ‘guardage’ (1.2.70) was strict. How did she get out? Did she have an accomplice? Did she speak to Roderigo, as Brabantio seems to think she would? What on earth could she have said? The question of who knows what continues to be problematic. Why does Cassio know all about Othello’s courtship and marriage in 3.1 but nothing in 1.2? Why does Montano, for no apparent reason, ask Cassio, ‘Is your general wived?’ (2.1.60). Most of the cast learn in Act 4 that Cassio has been appointed Othello’s successor in Cyprus, but Iago tells Roderigo that Cassio himself hasn’t yet heard of ‘his honourable fortune’ (4.2.236). It is significant that most of the play’s puzzles are about Desdemona, even though the question that agonizes Othello, her fidelity to him, is the one thing of which spectators can be certain. When Emilia speaks to Iago of the period long ago when, she suggests, someone else



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‘made you to suspect me with the Moor’, does Desdemona hear these words and realize that her husband, too, might have committed adultery? After Desdemona’s death, Gratiano offers the gratuitous information that her father has died of grief (5.2.202–4). Did she ever learn this news, which – we realize in retrospect – he must have come from Venice to tell her? H. H. Furness, in his Variorum edition, thought that she did not, and that her ignorance was the ‘one tiny glimmering ray of comfort in this blackness’.3 One might equally say that, far from comforting, it simply adds to the sense that Desdemona is shut out from her own story. The point about these questions is not that the play ought to have answered them, but that there was no need to raise them in the first place. Lodovico’s words to Othello in the play’s final scene – Sir, you shall understand what hath befallen, Which, as I think, you know not (5.2.304–5) – speaks to a general sense of events occurring behind the characters’ backs. Even in the opening scene, Iago and Roderigo are arguing not about what has happened but about whether Iago knew it. Hence the devastating ambiguity of Iago’s final ‘what you know, you know’ (5.2.300). What does anyone, even after what follows – that unconvincing pile-up of deathbed confessions and discovered letters – know for certain? This intimation of an unexplained reality behind the action – unexplained because, as in ‘real life’, the characters do not explain things to each other for the benefit of the audience – is part of what makes Othello such an emotionally involving play.4 It gives the impression that there exists, somewhere, a context in which it all makes sense. The most famous attempt at finding such a context was Christopher North’s distinction between Long and Short Time, to which Geoffrey Bullough added the concept of Psychological Time, to explain why theatre audiences have no

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problem with the inconsistencies of the time sequence. Ned B. Allen, on the other hand, offered a suggestion based on practical considerations: Shakespeare, he argued, wrote the last part of the play first, setting it on Cyprus after Othello and Desdemona had been married for some time.5 Later on, after he had written the first two acts, the dramatist linked the two parts through various backward references in Acts 3–5, but he apparently failed to realize that by adding Act 1, in which Othello and Desdemona are seen as a newly married couple, and Act 2, in which Desdemona and Cassio arrive in Cyprus on separate ships, he had made any suspicion of adultery between them impossible. Although not many critics accept Allen’s view, most nevertheless find something odd about the relation of the last three acts to the first two. Joel B. Altman, for example, though he does not really agree with Allen, finds the implications of his view fascinating, since writing the last three acts before the first two would be an example of the same temporal disjunction (hysteron proteron) that he finds elsewhere in the play.6 Kristian Smidt tries to get round the inconsistencies by arguing, rather implausibly, that Desdemona was being accused of infidelity before her marriage but finally concludes that ‘Shakespeare wrote the first and second acts before he had quite decided how to continue, and changed his mind about several important things as he unfolded his story.’7 A gap in the writing process might be enough to explain discrepancies between the two halves of the play, regardless of the order in which they were written. If, as Ernst Honigmann and other scholars have argued, the play was begun at the end of Elizabeth’s reign rather than the beginning of James’s, its writing could have been broken off by the unusually virulent and long-lasting plague of 1603 and resumed a year later when the theatres reopened. Nevertheless, it seems to me worth returning to Allen’s argument and asking the obvious question: supposing that Shakespeare did write the last part of the play first, why might he have done so?



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I can think of two possible explanations. One is that when Shakespeare wrote Acts 3 through 5 he was expecting someone else to write Acts 1 and 2. While it is hard to imagine Othello ever being intended as a collaboration, there may have been circumstances in which the play needed to be written quickly. The clear plot lines of the source would have made division of the writing relatively easy, and there is some evidence that in collaborations the senior dramatist wrote the latter part of a play, as with Pericles and to some extent with Timon of Athens. The other possibility is that the play was initially meant to be a shorter work, set entirely on Cyprus and, as Allen suggested, depicting a couple who had already been married for some time. It could then be told as briefly as it is in its source, Cinthio Giraldi’s Hecatommithi. But why would Shakespeare have wanted to write a short play?

Thematic frameworks As Ernst Honigmann says in his edition of Othello, Cinthio’s collection of stories is important as a whole, not simply as a source of plots.8 Since Shakespeare also drew on the Hecatommithi for the plot of Measure for Measure, he seems to have had some sense of the shape of the book and not just the content of the individual stories. As in most such collections, there is a framework, one of journey and enforced exile, in which a group of people can credibly spend long periods telling stories to pass the time. In this case, the narrators are both men and women, members of a group of Italian nobles sailing to Marseilles after the sack of Rome. The group decides on a topic for each session and discusses each story afterwards. Cinthio often indicates that the men have one view of the story and the women another, and many of the male storytellers are clearly anxious not to offend the women in their audience. Othello’s story is one of a group about infidelity among married couples.

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Robert Greene had already used one of the tales from the same ‘decade’ (3:1) as the source of his Scottish History of James IV. The story has nothing to do with the historical James IV of Scotland, but Cinthio had set it in the British Isles (his King was Irish and the wife Scottish) and Greene had no doubt observed that many of Cinthio’s stories are told of famous people like Lorenzo de’ Medici and Dante Alighieri. The King plans to murder his wife so that he’ll be free to court another woman. The wife disguises herself as a man in order to escape and undergoes many dangers, including the jealousy of a nobleman whose wife has been looking after her after she was wounded in her male disguise: ‘From this care’, wrote Cinthio, ‘there grew what is sometimes seen to happen through the faithlessness of other people without women being able to help it, when simply and with a pure heart they show themselves gracious towards some charming man.’9 On several occasions, in fact, this nobleman is on the point of killing his wife. At the end of Cinthio’s story, we are told, both the men and the women praise the faithful wife, because she forgives a husband who was not only prepared to kill her but also to make it appear that she had been killed in the act of adultery with someone else. The women, however, give more attention to the jealous nobleman, and blame him for his unworthy suspicions of his wife, though both male and female listeners are delighted that the two are at last reconciled.10 The context of his source probably explains why Greene also made use of a framework for his play, embedding it in a narrative told to a misanthropic Scot, and incorporating some discussion of its events. In such an enormous collection as the Hecatommithi, it must have been difficult to remember which story was which. Thus, Cinthio’s table of contents takes the form of a short plot summary of each tale, usually beginning with the name of the central character as the most obvious point of reference. In the chapter heading for Shakespeare’s source, the seventh tale of the third decade, the characters are simply, and atypically, ‘Un capitano Moro’, ‘un alfieri’, and ‘una



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cittadina veneziana’, while in the story itself the only name given is that of the heroine, Disdemona, meaning ‘ill-fated’ (or ‘ill-starred’, as Othello calls her in 5.2.270). Shakespeare, who often changes the names of all the characters in his source, in this case made it easy to identify: Othello is called simply ‘the Moor’ all through the first scene of the play, and Iago, though he is named at the start, identifies himself as ‘his Moorship’s ancient’ (1.1.32). Those spectators who had read Cinthio would be certain of the play’s indebtedness to him when, in the next scene, Othello names the woman he loves as ‘the gentle Desdemona’ (1.2.25). There may not have been many such spectators, of course. The constant references to ‘the Moor’ naturally sound racist (and in the literal sense they are, since they describe Othello purely in terms of his race). But they also seem a gesture toward Cinthio’s story. Othello, obviously, lacks both a framework and an opportunity for discussion of its subject matter. In this respect, it marks a departure from Shakespeare’s previous works, which frequently model the art of spectatorship by including a play within a play that is discussed by its audience. The closest parallel to Cinthio, and to Greene’s Cinthio-based play, is The Taming of a Shrew, and the truncated framework of the better-known Shrew play suggests some flexibility in the use of the device in performance. Composite plays seem to have been relatively common once, but the only one to survive in more than its title is Four Plays in One (1612–15), by John Fletcher and Nathan Field. The plays within this play, based on Petrarch’s ‘Triumphs’ of Honour, Love, Death, and Time, are presented before two newly married rulers, who comment on each play afterwards. The only known example of a play written for a multi-play sequence is A Yorkshire Tragedy, published as by Shakespeare in 1608 and now usually ascribed to Thomas Middleton. This short but powerful work is described in its head-title as ‘All’s One, or one of the four plays in one, called A Yorkshire Tragedy, as it was played by the King’s Majesty’s players.’ The other three plays are apparently lost. As Stanley Wells notes in his edition for the Oxford

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Middleton, ‘“All’s One”, meaning, “it’s of no account”, seems entirely inappropriate to so serious a play’.11 Though, as he notes, the phrase seems to be offered as an alternative title to the play, it might also be the title of the entire sequence, implying that the plays shared a common theme. A Yorkshire Tragedy, based on events of 1605, is the story of a husband who, having ruined his wife and children by gambling and riotous living, attempts to murder them all, partly on the grounds that death will save them from beggary. His wife can no longer recognize the man she married: he is ‘so much unlike himself at first / As if some vexed spirit had got his form upon him’ (2.38–9). Other characters also say that he was once very different: The springtime of thy youth did fairly promise Such a most fruitful summer to thy friends It scarce can enter into men’s beliefs Such dearth should hang upon thee. (2.145–8) By the end, indeed, the husband himself is convinced that he has been the victim of demonic possession. Meanwhile, his wife displays a willingness to forgive him that modern readers must find almost unbelievable. In the final scene, though he has killed two of her children and attempted to kill her, she is still hoping that her efforts can save him from execution. Lena Cowen Orlin has already shown the thematic relation of Othello and A Yorkshire Tragedy.12 I should like to suggest that that relation may once have been still closer. If the other ‘All’s One’ plays were similar to A Yorkshire Tragedy they would have dealt with some aspect of marital relations – perhaps jealousy, perhaps husbands’ cruelty to their wives and the wives’ capacity for forgiveness. The plays might also have had some kind of framework that, as in Cinthio’s story, would allow the subject of marital fidelity to be discussed in more general terms. As it stands, Othello incorporates this discussion within its own story. It may be a coincidence



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that Desdemona uses the phrase ‘All’s one’ in the course of her conversation with Emilia in 4.3, but the words occur as the two women are speaking of cruelty and infidelity within marriage and may therefore refer to a catch-phrase with a recognized local significance. In particular, Emilia’s speech (‘But I do think it is their husbands’ fault / If wives do fall’ [4.3.85–6]) suggests a more general interest in the subject than has been prepared for in the play. If Shakespeare had written an Othello consisting of the events of Acts 3 through 5, it would have depicted the rapid destruction of a once-happy marriage and the murder of a virtuous wife through the suspicions of a husband who succumbs to the deceit of someone he later calls a devil. When Lodovico incredulously asks whether the incoherently raging man who has just struck his wife can be the same man known for a ‘nature / Whom passion could not shake’, Iago replies with secret satisfaction, ‘He is much changed’ (4.1.265–6, 268). The constant references to Iago as a devil – first by himself, and finally by others – are an obvious link between the two plays, as is the amazing forgiveness exhibited by the suffering wife.13 This short Othello may never have existed. Othello, at least in the version performed at court on 1 November 1604, is undoubtedly earlier than A Yorkshire Tragedy, based on an event of the following year. It is not impossible, however, that Shakespeare, aware of the limited attention spans of court audiences at the end of a long evening, might have written a short version of the story of the capitano moro for the occasion, setting it entirely on Cyprus. In that case, Middleton’s play may have been intended for a projected ‘All’s One’ sequence and its thematic resemblance to Othello could be deliberate. Its stark narrative and its emphasis on the demonic obsession of the hero differentiate it from the other play inspired by the 1605 murders, George Wilkins’s The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (published 1607). Shakespeare may then have realized, perhaps as a result of audience comment, that his story demanded fuller treatment.

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The value of the comparison with A Yorkshire Tragedy is that the latter apparently shows different strata of composition and thus might offer some sort of analogy to Othello. For instance, the Middleton play has an opening scene that has been recognized as different in kind from the rest of the play, and that seems less like the background to the rest of the story than the beginning of an expanded version that for some reason never got written.14 Who knows what happened in the process of revision, or adaptation to the numerous contingencies of playwriting? When Richard Wagner wrote an opera libretto on the death of Siegfried, he found that he had to write another, and another, and another, to explain the background to it; hence the Ring cycle.

The subject of discussion Bullough says of the character in Cinthio’s tale, ‘We are told of the Moor’s noble nature, but we see no evidence of it in Cyprus.’15 The most obvious effect of Acts 1 and 2 of Othello is to make the hero an admirable character before his downfall. Without the magical language of his address to the Venetian senate and his rapturous greeting of Desdemona in Cyprus, Othello would have been much more like the husband of A Yorkshire Tragedy – profane, sarcastic, hysterical – who recognizes at the end that he must have been the victim of demonic possession. The first two acts also prevent Desdemona from being simply a bewildered, unhappy, and eventually forgiving victim of events that she never understands. Her carefully prepared and highly dramatic entrance to the senate in 1.3 – dramatic at least partly because this is also her first appearance – allows her to be an almost heroic figure. The fact that so much of the art inspired by this play dwells on the period before the tragedy begins (e.g. Théodore Chasseriau’s Othello illustrations, 1844, and Carl Becker’s ‘Othello Relating his Adventures to Desdemona’,



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1880) suggests that the play’s first two acts also fill a psychological need for readers and spectators. The love duet with which Verdi ended the first act of his opera, works, like the paintings, to evoke a beauty and happiness, embodied mainly in Desdemona, that exist only in reminiscence and are over almost at once. But the first two acts not only make the heroine more interesting, they also create a sense of something ambiguous and potentially misleading in her behaviour. Desdemona’s first appearance is designed to evoke real suspense about what she will say when, immediately after entering, she is asked to choose between her father and her husband. She is described in opposite terms by her father (‘a maiden never bold’ [1.3.95]) and her husband (‘Upon this hint I spoke’ [167]). The scene shows her living up to both descriptions, bold and timid at once, and thus leaves open the question of whether she is capable of betraying her husband. As Orlin writes in Private Matters, some of the reasons that might make one suspect Desdemona’s chastity (at least, if one were Iago), are not seen by Othello and thus ‘can resonate only in the minds of the audience’.16 Obvious examples are Desdemona’s jesting with Iago in 2.1 and her unexpected comment, ‘This Lodovico is a proper man’ (4.3.34) – which two Arden editors, M. R. Ridley and Ernst Honigmann, assigned to Emilia because they felt that it was out of character for Desdemona. Honigmann also thought that Emilia’s joke, ‘nor I neither, by this heavenly light. I might do it as well in the dark’, was intended for deletion by Shakespeare because he would have realized in the course of writing that ‘not even someone as slowwitted as Emilia could make a joke of Desdemona’s marital fidelity’.17 Yet Desdemona apparently makes a pun, conscious or unconscious, in her ‘I cannot say whore. / It does abhor me now I speak the word’ (4.2.163–4). This is less like Juliet’s hysterical sequence of ‘I/eye/aye’ than Mercutio’s ‘Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man’ (3.1.99–100). It is perhaps hard to imagine Desdemona making such a sick joke, yet there are several indications in the latter part of

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the play that she herself is puzzled by her own mental state. Immediately after her request to have the wedding sheets laid on her bed, she says, ‘All’s one’, as if it did not matter, and then, ‘How foolish are our minds!’ (4.3.21).18 Like Romeo’s and Richard II’s equally odd and abrupt comments at times of intense emotional stress, this seems to be one of ‘those odd tricks which sorrow shoots / Out of the mind’ (Antony and Cleopatra 4.2.14–15). Many lines spoken by or about Desdemona are problematic because of the existence of two early texts, as with the famous ‘sighs’ (Quarto) versus ‘kisses’ (Folio) disparity in 1.3.160.19 Others are interpretative cruces: what are ‘the rites for which I love him’ – his military career or their sex life? and, if the latter, has she already experienced it? The exchange between Iago and Cassio in 2.3 is a classic example of two readings of a woman’s look: iago W  hat an eye she has! methinks it sounds a parley to provocation. cassio An inviting eye; and yet methinks right modest. (21–3) Their entire conversation is open to multiple readings. Cassio has already called the general’s wife – in terms similar to those he will use for Bianca – ‘a most fresh and delicate creature’ (20). Does this mean that he is adopting Iago’s tone, as Honigmann suggests in his note to this line, and does his subsequent remark show him attempting to reconcile two contradictory male attitudes? Physical signs in the play are clearly unreliable: Othello deduces from Desdemona’s ‘hot, hot, and moist’ hand (3.4.39) that she is too sensual and needs to correct her temperament through forced abstinence. (John Ford understood this episode: in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore he made Giovanni hold Annabella’s hand and comment that its promise of health and long life is only ‘cunning flattery’, since he knows that he is about to kill her.) Later Othello applies the same logic when he sees his wife’s cold, pale face as a symbol



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of her chastity (5.2.271–4), although of course any dead woman would be cold and pale. ‘When she did seem to shake, and fear your looks, / She loved them most’ (3.3.210–11), Iago had told Othello, recalling the account of his courtship that Othello had given the Senate; Pechter suggests that Othello’s shaking before he falls into a fit is a reliving of her experience as Iago described it.20 Here at least the two parts of the play are quite clearly linked. When Desdemona reminds Othello that Cassio often ‘When I have spoke of you dispraisingly / Hath ta’en your part’ (3.3.72–3) she may mean that she pretended to criticize the man she loved in order to hear him praised by someone else – behaviour similar to that which Iago will interpret so differently. She herself admits in 2.1 that ‘I do beguile / The thing I am by seeming otherwise’ (2.1.123–4). Whereas Iago talks incessantly about himself and his motives, Desdemona has only one soliloquy, in the brief interval while Emilia is fetching Iago in 4.2: ’Tis meet I should be used so, very meet. How have I been behaved that he might stick The small’st opinion on my least misuse? (4.2.109–11) Her anxiety seems directed at her own behaviour and a belated recognition that it could be misinterpreted. Almost everything Desdemona says in her last minutes of life is fatally ambiguous. Not surprisingly, Othello takes her reaction to the news that Iago has agreed to kill Cassio – ‘Alas, he is betrayed, and I undone’ (5.2.75) – to mean, ‘Someone has betrayed our love affair and I’m ruined!’ But how should it be taken? Does she realize that the one who betrayed Cassio must be Iago – the Iago whom she had begged to help her win Othello’s love again? Is her use of the passive voice a sign of her inability to find a cause behind anything, or a final, fatal example of good manners – a reluctance to accuse Iago of lying? But, if she had said, ‘Then Iago has lied and betrayed both of us!’ would Othello have stopped in his tracks? Critics

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have debated what she means by ‘Nobody. I myself’ (5.2.122) in her last words to Emilia. Shirley N. Garner notes their oddity: no one could believe that Desdemona ‘smothered or strangled herself’.21 Moreover, she adds, her apparent forgiveness of Othello, ‘Commend me to my kind lord’ (123), is spoken in the third person to Emilia, not Othello.22 Helena Faucit, who had played the character many times, asked, ‘Who thinks of condemning Desdemona?’23 She meant this as a rhetorical question, but the answer, now, is that many critics do condemn her, because her failure to accuse Othello fits so easily into the ‘battered wife’ syndrome of self-blaming. Rather than treating Desdemona as an innocent victim, contemporary criticism often emphasizes her responsibility for what happens to her: she is too afraid of sex, perhaps because of unconscious racial prejudice;24 or, on the contrary, her ‘erotic boldness … seems to unnerve Othello’, acting as a sexual or emotional threat;25 or she has rushed into marriage without understanding herself or Othello, and is too silly to recognize the traps into which she keeps falling.26 It was characteristic of the 1970s that Julian C. Rice should criticize Desdemona not for her awareness of the sexual side of her nature but for not recognizing it enough. In 4.3, he suggests, her unpinning and undressing accompanies and symbolizes the stripping away of an innocence that is more like ignorance.27 Though no one tries to argue that she really has committed adultery with Cassio, W. H. Auden suggested that she would probably have taken a lover eventually.28 In short, readings of Desdemona usually reflect contemporary attitudes toward gender relations. Yet seeing her character in the context of its narrative source enables one to recognize the extent to which it is meant to be discussed, just as the courtly circle in Cinthio’s novel discussed the behaviour of the characters in the stories they were told. In Cinthio’s story, of course, Othello is eventually put on trial both for murder and for the wounding of the character who corresponds to Cassio (though he escapes legal punishment and is instead killed later by Desdemona’s relatives). Emily



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Bartels has pointed out that the play’s senate scene is effectively a trial, and that in Cyprus ‘Desdemona will replace Othello as the accused, at least for a while’.29 She is primarily concerned with the ‘multiple possibilities for playing’ Othello, which indicate that Shakespeare was ‘aware of the Moor as a potentially controversial figure’ in a historical moment that was itself ‘open-ended’.30 But a similar multiplicity is built into the treatment of Desdemona. In Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, a play clearly influenced by Othello, Ferdinand, who has ordered Bosola to kill his sister, indignantly repudiates the action. His rhetorical questions remind one that women as well as men can be the objects of legal scrutiny: ferdinand By what authority didst thou execute This bloody sentence? bosola By yours. ferdinand Mine? Was I her judge? Did any ceremonial form of law Doom her to not-being? Did a complete jury Deliver her conviction up i’th’court? Where shalt thou find this judgment registered Unless in hell? (4.2.297–305)31 Unlike Hermione in The Winter’s Tale or the heroine of Webster’s own White Devil, Desdemona is not put on trial, although Othello talks of a ‘cause’ and ‘justice’ and behaves like a judge when he warns Desdemona to ‘Take heed of perjury’ (5.2.51). Later he envisages another trial, in the afterlife, ‘when we shall meet at compt’ (5.2.271). While the audience of Cinthio’s story has no hesitation in condemning the incredible wickedness of the ensign and the foolishness of the Moor, their only comment on Disdemona is that her parents should not have given her such an ill-omened name. The implication is that she had no control over her destiny. Shakespeare’s play, however, makes all three protagonists morally and psychologically enigmatical. The confrontation

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between Othello and Emilia over Desdemona’s deathbed lie (‘She’s like a liar gone to burning hell’ versus ‘O, the more angel she’: 5.2.132–4) is essentially a debate over the meaning and implications of her words.32 It is the first of many debates, and suggests that, as in Cinthio’s collection of tales, male and female viewers may have different reactions to the story. Hence, perhaps, the odd language that Henry Jackson used about Desdemona, when he saw the play performed in Oxford in 1610. She ‘pleaded her case very effectively throughout’, he says, and did so still more after she was dead. Audience members, then, must have gone on gazing at her face throughout the final scene. They may have done so because, like Othello, they still wondered what to make of her. She was, and continues to be, on trial.

Notes 1

See the note to 1.1.1. in Julie Hankey, ed., Othello, Shakespeare in Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 116.

2

Edward Pechter, Othello and Interpretive Traditions (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 31.

3

H. H. Furness, ed., Othello: A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1886), 316 (note on 5.2.255).

4

Cynthia Lewis makes the same point with regard to Twelfth Night, which leaves the audience knowing less than the characters about such matters as why the sea-captain is in prison, why Viola wants to impersonate a eunuch, or why Sebastian was calling himself Roderigo. ‘Whodunnit?: Plot, Plotting, and Detection in Twelfth Night’, in James Schiffer, ed.,‘Twelfth Night’: New Critical Essays (New York: Routledge, 2011), 259.

5

Ned B. Allen, ‘The Two Parts of Othello’, Shakespeare Survey 21 (1968): 13–29.



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6

Joel B. Altman, The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 201.

7

Kristian Smidt, Unconformities in Shakespeare’s Tragedies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 127.

8

Ernst Honigmann, ‘Appendix 3: Cinthio and Minor Sources’, in Othello, ed. Ernst Honigmann, Arden 3 (Walton-onThames: Thomson Nelson, 1997), 368–70.

9

G. B. Giraldi Cinthio, Hecatommithi, Decade 3, Novel 1, translated from the French translation of Gabriel Chappuys by Norman Sanders in the Appendix to Robert Greene, The Scottish History of James the Fourth, ed. Norman Sanders, Revels Plays (London: Methuen, 1970), 139.

10 Giovanni Battista Giraldi [Cinthio], Gli Ecatommiti, ovvero Cento Novelle, 3 volumes in one, Vol. 2 (Turin, 1853), 17. In Greene’s play, interestingly, the wife really is in love with her guest, and thus is horrified when she learns the truth. 11 Stanley Wells, Introduction to A Yorkshire Tragedy, in Thomas Middleton, The Collected Works, gen. eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 452. 12 See Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 191–252. 13 These are not, of course, the only examples. Pechter comments on the proliferation of ‘Patient Grissil’ figures in the theatre of this period (217–18, note 9). 14 Or rather, as has often been noted, it sounds like the version of the story that George Wilkins developed as The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (published 1607). 15 Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols (London: Routledge, 1973), 7:200. 16 Orlin, 229, note 69. 17 E. A. J. Honigmann, The Texts of ‘Othello’ and Shakespearian Revision (London: Routledge, 1996), 35. 18 More precisely, she says ‘all’s one good faith’ in Q and ‘All’s one. Good Father’ in F.

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19 For more examples, see Lois Potter, ‘Editing Desdemona’, in In Arden: Editing Shakespeare, Essays in Honour of Richard Proudfoot, ed. Ann Thompson and Gordon McMullan (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2003). 20 Pechter, 102–3. 21 S. N. Garner, ‘Shakespeare’s Desdemona’, Shakespeare Studies 9 (1976): 249. 22 Ibid., 250. 23 Helena Faucit, On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1891), 15. Faucit was comparing Ophelia’s lie to Hamlet about her father with Desdemona’s lie to Othello; in both cases, she felt, the character took the lie ‘upon her own soul’ (14). 24 Dorothea Kehler, ‘“I Saw Othello’s Visage in His Mind”: Desdemona’s Complicity’, Weber Studies 5.1 (Fall 1988). 25 Walter Cohen, Introduction to Othello in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 392. Bartels also notes that the image of ‘Desdemona as a cannibal’, devouring his speech, is ‘jarringly disfigured’. See ‘Othello on Trial’, in Lena Cowen Orlin, ed., Othello, New Casebooks (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 158. 26 Julian C. Rice, ‘Desdemona Unpinned: Universal Guilt in Othello’, Shakespeare Studies 7 (1974): 209–26. 27 Rice, 221. 28 W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1962). 29 Bartels, 149. 30 Ibid., 165. 31 John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, in English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology, ed. David Bevington et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002). 32 See Pechter, 120–31 for an excellent, and much fuller, analysis of the varied critical responses to the character, and to this moment in particular.

3 ‘Speak[ing] Parrot’ and Ovidian Echoesin Othello: Recontextualizing Black Speech in the Global Renaissance Robert Hornback

For centuries, critics have noted that Othello frequently tilts into the comic. As early as 1693, neoclassicist Thomas Rymer decried the tragedy for including ‘some burlesque, some humour, … [some] ramble of comical wit, … and some mimicry’. Rymer even called ‘the tragical part … a bloody farce’ and dismissed Othello’s tragic fall as that of a ‘jealous booby [fool] ha[ving] his brains turn’d’. François Laroque later linked Othello to the cuckolded, hen-pecked protagonist from the shaming folk-ritual charivari, a connection Michael Bristol extended, concluding that it makes Othello ‘a kind of blackface clown’ in a ‘comedy of abjection’. Susan Snyder observed still more conjunctions of comedy and

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tragedy; noting that, through 2.1, in the lovers’ separation and reunion, the play presents ‘a perfect comic structure in miniature’, she anticipated Michael Witmore’s recent discovery via DocuScope data-mining that, linguistically, Othello is a comedy.1 Clearly, this tragedy contains strikingly comic features, although answers as to why and to what effects remain less certain. Resituating the tragedy’s comedic elements within the context of what many now call the ‘global Renaissance’, I propose two answers: (1) Othello enacts a complex relation to pan-European stereotypes of sub-Saharan Africans and, above all, their speech as exploited in comedy, and (2) Shakespeare’s focus on difficulty speaking and his violations of genre decorum together reflect as well an aesthetics and a humanism derived from Shakespeare’s favourite poet Ovid. In much of Europe, Renaissance fools in blackface (not some hypothetical ‘kind of’ clowns) represented black characters’ speech as particularly inept at a time when linguistic ineptitude – and attendant assumptions of irrationality – served as an emergent meta-discourse of racial difference. Speaking eloquently, the ‘noble Moor’ Othello initially seems anomalous, but he eventually suffers a jarring linguistic breakdown that prompts Iago to see his resemblance to conventional ‘fools’ (4.1.45). By 3.4, Desdemona already discerns the beginnings of this degrading transformation: ‘Why do you speak so startingly and rash?’ (3.4.81). According to the OED, the word ‘startingly’ comes from the adjective ‘starting’, ‘that starts’, ‘leaping’, ‘suffering displacement or disintegration’. Thus, the adverb ‘startingly’ means ‘impetuously, fitfully’, and connotes irrationality. ‘Suffering displacement or disintegration’ is also apt; Othello’s leaping logic and fitful words undergo displacement from meaningful contexts. He therefore speaks ‘startingly’ especially when parroting or repeating himself and others, sometimes in non-sequiturs betraying his almost feverishly irrational thoughts: ‘O blood, blood, blood’ (3.3.454), ‘Good, good, … very good!’ (4.1.206–7), ‘away, away, away!’ (4.2.42), ‘you, you, ay you!’ (4.2.94). Verbal displacement and



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disintegration become most apparent in his famous ‘fit’ or ‘trance’ (4.1.35ff.). Arden 3 editor E. A. J. Honigmann characterizes this speech in 4.1 as a nonsensical ‘jumble of words’,2 while Graham Bradshaw notes that ‘the only character who has never been heard speaking in prose’, up to this point, finally does.3 If eloquent verse had marked his initial nobility, a poetic-syntactic collapse into almost nonsensical prose, as we shall see, marks Othello as resembling a fool, as Iago in fact recognizes: ‘Thus credulous fools are caught’ (4.1.45). Also called a ‘fool’ (5.2.231), a ‘coxcomb’ (5.2.231), and an ‘ass’ (2.1.307), Othello is sometimes characterized as if he were one of the conventional black clowns of the era. Attending to the currency of a typology of black-faced folly, its relation to black speech in the global Renaissance, and the ways in which stereotyping breaks down in this unexpectedly affecting comi-tragedy presents a challenge to critics who continue to see the play as simply or unabashedly racist. Awareness of these concerns renders problematic interpretations of the protagonist as merely reverting to type or falling back into an essential ‘Moorish’ villainy or evil. Ironically, as we shall see, even critics attempting to break free from the dominant binary interpretations that assume a Manichean logic of ‘White as Good’ versus ‘Black as Evil’ have tended to view Othello’s fall in remarkably similar terms. While ignoring pervasive representations of eloquence versus ineloquence playing upon or against Manichean dualist logic, such readings have likewise overlooked the context of the widespread comic traditions of blackface. In these traditions, eloquence in a black speaker frequently served as a sign of a pure ‘white soul’, complicating if not belying the emblematic signification of a black complexion. Equally complicating Manichean logic were the often-related issues of assimilation and conversion with all the possibilities of transformation they raised. In this context, it became difficult to determine whether black skin colour was a sign of an immutable internal state – that is, an essential inner darkness in a Manichean world – or whether external signs such as skin colour were

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instead misleading. The difficulty of making such determinations in the global Renaissance further complicates the application of binary interpretations solely in the familiar critical terms of either a Christianized or a postcolonial ‘Manichean allegory’, for long-ignored tropes of speech and folly racialized elsewhere end up being altered or diffused in this play. Other factors similarly work against a simple reading of Othello solely in terms of the familiar Manichean dualities of good versus evil. The themes of change and the significance of speech as a reflection of the state of the soul came to be resituated in the decidedly unchristian logic of Shakespeare’s favourite poet, the pagan Ovid. Even as this tragedy ‘pivots on the metamorphosis of the hero at the hands of Iago’,4 as Jonathan Bate argues, one reason for the play’s complexity and its related violations of genre decorum alike is that it recasts otherwise racialized speech and comic stereotypes in self-conscious relation to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Writing in the context of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, Bate notes ‘points of similarity’ between the two poets that are especially relevant to interpreting tragic-comic juxtaposition in Othello; these parallels include ‘a refusal to submit to the decorums of genre, a delight in the juxtaposition of contrasting tones – the tragic and the grotesque, the comic and the pathetic’.5 Moreover, Shakespeare’s distinctive Ovidian effects also differentiate his Moor from typical comic representations of black characters; indeed, such Ovidian influence invites a reassessment of the way Othello’s speech breaks down, for difficulty speaking is a powerful motif not simply in Othello but in Metamorphoses. Unlike conventional representations of ‘black’ speech elsewhere in the literature of the global Renaissance, then, in Shakespeare’s Othello binary protoracial differentiation according to linguistic stereotypes breaks down just as exclusive genre distinctions do.



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Stereotypical black fools and racialized speech in the global Renaissance Many early modern Englishmen interpreted what they unfairly viewed to be the peculiar linguistic incapacity of foreign black speakers in English in stereotypical, proto-racial terms as signifying inferior mental ability. Speech was thought to mark one’s rational capacity, either differentiating man from beast or failing to do so. For that reason, assertions about Africans’ linguistic capacity rationalized proto-racist claims of cultural superiority. For instance, George Puttenham, in his influential Art of English Poesy (1589), linked the term ‘barbarous’ etymologically to African speech: those ‘who have digged for the etymology somewhat deeper … have said it was spoken by the rude and barking language of the Africans now called Barbarians’.6 Linguistic ‘barbarism’ was further constructed as stereotypically African through biased descriptions of Africans, such as the supposed ‘Trodlogitica’ of The History of Travel in the West and East Indies and Other Countries (1577) who are said to ‘have no speech but rather grinning and chattering’.7 In the wake of such portrayals, atlas-maker John Ogilby later insisted in his monumental Africa (1670) that ‘the Kaffers are … stupidly dull and clownish, and in understanding are more like beasts than men; but some, by continual converse with European merchants, show a few sparks or glimmerings of an inclination to more humanity’.8 To Ogilby, as to many English early moderns, black Africans were veritable Calibans, profiting little from the acquisition of speech. Negative views of African speech as a sign of sub-human rational capacity informed, in turn, a disturbing, related stereotype extant across Renaissance Europe, that of the black man or woman ‘too stupid to understand the misery of his or her situation’.9 This stereotype of African stupidity appeared

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in much early modern travel literature, as in an account of the 1564–5 second voyage of the famous Elizabethan slaver John Hawkins from Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations … of the English Nation (1589). There, Africans are called ‘the ignorant people’.10 Peter Heylyn likewise claimed in his Little Description of the Great World (1631) that Africans lacked ‘the use of reason which is peculiar unto man; [they are] of little wit’.11 Such stereotyping in terms of rational ability appears in Othello. When Emilia calls Othello ‘gull …. dolt! As ignorant as dirt’ (5.2.159–60) after referencing his black complexion (‘the blacker devil’, 5.2.129), the same racial stereotype of witlessness and the theatrical type of black-faced fool later revealed in Ogilby’s invocation of ‘clownish’ Africans already underlie her slurs. Calling Othello ‘such a fool’ (5.2.231), ‘coxcomb’ (5.2.231), ‘gull’ (5.2.159), and ‘dolt’ (5.2.159), Emilia imposes upon him the once-conventional role of the so-called ‘natural’ or born fool via pan-European Renaissance traditions of black-faced folly. Othello then internalizes this role in his echoing self-condemnation: ‘O fool, fool, fool!’ (5.2.321). Such emphatic references to Othello as a fool reflect contemporary depictions of ‘black speech’ from comic traditions across Western Europe. Notably, the first Harlequin, the internationally renowned Tristano Martinelli, touring Europe from 1584 to 1621, employed a ‘broken’, transnational pidgin dialect for comic effect. In a global Renaissance context, a focus on black speech would have been quite apparent in his gift-book Compositions de Rhetorique (1601). Padded with fifty-nine blank pages, this mock-book included a mere thirteen pages of scant text accompanied by images, all depicting Martinelli’s black-masked Arlecchino ‘speaking’ a hodgepodge of ungrammatical French, Italian, Spanish, and dog-Latin recently characterized by Robert Henke, in somewhat grandiose terms, as ‘distinctly international and polylinguistic’.12 In reality, the frontispiece announced the work in a broken macaronic as ‘Imprime Dela La Bout Du Monde’, that is, ‘Printed beyond



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the the [sic] edge of the world’, making Harlequin, far more than Othello, an ‘erring barbarian’ (1.3.356), a ‘wheeling stranger / Of here and everywhere’ (1.1.134–5). Arlecchino thus served as an ironic scapegoat for global Renaissance cosmopolitanism, exorcizing anxieties about cultural mixture and dilution. When Arlecchino in the frontispiece pompously styled himself – or, rather, Martinelli humorously styled his persona Harlequin – as the ‘corrigador de la bonna langua Francese e Latina’ (‘corrector of the good French and Latin language’),13 the suggestion here was that pure, grammatical language was foreign to, or beyond, this unwittingly ‘erring’, would-be pedantic black clown. (This joking uncannily prefigured frequent misspeaking by illiterate or semi-literate minstrel figures like ‘Zip Coon’ and ‘Sambo’ boasting about their ‘edgumkation’.) In fact, far from being a throw-away laugh at the expense of a generically ignorant clown, Arlecchino’s explicit sense of multiple languages as a single one instead closely resembled a pidgin or pre-pidgin mixture of languages, what a number of contemporaries called a ‘Lingua Franca’ actually being spoken by free westcoast Africans. For example, around 1680 the Frenchman Jean Barbot reported: ‘many of the coast Blacks … for the most part speak to us in a sort of Lingua Franca, or [in] broken Portuguese or French.’14 Pointing to earlier usage, Barbot noted that African merchants had learned this Lingua Franca ‘of their forefathers’ via previous ‘commerce on that coast’.15 Such historical evidence suggests that the earliest black-masked Harlequin’s language, a broken pidgin, impersonated African speech. Unsurprisingly, given Portugal’s slave trade monopoly, the first known Renaissance representations of such pidginized ‘black dialect’ appear in Portuguese literature. Jeremy Lawrance notes that in 1455 Fernão da Silveira’s entertainment for the wedding of Joana of Portugal to Enrique IV of Castile, in which an African king of Sierra Leone has his people dance, ‘is written in pidgin Portuguese’ in an ‘imitation of slave Creole’ that is represented as ‘a risibly infantile

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language’.16 Thereafter, it was Gil Vicente (c. 1470–1536), the so-called ‘Portuguese Plautus’,17 whose farces most defined a literary fala de preto or lingua de preto (i.e., ‘black talk’). This language, linguist John Lipski discovers, employed ‘phonetic, grammatical, and lexical traits reflecting both the imperfect acquisition of Portuguese’ and ‘direct interference from African [languages]’.18 Key features included linguistic characteristics of later Creole dialects, such as the use of ‘me’ (mi) as a subject pronoun instead of ‘I’ (as in ‘mi vem lá’ or ‘me comes there’) and loss of syllable-final /s/.19 Vicente regularly introduced black characters, and specifically mimicry of the language of Portugal’s black population, for decidedly comic effect.20 For example, in Vicente’s earliest play, Fragoa del Amor (Forge of Love, c. 1524), a would-be lover enters into a magical forge in hopes of becoming white, but the transformation works only outwardly; his speech remains stereotypically ‘black’.21 Here, with racial metamorphosis at issue, dialect is an indelible sign of intellect, the tell-tale sign of immutable ignorance. The demeaning comic type of the ignorant (would-be) black lover, speaking a caricatured, Africanized Creole or pidgin and appearing in plots involving potential transformation (often through manumission or conversion), also became an overwhelming preoccupation in Spanish Renaissance literature. The earliest extant example is a poem or copla by Rodrigo de Reinosa dated c. 1480–1510,22 featuring a freed black man named Jorge and a Senegambian slave woman named Kumba, both speaking ungrammatical language (for example, ‘if be in Jolof, me live at court’ [vv. 53–8, 71–2]; ‘Your land Guinea be an insult to you’ [v. 2]) as he fails to seduce her. Thereafter, in the sixteenth century, so-called habla de negros – also called guineo and even demeaningly referred to as a media lengua (‘half language’) by contemporaries23 – was ‘a stock in trade, which needed no introduction’ in Spanish comedy.24 By the seventeenth century, authors had become so ‘aware of the importance of mastering the technique of imitating sub-Saharan accents due to the



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popularity of laughing at black African characters’ that noted author Francisco de Quevedo wrote that any Spanish author wishing to write comedies needed to know guineo.25 Some recurring elements of this literary habla de negros have been noted in subsequent Creole. These include prevocalic /d/ or /l/ being pronounced as /r/ (that is, r used in lieu of d as in Rios for ‘God’).26 Yet, de Quevedo further recommended reversing l to r, gratuitously changing r to l as well (‘como Francisco, Flancisco; primo, plimo’).27 Famed dramatist Lope de Vega, Shakespeare’s contemporary, was ‘the master of seventeenthcentury habla de negros’, noted for his ‘near-obsession with [portraying] Africans as buffoons (a view shared by nearly all of his contemporaries)’.28 Significantly, a commonplace binary distinction regularly made by Spanish Golden Age authors and audiences was that between the assimilated, well-speaking African and the misspeaking and unassimilated African – that is, between the African who was said to be ladino and he who was called bozal. Sebastian de Covarrubias’s dictionary, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (Treasury of the Castilian or Spanish Language, 1611), explains the distinction as follows: ‘The barbarous Spanish population learned the purity of the Roman language badly, [but those] who mastered it were called ladinos. They were looked upon as discrete and reasonable men … ; the Moors and foreigners who learned our language so well that we cannot differentiate them are also called ladinos.’29 Ladinos, then, were not described stereotypically as differentiating themselves as ‘barbarous’, ‘[un]reasonable’, or Other by their language. Slave contracts thus valued assimilated slaves who spoke the prestige dialect ‘properly’ more highly than those unable to do so. In 1569, an English merchant explained, ‘For if a Negro be Bossale (bozal), that is to say, ignorant of the Spanish or Portugale tongue, then he or she is commonly sold for’ just four hundred or four hundred-fifty pesos.30 At issue in these two linguistic binary categories, therefore, was a key meta-language of racial difference that Shakespeare examined in Othello, linguistic

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signs presumed to be differentiating between the supposed civilized reason of the assimilable and ignorant barbarism constructed as inherently Other.

Speech as sign of the ‘white-souled’ Ethiope Othello, generally dated to 1603 or 1604 and printed in quarto and Folio in 1622 and 1623, can also be tellingly compared to the Spanish drama that appeared between 1602 and 1618. Such Lope de Vega plays as El prodigio de Etiopía (‘The Ethiopian Prodigy’), El santo negro Rosambuco (‘The Black Saint Rosambuco’), and El amante agradecido (‘The Grateful Lover’) featured ‘white-souled’ black saints who were ladino31 alongside foolish black lovers, the latter being slaves represented as bozal. The fundamental binary opposition between the two types was usually underscored via on-stage juxtaposition, what John Beusterien has called ‘the dramatic representation of Black-talking Black versus the White-talking Black’,32 in which ‘other black characters call attention to the way in which the saints speak as not black’.33 Thus, de Vega’s St Rosambuco, who describes himself as having ‘blanca el alma, el cuerpo negro’ (‘a white soul, a black body’), proves his claim when he verbally spars with – and exorcizes – a devil that speaks habla de negros after it takes possession of a young white girl. In such pieces, audiences witnessed the spectacle of conventional outward colour symbolism being reversed, so that the only trustworthy signs remaining were linguistic ones. A similar effect is invoked in Othello when, as the ‘demi-devil’ Iago (5.2.298) announces his intention to turn metaphorically white ‘virtue’ into ‘pitch’ (2.3.355), outward signs begin to fail. The failure of any fixed meaning behind skin colour culminates in the diabolical white Iago being found to lack devil’s hooves, for external moral emblems now exist only



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in ‘a fable’ (5.2.283). In Othello, though, oral and linguistic signs will blur as much as visual cues. However, the ‘white-souled’ typology was certainly familiar in England, where it was likewise typically distinguished by eloquence. The type appears, for instance, in Thomas Middleton’s Lord Mayor’s pageant The Triumphs of Truth (1613), which features an African King who refers to his conversion to ‘the true Christian faith’ (l. 440). Speaking eloquently, the King addresses those observers who rely solely on his ‘outward form and show’, including a ‘complexion … so black’ as to suggest a soul ‘As far from sanctity as my face from whiteness’ (ll. 413–27). He asserts, ‘However darkness dwells upon my face, / Truth in my soul sets up the light of grace’ (ll. 429–30).34 His black complexion, the pageant suggests, is opposite to his ‘light’ (white) soul. Like Othello, the King speaks largely, though not entirely, in noble iambic pentameter. Potentially mitigating his identification with converted assimilation or whiteness, however, Middleton grants his eloquent African King several irregular lines of eleven syllables, evident even from his first words: ‘I see amazement set upon the faces / Of these white people, wond’rings and strange gazes …’ (ll. 411–12). Because metrical irregularity is usually interpreted as a sign of ‘characters under stress’, in extreme passion, or even drunk,35 we might thus ask why a playwright would portray a black speaker as repeatedly speaking in such a mode, absent any exceptional cause. Such metrical irregularity, I suggest, could be deployed also to mark an essential Otherness. Given the many references to souls, damnation, and the Devil’s blackness in Othello, it may be useful to note that a once-familiar source for discourse on the ‘white-souled’ black man was the biblical account of the baptism of an Ethiopian eunuch (Acts of the Apostles 8:26–40) who speaks well (for example, ‘I pray thee, of whom speaketh the prophet [Isaiah]?’ in the King James version). As Anston Bosman explains, ‘in Christian Britain from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, historians, preachers, and poets’ had discussed the biblical

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episode, so that the biblically inspired converted Ethiope with pure, metaphorically ‘white soul’ – and speech – was as familiar in England as he was in Spain. Indeed, ‘the Venerable Bede wrote in the first century AD of the Aethiops dealbatus or whitewashed Ethiope, his heart purged of sins’, and in the 1640s Richard Crashaw held that it is ‘no longer a forlorn hope / To wash an Æthiope’, since ‘his gloomy skin a peaceful shade / For his white soul is made’.36 Crashaw referenced a familiar proverb: ‘To wash an Ethiope is a labour in vain.’ Biblioteca Eliota (1545) glossed ‘Thou washest a Mooren, or Moor’ as ‘a proverb applied to him that … teacheth a natural fool wisdom’.37 Erasmus had collected adages on Aethiopem lavas, describing them as ‘particularly apposite’ when ‘an unteachable person is being taught’, further moralizing that ‘that which is inborn is not easily altered’.38 The Ethiope’s blackness, then, could be associated with one that is ‘unteachable’ due to stereotypical African foolishness. Contradictory discourse on baptizing versus washing Ethiopes therefore dealt with the capacity or incapacity for transformation, either of the African soul or the African body/mind. The pan-European type of the biblically inspired ‘white-souled’ African and contrasting discourse about the impossibility of the black man’s transformation raise questions about how we interpret Othello’s changing character and altered speech. Although his murder of Desdemona presumably damns him, Othello is nonetheless, according to pan-European conventions, initially ‘white-souled’. The Duke says that ‘If virtue no delighted beauty lack’, Othello is ‘far more fair [white] than black’ (1.3.291), and Othello himself asserts that ‘my perfect soul [pure, symbolically white] / Shall manifest me rightly’ (1.2.31–2). The binary Iberian types for black speakers, the foolish, unassimilated, ineloquent bozal lover and the rational, assimilated, eloquent ‘white-souled’ saint who was ladino, thus seem relevant to Shakespeare’s Moor – as both lover and convert. In these contexts, can we confidently say that Othello simply degrades or reverts from



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being, in effect, ladino and white-souled to being bozal and black-souled since, by the end, he regains his formerly characteristic eloquence?

