There is more difference between thy flesh and hers than between jet and ivory, more between your bloods than there is between red wine and Rhenish. Merch, III.i.41–43
In her rejection of the suitor her father favors, Juliet has many Shakespearean sisters. From Hermia in the early comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Jessica in the tragicomedy The Merchant of Venice to Desdemona in the tragedy Othello, young women in Shakespeare’s plays insist on making their own choice of husband. Shakespeare pares the conflict to its simplest form: like Juliet, each of these daughters is an only child; like Prospero, each of the fathers is a widower. Juliet’s rebellion is secret: Capulet does not discover the wayward course she has pursued until after her death. Jessica, too, conceals her defiance, though only until her elopement. Hermia and Desdemona take their independent stands openly. Each man prides himself on being the spokesman for family and communal values, but the common message in these plays is that father does not know best. His theatrical ancestor is a stock figure from Roman comedy, the blocking senex, the irascible old man, father or guardian, who tries to prevent the courtship. The darker the play’s tone, the more beset is the daughter by her father’s opposition and the more dire prove the consequences, for himself as well as for her.
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Egeus believes in the paramount authority of the father and the duty of the daughter to unquestioning obedience. He is countermanded, however, by a higher power to which he holds fealty: that of the state, in the person of Duke Theseus. To emphasize the father’s ineffectiveness, Shakespeare creates a second authority figure who also overrules Egeus, this one supernatural—Oberon, the king of the fairies. Both he and Theseus are themselves lovers, and both take the side of the rebellious daughter over that of the peevish old man. Hermia, in turn, is virtually unaffected by her father’s decree, which she dismisses as preposterous and runs away to evade. Egeus’s intransigence serves as little more than an unwitting catalyst to the love’s fulfillment. From the lovers’ irreverent stance to Egeus’s utter defeat, this happy comedy ridicules even the possibility of an authoritarian father prevailing over a determined daughter. The lovers may make their famous lament: “The course of true love never did run smooth” (I.i.134). But Shakespeare leaves little doubt that, as the mischievous fairy Puck predicts,
Jack shall have Jill
Naught shall go ill,
The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well [III.i.461–63].
In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock advocates the supreme worth not only of paternal authority but of Judaism and of material wealth. Jessica pretends to embrace those values, but only long enough to defy her father by eloping with an impecunious Christian. In the process, she helps herself to a huge “dowry” from Shylock’s horde of money and jewels. Her rebellion, like Hermia’s, is sanctioned by the ruling Duke but for less benevolent reasons: he and the other Christians of Venice see Shylock as a usurer and an alien. They cheer Jessica’s betrayal of all that her father stands for, and intensify Shylock’s losses by forcing him to will his remaining fortune to the rebellious couple. Worse, they require that he convert to the religion he loathes.
On one level, this is a happy ending for Jessica, who attains financial security and marriage to the man of her choice. But the play gives several indications that that victory, devastating for her father, is not without cost to her. Although Shakespeare labeled the earliest edition of The Merchant of Venice a “comical history” (Pelican edition, 14) and most collections list it with the comedies, many commentators have argued that it should be called a tragedy. In part, the label depends on the character through whose eyes one views events. From the perspective of Portia, the wealthy heroine, it is a comedy (her story will be taken up in Chapter 5); for Jessica, who attains love and freedom at the cost of renouncing family and creed, it is still a comedy, but a dark one. From the point of view of Shylock, the play is a tragedy of the somberest shade.
In Othello, Brabantio appears only briefly, at the outset of the play. But his values and actions precipitate both Desdemona’s tragedy and his own. Paternalistic and bigoted, he denigrates his new son-in-law’s human worth and denies his daughter not only understanding but counsel and succor. Both the lovers seem, at first, to discount his contemptuous rejection. But once Iago, Othello’s treacherous ensign, begins to echo Brabantio’s demeaning views, Othello comes to credit them—to believe that his blackness and foreign birth repel Desdemona, and that she, like women in general, is fickle and deceitful. Desdemona, in contrast, is determined to take the opposite stance from her father: to deny Othello’s external qualities and see him only as mind and spirit and to govern her own conduct by the highest standards of forbearance and integrity.
As in the Dream, the lovers plead their case before the ruling duke, and the higher authority overrules the father. In Othello, however, the duke’s motive is not romantic sentiment but political expediency: he cannot afford to offend his leading general, whom he needs to lead the Venetian troops against the Turks. Outraged by the duke’s judgment, Brabantio takes out his frustration on Desdemona. He accuses her of deceiving him, and he flings in the face of her new husband the warning that she will be equally devious toward him.
Furthermore, Brabantio refuses to let Desdemona reside with him while Othello is at war. Like Hermia and Jessica, she leaves the ordered place of her girlhood and goes off with her beloved to what she trusts will be a refuge. In keeping with the tragic tone of the play, however, it is not a greenwood inhabited by benevolent fairies nor an idyllic retreat but a fortified island unsettled by disrupted preparations for battle. With its army camp ambiance of bravado and bawdry, Cyprus could hardly be more alien to a refined and naive bride. There Desdemona is cut off from the forces of communal harmony that ordered her world in Venice. Her only female companion is her new waiting woman, Emilia, who also happens to be the wife of Iago, her secret enemy.
In the isolation of Cyprus, Brabantio’s treatment contributes to a fatal pattern. After years of conforming to the role of dutiful daughter, Desdemona has transferred her allegiance to her husband. Deeply hurt by Brabantio’s rejection, she lacks the confidence and experience to cope with the terrible changes that Othello is undergoing. Alone and distressed by his unfounded accusations and physical abuse, she first tries to rationalize his mistreatment, then to take the blame on herself, and at last to fantasize a conception of Othello that conforms to her earlier ideal. Desdemona has such a stake in proving her father wrong that she refuses to see any aspect of her husband but the “visage in his mind,” the “honors” and “valiant parts” with which she fell in love. She tries to force the increasingly hostile Othello to fit this image by treating him as though he actually does. Her goals for her own behavior are equally fixed: to maintain the docile, modest decorum that Brabantio once praised in her and accused her of abandoning. Desdemona has not been taught to define herself apart from men or to defend herself against hostility.
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the father-daughter conflict is presented in its simplest terms. Old Egeus sounds his character note at his first appearance. He comes in “full of vexation … with complaint / Against [his] child” (I.i.22–23). The reason is suggested in the cast list: Hermia is identified as “daughter to Egeus, in love with Lysander.” The problem is that Egeus favors Demetrius, and has given him his consent. Lysander, Egeus claims, has “bewitched” Hermia, “filched [his] daughter’s heart” with “rhymes,” “love tokens,” “verses of feigning love,” “bracelets of his hair, rings, gauds, conceits, / Knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats”—in short, all the standard paraphernalia of courtship. The charge is made the more ludicrous by the list’s detail. The real issue, as it was for Capulet, is the father’s pride of possession. Lysander, Egeus charges, has “Turned her obedience, which is due to me, / To stubborn harshness” (ll. 27–38). For retribution, he appeals to the “ancient privilege” of Athenian law, and to its human representative, Duke Theseus: “As she is mine, I may dispose of her,” he asserts, and he puts her choices in the harshest terms: either marriage to Demetrius or death.
This heavy sentence is not long allowed to overshadow the lovers’ fate. Shakespeare gives several signs that the play will remain a comedy. The first is the arbitrariness of Egeus’s preference: there is no extrinsic bar to Lysander’s qualifications as suitor. Unlike Othello, whose future father-in-law also accuses him of seducing his daughter by means of witchcraft, Lysander is of the same race and social heritage as Hermia. Unlike Romeo, he does not hail from a rival family. As Lysander himself vouches, he is as “well derived as [Demetrius], as well possessed” (I.i.99–100). In fact, he is the worthier candidate, since Demetrius has jilted another young noblewoman, “Nedar’s daughter, Helena,” who nevertheless still “dotes” on “this spotted and inconstant man” (ll. 109–10). Both the unreasonableness of the father’s edict and the accessibility of the rejected maiden signal that the means for a happy ending are at hand.
The other characters’ reactions during the public hearing also suggest that the outcome will firmly favor the lovers. At Egeus’s request, Theseus dutifully recites to Hermia the party line on filial obedience: her father “should be as a god” to her; having “composed [her] beauties,” it is “within his power / To leave the figure or disfigure it” (I.i.47–51). Hermia is not daunted by this ugly threat. Not only does she defend her preference for Lysander, she appeals to the Duke to mitigate her possible punishment should she refuse to marry Demetrius. Although she makes a show of apology for this “boldness” in overstepping the bounds of “modesty,” her request emphasizes that the Duke is a higher authority than Egeus. Like Desdemona, Hermia cunningly uses her father’s faith in hierarchy against him.
Theseus, perhaps moved by Hermia’s youth and beauty (he addresses her as “fair maid”), perhaps by the parallel with his own situation, tempers Egeus’s black and white dictate. He proposes a third course of punishment, that Hermia “endure the livery of a nun” and “live a barren sister all [her] life” (I.i.70–72). This is slender mercy. Although it would spare her life, Theseus’s very language—“endure,” “barren”—suggests that “withering on the virgin thorn” holds few charms in this most earthly of paradises. Nevertheless, Hermia claims to prefer enforced chastity to bearing the “unwished yoke” of Demetrius’s love. Lysander’s response is a sarcastic retort to his rival:
You have her father’s love, Demetrius;
Let me have Hermia’s: do you marry him [ll. 93–94].
He faces down his angry father-in-law with equal confidence: “I am beloved of beauteous Hermia. / Why should not I prosecute my right?”
Theseus, hearing this youthful defiance, restates the exigencies of the “law of Athens,” backing the father’s “will” against his daughter’s “fancies,” which, he claims, he “by no means … may extenuate” (I.i.118–20). But then he draws away Egeus and Demetrius on “some business” about his own “nuptial.” Is this accident, with Theseus so “over-full of self-affairs” (l. 113) that he does not think through his actions? Or has the tolerant older lover intentionally left the couple alone? In any case, they lose no time in devising a plot to defy their elders. Lysander takes the lead. After her public show of bravado, Hermia turns pale and threatens to cry, signs of emotion that, typically, Shakespeare describes in the dialogue. But her suitor waxes philosophical, first uttering the oft-quoted observation about the rough course of “true love,” and then giving a series of similes for love’s transience: “swift as a shadow, short as any dream”—“so quick bright things come to confusion” (ll. 144, 149). This nostalgia, we might suspect, derives less from the character than from the playwright looking, Theseus-like, with a fond eye at the young lovers.
Hermia’s response is to preach “patience” in their “trial” (I.i.152). The bolder Lysander proposes a scheme to elude “the sharp Athenian law” by fleeing the city and taking refuge with his wealthy widowed aunt. Hermia must “steal forth [her] father’s house” (ll. 162–64)—in other words, leave the confines of paternal authority and, in its extended form, the city walls and the Duke’s edict. She agrees with no qualms except about the possible fragility of the proposed match, based as it is on “all the vows that ever men have broke” (l. 175). But she lightens this accusation by couching it in rhyme and agrees to meet Lysander that night.
The way to the dowager’s house is through the woods, the usual setting in Shakespearean comedy of confusion, magic, and transformation—the world of dream alluded to in the title. There, the lovers’ fidelity will be tested, and the forces that threaten to separate them will go beyond the external. Lysander passes the first test of his integrity, obeying the modest Hermia’s request to “lie further off” when they lose their way and are forced to spend the night in the woods. Such a “separation,” she says sententiously, “becomes a virtuous bachelor and a maid” (II.ii.57–59). The supernatural beings who rule this province have no such scruples. In fact, Puck, coming across the sleeping couple, is indignant at Lysander’s supposed rejection of the “pretty soul” who “durst not lie” near “this lack-love” (ll. 76–77).
The fairies, led by their King, Oberon, and their Queen, Titania, are openly promiscuous. In fact, the royals are fighting a pitched battle over the jealousy caused by their various affairs. This permissiveness reaches a ludicrous extreme when Titania, drugged into amorousness by Oberon’s magic flower, leads her latest lover, the “translated” Bottom, to her bower. She is delicate and lovely; he, in a metaphor made literal, is an ass. Her thoughts are of a situation opposite to her own, the horror of rape, with the moon and “every little flower, / Lamenting some enforced chastity” (III.i.184–85). The mortals follow Titania’s words, not her actions, and uphold the usual strict standard of chastity that Shakespeare sets for his lovers. When Theseus and his hunting party discover all four sleeping—Demetrius has meanwhile been reconciled to Helena—he immediately puts an innocuous face on the situation: “No doubt they rose up early to observe / The rite of May” (IV.i.131–32). This placating excuse is directed particularly at the outraged Egeus. But Theseus teases the dazed couples in a way that shows he senses their actual motives: “Saint Valentine is past! / Begin these woodbirds but to couple now?” (ll. 138–39).