Representing early ‘black’ dialect in England Unlike the dramatists of Portugal and Spain, English writers were long at a loss as to how to represent Africanized pidgin. Richard Brome’s The English Moor (c. 1637) is credited with being the first extant play to represent a recognizable Anglicized pidgin. In this play, two English women in blackface disguise themselves by turns as an imaginary ‘Blackamore’ or ‘Negro’ (ll. 57–8) slave named ‘Catalina’. When the lustful gallant Nathaniel repeatedly attempts to seduce ‘Catalina’, Virginia Mason Vaughan argues, each of the disguised women ‘responds in the way she imagines a Moorish woman would speak’:39 nathaniel … Hist, Negro, hist. millicent No see, O no, I darea notta. … O no de fine white Zentilmanna Cannot a love a the black a thing a. … O, take–a heed–a my mastra see–a. nathaniel When we are alone, then wilt thou. millicent Then I shall speak a more a. nathaniel And Ile not lose the Moor-a for more then I Will speak-a.40 Vaughan describes this ‘dialect’ as ‘pidgin English’,41 but that it is truly a hybrid of two or more languages is less than clear. Beyond a couple of quick, perfunctory gestures such as ‘de’ for ‘the’ and z in lieu of g, this impersonated ‘Moorish’ is, as

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Matthew Steggle notes, chiefly ‘a generic foreign accent adding a at the end of many words’. Here, this supposed ‘Moorish’ English dialect is so easily reproduced that Nathaniel himself is immediately able to parrot it ironically. Relative to other literary ‘black’ dialects in the era, then, Pidgin English (PE) is not yet developed at the level of impersonation. A century earlier, John Redford’s moral interlude for the Children of Paul’s The Play of Wit and Science (1534) may not have developed a form of pidgin but did offer a representation that aligned blackness with broken speech. Here we see an author experimenting with an elaborate but no more accurate linguistic means of representing the stereotypically black Otherness we have seen elsewhere. The Vice Idleness lulls the everyman Wit to sleep and blackens his face, remarking ‘so [he] beginneth to look like a noddy’ (l. 587), a noddy being both a black bird and a fool. She then dresses the sleeping Wit in the fool’s coat and hat of the black fool ‘Ingnorance’, who notes the resemblance to himself in an awkward syntax: ‘He is I now.’ Later, Wit’s fiancé Science mistakes him for Ingnorance, an identification that bewilders Wit until he checks his reflection in his ‘glass [or mirror] of reason’ and discovers that he looks like a fool: ‘god’s soul a fool, a fool by the mass ... and as for this face, [it] is ... as black as the devil.’ As for Ingnorance himself, he not only appears in blackface and fool’s cap and coat but also seems foreign; common English idioms are alien to him. When repeatedly asked, ‘Shall I beat thine arse now?’, for instance, Ingnorance responds five times with a confused ‘Um-m-m-m’ (ll. 445, 463, 464, 520, 533). Occasionally he falls into broken English in response to the questions ‘What sayth the dog?’ (l. 467) and ‘What said the goose?’ (l. 486), twice replying (once as non-sequitur), ‘Dog bark’ (ll. 468, 487). Tellingly, all this occurs in a hundred-line language ‘lesson’ (l. 456) in which the Vice Idleness ‘play[s] the schoolmistress’ (l. 454) while Ingnorance merely mimics sounds. As Idleness attempts to teach him to say his own name, syllable by syllable (‘Ing—no—ran—s—y’), the fool’s repeated imitation



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of ‘his’ (approximating the sound ‘s’) as ‘Hys-s-s-s-s-s-s’ (ll. 472, 474, 477, 480, 481, etc.) sounds exaggerated. Stephen Greenblatt describes ‘Europeans’ contemptuous dismissal of natives as “parrots”’,42 and Ingnorance nonsensically mimics abuse along with syllables he is meant to repeat: idleness ingnorance idleness ingnorance

Yet again: ran, whoreson! Ran! Ran! Ran, whoreson, ran, ran. Ran, whoreson! Ran, whoreson. (ll. 531–4)

Asked what he has learned, he replies, in a Southwestern English dialect Paula Blank describes as ‘the most foreign of English dialects’,43 ‘Ich cannot tell’ (l. 556), prompting Idleness to mockingly mimic his foreign dialect (‘Ich’, l. 557), as she does on four other occasions (ll. 485, 543, 571, 593). Clearly, the character Ingnorance does not represent a typical English schoolboy that, as John Skelton would have it in Speak Parrot (c. 1521), simply memorized Latin without understanding it. Instead, whereas Skelton’s competent English speakers were represented as parroting a Latin language alien to them, here, an inherently alien black character can only parrot English ineptly as a foreign language. A similar characterization appears in William Wager’s The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art (c. 1560–8). Like Ingnorance, Moros is a black fool. He not only calls to mind ‘a devil of hell’ (l. 1698) in a period in which stage devils were invariably black, but he is simultaneously recognizable as a fool by his face (‘Have you ever seen a more foolish face?’ [l. 699]). His very name ‘Moros’, Spanish plural for ‘Moors’ but also ancient Greek for ‘fool’, ‘doth a fool signify’ (l. 271). Other details suggest that Moros resembles this play’s own references to a Vice named ‘Ignorance’, once again in blackface, because the vices ‘Cruelty’ and ‘Impiety’ jest about Moros being ‘as like a cousin of mine as ever I did see’ (l. 1450) and, above all, ‘like him in face’ (l. 1451). Moros

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is, moreover, an incorrigible pupil in a rote lesson in which, evoking Redford’s ‘Ingnorance’, he repeats instructions and all. Discipline instructs Moros, ‘you will speak rightly after me …’ (ll. 337–8). Moros seemingly complies, until he too parrots without sense: discipline Well said. moros Well said… . piety His meaning you do not consider; Alone you must say the verses as they be. moros His meaning you do not consider; Alone you must say the verses as they be. (ll. 347–55) As with Ingnorance’s failed language lesson, the echoing continues at length. Parroting, then, was a convention for marking black speech in the English tradition before the representation of Pidgin English.

Speaking parrot in Othello The exchanges between a Vice-like Iago and Othello selfconsciously recall such portrayals stereotyping black speakers as linguistically inept parrots but, as we shall see, with a difference: iago Indeed? othello ‘Indeed?’ Ay, indeed! Discern’st thou aught in that? Is he not honest? iago Honest, my lord? othello Honest – ay, honest… . othello What dost thou think? iago Think, my lord? othello ‘Think, my lord?’ By heaven, thou echo’st me… (3.3.101–9)



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Both characters parrot words just used by the other, and Othello even imitates Iago. Hereafter, Othello increasingly echoes himself, too. In the next scene his speech deteriorates into impassioned repetition of the line ‘The handkerchief!’ three times (3.4.94, 95, 98). In 4.1, Othello echoes Iago from the opening dialogue (‘Iago Will you think so? / Othello Think so, Iago?’ [1–2]); formerly eloquent, Othello is reduced to recycling Iago’s words. Even the non-sequitur, ‘Goats and monkeys!’ (4.1.263), recalls Iago’s lurid remark, ‘Were they as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys …’ (3.3.406). Othello’s parroted, starting speech reaches its depths in his ‘fit’, which begins with othello What? What? iago Lie – othello With her? iago With her, on her, what you will. othello Lie with her? Lie on her? We say lie on her when they belie her! Lie with her, zounds, that’s fulsome! – Handkerchief! confessions! handkerchief! … It is not words that shakes me thus. Pish! Noses, ears, and lips. Is’t possible? Confess! handkerchief! O, devil! [He] falls into a trance (4.1.33–43) Significantly, it is this poetic-syntactic collapse that most marks Othello as foolish to Iago (‘Thus credulous fools are caught’ [45]). While critics have been quick to observe Othello’s fall from reasoned eloquence into fractured speech and, from Rymer through Bristol, even to note his debasement into apparent folly, they have failed to acknowledge that in the world of this play he is hardly alone. Consider Cassio’s drunken language in the serio-comic 2.3: ‘Reputation, reputation, reputation!’ (258). He speaks of the effects of his drunkenness in terms significant for this discussion: ‘Drunk? And speak parrot?’

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(275). As we learn in 1 Henry IV, when Prince Hal reduces a tapster to repeating ‘Anon, anon’, the scant, nonsensical words of parrots indicate that they lack what another prince, Hamlet, calls the ‘discourse of reason’ that ‘a beast … wants [lacks]’ (1.2.152). Hal muses, ‘That ever this fellow should have fewer words than a parrot, and yet the son of a woman!’ (2.4.90ff), just as Cassio elaborates that in drunkenness we ‘transform ourselves into beasts!’ (2.3.288); we devolve from ‘be[ing] now a sensible man, by and by a fool, [to] presently a beast!’ (300–1). Cassio suffers his own linguistic breakdown into non-sequiturs: The lieutenant is to be saved before the ancient. Let’s have no more of this, let’s to our affairs. God forgive us our sins! Gentlemen, let’s look to our business. Do not think, gentlemen, I am drunk: this is my ancient, this is my right hand, and this is my left. I am not drunk now: I can stand well enough, and I speak well enough. (2.3.105–12) Here, he speaks ‘startingly’, with much repetition (‘Let’s … let’s … let’s’; ‘Gentlemen … Gentlemen’; ‘This is my … this is my … this is my’). Though he also repeats that he can both stand and speak ‘well enough’, he is forced to admit, ‘I cannot speak’ (185), just as Montano must ‘spare speech’ (195). In a play in which impassioned characters struggle to speak and grapple with the weight and significance of words (see, for example, Othello’s ‘I cannot speak enough of this content, / It stops me here …’ [2.1.194–5], and Desdemona’s reluctance to characterize herself as a whore, which is at least phrased, affectingly on some level, in terms of an inability to speak as ‘I cannot say whore’ [4.2.163]), many experience a verbal collapse as Iago makes them fools: Roderigo is ‘my sick fool’ (2.3.48), Cassio ‘this honest fool’ (2.3.348), and Emilia ‘a foolish wife’ (3.3.308) and ‘a fool’ (4.2.150). In fact, Emilia, whom Desdemona initially describes as having ‘no speech’ herself (2.1.102), decidedly ‘speak[s]



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parrot’ in 5.2, interrupting Othello’s murder of Desdemona with ‘My lord, my lord!… my lord, my lord!’ (5.2.84), echoing Desdemona’s frequent repetition of ‘my lord’ not only throughout the play but five times in this scene alone, and, in the first quarto, an additional ‘O Lord, Lord, Lord!’ in the previous line. Othello consequently mistakes Emilia’s voice for Desdemona’s (‘What noise is this? Not dead? not yet quite dead?’ [85]). Echo-like, Emilia then repeats Desdemona again in her reverberating swan song (‘Willow, willow, willow’ [5.2.245]). Moreover, she speaks ‘startingly’ in repetitive, disjointed fragments, as for instance: ‘Villainy, villainy, villainy! / I think upon ’t, I think I smell’t, O villainy! / … O villainy, villainy!’ (5.2.187–90) or ‘’Twill out, ’twill out!’ (5.2.217). Her increasing tendency to echo when in passion becomes most palpable as she struggles to take in all that Iago has done, almost comically. Othello finally wonders if she fails to comprehend the word ‘husband’ – repeated nine times in twenty lines (though abbreviated here): othello …Thy husband knew it all. emilia My husband? othello Thy husband. … emilia My husband? … othello What needs this iterance, woman? I say, thy husband… . He, woman; I say thy husband – dost understand the word? – My friend, thy husband, honest, honest Iago. (5.2.137–50) Although Emilia judges Othello alone a ‘coxcomb’ and ‘a fool’ (231), ironically, she herself has foolishly believed lies, as with her almost laughable confidence in insisting, ‘I warrant it grieves my husband / As if the cause were his’ (3.3.3–4). In token of this shared foolishness, her own linguistic competence suffers in much the same way as Othello’s does.

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Ovidian echoing, eloquence, and metamorphoses With its pervasive theme of ‘iterance’ (5.2.146), ‘Othello contains the most figures of repetition’ of any of the great ‘mature tragedies’ including Hamlet and King Lear, according to Stefan Keller.44 With the single exception of epizeuxis in Lear, Othello uses more rhetorical figures of repetition – anadiplosis, epizeuxis, epanalepsis, epistrophe, and ploké – by considerable margins. Anadiplosis, where the same word ends one line and begins the next, is most in evidence, its use being ‘two to three times as high’ as in these two other mature tragedies.45 Anadiplosis (Latin reduplicatio) was also ‘a favourite Ovidian turn’, a rhetorical device for ‘organ[izing] his clauses’,46 as in Metamorphoses, studied for its eloquent fluidity. There, the ‘babbling’ Echo, who loses self-initiated speech, can express her feelings only by repeating words just spoken by Narcissus (‘coeamus’ [Let’s meet / copulate!]; ‘sit tibi copia nostri’ [Give myself to you!]; ‘eheu’ [Alas!]; ‘heu frustra dilecte puer’ [Ah youth, beloved in vain!]; ‘vale’ [Farewell!]). In The Garden of Eloquence Henry Peacham thus called anadiplosis ‘the Rhetorical Echo’, ‘for that it carrieth the resemblance of a rebounded voice, or iterated sound’.47 Iago both exploits this ‘rhetorical Echo’ (for example, ‘Othello Is he not honest? Iago Honest, my lord?’ [3.3.103–4]) and mimics it: ‘For “Certes”, says he, “I have already chosen my officer”’ (1.1.115–16). Actors have indeed taken this cue to imitate their Othello, as ‘[Ian] McKellen’s Iago sarcastically imitate[d] Willard White’s deep bass voice and accent as Othello’.48 Iago’s iteration often grates, as with his non-sequitur refrain, ‘put money in thy purse’, repeated six times in 1.3 (ll. 340, 342, 344, 348, 353, 356). Here, he parrots himself needlessly. My point, then, is anything but that Iago is somehow under the influence of a Moor who characteristically ‘speaks parrot’. Just the opposite: it is instead Iago whose malignant,



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dehumanizing influence generates the deterioration in language that affects, to one degree or another, all the central characters in the play. Notably, sounding an ironic ‘rebounded voice’, Iago’s puns employ repetition; he uses antanaclasis (repeating a word while shifting its meaning) eight times and paronomasia (similar sounding words with divergent meanings) twelve times.49 Appropriately, in his final lines, it is almost as if the inhumane Iago cannot help but ‘speak parrot’: ‘What you know, you know. / From this time forth I never will speak word’ (5.2.300–1). Before giving up speech, Iago reverts to his frequent habit of repetition and then surrenders the ‘discourse of reason’ that distinguishes ‘sensible man’ from irrational fool and beast once and for all. Iago, thus, arguably experiences the same kind of metamorphosis he initiates in other characters. Ovid’s influence on Shakespeare’s work has of course been well documented,50 so I will simply recall briefly for the reader but a few of the many evocations of metamorphoses into beasts that recur throughout this play.51 Most notably, Cassio muses on the change in his drunken self that ‘what remains is bestial’ (2.3.260), and we have seen that he recognizes that humans ‘transform ourselves into beasts!’ (2.3.288). Moreover, Iago’s lewd comparisons in Act one scene one reduce the union of Othello and Desdemona to animal sexuality (‘your daughter covered with a Barbary horse’ [110]; ‘an old black ram … tupping your white ewe’ [87–8]; ‘the beast with two backs’ [115]). He further announces his goal as being to ‘Make the Moor thank me, love me, and reward me / For making him egregiously an ass’ (2.1.306–7). Here, Iago gloats that Othello will foolishly dote on him for being the very one responsible for transforming ‘the Moor’ into a bestial fool. Of Othello’s radical transformation Iago further asserts, ‘These Moors are changeable’ (1.3.347); ‘The Moor already changes’ (3.3.328); and ‘He is much changed’ (4.1.306–7). Much as Iago intended, Othello indeed experiences an internal metamorphosis, metaphorically becoming beastlike.

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In many ways, the particular Ovidian myth from Metamorphoses that is likely most significant to an interpretation of Othello’s transformation is that of Actaeon. After all, Lodovico rebukes Iago with an especially Ovidian apostrophe, ‘O Spartan dog!’ (5.2.359), just as Roderigo also calls Iago ‘O inhuman dog!’ (5.1.62). As Bate has shown, Shakespeare alludes to the first hunting dog to pursue its master Actaeon after his metamorphosis into a stag, the dog called ‘Spartana gente’ (‘of Spartan kind’). The point of Lodovico’s Ovidian allusion is thus that Iago had likewise turned on and destroyed his master. Such potential Actaeon associations are foregrounded when, after the epileptic fit, Iago asks, ‘[H]ave you not hurt your head?’ (4.1.59), which Othello takes as a cuckold joke (‘Dost thou mock me?’ [60]), before lamenting, ‘A horned man’s a monster, and a beast’ (62). Actaeon’s story, I argue, is particularly meaningful and relevant to Othello in that it too relates the loss of speech to an attendant loss of selfhood. In Arthur Golding’s influential 1567 translation (reprinted 1575, 1584, 1587, 1593, 1603, 1612),  …when [Actaeon] saw his face And horned temples in the brook, he would have cried, ‘alas’, But as for then no kind of speech out of his lips could pass. … He strained oftentimes to speak, and was about to say, ‘I am Acteon; know your lord and master I pray.’ But use of words and speech did want to utter forth his mind. (33r-v) As here, Ovid’s most poignant transformations are those in which a victim under stress experiences a dissolution of self while suffering an inability to communicate, to express feelings, to retain individuality, humanity, or life. Actaeon is



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one of several famous figures from Metamorphoses for whom the poignant rupture of speech coincides with some loss of self (including Echo, Philomela, Io, Orpheus, and Byblis). Othello shares just such a loss: when he concludes his echoing ‘Farewell’ speech that ‘Othello’s occupation’s gone’ (3.3.360), he anticipates his realization of how much he has changed into a ‘rash … man’ (5.2.280), poignantly expressed by conveying distance from his former self via his use of third person: ‘That’s he that was Othello’ (5.2.281). Furthermore, whereas critics have tended to see disintegration and repetition in Othello’s discourse as reflecting a unique ‘mental collapse from which he never fully recovers’,52 I would argue instead that his repetition at the end of the play represents a recovery of rhetorical eloquence. It is not parroting but anaphora, repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of several clauses. Othello thus regains a signature kind of eloquence, speaking in the lengthy, fluid sentences and using the distinctive rhetorical devices he had earlier employed, as we can see by way of comparison of the following lines: Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances; Of moving accidents by flood and field, Of hair-breadth scapes i’th’ imminent deadly  breach, Of being taken by the insolent foe And sold to slavery; of my redemption thence ... And of the cannibals that each other eat …. (1.3.135ff.) Farewell the tranquil mind! Farewell content! Farewell the plumèd troops and the big wars That makes ambition virtue! Oh, farewell! Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump … Farewell: Othello’s occupation’s gone … (3.3.351–60)

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His recurring, characteristic use of balanced, flowing anaphora – Latinate rhetoric associated with Cicero’s First Oration against Catiline – prefigures Othello’s powerful suicide speech: … Then must you speak Of one that loved not wisely, but too well; Of one not easily jealous … … of one whose hand, Like the base Judean, threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes, Albeit unused to the melting mood, Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees Their médicinable gum. (5.2.341–50) Anything but parrot-like, this poetic nine-line sentence echoes the fluid eloquence that characterized Othello in the Senate scene. Given his facility with speech, this ‘noble Moor’ would have presented a stark contrast to audience expectations in the global Renaissance and the promise of stereotypical ‘rude … speech’ (1.3.82). With 860 lines, only four Shakespearean characters – Hamlet (1422), Gloucester / Richard III (1124), Iago (1097), and Henry V (1025) – are finally more verbal than Othello, who is indeed considerably more communicative than even such voluble characters as Coriolanus (809), Timon (795), Antony (766), Richard II (753), Brutus (701), Lear (697), Titus (687), Macbeth (681), Rosalind (668), Leontes (648), Prospero (603), Pericles (592), Romeo (591), Berowne (591), Falstaff in 2 Henry IV (593), Falstaff in 1 Henry IV (585), Portia (565), and Petruchio (549).53



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Conclusions: Beyond Manichean binary interpretations Critics over the last decade and more have expressed a keen desire to move beyond binary proto-racial logic in interpretations of Renaissance literature, especially in readings of Othello. Consequently, any further considerations of early modern European constructions of the Other have sometimes been declared ahistorical via such shaky historical grounds as an insistence that binary logic applied to race only much later, not in the early modern period. Daniel Vitkus for one has gone so far as to claim that the oppositions of colonizer and colonized or that between Self and Other ‘cannot be maintained in a properly historicized description of England’s early modern culture’,54 by insisting that ‘an early modern Mediterranean context … is nothing like the “Manichean world” described by Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth’.55 Yet, sweeping objections to analyses of binarism are finally difficult to maintain on rigorous historical grounds. As we have seen, early moderns, particularly those representing the Mediterranean, such as the famous Gil Vicente, Lope de Vega, Francisco de Quevedo, and Tristano Martinelli, often employed overt binary proto-racial constructions of black speech as tending to be Other with rare exception (ladino versus bozal, assimilated versus unassimilated, rational versus foolish, white-souled versus black-souled). Moreover, it is perhaps equally telling that Vitkus himself cannot help but fall back into an essentializing Manichean interpretation, one maintaining the old reading that ‘Shakespeare’s Othello does rely upon a binary, one that was violently apparent to Protestant culture – that of heaven and hell, described in terms of white and black’56 as he concludes that ‘this binary’57 is emphatically restored when Othello himself ‘reverts’: Shakespeare’s Othello begins with the spectacle of a ‘noble Moor’ who is neither ‘white’ nor ‘black’, in the sense that

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his spiritual ‘blackness’ has been ‘whitened’ by conversion to Christianity, but he reverts to ‘black’ deeds.58 In both its dismissal of Renaissance binaries and its unwitting inability to escape them, this reading is exemplary of lingering critical problems. Notably, even avowed global Renaissance critics too often remain oblivious to influences outside England, all the more so in constructions of race. At the same time, a post-modern impatience with binaries as simplistic too often leads, ironically, to an inability to recognize how complex early modern responses to them could be; that is, early modern authors were already blurring and questioning binaries. Therefore, even as we recognize that, historically, binary proto-racial logic was already widely available to early moderns, we should acknowledge that Othello and attendant issues of race in this period require a nuanced response. I therefore want to conclude this discussion by pointing out that a serious challenge to binary proto-racial logic in Othello can look beyond the dead end of exclusively Manichean frames of reference. A serious challenge to the seemingly everlasting binary interpretations of the play engages Shakespeare’s emphatic recourse to global Renaissance typologies of stereotypically foolish or inept black speech, audience familiarity with the eloquence of the white-souled Ethiope, and a kind of Ovidian humanism. These different frames of reference, so central to the play, together draw attention to Othello’s restored eloquence, which worked against simplistic allegorical Manichean logic of the period. His return to eloquence likewise flouts once-familiar transnational traditions representing blackness in terms of inherent folly through inept speech, as it recalls instead the well-speaking ‘white-souled’ Ethiope. Whereas still-dominant, strictly Manichean interpretations find only a degrading reversion in Othello, in this play, where Black/White fool binarism breaks down in white speakers as well, Othello reverts to noble eloquence. Further adding to the complexity here, he again speaks as if a ‘white-souled’ Ethiope, paradoxically, in the very moment he nobly accepts his



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damnation as punishment for his sins. That is, fully converted, wholly responsible, he ‘turns’ not so much Turk as noble Roman and ladino. Thus, ‘speak[ing] parrot’ in Shakespeare’s tragedy serves less as an essential, conventional mark of an inherently foolish sub-humanity than as a poignant sign of feeling, of being only too human – a potentially eloquent sign not of race or predestined damnation but of Ovidian humanism.

Notes 1

Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (Menston: Scolar Press, 1970), 146, 128; Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 74; François Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 287–89; Michael Bristol, ‘Charivari and the Comedy of Abjection in Othello’, in Materialist Shakespeare: A History, ed. Ivo Kamps (New York: Verso, 1995), 142–65; 147; http:// www.folger.edu/documents/DataminingShakespeare_transcript. pdf (accessed 20 December 2011).

2

E. A. J. Honigmann, Introduction to Othello, Arden 3 (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1997), 80.

3

Graham Bradshaw, Misrepresentations: Shakespeare and the Materialists (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 224.

4

Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 25.

5

Bate, 3.

6

The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Edward Arber (London: 1869), 258.

7

Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, The History of Travel in the West and East Indies and Other Countries Lying Either Way, trans. Richard Eden, ed. Richard Willes (London, 1577; STC 649), 394v.

8

Ian Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 74.

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Kate Lowe, ‘The Stereotyping of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe’, in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, eds T. F. Earle and K. J. P. Lowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 17–47; 26.

10 Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Slave Trade to America, 4 vols (1930; repr., New York: Octagon Books, 1965), 1:48. 11 Henry Louis Gates, Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the ‘Racial’ Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 15. 12 Robert Henke, ‘Border-Crossing in the Commedia dell’ Arte’, in Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theater, eds Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 29. 13 Robert Henke, Performance and Literature in the Commedia dell’Arte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 163, 166. 14 Magnus Huber, Ghanaian Pidgin English in Its West African Context: A Sociohistorical and Structural Analysis (Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1999), 14; Huber does not discuss Harlequin. 15 Huber, 17. 16 Jeremy Lawrance, ‘Black Africans in Renaissance Spanish Literature’, in Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, eds T. F. Earle and K. J. P. Lowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 70–93; 72. 17 Friedrich Bouterwerk, History of Spanish and Portuguese Literature: Portuguese Literature (London: Boosey and Sons, 1823), 85. 18 John Lipski, A History of Afro-Hispanic Language: Five Centuries, Five Continents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 55. 19 Lipski, 56, 57; Peter Burke, Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 38. 20 Albert Gérard, European-Language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2 vols (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1986), 1:47; Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood, From Slavery to Emancipation in the Atlantic World (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 13.



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21 For further analysis, see José I. Suárez, The Carnival Stage: Vicentine Comedy within the Serio-Comic Mode (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993), 84. 22 Lawrance, 72–3; John Beusterien, An Eye on Race: Perspectives from Theater in Imperial Spain (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2010), 109. Lawrance estimates 1500–10 and Beusterian as 1480. 23 Aurelia Martín-Casares and Marga G. Barranco, ‘The musical legacy of black Africans in Spain: A review of our sources’, Anthropological Notebooks 15.2 (2009): 51–60; 54. 24 Lipski, 79. 25 Aurelia Martín Casares and Matga G. Barranco, ‘Popular Literary Depictions of Black African Weddings in Early Modern Spain’, Renaissance and Reformation 31.2 (Spring 2008): 107–21; 112. 26 Burke, 38. 27 Francisco de Quevedo, ‘Libro de todas las cosas y otras muchas más’ in Obras de Don Francisco de Quevedo Villegas (Brussels, 1661), 583–96. 28 Lipski, 84, 85. 29 Beusterien, 108. 30 Beusterien, 108. 31 Beusterien, 127. 32 Beusterien, 129–30. 33 Beusterien, 129. 34 Thomas Middleton, The Triumphs of Truth, ed. David Bergeron, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, gen. eds Gary Taylor and John Lavignino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 973. 35 Neil Freeman, The Tempest (Vancouver: 1998), xl. 36 Anston Bosman, ‘“Best Play with Mardian”: Eunuch and Blackamoor as Imperial Culturegram’, in Shakespeare Studies 34 (2006): 123–57. Reprinted in Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Ania Loomba (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 280–9; 282. 37 Robert Hornback, The English Clown Tradition from the

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Middle Ages to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 49. 38 Bosman, 283. 39 Virginia Mason Vaughan, Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 118. 40 The English Moor, ed. Matthew Steggle, from Richard Brome Online, 4.4, 2084–94, retaining Quarto spelling: http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/brome/viewOriginal. jsp?type=ORIG&play=EM&act=4#723 (accessed 15 August 2012). 41 Vaughan, 119. 42 Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 99; Greenblatt does not discuss Wit and Science or the comic. 43 Paula Blank, Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings (London: Routledge, 1996), 80. 44 Stefan Keller, The Development of Shakespeare’s Rhetoric: A Study of Nine Plays (Tübingen: Francke, 2009), 168. 45 Keller, 168. 46 Stanley Wells, in Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, eds Michael Dobson and Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 334; William S. Anderson, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Books 1–5 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 156 notes 32–3. 47 Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence [1577] (London: 1593; STC 19498), 52. 48 Othello, ed. Julie Hankey, Shakespeare in Production, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 117–18 note 17. 49 Keller, 168. 50 On Ovid’s influence on Shakespeare and the playwright’s familiarity with the ancient poet, see T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 1:339, 2:418–20, 2:436–40;



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R. K. Root, Classical Mythology in Shakespeare (New York: H. Holt, 1903), 3–5; John Velz, ‘Shakespeare’s Ovid in the Twentieth Century: A Critical Survey’, in Shakespeare’s Ovid: The Metamorphoses in the Plays and Poems, ed. A. B. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 181–97. 51 See especially Jonathan Bate, ‘Ovid and the Mature Tragedies: Metamorphosis in Othello and King Lear’, in Shakespeare and the Literary Tradition, eds Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen (New York: Garland, 1999), 251–62; 254. 52 Honigmann, 80. 53 Alfred Harbage, ‘Table TT: Comparative Analysis’, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, rev. edn (London: Allen Lane, 1969), 31. 54 Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 3. 55 Vitkus, 7. 56 Vitkus, 2. 57 Vitkus, 2. 58 Vitkus, 23.

4 Othello’s Black Handkerchief Ian Smith

The cover of the 1997 Arden edition of Othello boasts a striking image: a single, white handkerchief suspended in mid-air, tilted at a downward angle against a smoky grey background.1 The cover art insists on the centrality of the play’s controversial piece of fabric and asserts as ‘ocular proof’ (3.3.363) what everyone seems to know or take for granted – that the handkerchief is white. Among critics, this presumption of whiteness has been the rule, with the discussion of the white handkerchief centring on Desdemona, her sexuality, questions of virginity, and marriage, as in Lynda Boose’s influential analysis: Shakespeare ‘insistently created for his audience a highly visual picture of a square piece of white linen spotted with strawberry-red fruit’.2 She continues: ‘What Shakespeare was representing was a visually recognizable reduction of Othello and Desdemona’s wedding-bed sheets, the visual proof of their consummated marriage.’3 The neat correspondences between a white handkerchief and sheets, their shared morphology, and accompanying red emblems have assumed an unquestioned critical orthodoxy.4 Boose’s assertion of the

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handkerchief’s whiteness is matched by her insistence on the specifically European nature of the wedding-night test in order to justify its appropriateness for Desdemona, the Venetian, so that ‘whiteness’ and ‘Europeanness’ coincide to provide an overdetermined racial discourse for which the handkerchief stands.5 Along with the handkerchief’s purported whiteness, the identification of the spotted or embroidered strawberry pattern suggests a home-grown tradition, since the ‘strawberry plant – its fruit, flowers, and leaves considered – is among the most frequently occurring of such objects represented in English domestic embroidery surviving from the period’.6 Not surprisingly, therefore, Farah Karim-Cooper, with an eye to cosmetics, identifies the red and white of the napkin as symbols of the ‘Anglo-European feminine ideal’ found in Desdemona.7 Karim-Cooper’s analysis not only bears witness to the overwhelming critical tendency to associate the handkerchief with Desdemona, but also makes explicit the racial presupposition among scholars that identifies the redness of the embroidered pattern and the whiteness of the handkerchief with Desdemona’s body: capillary or virginal blood and white flesh. Race has, indeed, played a significant part in the critical unpacking of the handkerchief in the play, but it has been curiously annexed to Desdemona and, most visibly, the whiteness of her body. Boose’s reading rebutted effectively, in part, the notorious attacks by Thomas Rymer,8 elevating the handkerchief from a mere plot device to address the substance of the drama while integrating the traditions of the virginity test and the strawberry iconography in domestic embroidery. But in Shakespeare’s time, the strawberry pattern embroidered on a white cloth would most likely have been in blackwork, that is, worked in black thread. Handkerchiefs with blackwork were ubiquitous, as seen among several presented to Queen Elizabeth as New Year’s gifts in 1577/78: ‘three handkerchiefs wrought with black Spanish work’, and in 1588/89, ‘six handkerchiefs of cambric wrought with black silk’.9 There remains, moreover,



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an even bigger question: was the handkerchief white? Despite the obvious familiarity of white handkerchiefs represented in paintings from the period, colour added to the variety of sumptuous elements – as in the following entry among the queen’s New Year’s gifts for 1561/62: six handkerchiefs presented by Lady Lane, ‘four of them black silk and gold, and two of red silk’.10 Black handkerchiefs, in other words, were not unknown, and this essay argues for the presence of a black handkerchief in Othello. Stage properties originated in the real world outside the theatre, and they assumed different functions and manifested different identities at various stages in their social circulation, up to and including their transition into the theatre space. While the labour-intensive cloth market historically engaged women as integral participants and producers, the critical tendency to identify Othello’s handkerchief with Desdemona betrays the erroneous presumption that women were virtually the exclusive users and wearers of handkerchiefs.11 By contrast, I examine the handkerchief primarily in relation to Othello and will concentrate on Othello’s handkerchief speech in Act 3. The traditional focus on women, handkerchiefs, and other goods has allowed an important examination of early modern gender politics, but race in relation to the handkerchief has received short shrift. This essay asks readers to contemplate the role of the handkerchief in constructing an idea of blackness and race that places severe constraints on black subjectivity. A ‘cultural biography’ of black cloth in the early modern theatre would include not only its use for Othello’s handkerchief but also, as this essay further argues, its function as a covering for actors’ bodies, employed to materialize the imagined black bodies of real-world Africans.12 As a corporal supplement signifying black skin, black cloth functioned as an epidermal prosthesis in the theatre of racial cross-dressing. Different from clothing or costume, the prosthetic black cloth’s primary function was to mimic the absent real black subject and to give it meaning. Prosthetic black cloth did not

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confer or shape social identity in the manner of clothing; in the representational and semantic space of the theatre, it was a body – a material or textile body that fashioned an idea of race contingent on the thingness of black textile.13 A peculiar, racially powerful consequence attended the black body, imagined and contemplated within the dialogic space of the theatre, where black cloth – the material object – defined and determined a specific notion of racial subjectivity. Reading a black handkerchief in Othello produces continuity between the famous fabric and the tradition of staging racial identity in the early modern period, situating blackness, corporeality, and race at the play’s centre.14 In examining the staging of blackness in the early modern theatre and its specific use of cloth among other related items, the essay argues that a radical reification of identity emerges, literal and concrete rather than rhetorical and metaphorical, to offer a material account of race.

Handkerchief dyed in mummy From the perspective of European cultural history, the handkerchief is first and foremost an expensive luxury item dating back to the medieval period. Found several times in the wardrobe accounts of Richard II during the 1380s, orders for ‘small pieces of linen made to be given to the lord king for blowing and covering his nose’ constitute some of the earliest English references to handkerchiefs.15 The generic notation concerning ‘small pieces of linen’, reasons George Stow, serves as an important clue as to the novelty of the item described at that time.16 Norbert Elias has famously argued that the introduction of the handkerchief to blow and wipe one’s nose, as opposed to using hands or clothing, marked a significant shift in a civilizing process that was aggressively aimed at shoring up class distinctions.17 ‘The ladies’, writes Elias, ‘hang the precious, richly embroidered cloth from their girdles. The



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young “snobs” of the Renaissance offer it to others or carry it about in their mouths.’18 The demand for the handkerchief as an aristocratic accessory persisted into the sixteenth century, as can be ascertained from the court records of the New Year’s gifts presented to the queen by gentlewomen: 72 handkerchiefs for 1562, 51 for 1578, and 42 for 1579.19 Made of expensive fabrics such as silk and cambric edged with gold, silver, or lace, and embellished with jewels and buttons, handkerchiefs evoked a gorgeous tapestry of rich, sensuous textiles, embroidery, and ornamentation, forming a portable symbolic treasury of the owner’s wealth and status.20 While initiating the gender neutrality of the handkerchief’s user, Richard’s great wardrobe accounts cemented the association of the handkerchief with aristocratic prestige, wealth, and display. Still, by the early seventeenth century, the availability of handkerchiefs in a wider variety and quality of textiles, both imported and locally manufactured for a more inexpensive product, met the growing demand of different consumer classes.21 This demand for handkerchiefs, along with similar luxury items, must be set against the economic and cultural background of a new consumerism. Energized by new shopping opportunities and regimens, the royal promotion of English luxury trades and manufactures, the incitement to own and collect inspired by travel and print, and the impact of early modern science on consumption, the new consumerism resulted in what Linda Levy Peck calls the ‘reinvention of identities through new artifacts’.22 The profusion of goods inspired a culture of commodity consumption that celebrated individual ownership and purchasing power. Thus, a considerable agency emerged in the abundance of objects that uniquely redefined early modern consumers, resulting in the commodification of the subject.23 Critics of early modern culture have found other instances of such commodified identity, understood as the interdependent relation between subject and object and the apparent transformation of the subject by and into an object. Implicit in

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this reading of early modern material identity is Marx’s notion of commodification, which articulates a defining trace of the object within the subject: ‘the object comes to overpower the subject, mysteriously incorporating the latter’s labor into itself – so that the subject’s activity looks like a property of the produced object itself.’24 Within the context of clothing and gender, Will Fisher states that ‘objects work to shape the identities that they help construct’ and ‘that the material form of these items mediates the types of identity that are brought into being through them’.25 The theme of textiles and cloth is, of course, relevant to the production and manufacture of handkerchiefs. ‘Like the handkerchief’ in Othello, Douglas Bruster writes, ‘clothing becomes the body, in both senses of the verb’.26 Juana Green suggests that women in city comedies who work in shops filled with goods ‘risk being commodified by the men who would conflate them with their ware’.27 But critical iterations of commodified identities have ignored race altogether. Thus where Bruster observes that, ‘the inscription of identity into objects is followed by an admission that the subjective then shares the properties of the material world’,28 my essay asks readers to contemplate the meaning and impact of such a claim in the context of racial subjectivity. When we first hear about the handkerchief in Othello, it is presented as a portable version or extension of Othello that Desdemona keeps ‘evermore about her / To kiss and talk to’ (3.3.299–300). Closely identified with Othello, the handkerchief is a substitute self, a metonymic memento, which he gives as a pledge of marital fidelity: the two shall become one flesh.29 Should this substitute self be separated or lost, it will signal the marriage’s dissolution (3.4.57–70). The handkerchief’s role as substitute for Othello is reinforced by its African provenance, established by the Egyptian who gave it first to his mother; transmitted to the son, it was then passed to the wife, Desdemona being the only non-African in the sequence. The rules of ownership, safekeeping, and fidelity are established by the Egyptian woman, ‘a charmer’ (3.4.59) whose extraordinary powers have invested the handkerchief with a



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magical force that recalls the discourse of race and witchcraft elaborated by Brabantio earlier in the play (1.2.62–81). Given this association, Shakespeare includes an important description of the handkerchief’s fabrication or manufacture (3.4.71–7). A sibyl sewed it in a moment of ‘prophetic’ and artistic ‘fury’ (l. 74), at the height of creative and expressive energy. We imagine that the sewing encompassed both the construction of the actual square or rectangle of material with its finished edges and the embroidery of the strawberries that beautified and distinguished the work.30 We are also informed of the material used – silk made from the rarest or ‘hallowed’ (l. 75) worms. The fixation among critics on a white handkerchief with red strawberries might suggest that Shakespeare made a significant departure from his source in Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi, which speaks only of ‘a handkerchief embroidered most delicately in the Moorish fashion’.31 However, without a mention of strawberries in the source, the handkerchief is branded as foreign and unique in its exceptional Moorish design. Natasha Korda finds that Theobald’s translation – rendering the elaborate workmanship as ‘curiously wrought’ – ‘captures the period’s fascination with elaborate, exotic curiosities’ and identifies ‘the handkerchief as precisely one of those foreign curiosities that were such sought-after commodities in England and about which the English were so ambivalent’.32 The play’s foreign silk handkerchief, so strongly identified with Othello, speaks directly to the ambivalence he experiences as the imported wartime general-for-hire, who is also a racially impugned, miscegenetic Moor. Shakespeare takes the reference to the handkerchief’s ‘Moorish fashion’ more seriously than has been allowed, translating the racial and ethnic designation of the source in the presentation of a black handkerchief in the play. Othello explains that this extraordinary, high-quality silk material was ‘dyed in mummy’ (l. 76), and most editorial glosses point to the medicinal and magical properties implied by the term as a substance derived from mummified bodies. Since mummification implies Egypt specifically, the dye and

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dyeing techniques are consistent with the narrative of the handkerchief’s origins in the Egyptian charmer and strengthen its association with Othello and his African history and heritage.33 Late in the play, Othello speaks of the handkerchief as a gift, ‘an antique token / My father gave my mother’ (5.2.215–16). While the exact lineage shifts from the charmer to his father as initiator of the gift, two important points remain consistent: the handkerchief’s African ancestry and its ‘antique’ quality that links it not only to the earlier reference of the sibyl, but also to Egyptian mummy highlighted in my current argument. What has not been sufficiently explored among scholars, therefore, is the colour of the cloth which, given the textual details concerning mummy, would be dyed black: that is, a dark colour resembling Othello’s skin. Othello’s narrative history of the handkerchief makes a salient point that should not be overlooked: in a series of references identifying the cloth industry and especially handkerchief manufacture – sewing, embroidery, silk production, and dyeing – the designation ‘dyed’ points directly to the addition of colour so that it appears other than white. When spurred on by Iago to anger and jealousy over the missing handkerchief, Othello laments, ‘O, it comes o’er my memory / As doth the raven o’er the infectious house’ (4.1.20–1). Clearly, the raven comparison indicates that throughout the play Othello conceives of the handkerchief as black. Additionally, ‘infectious’, from the Latin inficere meaning ‘to dye’, confirms the play’s recurrent association of the handkerchief, blackness, and dyeing. Most recent scholars locate mummy within the discourse of early modern medicine and, more specifically, medicinal cannibalism.34 That is, they trace the history of the widespread belief and practice of ingesting imported mummified flesh for its therapeutic value in addressing a spectrum of illnesses.35 Strange though this idea of eating desiccated human flesh might appear, its familiarity in England is registered by its frequent mention among authors, including Shakespeare.36 Richard Sugg enumerates the four types of mummy used in



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corpse medicine that in addition to the classic associations with embalmed Egyptian bodies remind us of the supplyside recourse to recently dead bodies in light of increasing European consumer demand: ‘One is mineral pitch; the second the matter derived from embalmed Egyptian corpses; the third, the relatively recent bodies of travellers, drowned by sandstorms in the Arabian deserts; and the fourth, flesh taken from fresh corpses (usually those of executed felons, and ideally within about three days) and then treated and dried by Paracelsian practitioners.’37 While the latter two have caught the attention of contemporary critics – both dealing with the processed bodies of recently deceased persons, the last showcasing a seemingly macabre taste among early moderns – it is the first two, much older and connected to Egypt, that I find relevant for a discussion of Othello’s handkerchief, dyed in mummy and steeped in the ancient lore of charmers, sibyls, and magic. Focusing only on mummy as an edible corpse product, moreover, obscures its full significance in relation to Othello’s handkerchief. A. Rosalie David reminds us that the designation ‘mummy’ referring to ‘the artificially preserved bodies of the ancient Egyptians’ is a misnomer: ‘The use of this term for such bodies is in fact erroneous.’38 Over time, confusion had arisen between the name of the active medicinal agent, called bitumen, the liquid extracted from mummified corpses, and the actual dead flesh.39 However, more is at stake in Othello, for what Karl H. Dannelfeldt describes as the ‘confusing process of transference and substitution’ goes to the heart of the central issue of colour.40 The specific confusion arose because of the similarity in appearance and texture between the black, bituminous substance coveted for its supposed medicinal virtues; the black liquid extracted from mummified corpses which was, in turn, alleged to have a similar therapeutic value; and the ubiquitous black colour of mummified flesh.41 ‘Mummy’ or bitumen (mumia or mumiya in Arabic), also known as pissasphalt, is a natural mineral pitch found in the eastern Mediterranean and credited among medieval Arab

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scholars as having medicinal properties.42 While Pliny the Elder and the Greek physician Dioscorides had also asserted a similar set of claims, by the twelfth century European scholars confirmed the curative properties of mumia in Arabic medical texts.43 The discovery generated interest that accelerated into the early modern period for a drug with an increased demand animating the quest for alternate sources of bitumen in mummified bodies. Regarding bitumen, Dominic Montserrat states that ‘the black, pitchy deposits found in ancient preserved bodies were equated with this substance, which became the designation for the body as a whole’.44 Writing in 1203, Arabian physician and historian Abd Allatif maintains that ‘the mummy found in the hollows of corpses in Egypt differs but immaterially from the nature of mineral mummy; and where any difficulty arises in procuring the latter, may be substituted in its stead’.45 Arabian authorities thus legitimized this development, ‘advocating the therapeutic value of any part of a mummy, not just mumia; it is this understanding of mummy that came to prevail in Europe’.46 The Egyptian practice of mummification – dehydrating dead bodies; anointing them with resins and oil; embalming them with myrrh, aloes, and spices; and wrapping the bodies in linen – grew beyond the exclusive province of the Pharaohs and the privileged social elites to the broader society. The Ptolemaic period (332–30 bc) witnessed the rise in commercial mummification that led to a change in techniques as bodily cavities of obscure individuals were ‘stuffed hastily with a range of available materials, including mud, molten resin, broken pottery, and the black, pitchy substance known as bitumen’.47 With the growing European demand for and the limited supply of naturally occurring medicinal bitumen, one seemingly obvious solution was to re-extract the bitumen that had been used in mummifying bodies in the first instance.48 Eventually, the logic of the market saw the expediency in medicinal metonymy, whereby the actual cadaverous flesh was alleged to have healing powers as well. Summarizing the brief history outlined here, Warren R. Dawson reports that



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the ‘medicinal value of bitumen was first derived from natural sources: the next stage was the pitch-like resinous substance obtained from mummified human bodies, and finally, it was forgotten that it was the properties of bitumen that were effective in medicine, and the virtue was transferred to the bodies themselves’.49 In Othello, Shakespeare calls attention to mummy as the fluid extracted from the preserved carcasses. Samuel Johnson, citing the ‘mummy’ reference in Othello in his Dictionary, describes the ‘liquor’ emanating from mummified bodies as ‘a thick, opaque and viscous fluid, of a blackish and a strong but not disagreeable smell’.50 So characteristic was the black colour of mummy that Johnson’s linguistic slippage allows for the blackness of the odour as well. It is the extraction process and its exudate to which Othello refers in identifying the handkerchief’s bituminous black dye ‘which the skilful / Conserved of maidens’ hearts’ (3.4.70–1). Not surprisingly, in formulating his plot to destroy Desdemona, Iago draws on the discourse of mummy, claiming, ‘So will I turn her virtue into pitch’ (2.3.355). As the wife of Othello, Desdemona will share the same punitive fate of blackness, couched in the terms of pitchy bitumen that the play attaches to Othello’s black handkerchief ‘dyed in mummy’. At the same time, the popularly circulated idea of mummy as black flesh injects Othello’s description of the handkerchief with a self-referential power and enforces a connection in the audience’s mind between the dyed fabric and Othello’s own black skin. In keeping with the handkerchief as a substitute self for Othello, its silk fabric takes on racial significance when read properly as dyed black, its dyeing agent having evolved over time into the black flesh that had become such a familiar part of European pharmacopeia. This arresting colour is a graphic reminder of the handkerchief’s function as a portable, visible metonym for Othello, where the ‘mummified’ or dyed fabric is steeped in a discourse of black corporeality.

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Textile black bodies First performed during the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean era, Othello (1604) emerges at a transitional historical juncture. The play not only registers changing notions of race but also presents them simultaneously, holding them in tension for the audience to grasp the trending shifts and developments in racial thinking. Language, religion, geography, and colour jostle in the semantic mixture of early modern racial discourse.51 Contingent on the changing ideas concerning race, however, are the multiple theatrical techniques of racial representation employed from the sixteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. As theatrical techniques changed and different materials were used for racial simulation, visual spectacles of blackness took on new emphases and meanings that, in turn, had a direct impact on the audience’s perception of the black body. This essay’s investigation of Othello’s handkerchief, its mummified material heavily inflected with corporal significance, is set against the changing early modern traditions of staging the black body. In the absence of Africans to play certain roles, how was blackness staged in the early modern English theatre? This interrogation animates, in part, Dympna Callaghan’s contention that blackface was the most obvious and compelling means of racial mimicry.52 While she recognizes the use of lambskin fur, for example, to imitate Africans’ hair or costume as indicators of foreignness, she finds most pertinent the skin-blackening agents such as ‘charred cork mixed with a little oil’.53 ‘More striking than all other features and accoutrements of alterity, such as nakedness or sartorial splendor’, she maintains, ‘the definitive characteristic of the racial other both on and offstage remained skin color.’54 Othello’s well-known self-denigrating statements, such as his comparison of Desdemona’s ruined reputation to his ‘begrimed and black’ face, would appear to endorse this focus on cosmetically altered skin coloration (3.3.390). ‘Othello’s



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darkness’ is the play’s central concern, Karim-Cooper claims; ‘the actor’s painted black face is the material signifier that brings this issue literally to the forefront’.55 Considerable evidence concerning the roster of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury London stage performers in Shakespearean roles, specifically Othello – Spranger Barry, Edmund Kean, William Charles Macready, David Garrick, Edwin Booth, John Philip Kemble, Henry Irving – along with their greater historical proximity, contributes to the narrowing of our contemporary perception of blackface as skin painting.56 The early modern stage practices of blackface, the imitation of black skin, however, exceeded various concoctions of skin paint and cosmetics. They included the fabrication of blackness from textiles and leathers that, while less naturalistic, were more ideologically expressive as a representation of the black body in its stark materiality and tangible objecthood. The royal festivities at Whitehall in 1510 for a visiting group of foreign dignitaries highlighted an array of international characters that, like the dignitaries, represented ‘diverse realms and countries’.57 Following the entry of a series of royal personages dressed in foreign attire, including Henry VIII and the Earl of Essex ‘apparelled after Turkey fashion’, were torchbearers ‘apparelled in crimson satin and green, like Morescoes, their faces black’.58 At first, the reader is unsure whether the torchbearers, belonging to a lower dramatic hierarchy, have their faces darkened by way of an unspecified skin-blackening substance. The continuing account, however, clarifies the specific use of black cloth to mimic skin for others. Immediately after the banquet show, ‘the king brought in a mummery’ that included six ladies in three pairs, each pair resplendently dressed in a manner befitting a royal personage, every shred of clothing and hair ornament recorded in sumptuous, gorgeous detail, but all described as appearing black, like Moors: ‘Their faces, necks, arms and hands, covered with fine pleasance black: some call it lumberdines, which is marvellous thin, so that the same ladies seemed to be Negros or black Moors.’59 Blackness, or more accurately

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the imitation of black skin, was achieved through the use of cloth – pleasance, a fine gauzy fabric – covering the face, neck, and extremities. Throughout the sixteenth century and accelerating into the next, this taste for showcasing foreigners in performance contexts persisted in court entertainments, masques, and plays. As an alternative to having very thin fabric covering the face, visors made of cloth or leather were in common usage, as recorded in the payments for the 1542 masque: ‘for eight vizards for Moors at 3s. 4d. apiece’.60 Also important were the performers’ arms, which were frequently covered with black gloves made of leather or velvet. The royal entertainments for February 1548 featured a masque of Moors requiring eight pairs of ‘long velvet gloves for Moors’.61 Some actors wore dyed leather gloves made from goatskin, the court records noting a payment of four shillings ‘for making of six pair of gloves made of goats’ skins at 8d. the pair’.62 In the 1559 coronation revels for Elizabeth I, thirty-four yards of black velvet were ‘employed wholly into legs, feet, arms, and hands for a masque of Moors’, indicating the care taken to replicate body parts. Cloth was not spared in the replication of legs, feet, arms, and hands.63 While clothing as costume covered the actor’s trunk, other exposed areas were the product of textile mimicry. The 1545/46 Christmas revels highlighted velvet as a suitably costly and luxurious fabric for royal entertainments, used to cover the performers’ arms, as records detail an order ‘for four pair gloves of black velvet for two Mores, 20s.’.64 By 1605, significant developments in cosmetic paint had occurred, and it is tempting to assume that in the early seventeenth century advancements in cosmetic blackface had eclipsed the textile body and the audience’s routine association of cloth with blackness.65 But this was not the case. Ben Jonson’s Masque of Blackness (1605) with its twelve African daughters of Niger caused consternation among attendees at the sight of the Queen and her ladies ‘all painted like Blackamores, face and neck bare’.66 Jonson’s spectacular cosmetically painted black women form a dramatic counterpoint to their sister



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incarnations, almost one hundred years before, from the 1510 celebrations whose imitation of blackness was effected entirely with gauzy black pleasance. Dudley Carleton’s often-quoted report of the innovative masque at Whitehall is generally assumed to register shock at the sight of the painted blackness of royal ladies in character as Jonson’s Egyptians. I propose another reading in light of the stage practices of textile corporeality here described. Carleton’s observation might be more fully grasped in the theatrical context of racial imitation: ‘Instead of vizards, their faces and arms up to the elbows were painted black, which was disguise sufficient, for they were hard to be known.’67 Carleton, in other words, exhibits surprise at the change in technique used on this occasion, with visors and cloth-covered extremities replaced by actual skin painting and blackface makeup. This suggests that the textile techniques had not been superseded; they remained a part of audience memory or even performance practice, contemporaneous with Othello, into the early seventeenth century. In 1598 Philip Henslowe’s inventory for the Lord Admiral’s Men identifies ‘Moors’ limbs’ to reference the textile body parts used for racial imitation – cloth covering for legs and arms – catalogued in their spare, material banality among various pieces of clothing for performances in the public theatre.68 While the evidence of a textile theatre I have presented is mostly taken from the records of court entertainments, such an historical investigation helps us understand the extent to which Shakespeare, at particular moments in his representation of race, advances our awareness of contemporaneous staging practices and creates a bridge between the court and the commercial theatre. Shakespeare shows that the textile and animal skin tradition had migrated to become part of his dramatic vocabulary in the public theatre. The result was that the explicitly material forms of racial impersonation derived from the court tradition significantly influenced his conceptualizations of race at specific moments. For example, early in As You Like It, Celia heads to the forest in exile, away from the confines of the court, but not before she stains and darkens

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her skin: ‘I’ll put myself in poor and mean attire, / And with a kind of umber smirch my face’ (1.3.108–9).69 The language of ‘smirching’ or ‘besmirching’ echoes the dirty, dark coloration of Othello’s ‘begrimed’ face, while ‘umber’, a brown pigment, suggests a tawny colour contrasting the pale beauty of the sheltered court with the suntanned skin Celia mimics of a lowerclass, labouring woman of the gritty outdoors. Later in the play, however, in an exchange citing once again the labourer’s darker, sun-tanned skin, Rosalind says of Phoebe: ‘she has a leathern hand, / A freestone-coloured hand – I verily did think / That her old gloves were on, but ’twas her hands’ (4.3.24–6). This passage humorously recalls the use of dyed leather gloves as a racializing stage device. For Shakespeare, in this example, the technique of the material body coexisted with that of skin painting. It remained alive in his creative consciousness as a further index of contemporary stage developments. Rather than posit a narrative of increasing technical improvements in racial impersonation, the evidence suggests simultaneous imitation practices where the textile body, whether as an immediately tangible stage presence or as an item remembered from earlier performances, reinforces and materializes blackness within the economy of early modern racial discourse. In 1836, writing with the awareness of the role played by the British plantation economy on the intersection of blackness and slavery, Leman Thomas Rede surveys the various methods of racial impersonation, including the addition of paints and ointments to the skin and the application of burnt cork blended with oil, the mixture that produced the most iconic form of blackface.70 Rede’s historical survey documenting the stage practice of racial imitation also cites the textile corporeality of cloth dyed in nuanced shades of brown, covering the actors’ arms to mimic skin and more closely achieve verisimilar results.71 His account suggests that the use of dyed cloth to imitate skin was a technique familiar to him – not confined to the realm of private or court performance, but one that has been largely lost to or overlooked by modern scholars.



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The commodification of race The black handkerchief is congruent with the theatre’s textile black body. Its black silk, identified with Othello’s flesh, recalls the black cloth and other materials used in early modern performances to fabricate and reproduce black skin. In a striking moment of metatheatrical citation, Othello’s reference to mummy recalls the wrapping of an embalmed body in blackened linen and thus becomes comparable to the highly evocative sixteenth-century theatrical practice of fitting the white actor’s body with dyed black cloth. Significantly bigger than the small lace embroidered item that a modern audience might expect, early modern examples of the handkerchief have been described as ‘magnificent, often very large cloths’;72 an entry from the queen’s wardrobe account reads, ‘two handkerchiefs like barbers’ aprons’.73 A black handkerchief suitable in size and proportion would serve as a visual echo of the black textiles used to wrap the actors’ bodies in early modern performances of racial impersonation.74 Moreover, the sibyl’s creation of the handkerchief is presented as a moment of exalted inspiration precipitating the material tasks of sewing and dyeing. The inserted details of its manufacture point to another artistic endeavour: the theatre, where sewing and dyeing are constitutive labours of that particular craft. Significantly, therefore, the handkerchief foregrounds theatrical practice as a reminder of the process of inventing and manufacturing the theatrical black body. The black body in the early modern theatre is the product of artistic and artisanal creation – conceived, sewed, dyed, and fitted according to the body measurements of the actor and, more importantly, the ideological demands of race. While racial cosmetics emerged as a significant addition to the theatrical repertoire in the early seventeenth century, Shakespeare capitalized on the overt materiality of the black body as textile to set a meaningful critical framework in relief.75 The handkerchief in Othello has been subjected

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to a series of semiotic and symbolic interpretations that have tended to overlook its physical presence and purpose. That presence may be usefully framed by the scholarship of material culture with its manifest interest in ‘objects, things, bodies, places’.76 The emergence of material culture studies can be read as a disciplinary and methodological adjustment, promising historical and cultural analysis more reliably grounded in the empiricism of evidence excavated from the archive. This interest in the empiricism of cultural artefacts has clarified our perspective on objects as things.77 In the theatre of cross-racial imitation, the application of such disciplinary reorientation to the handkerchief qua textile black body carries considerable ideological force. For the imitative textile practices of the theatre of racial impersonation defamiliarize the black body, making us hyperaware of its reification while circulating the abject notion of a black man as a thing. Such a material body finds its verbal echo and ideological grounding in Brabantio’s first confrontation with Othello. The incensed father expresses outrage over Desdemona’s rejection of eligible white men, ‘The wealthy curled darlings of our nation’ (1.2.68), when she runs instead ‘to the sooty bosom / Of such a thing as’ a black man (ll. 70–1). For Brabantio, blackness is the self-evident contrast to whiteness, wealth, beauty, and national belonging. And yet there is more. Blackness is also the sign of denuded humanity and evacuated subjectivity – of man diminished as an inconsequential ‘thing’. Like the handkerchief, Othello is a mere ‘trifle’ within the European racial economy (5.2.226). Admittedly, the powdery carbon deposit smeared onto the ‘sooty bosom’, a metatheatrical reference to blackening the skin with soot in performance, translates for an audience, by way of its materiality, the already existent ideology of racial objectification. Brabantio’s reference to soot, however, recalling the blackened faces of devils and damned souls in mystery plays, is intended to deploy religious discourse for racializing purposes.78 In a similar but more tangible and dramatic fashion, black cloth



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used to imitate skin in the theatre materializes and reproduces this idea of the black man as ‘thing’. While it is important to note that the use of soot belongs to folk and religious drama and that cloth and textiles figure largely in court entertainments and masques, Shakespeare dispenses with generic divisions and brings the diverse forms of racial impersonation together in the public theatre.79 His approach signals his awareness that different forms of racial representation in the theatre accumulate force and meaning over time, providing meanings that intersect and build, tracing paths that constitute the historical evolutions in racial perception. Shakespeare’s simultaneous citation of the charcoal, cosmetic, and textile forms of racial representation registers complementary notions of race. Whereas the rhetoric of religion remained a powerful tool in the English racial and proto-colonial arsenal, Shakespeare’s deliberate return to textile, to a form that might have appeared as less advanced than the newer racial cosmetics, produces an astute perception concerning the construction of blacks within a brutal materialist discourse. The black man as chattel, a nonhuman thing with the legal status of moveable property on a colonial plantation estate, is familiar to modern audiences and readers as an historical image with a consequential legacy in the era of late capitalism. With the irony that only the full unfolding of history could reveal, the European market created around mummy rehearsed the commerce in black flesh that would be realized in the African slave trade economy.80 In Othello, with its attention to the stage practices related to the textile black body, Shakespeare provided the ideological frame within which we can appreciate the theatre’s role in producing and circulating a material notion of race that would prove powerful for early modernity.

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Notes 1

Othello, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann, Arden 3 (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1997), front cover.

2

Lynda E. Boose, ‘Othello’s Handkerchief: “The Recognizance and Pledge of Love”’, English Literary Renaissance 5 (1975): 360–74, esp. 362.

3

Boose, 363.

4

Proponents of what is now an established critical and pedagogical commonplace include Edward A. Snow, ‘Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Things in Othello’, English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 384–412, esp. 390; Janelle Jenstad, ‘Paper, Linen, Sheets: Dinesen’s “The Blank Page” and Desdemona’s Handkerchief’, in Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’, ed. Peter Erickson and Maurice Hunt (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2005), 194–201, esp. 196; and Dympna Callaghan, ‘Looking Well to Linens: Women and Cultural Production in Othello and Shakespeare’s England’, in Marxist Shakespeares, eds Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow (New York: Routledge, 2006), 53–81, esp. 57.

5

Boose, 363–4.

6

Lawrence J. Ross, ‘The Meaning of Strawberries in Shakespeare’, Studies in the Renaissance 7 (1960): 225–40, esp. 226. Alice Mackrell notes that embroidery grew with the introduction of the steel needle and an array of imported coloured silks in An Illustrated History of Fashion: 500 Years of Fashion Illustration (New York: Costume and Fashion Press, 1997), 20.

7

Farah Karim-Cooper, Cosmetics in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 170.

8

Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (London, 1693).

9

John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, 3 vols (London: John Nichols and Sons, 1823), 2:76 and 3:12.

10 Nichols, 1:113. See Margarete Braun-Ronsdorf, The History of the Handkerchief (Leigh-on-Sea: F. Lewis Publishers, 1967)



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for a gallery of paintings of male and female subjects with handkerchiefs. 11 While both men and women used, wore, and displayed handkerchiefs, women featured prominently in providing labour, through their clothwork and embroidery, in the local domestic markets. See Natasha Korda, Labors Lost: Women’s Work and the Early Modern English Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 12 On the ‘cultural biography’ of things, see Igor Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Life of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–91. 13 On the role of clothing in constituting subjects, see Will Fisher, Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 14 Skin colour, as I have argued elsewhere, is not the only or primary component of racial identity in the early modern period. See my Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (New York: Palgrave, 2009), esp. 1–71; and Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), esp. 1–74. 15 George B. Stow, ‘Richard II and the Invention of the Pocket Handkerchief’, Albion 27 (1995): 221–35, esp. 226. 16 Stow, 226–7, 233–4. 17 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 126–9. 18 Elias, 126. 19 Nichols, 1:108–19; 2:65–79; 2:249–63. 20 Nichols, 1:116; 3:12; 1:117. 21 Juana Green, ‘The Sempster’s Wares: Merchandising and Marrying in The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1607)’, Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 1084–118, esp. 1089.

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22 Linda Levy Peck, Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 2. With regard to the materials used in making handkerchiefs, Peck details James I’s promotion of the English silk trade (73–111). See also Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). 23 On the role of commodities and objects in shaping identities, see Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in The Social Life of Things, 3–63; and Margreta de Grazia et al., Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 24 de Grazia et al., 3. 25 Fisher, 42. 26 Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 86. 27 Green, 1094. 28 Bruster, 90. 29 Diana O’Hara documents the handkerchief as a marriage token in ‘The Language of Tokens and the Making of Marriage’, Rural History 3.1 (1992): 1–40. 30 A black handkerchief with strawberries in blackwork, should we grant the latter’s affiliation with Desdemona, constitutes a fitting, virtually self-explanatory symbol of the play’s central, controversial marriage. A sibyl’s prophetic utterance, portending destruction and social chaos, inspired the construction of the specially handcrafted handkerchief and anticipated in the textile’s colour and design the tragic consequences attendant on the socially destabilizing interracial union. On the harmful nature of sibylline prophecy, see Jessica L. Malay, Prophecy and Sibylline Imagery in the Renaissance: Shakespeare’s Sibyls (New York: Routledge, 2010), 96–120. 31 Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957–75), 7:246 (seventh novella, third decade). 32 Natasha Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender



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and Property in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 124–5. 33 A. Rosalie David, ‘Mummification’, in Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology, eds Paul T. Nicholson and Ian Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 372–89. 34 Louise Noble, Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2011); Richard Sugg, Mummies, Cannibals and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorians (New York: Routledge, 2011); Philip Schwyzer, Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Tanya Pollard, Drugs and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); P. Kenneth Himmelman, ‘The Medicinal Body: An Analysis of Medicinal Cannibalism in Europe, 1300–1700’, Dialectical Anthropology 22 (1997): 183–203; and Karl H. Dannenfeldt, ‘Egyptian Mumia: The Sixteenth Century Experience and Debate’, Sixteenth Century Journal 16 (1985): 163–80. 35 See Michael Neill, ed., Othello (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Neill notes that although mummy was ‘prescribed for a wide variety of ailments, it was (interestingly, in view of Othello’s fit in 4.1) celebrated for its anti-epileptic virtues’ (appendix F, 466). 36 From Macbeth, we learn of the weird sisters’ brew containing ‘Witches’ mummy’ (4.1.23); in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff speculates that drowning and subsequent swelling would turn him into ‘a mountain of mummy’ (3.5.16–17). 37 Sugg, 15. 38 David, 372. 39 Per the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘Belief in the medicinal powers of the bituminous liquid which could be extracted from the bodies of ancient Egyptian mummies app. arose because of its resemblance to pissasphalt. Later, similar powers were ascribed to mummified flesh itself, which was often used in the form of a powder.’ 40 Dannenfeldt, ‘Egyptian Mumia’, 163. 41 Margaret Serpico examines the ubiquity of black mummified

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flesh in ‘Resins, Amber and Bitumen’, in Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology (see n. 33 above), 430–74, esp. 464–5. 42 Dannenfeldt, ‘Egyptian Mumia’, 163–4. 43 Schwyzer, 156. 44 Dominic Montserrat, ed., Changing Bodies, Changing Meanings: Studies on the Human Body in Antiquity (New York: Routledge, 1998), 169. White mummy has been noted, but the use of the qualifier ‘white’ indicates that this was not the most typical colour. Obtained from dried out bodies in the desert, for example, white mummy was regarded as inferior in quality; see Dannenfeldt, ‘Egyptian Mumia’, 179. 45 Quoted in Dannenfeldt, ‘Egyptian Antiquities’, 17. 46 Noble, 20. 47 Schwyzer, 156. 48 The increased demand for mummy led to a raid on Egyptian tombs, restrictions imposed by the local authorities, the market for contraband mummy, and the growth of the industry in artificial mummy (that is, the manufacture of mummy from recently deceased bodies); see Schwyzer, 162. 49 Dawson, 37. 50 See the entry for ‘mummy’ in Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols (London: W. Strahan, 1755). 51 On the diversity of racial construction in the early modern period, see Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton, eds, Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (New York: Palgrave, 2007). 52 Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (New York: Routledge, 2000), 76. 53 Callaghan, Shakespeare without Women, 78. 54 Callaghan, Shakespeare without Women, 78. 55 Karim-Cooper, 168. 56 For white actors in Shakespearean roles, especially Othello, see Philip C. Kolin, ed., Othello: New Critical Essays (New York: Routledge, 2002), esp. 1–88.



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57 Edward Hall, Henry VIII, ed. Charles Whibley, 2 vols (London: T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1904), 1:15. 58 Hall, 1:16. 59 Hall, 1:16, 17. 60 Folger Library MS L.b.259, fol. 1r. 61 Albert Feuillerat, ed., Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of King Edward VI and Queen Mary (Louvain: A. Uystpruyst, 1914), 30. 62 Folger Library MS L.b.7, fol. 2r. 63 Albert Feuillerat, ed., Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth (Louvain: A. Uystpruyst, 1908), 24. 64 Folger Library MS L.b.266, fol. 3v. 65 Jones, 121. 66 C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, eds, Ben Jonson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–52), 10:449. 67 Herford and Simpson, eds, 10:448. 68 Henslowe’s Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes, 2nd edn (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 318. 69 Juliet Dusinberre, ed., As You Like It, Arden 3 (Walton-onThames: Thomas Nelson, 2006). 70 Leman Thomas Rede, The Road to the Stage (London: J. Onwhyn, 1836), 34. For Rede, the actor coloured in the monochromatically darkened skin of blackface bears the specific social identity of the ‘Negro’ or slave from the contemporaneous historical context of the British plantation economy in the West Indies. Rede makes a distinction between the ‘Negro’ and the purportedly lighter-skinned ‘Moor’. 71 In contrast to the contemporary, subtler uses of cloth dyed in brown colours, Rede observes: ‘Wearing black gloves is unnatural, for the colour is too intense to represent the skin’ (34). 72 Braun-Ronsdorf, 17. 73 Nichols, 3:511. 74 Although Othello dismisses Desdemona’s ministrations,

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claiming, ‘Your napkin is too little’ (3.3.289), his comment can be read comparatively: the pain of suspected adultery is greater than any handkerchief or attempts at consolation that Desdemona has to offer. 75 On the advancements in racial cosmetics in the early seventeenth century, see Andrea R. Stevens, ‘“Assisted by a Barber”: The Court Apothecary, Special Effects, and The Gypsies Metamorphosed’, Theatre Notebook 16.1 (2007): 2–11. 76 Henry S. Turner, ‘Nashe’s Red Herring: Epistemologies of the Commodity in Lenten Stuffe (1599)’, ELH 68.3 (2001): 529–61, esp. 529. 77 James Knapp offers an engaging overview of the shifts in critical emphases and their implications in early modern studies in ‘“Ocular Proof”: Archival Revelations and Aesthetic Response’, Poetics Today 24 (2003): 695–727, esp. 696–705. 78 On the use of soot to blacken the skin, see Eldred Jones, Othello’s Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 120. More recently, Virginia Vaughan has remarked ‘For over a century, actors in country folk dramas and mystery plays had resorted to coal or some form of charcoal’, in Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 11. The Drapers’ accounts for Coventry in the 1560s and 1570s document the practice of blackening the faces of the souls of the damned; see Annette Drew-Bear, Painted Faces on the Renaissance Stage: The Moral Significance of Face-Painting Conventions (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1994), 33. 79 In Performing Blackness, Vaughan argues that for analytical purposes it is important to maintain a distinction among performance genres and their particular use of techniques for performing blackness that might be influenced by specific social matrices such as class (32–3). 80 On consumer demand and market expansion in relation to mummy, see Schywzer, 159–63.

5 Two Faced: The Problem of Othello’s Visage Ambereen Dadabhoy

Othello’s scopic economy mandates discovery, that things be seen and shown.1 From Brabantio’s call for light to see whether his daughter has absconded from her home to the ‘clasps of the lascivious Moor’ to Othello’s demand for ‘ocular proof’ of his wife’s infidelity, the play turns on the epistemology of sight (1.1.124; 3.3.363). The demand for visual transparency is, however, repeatedly put under pressure; indeed, Othello embodies the limits of sight because he is the site where the gaze is confronted by opacity, necessitating interpretation. Nowhere is this more apparent in the play than when Desdemona articulates the reasons why she loves Othello. Petitioning the Venetian senate to grant her the privilege of accompanying her husband on his military expedition to Cyprus, Desdemona’s argument rests on her resolution of the cultural anxiety produced by Othello’s anatomy:

My heart’s subdued Even to the very quality of my lord: I saw Othello’s visage in his mind. (1.3.251–3)

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Of note in her disclosure is the ontological paradox at the core of Shakespeare’s tragedy: there is a difference between Othello’s visage as it is presented to the world and that which he constructs in his mind. For the purposes of the early scenes in the play, which depend so heavily on the black-white binary, the duality of Othello’s visage points to a psychological fairness belied by his somatic one. Indeed, the Duke reinforces this dyad as he prosaically advises Brabantio to accept Othello, ‘If virtue no delighted beauty lack, / Your son-in-law is far more fair than black’ (1.3.287–8). Despite this tidy fusion of Othello’s cultural fairness with his external blackness, the resulting action of the play trades on the indelibility of the natural or somatic marker. Thus, the proof of Othello’s character, as desired by the play’s scopic economy, comes to be found not in the ‘visage’ of the mind but in the one that is on display for all to see. However, to interpret ‘the very quality of’ Othello, the ‘visage in his mind’, solely through the optics of colour obscures the multiple registers of difference subtending the play and the arena of colonial contest within which Othello’s subjectivity circulates. Othello’s blackness and the play’s subtitle, ‘Moor of Venice’, operate like ‘the Turk’, presenting ‘a pageant / To keep us in false gaze’ (1.3.19–20).2 While both call for interrogation and interpretation, they obscure other possible contexts within which to situate not only the character of Othello but also the cultural and imperial concerns of the play. Othello unfolds along the axis of imperial crisis and envy. The urgency and heat of the first act are driven as much by the Ottoman threat to Venetian imperial interests in the eastern Mediterranean as they are by Othello and Desdemona’s clandestine marriage. The conjunction of the two events, the Ottoman attempt at seizing a Venetian colony and Othello’s successful ‘theft’ of an elite Venetian woman, not only aligns Othello with the Ottoman Empire but also signals the latent danger of imperial expansion. In this essay I attempt to answer Shakespeare’s ambivalent construction of Othello through a re-turn to the



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geographic, cultural, and imperial hegemonies of the eastern Mediterranean. The re-orientation I posit situates the Ottoman Empire – sailing the liquid borders of Shakespeare’s play – at the centre of the ideological, geographical, and imperial taxonomies structuring the play. Such a move at once contradicts and furthers critical opinion that has positioned the Ottoman Empire either on the margins of Venetian and European paradigms of culture and civility or psychologically manifested within the figure of Othello.3 While a ‘Turk’ never sets foot onstage in Othello, Ottoman social, imperial, and military institutions certainly inform the organization of Venice’s cultural milieu. Of particular importance – and the specific institution that I will trace – is that of the devşirme or tribute-child tax collected from Ottoman imperial territories in Europe. Through the methodology of postcolonial theory and the optics of Ottoman imperial practice, I will show how Othello’s subjectivity, primarily constructed in the play through colour-coded discourse, problematizes the self/other dyad that is necessary to the process of empire at the same time that it disturbs its grand project. Even as the Ottoman Empire assimilates its others into its body politic to create the same, Othello’s simulacra of Ottoman practice emphasize that impossibility. Thus, the play is simultaneously a fantasy of inclusion and a tragedy of exclusion.

The Moor in Venice Given the primacy of sight as an instrumentality of knowledge in Othello, the swift conclusion of the hotly anticipated Ottoman-Venetian imperial conflict – ‘Our wars are done: / The desperate tempest hath so banged the Turks / That their designment halts’ – leaves us without a face or body on which to map the danger of ‘the Turk’ (2.1.20–2). Because Othello is the only figure who represents non-European identity, it seems easy to – as the play invites – recognize ‘the Turk’ in the Moor, as his own final speech and suicide indicate. Nevertheless, a

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Moor is not a ‘Turk’, even though, in the early modern period, the definition of Moor was elastic enough to contain multiple religious and racial differences.4 To make Moor coeval to Muslim – as I do in this paper – does not, I believe, ignore the importance of blackness in the play and to Othello’s character, nor does it turn ‘the Moor’ into ‘the Turk’. The common practices of merging critical taxonomies of Muslims into all-encompassing ethnic categories such as ‘Moor, Turk, and Saracen’ elide the cultural differences and conflicts within the so-called ‘Islamic world’.5 To give just one example, the kingdom of Morocco, while Muslim and adjacent to Ottoman regencies in North Africa, was independent from that empire, and, in fact, sometimes in conflict with it.6 My point in stressing the particularities and specificities of Islamic culture is to challenge totalizing narratives as well as to point out that Othello’s transformation is not the result of a natural or cultural degeneracy but of a crisis in colonial subjectivity. If we take Othello’s prior religious identity as Muslim as given, then it seems to me necessary to consider how his blackness collaborates with that identity, and how the dominant image of Islam, that of ‘the Turk’, manifests itself in the play. The action of the opening scene conjures and circulates Othello’s blackness through Iago’s sexual and bestial imagery: ‘an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe’; ‘you’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse’; and ‘your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs’ (1.1.87–8; 109–10; 114–15). Meant to inflame the spurned suitor and rouse the negligent father, Iago’s lurid descriptions also construct an image of Othello in the minds of the audience, so that he is aligned with predatory sexual energy and presented as a site of unnatural sexual licence.7 Iago’s narrative mediates Othello’s first appearance on-stage, embedding him within symbolic, colour-coded registers of meaning. Anticipating the furore over the elopement, Othello counters possible objections to his marriage based on his elevated – and secret – lineage: ‘’Tis yet to know’ that ‘I fetch my life and being / From men of royal siege’ (1.2.19–22).



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By hinting at his own noble background, Othello represents himself as equal to the ‘magnifico’ whom he has offended, cognizant, perhaps, of Brabantio’s objection to Othello’s blackness (1.2.12). In addition, his refusal to hide when a company of men find him, ‘Not I – I must be found: / My parts, my title, and my perfect soul / Shall manifest rightly’, signifies not only his honourable qualities and belief in the strength of his social position, but also point to his ability to encounter and confront the hostile gaze of authority (1.2.30–2). However, the claim that his ‘perfect soul’ will stand as his defence signals an uneasy conjunction between internal and external markers of character and identity. Thus, Iago’s framing and Othello’s own awareness of the opposition to his secret marriage make him susceptible to being seen as deviant and transgressive. Moreover, his body as the locus of the hurried action in the scene becomes the site on which to map disturbance and disorder. In the senate, met with the angry Brabantio and alarmed senators, Othello must distance himself from the alignment of his radical difference with dark and demonic agency. He challenges Brabantio’s narrative of witchcraft with one of his own, undertaking the project of narrative ‘self-fashioning’ to confirm his status as an imperial subject through linguistic similitude: Most potent, grave, and reverend signiors, My very noble and approved good masters: That I have ta’en away this old man’s daughter It is most true; true I have married her. The very head and front of my offending Hath this extent, no more. Rude am I in my speech And little blessed with the soft phrase of peace; (1.3.77–83)8 As Ian Smith claims, Othello exhibits his ‘cultural whiteness’ through discourse, carving out a place for himself in Venice through his ability to mimic correctly the language of the

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empire.9 Nevertheless, by deploying commonly circulated African exotica, he locates himself within a geographic and racial milieu that discloses that he is ‘almost the same but not quite’, and ‘almost the same but not white’.10 Othello’s narration limns his history to fables of Africa, yoking him to the modalities of radical difference he relates and simultaneously exposing his difference from those figures: I ran it through, even from my boyish days To the very moment that he bade me tell it – Wherein I spoke of most disastrous chances: Of moving accidents by flood and field, Of hair-bredth scapes i’th’ imminent deadly breach, Of being taken by the insolent foe And being sold to slavery; of my redemption thence, And portance in my travailous history, Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle, Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven, It was my hint to speak – such was my process – And of the Cannibals that each other eat, The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders. (1.3.133–46) Othello’s facility with imperial discourse, his ‘cultural whiteness’, points to the processes of colonial identification through which he can be the ‘Moor of Venice’. More important, Othello’s history also articulates a ‘space of splitting’; the exotic beings he conjures for Desdemona and the senate’s consumption are different from him, and in his difference from these Others, he moves closer to becoming ‘the same’ or Venetian.11 However, the symbolic, social, and cultural meanings attached to Othello’s skin continue to speak their own language, even as he effectively speaks in a borrowed one. Blackness emerges as a visible sign in a manner that religious – Islamic – difference does not. Perhaps that is why many of the Muslims on the early modern stage were Moors, because their



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skin could operate in drama’s scopic economy and testify to the ‘truth’ of their characters. Othello’s blackness and geographic history affiliate him with other stage Moors at the same time that his insider status in Venice, his military position, his rhetorical skill, and his baptism mediate his character, fixing him within an imperial and colonized context. The Manichean imperial framework presented in the play is between Venice and the Ottoman Empire. The conflict over Cyprus (or Rhodes) puts the action of the play before 1573, when Venice ceded the entire island to the Ottomans. Shakespeare’s 1604 play featuring a great Ottoman defeat akin to Lepanto (1571) would certainly flatter his monarch. James I had anti-Islamic sympathies, was interested in a pan-European alliance against ‘the general enemy’, and had authored an epic poem celebrating that famed victory, Lepanto (1591). However, the play as reflective of the realities of empire in the eastern Mediterranean is a fantasy. Ottoman power at that date was ascendant, and Venice had, in its numerous strategic alliances with the Sublime Porte in Istanbul, been labelled ‘the Turk’s Courtesan’.12 How then are we to understand Othello’s imperial investments? Even though Shakespeare sinks ‘the Turks’ with an off-stage tempest at the beginning of Act 2, I find Ottoman imperial stories and practices haunting the entirety of the play. From Othello’s ‘theft’ of Desdemona, so like the slavery and concubinage of European women in the Ottoman seraglio, to the gift of the handkerchief as a token of erotic interest, similar to the sultan’s throwing of his handkerchief at his chosen odalisque, the Ottoman phantasm glides across the action of the play.13 Indeed, the raucous brawling that interrupts Othello’s wedding night and elicits from him the angry response, ‘Are we turned Turks?’ deserves, I believe, more than passing consideration (2.3.166). In this specific instance, Othello asks whether they will destroy themselves through mutinous in-fighting after providence has favoured them with a victory over the Ottomans. The context of civil disorder among Venetian troops and the implicit comparison to the Ottomans indicated by

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‘barbarous brawl’ allows us to read a further analogue. Such rude, drunken, and riotous behaviour is not Ottoman at all, but quite a distinct feature of European armies. Early modern histories of the Ottoman Empire all point out with varying degrees of envy the order and discipline displayed by the sultan’s forces. Hugh Gough’s The Offspring of the House of Ottomano (1569) notes ‘the Turkish soldiers in many respects do surmount the warriors of other nations. First of all they readily obey, without grudging or disdain, their Prince and Captains, which is not observed among us. […] In as much as they are endurable and most patient, a long space of time they can sustain themselves without bread or wine.’14 The Mahumetane or Turkish History (1600) contrasts ‘Turkish’ military order and discipline with the disorder of European armies: ‘Our soldiers [are] licentious and freed from fear of punishment, with careless carriage, executing whatever is committed to their charge, still mutinous and seditious, respectless of command.’ But ‘none of all these defaults be conversant in the Turkish camp, where the soldier is ever serviceable and at command, executing what they have in change carefully, reserving their heat of courage to encounter the enemy’.15 While summarily dismissed by Shakespeare, the Ottoman military machinery inspired awe, envy, and fear in the European imagination. Othello’s furious outburst, then, is laden with irony, but it also exposes his own affinity with Ottoman order and discipline. To read Othello’s tirade in this way is to discover another intertextual link between Shakespeare’s lines and a passage from the seminal English text on the Ottoman Empire in this period: Richard Knolles’s The General History of the Turks (1603). This monumental study excavates ‘the first beginning of that nation’ and the causes of its present ‘glorious Empire’.16 Exhaustive in its methodology and scope, The General History catalogues the reigns, successes, and defeats of Ottoman rulers from the first, Osman (1258–1324), to Knolles’s present moment, Mehmet III (1566–1603). Of particular interest is his lengthy chapter on Sultan Süleyman, given the epithet ‘the



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Magnificent’ in Europe because of his remarkable conquests into Eastern Europe, particularly Belgrade and Hungary, and the expansion of his empire beyond that of any of his European counterparts, a list that includes Charles V, Francis I, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth I.17 Knolles expends considerable energy on Süleyman’s many wars and conquests, but his description of the sultan’s expedition against Rhodes (1522) commands our interest for its situational and aural homologies in Othello. Knolles recounts an unusual instance of riot and mutiny in the Ottoman contingent wherein Süleyman takes his soldiers to task for their insolence during the siege of Rhodes: ‘“Slaves”, quoth he, “for I cannot find it in my heart to call you soldiers, what kind of men are you now become? Are you Turks? Men wont both to fight and overcome?”’18 In this ventriloquized diatribe, Süleyman expresses shock and disbelief that his soldiers would dare be other than obedient and valiant. His deployment of the rhetorical question, ‘are you Turks?’, exposes the symbolic meanings attached to the identity marker which are conspicuously removed from those Othello accesses with his similar question. For both Shakespeare and Süleyman – via Knolles – the issue of proper conduct rests on what it means to be a ‘Turk’. Approaching the question from divergent perspectives, Othello and Süleyman arrive, however, at the same point, demanding appropriate military order. Such homologies point not only to Shakespeare’s use of Knolles as a likely source, but also to an interest in Ottoman state policy that is instrumental in the construction of Othello’s character.

The Moor as colonial subject The most striking consonant with Ottoman imperial practices occurs not in any verbal echoes or dialogue but in Othello’s own social and military position within the Venetian imperial bureaucracy. His narrative of enslavement ‘by the insolent foe’

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and subsequent ‘redemption’ supposes his free-alien status in Venice, yet his commitment to Venice’s imperial wars signals an obligation to the state that exceeds volunteer, or even paid, mercenary service.19 Venice, it seems, can (and does) deploy him with impunity. The ‘service’ he owes proposes equivalence to the kind of soldiers employed by the Ottoman Empire, their yeni çeri, or janissaries. Recruited from the empire’s European territories through a policy of taxation known as devşirme, which took Christian boys from Ottoman-controlled Balkan territories, converted them to Islam, and trained them for positions within the empire’s administration, these ‘turned Turks’ became a critical component of the empire’s success. The system, established under the aegis of Sultan Murad I (1326–89), fostered and trained these young men for careers in Ottoman administrative or military bureaucracy. Devşirme children became elite military officers and reached – barring the position of sultan – the highest echelons of Ottoman society. Indeed, as Karen Barkey notes, ‘at the height of the devşirme, between the mid-fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, only five grand viziers out of forty-seven were of Turkish origin; the others were of Albanian, Greek, or Slavic origin and had risen from the devşirme.’20 While a necessary and institutionalized imperial practice, the devşirme evoked horror in the minds of Europeans who perceived it as further evidence of Ottoman cruelty and barbarism. As one contemporary laments, What would a man not suffer were he to see a child whom he had begotten and raised […] carried off by the hands of foreigners, suddenly and by force, and forced to change over to alien customs and to become a vessel of barbaric garb, speech, impiety, and other contaminations.21 The anonymous observer registers the process of estrangement that the colonial subject endures through his violent separation from his natural identity, his turn into an other. The complaint derives its emotional charge through its recognition of the



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separation and transformation of the child from family member into foreigner. The Offspring of the House of Ottomano mirrors this torment: And now when they [Christians] have performed all duties, yet is it always lawful for the Turk to have the free election of the best of his sons, which, circumcised and converted […], is trained up for the wars […] so that if they should be conversant with him, he cannot discern or judge one of his kinfolk. […] The son is ravished from his parents perpetually to live among strangers and aliens, utterly to forsake that which by blood is dearly beloved.22 Gough’s detailed narrative probes the psychological wounds the system inflicted: the fragmentation of identity and trauma experienced by the families and boys because of forced imperial assimilation. Although European writers such as those quoted above claim that Ottoman imperial hegemony destroyed the boys’ native culture, historical investigation reveals that ‘those who became Muslim often kept their language and maybe even their allegiance, some returning to their region of birth as governors, others commanding in their native tongues, and many trying to help family members back in their homeland.’23 Rather than an existential crisis of identity, such occurrences illustrate a layered conception of identity, where the ‘natural’ is supplemented by the imperial. The terror induced by the devşirme spread across Europe, prompting European writers of Ottoman history to fetishize the practice, constituting it as the foundation of Ottoman success. Its rehearsals in European texts served multiple ideological purposes, demonstrating European cultural superiority vis-à-vis Ottoman cruelty and negating and eliding Ottoman military and imperial superiority through the insistence that Ottoman power was derived from that of its (former) Christian subjects.24 One of the earliest English histories to do so is Peter Ashton’s translation of Paulus

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Giovius’s Short Treatise upon the Turks’ Chronicles (1546), which fastens the devşirme to Ottoman military expansion: This Amurathes [Murad II] was the first which did ordain and appoint that kind of footmen which they call Janizars and chose them out of such Christians which before had forsaken Christ. Through whose strength and puissance both he and all his successors after him got the mastery and upperhand in all their wars and other their martial empires, and through them conquered in a manner all the great countries of the East.25 The power of the sultan’s janissaries, rather than the ability of ‘natural Turks’, undergirds the multitude of Ottoman conquests. Giovius returns again and again to the notion of Ottoman success as being dependent upon the valour of its ‘turned Turks’, whom he always calls Christians: ‘all the puissance and strength of the Turks’ wars, consisteth in those men which they call the Warriors of the Porte’, who ‘do consist wholly of Christians, which nevertheless before have renounced Christ’; ‘the emperor hath always about him his guard [of] most strong and puissant footmen […] These be elect and chosen (when they be but very babes) out of the most warlike and valiant Christian nations.’26 Impressing the same theme almost twenty years after Lepanto, the Venetian bailo Marcantonio Barbaro noted, ‘It truly merits serious consideration that the wealth, the power, the government, in short, that the entire state of the Ottoman Empire is founded on and entrusted to people who were all born into the Christian faith and who, by various means, were enslaved and borne off into the Mohammedan sect.’27 Reducing Ottoman imperial triumph to its successful enslavement of Christian outsiders, Barbaro invalidates any Ottoman facility regarding the imperial project. Each of these examples operates on a modality of negation and denial. By staking a cultural, national, or religious claim to the devşirme boys, these accounts attenuate Ottoman strength, making it alien to the empire.



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The discursive strategies that obfuscate Ottoman acuity serve a further purpose: to contrast the natural identity of devşirme boys with their assimilated, imperial one. The concomitant residence of one identity inside another signals a conception of identity that acknowledges multiple registers of difference and similitude through which identities cohere; however, the competition between natural and colonized identity that these narratives rehearse exposes a hierarchy that favours the natural over and above the assimilated. Thus, these accounts, like Othello, disclose ‘a space of splitting’, a colonial subjectivity ruptured and seamed through the processes of empire. European histories of the Ottoman Empire disclose many such instances of split subjectivity, especially in relation to the sultan’s (former) Christian slaves. These stories circulated within the discursive economy of imperial envy as sites of ontological crisis, as anxious attempts at recuperating – and maintaining – identity while warding off the onslaught of imperial aggression.28 The narrative of George Castriot told by Knolles configures the telos of the Ottoman imperial project in the European imaginary. His story recounts the successful integration of radical difference within the body politic, and, simultaneously, its failure, since ontological, essential difference continues to inhabit and disturb colonial subjectivity; in this account, the repressed is always ready to return.29 The son of an Albanian nobleman, Castriot along with his brothers was a political hostage of Murad II from 1423 to 1443. As a slave of the sultan, George, renamed Iskender, was converted and eventually rose to a high administrative and military position within the empire. His turning, however, did not take, and, when the opportunity presented itself, he abandoned the Ottomans, went back to Albania, and fought against his old captors.30 Tension between national and imperial identity subtends Knolles’s biography of Castriot. He relates Murad II’s cruelty in separating the family unit and his treacherous conversion of these noble boys, while celebrating Castriot’s rejection and overthrow of the culture

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into which he had been incorporated. Knolles’s particular interest lies in the double betrayal – Murad’s conversion of the Castriot boys and Iskender Bey’s re-turn to his native land and identity: To obtain peace, he [John Castriot] was glad to deliver into Amurath[’s] possession his four sons […] for hostages: whom Amurath faithfully promised well and honourably to entreat. But as soon as he had got them within his reach, he falsified his faith and caused them to be circumcised after the Turkish manner and to be instructed in the Turkish superstition […]. George the youngest, whom the Turks named Scander-beg or Lord Alexander for his excellent feature and pregnant wit, [Amurath] always entirely loved and, as some thought, more passionately than he should have loved a boy. […] He excelled all other his equals in Amurath his court, and rising by many degrees of honour came at last (being yet very young) to be a great Sanjak or governor of a province, and was many times appointed by Amurath to be general of his armies […] until at last he found opportunity by great policy and courage to deliver both himself and his native country from the horrible slavery of the Turkish tyranny.31 That Iskender exhibits the fine qualities of a leader – wit, beauty, honour, and valour – should come as no surprise, nor should we be scandalized by Murad II’s treachery and implicit lechery. Such tropes are commonplace in the Orientalist mode, which seeks narrative and ideological mastery over radical and threatening difference.32 The unusual feature of Castriot’s story is his resistance to Ottoman hegemony, even as an elite member of the sultan’s inner circle. Despite horrific trauma, such as the murder of his brothers and his circumcision, Iskender was the spectre and George Castriot the natural, indelible identity. Not only does his narrative announce exemplary opposition to Ottoman aggression, but also it furthers the ideology of imperial denial. It simultaneously



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asserts the entrenchment of a natural identity that rivals and supersedes colonial subjectivity. The struggle between natural and colonial identity marked English encounters with the Ottoman Empire as well. In 1599 Queen Elizabeth sent an embassy to Istanbul to cement commercial and diplomatic relations with the new sultan, Mehmet III. Accompanying the embassy was Thomas Dallam, an organ builder, in whose charge the queen’s gift to the sultan, an organ, was placed. Dallam maintained a record of his travels in his diary, which recounts not only his meeting with the sultan, but also incredible levels of access in the imperial palace: he claims to have seen the sultan’s concubines at play in a garden.33 Assisting Dallam with his labours while in Istanbul was a dragoman (translator), who was an Englishman turned ‘Turk’. In his brief description of the dragoman, Dallam points out that ‘he was a Turk, but a Cornish man born’.34 By indicating the man’s national origin, even as he declares his new colonial identity, Dallam points to the importance of natural or essential identity. Similarly, the encounter in Tunis between Elizabeth I’s ambassador, William Harborne, and the ‘English Turk’, Samson Rowlie, renamed Hasan Aga, a renegade and the highest ranking Ottoman official in Tunis, emphasizes the English belief in the superiority of the natural identity over the colonial. To be sure, Harborne hoped to exploit the national and cultural connection between them by appealing to Hasan Aga on the basis of his ‘true Christian mind and English heart’, yet in doing so he negated Hasan Aga’s identity by insisting on the indelibility of Samson Rowlie.35 The yoking of two ethnic designations, English and Turk, deploys markers of difference that suggest hybridity but, in fact, vitiate imperial conquest and hegemony. If we consider Othello as a character enmeshed in such praxis, perhaps his status as ‘Moor of Venice’ is more common than the sediments of history which have accrued make it appear. In addition to the strategy of imperial denial endemic to the archive, its contention of European man-power, through devşirme, bolstering Ottoman ascendency, depends on an

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inherent lack of such power in ‘natural Turks’.36 While the realities of cross-cultural encounter in this period limited contact between Ottoman subjects and the European travellers, writers, and diplomats who comprise much of the archive’s source material, this constriction did not stop writers from describing the manner or character of ‘native Turks’. Knolles refers to them in order to delineate their disparity from the colonized subjects of the devşirme. In The General History the ‘natural Turks’ reveal themselves as wholly unqualified for leadership. While the tribute children become horsemen, some footmen, and so in time the greatest commanders of his [the sultan’s] state and empire next unto himself, the natural Turks in the mean time giv[e] themselves wholly unto the trade of merchandise and other their mechanical occupations […] not intermeddling at all with matters of government or state.37 Within this dyad, the ‘natural Turks’ are relegated to the margins of power, more inclined toward trade or cultivation, and, appropriately, not fit for rigorous imperial service. Building upon this theme, yet shifting the semiotic frame from natural and made ‘Turks’ to the contrast between Asia and Europe, Knolles offers a hackneyed account of the constitutional differences inherent to each region: ‘for they of Asia are accounted more effeminate, as they have been always, more ready to fly than to fight; whereas the people of Europe have even in the East been accounted for better and more valiant soldiers.’38 As his narrative moves toward its conclusion, Knolles attempts to ease the anxiety he has generated regarding Ottoman imperial power by suggesting that such power is now waning: This warlike order of soldiers is in these our days much embased: for now natural Turks are taken in for janissaries, as are also the people of Asia; whereas in former times none were admitted into that order but the Christians of Europe only.39



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The objectionable inclusion of ‘natural Turks’ within the province of the sultan’s European and Christian subjects effects Ottoman imperial degeneracy. The archive’s ideological aim underscores the backward, primitive, and emasculated nature of the natural ‘Turkish’ population. The architecture of such arguments imagines and declares social, religious, political, and cultural superiority that voids the reality of Ottoman hegemony.