All four scramble to their knees and beg his pardon. After a night of confusion, discomfort, and barely averted battle, a farce directed by the mischievous Puck, the rivals are reconciled and the couples reunited. Hermia has proven her romantic heroine’s credentials: she was bold in claiming her rights against her rival when Puck’s error made Lysander abandon her for Helena, and steadfast in her concern for his safety even after he rejected her. Like Juliet and Desdemona, in a crisis she is resourceful and daring. But unlike those inhabitants of a tragic world, Hermia has not been forced to struggle alone. The wry Puck (whose watchword is “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” [III.ii.115]) is not the only guardian of their fates. Oberon, the fairy king, is there to assure that “all things shall be peace” (III.ii.377). “The pairs of faithful lovers” return to Athens to be “wedded with Theseus, all in jollity” (IV.i.91).
The difference in tone between the insouciant Dream and the later, more somber Tempest becomes evident if we compare the magical father-figures who determine the lovers’ fates. Oberon, unlike Prospero, is immortal. He is also unrelated to the lovers and secure in his native element. Having bestowed his blessing on them and their posterity, he can return to the wood he rules, with Puck and the fairy band permanently in his service and the new reconciliation with Titania to cheer his nights. He need sacrifice none of his own well-being for the sake of a loved one.
The suffering falls to the mortal father, Egeus, who, when the lovers return, renews his complaint against Hermia and adds the plea that Lysander, too, suffer “the law upon his head.” He tries to enlist Demetrius’s support in punishing their slight to two bastions of male power: the father’s “consent” and the suitor’s contract of marriage. But Demetrius is no longer his ally, and Theseus steps easily into the breach to decree: “Egeus, I will overbear your will” (IV.i.178). Thus, the Duke, the human analogue to Oberon (their parts are often doubled on stage), assumes the paternal role. Egeus says nothing; his silence shows that he has been completely thwarted, and no harsh word breaks the joyous mood.
The play remains a “dream,” with everyone except the irascible father given their fondest wish. Shakespeare acknowledges, through Theseus, the poet’s role as dream-maker, giving to “airy nothing / A local habitation and a name” (V.i.16–17). He links him, with endearing self-mockery, not only with the “lover” but the “lunatic” as three beings comprised entirely of “imagination” (ll. 7–8). Shakespeare exercises that imagination once more in a last act that serves as an epilogue to the main action and provides further distance from Egeus’s sour view.
The final act consists primarily of a play within the play that parodies the plot of the separated lovers. Some Athenian workmen present to the court their much toiled over “Pyramus and Thisby,” “very tragical mirth,” with “not one word apt, one player fitted” (V.i.57–65). Here it is an external barrier, and an animate one, that separates the lovers: a “vile wall” (l. 131). Coincidentally, the playlet also parodies Romeo and Juliet, written shortly afterwards, in Pyramus’s erroneous assumption that his lady is dead, the setting of the deaths in a tomb, and Thisby’s suicide with her lover’s dagger. In this small comic masterpiece, Shakespeare boldly mocks not only his own material but the conventions of his stage: the absence of scenery, the jog-trot verse, and the boy actors cast in female roles. He mocks, too, theater as a medium and actors as a type—eager for applause, keen on playing all the roles, at the mercy of their audience’s indulgence and the limitations of their own talents.
At the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, however, solemnity and beauty return. Oberon, Titania, and their fairy train bestow on the newlyweds all the worldly blessings: “sweet peace,” “safety,” and “issue [that] ever shall be fortunate” (V.i.394–409). These wishes parallel those conveyed to Miranda and Ferdinand in Prospero’s show of goddesses. Fittingly, in the simple comedy, the roles of father and supernatural overseer remain split: Oberon blesses the union while the irate Egeus remains conveniently off stage. Shakespeare’s tenets for marital happiness remained remarkably constant from the beginning to the end of his career. The poet’s alliance with the lover and with the father-figure who would promote wedded bliss, so early claimed, held firm.
The story of Jessica, the rebellious daughter in Merchant, also has the trappings of traditional romance. The woman, disguised “in the lovely garnish of a boy” (II.vi.45) evades her overbearing father and elopes with her true love. After honeymoon adventures—a gondola ride, a futile pursuit by an agent of her furious father, a prodigal spending spree—the lovers arrive at an idyllic setting where their union is sanctioned by a wealthy patron. In outline, this parallels Hermia’s story, but only in outline. The differences, more significant than the similarities, give the later play its darker tone.
The contrast begins with the cast list, where Shylock is described not as “father to Jessica” or “a moneylender of Venice” but “a Jew”—not, in other words, in terms of his affiliation but of his alienation. Jews were a rarity in Shakespeare’s England, the actual if not the designated setting of the play. They had few rights—could not, for example, own land, attend a university, or pursue most professions. The popular stereotype was that they were conspiratorial, greedy, and malevolent—the killers of Christ (the irony that Jesus was himself a Jew persecuted by the pagan Romans was lost on the Elizabethan populace). Their reputation was further sullied by the scandal of Dr. Rogerigo Lopez, a Portuguese Jew who was the revered Elizabeth I’s personal physician. In 1594, a few years before the probable date of The Merchant of Venice, he was accused of attempting to poison the queen and executed for high treason. Whether or not the charge was true, the case prompted a resurgence of anti–Semitism in already xenophobic England.
The theater, most socially cognizant of the arts, reflected that bigotry. The most famous example is Christopher Marlowe’s melodrama, The Jew of Malta. Marlowe, Shakespeare’s chief theatrical rival before his early death in a tavern brawl, wrote the play in 1589. After the Lopez trial, it was revived in order to capitalize on the sensationalism of the case. (See Anne Barton’s introduction to the play in the Riverside Shakespeare, p. 250.) The main character, Barabas, is a caricature of the inhumane, grasping Jew. When his daughter Abigail falls in love with a Christian, Barabas betroths her both to him and another powerful Christian and contrives to have them slay each other. Abigail takes refuge from his tyranny in a convent, whereupon Barabas poisons the entire sisterhood, including the offending daughter, with a gift of “a mess of rice-porridge.” In the end, he is lured into the trap he has set for his chief enemy, Ferneze, Governor of Malta. Barabas perishes, cursing, in a giant cauldron of boiling oil, an apt demise for the satanic protagonist. Because his enemies are themselves so venial and unscrupulous and because Barabas has the Marlovian hero’s daring and eloquence, he is the focal character.