Mapping empire on the Moor Applying the paradigm of the inferiority of natural subjects and the superiority of colonized subjects to Othello problematizes the agency and masculinity of Shakespeare’s native Venetians. Where is their strength, power, or valour? Indeed, the play insinuates that the disempowerment and emasculation of native sons is a danger of the assimilative capacities of empire. The military men we encounter, Othello, Cassio, and Iago, have the distinctly non-Venetian identities of Moor, Florentine, and Spaniard, respectively. Desdemona’s rejected Venetian suitors, ‘the wealthy curled darlings of our nation’ (1.2.68), are hardly the stuff of valiant command. The men of Venice, embodied by the impotent Roderigo, find fitting cognates in the ‘natural Turks’. Even Lodovico, a ‘very proper gentleman’, simply performs the service of messenger and mouthpiece for authority, lacking any power but that to hide the hideous display of the effects of colonial assemblage. Indeed, Elizabeth I’s edict deporting blackamoors registers this same anxiety that opening up borders for global traffic and empire will displace native subjects and native strength: The Queen’s Majesty, tendering the good and welfare of her own natural subjects greatly distressed in these hard times of dearth, is highly discontented to understand the great numbers of Negars and Blackamoors which […]

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are crept into this realm since the troubles between Her Highness and the King of Spain, who are fostered and relieved here to the great annoyance of her own liege people that want the relief which those people consume; as also for that the most of them are infidels. [She] hath given especial commandment that the said kind of people should be with all speed avoided and discharged of this Her Majesty’s dominions [emphasis added].40 The imperial agon between England and Spain explains the presence of these Moors, and the justification for their removal is their radical religious difference. Nonetheless, what is at stake within this nascent imperial text is the status of natural and unnatural subjects. Assimilation, for multiple reasons, not the least of which is religious and somatic difference, is neither offered nor possible. Juxtaposed with Shakespeare’s Venice, which has depleted native agency to the point that it must rely on the military strength of strangers, Elizabeth’s London reinforced national and natural distinctions to assure its preservation and construct an imperial ideology and colonial subjectivity that impressed ineradicable difference. Returning to the problem of Othello’s ‘visage’ and identity through the optics of Ottoman cultural and imperial praxis, we observe the mechanisms through which Shakespeare presents a hybrid form of identity necessitated by the imperial enterprise. Othello’s rise in Venice mimics that of devşirme boys, essential to the maintenance of the empire yet liminal in the European imaginary, because of their role as colonial subjects.41 The play’s emphasis on colour and racial epithets contours the ambit of Othello’s circulation within Venice’s cultural economy, embedding him within an imperial and military sphere. He transgresses his approved station in Venice through his furtive marriage to Desdemona, and, so, is forcefully made aware of his difference. Shakespeare puts pressure on Othello’s colonial identity by fracturing his connection to the very structures that facilitated his claim to Venetian status: his occupation and his language. As I claim above, these



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instruments allow him to pass for the ‘Moor of Venice’ and are the signs and symbols that cloak somatic identity markers. The move to Cyprus, coupled with the aborted conflict with ‘the Turks’, undermines the success of Othello’s imperial assimilation. Manipulating Othello’s weakness, his new domestic occupation, Iago attacks Othello precisely on the points where natural and cultural identities collide and compete – his body. Othello’s self-estrangement requires his perception of the limits imposed on him because of his blackness. Such recognition uncovers the illusion of belonging conferred by imperial processes of assimilation. Consequently, Iago’s machinations rupture Othello’s colonial subjectivity and transform him into a signifier for the Moors and Africans from whom he had earlier distinguished himself. The turn toward or into the Moor distances Othello from his Venetian identity, which had prompted the devotion and admiration of Venice’s elite. Iago deploys a two-pronged attack: fostering doubt in Othello as to his suitability as a match for Desdemona and confronting him with an image of blackness that harkens back to its negative associations. The so-called temptation scene in Act 3, wherein Iago plants the seed of jealousy in Othello’s mind, also traffics in the hitherto elided vulnerability of Othello’s difference. Even as Othello asserts, ‘she had eyes and chose me’, he submits to Iago’s superior knowledge of Venetian culture and women to painfully acknowledge, with ‘how nature, erring from itself’, that he is an unnatural choice for Desdemona (3.3.192; 231). His psychological journey within the space of a few lines admits doubt not only in Desdemona but also in himself. Indeed, from this moment he succumbs to Iago’s poison, first lamenting his current state, ‘Why did I marry?’, and then finding the cause of both his own torment and his wife’s presumed infidelity in his radical, racial difference: ‘Haply, for I am black’ (3.3.245; 267). Othello reacts to Iago’s oration of Cassio’s dream with incoherence (‘Lie with her? Lie on her? We say “lie on her” when they belie her. Lie with

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her? ’Swounds, that’s fulsome! Handkerchief – confessions – handkerchief? […] It is not words that shakes me thus. Pish! Noses, ears, and lips! Is’t possible? Confess? Handkerchief? O, devil!’). His outburst and subsequent epileptic fit contrast markedly with the rhetorical virtuosity he displayed before the senate (4.1.35–43). Pressed by Iago into the rank of cuckold, the Othello who would know his ‘cue to fight […] without a prompter’, now hides in the shadows and suffers a mental breakdown in the face of dishonour, promoting Iago’s portrayal of him as a ‘savage’ foaming at the mouth (1.2.82–3; 4.1.54–5). The confluence of his linguistic and mental failure evidence Othello’s regression; indeed, once he rises from his trance his thoughts and actions are bent on destruction: ‘I will be found most cunning in my patience […] most bloody’ (4.1.91–2). Like the European authors of Ottoman history, Iago dissects the multiple tissues that constitute Othello’s imperial identity, and, by locating the somatic as the natural, he destroys the psychological and cultural registers through which Othello has constructed himself and the ‘visage in his mind’. Shakespeare’s presentation of the split between noble and bloody Moor replicates the division between colonial and natural subjectivity. The architecture of Iago’s villainy, his destructive impulses yoked to and ventriloquized through Othello, causes the ideological re-turn of the ‘savage’ Moor residing behind the civilized veneer. Yet, it is important to note that ‘the Moor’ that Othello becomes is Iago’s creation, thus belying the ‘natural’ savagery Iago would have us see. Othello’s reliance on sight as an epistemological instrument is coupled with the play’s insistence that reality belies appearance: ‘I am not what I am’; ‘men should be what they seem’; ‘my lord is not my lord’; and ‘he that was Othello? here I am’ (1.1.64; 3.3.129; 3.4.125; 5.2.281). This fissure signals a fundamental ontological crisis, one related to and compounded by the crisis of Othello’s subjectivity. Problematizing the transparency of identity by fetishizing opacity, the play traffics in the anxiety produced by the project of empire in which others are discursively made into the same. Othello’s epithet,



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‘Moor of Venice’, points to the degree of assimilation he has achieved, yet the mobilization of an ethnic marker resists total acceptance and insists on acknowledging difference: he is like ‘but not quite’.42 Consequently, Shakespeare excavates structures of identity cohesion and estrangement within an imperial context that vex all other articulations of identity in the play. It is unsurprising, then, that Othello’s suicide registers not just a split in subjectivity – an affiliation with the other that was vehemently denied – but also a plea for posthumous inclusion within the imperial body politic. Having regained his rhetorical dexterity after Desdemona’s murder and Iago’s exposure, Othello offers a final confession that is both defence and retribution for his crime: I pray you in your letters, When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate, Nor set down aught in malice: then you must speak […] of one whose hand, Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes, Albeit unused to the melting mood, Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees Their medicinable gum. 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. (5.2.338–54) Of note in Othello’s obituary is the geography toward which he orients his final moments: not one that refers to North Africa or the Mediterranean, but an eastern locale loaded with Islamic and Ottoman symbols and meaning. By killing ‘the Turk’, who we must not forget is circumcised and permanently

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marked with the sign of religious difference, Othello kills himself – suggesting that his identity has shifted again, to that of ‘the general enemy Ottoman’ (1.3.50).43 Confronted with what he was, a noble, valiant general who protected Venice and its territories from the barbarity and destruction of Ottoman imperial aggression, and what he has become, a fool and a murderer, Othello sees himself as fallen away from all bonds of culture, civility, and honour. The play’s double estrangement produces a crisis in colonial subjectivity that can access identity only through the most radical of differences. Therefore, Othello can rehabilitate and recognize himself only on a symbolic level, through tropes of similitude and opposition. The ‘Moor of Venice’ is transformed once more into the law-bearing Venetian, yet he is simultaneously ‘the Turk’ who traduced the state.44 The hand wielding the knife is Venetian, while the body accepting fatal punishment is ‘Turkish’. Enmeshed within a colonial praxis founded on binary opposition that forbids hybrid or multiple markers of identification, Othello seems to negate all identities. Shakespeare locates Othello’s final moments within the dyad of imperial competition, effacing the essential, natural markers of identity that he exploited through Iago. In the matrix of Ottoman-Venetian conflict the Moor disappears, and we must wonder into which empire he has been subsumed. Thus, the play abrogates the ‘bloody Moor’ by exposing that phantom as a discursive, colonial fiction. I find the aporia of Othello’s final moments to mimic that of his subjectivity, which I observe in the uncertain signification of his visage. The question of which identity Othello has destroyed and which he has reclaimed through suicide is analogous to the question of what Othello sees in ‘the visage in his mind’. His words affirm the superiority of Venetian identity, yet like the outward face that belies his internal fairness, this triumph is undermined by  the simultaneous destruction of that identity. By trading on the legibility of the somatic marker within an imperial milieu, the play investigates and denies the possibility of incorporating alien others into a European imperial body politic.



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As a text of empire, then, Othello is a tragedy investigating the limits of the colonial enterprise, the failures of cultural hegemony, and the dangers of imperial identity.

Notes 1

Michael Neill points out that sight and seeing are fetishized activities in the play. ‘Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello’, Shakespeare Quarterly 40.4 (1989): 383–412.

2

I employ quotation marks around ‘Turk’ because its use as an identity marker for Ottomans is exclusive to Europeans. In Ottoman usage ‘Turk’ indicated an Anatolian ethnic origin and was sometimes a pejorative.

3

Alvin Kernan, Introduction to Othello, Signet (New York: Signet, 1963) and Daniel Vitkus,‘Turning Turk in Othello: The Conversion and the Damnation of the Moor’, Shakespeare Quarterly 48.2 (1997): 145–76.

4

Vitkus in ‘Turning Turk’ points to the equivalency of Moor, Turk, and Saracen, conflating the three based on a shared Muslim religious identity. Thus, a Moor is also a Muslim (159). Daniel Boyarin (‘Othello’s Penis: Or, Islam in the Closet’, in Shakesqueer, ed. Madhavi Menon [Durham: Duke University Press, 2011]) suggests that in the period Moor meant Muslim (255). Michael Neill (‘“Mulattos,” “Blacks,” and “Indian Moors”: Othello and Early Modern Constructions of Human Difference’, Shakespeare Quarterly 49.4 [1998]: 361–75), indicates that Moor could be applied to a host of ‘darker skinned peoples’, and that it had strong affinities with Islam (364–5). Anthony Barthelemy (Black Face, Maligned Race, The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987]) states that ‘the only certainty a reader has when he sees the word is that the person referred to is not a European Christian’ (7).

5

Vitkus and Benedict Robinson in Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to

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Milton (New York: Palgrave, 2007) both move among ethnic identity markers for Muslims as though all indicated the same identity. 6

Nabil Matar notes these differences in Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) and Britain and Barbary, 1589–1689 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005). A further instance of internecine conflict within the ‘Islamic world’ is that between the Ottomans and the Safavids in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a conflict that many European powers, including England, attempted to exploit.

7

For the early modern link between blackness and sexuality, see Barthelemy; Karen Newman, ‘“And Wash the Ethiope White”: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello’, in Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Othello, ed. Anthony Barthelemy (New York: G. K. Hall, 1994); Ania Loomba, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Virginia M. Vaughan, Othello: A Contextual History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). For Islam and sexuality, see Vitkus, Matar, Robinson, and Loomba.

8

For more on narrative in Othello see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

9

Ian Smith, Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 135.

10 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004), 132. For Othello’s use of African narratives see Emily C. Bartels, ‘Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashionings of Race’, Shakespeare Quarterly 41.5 (1990): 433–54; Bartels, ‘Imperialist Beginnings: Richard Hakluyt and the Construction of Africa’, Criticism 34.4 (1992): 517–38. 11 Bhabha, 64. 12 Eric Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople: Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 5. 13 The story of the sultan’s handkerchief enjoyed wide circulation in Europe (as did many seraglio and harem tales) and can be



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found in Ottaviano Bon. Bon provides a titillating narrative of the ritual through which the sultan chooses a sexual companion: ‘Wherefore when he is prepared for a fresh mate, he gives notice to the said Kahiya Cadun [female warden of the harem] of his purpose, who immediately bestirs herself like a crafty bawd and chooseth out such as she judgeth to be the most amiable and fairest of all; and having placed them in good order in a room, in two ranks, like so many pictures […], she forthwith brings in the king, who, walking four or five times in the midst of them, and having view’d them well, taketh good notice within himself of her that he best liketh, but says nothing; only as he goeth out again, he throweth a handkerchief into that virgin’s hand; by which token she knoweth that she is to lie with him that night.’ Ottaviano Bon, The Sultan’s Seraglio: An Intimate Portrait of Life at the Ottoman Court, ed. Godfrey Goodwin (London: Saqi Books, 1996), 47. 14 Hugh Gough, The Offspring of the House of Ottomano (London, 1570; STC 11746), C2r. 15 Ralph Carr, The Mahumetane or Turkish History (London, 1600; STC 17997), 121–2. 16 Richard Knolles, The General History of the Turks (London, 1603; STC 15051). 17 Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 45–55. 18 Knolles, 583. 19 Othello 1.3.136–7. Vaughan points out that the Venetian Republic quite frequently employed alien mercenaries for its wars (5). 20 Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 124. 21 Ibid., 123. Barkey finds the quote in Speros Vryonis, Jr., ‘Isidore Glabas and the Turkish Devhirme’, Speculum 31 (1956): 433–43. 22 Gough, J1r-v. 23 Barkey, 124.

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24 Early modern European writers also focused on how this practice was not original to the Ottomans but was common to the Greeks and Romans. In this way they place the Ottomans within an imperial trajectory that complicates notions of translatio imperii. Giovius notes that the janissary order ‘is nothing else than was in time past the host of footmen of the Macedonians, wherewith Alexander the great subdued all the East. And now also the Turks, even as they be lords and governors of the Macedonian kingdom.’ Peter Ashton, Short Treatise Upon the Turkes Chronicles (London, 1546; STC 11899), Cxxxvir. 25 Giovius mistakenly asserts that Murad II began the system. 26 Ashton, Cxxir; Cxxiiv. 27 Lucette Valensi, The Birth of the Despot: Venice and the Sublime Port, trans. Arthur Denner (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 24. 28 In Looking East: English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800 (New York: Palgrave, 2007), Gerald MacLean mobilizes this term to show the multifaceted character of English mercantile and discursive interactions with the Ottoman Empire (20). 29 Both Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha employ the optics of psychoanalysis, particularly in reference to colonial subjectivity. In both critiques the lines of desire that inform the colonial relation depend upon the mechanics of denial, transference, and repression. See Bhabha, 44. 30 Imber, 24–7. 31 Knolles, 260–1. 32 While Edward Said’s Orientalism cites eighteenth-century projects, the texts I cite here can be characterized under his rubric, perhaps as proto-Orientalist. 33 Thomas Dallam, The Diary of Thomas Dallam, in Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant (London: Hakluyt Society, 1893). 34 Ibid., 79. 35 Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation, vol. 3, ed. John



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Masefield (New York: Everyman Library, 1907), 131. MacLean characterizes Samson Rowlie’s turn into Hasan Aga as an imitation of Ottoman devşirme (105). 36 Knolles, 260. 37 Ibid., Fffff2v. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Quoted in Eldred Jones, The Elizabethan Image of Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1971), 20. 41 In the Ottoman context devşirme boys were not liminal but rather central and elite members of the body politic. In fact, some were often married to the sultan’s sisters or daughters. 42 Bhabha, 132. 43 Vitkus, Loomba, Jonathan Burton in Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama 1579–1624 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005) and Julia Reinhard Lupton in ‘Othello Circumcised: Shakespeare and the Pauline Discourse of Nations’, Representations 57 (1997): 73–89, all interpret and theorize the significance of circumcision as a marker of difference. 44 This passage offers a further puzzle. In 1516, the Ottoman Empire had conquered territory in the near East that included Aleppo; therefore, the question that must be asked is which state ‘the Turk’ traduces in Othello’s speech, because he surely would not have been able to kill an Ottoman subject in Ottoman territory. What are we to make of this speech beyond fantasy concocted by Othello in order to reclaim his identity as Christian, Venetian soldier?

6 Eloquent Barbarians: Othello and the Critical Potential of Passionate Character Lynn Enterline

Summoned before the senators of Venice, Othello begins his defence by claiming, ‘Rude am I in my speech’ (1.3.82). But critics rarely believe his disclaimer.1 As Othello narrates a story about how his own powers of story-telling inaugurated the love that no one in Venice wants to accept – ‘My story being done, / She gave me for my pains a world of sighs’ – Othello masterfully parries the accusations of ‘witchcraft’ hurled at him (1.3.159–60, 170). The sense that he is indeed far from ‘rude’ in speech is confirmed once again when the Duke remarks, on the heels of his testimony, ‘I think this tale would win my daughter too’ (171–2). Othello’s captatio benevolentiae, though quickly proved a polite social fiction, is nonetheless a subtle one: it allows him to remind the powers that be in Venice of the martial skill from which they benefit

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(‘little of this great world can I speak / More than pertains to feats of broils and battle’ [87–8]) and at the same time to distinguish his proceedings from witchcraft: can a ‘rude, unvarnished tale’ really be magical? And yet, even a disavowal draws audience attention to language’s effects; and, very soon, the hero starts to recall Desdemona’s reactions to his first act of story-telling – how he ‘beguiled’ her of ‘tears’, ‘kisses’, and ‘sighs’ and was encouraged by such responses as ‘she swore in faith ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange’ and ‘she wished / That heaven made her such a man’ (157–65). Quoting someone else’s admiring reaction to his former ‘discourse’ of wandering, adventure, and battle, Othello deftly manages to suggest that his words, and the life they represent, are indeed ‘wondrous’ – without quite appearing to be saying so himself.2 Othello’s speech sets up a temporal overlap between two moments of persuasion: wooing Desdemona, winning over the senators. This past and present doubling down on verbal power anticipates the self-consciously rhetorical work of the ‘monstrous birth’ to come. Mindful as always of rhetoric’s transactional effects, Shakespeare uses an ambiguous word for Desdemona’s reactions to Othello’s discourse – one that echoes across the play to unite the lovers’ passions. Brabantio complains, I therefore vouch again That with some mixtures powerful o’er the blood, Or with some dram, conjured to this effect, He wrought upon her (1.1.104–7) And in the speech before his suicide at the end of Act 5, Othello declares himself the one who has been ‘wrought’ (5.2.343). The word’s two potential meanings let us know that he has been intensely moved (‘one not easily jealous, but, being wrought / Perplexed in the extreme’) and that, as Brabantio once suspected of Desdemona’s passion, Othello’s emotional undoing was ‘created, shaped, moulded’ by someone else.3 My aim in this essay is to analyse the power speech has in Othello



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to move the passions so forcefully as to make, and unmake, both racial and gendered identities in light of Shakespeare’s fractious indebtedness to the educational institution that trained him in rhetoric and gave him a life-long interest in the social vicissitudes of eloquence.4

Barbarism, eloquence, and the Latin grammar school Some years ago, Ian Smith surveyed the preoccupation with rhetoric in Tudor England to argue that in Othello Shakespeare gives us ‘a most paradoxical figure: the barbarian who not only speaks well but who stands out as eloquent’. As he astutely points out, ‘barbarism and its significant cognates, barbarian and barbarous, function as a discursive site from which to examine racial formation in the period’. And as such, Iago’s insistence that Othello is indeed a ‘barbarian’ and a ‘stranger’ should remind us how far ‘the Moor’s’ persuasiveness in Act 1 defies early modern racial categories: committing ‘rhetorical errors’ was widely taken to be ‘a direct function of being an outsider whose very presence constitutes a transgression of the social order’.5 Surveying a wide variety of English rhetorical texts and travel narratives, Smith argues that the figure of an eloquent barbarian is ‘an Elizabethan national oxymoron’ and that the ‘Mooring’ of Iago, as well as the play’s attention to a self-consciously verbal process of ‘social abjection’, mean that Othello exposes ‘race’ as a fantasmatic, performative social script. More recently, Joel Altman outlined an even more extensive survey of Elizabethan thinking about classical rhetoric in relation to the play, proposing that Othello offers a kind of ‘rhetorical anthropology’ with an internal critique of ‘self-hood’ born of ‘ancient parents’.6 On Altman’s account, it is in the performance of character, or ‘ethos’, that we best detect Shakespeare’s critique of contemporary fantasies about nation and race.

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The complex, explosive connections among eloquence, character, race, and gender in Othello pose pressing and urgent questions that are far from exhausted. So I take my cue from both Smith and Altman on this tragedy’s critical potential with respect to the ideological terrain of Tudor England in order to develop an institutionally specific account of how to conduct a ‘rhetorical anthropology’ of character and emotion in it. Reading the meta-rhetorical preoccupations of Othello in light of humanist pedagogy, we begin to see that the play’s transactions with the literary texts of classical antiquity are crucial to the violent intersections between categories of social distinction in the play. That is, an institutional focus reveals that Roman literature is as important to Shakespeare’s critique as are the more ‘popular’ discourses usually adduced to understand representations of race in this period.7 Of course, the recent wave of research into travel narratives and texts from early traders (Samuel Purchas, Richard Hakluyt, John Leo Africanus, and the ‘Voyage made to Tripolis in Barbary, in the year 1583’) have painted a much-needed, detailed picture of the precise stereotypes that were brought to bear on ‘the Moors’ and that circulate in Othello and elsewhere on the Renaissance stage – particularly the commonplace charges of duplicity, lasciviousness, changeableness, and cruelty.8 As many have recognized, such charges pertain far more to Iago than they do Othello; accordingly, they also define the portrait Iago projects of the false Desdemona.9 And in this volume, Robert Hornback argues that the European dramatic practice of black-face clowning underpins the charges of stupidity brought against Othello – ‘fool’, ‘ass’, ‘gull’, ‘dolt’ – charges that, by the end of the play, Othello brings against himself (‘O fool, fool, fool’, 5.2.322).10 More tellingly still for our purposes, Hornback points out that the Iberian dramatic practice of caricaturing African characters as inept, babbling speakers made its way to England as early as John Redford’s Wit and Science (1534), a play in which Wit, a character whose face is blackened in Act 2 as a sign of his moral decline, is mirrored by another, ‘Ingnorance’, who speaks only broken English.



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But with respect to the way Shakespeare invents barbarian eloquence as well as the more general effects that ancient rhetoric had on experiences of nation and character in Tudor England, I would like to reach beyond theatre history and the history of texts, ideas, and discourses about rhetoric to read Othello in light of the institutions and practices of rhetorical training. Because it is not merely as inherited ideas or textual transmission, but as practice, that ancient rhetoric acquired such force in the period that it could substantially inflect the emotionally charged, shifting, and intersecting terrain of social distinctions. If a classically defined standard of what counts as ‘eloquence’ shaped the period’s fantasies, scripts, and performances of nation, gender, and race, it did so in large part because of the curriculum and pedagogical methods of the Latin grammar school, the institution within which Shakespeare and male contemporaries were trained as if they would become orators. Here it is important to remember that Redford was a schoolmaster who, like other humanist masters, believed school theatricals were an important device for training young Latin scholars in the art of public speaking. In Wit and Science, the schoolmistress Idleness blackens Wit’s face as a sign of his moral and verbal decline. She summons the stuttering Ingnorance, another pupil, for whom Wit is mistaken later (718); after starting to swear and being called a ‘fool’, Wit recovers by looking in Reason’s mirror to see that he has been ‘shamefully spotted’ while the faces around him remain ‘fair and clear’ (809). Once cured, Wit’s betrothed signals that he is not Ingnorance because ‘his tongue serveth him now trim’ (721).11 But theatre history alone does not tell the whole story here. Redford wrote this play for his students to perform as an interlude at school. It was designed not merely to teach them a moral and social lesson about the benefits of learning; it was written to make them practise the verbal and bodily skills necessary for rhetorical success and social advancement.12 This account of what school practices can reveal about the meta-rhetorical dimension of barbarism in Othello builds

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on my recent work on the unintended consequences of contemporary pedagogy. Like the other texts I examined in Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, Othello both uses and interrogates the grammar school’s language, curriculum, and disciplinary methods for achieving eloquence by giving classically inflected voices and emotions to precisely those characters its rhetorical training was designed to exclude: women and ‘barbarians’. Such ‘habits of alterity’, I argued, were the product of humanist training in impersonation; but in the hands of at least one former grammar schoolboy, such impersonations were also an important way of testing the limits of the humanist social agenda. The category of distinction and exclusion I begin with here is ‘the barbarian’ – though by the end of this essay it will become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to disentangle one from the other. To read the eloquent ‘barbarian’ that is Othello in light of the discursive, material, and disciplinary practices of the grammar school – in light of what Pierre Bourdieu would call the school’s habitus – I conduct a dialectical analysis of the relationship between the early practices of the institution within which former schoolboys like Shakespeare acquired rhetorical skill and the literary texts many of those former students went on to produce. Such a method will illuminate the precise role that certain ancient texts and rhetorical tropes played not merely on stage, but in the everyday life of Tudor schoolboys. And it will also give a detailed sense of the way that the socially valued distinctions accompanying early rhetorical training inflected contemporary popular materials concerning geographic distinction. If, as Smith astutely argues, hegemonic fantasies of nation – and following from that, of race and masculinity – informed Elizabethan notions of a healthy ‘body politic’ and emerge in Shakespeare’s dramatization of a rhetorically capable Moor subject to a searing process of social and verbal abjection, their power has much to do with the fact that schoolmasters worked mightily to convince generations of students and parents that their Latin curriculum and the ancient rhetorical techniques imbibed in their programme would directly contribute to the



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personal good of their students and the collective good of the nation. As one schoolboy wrote in the front of his copy of Aphthonius’s Progymnasmata, the most popular advanced rhetorical manual in the schools, the book was ‘disbursed to me by my tutor last term for the mending of my youth’.13 Firm in that belief that ‘eloquence and wisdom are one’, masters proclaimed that the school’s classical curriculum and founding pedagogical method – imitation – would produce young gentlemen whose rhetorical skill directly promoted what Lily’s A Short Introduction of Latin Grammar (1553) called ‘the good of the commonwealth’. ‘Barbarism’ and its variants are sprinkled across school archives, and they almost always designate speaking or writing your Latin badly. As the ubiquitous Lily’s Grammar declares, in high humanist mode: ‘All barbary, all corruption, all Latin adulteration which ignorant, blind fools brought into the world … and poisoned the old Latin speech of the early Roman tongue will not be allowed entrance into the school.’ Here a historico-philological polemic dominates, labelling as barbarian all ‘ignorant, blind’ (read: medieval) ‘adulterations’ of ‘the early Roman tongue’. Roger Ascham’s Schoolmaster (1570) similarly announces the new pedagogical project of turning ‘rude and barbarous into proper and eloquent’. But barbarian and its cognates soon became floating signifiers. In 1588 another schoolmaster, William Kempe, tells a story about the ancient past he was at such pains to bring to England: Ovid’s poetry, ‘like Orpheus’s music … persuaded even the Getes, a wild and barbarous people, to use great humanity towards him while he lived and afterwards to bury him with great pomp’.14 Tribal and geographic, rather than historical, distinction informs Kempe’s story; he invokes the (classical, strictly philological) meaning of bar-bar (those whose syllables make no sense) for students in his own time and institution, to give them an ancient model capable of teaching them how to distinguish themselves from other, ‘barbarous’ nations. For John Brinsley in 1618, ‘barbarian’ acquires a contemporary us/ them meaning useful for institutional and national purposes.

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In the preface to his translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses he joins humanist teleology – eloquent gentlemen – to national ends. He ‘dedicates’ his work ‘to the good of the schools’ because its language and forms of teaching will help in ‘all the ruder places of the land’, ‘chiefly for the poor ignorant countries of Ireland and Wales’. Ovid’s ‘singular wit and eloquence’ will allow Latin schoolmasters to ‘reduce’ the ‘barbarous … unto civility’ and change ‘their savage and wild conditions … into more humanity’.15 Perhaps it does not go without saying that Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, whose travel narratives have been so important to post-colonial studies of race in the period, were former grammar schoolboys (Hakluyt went to the Westminster School in the 1560s; Purchas graduated from St John’s, Cambridge, in 1600). Given such associations, it’s hardly surprising that the antipathy toward ‘barbarism’ acquired a disciplinary force in the institution’s everyday life. According to the 1635 testimony of a former student, for example: ‘All that were presumed by their standing able to discourse in Latin were under a penalty if they either spoke English or broke Priscian’s head; but barbarous language, if not incongruous language, had not punishing but derision’ (emphasis added). From its initial, self-promoting humanist disdain for medieval Latin, ‘barbarism’ evolved into a word that associated Latin eloquence with national self-definition. And because school discipline subjected young students to the threat of corporal punishment alongside the communal policing of ‘derision’, Latin schoolboys were inculcated very early into the physical, psychological, and social hazards of verbal abjection. In the eyes of both Kempe and Brinsley, Ovid’s power to subdue barbarism stems from ‘wit and eloquence’, both of which were words of high praise at school. Certainly it inflects Francis Meres’s famous assessment that ‘Ovid’s sweet, witty style doth live in honey-tongued Shakespeare’. Such confidence in the civilizing power of Ovid’s ‘wit’ smacks of what Richard Halpern astutely calls the humanist ‘destruction of content’ – ‘atomizing larger structures of meaning and



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ideological content’ for the sake of generating ‘strategies of style’.16 But the scandalous nature of Ovidian ‘content’ remained a problem despite schoolmasterly admiration for his stylistic flair. Consonant with the announced goal of their pedagogy, humanist theorists and schoolmasters were united in their admiration for epic poetry, the genre of nations. But grammar school teachers overwhelmingly preferred its Virgilian form. The school curriculum built toward epic as the culminating genre in a boy’s final year; first-year students began with Aesop while the boys in the final form dedicated the year to Virgil and Ovid. In theory as well as in practice, however, Virgil trumped his younger rival in discussions about an eloquent gentleman’s character. Lily’s grammar puts the matter succinctly: in the lesson on the impersonal verb, boys learned ‘Oportet me legere Vergilium’, ‘it is good for me to read Virgil’. However revered for ‘sweetness of style’ and ‘wit’ (ingenium), Ovid’s poetry continued to arouse suspicion – as the fate of Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s love poetry reminds us. As Baldwin pointed out years ago, Ovid’s poetry (i.e. Ars amatoria and the Amores) landed on a list of texts banned altogether from schools. But Virgil required no defence. Thomas Wolsey argues that a good curriculum requires a student to imitate Virgil, ‘the first among all poets’. Thomas Elyot recommends that boys imitate Virgil especially because he is ‘like to a good nurse’. Ovid, however, is a necessary evil: he helps ‘for understanding other authors’ but has ‘little other learning … concerning other virtuous manners of policy’.17 The humanist preference for the Aeneid was not simply a matter of pedagogical theory; we can trace it in practice. Perhaps the most revealing example of masterly preference for Virgil lies in a collection of verses by the headmaster and several scholars of the St Paul’s School. Presented to Elizabeth in 1573, the collection opens with William Malim’s poem, setting out Virgil’s theme of translatio imperii for his boys’ imitation: first the master, then several scholars after him, praise Elizabeth for bringing a ‘second Rome’ to England.18 Subject to Lily’s maxim, ‘it is good for me

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to read Virgil’, schoolboys were drilled in the art of imitation and imbibed a system of training built around an ideal like that of Aeneas, who abandoned desire for the good of Rome. ‘Barbarism’ became an important word in Tudor debates about the vernacular tongue19 as well as in the geographic categories that informed racial stereotypes in travel narratives and comedic practices. But the word also brought with it associations from classical rhetorical theory and ancient literary texts; and both these, in turn, were woven into early experiences of childhood and puberty for many sixteenthcentury ‘gentlemen’. In other words, the institutional habitus promoted by humanist schoolmasters to intervene in the social reproduction of English masculinity gave ‘barbarism’ an early, and deeply personal, history – one that inflected a boy’s relationship with his own body and discourse as well as the bodies and discourse of others. How far schoolmasters succeeded in establishing the distinctions necessary to becoming eloquent ‘gentlemen’ is something that Othello’s far from ‘rude’ speech, I think, can help us measure.

Epic teleology and masculinity Given the resonance between humanist admiration for Virgil’s theme of public duty and the school’s announced goal of training eloquent gentlemen for the good of the realm, there is something puzzling about the results of its training: poems written at the turn of the century by former schoolboys rarely imitate anything like the Aeneid or the itinerary of its hero. Rather, in the 1590s former schoolboys poured out minor epics with conspicuously Ovidian genealogies. Rather than explore themes of nation and duty, they turned their verbal skills to depictions of character, emotion, and the digressions of desire.20 A notable exception to this general omission, of course, occurs in the first act of Othello when a warrior described as an ‘erring barbarian’ and ‘an extravagant and



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wheeling stranger’ (1.1.134) eloquently defends himself in public by imitating a culturally significant classical precedent in Renaissance Europe: Virgil’s Aeneas. It is often remarked that Othello represents himself as a heroic figure of romance; and the details of wandering in his speech are generally thought to rely on Pliny’s Natural History and, more recently, on John Leo Africanus’s autobiographical depiction of his life in A Geographical History of Africa. But the European literary prototype of ‘romance’ wandering, The Odyssey, was captured and transmitted to England (and early modern schoolboys) in large part by the first six books of the Aeneid. And if we consider not only the content of Othello’s lifestory – the ‘anthropophagi’, ‘antres vast and deserts idle’ of romance wandering (1.3.141–5) – but the situation of address as well – the well-trained rhetorician’s concern – it becomes clear that when faced with the task of arguing for his own defence in public, Othello behaves as any early modern schoolboy would: he finds a classical precursor to imitate. Here it is important to point out that Aeneas would likely stand out for humanist readers for rhetorical as much as martial power. This culturally specific aspect of the text’s appeal is perhaps best captured by the fact that one of the earliest translations of the Aeneid, by Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, consisted of only two books: the second, entirely given over to Aeneas as he tells the story of Troy’s fall – ‘They whisted all, with fixed face attent / When prince Aeneas from the royal seat / Thus began to speak. “O Queen …”’ (2.1–3; emphasis added) – and book four, in which we read how that story affects Dido. Indeed, Howard shifts Virgil’s emphasis away from the ‘wound’ of Cupid’s arrow, giving his version a distinctly humanist edge by stressing the wounding power of Aeneas’s words: But now the wounded Queen, with heavy care, Throughout the veins she nourisheth the play, Surprised with blind flame, and to her mind Gan eke resort the prowess of the man

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And honour of his race: while in her breast Imprinted stack his words and pictures form …21 Turned into a ‘play’, Aeneas’s discourse sparks Dido’s passion as much as his ‘prowess’; rather than stuck with an arrow, she is ‘stuck’ with the hero’s ‘words’ and led to admire the ‘honour of his race’.22 Beyond Surrey’s revealingly meta-rhetorical additions to the original Latin text, school training also suggests how canny a choice of classical exemplar Othello makes in order to defend himself. Revered by schoolmasters, central to contemporary fictions about England’s ‘second Troy’, and consonant with the nationalist aspirations of the humanist educational programme, Aeneas’s precedent allows an outsider under interrogation to remind his audience that he, too, has ‘done the state some good’ – recalling the founding European story of nations at a moment when that hint will do the speaker some good as well. In his culturally and institutionally saturated citation of Roman eloquence, the ‘erring barbarian’ performs what it means to be European – as Smith might put it, Othello’s eloquent imitation ‘declares his cultural whiteness and hence his innocence’.23 The precedent of Virgil’s eloquent travelling warrior and the sixteenth-century social valuation of his example offer Othello not simply an ancient character to imitate, but an entire scene of address that works to his advantage. Indeed, the performative dynamics of the trial scene are more complex than that of mere imitation or repetition (or for that matter, source study). At least two things distinguish Othello from the narrator on whom he models himself. First, when he stands before the senators, Othello requires not merely skill in imitatio, but the ability to perform classical eloquence in an impromptu trial where the audience is listening in order to render judgment. For Tudor schoolboys, regularly asked to perform ‘without book’ before the audience of master and peers under the threat of harsh punishment, early training meant that future performances of eloquence would likely carry within them the internalized dynamics



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of hierarchy and authority – an interpsychic remnant of an intrapsychic scene in which student speeches were delivered and masterly judgments pronounced.24 When Othello recalls Dido’s passionate audition, he does so in the context of another, judicial form of audition: Desdemona enters not just as a wife, but as ‘witness’ for the defence. The forensic frame for Othello’s rhetorical re-enactment, in other words, carries a reminder of the institutional setting in which Shakespeare and contemporaries learned that imitating Virgil was good for them. Second, and by contrast to Aeneas, Othello refuses to abandon desire for the sake of public duty. Invoking the European literary model for eloquent romance heroism that brings with it a civic-minded teleology, Othello persuades Venice at the cost of suggesting, as any schoolboy would know, that his desire to keep Desdemona with him deviates from the ancient ‘emotion script’ he imitates.25 Abruptly suspending both the imperial and educational teleologies that his act of classical imitation invokes, the play moves away from the romance world of Aeneid 1–4 to enter a domestic space only to postpone yet one more end-driven narrative: the heterosexual marriage plot. As critics often point out, Othello and Desdemona’s marital ‘rites’ are twice interrupted – first in Venice, then on Cyprus – leading some to suspect that the only consummation achieved is the ‘obscene’ revelation on the loaded marriage bed.26 Invoking end-driven narratives of empire, education, and reproduction only to suspend them, Othello’s performance of ‘cultural whiteness’ means that while he momentarily secures a place in Venice by imitating an influential script for European masculinity, he simultaneously casts Desdemona in the part of Dido, a Phoenician from Carthage and thus a barbarian. Readers often notice how terms like ‘barbarian’, ‘black’, ‘moor’, and ‘devil’ move across characters in the play. Shakespeare transfers the stereotypes of Moorish ‘duplicity, jealousy, changeableness, senseless cruelty, and sexual excess’ onto Iago, defining his actions as well as his fantasies. By

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the time Iago is labelled the play’s final ‘devil’, Othello has performed what Smith aptly calls an ‘experiment in racial reversal’.27 But Othello’s imitation of Aeneas means that this experiment includes Desdemona as well: cast in the shadow of Africa and Dido before she walks onstage, Desdemona, too, slowly takes on the culturally marked signs of her husband’s difference. Othello projects his colour onto her by way of the new meaning of ‘black’ he is starting to accept (‘Her name, that was as fresh / As Dian’s visage is now begrim’d and black as my own face’, 3.3.389–91); and Desdemona associates her powerful feelings of despair with the geography of Africa when reminiscing about the song of the abandoned maid, ‘Barbary’. A common name for the Northern coast of Africa (and of considerable specific interest in England during these years),28 ‘barbary’ begins as Iago’s insult for Othello’s bestiality (‘you’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse’, 1.1.108). But in Desdemona’s expression of grief, Barbary works as a persuasive precedent for sorrow. The play enacts a geographic and rhetorical chiasmus: in Act 1, an eloquent Moor imitates the moving words of the founding father of European imperial power; in Act 4, a European recalls the words of a ‘barbarian’ precursor, capturing her own grief by imitating and identifying with a stranger’s dying song (4.3.45).

Character and metamorphosis Iago’s monstrous verbal ‘work’ and Othello’s Virgilian eloquence put the social benefits claimed for school training in rhetoric to the test. As soon as his performance in Venice is done, Othello is subjected – made subject to – Iago’s rhetorical production of what counts as ‘barbarian’. In Michael Neill’s apt words, one of the ‘terrifying’ things about the play is the way ‘Iago lets horrible things loose and delights in watching them run’.29 Among the ‘horrible things’ Iago lets loose is a relentless barrage of animal imagery; it is as if he thinks that



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the very act of naming rams, horses, goats, and monkeys could turn Othello into the ‘beast’ that Iago says he is. Othello’s opening eloquence cannot contend with Iago’s verbal skill – the rhetorician who stage-manages a process of ‘verbal abjection’ that succeeds insofar as his audience eventually acts like the beast that Iago calls him. As many critics note, the ensuing acts follow a slow process of racial insults hurled and, finally, internalized (i.e., ‘O fool, fool, fool’). And the classical text most actively involved in producing Iago’s definition of what it means to be a barbarian, as Jonathan Bate ably demonstrates, is Ovid’s Metamorphoses.30 The very idea of metamorphosis is pertinent to Othello’s thoroughly hybrid status: as recent post-colonial readings remind us, Othello is a ‘wheeling’ figure who comes from ‘here and everywhere’, marked by a difference that is notoriously mercurial, characterized not as a single feared identity but as an amalgamation of geographic, religious, and racial intersections.31 And the common charge in travel narratives that ‘Moors’ are ‘changeable’ finds immediate resonance in relation to the Roman epic of incessant change. More generally, the chief principles informing Ovid’s poem from first to last are clearly at work: the threat of a return, or degeneration, from human to animal or inanimate object; the ever-present fascination with the crossed orders called ‘monstrous’; and the equally ever-present threat of a return to ‘chaos’. With respect to Iago’s parade of animals, Bate quotes Georgius Sabinus’s widely used edition of the poem (1555): ‘here are represented those who have changed from men into beasts, who bear the barbarity of the beast in the figure of man: such are the drunken, the libidinous, the violent … whose appetite submits minimally to the law of right reason’ (emphasis added). Bate therefore argues that the tragedy depicts Othello’s ‘internal metamorphosis’: ‘Shakespeare works intensively with the Ovidian idea of raw emotion, engendered chiefly by sexual desires and fears, reducing man to the level of a beast.’ And thus at the prompting of Iago – who thinks love is something that would cause him to ‘change’

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his ‘humanity with a baboon’ (I.3.317) – Othello is haunted by fantasies of bestiality (dogs, monkeys, goats). More to the point for our purposes, the allusions to Ovid blossom right after Othello’s performance of Aeneas’s story-telling: beginning with the last line of Act 1, where Iago ‘engenders’ his ‘monstrous birth’ (1.3.395), allusions to the Metamorphoses multiply. Bate points out that as they leave for Cyprus, a near shipwreck recalls Ovid’s story of the parting of Ceyx and Alcyone, and does so by way of a citation of a common school text, Susenbrotus’s Epitome troporum. And the play ends on what may be a recollection of Ovid’s story of Actaeon; over the ‘tragic loading of this bed’, Lodovico charges Iago, ‘O Spartan dog … This is thy work’ (5.2.359–62). Here Bate observes that Actaeon’s first dog, Melampus, is Spartana gente in Ovid and ‘Blackfoot of Sparte’ in Golding – i.e. that Iago is comparable to one of the hounds that turns on his master to destroy him.32 But it seems to me that the phrase ‘internal metamorphosis’ is misleading. First, it attributes to individual pathology what Shakespeare dramatizes as the result of a dialogue between Othello and Iago, a dialogue that produces the very ‘barbarity’ European travellers claimed to discover in the ‘Moors’ and those from ‘Barbary’. It does not do justice to the crucial role that rhetoric plays in Othello’s undoing nor to the way in which Ovid’s text is put to work. Here it is worth remembering that the Spartan dog is not merely an animal that turns on its master. The scene’s terror lies in the dog’s noise, a cacophony that Ovid sets in deliberate competition with Actaeon’s failing voice: ‘He longs to shout … but words fail him and the air resounds with the sound of barking.’ A poet famous for the very skill in the art of declamation that Tudor schoolboys were being trained to perfect, Ovid is a rhetorically self-conscious poet who offered sixteenthcentury students numerous figures to convey the anxieties that can attend rhetorical practice. As I’ve argued elsewhere, his stories continually dramatize the ways in which language is never merely instrumental, can exceed its speakers, and can go amiss in ways that suddenly reveal the extent to which



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speaking beings are subjected to it.33 There are few figures in the Metamorphoses better suited to such a critique of fantasies about vocal presence and power than Echo, which is precisely how Iago begins his work: othello What of thy thought, Iago? iago I did not think he had been acquainted with her. othello O yes, and went between us very oft. iago Indeed! othello Indeed? Ay indeed. Discern’st thou aught in that? Is he not honest? iago Honest, my lord? othello Honest? Ay, honest. iago My lord, for aught I know. othello What dost thou think? iago Think, my lord? othello ‘Think, my lord?’ By heaven, thou echo’st me As if there were some monster in thy thought Too hideous to be shown. Thou dost mean something (3.3.98–111; emphasis added) Othello utters Iago’s word, ‘monster’, for the first time as a response to Iago’s repetitions. Just as Echo ushers in the first suspicion, she later attends the process of tragic discovery. Othello and Emilia go back and forth, traumatically echoing each other: othello …. Thy husband knew it all. emilia My husband? othello Thy husband. emilia That she was false in wedlock? othello Ay, with Cassio. … emilia My husband? othello Ay, ’twas he that told me on her first … emilia My husband? othello What needs this iterance, woman? I say, thy husband. (5.2.142–54; emphasis added)

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As critics notice in various ways, Othello is constantly met by doubles in this play – Iago as well as Desdemona mirror him. To that moral and thematic doubling, Shakespeare adds Ovid’s story of Echo, an acoustic mirror whose destabilizing repetitions separate language from thought and eventually drive Narcissus to ask the bewildering question about his own words that marks a voice, and an identity, undone: ‘is anyone there?’ Once Echo is unleashed, she proliferates.34 ‘Cassio, Cassio, Cassio!’ ‘Sing willow, willow, willow.’ ‘Reputation, reputation, reputation.’ ‘Lie with her? Lie on her … lie with her’ (4.1.33–4), etc. Echo undermines the continuity Othello (all too naively) presumes between speech and thought and life. In addition, Iago’s verbal strategy puts Othello in a dilemma that would have been obvious to those educated according to incessant drilling in imitation: ‘What needs this iterance?’ For some former schoolboys, inventive mimesis might sometimes appear to ‘mean’ nothing, to bleed into mere repetition. As if in response to Othello’s opening gesture – to claim Aeneas’s rhetorical power as his own – comes the verbal assault of Iago’s echo, an Ovidian form of alienation from within one’s own discourse that carries an institutionally specific edge.35 Contemporary objections to school training also depicted the problem endemic to imitation – that it might verge on mindless repetition – as the sign of a descent from human to animal: those who objected to the humanist discipline of imitatio called schoolboys ‘parrots’ and ‘seven-year-old apes’. Within the school itself, boys who did not live up to appropriate expectations for linguistic performance could be designated asinus, or ‘ass’, and excluded from lessons until they proved themselves worthy. Stigmatizing the would-be Aeneas as a ‘barbarian’ while transforming his sense of himself according to fantasmatic images of a regression from human to animal, from voice to noise or echo, the rhetorical process of rendering Othello abject works by pitting an ancient text with a far more ambivalent place in the eyes of Latin schoolmasters against the



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officially sanctioned example Othello imitates. If understood from the vantage point of the school’s discursive practices and announced goals, Othello’s attempt to carve a place for himself in the European world by way of successfully performing Virgilian eloquence is eroded by Iago’s Ovidian verbal ingenuity. Where Aeneas, and Othello after him, base story-telling on reference – Othello’s ‘free and open nature’ (1.3.398) presuming a seamless equation between words and the life lived – Iago relies on a disjunction between speaking and being that comes not just with the story of Echo but with humanist rhetorical training as such, however much schoolmasters would like to wish away the Aristotelian insight into the rhetorical production of character (ethos). As any convincing orator might tell you, on Aristotelian authority, ‘I am not what I am.’36 If school training means that Ovidian rhetoric as much as his idea of metamorphosis is at work in this play, then it is worth pointing out that with respect to Desdemona, Iago unleashes another awful lesson gleaned from Ovid about language’s betrayals. The ‘monstrous’ trap Iago sets for her goes well beyond slander. He puts her in the predicament that no matter what she says – or rather, the better she is at saying it – the worse for her. desdemona Come now, your promise. othello What promise, chuck? desdemona I have sent to bid Cassio come speak with you. othello I have a salt and sullen rheum offends me, Lend me thy handkerchief. (3.4.48–52) The drama of being trapped by one’s own tongue is one of the most moving, and disruptive, rhetorical dilemmas that Shakespeare learned from Ovid: Lucrece, Isabella, Hermione, to name a few, are similarly situated.37 Othello’s metamorphic descent, then, is more than a matter of allusion and literary history. It reveals important aspects

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of the way that the classical past, as transmitted through the practices of an educational institution with designs on the reproduction of English masculinity, became part of the collective definition of what counted as ‘barbarian’. We are now in a position to explore the question of what counted as ‘character’ – ethos – in grammar school practice. The idea of metamorphosis was not merely conveyed in Ovid’s poem: it defines a lesson in the art of ‘character-making’ (ethopoeia) from a popular school manual in rhetoric. In light of the self-annihilating passion that consumes Othello, a character ‘wrought’ and ‘perplexed in the extreme’ by Iago’s verbal ingenuity, it is worth pointing out that such extreme passions were passed along as discursive practice in Reinhard Lorich’s much-expanded version of Aphthonius’s Progymnasmata, a rhetorical manual almost as popular as Lily’s grammar across England.38 As T. W. Baldwin demonstrated, Shakespeare knew it well. An umbrella term for prosopopoeia – the Roman declamatory art of giving a voice to legendary or mythological characters at which Ovid excelled – ethopoeia constitutes an entire chapter of Aphthonius. Lorich, a German humanist, seems to have been inspired by Aphthonius’s single example of Niobe’s speech, because he invented nearly a dozen more, mostly words spoken by extremely emotional women (Hecuba, Andromache, Antiope, Medea, Cleopatra). These exemplary monologues were offered for boys to memorize and imitate in order to learn the art of portraying ‘emotional character’ (ethos passiva). Lorich comments that ‘charactermaking’ requires an orator to invent a speech that ‘follows the motions of the mind in every respect’. In two of what became Shakespeare’s favourite examples – Niobe and Hecuba – ethos emerges when the speaker in question is shattered by emotions strong enough to provoke a metamorphic crisis. The first example offered for schoolboy imitation is ‘The words Niobe would say over her dead children’. Like Othello’s query in Act 5, ‘Where should Othello go?’ (5.2.269), Niobe also asks, ‘Where shall I go?’ And her speech ends with a nod to her fate



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in the Metamorphoses: ‘I see one cure for my misery: to be changed in form, joining the things that have no life or feeling. And yet with misery like mine, even in that form I shall never stop weeping.’39 Lorich was inspired enough by this example to invent another like it: ‘The words Hecuba would say at the fall of Troy’. And her monologue also ends in Ovid’s rather than Virgil’s version of the story. Hecuba poses another rhetorical question, ‘Why do I complain?’ only to describe an overpowering grief that ends in metamorphosis: ‘The gods will turn me into a dog. I will have no human voice, but my vigorous barking will never cease to complain’ (emphasis added).40 All the speeches in Aphthonius are divided into three parts, as the speaker addresses an imagined ‘present’ audience about ‘past’ events and what they mean for a ‘future’ the speaker in question sees as no longer viable (the prominent marginal glosses read ‘a praesenti’, ‘a praeterito’, ‘a futuro’). Othello’s final speech is similarly structured with an eye to the past in the future – ‘I pray you, in your letters, / When you shall these unlucky deeds relate’ (5.2.338–9) – precisely because, like Lorich’s characters, the speaker himself knows he has no future. No single Ovidian story defines Othello’s final speech, but rather, hints of several play at the edges of it.41 Whether drawn from Ovid’s poem or from Aphthonius’s examples of Niobe and Hecuba, or both, several stories merge when Othello depicts his ‘wrought’ state as a metamorphic regression to the world of objects and animals – one who ‘drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees / Their medicinable gum’ and who, in stabbing himself, is killing a ‘dog’. Of course, the very idea of metamorphosis works against the kinds of social distinction classical rhetorical practice was designed to set in place: neither/nor or both/and, metamorphosis means that Ovid’s characters emerge most memorably when they find themselves suspended in liminal, in-between predicaments that defy the logic of identity (which is perhaps why Lorich thought them so moving). Under the pressure of such category crises, the social distinctions important to humanist education

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come undone. First, just as the act of inventing an eloquent ‘barbarian’ defies grammar school categories, so Othello’s final speech invokes the category of nation-race only to efface it. He divides himself in two – the ‘turbaned Turk’ who kills the ‘Venetian’ (350–1) – which seems to accede to the racial difference Iago has produced; but in the same sentence, and in part because of the complex shifts in grammatical subject that precede it (‘I’, ‘one’, ‘one’), Othello also suggests that the ‘Turk’ who ‘traduced the state’ is in fact Iago, the Venetian. Second, Hecuba’s barking dog and Niobe’s weeping rock may indeed be convincing figures for passionate character. But Apthonius’s lesson in ethopoeia, in calling for schoolboys to master the art of impersonating female passions, pulls against the very telos of ‘masculine’ rhetorical mastery humanists aimed to inculcate. Othello’s final, rhetorically self-conscious yet self-annihilating speech ends in a ‘bloody period’, forcing the school’s training and social teleology to collide. Inventing ‘the words’ a ‘Moor’ might say ‘over the dead body of his wife’, Shakespeare convincingly depicts what any schoolboy would call ‘emotional character’ while at the same time undoing the national, racial, and gendered distinctions that masters claimed they would produce in their students for the good of England’s commonwealth.

Notes 1

T. W. Baldwin, for example, points out that when he opens his defence by addressing ‘The very head and front of my offending’, Othello echoes a phrase from Quintilian concerning the exordium (‘Frons cause non satis honesta est’): thus ‘Othello makes conscious allusion to the type of exordium he is using, and in doing so echoes Quintilian’s very phrase’ (Shakespere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 vols [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944], 2:200).

2

I borrow Harry Berger’s incisive definition of the predicament of ‘the Hero’s Discourse’ from Making Trifles of Terrors:



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Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 222–50. 3

To have been ‘manufactured or fashioned’ is the oldest sense of ‘wrought’, as detailed in OED 1.1., which attributes the sense of ‘stirred up’ or ‘excited’ only to the early nineteenth century. As Edward Pechter notes in the Norton Critical Edition of Othello (New York: Norton, 2004), the syntax of Othello’s last speech signals both meanings. I would add only that the blurring of agency implicit in the pun, which extends across the play from Desdemona to Othello, stems from the play’s fascination with rhetoric’s power to ‘move’ the passions.

4

That the audience was as prepared as the playwright to think as a rhetorician might is perhaps best attested by one audience member in 1610. Henry Jackson accounts for the play’s emotional effects, as well as Desdemona’s role in it, first in specifically forensic terms and then more generally in terms of perlocutionary effects: ‘the celebrated Desdemona … although she pleaded her case very effectively throughout, yet moved us more after she was dead, when lying in her bed she entreated the pity of the spectators by her very countenance’ (as quoted in Pechter, 308; emphasis added).

5

Ian Smith, ‘Barbarian Errors: Performing Race in Early Modern England’, Shakespeare Quarterly 49.2 (1998): 175.

6

Joel B. Altman, The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 18.

7

I use scare-quotes for ‘popular’ because humanist schoolmasters were in the business of producing a difference between popular and elite materials, and the rapid expansion of humanist pedagogy means that training in Latin was widespread.

8

On the complex overlap, and dizzying indeterminacy, of early modern terms such as ‘Moor’, ‘Negro’, ‘Ethiope’, ‘Indian’, and ‘African’ in early modern discourse, see Michael Neill, ‘“Mulattos,” “Blacks,” and “Indian Moors”: Othello and Early Modern Constructions of Difference’, Shakespeare Quarterly 49.4 (1998): 361–74.

9

See Emily Bartels, Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to

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Othello (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). On Iago’s projections, see Janet Adelman, ‘Iago’s Alter Ego: Race as Projection in Othello’, Shakespeare Quarterly 48.2 (1997): 125–44. 10 Robert Hornback, ‘“Speaking Parrot” and Ovidian Echoes in Othello: Recontextualizing Black Speech in the Global Renaissance’. 11 Black-face characters appeared even earlier in medieval festivals, but it seems that Wit and Science is one of the first plays to connect black-face with babbling and echolalia. On the educational allegory in Redford’s play, see Victor I. Scherb, ‘Playing at Maturity in John Redford’s Wit and Science’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 45.2 (2005): 271–99. 12 For details about humanist faith in theatricals as well as the school exercises at work in Redford’s play – particularly drilling young boys’ tongues in pronuntiatio – see my Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 13 Aphthonii sophistae Progymnasmata (London: 1572; STC 700). 14 The Education of Children in Learning (London: 1588; STC 14926), 5 (emphasis added). 15 Ovid’s Metamorphosis Translated Grammatically (London: 1618; STC 18963), 3. 16 Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), chapter 2. This paragraph is drawn from my third chapter in Shakespeare’s Schoolroom. 17 Wolsey as quoted in Foster Watson, English Grammar Schools to 1600: Their Curriculum and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908); Elyot, The Boke named the Governour (New York: Garland Press, 1992), 19. For a concise account of Virgil’s important place in the schools, see Andrew Wallace, Virgil’s Schoolboys: The Poetics of Pedagogy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 18 British Museum Library Royal ms. 12 A.LXVII.



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19 For the history of the tension between Latin and English, see Richard Foster Jones, The Triumph of the English Language: A Survey of Opinions Concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953). See also Jennifer Mann’s account of the conflicts bedevilling the cultural project of elevating English and placing it on a level with Latin and Greek in Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012). 20 See my chapter, ‘Epyllion’, in The Oxford Handbook of Classical Reception in English Literature, eds Patrick Cheney and Philip Hardie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 21 The Aeneid of Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, ed. Florence H. Ridley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), emphasis added. 22 As Margo Hendricks points out in Shakespeare’s usage as well, ‘race’ here denotes genealogy (‘“Obscured by dreams”: Race, Empire, and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Shakespeare Quarterly 47.1 [1996]: 37–60) – a way of designating inside/outside distinctions that, as Smith argues, requires a term like ‘nation-race’, as it ‘excludes those outsiders who are not part of the national racial heritage’ (‘Barbarian Errors’, 170). 23 Smith, 175. Here Marlowe’s Dido Queen of Carthage offers a useful reminder of Aeneas’s ‘whiteness’, since twice the Trojan refugees declare that while in Carthage, they are the ones under threat of attack from ‘barbarians’. 24 The structures of monitoring at school established what Harry Berger calls ‘internal audition’ inside schoolboy subjects, an interpsychic scene of performance and judgment taken in as intrapsychic system, imbedding past experiences of imitation and admonition as the price of entry into the school’s social hierarchy (see Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, 39–41). 25 I borrow this incisive formulation from Katherine Rowe, Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 24.

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26 The most persuasive version of this case is in Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Several Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 27 Smith, 180. 28 On the intense interest in ‘Barbary’ after the Battle of Alcazar, see Bartels, 21–44. 29 Michael Neill, ‘Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello’, Shakespeare Quarterly 40.4 (1989): 390. 30 Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 182–90. 31 Reading the implied hierarchy between ‘tawny Moors’ and ‘Negroes’ who lead ‘a beastly life’ in Leo Africanus’s The History and Description of Africa, Ania Loomba observes that ‘Othello condenses a range of differences into a single individual, translating the tension between them into the social and psychic complexities of his being’ (Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002], 109). See Bartels’s detailed discussion of the numerous intersections in The History, not the least of which is that between its original author, al-Hasan ibn Mohammed al-Wezaz al-Fasi and the text’s British translator, John Pory (friend of Hakluyt and graduate of Cambridge). 32 Bate, 185. He points out that here Shakespeare departs from his source, Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi, where the sea remains tranquil for their passage to Cyprus. 33 For a full account of the way Ovid’s ‘phonographic imaginary’ destabilizes fantasies of the voice by alienating subjects by the sounds of their own tongues, see my Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 34 Hornback notices these patterns of repetition and associates them with the Iberian practice of black-faced clowning, where barbarian speech was frequently represented as nonsense echoing. Once again, popular and classical representations of barbarism collide. 35 In the Parnassus Trilogy, a satire on humanist pedagogy depicts a teacher as someone who interprets a common schooltext,



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Pueriles confabulatiunculae, to ‘a company of seven-year-old apes’ (lines 659–63). 36 See Keir Elam’s discussion of Aristotle’s ‘unsentimental’ view that in rhetorical practice, an orator’s character, or ethos, is the after-effect of his language use, not its precondition (Shakespeare’s Universe of Discourse: Language-Games in the Comedies [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984], 218). 37 The Rhetoric of the Body, passim. 38 For a full detailed discussion of the manual, see Shakespeare’s Schoolroom. 39 Aphthonii sophistae Progymnasmata, 179, translation mine. ‘… ut me in aliam naturam transmutent, impetrare liceat? Unum hoc miseriarum mearum video remedium, ut in alicuius, quod sensus vitaeque sit expers, formam commuter. Sed vereor misera, ne & sic quoque, quamuis mutata, inter lachrymas agere non cessem.’ 40 Ibid, 197. ‘Sed quid lamentor? Multo consultius fuerit Deos precari, ut in aliquod sensu carens, aut in rationis expers animalculum me transforment … Tamen ego quod humana voce non potero, id latratibus assiduis deplorare non sum cessatura.’ 41 Bate makes a good case for Ovid’s Myrrha, the weeping tree, as another precedent; Golding and Sandys associated her with Arabia (188).

7 Making Ambition Virtue? Othello, Small Wars, and Martial Profession James Siemon

Stephen Greenblatt has recently suggested that ‘Shakespeare’s tragic vision’ was the product of the ‘political defects of his age’ in that the ‘absence of any conception of democratic institutions and the rule of a hereditary monarch with absolutist pretensions left little or no room to formulate an ethical object for secular ambition’.1 This assessment ignores one ethical object repeatedly noted by Shakespeare and clearly articulated in Othello’s occupational tribute to ‘the big wars / That makes ambition virtue’ (3.3.352–3).2 It also ignores the implications of recent arguments by social historians concerning republican elements and discourses to be found inhabiting England’s monarchical order in both its civic and martial realms.3 Such accounts suggest that ‘democratic’ sets the bar too high in delimiting what should count for participatory government, while the qualifiers ‘hereditary’ and ‘absolutist’ may overly restrict what could be ‘formulate[d]’ in the non-elite social imagination.

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In fact, recent historical studies have traced an area of hybridity where early modern martial culture overlapped with civic culture, invoking common classical antecedents, exhibiting similar attitudes, and employing related discourses of individual merit and empowerment. Many military writers took the Roman citizen as ‘the template for modern soldiers’, and notions of the ‘citizen-soldier’ encouraged ‘citizens … to behave like soldiers and soldiers like citizens’.4 Similar qualities of ‘experience, valiance, authority and felicity … justice, fortitude, policy, and temperance’ should apply ‘in a governor or general’.5 However, the discursive field is complex, with martial values and behaviours sometimes at odds with those of ‘sunday citizens’ (1 Henry IV 3.1.250). Paul Robinson characterizes early modern soldiership as conflicted, with elements of a ‘romanticized form of chivalry’ conjoined with ‘Italian humanism and Protestantism’ to produce values and utterances that ‘often pulled [Elizabethans] in very strange directions’.6 Othello suggests the conflicted early modern intersection of martial and civil orders. Othello, Shakespeare’s first ‘post-war tragedy’, represents a martialist who progresses from ‘tented field’ (1.3.86) to command and high office, from ‘casque to th’ cushion’ (Coriolanus 4.7.43), against the politically exotic backdrop of the early modern quasi-republic par excellence.7 Shakespeare and some among his first audiences for Othello would have heard about Venice as, in Camille Wells Slights’s characterization, an ‘appropriate home for a military hero participating in a civic community characterized by values of justice, public service, and individual merit’.8 Yet there were other opinions about Venice and its distinctive civic and military orders, even within one source of Shakespeare’s information, Contarini’s Commonwealth and Government of Venice.9 Contarini’s text supports variant opinions concerning the workings of Venice’s civic and military orders. Granting that ‘virtue’ based on merit and discipline should appear ‘as well in the offices of war, as in the functions of peace’, Contarini offers subtle qualifications that differentiate high civic office



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from military command. Different ‘disposition’ and ‘temperature’ are suitable to the two realms. ‘It were the token of an uncivil disposition … to wish for wars … that he might be honoured with the name of a great captain’, Contarini writes; by contrast, that ‘governor of a commonwealth that would be accounted … perfectly accomplished ought to use that temperature and to maintain that order, that the whole commonwealth may seem accommodated to virtue, and withal, that it be rather thought to attend to the exercises of peace than to the offices of war’ (Contarini, 9). From Iago’s caustic opening complaints about extra-martial interference with military discipline in the matter of promotion to the ‘place’ of lieutenant (1.1.4) to the play’s final ‘bloody period’ concluding the cashiered governor-general’s résumé of ‘service’ rendered to ‘the state’ (5.2.336–55), Othello portrays struggles surrounding attainments, affirmations, and losses of office, rank, and place – military, civil and domestic. None of this comes from the play’s narrative source, Giraldi Cinthio’s Heccatommithi, lending support to Paul Jorgensen’s suggestion concerning Shakespeare’s own ‘special interest in the qualifications, problems and psychology of army offices’ or, as Michael Neill has suggested, in ‘rank’.10 How might this aspect of Othello have addressed the needs, values, and experiences of an audience that certainly included ‘men that are’ or, more accurately, men that sometimes deported themselves as if they were, ‘their own masters’, including ‘gentlemen of the Court, the Inns of the Court, and the number of captains and soldiers about London’?11 More specifically, how might the play have addressed such functionaries civil and military who wanted to think of themselves as ‘their own masters’ in and around 1604?

Martial ambition No subject is ‘more ambiguous’ than war, writes Barnabe Rich in 1604, and the contemporary ambiguities attending the status of early modern martial values, service, and office open

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onto a wide field of expression traversed by scores of early modern writers who urged conflicting values and employed diverse social languages.12 Leaving aside the fallout specific to the Essex rising of 1601 with its well-known struggles between values and factions of ‘sword and robe’, there is a rich field of discursive options at play.13 At one extreme, war was defined as the evil offspring of ‘ambition’, and militarists were depicted as potential threats to established order and degree. At the other, martial service was described as either the privileged field for affirmative display of ‘gentle’ qualities or as a uniquely legitimate arena for the pursuit of distinction by commoners possessed of little more than courage and ambition. George Whetstone brings extremes together in defining ‘modern’ war as the evil product of ‘ambition’ while simultaneously extolling the potential superiority of the military sphere to the ‘civil’ order insofar as martial ‘justice’ had historically provided opportunities for even the meanest born individual to rise ‘from the cart, to be a sovereign captain’ on the basis of merit.14 Writers encourage gentlemen to embrace martial ‘hazard and adventure’ and ‘wand[er] the world’ to emulate that famous English mercenary Sir John Hawkwood or, more mundanely, to begin their pursuit of higher office as ‘governors of towns, colonels, and chieftains’.15 One problem with any such idealized claims about soldiering and advancement, as Whetstone among many, many others observes, is that such images of an advantageous military career are – at least in ‘modern’, debased times – mostly just imaginary, begot from examples and precedents provided by other times and social orders. Like many other writers, Matthew Sutcliffe laments that the England of the 1590s awards martial ‘honour … for wealth, kindred, and favour’ rather than for merit, while distributing material and social ‘profit’ unfairly.16 Furthermore, cessation of conflict threatened English martialists with economic disaster: without a standing army, hostilities ‘being ended, are the beginning of beggary and calamity’ (Sutcliffe, Practices, 298–9). Iago’s portrayal of the soldier’s economic desperation as ‘follow[ing]’



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and serving in penurious ‘bondage’ and ending up ‘when he’s old, cashiered’ (1.1.43–7) registers a perennial concern that became especially pressing at the time of the Spanish Peace. Over the decades of Elizabethan warfare leading up to the Peace, various works had addressed such problems. In 1579 Civil and Uncivil Life suggested that the risks involved in soldiering demanded the martialist adopt an attitude somewhat resembling Iago’s own alienation. Amid passages of high-flown rhetoric about wandering adventure, advancement in office, love of honour, and dedication to service of Prince and country, soldiers are told to maintain a personal detachment, serving when ‘occasions’ permit, but prudently looking to their own profit and exit strategies, ready to retire ‘to their own houses’ or positions (Civil, 26). Here, without the villainous overtones, is the self-serving logic of Iago’s portrayal of the soldier’s common lot as that of an ass who ‘when he’s old, cashiered’, but Iago boasts his own ‘peculiar’ individual mastery of circumstance in his strategic choice to pretend to ‘visages of duty’ and ‘shows of service’ while truly ‘attending’ and doing ‘homage’ to himself alone: Others there are Who, trimmed in forms and visages of duty, Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves And, throwing but shows of service on their lords, Do well thrive by them, and, when they have lined their coats, Do themselves homage: these fellows have some soul And such a one do I profess myself. (1.1.48–54) This cynical self-profession merely reifies a plausible response to a systemic martial problem, offering a self-defence against the exalted rhetoric of adventure, true commitment, and sacrifice proclaimed by many advocates of martial profession. Iago’s striking simile – wearing ‘out his time much like his master’s ass, / For nought but provender, and when he’s old, cashiered’ (1.1.46–7) – echoes martial writers. Thomas Churchyard, writing in 1579, compares the warrior

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in peacetime to a ‘hackney horse … having borne a burthen all the day on his back, and … cast off at night to a bare common, there to seek for food and abide a hard fortune’.17 But Churchyard’s grim image is meant as a stoical marker by which to measure the martialist’s true vocational commitment. Facing inevitable poverty may be tough, but it would be far worse to be a despicable false soldier like Iago, a ‘servingman’ who ‘flatter[s] and fawn[s], or crouch[es]’ to his superiors in pursuit of his own ‘commodity’, unjustly displacing the ‘grave soldier’ from rightful preferment. Reversing Iago’s value judgements, Churchyard puts such ‘servile’ strategies of time-serving as Iago boasts in his own definition of ‘soul’ into contrast with the glories of committed martial vocation. Anticipating Othello’s exultant evocation of ‘glorious war’ with its ‘spirit-stirring drum’, ‘royal banner’, ‘plumed troops’, ‘neighing steed’, and ‘pride, pomp, and circumstance’ (3.3.352–7), Churchyard depicts his ‘courageous soldier’ as ecstatically possessed ‘by his own disposition to delight and follow the cannon wheel, whose countenance and cheerful face begins to smile and rejoice when the drum soundeth, and whose heart is so high, it will not stoop to no servile slavery’ (Churchyard, General Rehearsal, M2v–M3r). The true soldier’s ‘greediness of glory and ambitio[n]’, furthermore, dismisses domestic prosperity as categorically as does Othello. Othello’s denigration of householding when he proclaims that he would not his ‘unhoused free condition / Put into circumscription and confine / For the sea’s worth’ (1.2.26–8) follows Churchyard and others who dismiss ‘drudging’ at home as repellent to the true soldier’s fervent desire to ‘seek out new kingdoms, and refuse their old habitatio[n]’. Writings from the years of Othello’s composition and first performances provide strong counter-trends to Churchyard’s romanticism in the matters of homelessness and unemployment for peacetime martialists.18 The widely-copied ‘Poor Man’s Petition’ of 1603 urged ‘Good K[ing James]: Let poor soldiers be paid their wages while they be employed and well provided for when they are maimed’.19 Thomas Middleton’s Father



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Hubburd’s Tales of 1604 told the story of a young ant, who, prompted by ‘ambition’ to ‘venture’ into the world as a soldier, returns to London a double amputee, forced to beg and dodge the law while citizens disrespect his values of ‘valour and resolution’.20 Robert Pricket, who had initially urged James in 1603 to re-invest in England’s martial greatness, had been reduced by 1607 to desperate longing for ‘some honest war’.21 Without ‘living maintenance’, Pricket depicts himself, ‘Unhappy … in this best time of greatest happiness … a poor, despised, hated, scorned, and unrespected soldier’. Some writers claimed that cessation of major conflicts with Spain had turned desire for advancement either into smaller civil wars, contending about petty differences in rank, or abroad into mercenary activities. Barnabe Rich protests that the end of major foreign wars that had been ‘wont to stir up men’s minds to strive who should march in the foremost rank’ had given way to a domestic situation that some might ‘call … a happy peace’ but that was, in fact, the ‘greatest fury’ consisting of pervasive small wars for ‘precedence and taking of places’ that had turned ‘neighbour against the neighbour, the friend against the friend, the brother against the brother’.22 Captain John Smith describes the collapse in ‘employment for … men of war’ as driving soldiers to mercenary ventures: ‘those [soldiers] that were poor … turned pirates’, adding a remarkable list of social antagonisms to characterize their motivations: ‘some, because they became slighted of those for whom they had got much wealth; some, for that they could not get their due; some, that had lived bravely, would not abase themselves to poverty; some vainly, only to get a name; others for revenge, covetousness, or as ill; and as they found themselves more and more oppressed, their passions, increasing their discontent, made them turn pirates.’23 Instead of Rich’s civil war over small differences in rank or Smith’s piracy driven by poverty, ‘sleight[s]’ and desires for ‘bravery’ and ‘name’, John Stow depicts the post 1604 ‘peace’ as depriving disparate unruly groups of the linguistic cover that the state of war had provided for their anti-social activities:

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‘This peace was more joyfully accepted than the people made show for, by reason the multitude of pretended gallants, bankrouts, and unruly youths were at this time settled in piracy accompting whatsoever they got, good purchase’.24 In these evocations of status conflict, pretend gallantry, and piracy there is matter, language, and even location relevant to Othello and to its first audiences. English audiences could have heard and read a great deal about Venice’s stable civic order and its unique military system, but also about the Mediterranean privateering and piracy of these years and the tensions they created between England and Venice. Opinion could be as divided about piracy as about Venice’s justice, mixed government, and employment of foreign soldiers.

Othello’s sublime career Othello’s own initial successes in the legendarily stable republic appear to represent a happy opposite to both Iago’s pessimism and the doom that dogs Coriolanus in Shakespeare’s later portrayal of Rome’s emergent republic. While the very pursuit of political office is evidently impeded by the martial habitus of speech and behaviour that Shakespeare’s Coriolanus bears with him from the Roman camp into the highly volatile and bitterly factional elective arena constituted by the city’s newly conjoined marketplace and senate chamber, Othello appears initially to thrive, despite claims to being occupationally ‘rude in speech’ when it comes to ‘the soft phrase of peace’ (1.3.82–3), as a stunningly successful one-off martial outsider. Othello wins personal ‘love’ from aristocratic citizens (1.3.129), romantic ‘love’ from one of their ‘gentle’ daughters (1.3.168), and public affirmation for his ‘virtue’ (1.3.290). By contrast, Coriolanus recalls Machiavelli’s negative portrait of the professional soldier, a man whose ‘art’ demands he oppose ‘custom and manner, in voice, and … the fashion of all civil use’ as being ‘effeminate … and not to be agreeable



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to his profession’ and which encourages rough ‘fazings and blasphemies’ instead of acceptably ‘civil gesture and ordinary words’.25 But Machiavelli’s criticism of the individual habituated to military profession (embodied in Agathocles of Sicily in The Prince) constitutes part of his critique of political dangers embodied in the idea of an institutionalized military. Machiavelli’s criticism comes down to an iron law: if the ‘exercise’ of arms should become an ‘art’ or profession, then the martialist so shaped by ‘tyrant custom’ (1.3.230), so ‘rude … in … speech’ (1.3.82), so rewarded and promoted by ‘the trade of war’ (1.2.1) could hardly be expected in peacetime to renounce the institutionalized values, habits, abilities, and interests, the specific capital of his ‘particular art’ (Machiavelli, Art, 35–7).26 By contrast with the disastrous career of Coriolanus, Othello’s career exemplifies military achievement that appears to translate almost effortlessly to recognized qualification for the ladder of high office in the play’s remarkably open oligarchic republic. Perhaps nothing speaks more pointedly to the specifically professional romance embodied in Othello’s initial promise than his offhand dismissal of his own descent. By contrast with the dilemmas posed for the warrior-citizen Coriolanus in negotiating social ascriptions as martialist and aristocrat, Othello is so confident about the public recognition of his true martial ‘demerits’ that he discounts as mere vulgarity any thought of enlisting his descent from men of ‘royal siege’ (1.2.21–2). In so doing, Othello dismisses the very claims of lineage that so often resolve early modern romances or that furnish characters with proud self-definition – as in the cases of Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, Averagus and Guiderius in Cymbeline or Ferdinand in The Tempest – as being unworthy ‘provulgat[ion]’ (3.1.59–60) when compared to those ‘services’ that speak for themselves forcefully enough to ‘out tongue’ the power of aristocratic endogamy. In the event, Othello’s services do initially appear to trump the otherwise fearful potency of Brabantio’s own ‘voice’ – ‘double’ that of the Duke’s own voice and grounded in the social authority

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of ‘kindred’, ‘people’, ‘brother’, ‘brothers of the state’, the ‘bloody book of law’ and ‘command’ in most ‘house[s]’ (1.1.139–1.2.96). Thus, simply and almost effortlessly, military achievement in its own right translates into respect, high public office and social triumph without – in fact, in spite of – tensions deriving from social differences and antagonisms. Venice’s ostensibly meritocratic republic may be oligarchic, but it appears to be welcoming enough to reward and office the stranger warrior’s merits, despite patriarchy’s xenophobic rant comparing Othello’s advancement to the dire prospect of ‘bond-slaves and pagans’ becoming ‘our statesmen’ (1.2.99). Of course, Othello’s martial service enables a marital success that in itself would also seem more than sufficient to conclude a romance fiction. The fabula in which the beauteous daughter of exalted rank and privilege maritally rewards the culturally exotic martial stranger would be as familiar to early modern English audiences as Bevis of Hampton.27 That Venice itself was often personified as an ‘unblemished’ beauteous ‘virgin’ lends further symbolic resonance to Othello’s achievement in marrying Desdemona (Contarini, 2r; A2r). Yet the institutional processes involved in legitimating both office and bride prove slightly more complicated than they seem at first, since both require litigation, and further ‘voices’ in witness, testimony, consensus, and confirmation. These processes too, speak to the play’s setting in early modern Venice. The decisions of the perspicacious senate appear to validate Othello’s presumption of fully fungible martial credit. Othello is named to replace as ‘governor’ a Venetian who is otherwise recognized as being of ‘most allowed sufficiency’ (1.3.224–5). However, this appointment to office, like the approval of marriage to Desdemona, is not quite so simple as a recognition of inherent worth, of superior place seamlessly following upon superior qualification. The Duke admits that Othello’s promotion over the ‘substitute’ – a term equatable in the civil realm with ‘lieutenant’ in the military – now holding office comes as a response to the ‘voice’ of ‘opinion, a sovereign



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mistress of effects’ (1.3.225–6). This gendered personification of ‘opinion’ as a ‘sovereign mistress’ who rules Venice’s Senate suggests a shadowy figural alternative to the serene, intact virgin of Venetian civic iconography. That the ultimate arbiter of Othello’s appointment goes by a name that typically connotes the opposite of stable judgement in early modern usage hints at the complexity that Shakespeare and his contemporaries could have glimpsed within the writings of commentators upon Venice’s much-envied ‘justice’ in ‘offices and dignities’. In the short run, of course, even the displaced governor accedes to this shared opinion, pronouncing the ‘warlike Moor’ to be a ‘worthy governor’ on the sole evidence of his demonstrated capacity to ‘command[] / like a full soldier’ (2.1.27–36). Thus far, Othello’s trajectory offers an absolute contrast to Iago’s cynical pessimism by imagining martial credit as meritorious ‘service’ counting as ‘fully’ transferrable to the public realm as ‘full commission’; there were, however, other sides to Venice’s ordered authority than its reputation as being run by ‘an assembly of Angels’ (Contarini, A2v). In fact, Venetian government is said by Contarini to be purpose-built to counter as well as to reward ambition, to be ‘ordered in such so secret, strange, and intricate a sort, that it utterly overreacheth the subtlety of all ambitious practises’ (Contarini, A2v). The city has remained ‘invincible’ only by virtue of a complex integration of martial and civil orders that requires ‘unweaponed men in gowns … give direction and law to many mighty and warlike armies both by sea and land’ (Contarini, A3r). Venice’s offices, civil and martial, not only depend on high levels of supervision by individuals and committees, but are subject to temporal constraints that demand rotation of officers as a safeguard.28 The frequently noted opportunity for ‘foreign mercenary soldiers’ to become citizens is actually only one part of a larger system of constraints designed to thwart ‘civil disturbance and tumult’ by preventing the ‘high and ambitious thoughts, that such [citizens] would have entertained, as did see themselves mighty in arms, and followed with affecting

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troupes of unquiet soldiers’ (Contarini, 130–1). To this end, the ‘Captain General of our army’, who is ‘always a stranger’, may eventually become a great citizen; but while in office, he ‘hath no authority to do or deliberate any thing without the advice of the legates’, and ‘the war being ended … [he] returneth home, giving up his authority’ (Contarini, 132; cf. Thomas, History, 82r). Thus, both Othello’s initial commission and his ultimate dismissal are, respectively, enabled and dictated by a selfsustaining political system that works to maintain and reproduce itself somewhat paradoxically by advancing and terminating individual office-holders in the name of stability of office itself.29 Merit and service certainly may matter in such cases, but not exclusively, or it seems within Shakespeare’s play, not even inevitably: witness Cassio’s surprising and spectacular rise from his initial appointment to a lieutenancy, a rank, nearly equivalent to Iago’s ensignship, to his ultimate commission to displace Othello ‘in his government’ (4.2.236).30 As a ‘Florentine’ (1.1.19), furthermore, Cassio is a ‘stranger’, whose rise to displace the native Iago in ‘our … Venice’ (3.3.204–5) is infinitely surpassed when he replaces the replacement governor-general of Cypress despite his demotion for public dereliction of martial ‘place and duty’ (2.3.163). A man of Othello’s rank might feel professionally insulted to surrender his briefly held office to one who failed miserably as his trusted ‘lieutenant’, his designated personal stand-in. Perhaps that displacement might rankle as hatefully as marital replacement with a martial subordinate, ‘with mine officer’ (4.1.199). But this bitter official surprise merely darkens ironies that have shadowed Othello’s spectacular successes from the first. Not only ‘opinion’ but also expediency has a voice in Othello’s appointment. Whatever Othello’s recognized ‘fathom’ or capacity, ‘th’ affair cries haste / And speed must answer it’ (1.3.277–8); in fact, an alternative appointee for Othello’s office may exist in the absent ‘Marcus Luccicos’ who is frantically written for ‘post-post-haste’ in Florence in the moments preceding



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Othello’s commissioning (1.3.45–7). The role of the letter at this juncture, as well as, earlier, in Iago’s litany of complaint, in Othello’s abrupt dismissal, and ultimately in his farewell to arms tracks something important in the play’s sceptical treatment of manly martial autonomy.

Iago’s privateering irony The importance of letters in initially thwarting Iago’s promotion and in ultimately commanding Othello’s abrupt dismissal merits attention. That ‘instrument of [Senatorial] pleasures’ (4.1.217) that Othello kisses and obeys conveys a bitterly peremptory, unexplained supersession of his wellearned place. Desdemona logically interprets the letter as expressing extra-official interference occasioned by displeasure in the form of personal bias (4.2.45–6). That is, she guesses that the cause of Othello’s disappointment in office resembles the cause to which Iago attributes his own disappointment in rank. Iago complains initially that ‘Preferment’ now ‘goes by letter and affection / And not by old gradation, where each second / Stood heir to th’ first’ (1.1.35–7). This attribution of Cassio’s unjust appointment to string-pulling and favouritism, to ‘letter and affection’, echoes early modern criticism of nobles and privy councillors for electing ‘their favourites’ to martial appointments in place of ‘the most ancient, most skilful and best renowned’.31 Although virtually all early modern military appointments at rank – even Iago’s own failed attempt, seconded by ‘personal suit’ from ‘three great ones of the city’ (1.1.7–8) – involved negotiations and alliances that testified to the social and economic credit required of individuals undertaking officership, many writers not only objected on behalf of the virtues of ‘desert’ according to proven performance of their ‘profession’ but expressed particular contempt for martial offices effected by means of letters rather than earned

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by ‘tried and known experience’.32 Furthermore, such criticisms of the violation of meritorious promotions also recur time and again to invocations of gender in order to figure disqualification in martial experience while simultaneously implicating the subjection of professional judgement to bias of affection. Iago’s slams at Cassio – for ignorance no better than ‘a spinster’ (1.1.23) and an attractiveness ‘framed to make women false’ (2.1.397) – echo old clichés that oppose true soldiers to ‘effeminate’ courtiers as ‘Hermaphroditus half men, half women, such as will lie rolling in a lady’s lap kissing her hands, feeding her ears with filed flattering talk’.33 Of course, at the time of Othello’s first performances, gendered images for bias in general and epistolary interference in particular also had topical resonance as well. In 1603 Robert Pricket treats promotion by lady’s letter as emblematic of abuses during the reign of Elizabeth. Urging James to undertake martial endeavours ‘More than could by a maiden Queen be done’, Pricket anticipates the arrival of a new age when ‘tri’de experience’ shall be rewarded and ‘A lady’s letter shall not a soldier shake, / Nor be of force, a captain’s name to make’ (Pricket, Souldiers Wish, C1v). In 1604 Barnabe Rich personifies contemporary abuses of promotion in the upstart officer candidate who can ‘rob … a book of a discourse, a fool of a fashion’, concluding, if such a one can ‘bring my Lady’s letter to my Lord, it is experience enough, and he shall be preferred before another that hath served twenty years in the camp’ (Rich, Fruits, 33). From such a perspective, Desdemona’s intercession on Cassio’s behalf with his commander or Emilia’s carrying messages for Cassio to the ‘great captain’s captain’ suggest compromising interference by intrinsically unqualified female agents. Furthermore, one can imagine Pricket, Rich, Iago – or London veterans – remarking an inability to comprehend martial values in Desdemona’s blithe declaration granting Cassio ‘warrant’ of his restored ‘place’ before Emilia (3.3.20) and then proceeding to dismiss the demands of ‘the wars’ – i.e. the rules of military discipline – as wrongfully harsh by standards of ‘common reason’



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(3.3.64–7). In fact, Cassio’s dereliction while stationed at the ‘court’ of guard, disturbing the peace of a ‘town of war / Yet wild’ (2.3.209–10) by turning his sword upon a fellow officer in drunken ‘private’ quarrel, violates item after serious item of solemn prohibition.34 That this already damning list expands to further charges of threatening a civilian with ‘determined sword’ (2.3.223), swearing ‘high in oath’ (2.3.231), and habitual drunkenness (and later to adultery) emphasizes the ignorance of military codes and the biased affection betrayed by attempts to trivialize the whole affair as deserving no more than a ‘private check’ (3.3.67).35 Against subjection to such extrinsic interference by unqualified and biased interlopers, Iago proclaims resistance. Never mind his own enlistment of ‘great ones of the city’ to ‘off-cap’ to his commanding officer in ‘personal suit’ for his promotion (1.1.7–9), Iago professes himself a man of ‘soul’ in undertaking self-interested action. In fact, threatened by ‘debtor and creditor’ like a ship to be plundered by actuarial pirates, he has turned the tables and become a pirate himself by using the pirate’s trick of ‘show[ing] out a flag and sign of love’ in order to line his purse by fraudulent ‘shows of service’ (1.1.17–53). Iago’s pirate discourse might recall Captain John Smith’s description of martial men driven to violent venture and revenge – or, less romantically, Stow’s evocation of shiftless grifters. When Iago employs similar language to describe Othello’s ‘achiev[ing]’ of Desdemona, however, his usage opens onto further significant social discrepancies between himself and Cassio with implication for the play’s small wars of rank and standing. Iago speaks to Cassio metaphorically of Othello’s successful raid upon a ship of large burden, ‘Faith, he tonight hath boarded a land carrack’, adding details that place the marriage within the ambiguous legal territory defined by privateering and outright piracy: ‘If it prove a lawful prize’, Iago adds, ‘he’s made for ever’ (1.2.50–1). The ambiguities of legality and piracy, endemic to the era of English state-sponsored and semi-commercial privateering, and a particular source

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of tension in English relations with Venice, continue themes already raised in Iago’s talk of employing the pirate tactic of false-flag affiliation (1.1.154).36 Cassio’s non-response to Iago’s ‘he’s made for ever’ – ‘I do not understand’ – may represent feigned ignorance (contrast the evidence for Cassio’s knowledge of Othello’s and Desdemona’s love in 3.3.94–100), but subsequent exchanges suggest that, here as elsewhere, he and Iago do not speak the same language, even when they share the same metaphor of the treasure ship. Iago’s figure for Desdemona as a vessel, boarded by the adventurer, and plundered for booty that may or may not be adjudicated to be ‘lawful’ and hence retainable due to legal risks of entangled ownership, deploys imagery highly relevant to contemporary conflicts implicating English martial values and England’s seriously frayed relationships with Venice. Privateering and piracy, always near-neighbours in early modern practice, and widely pursued by Englishmen in the Mediterranean, had become a significant public issue and a major irritant in English-Venetian relations in the years of the play’s composition and first performance. By the close of Elizabeth’s reign, England and the Republic of Venice were ‘virtually at war … over the actions of English pirates in the Eastern Mediterranean’.37 While the threat of violence was endemic to such endeavours and amply denounced in Venetian references to the ‘barbarous cruelty’ of the ‘accursed race’ of English Mediterranean interlopers, the Florentines, the French, and the Turks as well as some Englishmen also understood that English ‘pirates’ and even English voyages ostensibly undertaken to curtail such activities were operating with scandalous official complicity. As a result England had become regarded abroad as ‘a nation of pirates’.38 Upon his accession, James had been urged by the Recorder of London to take action to protect the ‘just traffic of all nations’ by ‘washing away our reproach of universal pirates and sea-wolves’.39 But during the subsequent negotiations of trade agreements for the Levant, the English continued to be widely vilified as false-faced antagonists whose ‘ships,



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under guise of friendship, are constantly committing intolerable injuries’.40 Some Englishmen saw these matters differently. Such tensions activated a long-lived pride in English martial manhood that defined itself in mockery of Venetian martial decline, ‘both by reason (as the fame goeth) they rather practise with money, to buy and sell countries, peace and war: than to exercise deeds of arms: and for that most Venetians are at these days become better merchants than men of war’ (Thomas, History, 75v). Robert Greene praises London by mocking Venice: the contemptible Venetian doge is characterized as lacking the Lord Mayor’s ‘honour and knighthood, purchased with his predecessors’ valour’. Venice may boast ‘their Armada and naval fight’ but London’s city officials are themselves ‘approved cavaliers’ who ‘hire not straggling mercenaries’. London’s citizens are ‘merchants with their friends and traffic fellows, otherwise martial minded soldiers … as valiant to attempt in wars as to counsel in peace’.41 Others mocked Venice as feckless for having failed to hold on to Cyprus, and as cowardly for lacking ‘sailors and soldiers amongst them [that] will adventure as worthy men indeed for their countries honour … For the least affrighting news of a pirate, shall detain them three months in harbour.’42 Iago’s piracy metaphors treating Desdemona as booty that, if successfully litigated for Othello, will ‘ma[ke]’ him ‘forever’ (1.2.51) register no more clearly with Cassio than Iago’s later attempts to engage him by calling Desdemona ‘full of game’ or ‘sport for Jove’ (2.3.15–25). Nevertheless, Cassio offers up oddly related metaphors for Desdemona in response to Montano’s query as to whether Othello is ‘wived’. Cassio first responds with praise for Othello’s marriage as an achievement: ‘he hath achieved a maid / That paragons description and wild fame’ (2.1.60–2), and then he casts Desdemona as the ‘riches of the ship’ (2.1.83). However, these riches are neither prize for the pirate’s taking, nor simple achievement for the aspirant; rather, Desdemona, the ‘great captain’s captain’, mystically bestows herself as bounty: ‘The riches of the ship

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… come on shore’ (2.1.83). Without art, labour or guilt, she safely passes through peril after peril to reach her goal, disarming violence, treachery, even ‘congregated’ opponents of their dangers, while even dispropertying nature itself: Tempests themselves, high seas, and howling winds, The guttered rocks and congregated sands, Traitors ensteeped to clog the guiltless keel, As having sense of beauty, do omit Their mortal natures, letting go safely by The divine Desdemona. (2.1.68–73) This rapturous vision of ‘divine’ bestowal aligns with the longing of Barnabe Rich for a world where ‘places’ themselves mystically choose their own officers, as in classical times when ‘such captains and officers were chosen as the places had need of, not such as had need of the places’ (Rich, Fruits, 19). Alas, that is not to be here, even under Venetian hegemony, where small antagonisms prove to be pervasive. If Iago’s piracy metaphors do not suit Cassio’s understanding, then neither do his drinking songs, though Cassio’s failure to approve – as his supposed failure to understand – is clearly inflected with antagonisms that are more than individual. Iago exploits vulnerabilities specific to the composite nature of the Venetian civil-martial polity. The contempt for Cassio’s gestures in Iago’s scatological mockery of Cassio’s ‘play[ing] the sir’ by kissing his fingers as kissing ‘clyster-pipes’ (2.1.174–6) responds precisely to the brutal social put-down constituted by Cassio’s condescending explanation of his superior ‘manners’ and ‘breeding’ to the presumed ignorance of Iago when he takes the sophisticated liberty of kissing Emilia in ‘courtesy’ (2.1.96–8). Iago’s hatred of Cassio’s thinly veiled arrogance acquires an objective correlative in the drunken confidences that Cassio shares: calling it ‘unworthy of his place’ to be caught hearing Iago’s songs, Cassio betrays a ludicrous obsession with his skimpy claim to military precedence over Iago by asserting that ‘The



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lieutenant is to be saved before the ancient’ (2.3.105–6). Small as the distinction may be, it nonetheless allows Cassio to assume a primacy that rankles with someone in Iago’s position. Thus, the tiny vantage of nominal difference in office internal to their occupation betrays itself as constituting for him a symbolic synecdoche for a spiritual-ontological superiority of rank per se. Of course, Iago’s assault upon Othello also exposes a point of professional pride as a source of weakness in his victim. While Iago counts, among other factors, upon a specific structural vulnerability created by Venice’s institutional demand that its highest military officers be semi-professional outsiders, Othello’s ‘unbookish’ (4.1.102) cultural ignorance concerning Venetian society is compounded by sentimental pride in his previously ‘unhoused free condition’ and a domestically disastrous professionally-heightened preference for manly, resolute action over trust, deliberation, compromise, and uncertainty. Iago’s prompt ‘Are you a man’ (3.3.377) directly addresses this martial habitus at its bedrock conviction that ‘to be once in doubt / Is once to be resolved’ (3.3.182–3). Early modern practice had begun to temper this long-standing preference for military leadership as top-down, all-in decisiveness with its accompanying visceral prejudices against such civil values as counsel and debate, though Iago’s own express disdain for the ‘snorting citizens’ and their ‘senator’ needs attention.43 If, as Iago sings, ‘A soldier’s a man’ (2.3.67), then not only is a ‘man’ not a ‘spinster’, but also not a ‘toged consul[]’ (1.1.24). When Iago calls out Brabantio for being ‘a senator’ (1.1.116), or when he mocks the ‘toged consuls’ for ‘bookish’ theorizing without experience (1.1.23–4), he may echo early modern martialists’ clichés. However, his truncated insulting inflection of Cicero’s ‘cedant arma togae’ (arms yielded to the toga) alludes to the controversial matter of the civic crown, a symbol of office that interested contemporary martialists and that will also, as we shall see, come to haunt Othello’s final moments.

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While martialists debated whether the Roman civic crown was exclusive to military men, George Whetstone contextualized Cicero’s arms-toga formula to undermine citizen-soldier distinctions. Against those who claimed that the civic crown was ordained ‘for the wearing only of an honourable soldier’ (Churchyard, General Rehearsal, O4r), Whetstone points out that Cicero himself wore the crown every bit as worthily in recognition of his status as a civilian hero: ‘Cicero was not naturally give[n] to follow arms, as appeared by his saying: Cedant Arma toge: yet for that by his policy and wisdom, he delivered Rome from the dangerous conspiracy of Catiline: He (by dispensation) was recompensed with the crown civic’ (Whetstone, F1v). When Othello dies requesting that his final account be ‘set down’ and submitted, his final letter to Venice addresses the requirements for award of the civic crown. The crown civic was understood to be intended to recognize someone who rescued a citizen – not a monarch or a general – and killed the oppressor on enemy territory (Churchyard, General Rehearsal, O3r). Othello’s report doubles the stakes. Not only did he kill a ‘malignant and a turbanned Turk’ who ‘beat a Venetian’ in Aleppo, but Othello adds that the offender had ‘traduced the state’ (5.2.351–2). The pathos of recording this additional detail about his motivation in his sumnatory vitae under ‘service’ to ‘the state’ is considerable. Over the bloody corpse of the wife he has just traduced and murdered, Othello manages a bid for posthumous promotion. Ironically, he couches this account in a distinctly Venetian, bureaucratized, and genderless idiom. For the honour of ‘the state’, he once undertook an action that English travellers and English mercenaries repeatedly invoke in quasi-chivalric, often patently self-serving tales that are told as witnessing to their own uncalculating affective outbursts of loyalty when confronted with foreigners who used ‘villainous and opprobrious speeches towards our Queen’s Majesty’.44 Reporting officially what he once did – impulsively, instantly, and from the heart – far away, without concerns for



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calculating advantages or losses like a ‘debtor and creditor’ or worries about risking dishonour by the ‘finger of scorn’ – to a foreigner who traduced the state, Othello re-enacts his deed, once martial and now civil, upon himself. As Emily Bartels puts it, elegantly, ‘we cannot really tell where Venice’s story stops and the Moor’s story begins’.45 Nor, it seems, can he. But as we gaze on that crime scene that the Venetians want to be ‘hid’ (5.2.363) while they proceed to apportion, justly and in good order, ‘the house’ and ‘fortunes of the Moor’, his office as ‘lord governor’, and the responsibility of pressing judicial ‘censure’ against Iago (5.2.363–7), we might pause to call to mind Francis Bacon’s observations about soldiers, love, and ambition. Writing categorically, Bacon pronounces that ‘To take a soldier without ambition, is to pull off his spurs,’ adding that martial men are much given to love.46 More subtly, however, Bacon weaves love and ambition together in a gnarled cord that may lead us closer to the murderer’s obscene invocations of justice, love, honour, and possession in his self-personification as ‘Justice’, his express desire to ‘kill thee / And love thee after’ (5.2.17–19), and his claim to have done ‘nought … in hate, but all in honour’ (5.2.292). ‘Is not love a goal of ambition’, Bacon asks, ‘a perfection of commandment, including not only the commandment of the person but of the will? Do we not see that in popular states ambition is more sweet, because honour is more voluntary?’47 The stories of Othello and Venice open onto narratives of early modern London and its own semi-martialized citizenry, contentious at home and already adventuring to extend its will around the world. And where will these stories end? This new century, like that new century, is no stranger to confusions and problems attending the values of soldiery and citizenry, of ambition and security, of honour and justice, of foreign wars and domestic contentions, big and small: casualties in the thousands around the world, or 26 at a time around the corner, or one by one by one at home.

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Notes 1

Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare’s Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 84.

2

Cf. Fortinbras ‘with divine ambition puff’d’ (Hamlet 4.4.49); ‘ambition, / The soldier’s virtue’ (Antony and Cleopatra 3.1.22–3); Jaques on the soldier’s ‘ambitious’ melancholy (As You Like It 4.1.13).

3

See especially Patrick Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 69 (1987): 394–424; Mark Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England’, The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850, ed. Tim Harris (Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001), 153–94.

4

Phil Withington, ‘Introduction – Citizens and Soldiers: the Renaissance Context’, JEMH 15 (2011): 3–30; 25, 5; cf. Rory Rapple, Martial Power and Elizabethan Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 78.

5

Thomas Styward, Pathway to Martial Discipline (London: 1581; STC 23413.5), 148.

6

Paul Robinson, Military Honour and the Conduct of War (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 83–4. Cf. Roger B. Manning, Swordsmen: The Martial Ethos in the Three Kingdoms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 60; David Trim, ‘Calvinist Internationalism and the English Officer Corps, 1562–1642’, History Compass 4.16 (2006): 1024–48.

7

Nick De Somogyi, Shakespeare’s Theatre of War (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 50. Even a partial list of plays that show warriors negotiating civilian status and office would include Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Timon of Athens.