Shakespeare was no doubt influenced by Marlowe’s depiction when he created Shylock. Certainly, he adopts the stereotype in making his Jew, too, rich, miserly, and vindictive. Shylock also has a daughter who falls in love with a Christian. But Shakespeare’s conception goes far beyond Marlowe’s black humor caricature. Usury, one of the only means allowed Elizabethan Jews for earning a living, is more than simply a profession for Shylock. The financial success it affords him is inextricable from his identity as a Jew and even as a father. His first trustworthy—i.e., non-public—words to the audience on his “ancient grudge” against the merchant Antonio suggest his tangle of attitudes:
I hate him for he is a Christian,
But more for that in low simplicity
He lends out money gratis and brings down
The rate of usance here in Venice [I.iii.38–41].
For the Christians, usury is not only unsavory but sinful—on the grounds, quaint to modern ears, that it is unnatural because it “breeds” money out of an inanimate substance. They see anyone, like Shylock, who dirties his hands in this unclean practice as a pariah, a “villain” and a “devil.” In the apt malapropism of the clown Launcelot Gobbo, his master Shylock is “the very devil incarnation” (II.ii.24). The Christians conveniently ignore the fact that they have left him few other means of support and that, in any case, his religion automatically makes him an alien in their society.
The crucial point for the father-daughter issue is that Jessica does not elope with just any young man. She deliberately chooses a Christian, and one who is allied with the closest friends of Shylock’s rival merchant, Antonio. In fact, she values Lorenzo not despite but because of his religious affiliation. She admits her “heinous sin” in being “ashamed to be [her] father’s child.” But she swears that, “blood” alliance aside, she is not “daughter … to his manners” (II.iii.16–19). She is counting on Lorenzo to “keep promise” and elope with her. By that means, she vows: “I shall end this strife, / Become a Christian and [his] loving wife” (ll. 20–21). From the first then, Jessica links marriage with religious conversion and professes that her salvation, of soul and emotional well-being, lies in her suitor’s good faith.
Unlike Hermia, Jessica has not picked a suitor who is a virtual clone of her father’s favorite. Nor does she run away on impulse. The elopement is part of a precisely orchestrated scheme, devised by both lovers and carried out by means of secret messages, disguises, and careful timing. From the first, it is meant to include Jessica’s theft of a great part of Shylock’s wealth. We have Lorenzo’s word to his friend Gratiano that the mastermind of the plan is Jessica herself:
She hath directed
How I shall take her from her father’s house,
What gold and jewels she is furnished with,
What page’s suit she hath in readiness… [II.iv.30–33].
On the designated night, Jessica confesses to being “much ashamed”—but only of her male disguise, of being “transformed to a boy” (II.vi.35, 39) before her lover’s eyes. The elopement and the burglary do not touch her conscience. From her window, she tosses Lorenzo a “casket” of jewels, commenting wryly, “it is worth the pains” (l. 33). The casket, long a symbol of female sexuality, is Jessica’s self-bestowed dowry. Unlike Portia, Jessica is the one who chooses the “casket” for her suitor, though she, too, gives herself with her fortune. But, again in contrast to the heiress, Jessica steals the prerogative that she knows her father would never grant.
Far from feeling remorseful, Jessica is elated. She promises to join Lorenzo immediately, pausing only long enough to “gild [herself] / With some more ducats” (II.vi.49–50). The gild/guilt pun, to which she seems oblivious, resounds clearly in the audience’s ears. Lorenzo, like Jessica, sees no perfidy in the theft. He praises it as his bride’s means of “prov[ing] herself” “wise,” “fair,” and “true,” deserving of placement in his “constant soul” (ll. 53–55). The religious allusion is a reminder that he, too, sees the marriage as the instrument of Jessica’s salvation. In fact, he expresses the hyperbolic wish that her act might sanctify even her “faithless” father:
If e’er the Jew her father come to heaven
It will be for his gentle daughter’s sake [ll. 33–34].
The pun (gentle/gentile) again emphasizes that social status and religious affiliation are inseparable in Venice. It is worth noting, too, that Lorenzo’s designation for Shylock is “the Jew.” In his capacity as bereft parent, he has not roused the sympathy of either lover.
The reasons for Jessica’s alienation from her father are not far to seek. He has not made her life pleasant or easy. She complains to Launcelot, her one companion, that her house is “hell,” relieved of its tedium only by the clown himself, a “merry devil” (II.iii.2). Launcelot, however, is about to leave his post to serve the indulgent Christian gentleman Bassanio. Shylock is not sorry to see him go. He reproaches Launcelot, to his face and in soliloquy, with being “a huge feeder” whose only functions are to “sleep,” “snore,” and wear out his clothes (II.v.3–5). Shylock begrudges him, in other words, the commonest human needs. Although he grants privately that Launcelot is “kind enough” (l. 44), all his words to the servant consist of commands, insults, and threats.
With Jessica, too, Shylock’s principles are thrift and duty, his tone stern and authoritarian. In their one tête-à-tête, his main concern is instructing her on how to protect his property: “Look to my house,” he orders, “Lock up my doors” (II.v.16, 28). That guardianship extends to her: his longest speech is a warning not to look out the “casements … into the public street” during that night’s music and masquerading. Scornfully, he adds that these “sounds of shallow foppery” will emanate from “Christian fools with varnished faces” (ll. 32–34). Her duty is to protect his “sober house” from such intrusion. He assumes, of course, that Jessica is his ally in this enterprise, as well as in his malice toward Christians. He confides that his motive for attending the supper to which his new client, Antonio, has invited him is rancor: “I’ll go in hate to feed upon / The prodigal Christian” (ll. 14–15). Still, he says, he feels “loath to go.” He senses “some ill a-brewing towards his rest.” The bad omen is his recent dream of “money-bags,” the comic symbol of his security and status. Shylock’s solution is to lock up his treasures with extra care: “Fast bind, fast find” is his sententious last word to Jessica. What he does not take into account is that he cannot “fast bind” the human “treasure”—that he has more to fear from traitors within his house than from robbers.