8

Camille Wells Slights, ‘Slaves and Subjects in Othello’, Shakespeare Quarterly 48.4 (1997): 377–90; 379.

9

Gasparo Contarini, Commonwealth and Government of Venice, trans. Lewis Lewkenor (London, 1599; STC 5642).

10 Jorgensen notes this interest in Shakespeare’s plays between 1 Henry IV and Othello (Shakespeare’s Military World



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[Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956], 65); Michael Neill, ‘“His Master’s Ass”: Slavery, Service and Subordination in Othello’, in Tom Clayton, Susan Brock, Vincente Forés, eds, Shakespeare and the Mediterranean (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 215–29; for office and place, see also Michael Neill, ‘Changing Places in Othello’, Shakespeare Survey 37 (1984): 115–31; and, most fully, Julia Genster, ‘Lieutenancy, Standing In, and Othello’, ELH 57.4 (1990): 785–809. Many studies helpfully address the topic of military discourses in Othello; see especially Virginia Mason Vaughan, Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Charles Edelman, Shakespeare’s Military Language: A Dictionary (London: Athlone, 2004). Among studies of the play’s social and occupational settings, see especially Tom McBride, ‘Othello’s Orotund Occupation’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30.3 (1988): 412–30. Mark Matheson, ‘Venetian Culture and the Politics of Othello’ is particularly insightful (Shakespeare Survey 48 [1995], 123–33). For recent historical studies of the military, see the overview in David R. Lawrence, ‘Reappraising the Elizabethan and Early Stuart Soldier: Recent Historiography on Early Modern English Military Culture’, History Compass 9.1 (2011): 16–33. 11 Thomas Nashe, The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, 5 vols (London: A. H. Bullen, 1904–10), 1: 212. 12 Barnabe Rich, The Fruits of Long Experience (London, 1604; STC 21001), 4. 13 On this contention, see Mervyn James, Society, Politics, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 429; cf. James Siemon, Word against Word: Shakespearean Utterance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 107–18. 14 George Whetstone, Honourable Reputation of a Soldier (London: 1585; STC 25339), B1r-v. On advancement, see Christopher Storrs and H. M. Scott, ‘The Military Revolution and the European Nobility, c. 1600–1800’, War in History 3 (1996): 1–41. 15 Cyuile and Vncyuile Life (1579) in Inedited Tracts, ed. W. C. Hazlitt (1868; rpt New York: Burt Franklin, n.d.), 25–6.

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16 Matthew Sutcliffe, The Practice, Proceedings and Laws of Arms (London: 1593; STC 23468), 299–301. 17 Thomas Churchyard, A General Rehearsal of Wars (London: 1579; STC 5235.2), M3v. 18 On the perennial problem, see Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 210–11. 19 Gabriel Heaton, ‘“The Poor Man’s Petition”: Anthony Atkinson and the Politics of Libel’, Huntington Library Quarterly 69.1 (2006): 105–20; 107. 20 Thomas Middleton, The Collected Works of Thomas Middleton, eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 149–82. 21 Robert Pricket, A Soldier’s Wish unto his Soveraign (London: 1603; STC 20341), C1v; Robert Pricket, The Lord Coke his Speech and Charge (London: 1607; STC 5492.4), A3v. 22 Barnabe Rich, Room for a Gentleman (London, 1609; STC 20985), 2v. 23 John Smith, The Complete Works of Capt. John Smith, ed. Philip L. Barbour, 3 vols (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 2:914. 24 John Stow, Annales (London: 1615; STC 23338), 845, col. 2. 25 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Art of War Translated by Peter Whitehorne, 1560, ed. W. E. Henley (London: David Nutt, 1905), 13. 26 On Machiavelli’s good citizen-soldier of the ancient republic who integrated ‘military virtue’ and ‘political virtue’, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 201–2. 27 Cf. Mark Rose, ‘Othello’s Occupation: Shakespeare and the Romance of Chivalry’, English Literary Renaissance 15 (1985): 293–311. 28 See e.g. Contarini, 132; cf. William Thomas, The History of Italy (London: 1549; STC 24018), 79v; Zera S. Fink, The Classical Republicans (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1945), 30–3.



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29 On Venice’s complex civil-military system and its bureaucratic strategies aimed at containing potential usurpers while rewarding martial success, see William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 76–7; cf. M. E. Mallett and J. R. Hale, The Military Organisation of a Renaissance State: Venice c. 1400–1617 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 30 On the changing nomenclature of martial hierarchy and the ‘new’ rank of lieutenant, see Sir Charles Oman, A History of the Art of War in the Sixteenth Century (1937; rpt London: Greenhill, 1999), esp. 377; cf. Genster, ‘Lieutenancy’. 31 Robert Barret, Theoric and Practic of Modern Wars (London: 1598; STC 1500), 23; on the ‘ancient custom’ of step-wise promotion, cf. Sir Henry Knyvett, The Defense of the Realm 1596, ed. Charles Hughes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 60–1. 32 See Rich, Fruits, 19–20, 31. 33 Barnabe Rich, A Right Excellent and Pleasant Dialogue (London, 1574; STC 20998), P3v. 34 See C. G. Cruickshank, Elizabeth’s Army, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 296–303. 35 For adultery as capital offence, see Thomas Styward, Pathway to Martial Discipline (London, 1581; STC 23413.5), 57. 36 For ‘covering flags’ in disputes between England and Venice, see Calendar of State Papers Venetian 10 (1603–7), ed. Horatio F. Brown (London: HMSO, 1900), lviiii; for pirate false flags, see e.g. CSPV 10: 187 (item 285; 19 October 1604); cf. Virginia W. Lunsford, Piracy and Privateering in the Golden Age Netherlands (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 61. 37 Edelman, Shakespeare’s Military Language, 260; for a Venetian list of English pirates active in the Mediterranean between May 1602 and February 1603, see CSPV 10: 31–2 (item 53, 9 May 1603). 38 CSPV 9 (1592–1603), ed. Horatio F. Brown (London: HMSO, 1897): 412 (item 887; 3 June 1600); Kenneth R. Andrews, ‘Sir Robert Cecil and Mediterranean Plunder’, English Historical Review 87 (1972), 513–32; 529.

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39 Richard Martin, A Speech Delivered to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty (London, 1603; STC 17510), B1v. 40 CSPV 10: 189 (item 289; 30 October 1604). 41 Robert Greene, The Royal Exchange (London, 1590; STC 12307), ¶2v–3v. 42 Thomas Gainsford, The Glory of England (London, 1619; STC 11518), 228–9. 43 See the discussion of Charles V’s prudent councils of war in William Garrard, The Art of War (London, 1587; STC 11625), 337. 44 William Parry, New and Large Discourse (London, 1601; STC 19343), 5; cf. Rapple, 87; Whetstone, Honorable Reputation, A3r-v. 45 Emily C. Bartels, Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 190. 46 Francis Bacon, ‘Of Ambition’, The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 415. 47 Bacon, ‘Of Tribute’, The Major Works, 31.

8 Othello’s Consummation David Schalkwyk

In 1983, T. G. A. Nelson and Charles Haines published an essay that purported to get to the heart of Othello’s madness. In ‘Othello’s Unconsummated Marriage’ they argue that ‘Othello fails to consummate his marriage with Desdemona because … the pressures placed on him during the couple’s turbulent first night in Cyprus … reduce him to a state in which his judgement is fatally impaired … Desdemona … is not merely faithful but immaculate: she lives and dies a virgin’. In short, they argue that critics like F. R. Leavis fail to see that what they call Othello’s ‘“angry egotism … angry sensuality … ferocious stupidity … insane and self-deceiving passion” … may be the result of frustrated desire’.1 There are a number of striking aspects to this claim. The most apparent is the popular, neo-Freudian position that frustrated sexual desire is a common-sense explanation of the debilitating and murderous intensities that Leavis attributes to Shakespeare’s tragic hero.2 Had Othello only been given the opportunity to spend one blissful night with his new wife he would have been able to take all the other crosses on Cyprus in his stride. The second is that the psychological effects of such erotic frustration is the domain only of men – Desdemona,

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supposedly just as deprived of sexual satisfaction as her husband, experiences no such loss of self-possession. The third, intimately connected to the first, is the authors’ implicit idealization of Desdemona’s virginity – their celebration of her immaculate inviolability does more than underline the terrible irony of her death; it subscribes to the ‘angry sensuality’ and ‘insane … passion’ that prompt Othello to murder his wife in the first place. In underlining that irony, they celebrate and lament the very reification of untouchability that informs Othello’s drive to turn his wife to ‘monumental alabaster’ just before he smothers her.3 Nelson and Haines spend much of their essay trying to connect clues in Shakespeare’s text that the couple has no opportunity for consummation. There is no knock-down counter to their argument. There may indeed be no time on the first night, when Iago stirs up Desdemona’s father in Venice to pursue them, despite his insistent invitation to everyone to imagine their immediate intercourse: ‘Even now, now, very now an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe!’ (1.1.87; emphasis added). And Iago’s prurient statement, of his master, that ‘he hath not yet made wanton the night with her’ (2.3.16), coupled with Othello’s strangely public declaration, ‘The purchase made, the fruits are to ensue:  / That profit’s yet to come ’tween me and you’ (2.3.9–10) on Cyprus, could be read as a declaration that they have indeed not yet enjoyed enough privacy for consummation. How long does it take? But this hunting for clues in the text is beside the point. One can read these indications any which way – the play simply does not tell us what has or has not happened in the marriage bed. It may be that its silence on the issue, or its tentative, enticing hints, are in fact the point. Michael Neill argues that Othello works continuously to excite the scopic curiosity of the audience … the play arouses a similarly ambiguous longing in the audience to ‘grossly gape on’. The repeated frustration of this need means that even a matter so



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apparently straightforward as the consummation of Othello and Desdemona’s marriage becomes clouded by a miasma of doubt and impertinent conjecture.4 Such ‘scopic curiosity’ extends well beyond the prurient desire for pornographic spectatorship, however. If The Comedy of Errors is Shakespeare’s deepest investigation of the constituents of human identity, Othello offers his most extensive treatment of the philosophical problem of what is and is not available to sight in the human quest for knowledge, especially of other people. This makes it a central play in Stanley Cavell’s extended argument that Shakespeare’s tragedies especially are primarily concerned, avant la lettre, with Cartesian scepticism.5 The putative scenes that Shakespeare could not, or was not permitted to, represent on stage are merely an indication of a much deeper problem. It is connected to the question of sexual trust to be sure, but extends beyond it. It is the ‘grammatical’ or conceptual problem highlighted by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s investigation of the philosophical confusions that arise from our tendency to assume that the processes of knowledge are all of the same kind: that we know things essentially by seeing them, even when it makes no sense to assume an object that can be grasped by the senses.6 A signal instance, which I shall discuss in due course, is the exchange between Othello and Iago, in which Othello’s desire to know his servant’s thoughts is rebuffed by the ensign’s insistent reminder that nothing can force him to reveal what appears to be incorrigibly inside him: Good my lord, pardon me; Though I am bound to every act of duty, I am not bound to that all slaves are free to – Utter my thoughts. (3.3.136) Iago couches the essential inscrutability of his thoughts in political terms, but he is touching on a metaphysical truth, or

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what Wittgenstein would term a ‘grammatical’ one because it arises from a grammatical confusion. We assume that thoughts and (say) treasure are, as common nouns, grammatically objects of the same kind. One should be able to confirm the existence of treasure by digging it up and looking at it. By extension we assume that thoughts are similar objects; they merely have to be ‘dug up’ to be seen. But they are not: thoughts are not objects amenable to visual inspection. When we come up against the limits of our language in such cases, our scopic curiosity is raised to fever pitch, and we register our disappointment in achieving our logically impossible aim in an outburst of violent frustration (or philosophical puzzlement). In the rest of the essay I will investigate the relationship between two sorts of ‘scopic curiosity’: the erotic prurience that drives Othello and the members of the audience alike to want to ‘grossly gape on’ and the frustration induced by the more general philosophical problem of wanting to delve into another person by seeing what is inside them. If the former problem arises from the historical limitations placed upon what was allowed to happen on Shakespeare’s stage, the latter takes the intense form it does from the nature of theatre itself. The novel, which has developed the conventions of representing the interiority of its characters against our normal intuitions and experience and therefore serves to satisfy such curiosity, could not present the scopic frustrations of Othello as Shakespeare does on his stage. Shakespeare’s theatre presents its characters as impenetrable bodies that resist the desire of inquiring character and gaping audience to see into them. That desire to penetrate people with our eyes is satisfied by the illusionary power of the omniscient narrator, but it is both provoked and frustrated by the very materiality of the stage. In no play does Shakespeare provoke and frustrate that desire to penetrate with the eyes in this more philosophical sense as relentlessly as he does in Othello.



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The consummations of Lucretius By returning to a question that Neill clearly finds not only distasteful but also morally questionable, I do not intend to try to settle the matter one way or the other. I am interested in the assumptions that underlie one reading (consummation) against the other (non-consummation): the commonplace, modern idea that sexual frustration drives men (but not women?) mad, on the one hand, and the more historically distant notion that it is precisely the physical intercourse of two bodies that may lead to frustration and madness. The former idea is a current commonplace of folk psychology.7 To find someone who argues that it is precisely sexual consummation that leads to anger and frustration one has to turn to the Roman author Lucretius, specifically Book IV of On the Nature of Things. Lucretius is much closer to Shakespeare on this issue than popularized Freud, and Stephen Greenblatt has recently argued that the Roman dwells within our hearts and desires.8 He certainly would have made good pre-nuptial reading for the Moor of Venice. It is now commonplace that Lucretius’s poem sets out a thoroughly materialist theory of the constitution of the world and human consciousness that anticipates a modern, secular worldview. The universe is constituted of atoms in a variety of combinations and recombinations, the minute building-blocks of which cannot be created or destroyed; there is no divine plan or providence that directs human existence; and, as Greenblatt puts it, ‘the highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain. Life should be organized to serve the pursuit of happiness. There is no ethical purpose higher than this pursuit for oneself and one’s fellow creatures’ (Greenblatt, 3). On the face of it, Othello has nothing to say about the first of these precepts, and if anything seems to contradict the last two. Unlike King Lear, which does appear to unfold in a universe devoid of Christian providence or grace, the last act of Othello in particular invokes the very

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terrors of a supernatural world that Lucretius does everything to deny. One of the unbearable aspects of this most unbearable of plays is its insistence to the end on fixing our gaze upon the ‘hell and the demon staring out of the names of Othello and Desdemona’ (Cavell, Claim of Reason, 495). But where do those demons and that hell come from? In Lucretius’s view, not from outside the human world but rather from within the darkness of its own mistaken expectations and desires. In his account of the rescue and dissemination of Lucretius’s poem and its Epicurean ideas, Greenblatt holds that Shakespeare would have ‘shared his interest in Lucretian materialism with Spenser, Donne, Bacon and others’ and that apart from being able to read the original in Latin, he would undoubtedly have discussed On the Nature of Things with his friend Ben Jonson, whose copy of Lucretius’s text survives in the Houghton Library at Harvard University (Greenblatt, 51). It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Lucretius’s account of the causes and effects of dreams is echoed by one of Shakespeare’s early tragedies. Lucretius claims that the subject of our dreams arises from whatever activity is the object of our closest interest and attachment or whatever business has occupied much of our time in the past and has received our mind’s special attention: ‘Lawyers dream that they are pleading cases and drafting contracts; generals that they are fighting battles; mariners that they are continuing to wage war with the winds; and I that I am tackling my task of constantly investigating the nature of things and expounding my discoveries in my native tongue.’9 Mercutio’s ‘Queen Mab’ speech in Romeo and Juliet recalls this passage in both its evocation of the ‘atomi’ and the coincidence of dream and dreamer’s occupation or obsession: She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes In shape no bigger than an agate stone On the forefinger of an alderman, Drawn with a team of little atomi Over men’s noses as they lie asleep.



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  … And in this state she gallops night by night Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love; On courtiers’ knees, that dream on cur’sies straight; O’er lawyers’ fingers, who straight dream on fees; O’er ladies’ lips who straight on kisses dream.     … Sometime she driveth o’er a soldier’s neck, And then dreams he of cutting foreign throats Of breaches, ambuscadoes, Spanish blades, Of healths five fathom deep… (Romeo and Juliet, 1.4.54–84) From his disquisition on dreams Lucretius moves to the image of the beloved in love’s vision. So does Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet, for whom the projective madness wrought on the imagination by Queen Mab’s ‘atomi’ culminates in the madness of the lover, who dreams and speaks, finally, of ‘nothing’: romeo Peace, peace, Mercutio, peace. Thou talk’st of nothing. mercutio True, I talk of dreams, Which are the children of an idle brain, Begot of nothing but vain fantasy, Which is as thin of substance as the air And more inconstant than the wind… (95–100) The most striking thing about Lucretius’s pronouncements on human sexuality is that they come at the end of a fairly straightforward materialist theory of perception that appears at first sight to be contradicted by his account of love’s vision. Beginning with an explanation of the differences between the ways in which the respective senses are struck by the configurations of atoms that emanate from physical objects (and the effects of other objects on the passage and

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strength of those emanations), he moves via a description of the way in which mere images can impinge themselves upon body and mind in dreams to an explanation of sexual desire – specifically through the wet dream of the boy whose involuntary ejaculation at the prompting of his imagination of a beautiful girl stains the bedclothes. His position is initially at least entirely in keeping with his materialist psychology: ‘human seed can be elicited from the body only by the influence of a human being’ (ll. 1040–5), but his subsequent account of desire moves away from the strict causality of the effect that the object of desire makes upon the perceiver. Why do we desire the person whose image has wounded our eyes? Just as, ‘as a general rule’, the body tends involuntarily to fall towards the object that has wounded it, and blood gushes outward towards that which has injured it, so the lover ‘moves toward the source of the blow, yearning to copulate and ejaculate the accumulated fluid from body to body’ (ll. 1049 and 1054–7). Lucretius’s explanation of the pressure of accumulated semen that seeks release, even in sleep, would find acceptance in modern folk wisdom, but his far-fetched analogy with the wounded body would engender scepticism. These are the dangers of seeking causal explanations, especially when the difference between cause and effect is unclear. The analogy between desire and wound is metaphorical, not causal – Lucretius is extending an age-old notion of desire as a kind of injury inflected from beyond oneself, just as he subscribes to the idea of love as a kind of warfare. (The analogies with Othello should be already apparent, if only indistinctly, in the Moor’s ‘occupation’ and his unwillingness to shed Desdemona’s blood.) And once Lucretius begins to explore the nature of desire, the relation between cause and effect refuses to fit into a simple materialist framework. At first it seems that the lover is at the mercy of the image of the beloved – obsessed by desire, the lover feeds the pain of his wounds and wishes to intensify them. Materialist theory has an answer to the question of how to diminish the intensity of such obsession: if



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the pressure is caused by the build-up of semen, then the lover should ‘shun all that feeds your love, and turn your attention elsewhere: you should ejaculate the accumulated fluid into any woman’s body rather than reserve it for a single lover who monopolizes you and thus involve yourself in inevitable anxiety and anguish’ (ll. 1063–8). It is not merely a matter of hydraulics, however, at least not when it comes to love. For in the throes of love something else is at work that cannot be attributed to mere mechanics: Even in the hour of possession the passion of lovers fluctuates and wanders in uncertainty; they cannot decide what to enjoy first with their eyes and their hands. They tightly squeeze the object of their desire and cause bodily pain, often driving their teeth into one another’s lips and crushing mouth against mouth. This is because their pleasure is not pure: there are secret spurs that stimulate them to hurt the very object, whatever it may be, from which those germs of madness spring. (Lucretius, ll. 1077–83) Imagine this description as the form of Othello and Desdemona’s consummation, with its fundamental frustration and its overtones of violence, frenzy, and ultimate alienation. In this passage Lucretius admits that there is something in eros that escapes his attempts at causal explanation: ‘secret spurs … whatever it may be … from which those germs of madness spring’.10 What would ‘pure’ pleasure be for Lucretius? Presumably the pure, mechanical release of tension into whatever receptacle is available. The ‘secret spurs’, which frustrate the indulgence in pure pleasure, combine a perversity of desire and perception that goes beyond the purely causal model. For what engenders the lover’s madness is not the image that is imprinted upon his psyche by the atoms that come from the beloved, but rather his own projective vision upon her: ‘for men who are blinded by passion generally … attribute to their mistresses virtues that in reality they do not possess. Thus we find women with numerous defects of body

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and behavior being fondly loved and held in high esteem’ (ll. 1152–7). If a lover could see (or smell) his beloved as she really is, ‘he would own himself a fool, on seeing that he had attributed to her more qualities than one ought to ascribe to a mortal’ (ll. 1183–4). This projective strangeness of love’s vision is encapsulated in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which represents a series of variations on the insight that ‘Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1.2.234). The perversity that Lucretius derides goes beyond the merely sensory inversion of perceiver and perceived, image and imagination. It extends to the ascription of deity to the beloved who is no more than a figment of the lover’s imagination and is encapsulated by his entrapment within this imaginative projection: ‘his life is ruled by another. His duties are neglected, his reputation totters and dwindles’ (ll. 1122–3). Lucretius thus offers three accounts of love or desire that may resonate with Othello. First, love’s madness arises from its tendency to project an unreal or idealized image upon the beloved, to overvalue her, in Freud’s terms. This process is prone to severe disillusionment. Second, such projective vision renders the lover vulnerable to an extreme and dangerous form of dependency upon this image of the beloved as pure fantasy, to the extent that he is in danger of losing his autonomy, neglecting his duties, and sacrificing his reputation. Third, the consummation of loving desire does not procure satisfaction but rather an intensification of violent frustration, as the physical act of union produces no more than frenzied desperation, vicious alienation, and ultimate disappointment.

The scepticism of Eros Entertaining the possibility that Othello’s madness may arise, not from the frustrations induced by the postponement



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of consummation but rather from a deep Lucretian disappointment in the achievement of physical love, allows us to turn to the central argument in recent criticism concerning the alienation of human beings in or by love. This argument is exemplified by Cavell’s path-breaking observation that at the heart of all Shakespearean tragedy (and some of his romances) lies a form of (anachronistic) scepticism fully developed by René Descartes some fifty years after Othello was written. That Cavell regards Othello as the Shakespearean exemplum of what he calls ‘the attempt to convert the … condition of humanity into an intellectual difficulty, a riddle’ (495) is underlined by the fact that his analysis of the play concludes a 500-page study of the nature of scepticism as a philosophical (and ultimately, for Cavell, genuinely human) problem. Shakespeare’s tragedy demonstrates everything Cavell has to say about the history of the philosophy of scepticism. It is scepticism eroticized. Cavell’s argument is complex and difficult. Especially his discussion of Othello undergoes transformations and shifts that are often very difficult to follow. Scepticism erects itself on the metaphysical limitations of human beings to know each other – for me to (really, truly) know what only you can really know: that you are in pain, that you are feeling x, or thinking y. One response is to say that the only way in which I know that you are a human being, like me, is through ‘empathetic projection’. Certain of what I feel or think, I project my humanity upon you in an act of empathetic charity. (In doing so, it may be that my sense of my own humanity is endorsed.) But this remains a projective speculation – it offers no certainty of the kind the sceptic seeks. No recent critic has subjected Othello to as trenchant an analysis in terms of the constitution of subjectivity through rhetoric – what he calls ‘rhetorical anthropology’ – as Joel Altman in his magisterial recent study, The Improbability of ‘Othello’. His argument is even longer and more complex than Cavell’s. In short Altman argues that Shakespeare’s peculiar historical position, especially as a man of the theatre, provides

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him with the rhetorical instruments for creating characters in whom the dialectical ethos of the Stoics may be destabilized by a Protagoran rhetoric of uncertainty, change, and improvisation through which the distinction between verba and res, word and thing, evaporates. Altman’s breadth of reading and scholarship is extraordinary, his attention to the nuances of language astonishing. One asks, after reading his book, whether there is anything more to say about Othello. If there is one thing that is missing from his treatise, it is attention to a properly dialogical interaction between characters. Yes, Altman is alive to the ways in which Iago, the epitome of the Protagoran figure of instability and extemporization, infects and inflects Othello’s blind sense of the impermeability of his ethos, which is exemplified by his defiance of the threat of confinement by Brabantio: othello Let him do his spite; My services, which I have done the signiory, Shall out-tongue his complaints. ’Tis yet to know – Which, when I know that boasting is an honour, I shall promulgate – I fetch my life and being From men of royal siege, and my demerits May speak unbonneted to as proud a fortune As this that I have reached …      … I must be found. My parts, my title and my perfect soul Shall manifest me rightly. (1.2.18–33) In spite of his erotic reading of Christianized will in the play, by which ‘Shakespeare syncretizes the humanist insight into the erotics of cognition, the psychogogic potential of a revived classical rhetoric, and the wayward spiritual itinerary of the late English morality play in an internal critique of the affective theatrical medium in which he himself works’ (Improbability, 182), Altman has very little to say about eros as a force acting between human beings. Nor does he have



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anything to say about Cavell’s reading of Othello, where the ‘erotics of cognition’ is invoked to present the best case against scepticism with regard to other minds. If the person in the thrall of scepticism needs a case in which they might say, ‘if I don’t know this I don’t know anything’, then, Cavell argues, love is that scenario: if my knowledge of the other breaks down in this case – confronted by someone I love – then I really can’t know anything: ‘Chaos is come again’ (3.3.92). But love is not simply the best instance of knowledge of human beings generally – it is a special case. I must have invested my whole being – the very stability and order of my self, my ethos – in the other for their removal to result in the return of chaos. I must have engaged in a relationship with them, and be committed to pursue that engagement up to its possible point of disentanglement. On this point Cavell seems to be closer to Othello than Altman, for despite the greater opacity of his analysis, he understands that the sense of self at stake in the play is not merely a product of historically available forms of rhetoric expressed by a character – even if the character is divided from himself by those rhetorical resources – but the capacity of a subject to involve himself or herself with and in another. My erotically charged desire to know the world by incorporating it into myself as an object of knowledge is one thing; my love for someone expressed in a need to open myself to them and open them to myself is another. The metaphor of the erotic charge or wish to know something may work for desire, but it breaks down in the case of love, where the ideal mutuality of the relationship is imperilled by the desire for penetration or incorporation. Othello makes this clear. That is why the long exchange between Othello and his servant about the latter’s essential opacity and Othello’s secure, perhaps arrogant, assurance that he is himself transparent to the world are key points for Altman and Cavell, but play a somewhat different role in my argument.

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Two things are striking about Othello’s response to Iago’s warning over and above his absolute certainty that he inhabits a self whose matchless integrity speaks for itself. The first is that there are aspects of himself which remain unknown – ‘’tis yet to know’. The second is his invocation of service and bondage as aspects, indeed as the signs, of free will. It is not merely that Othello’s services to the state have an unanswerable voice of their own; they are his by choice.11 (This fact is, ironically, given a greater indicative weight at the end of the play when he declares, simply, ‘I have done the state some service, and they know’t’ [5.2.336; emphasis added].) His sense of service is integrated with that of bondage, and such bondage is eroticized in Othello’s asseveration of his voluntary agency and willing service to Desdemona: For know, Iago, But that I love the gentle Desdemona I would not my unhoused free condition Put into circumscription and confine For the sea’s worth. (1.2.24–8) This is clearly something that Othello’s condition or ethos does not speak of its own accord. Why does Othello invoke his love for Desdemona at the point at which he is threatened with imprisonment? His utterance is a declaration of freedom in the face of possible arrest, but it also conjoins marriage and ‘confine’ in a grammatically complex, if not exactly confused, way. It opens with the consequent, ‘for’, before moving on to an imperative (as befits a master to a servant, but also a friend to a confidant), ‘know, Iago’. The consequent is not obvious or even expected: what brings Othello’s relationship with Desdemona to mind at this point? Well, obviously, the fact that his elopement is precisely what threatens his freedom, but it is strange that he should characterize his present condition of love as a form of willing bondage. Othello thinks of his love for Desdemona as a form of



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voluntary self-imprisonment, freely chosen in despite of his perceived ethos as a free man. I confess to you, he says, that I would never give over my freedom, except insofar as I already have, by loving Desdemona. And I have chosen, freely, to do so. This recalls Iago’s opening disquisition on service to Roderigo. In the face of a historically grounded, perceived abrogation of reciprocal relationships between master and servant (‘whip me such honest knaves!’ [1.1.48]), Iago’s choice as servant is, in effect, to serve himself by feeding upon his master: ‘I follow him to serve my turn upon him’ (1.1.41). Othello occupies the opposite position: embracing willing service as the epitome of real freedom, he celebrates his relationship with Desdemona as a choice in which the value of his relationship outvalues the inestimable worth of the sea itself. Love is a form of willing slavery; its confines are vaster than the ocean. This is familiar enough, both in the erotic literary tradition in which Shakespeare is working, and in singular instances from his own work, like the dedication of Ferdinand and Miranda to each other, literally over the burden of logs that Ferdinand has been forced to carry by Prospero. But Othello gives this familiar notion a peculiar twist in the interchange between Othello and Iago, when Iago reminds Othello that slavery sets the conceptual limits to the power to know someone else. This occurs in the context of an exchange about the knowability of others, and the ethics of how men should ‘seem’: iago Men should be what they seem, Or those that be not, would they might seem none. othello Certain, men should be what they seem. iago Why then, I think Cassio’s an honest man. othello Nay, yet there’s more in this: I prithee speak to me as to thy thinkings, As thou dost ruminate, and give thy worst of thoughts The worst of words.

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iago Good my lord, pardon me; Though I am bound to every act of duty I am not bound to that all slaves are free to – Utter my thoughts? (3.3.129–39) Whereas Othello makes a personal claim about himself, Iago states a truth about humanity in general, using the epitome of abject and powerless subjectivity as his exemplum: even a slave cannot be commanded to reveal his thoughts to another. This is a variation on a similar logical truth with which Shakespeare is obsessed elsewhere: not even a king can order a slave to love someone (cf. Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Bertram in All’s Well That Ends Well). It returns us to Cavell’s preoccupation with scepticism, which is concerned with the metaphysical privacy of an individual’s thoughts. It turns the moral observation ‘men should be what they seem’ into a metaphysical question about depth and surface, appearance and reality, being and performance, and the limits of knowledge. This metaphysics is explored through the concept of slavery, which is connected variously in Othello in asymmetrical ways: (1) by Othello’s initial story ‘Of being taken by the insolent foe / And sold to slavery’ (1.3.138–9); (2) by his own free choice of love as a form of slavery; and (3) by Iago’s invocation of the limits of the capacity of the most powerful to extract the thoughts of the most menial. Conceptually, (2) stands between (1) and (3), for it straddles the merely material constraint upon freedom that may at any point enjoy ‘redemption thence’ and the metaphysical freedom that lies at the heart of every person to keep their thoughts to themselves. The slavery that love involves is paradoxically both constrained and freely chosen – one falls in love, abjectly, but such love affords a kind of freedom that is mutually enjoyed and freely pursued – ‘I did thrive in this fair lady’s love, / And she in mine. … She loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them’ (1.3.127–69). The three instances of slavery



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measure an equal number of distinct relations of reciprocity or lack of it: the captured slave is wholly at the command of the master; lovers enter a state of mutually enjoyed bondage to each other, which is in effect a kind of freedom; and the slave commanded to reveal his thoughts remains secure in his singular solipsism. This returns us to Lucretius, for the willing, mutual bondage of love that Othello celebrates in the opening of the play is contaminated by both the solipsism of (3) and the sheer exercise of brute power of (1). Lovers in physical intercourse, Lucretius avers, tear each other apart; indeed, they try to eat each other, in ignorance of what they really want from the other. Each of them shares the position of the slave who cannot be forced to reveal themselves, but also the master who, like Othello, is desperate to tear the innermost being of the other from them. Iago can remind his master that such power lies beyond his command; lovers in the throes of passionate desire have no such philosophical cue – they encounter nothing but mutual frustration and alienation while in the throes of the most intimate physical contact. The metaphysical imperviousness of human beings to epistemological penetration from others is nicely (and gruesomely) encapsulated by Iago’s secure disavowal in the face of his master’s demand: othello By heaven, I’ll know thy thoughts! iago You cannot, if my heart were in your hand, Nor shall not, whilst ’tis in my custody. (3.3.164­–7) It takes John Ford to render this image and the violent desire that it expresses literally in erotic rather than purely epistemological terms, when Giovanni enters with his sister’s heart on the point of his dagger (’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 5.6). Othello avoids such bloody literalism in his desire to preserve his wife as an unstained alabaster statue. He thus reverses Pygmalion’s wish to overcome the essential alienation of love

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for the other by forming his beloved entirely in his own image: stone. Such stone has no inner, metaphysically alienable being. When it is turned (with the help of Venus) to flesh, it yields itself to the sculptor’s greedy manipulations; it reserves and hides nothing in such yielding: As soon as he came home, straightway Pygmalion did repair Unto the image of his wench, and leaning on the bed, Did kiss her. In her body straight a warmness seemed to spread. He put his mouth again to hers, and on her breast did lay His hand. The ivory waxed soft: and putting quite away All hardness, yielded underneath his fingers, as we see A piece of wax made soft against the sun, or drawn to be In divers shapes by chaffing it between one’s hands, and so To serve to uses.12 Pygmalion is the figure of Narcissus in which the desire for the self-image has been propelled outwards, onto what is in effect the projected incarnation of solipsistic amour propre. For Lucretius, the figure probed, crushed, and bitten is also a projection: ‘the truth is that nothing is more difficult than to separate patent facts from the dubious opinions that our mind at once adds of its own accord … from the fair face and complexion of a human being nothing passes from the body for enjoyment except impalpable images, a sorry hope often snatched away by the wind’ (Nature, Bk. 4, ll. 467–9 and ll. 1093–5). Desire or love for Lucretius is thus a sado-masochistic combination of situations (1) and (3), sketched above, in which each is both slave and master: master insofar as s/he demands to devour the other in their absolute abjection; slave insofar as each, like Iago, withholds whatever it is that the other bites and scratches to obtain. And because, like Pygmalion’s statue, the other is no more than a projection – not a real other to be engaged or encountered through its resistance but rather an ‘impalpable image’ incapable of affirming the desiring self precisely through its palpable, resisting difference and



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otherness – the beloved will never be properly encountered. Such is the nature of Othello and Desdemona’s putative consummation, at least as Lucretius might see it. We should now be able to recognize that ‘empathetic projection’, as the mechanism by which each person assures him or herself of the humanity of the other, does not solve the sceptical problem. That projection is likely to follow Narcissus or Pygmalion in being the ‘impalpable image’ (to use Lucretius’s words, but also to follow Freud) of illusionary and illusory desire. Love may thus not be the solution to the sceptical problem but rather its apotheosis, at least if we insist on regarding its desires as a problem of knowledge: of ingesting or penetrating the depths of the other, as when Desdemona appears (but these are Othello’s words, not hers) to seek to devour Othello through his stories (‘She’d come again, and with a greedy ear / Devour up my discourse’ [1.3.150–1]), or when Othello conceives of her as a repository for ceaseless penetration (‘I had rather be a toad / And live upon the vapour of a dungeon / Than keep a corner in the thing I love / For others’ uses’ [3.3.274–6]; cf. Pygmalion’s manipulation of his enlivened statue ‘to serve to uses’). Is there a way of reconceiving love as something that is not essentially a relation of knowing another, of penetrating them or turning them into a corner of oneself?

The web of signs In Othello’s description of the provenance of his handkerchief, the Egyptian charmer who gave its ‘magic … web’ (3.4.71) to Othello’s mother ‘could almost read / The thoughts of people’ (3.4.59–60). Almost. No degree of magic can abrogate the law that people’s thoughts are their own. But what Othello desires is precisely that magic. He invests the handkerchief with the power to enable him to read Desdemona’s thoughts. But as everyone but he knows, the handkerchief is, as his ensign puts

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it in a different context, ‘a flag and sign of love, / Which is indeed but sign’ (1.1.154–5). Not everyone knows that signs are complex things. Iago does. He knows that signs are made to be circulated – for use – and that they take on a different significance with their new contexts. He also realizes that signs are of different types. The long disquisition on reputation in the speech (‘Who steals my purse steals trash’) points to a critical difference between types of sign: Good name in man and woman, dear my lord, Is the immediate jewel of their souls: Who steals my purse steals trash – ’Tis something – nothing, ’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands – But he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him And makes me poor indeed. (3.3.158–64) This returns us to slavery, but it now involves the promiscuity of money which, in Iago’s deft syntax, is ‘something’ or ‘nothing’ in its relation to its context and ownership: ‘’Twas mine, ’tis his’. It is precisely this promiscuity of movement and attachment that makes the purse equally ‘slave to thousands’ and eternally alienable and fungible. Such fungibility is the soul of money, which means in effect that money has no soul. As ‘pure’ slave it has nothing to hide or reserve for itself. ‘Good name’ is different – it is the ‘immediate jewel’ of the soul of men and women, which means that it is not only a thing of absolute value but also, ideally, of complete presence: it is an ‘immediate jewel’. However, it is a mistake to think of it as a thing at all. It may well be stolen, but it does not pass, like a purse, to the one who alienates it. It is a name, a sign, and therefore subject to laws of circulation or promiscuity that are different from those that govern money. Apparently fixed to its referent, it is also subject to the kind of circulation through which it may be displaced



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or transformed: ‘Othello’ is turned from ‘noble soldier’ to ‘contemptible cuckold’; Cassio from ‘loyal lieutenant’ to ‘violent drunkard’; Desdemona from ‘fair virgin’ to ‘ravenous whore’. It is therefore different from money, and that difference is precisely what Iago underlines: ‘he that filches from me my good name / Robs me of that which not enriches him / And makes me poor indeed.’ Iago is well aware of the dangers of confusing one kind of thing with another, however similar they seem. In language that is strikingly echoed by Othello’s brooding over Desdemona as a ‘corner’ which he keeps for his own (but not others’) ‘use’, ‘good name’ as the ‘immediate jewel’ of the soul is presented as an object closer to the soul than anything else, and therefore the very essence of identity. And yet, as an alienable signifier it is subject to – indeed mobilized by – the projective, promiscuous circulation of the language system and those who have the power to use it.13 Iago is such a user; moreover, he warns Othello of the degree to which a name may be alienated by the mere projection of prejudiced supposition: I do beseech you, Though I perchance am vicious in my guess – As, I confess, it is my nature’s plague To spy into abuses, and oft my jealousy Shapes faults that are not – that your wisdom From one that so imperfectly conceits Would take no notice, nor build yourself a trouble Out of his scattering and unsure observance: It were not for your quiet nor your good Nor for my manhood, honesty and wisdom To let you know my thoughts. (3.3.147–57) ‘Oft my jealousy / Shapes faults that are not.’ Many critics castigate Othello for his blind stupidity on the basis of statements like this. Iago is both telling Othello of the

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propensity of thought to project its own untrue character upon others (thereby warning him of what jealousy might do to Othello himself through ‘scattering and unsure observance’) and also of his own (Iago’s) tendency to destroy the good name of others by filching it with his jealous thought. What ‘good name’ is is in fact a gift bestowed upon the person on the basis of an amalgamation of their own actions and the projective thought of others. As a gift it may be taken away, like the handkerchief, and like the handkerchief in Othello (but not all handkerchiefs), once alienated it cannot be regained. Othello invests the handkerchief with a magic that turns it into an ‘immediate’ signifier; but its web is not only that of the spider but also the network of signifiers. It is therefore, pace Rymer, a cardinal signifier of the operation of signs in the play:14 of their capacity for different forms of investment through imaginative and emotional projection; of their potential promiscuity; and of their paradoxical transparency and opacity. Othello is certain what the handkerchief means, and what its alienation signifies: in this respect it is transparent to him. But it is in fact opaque – it offers no way to ‘read the thoughts of people’. That everyone who crosses its path wishes the ‘work’ to be ‘taken out’ attests to its fungibility and transparency as a sign, on the one hand, and to its opacity on the other, for it is utterly unclear what that ‘work’ is or entails. Its pattern (the common meaning of ‘work’ in this context) may be replicated, but this is not true of the actual labour (with its attendant magic), which is Heraclitan in its singularity. As the embodiment of such labour and the singular materials that went into it – the mummified hearts of maidens – the handkerchief represents the singularity of the person loved – the ‘immediate jewel’ of the soul – and therefore that person’s ideal difference from the alienable promiscuity of signs, which is encapsulated by Hero in Much Ado About Nothing as ‘but the sign and semblance of her honour’ (4.1.31). What exactly is the handkerchief, then, and does it cast any light on the difference between ‘good name’ and Iago’s purse (which presumably belongs to Roderigo)?



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The ordinariness of love Lynda Boose has written an influential essay that argues that the (obviously) white piece of cloth with its strawberry decorations signifies Desdemona and the virginal blood with which the marriage sheets would have been spotted had the marriage been consummated. Ian Smith counters that a handkerchief dyed in ‘mummy’ would be black (or at least very dark) and therefore acts as the sign for Othello’s ‘sooty bosom’ and ‘grimed … face’.15 His major point is that the handkerchief itself continues to act as a screen for projective desires and cultural expectations, and that therefore it exemplifies the projective (blind) imagination that is at work throughout Othello. Mummy returns us to this play’s preoccupation with hearts: with displaying them, distilling their essence (‘which the skilful / Conserved of maidens’ hearts’ [3.4.76–7]), or, following the recent scholarship that traces the cannibalistic trade in medicinal human flesh that mummy represented in the early modern period, with eating them – and thereby to Cavell.16 One of the curious things about both Cavell’s and Altman’s readings is that both of them attribute at least part of Othello’s worry to his surprise at having awoken Desdemona’s sexual passion, and thereby female sexuality as such. It is curious because this assumption is not prepared for or provided a place in the overall framework of their respective arguments. It is one thing to consider love as the ‘best case’ for overcoming general human scepticism about other minds (or other hearts), but there is nothing in scepticism itself that leads to the psychoanalytical diagnosis concerning the awakening of female sexuality or the psychic stain that physical intercourse might cause. Altman is in a similar position to Cavell, for although he declares that the subject position that results from the undermining of an ethos based on dialectic by a contaminating selfhood characterized by the shifting possibilities of rhetorical utterance offers a psychoanalytical diagnosis of the

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unconscious forces of this historical crossing, such a psychoanalytical position is not sexual. It holds no obvious lessons (as far as I can) see for the awakening of female sexuality and the attendant erotic violence that it provokes in men. The argument about awakening sexuality appears thus to be a powerful intuitive argument for accounting for Othello’s jealous rage. But read through Lucretius, that rage makes perfect sense, not because of a particular male anxiety about female sexuality but rather as a result of a generally human force of desire which is both ignorant of what it actually wants from the other and also repeatedly inflicts violence upon him or her in order to get it. Note that in Lucretius both men and women bite each other and crush each other’s lips in a frenzy of unfulfillable desire. Such mutuality finally leads to a curious movement at the end of Book IV of The Nature of Things, in which Lucretius celebrates the mutual pleasure of both sexes and advises a reciprocal enjoyment of mutual sexuality at a purely human level. This is far from the initial materialist account of perception, but it develops out of Lucretius’s diagnosis of the illusions to which lovers are prone. For Lucretius the illusions are ideological, in the sense of being fixated on an idea, not metaphysical. Lovers end up wanting to destroy each other for failing to satisfy their cravings because the cravings are crazy – they are based on delusion about desire, love, and what human beings themselves are and are not capable of giving or receiving. We are bound to be dissatisfied because we ask for the wrong things: we want an impossible union with the other, to penetrate them completely so that they come to occupy one’s heart, to own a corner in their very being that one can keep for oneself, and we want to believe that love can somehow achieve this complete penetration. We project an illusory image upon the other instead of simply accepting them as people who are capable of mutually beneficial satisfactions. In Martha Nussbaum’s words: ‘The other disappears almost entirely, becoming a mere vehicle for the lover’s personal wish, and, at the same



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time, a permanent obstacle to its fulfilment … The partner is punished, in effect, for her very otherness, for resisting an incorporation that would remove love’s bondage.’17 In Othello, Cavell argues, ‘the partner is punished, in effect, for her very otherness’. This otherness is exacerbated by racial difference but cannot be reduced to it. The play is indeed the story of ‘one that loved not wisely, but too well’ (5.2.342), if loving ‘too well’ is taken in the sense of the Lucretian critique of eros. By the time Othello begins to be persuaded of Desdemona’s alienation from him, he has already ensconced her in his heart, where she engenders the most loathsome vermin, and where he discovers that the ‘delicate creature’ of his imagination and desire cannot properly belong to him: ‘O curse of marriage, / That we can call these delicate creatures ours /  And not their appetites!’ (3.3.272–5). This is the illusory madness that Lucretius deprecates. It is encapsulated, perhaps unexpectedly, by the moment, immediately after the perils of the storm have passed, when Othello is ready to die of joy: If it were now to die, ’Twere now to be most happy, for I fear My soul hath her content so absolute That not another comfort like to this Succeeds in unknown fate. (2.1.187–91) It’s a strange declaration, entirely understandable, on the one hand, as the climax of a reunion after a perilous separation but, on the other, it is troubling in its declaration of the absolute happiness of death against the fear that nothing could be satisfying after this particular meeting – this moment, all-consuming and encompassing. Is this Othello’s consummation? Against its Lucretian madness, Desdemona tries to return him to ordinary people acting as a mutual comfort to each other in a world subject to time:

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The heavens forbid But that our loves and comforts should increase Even as our days do grow. (2.1.191–3) Desdemona’s sane reminder is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s recovery of sanity in the sonnets about love and time, when he recognizes the humanity of a love that changes with time without being destroyed by it: Those lines that I before have writ do lie, Even those that said I could love you no dearer; Yet then my judgement knew no reason why My most full flame should afterwards burn clearer. (Sonnet 115) The repartee between Desdemona and Iago that precedes Othello’s arrival, so disturbing to many, should be seen in the context of a de-idealizing view of love that recognizes, like Lucretius and unlike Othello, its incorrigible humanity. Like Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, Desdemona displays an assured sense of what it is to be in a loving relationship with another person rather than live inside them, have them cloistered within oneself, or live in the certainty that nothing to come could match this moment in the present, which has always already slipped into the past. To see the difference between Othello and Desdemona, look at the decisive exchange between the couple when Desdemona presses her husband to see Cassio: othello Prithee, no more. Let him come when he will, I will deny thee nothing. desdemona Why, this is not a boon, ’Tis as I should entreat you wear your gloves, Or feed on nourishing dishes, or keep you warm, Or sue to you to do a peculiar profit To your own person. Nay, when I have a suit



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Wherein I mean to touch your love indeed, It shall be full of poise and difficult weight, And fearful to be granted. othello I will deny thee nothing. Whereon I do beseech thee, grant me this, To leave me but a little to myself. desdemona Shall I deny you? No. Farewell, my lord. othello Farewell, my Desdemona. I’ll come to thee straight. desdemona Emilia, come. – Be as your fancies teach you: Whate’er you be, I am obedient. Exeunt Desdemona and Emilia. othello Excellent wretch! perdition catch my soul But I do love thee! And when I love thee not, Chaos is come again. (3.3.75–92; emphasis added) For Desdemona, loving someone means caring for them in the smallest domestic matters, and clearly in her view restoring Othello’s friendship with Cassio is as much for Othello’s good as providing ordinary companionate advice. The actress playing the part has a range of possible ways of doing so, from the dutifully humble young wife to the somewhat playful, slightly amused, but warmly caring woman secure in her love for this man. Against her attention to ordinary concerns like keeping warm, wearing gloves, or eating properly, Othello thinks of his wife in grand, metaphysical hyperbole: ‘I will deny thee nothing!’ and ‘when I love thee not / Chaos is come again’. The scene presents the two different concepts of love to which Lucretius draws our attention. There is Othello’s hyperbolic, metaphysical investment in the beloved that, staking its very existence on the other, does not know what it wants, can never be satisfied, and can never forgive the beloved for being impenetrable; against this stands Desdemona’s acceptance of the ordinary humanity of love and its trivial concerns and cares, which has no room for the desire for metaphysical

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penetration. What kind of relationship is it in which the other can be denied nothing? Cavell is only half right to suggest that love is the best case against scepticism, that if that best case collapses then the self is lost along with the world, and that Othello is the exemplum of the collapse of such a case (‘Chaos is come again … Othello’s occupation’s gone’). From a Lucretian perspective, love as a deluded desire to fuse with the other is the prime case of scepticism: the frenzied lovers biting and bruising each other do not know what it is in the other that they want; and they know nothing of the ‘secret spurs’ that drive them. Love of this kind is scepticism writ large. But love of the kind that Desdemona embodies, as she teases Othello about her care for him, is not simply the best case against scepticism. It has no room for scepticism at all – the metaphysical question does not arise, just as the problem of other minds disappears when we recognize, as Wittgenstein urges us to, that it arises from a grammatical confusion between objects that can be brought to light and inspected, and thoughts, which are not so much things that cannot be inspected but rather are not things at all, and therefore cannot be expected to behave like things amenable to examination. There are no ‘secret spurs’ to goad the kind of love Desdemona speaks for into violent revenge. But it does require a reciprocal acceptance of its ordinary humanity. From the beginning, the love that marks Othello and Desdemona is perilously asymmetrical: She loved me for the dangers I had passed And I loved her that she did pity them. (1.2.168–9) In each case, at least in Othello’s mind, it is also displaced. Desire is displaced from the person loved onto something else – ‘dangers’ and ‘pity’, respectively. Such displacement is echoed in Othello’s account of the fungibility of Desdemona’s desire:



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She thanked me And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her, I should but teach him how to tell my story And that that would woo her. (1.2.164–6) These may merely be the common indirections of desire, which, especially in a woman of this order and degree, fears to expose itself too directly and openly. But these are Othello’s words, not Desdemona’s. As such they signal Othello’s fears and obsessions long before Iago sets to his corrosive work. The ‘friend’ that loves Desdemona is already in Othello’s unconscious the one who intercedes on Othello’s behalf, where, presumably, he tells Othello’s ‘story’, but in his own voice, and so wins the beautiful bride over to himself. In his own mind, the Moor of Venice is always already displaced, loved by everyone, not just Desdemona, not for himself (which is what we all wish to be loved for) but for the dangers he had passed, for his story. In this light, what is it exactly that Desdemona and Othello love in each other? Shakespeare never shows us. This unrepresented thing, to which neither of them has access, is the source of our scopophilic urgency. Lucretius would suggest that the physical consummation of the kind that Othello might have enjoyed with Desdemona would not have resolved but rather intensified his metaphysical uncertainty.