Shylock has been so busy lecturing Jessica that he has taken no notice of her reactions. The sounds of music and partying are hardly repellent to her young ears. Nor has he uttered any word of affection or appreciation. She says almost nothing to her father during this scene, except to ask “What is your will?” and, later, to lie about what Launcelot has whispered to her—not “farewell” but details about the elopement. Shylock’s opposition to revelry, music, and romance have made Jessica all the more determined to enjoy them. No sooner has the old man shut the door than she makes a grim vow to escape his oppression:
Farewell; and if my future be not crost,
I have a father, you a daughter lost [II.v.54–55].
She expresses neither love nor remorse. Jessica has played the role that her father demanded of her: caretaker of his possessions, acquiescer in his prejudices—the self-effacing Good Girl. Like Lear (see Chapter 4), Shylock takes that guise at face value. As Launcelot wryly observes of his own parent: “It is a wise father that knows his own child” (II.ii.70–71).
Typically, Shakespeare has put this wisdom into the mouth of the clown. In context, it arises from a literal failure of recognition: all Shakespeare’s clowns are adamantly literal-minded. Old Gobbo, nearly blind, is tricked by the fatuous Launcelot into believing that his son has died in Shylock’s service. But the pronouncement echoes in the serious plot, as does the old father’s reaction to the “death”: “God forbid! The boy was the very staff of my age, my very prop” (II.ii.60–61). Shylock, in failing to see his daughter as she really is, suffers the devastating loss of his life’s “very prop.” By running off with Lorenzo, Jessica betrays her religion, her culture, and her one living parent. Her act makes her father an object of derision to his enemies and drives him to greater isolation, hatred, and despair. Before Jessica’s elopement, the play is a comedy. We are on the side of the lovers, as usual, and against the killjoy father. But the conventional comic plot calls for a play to end in weddings, as does the Dream. When a marriage occurs earlier on, obstacles to the match become the focus and the tone darkens. Here, Shylock goes from dupe to would-be avenger to victim; moreover, Shakespeare implies, the union founded on the old man’s misery is not entirely happy.
Shylock has nothing like simple old Gobbo’s understanding of his love for his child. His first reaction to Jessica’s flight is a howl of pain and fury that confounds all his forms of loss: “‘My daughter! O my ducats! O my daughter! / Fled with a Christian! O my Christian ducats!’” (II.viii.15–16) This is the illogic of free association: the “very prop[s] of [his] age”—child, wealth, religion—have all been knocked out from under him. In his shock, Shylock cannot separate the perpetrator from the possessions, the sense of betrayal from the material loss.
His suffering is given a comic twist by being reported rather than staged—an “unscene,” in Marjorie Garber’s apt term. The witnesses are Antonio’s obsequious cronies, Salerio and Solanio, for whom the moneylender’s troubles mean only the latest item of gossip. They turn his outburst into an object of ribald humor: “‘Justice! Find the girl!’” they quote Shylock mockingly. “‘She hath the stones upon her, and the ducats!’” (II.viii.21–22). The word “stones” is Elizabethan slang for testicles; Solanio stresses Shylock’s unwitting pun when he reports gleefully: “all the boys in Venice follow him, / Crying his stones, his daughter, and his ducats.” Their ridicule has a grim underlying implication: Jessica has robbed her father of his manhood, and done so in a way that makes his humiliation public.
Later, when Shylock comes upon the gossiping toadies, his tone is somber and his words dignified. His opening remark is a sad accusation: “You knew, none so well, none so well as you, of my daughter’s flight” (III.i.21–22). They are undeterred from their malicious ridicule, admitting not only their foreknowledge but their approval. When Shylock’s despair drives him to exclaim “My own flesh and blood to rebel!”, they react not with sympathy but with another lewd pun, and Salerio dismisses the old father’s claim of kinship: “There is more difference … between your bloods than there is between red wine and Rhenish” (ll. 34–36). Shylock has described Jessica as an extension of his body and his will; they deny that there is any connection at all. Shylock’s isolation is made more poignant because Salerio and Solanio are such shallow fops. As with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the sycophants in Hamlet, Shakespeare has rendered them ridiculous by making them virtual twins. In fact, so indistinguishable are their characters that the playwright himself seemed to forget the similar Italianate names he gave them and in the quarto text several times calls “Salerio” “Salerino.” Modern actors have echoed this mockery by nicknaming them “the Salads.”
The contemptible clowns serve several dramatic purposes: to report to the audience Shylock’s reaction to the elopement, to goad him into further response, and to spare the more important Venetians—Antonio, Bassanio, and Gratiano—the unsavory role of tormenting the old man when he is down. They are also the first to make the connection between Jessica’s betrayal and Antonio’s peril. Before Shylock appears, Solanio suddenly cuts off the banter with an ominous surmise: “Let good Antonio look he keep his day, / Or he shall pay for this” (II.viii.25–26). This is the first hint that ruthless materialism can be the means of solacing a bruised heart and restoring lost face.
Shylock himself makes this connection when he is talking to his one friend, his fellow Jew Tubal, who has come to report the futility of his search for Jessica, undertaken at Shylock’s behest. Tubal has discovered a long trail of extravagant purchases and wild exploits—“A diamond gone cost … 2,000 ducats in Frankford,” the squandering of “fourscore ducats at a sitting” (III.i.74–75; 98). Shylock is appalled at the “loss upon loss,” compounded by “what’s spent in the search.” But, as in his reported cry, he is incapable of articulating the real cause of his anguish: his daughter’s betrayal of family loyalty and religious faith.
Shylock is not an introspective man. He never admits—probably never realizes—his own part in provoking Jessica’s rebellion. Instead, he displaces love with wealth and grief with fury in a grotesque conflation: “I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear! Would she were hearsed at my foot, and the ducats in her coffin!” (III.i.78–80). This curse is too terrible for him to dwell on, and, in any case, the thief is out of his grasp. He is bemoaning that he can have “no satisfaction, no revenge” and, more broadly, that only he has “ill luck,” when Tubal supplies a new target for Shylock’s rage: Antonio. The merchant, too, has been unlucky: he has lost one of his cargo ships. Shylock shifts to this object with alacrity: “I thank God, I thank God! … I am glad of it. I’ll plague him; I’ll torture him. I am glad of it” (ll. 91; 103–04). The repetition of words and syntax, typical of Shylock’s diction whenever he is intent on a point, here suggests his rapacity and his eagerness to turn impotence into action.