Notes 1

T. G. A. Nelson and Charles Haines, ‘Othello’s Unconsummated Marriage’, Essays in Criticism 33 (January 1983): 1–18 (1).

2

F. R. Leavis, ‘Diabolic Intellect, or the Noble Hero’, in The Common Pursuit (Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books/Penguin Books, 1958).

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3

All quotations from Othello are from the Arden 3 edition; quotations from other Shakespeare plays are from William Shakespeare, The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, eds Ann Thompson et al. (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2011).

4

Michael Neill, ed., Othello, the Moor of Venice, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford; Clarendon Press, 2006), 136.

5

Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 495. See also Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

6

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, new edn (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 1973).

7

Lena Orlin has drawn my attention to an episode of Seinfeld, ‘The Abstinence’, that trades on the folk psychology of gender difference in sexuality: ‘George, deprived of sex when his girlfriend is diagnosed with mononucleosis, picks up Portuguese in a day, uses applied physics to show Derek Jeter how to hit home runs, and tosses off all the answers to Jeopardy. Elaine withholds sex to help her boyfriend in his medical studies, but abstinence renders her vague and stupid. She begs Jerry to have sex with her to clear her mind.’ (Personal correspondence).

8

Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011).

9

Titus Lucretius Carus, On the Nature of Things, trans. Martin Ferguson Smith (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2001), ll. 963–71.

10 Nick Moschovakis has suggested to me that the body instinctively tries to destroy the alien creature that is the cause of its delirious madness. I am grateful to him for his invaluable critical responses to this paper. 11 For a pathbreaking account of willing service in Shakespeare, see Michael Neill, ‘Servile Ministers’: Othello, King Lear and the Sacralization of Service (Vancouver: University of British Columbia/Ronsdale Press, 2004). See also David Schalkwyk, Shakespeare, Love and Service (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).



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12 Ovid, The Fifteen Books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding, Bk. 10, ll. 304–12: http://www. elizabethanauthors.org/ovid10.htm (accessed 31 July 2013). 13 Notice how closely Othello’s concern with toads, Iago’s representation of good name, and the ambiguous notion of ‘use’ reflects an apparently very different thought: Duke Senior’s meditation in the forest of Arden on the uses of adversity: ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity, / Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, / Wears yet a precious jewel in his head’ (As You Like It, 2.1.12–14). 14 A Short View of Tragedy (London, 1693): ‘So much ado, so much stress, so much passion and repetition about an Handkerchief? Why was not this call’d the Tragedy of the Handkerchief? What can be more absurd than (as Quintilian expresses it) in parvis litibus has Tragog dias movere?’, The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer, ed. Curt Zimansky (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), 132–64 (160). 15 Lynda E. Boose, ‘Othello’s Handkerchief: “The Recognizance and Pledge of Love’’ ’, ELR 5 (1975): 360–75; Ian Smith, ‘Othello’s Black Handkerchief’ in this volume (and see a first version in Shakespeare Quarterly, 64.1 [2013]: 1–25). 16 See Louise Christine Noble, Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Literature and Culture, Early Modern Cultural Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 17 David Evett, Discourses of Service in Shakespeare’s England (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

9 Othello’s Double Diction Robert N. Watson

Shakespeare often taught vocabulary by pairing neologisms with synonyms. He did so partly because new words were a valuable enough commodity in Elizabethan society to attract audiences to the theatre, and partly because he needed a wider verbal palette to map some boundaries repeatedly embattled in his plays: between inward and outward selves, between perception and reality, between passion and deliberation, and between self-assertion and assimilation into the social order.1 In Othello, Shakespeare integrates this expansion of the lexicon with his exposition of a character in the grip of those dilemmas. Character criticism has often been dismissed in recent years on the grounds that plays are really ‘only words’; but words can be constitutive of character, both on stage and off. C. S. Lewis’s complaint that Shakespeare’s near-repetitions (and those of other Elizabethan dramatists) offer mere ‘variation’ where Milton’s involve ‘construction’2 overlooks not only the pedagogical function of Shakespeare’s synonyms, but also the way those doublets construct Othello’s character, by implicitly reflecting (in microcosm) the doubleness the hero must endure inwardly and project to the world outside.

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Othello’s efforts to introduce himself to the Senate in his new role as Venetian husband, as they overlap with Shakespeare’s efforts to introduce him to us in his full hybridity, provide a particularly telling example – and one that shows the value of attention to neologisms for literary interpretation as well as for historical linguistics. Both for Shakespeare’s purposes and for Othello’s own, Othello must seem both exotic and accessible – a double-bind often lamented by racial-ethnic minorities, who find themselves required to stand out and yet to assimilate, at once to exemplify and reject the stereotyped expectations of the majority. After a disarmingly simple first line – ‘’Tis better as it is’ (1.2.6) – Othello’s first speech contains three neologisms, each created by attaching an ordinary Anglo-Saxon prefix (as with ‘unbonneted’) to change a common word into a new part of speech: My services which I have done the signiory, Shall out-tongue his complaints. ’Tis yet to know – Which, when I know that boasting is an honour, I shall promulgate – I fetch my life and being From men of royal siege, and my demerits May speak unbonneted to as proud a fortune As this that I have reached. For know, Iago, But that I love the gentle Desdemona, I would not my unhoused free condition Put into circumscription and confine …. (1.2.18–27) ‘Out-tongue’ uses an outré tongue to override the mere ‘complaints’ of a Venetian insider (perhaps a touch of the anti-Petrarchan Shakespeare). Othello then amplifies ‘boast’ into ‘promulgate’ (or the First Quarto’s ‘provulgate’), and familiarizes ‘unhoused’ with ‘free’, and ‘circumscription’3 with ‘confine’. Thereafter, Othello – unlike Shakespeare’s deliberately less appealing African characters such as Aaron or Morocco – often employs a compressed form of the socially driven practice that linguists call ‘code-switching’, juxtaposing



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a common word with a new or rare one of similar meaning, making Othello a kind of familiar stranger, appealing in both aspects of the oxymoron. Hendiadys often implies a neologism residing in the unarticulated space between the paired words; in Othello’s case, it implies an uninhabitable oceanic space between his two worlds. Sometimes this tactic involves pairing an AngloSaxon word with a Romance-language import; sometimes it involves pairing an idiomatic with a non-idiomatic usage of native words, with the charm of a foreign speaker offering us a fresh look at the contingency of our speech. Not all the highlighted phrases below include an outright neologism in the pairing (though some of Othello’s other words here, such as ‘hint’ at 1.3.167, were surprisingly rare), but they suggest the many ways Othello gathers customary and unaccustomed language together in this scene in order to represent himself effectively. To these ‘Most potent, grave, and reverend signiors, / My very noble and approved good masters’, he will ‘a round unvarnished tale deliver / Of my whole course of love, what drugs, what charms, / What conjuration and what mighty magic’ he used on Desdemona (1.3.77–93). He told her Of moving accidents by flood and field, Of hair-breadth scapes i’ th’ imminent deadly breach… And of the cannibals that each other eat, The Anthropophagi, and ‘of some distressful stroke / That my youth suffered’ (1.3.136–7, 144–5, 158–9). These struggles, Othello adds, have made ‘the flinty and steel couch of war / My thrice-driven bed of down. I do agnize / A natural and prompt alacrity’ for such martial hardships (1.3.231–3). For Desdemona, however, he demands ‘Due reverence [reference, F1] of place and exhibition, / With such accommodation and besort / As levels with her breeding’ (1.3.238–40). He asks permission to bring her along to Cyprus, not

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   to comply with heat (the young affects In me [or, my] defunct),4 and proper satisfaction, But to be free and bounteous to her mind. …. No, when light-winged toys Of feathered Cupid seel with wanton dullness My speculative and officed instrument, That my disports corrupt and taint my business, Let housewives make a skillet of my helm, And all indign and base adversities Make head against my estimation. (1.3.264–75) This remarkable flurry of neologisms within hendiadys in a span of fewer than two hundred lines seems designed to present Othello, to both the on-stage and off-stage audiences, as cool enough to produce chills, and yet communicative enough to generate the warmth of connection. Pierre Bourdieu has rightly argued against an excessively decontextualized understanding of language that once dominated the field of linguistics, but his model may benefit from an even more complex model of power and language here replicated by Shakespeare. According to Bourdieu, ‘language is worth what those who speak it are worth, i.e. the power and authority in the economic and cultural power relations of the holders of the corresponding competence’.5 My claim – which gives the tu quoque to Bourdieu’s condemnation of ahistorical linguistics, and reflects in miniature the complaint that Bourdieu’s theory underrates the potential of resistance – is that this speaker (like others in the humanistic Renaissance) will be deemed worth approximately what his language is worth. Othello’s acceptance bears no simple correspondence to his subjugation of his native discourse to that of the dominant community. His position is certainly strengthened at this moment by Venice’s pressing needs for his military abilities. But to reduce language to either a mystification of power or a quantity of capital6 – even including the cultural



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capital (and the IOUs) Othello’s introductory and valedictory speeches deploy – is to overlook the complex relationships of local buyers and alien sellers, and what rarities those sellers have to offer. ‘Symbolic capital’ may be ‘inseparable from the speaker’s position in the social structure’,7 but a shrewd speaker can negotiate favourable exchange-rates for that capital and thereby improve his accounts. Othello’s verbal mode fits Mikhail Bakhtin’s category of ‘hybridization’: ‘a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses, separated from one another by an epoch, by social differentiation, or by some other factor’; and this mixing is important not so much for the linguistic forms themselves as for ‘the collision between different points of view on the world that are embedded in these forms’.8 Othello does not aim merely at what Bourdieu would predict: to ‘be believed, recognized, obeyed’.9 By making his verbal self partly astonishing and partly recognizable, he intends to be charming – to exercise (as his ‘This only is the witchcraft I have used’ half-jokingly acknowledges at 1.3.170) an alternative kind of control through his spell-binding diction. He replicates, at the level of vocabulary, the charm already cast on Desdemona at the level of story – something that demands admiration (as far more adventurous than her Venetian domesticity) but also somehow enables sympathetic identification. To recognize fully the tragedy of ‘he that was Othello’, audiences must say, with her, ‘’twas strange, ’twas passing strange, / ’Twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful’ (5.2.281; 1.3.161–2). Several otherwise excellent scholarly commentators feel obliged to resist this spell and judge it as Iago does (before we have heard Othello speak a word), dismissing Othello’s unusual diction as ‘bombast circumstance / Horribly stuffed with epithets of war’ (1.1.12–13). Lynne Magnusson – elsewhere admirably alert to Shakespeare’s recognition of the complex social matrices shaping characters’ speech10 – criticizes Othello for ‘bombast … an impulse to linguistic overreaching’.11 Kenneth Gross diagnoses ‘self-conscious excesses of ornament,

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almost ludicrous neologisms’.12 George T. Wright (even while illuminating some subtle functions of hendiadys in Hamlet) dismisses the Moor’s pairings as the mere ‘orotundity’ of an ‘incorrigibly extravagant’ man ‘excessively disposed to use the doublet theatrically’.13 Simon Palfrey – although he recognizes acutely that ‘Othello’s bloated and half-borrowed discourse is a crucial marker of his incipient tragedy’ – hears mostly ‘a snip and paste job gleaned from some unholy mix of official documents and ancient romance’, and perceives these doublets as ‘over-stuffed padding’ in which ‘the second noun is pretty much redundant’.14 Much virtue in ‘pretty much’: Othello’s doublets are obviously different from the mere repetitiveness of AngloSaxon monosyllables mustered by Justice Shallow (2 Henry IV, 3.2.98–101) or, more winningly, Cordelia. They also differ from the mode of hendiadys that pairs words to complicate or compromise the meanings of those words; Othello’s doublets instead signal his own complications and compromises. Sylvia Adamson recognizes that Shakespeare’s matching of high-style words with their low-style synonyms can produce the illusion of a rounded character, but she reads the effect of Othello’s diglossia as ‘a glimpse of a private man behind the public hero, of a sincere feeling behind the rhetorical splendor’.15 I see a murkier and more politically constrained division. If ‘hendiadys is a principle that asserts conjunction and thwarts it’,16 so is multiculturalism. If we recognize the double-bind of Othello’s social situation, we can find those pairings fully apt to the play’s tragic theme. Iago declares ‘I am not what I am’; Othello is constantly declaring (as if to a Customs and Immigration officer) more than one self. Frank Kermode characterizes Othello’s language as ‘innocent pompousness’ and notes that to ‘use a strange word rather than a familiar one’ is something Othello ‘does on a good many other occasions’.17 My claim is that Othello often uses a strange word along with a familiar one that glosses it – a device that Shakespeare developed for the Ghost in Hamlet, another figure caught between worlds who must seem



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unsettlingly alien yet also eligible for sympathy as he tells the frightening story of his distant other home. What produces Othello’s ‘language habitus’ (to use Bourdieu’s term, but to go beyond his limitation of that concept to ‘a dimension of class habitus’18) is his habitation of two worlds, in neither of which he feels fully at home. The locus of Othello’s speech is always already Cyprus – in his speeches to the Senate he may be displaying his unique suitability for that posting, offering a rhetorical resumé at the moment he most needs to be needed there – and Cyprus, significantly, is the locale of the secondary bloom of neologisms in the play, as several characters attempt to speak to this liminal territory, claimed by two empires.19 Throughout Othello, neologistic speech remains a significant index of alienation, and not just for the title character. This may explain why Michael Cassio, scorned by Iago as a vain, over-educated Florentine seducer among the saltof-the-sea Venetians, has more than his share of minor neologisms, created by small prefix alterations: it marks him as a little bit foreign, and a little bit affected. More centrally, Shakespeare has Iago – the ‘Turk’ disguised as a loyal Venetian (2.1.114), the man who swears ‘By Janus’ (1.2.330) – introduce himself through doublets such as ‘duteous and knee-crooking knave’ and ‘timorous accent and dire yell’ (1.1.44, 74, with further examples here and at the end of 1.3). Iago’s mode of hendiadys reveals his characteristic satiric and nativist mode, deflating the pretensions of others by dropping from exotic and exalted terms to their blunt Anglo-Saxon equivalents. He thus does in small what he will do to undo Othello in the plot at large: reducing romance to materiality, and the foreign-word-weaving aristocrat thereby to a mere beast. In vocabulary as in psychology, Iago also works in infernal triangles: it is easy to understand ‘fleers’ when Iago speaks of the ‘fleers, the gibes, and notable scorns’ that the arrogant Cassio will cast on a disdained mistress (4.1.83); or ‘denotement’ (or the unemended ‘devotement’) when Iago speaks of Othello’s ‘contemplation, mark and denotement’ of

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Desdemona’s beauty (2.3.312). As with ‘honest’,20 Iago often balances the old and new meanings of single words to conceal his real intentions, whereas Othello balances old words with new ones to display his complex self. Othello’s near-repetitions serve, not so much to provide Erasmian copia, as to imply Laingian schizophrenia; the Shakespearean doublet that William Empson identifies as a type of ambiguity21 may function here instead as a symptom of dual citizenship. The tension persists even at the micro-level of Othello’s name, decipherable as ‘Ottoman’ with an Italian suffix,22 and at the overarching level of the play’s title, The Tragedie of Othello, the Moore of Venice. Othello evinces small resurgences of this verbal tic as his split identity reasserts itself around the murder of Desdemona. The temptation scene adds ‘contract and purse thy brow together’, ‘exsufflicate and blown surmises’, ‘icy current and compulsive course’, and ‘destiny unshunnable’ (3.3.115, 185, 457, 279). His soliloquy opening the final scene, as he prepares the murder, begins with forty-one monosyllables and one bi-syllable before exploding, like a chilly firework, into ‘monumental alabaster’ (5.2.1–5). Before Othello laments, ‘I know not where is that Promethean heat / That can thy light relume’ (again setting his exotic verbal treasures in the foil of common English monosyllables), Shakespeare gives us eight lines on the problem of restoring extinguished lights (5.2.7– 13). Othello calls the handkerchief – at once the most lowly domestic and most exotically magical item – a ‘recognizance and pledge of love’ (5.2.212), and then tells Desdemona’s corpse that ‘when we shall meet at compt / This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven / And fiends will snatch at it’ (5.2.271–3). The moment audiences spend wondering what ‘compt’ (or Q1’s ‘count’) is, before the next line explains it as Last Judgment, provides another opportunity to wonder at Othello’s beautiful strangeness just when we have been repelled by his horrible deed – committed partly because he could not reconcile a Christian discourse of gratuitous love (from ‘the divine Desdemona’, 2.1.73) with a paganistic



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discourse (echoed and amplified by Iago) that says love must be earned and can be quantified.23 When Othello speaks, finally, of his ‘subdued’ eyes (5.2.346), the adjective is unusual (though not as novel as the OED suggests), but prepared by Desdemona’s use of the common verb form at 1.3.251; and Othello’s combination of the etymological senses (‘deceived’ and ‘purged’) with the homophonic hint of ‘dewed’ is fulfilled when the sentence goes on to describe his guilty teardrops. The domesticated Othello then silences the exotic one, just when he has made us love that verbal exoticism most, set against the blank of Lodovico’s official Venetian rhetoric that closes the play. He does so not only in his allegorical construal of his suicide, but also in the way he narrates it: the polysyllabic descriptor of the exotic self is Latin in etymology and Semitic in theology, and besieged by sixteen Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: ‘I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog / And smote him – thus!’ (5.2.353–4). And he does so, finally, in his terribly simple dying words, which echo the sounds and simplicity of his opening ‘’Tis better as it is’: ‘I kissed thee ere I killed thee: no way but this, / Killing myself, to die upon a kiss’ (5.2.356–7). In short – or, better, ‘in other words’ – Othello is sold to the audience partly as Shakespearean drama as a whole is sold to the audience: as a purveyor of new words that offer a glimpse into wonderful and terrible new worlds. Less than two years after Othello first spoke, Thomas Middleton similarly signalled the liminal social status of the usurer Harry Dampit by peppering his ordinary speech with neologisms (thus also linking the morally dubious coining of money to the coining of words).24 Within that same brief aftermath, Shakespeare himself used the collapse of Lear’s exalted diction into brutally blunt Anglo-Saxon monosyllables in the final scene to convey the plainness with which Lear has come to perceive the brutality of life and death – a reductiveness like that of Iago toward the erotic. Shakespeare conversely used the leap from extreme verbal simplicity into neologistic elaboration to convey Macbeth’s slippage from selfish determination to self-alienating rationalization:

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If it were done, when ’tis done, then ’twere well It were done quickly: if th’assassination Could trammel up the consequence, and catch With his surcease success. … (Macbeth, 1.7.1–4) The double character of Macbeth, at war with himself, is similarly signalled by a division between high and low diction when he complains that ‘this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red’ (2.2.60–2). The aptly multi-syllabic ‘multitudinous’ – not attested before 1603 – is set against its aptly simple antonym ‘one’; in the same pair of lines, Shakespeare alters the form, the former function, and the previous meaning of the rare and difficult ‘incarnadine’, and then defines it vividly in simple monosyllables. That language makes character in a dramatic text is a truism; the great invention of Shakespearean drama was that the details of diction make fully psychological and sociological characters, to a degree still unsurpassed. Rhetorical knowledge was real power, in the collective mind of Renaissance humanism. Words mattered not only for persuasion in courtship, courtiership, and the law-courts. They mattered greatly in geopolitics, as Shakespeare’s second history tetralogy demonstrates through Richard II’s rhetoricriddled fall, Prince Hal’s mastery of Eastcheap dialects, his inspirational unification of the British as Henry V, and Princess Katherine’s word-by-word preparation for the subjugation of France (1 Henry IV, 2.4.4–33; Henry V, 3.4). The expansion of world trade and the emergence of vernacular literatures made the development of English into an essential work of patriotism, as many writers eagerly asserted. Words mattered no less in soteriology, where Catholics and Protestants had very different ideas of how words would save, and in which language, but no doubt that they were indispensable for salvation. And, on the mean streets of Elizabethan London, they were a matter of survival: for swinging a deal, demanding respect, finding a laugh or a friend.



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According to the distinguished linguist Manfred Görlach, the early modern period ‘exhibits the fastest growth of the vocabulary in the history of the English language, in absolute figures as well as in proportion to the total’, with ‘an extremely rapid increase in new words especially between 1570 and 1630’.25 This corresponds to the prime of the English drama, which drew on those new verbal energies and (after skimming off a little middle-man profit) fed them back into the system. Nearly a third of the neologisms created in English during the entire Renaissance emerged between 1588 and 1612,26 which is to say, within the quarter-century scope of Shakespeare’s career as a playwright. A mass of newcomers to London, arriving from all over an England far more diverse in its dialects than we can now imagine, would have both faced and presented great linguistic challenges; and – in a society where, as Philip Sidney shrewdly remarked, Londoners were inclined ‘to jest at strangers, because they speak not English so well as we do’27 – people would have had special incentives to catch up on the latest parlances. Playgoers often recorded appealing locutions in commonplace books; the learning of single words may not have required such a record, but it was a miniature of the same process, prying loose a piece of artful language to take home – where it often ended up looking ridiculous rather than magnificent, as when Polonius savours ‘mobbled queen’ (Hamlet, 2.2.504–5). If writers lured clients by promising social ascent and seductive graces, they also depicted the humiliation of those who acquired their words from some inferior supplier. Shakespeare’s unwitting masters of malapropism, such as Dogberry, Bottom, Elbow, Mistress Quickly, and the Gobbos, constitute a kind of negative advertising. In fact, Shakespeare and his colleagues provide more examples of people embarrassing themselves by trying to echo theatrical grandiosities than examples of people actually succeeding with such echoes. Perhaps the rhetorical commodity was then so saleable that drumming up demand was less important than diverting market-share from rival manufacturers.

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Alternatively, the predominance of failed mimics may derive from the ambivalence of English Renaissance drama generally toward social volatility: plays implied they could teach the means of social advancement, but they also assured people that their inferiors would only demonstrate their insufficiencies for higher rank if they tried to ascend through borrowed rhetoric.28 The malaprops tend to be lower-class characters attempting dignified forms and seeking access to professional vocabularies – Bottoms aspiring to the top – and their mangling of a privileged lexicon made an essentialist case against social levelling. This contradictory function matches the way Shakespearean drama has been presented for centuries: on the one hand, as a resource whereby menial classes could improve themselves into sensibility and respectability, and non-white races could participate in a shared and therefore equalizing human essence, yet on the other hand, as an implicit (and sometimes explicit) validation of aristocratic culture and Eurocentrism. Othello is always haunted by fears of humiliation: early in Act 4, for example, when Iago’s ‘have you not hurt your head?’ and Cassio’s snickering rouse Othello’s terror that ‘the time of scorn’ will ‘point his slow unmoving finger’ at him (4.1–59, 110–23; 4.255–6). He would therefore have felt these risks acutely; no wonder he belittles his rhetorical ability so extensively before addressing the Venetian Senate. The mighty lines of great, exotic soldiers sometimes received the same mockery as the grandiosities of low-comic figures. Ben Jonson’s Timber, or Discoveries argues that a writer should ‘speak to the capacity of his hearers. And though his language differs from the vulgar somewhat, it will not fly from all humanity, with all the Tamerlanes and Tamer-chams of the later age.’29 In the Induction to Antonio and Mellida, John Marston has Feliche scoff, ‘Rampum scrampum, mount tufty Tamberlaine. What rattling thunderclap breaks from his lips?’30 Shakespeare belittles his Ancient Pistol by making his speeches a collection of stage-grandiosities, including what was surely intended to be recognized as an echo of Tamburlaine (2.4.162), with no actual heroism to back them up.



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The lexically fashioned self can succeed, at least for a while. Tamburlaine, the world-conqueror, often worked by words; his astonishing ‘terms’ repeatedly prove to be his most effective weapon. This kind of siege-warfare power is what The Return from Parnassus mocks in remarking that Marston ‘Brings the great battering-ram of terms to town’.31 The association of exalted diction with military force is not surprising: ‘At its core, then, Renaissance rhetoric is animated by a fantasy of power in which the orator, wielding words more deadly than swords, takes on the world and emerges victorious in every encounter.’32 Perhaps this explains why Tamburlaine’s innovative stage rhetoric was ridiculed more widely and fiercely than any other model for imitation (Thomas Kyd’s raving Hieronimo is a distant second): it was associated, by plot, with the most extreme form of social climbing – a shepherd rising to emperor by sheer will and violence. That Othello’s situation was hardly safer in this regard is made clear by Thomas Rymer’s sneers at Othello’s speech about his story-telling in Brabantio’s house: ‘This was the charm, this was the philtre, the love-powder that took the daughter of this noble Venetian. This was sufficient to make the blackamoor white, and reconcile all, though there had been a cloven-foot into the bargain.’33 The lyrics accompanying the famous ‘Othello music’34 exemplify transmission of vocabulary laterally, by reaching across into a foreign culture – a version of colonial commerce. The high-humanist innovations in English are versions of domestic social climbing. Learning downward was also important, however: partly for the sheer pleasures of billingsgate (many teachers now arrange ‘railing’ or ‘flyting’ contests, using insults culled from the plays, to introduce schoolchildren to the energies of Shakespearean language), but also to avoid being gulled or cozened (two verbs the drama itself helped popularize) by the many predatory schemers who – aided by the anonymities of the new urban landscape – lurked as parasites, using a secret ‘cant’ or jargon. Western cultures have long relied on popular writers to enliven their verbal style and update their lingo, and recent

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research suggests (and literature professors will like to believe) that an extensive vocabulary may be sexually alluring, just as complexity of song can be as important a display for a mateseeking nightingale as plumage is for a peacock.35 Disputes over which kinds of verbiage were healthy and which were merely garish – George Gascoigne aspired ‘rather … to make our native language commendable in itself, than gay with the feathers of strange birds’36 – only confirm that there were incentives for the right kind of display. The phenomenon I have been describing is hardly unique to Elizabethan and Jacobean England. That does not mean, however, that it is entirely transhistorical. Other types of rhetorical self-help books evidently became saleable around the year 1600 in England: along with the aforementioned exposés of ‘canting’ terms came collections of similes for all occasions, and handbooks promising new and improved ways of writing letters, poems, and sermons. In popular medical texts, ‘an aid to comprehension was occasionally provided by word pairs, with the foreign terms followed by common equivalents or interpretations’.37 English dictionaries are another genre that emerged during Shakespeare’s years as a playwright. The first, Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabetical of Hard Usual English Words, appeared in 1604, probably the same year that Othello was first performed; in 1623, when Othello next appeared (in Shakespeare’s First Folio), Cockeram’s English Dictionary included a Latinizing section where ‘any desirous of … a more refined and elegant speech … shall there receive the exact and ample word to express the same’. Shakespeare’s ascent to the rank of gentleman was a direct result of economic developments – the social fluidity produced by urbanization and emergent capitalism – but also an indirect result of that fluidity as it coincided with the diachronic evolution of language. The question so central to ongoing controversies in the social sciences as well as the humanities – whether the chief work of cultures is performed by individual will and genius, or instead by large impersonal collective historical forces – recurs



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in miniature when we ask whether Shakespeare’s astonishing productivity of lasting neologisms was an index of his greatness or, instead, of his moment. The safe answer may also be the correct one: both, irreducibly so. Clearly others tried to become large-scale merchants of new ways of speaking, but they did not succeed on Shakespeare’s scale, because (I believe) they lacked his instinct for making neologisms accessible and memorable, and for linking them to the settings of the plays and the psychology of the speakers. No wonder, then, that the schoolman Robert Greene complained about this ‘upstart crow, beautified with our feathers’.38 Artful words – including ‘ruminate,’ which Shakespeare may have learned from Greene – were the plumage of the new social elites, and those who could produce them in quantity and quality could find thousands of customers on the South Bank. Leave it to Shakespeare to notice a tragedy of multiculturalism and self-fashioning – which is to say, a tragedy of the Renaissance – lurking in all that hopeful verbal finery. Clearly these diction-lessons are part of a broader trade in habitusupgrades for an era of social fluidity: ‘as merchandise, so also new words’, according to the influential 1561 translation of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier.39 Shakespeare must have known how it felt to be a man – marginally, a gentleman – made by vocabulary rather than birth. The carping voices, internal and (as from Greene) external, that reminded him of the fragility of that construction, he put partly into Iago (whose closing vow of silence at 5.2.300–1 consists of thirteen monosyllables preceded by a ‘nothing’ and broken only by a ‘never’). From Love’s Labour’s Lost through those notorious malaprops, mannered fops, incompetent wooers, and boastful but cowardly soldiers, Shakespeare satirized many overreaching word-makers; but he must have felt the joke was partly on himself: cold water thrown on his ‘fire-new words’. For Shakespeare as for Prospero, to renounce his magic words was to accept annihilation of his omnipotent self and its pageants, in favour of the calls of ordinary life – and death. Like Othello struggling to believe in the miracle

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of Desdemona’s love that turned chaos into a wonderful universe, like a Protestant struggling to rest the hope of salvation on nothing more tangible than faith in the Word, Shakespeare could not entirely believe in the language he loved so intensely, nor in the stability of everything he built on it. He could instead have thought, ‘That’s he that was Othello? here I am’ (5.2.281).

Notes 1

On the marketability of neologisms in late-Renaissance London, see Robert N. Watson, ‘Coining Words on the Elizabethan and Jacobean Stage’, Philological Quarterly 88 (2009): 49–75. On Shakespeare’s technique and purposes in creating and promoting this burgeoning vocabulary, see Robert N. Watson, ‘Shakespeare’s New Words’, Shakespeare Survey 56 (2012): 358–77.

2

C. S. Lewis, ‘Variation in Shakespeare and Others’, in Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 76. On similar flaws Lewis detects in the work of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, see 77–80.

3

Richard Mulcaster, The First Part of the Elementary (1582), 140, remarks on ‘the enfranchising of such words, as circumscription’, which means that the word was hardly new when Othello was written; but the same evidence suggests it had been recognized during Shakespeare’s adult life as an imported novelty, and outside of a couple of theological uses it is very scarce before Othello. ‘Confine’ was common, though not as a noun without the terminal ‘s’.

4

Hilda M. Hulme, Explorations in Shakespeare’s Language: Some Problems of Lexical Meaning in the Dramatic Text (London: Longmans, 1962), 153–4, suggests that ‘defunct’ here might mean ‘free – of danger, punishment’; so eliminating the emendation of ‘my’ to ‘me’ and the punctuation imposed by modern editions on this sentence would make ‘defunct and proper’ another pairing of the sort I am describing. Othello would then be saying that, with his marriage authorized despite



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Brabantio’s complaints, his bodily proximity to Desdemona would be legal and suitable, even though that is not, he insists, his motive for welcoming her company. 5

Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The economics of linguistic exchanges’, Social Science Information 17 (1977): 645–88, esp. 652.

6

‘The structure of the linguistic production relation depends on the symbolic power relation between the two speakers, i.e. on the size of their respective capitals of authority’; Bourdieu, 648.

7

Bourdieu, 646.

8

Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 358, 360.

9

Bourdieu, 648.

10 Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 11 Lynne Magnusson, ‘“Voice potential”: language and symbolic capital in Othello’, in Shakespeare and Language, ed. Catherine M. S. Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. 219; Magnusson does notice the insistence of doublets in Othello’s introductory speeches, but sees them instead as ordinary embellishments signalling insecurity. 12 Kenneth Gross, ‘Slander and Skepticism in Othello’, ELH 56 (1989): 819–52, esp. 826. 13 George T. Wright, ‘Hendiadys and Hamlet’, PMLA 96 (1981): 168–93, esp. 175–6. 14 Simon Palfrey, Doing Shakespeare (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2005), 52–3. 15 Sylvia Adamson, ‘With double tongue: diglossia, stylistics and the teaching of English’, in Reading, Analysing and Teaching Literature, ed. Mick Short (Harlow: Longman, 1989), 221–2. 16 Patrick Cheney, Shakespeare’s Literary Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 144. 17 Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (New York: Farrar, Straus, 2000), 180. 18 Bourdieu, 660.

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19 Shakespeare may also be signalling the strangeness of the place and the dramatic grandeur of both the storm and the emotional reunion, with ‘ruffianed’, ‘chidden’, ‘enchafed’, ‘ensheltered’, ‘banged’, ‘designment’, ‘aerial’, ‘arrivance’, ‘blazoning’, ‘ingine’, ‘ensteeped’, ‘enclog’ and ‘enwheel’ (2.1.7–87). 20 William Empson, ‘Honest in Othello’, in The Structure of Complex Words (1951; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 218–49. 21 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd edn (London: Penguin, 1956), 88–101. 22 David Schalkwyk, Speech and Performance in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 180–3, observes that this name was created ‘supposedly by adding to the first syllable of “Oth-oman” the Italianate “-ello”’, and goes on to discuss perceptively the dangers represented by such ‘splitting of self across two names’. 23 Robert N. Watson, ‘Othello as Reformation Tragedy’, in In the Company of Shakespeare: Essays on English Renaissance Literature in Honor of G. Blakemore Evans, eds Thomas Moisan and Douglas Bruster (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), 65–96. 24 In A Trick to Catch the Old One, Dampit’s personality and social status are both ‘registered in his inventive language: “trampler”, “fooliaminy”, “infortunity”, “gernative”, “mullipood”. Dampit’s speech is familiar, colloquial and alien at once. His penchant for neologisms in conventional, if energetic, exchanges highlights the oddity of his role in the community: he is successful within the law but operates beyond its bounds; he is widely known but close to no one’ (Eric Leonidas, ‘The School of the World: Trading on Wit in Middleton’s Trick to Catch the Old One’, Early Modern Literary Studies 12.3 [January 2007]: 1–27, esp. 24–5 (available at http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/12-3/leontri2.htm). The technique is different – fewer doublets or lexical affixations – but lexical innovations again signal liminality: a borderline personality in a man of the borderlands.



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25 Manfred Görlach, Introduction to Early Modern English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 136–7. The surge was noted in 1668: ‘this last century may be conjectured to have made a greater change in our tongue, than any of the former, as to the addition of new words’; Wilkins, quoted by Görlach, 138. 26 Bryan A. Garner, ‘Shakespeare’s Latinate Neologisms’, in A Reader in the Language of Shakespearean Drama, eds Vivian Salmon and Edwina Burness (Amsterdam: J. Benjamins Publishing, 1987), 209. Paula Blank, Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings (London: Routledge, 1996), 40, claims that ‘the period 1500–1659 saw the introduction of between 10,000 and 25,000 new words into the language, with the practice of neologism culminating in the Elizabethan period’; see also her 44: ‘The period from 1580 to 1619, the era of Nashe and Shakespeare, seems to have been the heyday of neologizing in England.’ Jonathan Culpeper and Phoebe Clapham, ‘The borrowing of Classical and Romance words into English: a study based on the electronic OED’, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 1.2 (1996): 199–218, endorse a figure of ‘somewhat above 12000’ during the Renaissance, as well as the idea that this constituted a notable acceleration; they also endorse the belief that ‘borrowing from Latin peaked in the period from about 1580–1660’ (210–11). Nevalainen, 246, observes that ‘English was gaining new functions as a standard language in the public sphere, and was therefore in the process of acquiring a wealth of new vocabulary’ in the Renaissance. 27 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry (London, 1595; STC 22534), K3r. Cf. Blank, 3: ‘The Renaissance saw the rise of dialect comedy, and juxtaposing a peasant dialect with the King’s English was, often enough, played for laughs. One of the first genres to incorporate dialect was the early sixteenthcentury popular jest book; many jests hinge on provincials and foreigners being unable to speak the language properly.’ 28 Sylvia Adamson, ‘Literary Language’, in The Cambridge History of the English Language, ed. Roger Lass, 6 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3:539–95 (575–6), perceives a bias in the modern tendency to call the

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verbal novelties of lower-class characters ‘malapropisms’ and those of higher-class characters ‘neologisms’; but this accusation seems to me to overlook the ways that Shakespeare marks the malapropisms as comically erroneous (and usually antonymic) rather than innovative. 29 ‘Timber, or Discoveries’, in Ben Jonson, eds C. H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 9 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925–53), 8:587. 30 Induction, lines 91–2; in John Marston, The History of Antonio and Mellida. The first part (London, 1602; STC 17473), A4v. Line numbering based on Antonio and Mellida, ed. W. Reavley Gair, Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991). 31 1.2.282; The Second Part of The Return From Parnassus, in The Three Parnassus Plays, ed. J. B. Leishman (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1949). ‘Action is eloquence, and the eyes of th’ ignorant / More learned than the ears’, Volumnia tells Coriolanus as she directs his performance in the marketplace (3.2.76–7), but physical actions were also described as eloquent speech: although the OED seems not to have noticed it, ‘well said’ often praised a deed rather than a phrase in this period. 32 Wayne A. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 15; quoted by Russ McDonald, Shakespeare and the Arts of Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 29. Whether or not this is still widely believed may be a crucial question for the viability of literary study in the twenty-first century. 33 Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (1693), ed. Curt Zimansky (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), 133. 34 G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (1930; reprint, London: Methuen, 1993), 97–100; for my purposes, it seems noteworthy that Knight claims that Othello offers ‘no fusing of word with word, rather a careful juxtaposition of one word or image with another’. 35 Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Doubleday, 2001), 369–92.



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36 R. F. Jones, The Triumph of the English Language (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1953), 115, quoting from The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, ed. J. W. Cunliffe, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), 1:6. 37 Görlach, 148. 38 Robert Greene, Greene’s Groats-worth of Wit, bought with a million of repentance (London, 1592; STC 12245), 40. 39 The Courtier of Count Baldessar Castilio, trans. Thomas Hoby (London, 1561; STC 4778), C1r.

10 Shakespeare’s Nobody Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld

There is something dissatisfying about Emilia’s answer to one of Desdemona’s questions in Act 4, scene 3 of Othello. Emilia prepares Desdemona for bed as Desdemona sings Barbary’s ‘song of “willow”’ (4.3.26). In the midst of this song, Desdemona interrupts herself – ‘Nay, that’s not next’ – and then she calls for Emilia to listen: ‘Hark.’ She follows this call with a question – ‘who is’t that knocks?’ – to which Emilia responds, ‘It’s the wind’ (52–3). The first thing to say, here, is that Emilia provides the answer to a different question from the one that Desdemona asked. Desdemona’s question presupposes that the sound at hand is the product of a human gesture: she asks, ‘who is’t that knocks?’ Emilia’s answer implies but elides a crucial corrective to this presupposition: when Emilia says ‘It’s the wind,’ Emilia is also saying It’s nobody. This elision has encouraged a range of readers to hear as tone what could have been represented by a diminutive – It’s just the wind – and this tone has led critics to describe Emilia’s answer, as with several of her responses to Desdemona in this scene, as reassuring: ‘Come, come, you talk’ (23), ‘’Tis neither here nor there’ (58).1 In his influential essay ‘The Women’s Voices in Othello’, Eamon Grennan suggests that the ‘rich harmonies of this

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conversation … resolve the different values of the two women into complementary chords’, and the sound of the women’s voices thus becomes an aesthetic counterpart to ‘the atmosphere of private freedom within this protected feminine enclosure’.2 Oscillations between song and silence ‘transport us to a zone of feeling where analysis becomes futile’: ‘the point’, Grennan continues, ‘is that we do feel; that for the unreflecting moments while the song endures we are bound with Emilia to Desdemona in sympathy’.3 Grennan’s own essay, hailed as a ‘sensitive exegesis’, a ‘sensitive study’, an ‘affectionate reconsideration’, and a ‘careful study’, has perhaps been so compelling because it stylistically shares in the rhythms of this reciprocity by way of (for example) his frequent and well-placed parentheses.4 While Act 4, scene 3 was routinely cut from performances of Othello through the early decades of the twentieth century, arguments for the rehabilitation and the significance of this scene have tended to operate under the sign of such affect.5 According to this line of interpretation, Desdemona’s question – ‘Hark, who is’t that knocks?’ – is significant as an instrument of calibration: by interrupting the lyrical soar of her song and returning us to the here-and-now of the scene, Desdemona’s question regulates an aesthetic harmony that is both cause and effect of feminine sympathy and its attendant social harmony, while Emilia’s response – ‘It’s the wind’ – ‘underlines again the reassuring reciprocity of speech between these two women’.6 Under this reading, the scene as a whole serves as a crucial mechanism in what Edward Pechter has called the ‘affective economy’ of the play: the lull in necessary action (the very reason why this scene was so easily cut) consolidates an audience’s sympathy just prior to the murder of Act 5.7 This is why Kenneth Burke asked: ‘might the fourth act be one that seeks to say pity-pity-pity repeatedly?’8 Where Burke, however, understood this pity as ‘a device to “soften up” the audience’, Heather James has argued that Shakespearean depictions and elicitations of pity can rouse a subject to action.9 Viewed as a model of social engagement, pity acts – not in the service



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of a purging – but as a pivot between gnosis and praxis. Taken to an extreme, this paradigm raises the spectre of an audience that not only sympathizes with but also intervenes in the action of the play (that is, one that best plays its part by destroying the play itself).10 I would like to explore this exchange – Q. ‘Hark, who is’t that knocks?’ / A. ‘It’s the wind’ – in order to examine what I take to be the play’s peculiar engagement with the ethics of audition and intervention.11 Those who hear Emilia’s response as ‘reassuring’ or as a dose of ‘pragmatic common sense’ presuppose, in short, that Emilia is right.12 When Emilia answers ‘It’s the wind,’ she dismisses the possibility that somebody is knocking at Desdemona’s door; the play would seem to follow suit inasmuch as nobody enters the room. And yet, the possibility prior to this moment that somebody might enter and intervene constitutes an epistemological and an ethical problem, for Emilia as for us. This essay is thus a thought experiment in the ethical valence of dramatic potentialities that do not actualize, and it will be guided by three questions:13 1. Does Emilia hear what Desdemona hears? 2. Does Desdemona hear what Disdemona heard? 3. Does Desdemona hear Nobody? By ‘Nobody’, I mean the implied but elided corrective of Emilia’s response, but I also argue that when Desdemona first names her murderer ‘Nobody’ during her brief revival from the dead, this act of naming hypostatizes the very potentiality that the play fails to actualize (5.2.122).14 The exchange in Act 4, scene 3 is admittedly brief but, by pushing at the misalignment of question and answer just a bit, I want to suggest that this moment has surprising explanatory power. The elided corrective of Emilia’s response points to the possibility that the play could have gone otherwise than it will. This possibility is present within the scene as a kind of remainder to an initiated but imperfect act of dramatic invention, an

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arrested poiesis: at this moment in Act 4, scene 3, we have a character for which no actor lends his body.

1. Does Emilia hear what Desdemona hears? Desdemona’s question suggests that she hears something. When Desdemona calls ‘Hark’, she commands Emilia to stop and listen, as if Emilia does not hear what she hears, or as if Emilia’s bustle to fulfil her previous command – ‘Prithee hie thee’ – keeps Desdemona from hearing what she heard just a moment before (4.3.49).15 It is less clear whether Emilia hears anything at all. In the 1965 Laurence Olivier production, the wind begins to whistle just as Desdemona interrupts herself – ‘Nay, that’s not next’ – and a double rap is audible. When Desdemona asks, ‘Who is’t that knocks?’ Emilia wraps her arms around Desdemona and follows her answer with a kiss to the cheek.16 In Janet Suzman’s 1989 production, by contrast, there is no noise and Emilia’s first response is a worried look on her face. Emilia then incorporates an extended pause into her answer – ‘It is [pause] the wind’ – suggesting that she offers the causal explanation for a sound that never existed.17 The ear of the audience is aligned with Emilia’s ear in both of these productions: we hear what Emilia hears, whether noise or silence, and we are therefore made to implicitly corroborate her account. If Emilia hears what Desdemona hears, the knock at the door may contribute to critical consensus concerning the shared intimacy of this scene (and the audience, hearing the knock that Desdemona and Emilia hear, gets to be on their side of the door). If Emilia does not hear what Desdemona hears, then we are not dealing with the same problem of competing accounts of the efficient cause. Instead, our problem is that Desdemona and Emilia do not access the same object of interpretation.18 A brief scene from



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Antony and Cleopatra offers an illustrative counterpoint. Just before battle, First through Fourth Soldiers hear something: second soldier Peace, what noise? first soldier List, list! second soldier Hark! first soldier Music i’th’ air. third soldier Under the earth. fourth soldier It signs well, does it not? third soldier No. first soldier Peace, I say! What should this mean? second soldier ’Tis the god, Hercules, whom Antony loved, Now leaves him. first soldier Walk. Let’s see if other watchmen Do hear what we do.19 These soldiers all seem to hear the sound and their primary concern is one of meaning – ‘It signs well, does it not?’ – but First Soldier strays from this concern when he compels all of the other soldiers to seek corroboration from yet more soldiers: ‘Let’s see if other watchmen / Do hear what we do.’ First Soldier asks, ‘What should this mean?’ but he seems at least as concerned with finding even more soldiers to say that they hear what he hears. If Desdemona and Emilia do not access the same object of interpretation, then Desdemona’s question turns the lack of a knock into a palpable silence in Emilia’s ear: ‘who is’t that knocks?’ transforms absent noise into the staged presence of bounded, localized silence. To Jean Howard’s distinction (via Arnheim) between living and dead silences on Shakespeare’s stage, we might add the resurrected silence (one that comes to life only after Desdemona speaks).20 The sound that prompts Desdemona’s question is thus a contingent event. I do not mean that the existence of this sound is contingent on a given production or even that the truth-values of Desdemona’s presupposition that somebody is knocking and Emilia’s corrective that nobody is knocking

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are contingent on who or what produced a sound that may or may not exist. I mean, instead, that Othello scripts this sound as a particular kind of event, an event that, to quote Boethius, ‘tend[s] equally toward being or toward not being’.21 Unlike, say, the knocking at the gate in Macbeth, Othello scripts no actions that necessarily produce or follow from the occasion of this sound. The knock may or may not occur. While this brief exchange has seemed significant primarily for returning the audience to the here-and-now of the scene, I want to suggest, instead, that the slight misalignment of question and answer insists on the vexed ontology of the contingent event. In his phenomenological study of the theatre, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, Bert O. States writes, ‘if you press the concreteness of the here and now far enough, you arrive at the infrastructure of reality, or the laws that hold reality up. There is a point’, he continues, ‘where scrupulous attention to detail – for example, a photo of the pores of the skin – leads one back, or out, to the universe of geometric mass.’22 If the question that Desdemona asks – ‘Hark, who is’t that knocks?’ – returns us to the here-and-now of the scene, Emilia’s response encourages us to re-examine the ‘infrastructure’ of this particular world. The vexed ontology of the contingent event suggests that potentiality is a property or a possession of the play (a hexis or a ‘having’): as Giorgio Agamben writes via Aristotle, ‘potentiality is not simply non-Being, simple privation, but rather the existence of non-Being, the presence of an absence’.23 A knock that may or may not occur is the theatre’s metonymic substitution for the presence of a non-existent agent on the other side of Desdemona’s door.