There is no question that Shylock has been deeply hurt by Jessica’s betrayal. He reveals to Tubal the emotional wounds that he conceals from his Christian enemies, who see him only as a “stony adversary” (IV.i.4). To his friend, Shylock confesses his “sighs” and “tears,” and says with every new detail of the man’s incoherent account, “Thou torturest me, Tubal” (III.i.106). The most painful news is that Jessica traded a ring for a monkey. This, Shylock cries, was his “turquoise,” given him by “Leah when [he] was a bachelor.” We do not know Leah’s identity, but most critics have assumed that she is Jessica’s long-dead mother. This interpretation is suggested by Shylock’s comic/poignant protest: “I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys” (l. 108–09). It is the one point in the play where he chooses love over wealth. Immediately afterwards, he vows about Antonio: “I will have the heart of him if he forfeit.” Shylock’s own heart, Shakespeare implies, is gone—or, to use Antonio’s metaphor, become so hard that neither pleas nor “prayers” can “soften” it (IV.i.77–80). Love, thwarted, has turned to hate.
In the 1970 film of the London stage production, Laurence Olivier, playing Shylock, implies that this is the point in the play when Shylock’s “merry bond” turns grimly earnest. His main motive for revenge is not the religious cause that he professes at the outset—“I hate him for he is a Christian”—or the financial one that Antonio disingenuously offers—his own beneficent “delivery” of Shylock’s debtors (III.iii.22–24). Olivier’s production focuses on the searing pain caused by Jessica’s elopement. The film is set in Edwardian times, and Olivier plays Shylock as a dignified businessman and lonely widower. When he mentions Leah, he turns to a framed portrait, holds it mournfully to his chest, and then dashes it to the floor. The scene ends with the old man donning a prayer shawl, bowing his head, and swaying back and forth as he chants the Hebrew prayer for the dead. For him, Olivier suggests, Jessica is lost in soul as well as body.
Although Olivier’s gestures may be exaggerated and his interpretation of Shylock idealized, the motive for revenge rings true: Shylock blames the Christians for Jessica’s betrayal and sees himself solely as the wronged party. In the trial scene, he demands “justice” and “the law” (IV.i.196, 204), and his answer to Portia’s pivotal plea about his own “hope for mercy” is the uncompromising: “What judgment shall I dread, doing no wrong?” (l. 89). He maintains that no “mercy” has been shown him, either by his daughter or the enemies she has allied herself with, and he falls back on his old biases. The Christians condemn him as “an inhuman wretch, / Uncapable of pity, void and empty / From any dram of mercy” (ll. 4–6). They compare him to a natural force, cruel and unstoppable—a “flood,” a “wolf,” (ll. 72–73). Certainly Shylock’s intention of cutting out Antonio’s heart is nothing less than barbarous. At the same time, the mercy-preaching Christians are far from altruistic. The Merchant of Venice is a play whose interpretation has inevitably been affected by history, to the point that some have argued against the appropriateness of its being staged at all for post–Holocaust audiences. That stance ignores the considerable ambiguity that Shakespeare has written into the portrayal of the Christians.
Portia’s sentence, backed by the Venetian court, is a series of hammer blows: not only must Shylock forfeit the bond, he must cede “half [his] wealth” to Antonio, his bitterest enemy. He makes an appalled protest: “You take my life / When you do take the means whereby I live” (IV.i.374–75). Having lost his family, he wants to retain his profession and economic status. But worse is coming. Antonio’s “mercy”—Portia’s term—is that Shylock be required to leave “all he dies possessed [of] / Unto his son Lorenzo and his daughter” (ll. 387–88). The filial designation sounds especially galling given Antonio’s frank description, just a few lines earlier, of Lorenzo as “the gentleman / That lately stole his daughter.” Finally, Shylock must “presently [i.e., immediately] become a Christian” (l. 385). The penalty for failing to comply is the Duke’s retraction of the pardon he has just given the “alien.”
Some critics have argued that this is “kind” treatment—the Christians’ way of bringing Shylock into the mainstream of their society and of saving his soul. That is not the effect on stage. After the terms have been meted out, Portia demands, “Art thou contented, Jew? What dost thou say?” The familiar second person pronoun, used toward inferiors, the contemptuous reference to the religion he is being forced to forsake, and the repetition of the prompt to the response she expects—all indicate who has the upper hand. Shylock can manage only a faint echo of her words, “I am content,” before Portia matter-of-factly completes the blank verse line: “Clerk, draw a deed of gift.” Shylock’s property will of course go to Jessica and Lorenzo: she has left him no choice. Saying, “I am not well,” Shylock begs leave to depart, promising, however, that he will sign the deed. As usual, Shakespeare’s text provides no stage directions for this crucial moment. Directors have chosen to signal Shylock’s feelings in a variety of ways, depending on the degree of sympathy they want to convey. The choices have ranged from a lightly self-mocking acquiescence to a tremulous stammer to a near collapse to Olivier’s famous off-stage howl in the wings of the Old Vic. No matter what reaction Shylock shows his enemies, it is clear that he has lost everything. The Christians stay behind to exult.
And what of the daughter who exposed her father to such treatment? Did she wish his downfall? Yes, in fact she joined in the scheme against him. At Belmont, before the trial, Salerio comes to report Antonio’s arrest and to warn the company about Shylock. Jessica, now Portia’s guest, adds confirming testimony, both of her father’s malice and of his particular enmity to Antonio:
When I was with him, I have heard him swear
To Tubal and to Chus, his countrymen,
That he would rather have Antonio’s flesh
Than twenty times the value of the sum
That he did owe him [III.ii.284–88].
This, her only speech in the scene, reads suspiciously like a newcomer’s eagerness to ingratiate herself by playing informer.
But does Jessica secure a place in Christian society and in her new husband’s heart? Shakespeare implies that the union is a tenuous one. Although Jessica expresses hope that she “shall be saved by [her] husband” through her conversion, Gratiano describes the couple approaching Belmont as “Lorenzo and his infidel” (III.ii.218). Granted that he is the play’s crude prankster, the nobleman who expresses anti–Semitism in its rawest form; still, his fellow Christians display similar bigotry. In Portia’s Belmont, Jessica seems very much the outsider. She speaks freely only to her former servant, Launcelot, who has come along in Bassanio’s service, and to Lorenzo. When the other Venetians are present, she is largely silent. She praises her hostess in elaborate terms, claiming to like her “past all expressing” and to believe “the poor rude world / Hath not her fellow” (III.v.66, 75–76). Yet Portia says almost nothing to her—nearly all her lines, both before leaving for Venice and on her return, are addressed to Lorenzo.
At the end, Jessica discovers, along with everyone else, that her hostess is the brilliant lawyer who has defeated and humiliated her father. Lorenzo exults at the news of the “special deed of gift” from “the rich Jew”: “Fair ladies, you drop manna in the way / Of starved people” (V.i.294–95). This is an insensitive allusion to Jessica’s Old Testament roots, and a reminder that the ultimate source of her wealth will be the death of the father who accrued it. Jessica says nothing.
As fitting the play’s comic ending, Shakespeare provides no subsequent confrontation between Jessica and Shylock. The last act, as in Dream, is largely an epilogue to the main plot. The resolution has come in Act IV, with Shylock’s defeat. In this darker play, the irascible father has been not only silenced, like Egeus, but banished from the final idyll. It is Jessica who remains silent during the scene of Portia’s triumphant return, and we can only guess at her feelings. The choices that a director makes about Jessica’s gestures and movements can have a substantial effect on the play’s tone. The comic/romantic choice requires that she engage in affectionate flirtation with Lorenzo and regard Portia with smiling awe. The 1987 Royal Shakespeare Company production took a strikingly different approach. Jessica was played as awkward and isolated, dressed in a colorful Old World costume, at odds with the fashionable Belmont crowd. At the end, the group, including Lorenzo, followed Portia and Nerissa off stage, eager to hear the details of the courtroom victory. Jessica was left alone with her father’s enemy, Antonio. In the final moment, before the lights dimmed, he dangled a crucifix over her and she dropped to her knees, stricken.
Is there evidence in the text for this dark view of Jessica’s marriage? Certainly there are hints that it is not perfect. The “monkey” for which she so willingly trades Leah’s turquoise was for the Elizabethans a symbol of sexual license, and the play is full of references to lust as a threat to fidelity. Gratiano, the “all-licensed” advocate of the appetites, says that anticipation is ultimately more pleasurable than gratification: “All things that are / Are with more spirit chasèd than enjoyed” (II.v.12–13). In the spirit of the locker room bull session in which this remark is uttered, Salerio expresses doubt about Lorenzo’s will to “keep obliged faith unforfeited”—i.e., be true to his marriage vows. “Love’s bonds new-made,” he says, are more appealing. Granted, these two wastrels are hardly the most reliable spokesmen on this subject, and Lorenzo does carry out his promise to marry Jessica. He does not simply seduce and abandon her. He also speaks some lovely poetry in her praise. Still, on their honeymoon at Portia’s borrowed estate, they begin a contest in verse on lovers who also enjoyed such an idyllic night. Lorenzo’s examples, Troilus and Dido, allude to affairs that ended in betrayal; Jessica’s—Thisbe and Medea—to loves destroyed by death. All four of these stories are tragedies. Then Lorenzo shifts rather insensitively to the present, to the night when Jessica “Did steal from the wealthy Jew,” and she counters by accusing him of “stealing her soul with many vows of faith, / And ne’er a true one” (V.i.19–20). Their tone is playful, the duel of wit a typical romantic device, Jessica a willing and equal participant. But the tenor of the allusions is ominous.
When Lorenzo changes the subject to rhapsodizing on “the touches of sweet harmony” in the air, Jessica responds moodily, “I am never merry when I hear sweet music” (V.i.69). He urges her to “mark the music,” and warns against “the man that hath no music in himself” as “fit for treason, stratagems, and spoils,” with “affections dark as Erebus” (ll. 83–85). Shylock, we are reminded, hated the sound of “the wry-necked fife” and warned Jessica against harkening to it. Is her gloominess the mark of a belated—and ineffable—twinge of conscience? Is it a sign, again in the words of the prescient clown Launcelot, that “the sins of the father are to be laid upon the children”? (III.v.1–2). Jessica’s story ends before we see the course of her marriage. The larger play is, after all, a comedy, and it returns at the end to the main love plot between Portia and Bassanio. But Shakespeare implies that the happiness Jessica achieves at the cost of her father’s pain does not go unscathed, that for all her defiance, she remains Shylock’s “flesh and blood.”
Like Jessica, Desdemona, the rebellious daughter in Othello, marries a man who is anathema to her father. In keeping with the tragic plot, the basis for the father’s opposition to the match is not arbitrary and superficial, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but intrinsic. This time it is not the suitor’s religion that is the issue, as in The Merchant of Venice, but his race: Othello, who has been a welcome guest at Brabantio’s manor house in his capacity as legendary general, becomes a pariah as a husband for Desdemona. The senator, wealthy and privileged, is appalled at the idea of his daughter allying herself with a “stranger of here and everywhere,” and, what is more shocking, “a Moor”—in Elizabethan parlance, a black man. Again, the timing of the marriage suggests the tone of the play: the wedding does not bring the action to a happy close, as in the comic Dream, or occur in mid-play, as in the tragicomic Merchant. Othello and Desdemona elope before the first scene begins; the rest of the play traces the results of that impulsive act. After a brief ascent, events move relentlessly toward their fatal conclusion. Usually, the blame for the love’s failure has been laid on Iago, Othello’s malevolent ensign. Certainly he is the instigator of Othello’s violent jealousy. But it is Brabantio’s jaundiced outlook that informs the play. Bigotry, chauvinism, the inferiority and deviousness of women: these are the values that the magnifico professes. Iago, master artificer that he is, merely spins his web of lies from this insidious matter.