2. Does Desdemona hear what Disdemona heard? In Shakespeare’s source tale, Cinthio’s Hecatommithi, there are two kinds of proof that convince the Moor of Disdemona’s



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guilt. The first kind of proof is the napkin: noting that Disdemona ‘sometimes carried with her a handkerchief embroidered most delicately in the Moorish fashion, which the Moor had given her and which was treasured by the Lady and her husband too, the Ensign planned to take it from her secretly, and thereby prepare for her final ruin’.24 Before, however, the Moor has even learned that the handkerchief is missing, he is troubled by the second kind of proof: a knock at the door. The Ensign has already told the Moor that Disdemona ‘takes her pleasure with’ the Corporal ‘whenever he comes to your house’ (245). In response, the Moor threatens the Ensign, ‘if you do not make me see with my own eyes what you have told me’, and the Ensign’s accusation is accidentally corroborated by the single act of ‘Fortune’ in Cinthio’s tale (246). Recognizing the handkerchief that the Ensign placed on his bedroom floor, the Corporal intends to return the item to Disdemona: So he waited till the Moor had gone out, then went to the back door and knocked. Fortune, it seems, had conspired with the Ensign to bring about the death of the unhappy lady; for just then the Moor came home, and hearing a knock on the door went to the window and shouted angrily: ‘Who is knocking?’ The Corporal, hearing the Moor’s voice and fearing that he might come down and attack him, fled without answering. The Moor ran down the stairs, and, opening the outside door, went out into the street and looked around, but could see nobody. The window through which the Moor shouts is a counterintuitive device: this window allows the Moor to ask the very question we might instead expect it to help answer – ‘Who is knocking?’ For an answer, the Moor must run downstairs and open the door. Finding ‘nobody’, the Moor then ‘ask[s] his wife who had knocked on the door’. Ignorant, Disdemona ‘replie[s] truthfully that she d[oes] not know’. To this, the Moor insists ‘[i]t looked to me like the Corporal’,

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though the narrative makes it clear that when he opened the door he ‘could see nobody’: ‘I do not know’, Disdemona responds, ‘whether it was he or somebody else’ (247). Where the Moor saw ‘nobody’, he names ‘the Corporal’. For Disdemona, where there was ‘nobody’, there might have been the Corporal but, equally, there might have been ‘somebody else’. In Cinthio, there is no question but that the knock at the door is the product of a human gesture; the debate, instead, turns on how to interpret the absence of the efficient cause. Is ‘nobody’ one particular person or is ‘nobody’ any number of persons, also called ‘somebody’? Cinthio revisits and rewrites this moment when the Moor and the Ensign conspire to kill Disdemona. Determined to beat her with a ‘stocking filled with sand’, the Ensign hides in the closet as the pair lie down to sleep – ‘in accordance with their plan’, the Ensign ‘ma[kes] some sort of noise’. The Moor asks Disdemona: ‘Did you hear that noise?’ ‘Yes, I heard it,’ she replied. ‘Get up,’ said the Moor, ‘and see what it is.’ As Disdemona approaches the closet door, the Ensign jumps out and delivers ‘a frightful blow in the small of her back’ (250). In our earlier scene, the Moor’s investigation of a knock at the door led him to discover ‘nobody’ where the Corporal had stood just a moment before. The Ensign’s charge, that Disdemona ‘takes her pleasure with him whenever he comes to your house’, was implicitly corroborated by the timing of that knock – just as the Moor arrived home (245). The Moor, however, desires a physical impossibility: he wants to ‘see’ with his own ‘eyes’ what occurs in his house at the very moment he (along with his eyes) is absent from that house (246). The Moor and the Ensign’s ‘plan’ restages the earlier missed connection as if to actualize this physical impossibility. The imperative commands – ‘“Get up”, said the Moor, “and see what it is”’ – allow the Moor to watch his wife open the



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door (any door will do) to another man (any man). In the performance of this ‘plan’, the Ensign plays the Corporal, Disdemona plays the Ensign’s version of Disdemona, and the Moor plays the part of his own absence. In Orson Welles’s 1952 film adaptation of Act 4, scene 3 of Othello, the camera is fixed on the floor of a stone corridor as an approaching figure becomes visible by the disproportionate shadow it casts – an elongated head.25 The sound of a closing gate and its visual counterpart (the shadows cast by parallel, vertical bars sliding across the screen) provide the transition into a thoroughly gothic, interior space. The closing gate produces the sound that prompts Desdemona’s question – ‘who is’t that knocks?’ – and Emilia’s answer, the audience knows, is wrong – though the audience does not yet know to whom this shadow belongs (it could belong to any number of characters). The correct answer emerges only as the final shot reveals Othello, stepping out from behind a nearby pillar where he has been listening. Q&A are, here, turned into scenic bookends, with the result that this abridged performance of Act 4, scene 3 is overheard by somebody and the question – who is that somebody? – remains open until the scene’s close. There is precedent for Welles’s answer to this question: apparently influenced by Rossini’s Otello, Delacroix sketched a pencil composition of the unpinning scene in 1825; in his 1853 painting, an oil lamp that had been at Desdemona’s elbow in 1825 is now lowered and brought forward so as to open up space to a background in which Othello lurks, unnoticed by the two women.26 Such adaptations validate Desdemona’s anxiety but they do so only by actualizing in one particular body what is, significantly, disembodied in the play. In Othello, the knock that Desdemona hears raises the possibility that somebody might enter and intervene only to put nobody in the place of that somebody; in the Delacroix adaptation, somebody is always only Othello and the imagined intervention is always only the murder that will take place anyway. In between his scenic bookends, Welles comes closest

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to capturing the potentiality of Shakespeare’s text: the shadow that lingers without a body just outside Desdemona’s closet.27

3. Does Desdemona hear nobody? It is not actually the knock at the door that returns Desdemona to the here-and-now of Act 4, scene 3. Desdemona interrupts herself – ‘Nay, that’s not next’ – just before she hears a knock at the door. When Desdemona calls ‘Hark’, she could be calling for Emilia to listen for the words she cannot remember.28 Desdemona, it seems, sings her lyrics out of order:29 desdemona [Speaks.] Prithee hie thee: he’ll come anon. Sing all a green willow must be my garland. Let nobody blame him, his scorn I approve— [Speaks.] Nay, that’s not next. Hark, who is’t that knocks? emilia It’s the wind. (4.3.49–53) We do not know the precise version of the song that Shakespeare had before him (or in his ear), but it is fairly clear that Desdemona’s line about blame was meant to come later. In Shakespeare’s probable source, the singer is gendered male and the false lover, female, and the line reads: ‘Let nobody blame me, her scorns I do prove.’30 What is interesting about Othello’s revision is that Desdemona’s words allow for a conflation impossible to the previous incarnation: ‘his scorn’ might belong, not to the object of blame, but to the subject who blames. In Desdemona’s revision, the language of her song (if even in spite of herself) does not simply permit but calls into being, compels into existence, a ‘nobody’ to fulfil her command, a ‘nobody’ who ought to blame, a ‘nobody’ of whose ‘scorn’, she declares ‘I approve’: ‘Let nobody blame him, his scorn I approve.’31 It is at this moment of predication,



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when Desdemona’s language posits the existence of the very thing she putatively denies, that she interrupts herself – ‘Nay, that’s not next’ – and then, hears a knock at the door (after which nobody enters the room). This moment dramatizes an act of arrested poiesis: the initiated but imperfect genesis of a dramatic character. Most simply, Desdemona’s grammar predicates a character – ‘Nobody’ – for which no actor supplies a body. The category of ‘absent characters’ is an illustrative counterpoint to the peculiar ontology of ‘Nobody’. ‘It is when a character is expected’, Kristian Smidt writes, ‘and still does not materialize that an absence attracts our attention’: ‘sometimes’, he continues, ‘we are not led to expect a visible appearance, but we are made aware of the absent person as an influence, which may be all the more pervasive or ominous for being incorporeal.’32 In Othello, however, ‘Nobody’ makes us aware – not so much of an influence – as of a lack of influence: he is the non-existent agent responsible for the intervention that could have (but did not) occur. The technical operations of this claim are made explicit in the comic subplot of the anonymously authored Nobody and Somebody (1606): this subplot turns on two grammatical jokes that it repeats (over and over again) with slight variations.33 The first joke runs something like this. A character named ‘First Man’ asks another character named ‘Wife’ a question: ‘Minion, where have you been all this night?’ (489). Wife answers: ‘I have been with Nobody’ (492), ‘Lie with me, why Nobody’ (496), ‘God’s life husband, you do me wrong; I lay with Nobody’ (501); all the while, the unfortunately named ‘Nobody’ responds, with mounting frustration – ‘’Tis a lie good man! believe her not, she was not with me’ (493–4), ‘Oh monstrous! They would make me a whoremaster’ (497), and ‘I will endure no longer in this climate’ (504). Wife’s grammar posits the existence of the very thing she would seem to deny, and the character named ‘Nobody’ is predicated of the same speech acts that he claims to be false. The first joke turns on actions which have occurred but

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for which a non-existent agent – ‘Nobody’ – replaces the actual agent.34 Wife (it appears) has slept with ‘somebody’ but ‘Nobody’ is blamed in his stead. The second joke, by contrast, turns on actions that have not occurred: ‘Nobody’ is also the non-existent agent responsible for all of the good deeds that no one bothers to perform (e.g. feeding the poor).35 It is in this sense that we might understand Roderigo’s line as he lies bleeding on the ground. Both Roderigo and Cassio cry out while Lodovico teeters on the edge of action: lodovico Two or three groan. It is a heavy night; These may be counterfeits, let’s think’t unsafe To come in to the cry without more help. roderigo Nobody come? then shall I bleed to death. (5.1.42–5) Roderigo’s ‘then’ asserts a causal connection between the fact of Nobody’s arrival and the death he anticipates (actually, Iago will come along and stab him). This causal account pinpoints Lodovico’s refusal to intervene; indeed, his thought process sounds more like a retrospective justification than an assessment of his surroundings – ‘let’s think’t unsafe’, shall we? Poised on the edge of action, placed in the platea, Lodovico might extend that justification to the audience – ‘let’s’. His casual contraction offers the audience a gift. During Desdemona’s brief revival from the dead in Act 5, scene 2, Emilia asks her a question: ‘O, who hath done / This deed?’ (5.2.121–2). The primary meaning of ‘deed’ is surely murder: when Desdemona names her murderer ‘Nobody’, she relieves Othello of responsibility for the crime by invoking a peculiarly literary legal loophole – ‘the attribution of a homicide to a fictional persona in order to exculpate the accused’.36 The ambiguity of Emilia’s deixis, however, invites the second of Nobody and Somebody’s jokes: who is responsible for the intervention that never occurred? Nobody. If we take the satirical thrust of this joke seriously, the answer to Emilia’s question is also an admonishment to



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the audience. As the non-existent agent of actions that no one bothers to perform, the character of Nobody is always triangulated through the audience who ought to (but does not) perform those actions.37 A 1997 production of Othello at the National Theatre manifested in a stage property what I am trying to articulate by way of a sound effect. In his review of this production, Robert Butler noted that the discarded handkerchief was left on stage during the intermission of this performance: the handkerchief seemed to be ‘challenging one of us to pick it up and prevent a tragedy’.38 This production scripts the audience as complicit by way of a missed opportunity that is itself already foreclosed upon by the conventions of dramatic form. The challenge to ‘prevent a tragedy’ is something like the play soliciting its own destruction. Desdemona’s question – ‘who is’t that knocks’ – presupposes that an act has occurred, and her enquiry into the efficient cause of that sound opens up the possibility that somebody will enter and intervene. By this light, what is most significant about Emilia’s response is not that she answers a question other than the one that Desdemona asked but instead, that she answers at all. Desdemona’s question was never for Emilia (it was directed, instead, at the other side of the door). By contrast, if Emilia’s dismissal suggests that a knock has not occurred, then Desdemona’s question points up an absence: her question makes room for, clears out a space on stage for, the non-existent agent of an action that never occurs. States defines the actor as the ‘original of the poet’s “copy” in the sense that he is the being who grants it an existence’. ‘All dramatic texts’, States continues, ‘are hypotheses’ that the actor validates as ‘nature validates the vision of the physicist by acting naturally’. Without an actor’s body, however, the possibility of intervention becomes a hypothesis that will never be validated, an unanswered ‘yearning’ of the play.39 Emilia attempts to answer this ‘yearning’ twice but, both times, belatedly. She answers it first with her confession of that crucial piece of knowledge withheld throughout Act 4, scene 3: ‘that handkerchief thou speak’st of / I found by fortune

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and did give my husband’ (5.2.223–4). In Cinthio, a single act of ‘Fortune’ prohibited the return of the handkerchief. When the Corporal knocked on Disdemona’s door, ‘Fortune, it seems, had conspired with the Ensign to bring about the death of the unhappy lady; for just then the Moor came home and, hearing a knock on the door, went to the window and shouted angrily: “Who is knocking?”.’ In Cinthio, ‘Fortune’ is the name of the agent who keeps the handkerchief away from Desdemona. ‘Fortune’ actively ‘conspires’ with the Ensign in her capacity as a goddess: she brings about that which was not a necessary but a contingent event. In Othello, Emilia’s invocation of ‘fortune’, as Harry Berger, Jr. has suggested, ‘is less than the whole story’.40 And yet, if we take ‘fortune’ here to be precisely opposed to that which is necessary, Cinthio’s goddess reduced to chance, then to say that Emilia ‘found’ the handkerchief ‘by fortune’ is to establish the structural conditions for ethical action as such: Emilia’s actions were not necessary – she could have acted otherwise.41 This is, to be sure, a reading in which Emilia sidles up to an admission of guilt from an oblique angle, but that prepositional phrase ‘by fortune’, loosely attached to a sentence that could have proceeded without it, does not so much shift blame onto Cinthio’s conspiring goddess as it admits for the possibility that this play could have gone otherwise than it did. It is with this possibility in mind that I would like to turn to Emilia’s second answer to the play’s ‘yearning’ for intervention. After Iago stabs her, Emilia requests to be laid alongside the dead Desdemona, to whom she begins to speak: What did thy song bode, lady? Hark, canst thou hear me? I will play the swan And die in music. [Sings.] Willow, willow, willow. (5.2.244–6) Just before her reprisal of the willow song, Emilia calls for Desdemona to listen – ‘Hark’ – and she follows this call with a question: ‘canst thou hear me?’ Emilia’s question is, I think,



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a belated attempt to stand on the other side of Desdemona’s door. Emilia’s question has a semantic value distinct from a knock but if we were to develop a system for punctuating sounds, the punctuation of a ‘knock’ would be something like a question mark: a knock solicits, as its answer, the act of opening a door. If, in Act 4, scene 3, the knock at the door is a contingent event – an event that may or may not be – it is because it is a future contingent (it has not yet come to pass).42 As it turns out, Desdemona’s question was for Emilia (only, the Emilia of Act 5). When, in her final lines, Emilia echoes Desdemona’s call to listen – ‘Hark’ – and then substitutes her question for the knock – ‘canst thou hear me?’ – she lends a body to the implied but elided corrective of her earlier dismissal.

Conclusion A history of Othello criticism could be written as a series of substitutions for Desdemona’s ‘Nobody’. Criticism has, that is, treated ‘Nobody’ as a kind of cipher – for Iago, Othello, Emilia, and even Desdemona, who provided that first substitution: ‘Nobody. I myself. Farewell’ (5.2.122). In ‘Othello: A Bloody Farce’, the play’s notorious eighteenth-century critic, Thomas Rymer, provides a different substitution. He blames Shakespeare: A noble Venetian lady is to be murdered by our poet: in sober sadness, purely for being a fool. No pagan poet but would have found some machine for her deliverance … Has our Christian poetry no generosity, nor bowels? Ha, Sir Lancelot! Ha, St. George! Will no ghost leave the shades for us in extremity, to save a distressed damsel?43 According to Rymer, the playwright enters into the diegesis of the play as the murderer of his character. This account reverses the legal loophole invoked by Desdemona: instead of inventing

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a fictional persona – for example, ‘Nobody’ – and blaming that persona for an actual event, Rymer instead inculpates an historical being in the death of a fictional persona.44 What is Shakespeare’s instrument of murder? Shakespeare murders by withholding the character that might have intervened – the knights of romance or even, a ‘ghost’. Shakespeare withholds and produces poetry that, according to Rymer, is incapable of pity because it lacks the proper body for pity: Shakespeare’s poetry has no ‘bowels’. By Rymer’s account, Shakespeare is Nobody: he is the agent just outside the threshold of the causal world of the play and he commits, by virtue of what he did not write, murder.

Notes This essay is indebted to a number of careful readers, including Aaron Kunin, J. K. Barret, Harry Berger, Jr., Lena Orlin, and especially Katherine Schaap Williams. This essay owes a special debt to the ingenuity and diligence of the students in my 2011 Othello seminar at Pomona College as well as the participants in the 2012 SAA seminar devoted to Othello. 1

E.g. Kenneth Gross writes, ‘It is nothing but the wind, Emilia reassures her’, though his subsequent concessive clause, ‘but the wind too is contaminated in this play’, registers the dissatisfaction that motivates this essay (Shakespeare’s Noise [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001], 125).

2

‘The Women’s Voices in Othello: Speech, Song, Silence’, Shakespeare Quarterly 38.3 (1987): 279, 277. Grennan builds from the work of early feminist scholars who sought to correct the critical tradition’s exclusive focus on Othello and Iago. Carol Thomas Neely reads this scene as the culmination of a ‘growing intimacy’ between the two women, an intimacy born from a ‘sympathy’ that ‘stretches from Emilia and Desdemona to include Barbary and the protagonist of the song – all victims of male perfidy’ (Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare’s Plays [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985], 123). Carole



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McKewin describes Desdemona’s closet as a ‘counter-universe’ characterized by a ‘feminine friendship that is affectionate and frank, generous and nurturing’ (‘Counsels of Gall and Grace: Intimate Conversations Between Women in Shakespeare’s Plays’, in The Woman’s Part, eds Carolyn Ruth Swift et al. [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980], 128). 3

Grennan, 279.

4

See Ruth Vanita, ‘“Proper” Men and “Fallen” Women: The Unprotectedness of Wives in Othello’, SEL 34 (1994): 355, note 21; Denise A.Walen, ‘Unpinning Desdemona’, Shakespeare Quarterly 58.4 (2007): 496; Edward Pechter, ‘Why Should We Call her Whore? Bianca in Othello’, in Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century, eds Jonathan Bate et al. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 372, note 8; Kent Cartwright, Shakespearean Tragedy and its Double (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 144, note 15. For Grennan’s use of parentheses, see e.g. ‘Although they seem to value things differently (and to value different things), their speech nevertheless suggests that they can share, unthreatened, with one another their respective sense of the world’ (279).

5

Two exceptions to this characterization consider the theatrical labour of this scene. Carol Chillington Rutter explores the act of ‘unpinning’ Desdemona in ‘Unpinning Desdemona (Again) or “Who would be toll’d with Wenches in a shew?”’, Shakespeare Bulletin 28.1 (2010): 111–32. By this account, Desdemona’s interruptions ‘operate as delaying mechanisms while [the song’s] mournful tempo, almost sedative, draws out the story that covers Emilia’s frantic need to “dispatch”’ (127). Martha Ronk also sees this scene as ‘theatrical, performative, artificial – a play within a play, slowed and curtained off from the rest of the action at least for the time being’ in ‘Desdemona’s Self-Presentation’, English Literary Renaissance 35 (2005): 61–2. While significantly more attentive to the technology of theatrical and poetic labour, these analyses nevertheless subordinate tensions between the two characters to the actors’ collaborative production of an ‘intimate place of (female) undressing’ (Rutter, 114) or ‘a room designed for privacy and intimacy, both enclosed and intimate’ (Ronk, 65).

6

Grennan, 280.

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7

Edward Pechter, Othello and Interpretive Traditions (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), 126; see also 113–40.

8

Kenneth Burke, ‘Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method’, The Hudson Review 4.2. (1951): 174.

9

Burke, 175; Heather James, ‘Dido’s Ear: Tragedy and the Politics of Response’, Shakespeare Quarterly 52.3 (2001): 360–82. James concludes: ‘Dido’s listening figure instantiates, for Shakespeare, an anti-Aristotelian idea of tragedy: the plot builds up sympathy, frustration, and outrage but effects no catharsis. Political disaster … may consequently originate in the way she listens: intent, pliant, yet terrifying, she paradoxically redeems and threatens the performance to which she raptly attends. Shakespeare’s Dido consequently evokes the theater’s potential for generating a dangerous political agency that leaves the playwright vulnerable to intents he may wish to disown’ (382).

10 See Pechter for a survey of moments of theatrical breakdown and intervention in Othello’s stage history (Othello and Interpretive Traditions, 11–14). Also reviewed by Lena Orlin in the introduction to this volume. The audience of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1967 short film adaptation Che Cosa Sono Le Nuvole? (What Are Clouds Like?) threatens Othello, ‘If you lay a finger on Desdemona, we’ll teach you!’ and then storm the stage and attack ‘Iago’ and ‘Othello’ before the two can kill ‘Desdemona’; see Sonia Massai, ‘Subjection and Redemption in Pasolini’s Othello’, in World-Wide Shakespeares, ed. Sonia Massai (Abingdon: Routledge, 2005), 96. Massai writes: ‘by storming the stage, Pasolini’s popular audience claim the right to rewrite the plot and to free the characters from its foregone, tragic resolution. The fictive audience, in other words, claim authorial agency for themselves and deny representation of any single authorizing point of origin’ (101). I am grateful to Aaron Kunin for introducing me to this film. 11 My attention to the vexed ontology of sound in the play is indebted to such studies as: Harry Berger, Jr., Imaginary Audition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Kenneth Gross, Shakespeare’s Noise. 12 Grennan, 280; Pechter, Othello and Interpretive Traditions,



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117. Whereas Emilia is understood as pragmatic, the tendency has been to hystericize Desdemona. E.g. John Russell Brown’s gloss on this moment: ‘Desdemona has become hyper-sensitive. She thinks someone knocks when it is only the wind’; see Shakespeare: The Tragedies (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 211. 13 Kenneth Burke describes the plot of Othello as the interplay of potentialities and actualizations: ‘the ways in which the playwright builds up “potentials” (that is, gives the audience a more or less vague or explicit “in our next” feeling at the end of each scene, and subsequently transforms such promises into fulfilments). The potentialities of one scene would thus become the actualizations of the next, while these in turn would be potentials, from the standpoint of unfoldings still to come’ (189–90). The knock at Desdemona’s door throws a wrench into this design and compels us to consider the work of potentialities that do not actualize. 14 My argument is indebted to Luke Wilson’s investigation of the ‘paradox of action without an agent’ (216) in early modern England, a paradox that he understands as a historical ‘precursor’ of ‘poststructuralist hysteresis of action’: ‘the rhetorical strategy by which intentions and practical schemes are enabled to persist, conceptually, in hypostatized form, without or apart from subjects’ (Theaters of Intention [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000], 30). 15 In Verdi’s Otello, Desdemona repeats her call to stop and listen: ‘Listen. I hear a sigh. / Quiet. Who knocks on the door?’ (trans. Burton D. Fisher [Coral Gables: Opera Journeys Publishing, 2001], 61). 16 Othello, directed by Stuart Burge (1965; Warner Brothers Home Video, 2007), DVD. 17 Othello, directed by Janet Suzman (Focus Films, 1989), Video. 18 In ‘The History of Air’, Carla Mazzio examines a similar moment in Hamlet, though the sense in question is sight rather than sound: ‘when Gertrude sees “nothing at all” while Hamlet sees a spirit, we have, to state the obvious, a failure of consensus. But this problem is integral to the status of theater … Shakespeare was confronting as well as dramatizing

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the limits of his own medium, or dramatic instrument, to subject that element of air to a form of “capture” capable of producing collective consensus’ (South Central Review 26.1 and 2 [2009]: 161). 19 Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Ania Loomba (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 4.3.9–16. 20 Jean E. Howard, Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 82. ‘Dead Silences’, Howard writes, ‘are those – such as occur between the movements of a symphony – which mark the formal divisions of the piece and occur when sound is not expected.’ ‘More interesting’, she continues, ‘are those live silences which have the power to create suspense and produce strong reactions precisely because they occur when sound is expected.’ 21 Boethius, Comentarii in librum Aristotelis Peri Hermeneias, quoted by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Fortune’s Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 21. See Heller-Roazen, more generally, 11–28. 22 Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 80–1. I am grateful to Katherine Schaap Williams for introducing me to this study. 23 Giorgio Agamben, ‘On Potentiality’, in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 179. 24 G. B. Giraldi Cinthio, from Gli Hecatommithi (1566), trans. by the editor in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, 8 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 7: 246. 25 Othello, directed by Orson Welles (Mercury Productions, 1952), Video. 26 ‘Desdemona and Emilia’ in The Paintings of Eugène Delacroix, ed. Lee Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 3: 126. For a reproduction of the reverse lithograph of the 1825 composition, see vol. 4, plate 116. 27 G. R. Elliott may come closest to this reading, though he understands that shadow as a supernatural force: ‘in a



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sudden gust of “wind”’, Desdemona ‘hears again [Othello’s] dreadful “scorn”, along with low summoning voices, so it seems, from the spiritual realm: “Hark, who is’t that knocks?”’ Elliott subsequently suggests that access to such ‘voices’ is due to a lack of self-control: ‘But quickly she controls herself’ (Flaming Minister: A Study of Othello as Tragedy of Love and Hate [Durham: Duke University Press, 1953], 204). 28 With thanks to Lena Orlin for suggesting this possibility. 29 For the complexities of both fictive and historical transmissions of this song, see Gavin Alexander, ‘Song in Shakespeare: Rhetoric, Identity, Agency’, in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry, ed. Jonathan Post (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), esp. 253–9. Of Emilia’s reprisal of the song just before she dies, Alexander writes: ‘An actor plays Emilia, who borrows Desdemona’s voice, which had been given her by another actor so that she could borrow Barbary’s voice and give life to the voice of a female lover based on the voice of a male lover in this converted, adapted, half-forgotten, remembered, revised ballad’ (258). 30 Ross W. Duffin, Shakespeare’s Songbook (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 468. 31 This line is more often read as Desdemona half-remembering her earlier admonishment to Emilia: ‘my love doth so approve him / That even his stubbornness, his checks, his frowns / Prithee unpin me – have grace and favour’ (4.3.17–19). 32 ‘Shakespeare’s Absent Characters’, English Studies 61.5 (1980): 397. Joseph A. Porter’s discussion of the ‘ghost character’ of Valentine in Romeo and Juliet is also illuminating: Porter describes Valentine as a ‘symptom or by-product of Mercutio’s transformation’ from rival lover (in Shakespeare’s source) to friend (Shakespeare’s Mercutio [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988], 7). Given the knock at the door in Cinthio’s tale, we might also consider ‘Nobody’ as a kind of ‘ghost character’ or a ‘by-product’ of adaptation. 33 While Nobody and Somebody was not published until 1606, its earliest version has been dated to c. 1592 (David L. Hay, ‘Introduction’ in Nobody and Somebody [New York: Garland,

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1980], 63–6). For discussions of this play in relation to Shakespeare’s interests in negation, see Richard Halpern, ‘“The Picture of Nobody”: White Cannibalism in The Tempest’, in The Production of English Renaissance Culture, eds David Lee Miller et al. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 276; Wilson, 216–62; Peter Womack, ‘Nobody, Somebody and King Lear’, New Theater Quarterly 23.3 (2007): 195–207. For Shakespeare and the wider Nemo tradition, see also Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 245–6. For a survey of the Nemo tradition, see Gerta Calmann, ‘The Picture of Nobody: An Iconographical Study’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23 (1960): 60–104. 34 As Wilson explains, ‘an act, understood as a function of its consequence and detached from the agent to which it would otherwise be ascribed, is linked instead to this nobody, this agent who is not one’ (241). 35 ‘The second scheme’, Wilson explains, ‘works in the opposite way, starting with the deficiency or absence of a praiseworthy act and inferring, as it were, the consequent nonexistence of the agent, who is then, in a witty reversal, hypostatized as Nobody’ (242). 36 Wilson, 218. 37 Wilson explains: ‘To say “Nobody did it” of an act that is done, is to rescue any particular person from taking responsibility for that act, whereas to say that “Nobody feeds the poor” is to say that others ought to do so’ (242). 38 As quoted by Julie Hankey, ed., Othello, Shakespeare in Production, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 207. 39 States, 127. 40 Significantly, however, Berger withholds judgment: ‘But even in my bitter book this moment is too sad for moral casuistry. If she fudges it must be because she perceives and acknowledges what she helped happen, because she anticipates my criticism enough to stand up to it and brave this moment out the best she can’ (A Fury in the Words: Love and Embarrassment in Shakespeare’s Venice [New York: Fordham University Press, 2013], 182).



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41 For a discussion (via Cicero) of ‘fortuna’ as ‘that by which a thing takes place in one way while being essentially capable of having taken place otherwise’, see Heller-Roazen, 67. 42 This reading is indebted to Jonathan Gil Harris’s suggestion that Othello ‘refuses linear temporality’: ‘rather than a singular progression that can be geometrically plotted, time in Othello is a dynamic field whose contours keep shifting, bringing into startling and anachronistic proximity supposedly distant and disparate moments’ (Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009], 169). 43 ‘Othello: A Bloody Farce’, in A Casebook on Othello, ed. Leonard F. Dean (New York: Crowell, 1961), 121. 44 Wilson describes a murder case at the Essex Assizes in 1570 in which the jury assigned blame to one fictional ‘William Nemo’ (219). Other names for fictional killers circulating in the early modern legal system included: ‘John in le Wind’, ‘John Anoke’, ‘John Atstile’, ‘John Atdeath’, ‘William Anoke’, and ‘William Death’ (218).

INDEX Adamson, Sylvia 240, 253–4n. Adelman, Janet 172n. Aesop 157 Africanus, John Leo 152, 159, 174n. Aga, Hasan (Samson Rowlie) 135, 147n. Agamben, Giorgio 262 Alexander, Catherine M. S. 251n. Alexander, Gavin 277n. Allatif, Abd 104 Allen, Ned B. 48–9 Allen, Woody 18 Altman, Joel 21, 48, 151–2, 213–15, 225–6 Anderson, William S. 92n. Andrews, Kenneth R. 201n. Aphthonius 155, 168–9, 172n., 175n. Appadurai, Arjun 115n., 116n. Arber, Edward 89n. Archer, Ian W. 200n. Aristotle 175n., 262 Arnheim, Rudolf 261 Ascham, Roger 155 Ashe, Oscar 45 Ashton, Peter 131–2, 146n. Attenborough, Michael 33–4 Auden, W. H. 58 Bacon, Francis 197, 208 Bakhtin, Mikhail 239

Baldwin, T. W. 92n., 157, 168, 170n. Barbaro, Marcantonio 132 Barbot, Jean 69 Barbour, Philip L. 200n. Barkey, Karen 130 Barranco, Marga G. 91n. Barret, J. K. 272 Barret, Robert 201n. Barry, Spranger 107 Bartels, Emily 58–9, 62n., 144n., 171–2n., 174n., 197 Barthelemy, Anthony 143n., 144n. Bate, Jonathan 66, 84, 93n., 163–4, 175n., 273n. Beale, Simon Russell 33 Becker, Carl 54 Bede 74 Berger, Harry, Jr. 170–1n., 173n., 270, 272, 274n., 278–9n. Berger, Thomas L. 41–2n. Bergeron, David 91n. Beusterien, John 72, 91n. Bevington, David 62n. Bevis of Hampton 186 Bey, Iskender (George Castriot) 7, 133–4 Bhabha, Homi 6, 144n., 146n., 147n.

282 Index

Bishop, Tim 43n. Blank, Paula 77, 253n. Boethius 262, 276n. Bon, Ottaviano 144–5n. Boose, Lynda E. 5, 95–6, 225 Booth, Edwin 107 Bosman, Anston 73–4 Bourchier, Henry, Second Earl of Essex 107 Bourdieu, Pierre 154, 238–9, 241 Bouterwerk, Freidrich 90n. Boyarin, Daniel 143n. Bradshaw, Graham 43n., 65 Branagh, Kenneth 20, 22 Braun-Ronsdorf, Margarete 114–15n. Brinsley, John 155–6 Bristol, Michael 63, 79 Brock, Susan 199n. Brome, Richard 75 Brooks, Harold F. 42n. Brown, Horatio F. 201n. Brown, John Russell 274n. Bruce, John 39n. Bruster, Douglas 25, 100, 252n. Bullough, Edward 1, 25–6, 34, 35, 36–7, 41n. Bullough, Geoffrey 47–8, 54, 116n., 276n. Burbage, Richard 19, 26 Burge, Stuart 275n. Burke, Kenneth 258, 275n. Burke, Peter 90n. Burness, Edwina 253n. Burton, Jonathan 118n., 147n. Butler, Robert 269

Calmann, Gerta 278n. Carleton, Dudley 109 Carr, Ralph 128 Cartwright, Kent 273n. Castiglione, Baldasarre 249 Castriot, George (Iskender Bey) 7, 133–4 Cavell, Stanley 174n., 205, 208, 213, 215, 218, 225–7, 230 Cawdrey, Robert 248 Chappuys, Gabriel 61n. Charles V 129, 202n. Chasseriau, Théodore 54 Cheney, Patrick 173n., 251n. Churchyard, Thomas 181–2, 196 Cicero 86, 195, 196, 279n. Cinthio 22, 23–4, 49–52, 54, 58–60, 101, 174n., 179, 262–5, 270, 277n. Civil and Uncivil Life 181 Clapham, Phoebe 253n. Clayton, Tom 199n. Cockeram, Henry 248 Cohen, Walter 62n. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 9 Colie, Rosalie 278n. Collinson, Patrick 198n. Contarini, Gasparo 178–9, 186–8, 200n. Covarrubias, Sebastian de 71 Crashaw, Richard 74 Cruickshank, C. G. 201n. Culpeper, Jonathan 253n. Cunliffe, J. W. 255n.

Calderwood, James L. 39n. Callaghan, Dympna 106, 114n.

Dadabhoy, Ambereen viii, 6, 8, 12

Index

Dallam, Thomas 135 Dannelfeldt, Karl H. 103, 117n., 118n. Dante Alighieri 50 David, A. Rosalie 103 Dawson, Warren R. 104–5 De Grazia, Margreta 116n. De Somogyi, Nick 198n. Dean, Leonard F. 279n. Delacroix, Eugene 265 Denner, Arthur 146n. Descartes, René 205, 213 Dioscorides 104 Dobson, Michael 40n., 92n. Donnan, Elizabeth 90n. Donne, John 208 Doran, Gregory 14, 34 Dorval, Patricia 38, 43n. Drew-Bear, Annette 120n. Duffin, Ross W. 277n. Dunbar, Robin I. M. 37, 41n. Dursteler, Eric 144n. Dusinberre, Juliet 119n. Earle, T. F. 90n. Edelman, Charles 199n., 201n. Eden, Richard 89n. Elam, Keir 175n. Elias, Norbert 7, 98–9 Elizabeth I 48, 96, 108, 129, 135, 137–8, 157, 192 Elliott, G. R. 276–7n. Elyot, Thomas 157 Emerson, Caryl 251n. Empson, William 242 Enrique IV of Castile 69 Enterline, Lynn viii, 7–8, 10, 12, 153–4, 172n., 173n., 174n., 175n. Erasmus, Desiderius 74, 242

283

Erickson, Peter 40n., 114n. Evett, David 233n. Fanon, Frantz 87, 146n. Farrow, Mia 18 Faucit, Helena 58, 62n. Fenner, David 26, 34, 41n. Feuillerat, Albert 119n. Field, Nathan 51 Fink, Zera S. 200n. Fisher, Burton D. 275n. Fisher, Will 100, 115n. Fletcher, John 51 Foakes, R. A. 15n., 119n. Foote, Samuel 28 Ford, John 29, 41n., 56, 219–20 Forés, Vincente 199n. Francis I 129 Freeman, Neil 91n. Freud, Sigmund 203, 207, 212 Frey, Silvia 90n. Furness, Henry Howard 47 Gainsford, Thomas 202n. Gair, W. Reavley 254n. Gammer Gurton’s Needle 23 Garner, Bryan A. 253n. Garner, Shirley N. 58 Garrard, William 202n. Garrick, David 107 Gascoigne, George 248 Gates, Henry Louis 90n. Genster, Julia 199n., 201n. Gérard, Albert 90n. Giovius, Paulus 131–2, 146n. Goldie, Mark 198n. Golding, Arthur 84, 164, 175n., 233n. Görlach, Manfred 245, 253n., 255n.

284 Index

Gough, Hugh 128, 131 Green, Juana 100, 115n. Greenblatt, Stephen 62n., 77, 92n., 144n., 177, 207, 208 Greene, Robert 42n., 50, 51, 61n., 193, 202n., 249 Grennan, Eamon 257–8, 272n. Gross, Kenneth 239–40, 272n., 274n. Haines, Charles 11, 203–4 Hakluyt, Richard 68, 146–7n., 152, 156, 174n. Hale, J. R. 201n. Hall, Edward 119n. Halpern, Richard 156–7, 278n. Hankey, Julie 28, 41n., 60n., 92n., 278n. Harbage, Alfred 93n. Harborne, William 135 Hardie, Philip 173n. Harris, Jonathan Gil 279n. Harris, Tim 198n. Hawkins, John 68 Hawkwood, Sir John 180 Hay, David L. 277n. Hazlitt, W. C. 199n. Heaton, Gabriel 200n. Heller-Roazen, Daniel 276n., 279n. Hendricks, Margo 173n. Henke, Robert 68 Henley, W. E. 200n. Henry VIII 107, 129 Henslowe, Philip 109 Herford, C. H. 119n., 254n. Heylyn, Peter 68 Himmelman, P. Kenneth 117n.

Hoby, Thomas 255n. Holland, Peter 21 Holquist, Michael 251n. Homer 159 Honigmann, E. A. J. 18, 21, 40n., 48, 49, 55, 56, 65, 114n. Hornback, Robert viii–ix, 3–4, 7–8, 36–7, 42n., 43n., 91–2n., 152, 174n. Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey 159–60 Howard, Jean 114n., 261, 276n. Huber, Magnus 90n. Hulme, Hilda M. 250–1n. Hunt, Maurice 40n., 114n. Hutson, Lorna 23 Imber, Colin 145n., 146n. Irving, Henry 107 Iser, Wolfgang 28 Jackson, Henry 10, 13, 60, 171n. James VI and I 48, 127, 182, 183, 190, 192 James, Heather 258, 274n. James, Mervyn 199n. Jauss, Hans 28 Jenkins, Harold 39n. Jenstad, Janelle 114n. Jephcott, Edmund 115n. Joana of Portugal 69 Johnson, Lee 276n. Johnson, Samuel 105 Jones, Ann Rosalind 115n. Jones, Eldred 120n., 147n. Jones, Richard Foster 173n., 255n.

Index

Jonson, Ben 108–9, 208, 246 Jorgensen, Paul 8, 179, 198–9n. Kamps, Ivo 89n. Karim-Cooper, Farah 96, 106–7 Kean, Edmund 107 Kehler, Dorothea 62n. Keilen, Sean 93n. Keller, Stefan 82 Kemble, John Philip 107 Kempe, William 155, 156 Kermode, Frank 240 Kernan, Alvin 143n. Knapp, James 120n. Knight, G. Wilson 254n. Knolles, Richard 128–9, 133–4, 136 Knyvett, Sir Henry 201n. Kolin, Philip C. 118n. Kopytoff, Igor 115n. Korda, Natasha 101, 115n. Kunin, Aaron 272, 274n. Kyd, Thomas 247 Laing, R. D. 242 Lane, Lady 97 Laroque, Françoise 63 Lass, Roger 253–4n. Lavagnino, John 61n., 91n. Lawrance, Jeremy 69, 91n. Lawrence, David R. 199n. Leavis, F. R. 203 Leishman, J. B. 254n. Leonidas, Eric 252n. Lester, Adrian 16n. Lewis, C. S. 235 Lewis, Cynthia 60n. Lewkenor, Lewis 198n.

285

Lily, John 155, 157–8, 168 Lipski, John 70 Lloyd, Janet 89n. Loomba, Ania 91n., 115n., 118n., 144n., 147n., 174n., 275n. Lorich, Reinhard 168–9 Lowe, K. J. P. 90n. Lucretius 11, 207–12, 219–21, 226–31 Lunsford, Virginia W. 201n. Lupton, Julia Reinhard 147n. Machiavelli, Niccolò 184–5, 200n. Macklin, Charles 28 Mackrell, Alice 114n. MacLean, Gerald 146n., 147n. Macready, Charles 107 Magnusson, Lynne 239, 251n. Maguire, Laurie ix, 1–2, 5, 13, 14, 41–2n. Malay, Jessica L. 116n. Malim, William 157 Mallett, M. E. 201n. Mann, Jennifer 172n. Manning, Roger B. 198n. Manningham, John 19 Marlowe, Christopher 17, 39n., 157, 173n., 247 Marston, John 246–7 Martin, Richard 202n. Martín-Casares, Aurelia 91n. Martinelli, Tristano 68–9, 87 Martino, Pierre 15n. Martire, Pietro d’Anghiera 67 Masefield, John 146–7n. Massai, Sonia 274n. Matar, Nabil 144n. Matheson, Mark 199n.

286 Index

Maxwell, J. C. 39n. Mazzio, Carla 275–6n. McBain, James 23 McBride, Tom 199n. McCabe, Richard 33–4 McDonald, Russ 254n. McKellen, Ian 27–8, 41n., 82 McKerrow, R. B. 199n. McKewin, Carole 272–3n. McMullan, Gordon 62n. McNeill, William H. 201n. Medici, Lorenzo de’ 50 Mehmet III 128, 135 Melchiori, Giorgio 21 Mendes, Sam 14 Menon, Madhavi 143n. Meres, Francis 156 Middleton, Thomas 3, 51–5, 73, 182–3, 243, 252n. Miller, David Lee 278n. Miller, Geoffrey 254n. Miller, Stephen R. 42n. Milton, John 235 Moisan, Thomas 252n. Montserrat, Dominic 104, 118n. Moschovakis, Nick 232n. Mowat, Barbara A. 42n. Mulcaster, Richard 250n. Murad I 130 Murad II 132–3, 146n. Nashe, Thomas 17, 39n., 199n., 253n. Neely, Carol Thomas 272n. Neill, Michael 40n., 117n., 143n., 162, 171n., 179, 199n., 204–5, 207, 232n. Nelson, T. G. A. 11, 203–4

Nevalainen, Terttu 253n. Newman, Karen 144n. Nichols, John 114n., 115n., 119n. Nicholson, Eric 90n. Nicholson, Paul 117n. Noble, Louise Christine 117n., 233n. Nobody and Somebody 267–9 North, Christopher 47 Nunn, Trevor 41n. Nussbaum, Martha 226 Nuttall, A. D. 21–2, 37–8 O’Hara, Diana 116n. Ogilby, John 67, 68 Olivier, Laurence 20, 260 Oman, Sir Charles 201n. Orgel, Stephen 93n. Orlin, Lena Cowen ix, 52, 55, 62n., 232n., 272, 274n., 277n. Osman 128 Ovid 4, 7–8, 64, 66, 82, 83–5, 88–9, 92–3n., 155–7, 163–9, 174n., 175n., 219–20 Palfrey, Simon 23, 240 Parker, Oliver 20, 42n., 43n., 45 Parry, William 202n. Pasolini, Pier Paolo 274n. Peacham, Henry 82 Pechter, Edward 46, 57, 61n., 62n., 171n., 258, 273n. Peck, Linda Levy 99, 116n. Pendry, E. D. 39n. Pepys, Samuel 1, 4, 27

Index

Petrarch 51 Pliny the Elder 104, 159 Pocock, J. G. A. 200n. Pollard, Tanya 117n. Porter, Joseph A. 277n. Pory, John 174n. Post, Jonathan 277n. Potter, Lois ix–x, 2–3, 10, 12, 13, 15n., 62n. Pricket, Robert 183, 190 Pryse, Marjorie 27 Purchas, Samuel 152, 156 Puttenham, George 67 Quevedo, Francisco de 71, 87 Quintilian 170n. Rapple, Rory 198n., 202n. Rebhorn, Wayne A. 254n. Rede, Leman Thomas 110, 119n. Redford, John 76–7, 78, 152–3, 172n. Reinosa, Rodrigo de 70 Rice, Julian C. 58 Rich, Barnabe 179–80, 183, 190, 194, 201n. Richard II 98–9 Ridley, Florence H. 173n. Ridley, M. R. 11, 16n., 55 Righter, Anne 43n. Robeson, Paul 13 Robinson, Benedict 143–4n. Robinson, Paul 178, 198n. Ronk, Martha 273n. Root, R. K. 93n. Rose, Mark 200n. Rosenberg, Marvin 16n. Rosenfeld, Colleen Ruth x, 13–14

287

Ross, Lawrence J. 114n. Rossini, Jean 265 Rowe, Katherine 173n. Rowlie, Samson (Hasan Aga) 135, 147n. Rutter, Carol Chillington 22, 273n. Rymer, Thomas 4–5, 63, 79, 96, 224, 233n., 247, 271–2 Sabinus, Georgius 163 Said, Edward 146n. Salgado, Gamini 15n. Salmon, Vivian 253n. Sanders, Norman 61n. Sandys, George 175n. Schalkwyk, David x, 10–12, 43n., 232n., 252n. Scherb, Victor I. 172n. Schiffer, James 60n. Schwyzer, Philip 117n., 118n., 120n. Scott, H. M. 199n. Serpico, Margaret 117–18n. Shakespeare, William All’s Well That Ends Well 218 Antony and Cleopatra 56, 86, 198n., 261 As You Like It 86, 109–10, 198n., 233n. Comedy of Errors, The 205 Coriolanus 36, 86, 178, 184–5, 198n., 254n. Cymbeline 185 Hamlet 1, 17, 30–31, 39n., 40n., 80, 82, 86, 198n., 240–1, 245, 275n. Henry IV Part 1 36, 80, 86, 178, 198n., 244

288 Index

Henry IV Part 2 36, 86, 240 Henry V 36, 86, 244 Julius Caesar 18, 86, 198n. King Lear 1, 30, 35–6, 82, 86, 207–8, 240, 243 Love’s Labour’s Lost 35, 86, 249 Macbeth 30, 86, 117n., 198n., 243–4, 262 Measure for Measure 49, 167, 245 Merchant of Venice, The 86, 236, 245 Merry Wives of Windsor, The 117n. Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 25–6, 35, 37, 42n., 212, 218, 245 Much Ado About Nothing 224, 245 Pericles 49, 86 Rape of Lucrece, The 167 Richard II 56, 86, 244 Richard III 19, 86, 198n. Romeo and Juliet 32, 55–6, 86, 208–9, 228 Taming of the Shrew, The 35, 40n., 42–3n., 51, 86 Tempest, The 17, 39n., 86, 185, 217, 249 Timon of Athens 42n., 49, 86, 198n. Titus Andronicus 86, 198n., 236 Troilus and Cressida 18 Twelfth Night 35 Winter’s Tale, The 36, 59, 86, 167, 185 Shapiro, James 39n. Shaw, Ian 117n.

Sher, Anthony 14, 34, 40n., 42n. Shershow, Scott Cutler 114n. Short, Mick 251n. Sidney, Philip 36–7, 245, 253n. Siemon, James x–xi, 8–10, 12, 199n. Silveira, Fernão da 69 Simpson, Evelyn 254n. Simpson, Percy 119n., 254n. Skelton, John 77 Slights, Camille Wells 178 Smallwood, Robert 42n. Smidt, Kristian 48, 267 Smith, Bruce R. 274n. Smith, Emma 39n., 40n. Smith, Ian xi, 5–6, 7, 89n., 115n., 125–6, 151–2, 154, 160, 162, 173n., 225 Smith, John 183, 191 Smith, Martin Ferguson 232n. Snow, Edward A. 114n. Snyder, Susan 42n., 63–4 Spenser, Edmund 208 Stallybrass, Peter 115n. Stanislavski, Konstantin 23 States, Bert O. 262, 269 Steggle, Matthew 76 Stendhal 1, 5, 13, 15n., 27 Stern, Tiffany 23 Sterne, Laurence 41n. Stevens, Andrea R. 120n. Storrs, Christopher 199n. Stow, George B. 98 Stow, John 183–4, 191 Styward, Thomas 198n., 201n. Suárez, José I. 91n. Sugg, Richard 102–3, 117n. Süleyman I 128–9 Susenbrotus, Joannes 164

Index

Sutcliffe, Matthew 180 Suzman, Janet 42n., 260 Swift, Carolyn Ruth 273n. Takano, Mamoru 39n. Taming of a Shrew, The 35, 40n., 42–3n., 51 Tanner, Tony 37–8 Taylor, A. B. 93n. Taylor, Gary 61n., 91n., 200n. Theobald, Lewis 101 Thirsk, Joan 116n. Thomas, William 188, 193, 200n. Thompson, Ann 62n., 232n. Trim, David 198n. Turner, Henry S. 120n. Valensi, Lucette 146n. Vanita, Ruth 273n. Vaughan, Virginia Mason 75, 120n., 144n., 145n., 199n. Vega, Lope de 71, 72, 87 Velz, John 93n. Verdi, Giuseppe 55, 275n. Vicente, Gil 70, 87 Vickers, Brian 202n. Virgil 7, 17, 39n., 157–62, 167, 169 Vitkus, Daniel 87–8, 143–4n., 147n. Vryonis, Speros, Jr. 145n. Wager, William 77–8 Wagner, Richard 54

289

Walen, Denise A. 273n. Wallace, Andrew 172n. Watson, Foster 172n. Watson, Robert N. xi, 12, 15n., 250n., 252n. Wayne, Valerie 32 Webster, John 59 Webster, Margaret 13, 16n. Weimann, Robert 36 Welles, Orson 45, 265–6 Wells, Stanley 51–2, 92n. Werstine, Paul 42n. Whetstone, George 180, 196, 202n. White, Willard 28, 82 Whitehorne, Peter 200n. Wiggins, Martin 39n. Wilkins, George 53, 61n. Willes, Richard 89n. William the Conqueror 19 Williams, Katherine Schaap 272, 276n. Wilson, Luke 275n., 278n., 279n. Withington, Phil 198n. Witmore, Michael 64 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 205–6 Wolsey, Thomas 157 Womack, Peter 278n. Wood, Betty 90n. Wright, George T. 240 Yorkshire Tragedy, A 3, 51–5 Yutkevich, Sergei 45 Zimansky, Curt 233n., 254n.