Before Desdemona’s elopement, Brabantio feels secure in his conception of both his rank and his daughter’s nature. He is an established member of the ruling class, accustomed to ease and deference. Desdemona is his only child and heir, a “jewel” (I.iii.195) whose duty is to run his household smoothly until such time as he chooses a husband for her. All these complacent assumptions are apparent in the opening scene. Iago, with his usual eye for human foibles, predicts how the senator will react to the news of Desdemona’s flight. He rouses Brabantio from sleep and “poison[s] his delight” (I.i.68) with a cry against “thieves”: “Look to your house, your daughter, and your bags!” (ll. 79–80). The equation of family relationships and material possessions sounds like Shylock. But Iago immediately connects the “robbery” to greater loss: “Your heart is burst; you have lost half your soul.”
As the dazed old man attempts to understand “the reason of this terrible summons,” Iago, under cover of darkness, uses crude barnyard metaphors to describe the new marriage: “an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe” (I.i.88–89). His taunts debase not only the marriage but its progeny: “You’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse; you’ll have your nephews neigh to you” (ll. 110–12). Lest the father, or the audience, misunderstand, Iago’s feckless sidekick, Roderigo, puts the message in more prosaic terms:
Your daughter, if you have not given her leave,
…hath made a gross revolt,
Tying her duty, beauty, wit, and fortunes
In an extravagant and wheeling stranger
Of here and everywhere [ll. 132–36].
The implication is the familiar one that the daughter is the father’s possession, to be bestowed on a husband he approves of. But Desdemona, Roderigo charges, is even at that moment in “the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor.” The alliterated “s” turns the line into a hiss.
Brabantio condemns her act as “treason of the blood” (I.i.168), a betrayal not only of morality but of family alliance. Like Shylock, he sounds more like a cuckolded husband than a grief-stricken father: “O, she deceives me / Past thought!” he exclaims (ll. 164–65). Several commentators have labeled father-daughter relationships in the plays incestuous. Although such charges, taken literally, seem exaggerated, it is true that Shakespeare’s most damaging fathers are also the most possessive.
Brabantio asserts that his only consolation would have been to act as the arbiter of Desdemona’s choice. In an about-face so sudden that it is comic, he cries to Roderigo, “O, would you had had her!” (I.i.174). This to the drunken fop whom, moments earlier, he was reproaching for “haunt[ing] about [his] doors” after being told outright “My daughter is not for thee” (ll.96–98). Her act makes fatherhood itself seems worthless to him: “Who would be a father?” (l. 163) he demands melodramatically. But Brabantio will not give Desdemona up without a fight. He means to exercise all of his political and social influence to divorce the new couple. Armed and assisted by “special officers of night,” he sets out to “apprehend the Moor” and arraign him before the Duke.
Iago, now playing the role of loyal officer, conveys Brabantio’s invidious purposes to Othello: “He will divorce you,” he warns, or at least use the “law” to exert “restraint and grievance” (I.ii.14–17) on the newlyweds. Under ordinary circumstances, Iago would be right, as we see when Brabantio pleads his case before the Duke and his council. The senator calls this marriage a “wrong” which, he asserts, “any of [his] brethren of the state” must feel “as ’twere their own” (ll. 95–97). Like Hermia’s father, he assumes that only “witchcraft” or “drugs” and “minerals” could cause “nature so preposterously to err” (I.ii.74; I.iii.62–64). By “nature,” he means his conception of Desdemona’s character and predilections: “a maiden never bold; / Of spirit so still and quiet” that she “blush’d” at her own emotions (I.iii.94–96). She seemed entirely opposed to marriage, having “shunned / The wealthy curlèd darlings of [their] nation” (I.ii.67–68). How could such a paragon of modesty and chastity, he flings at Othello, have “run from her guardage to the sooty bosom / Of such a thing as thou—to fear, not to delight” (ll. 70–71). “Sooty” and “thing” reduce the noble commander to a soiled object. Such a choice, he adds cuttingly, could only “incur a general mock.” To him, Othello’s noble lineage means nothing. Although the general descends “from men of royal siege” [rank], and can claim “as proud a fortune” as that of his bride (ll. 21–24), the outraged father sees only his racial heritage and ranks him with “bondslaves and pagans” (l. 99).
This bigotry reflects the typical Venetian attitude, expressed in the slurs of Iago and Roderigo and in the Duke’s initial reaction to Brabantio’s charge. He first grants the magnifico absolute power over the man who has “beguiled” his daughter, promising that the father himself shall read “the bloody book of law” to the malefactor, even should he prove to be the Duke’s “proper [own] son” (I.iii.65–70). But that is before he discovers that the groom is “valiant Othello,” whom he has just summoned to lead the Venetian fleet “against the general enemy Ottoman” (l. 49). Two sources of power are in conflict here: social status and political expediency. In this instance, the general is a much more valuable ally to the Duke than the senator. Still, not wishing to affront Brabantio, he politically takes the middle course and grants the accused a hearing.
Othello calmly admits the factual charge: “That I have ta’en away this old man’s daughter, / It is most true; true I have married her” (I.iii.78–79). But, he adds wryly, it was not a seduction brought about by “drugs” and “conjuration” but a mutual accord. He bids them “send for the lady,” staking not only his “office” but his “life” on her confirmation (ll. 115–20). Meanwhile, he recounts the actual “process” of courting Desdemona, which consisted of telling her “the story of [his] life,” with its “disastrous chances,” “moving accidents,” and “hairbreadth scapes” (ll. 129–36). The setting for this account was her own home, where, Othello recalls, Brabantio himself “oft invited me”; in this capacity as heroic adventurer, he recalls, “her father loved me.” Desdemona listened to the tale with “a greedy ear” (l. 149) and reacted with tears, “a world of sighs,” and exclamations of awe: “She swore, i’ faith, ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange; / ’Twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful” (ll. 159–61). Othello’s echo of his beloved’s diction shows affection and pride. He recalls fondly her remark that if he could teach this story to “a friend,” it alone “would woo her.” Othello heard this as the indirect proposal that it was, and declares, “Upon this hint I spake” (l. 166). The impetus for the love, then, is the sheltered woman’s admiration for the man’s prowess and stoic suffering, her “pity” for “the dangers [he] had passed,” and his gratification at her sympathy: the classic warrior/maiden bond.
The Duke is charmed: “I think this tale would win my daughter, too,” he murmurs indulgently. But Brabantio is counting on a last chance to prove his fixed conception of his daughter. When Desdemona enters, he leads with what he thinks is his strongest card: he asks the young woman who has hitherto been all compliance to state “Where most you owe obedience” (I.iii.181). She responds with an eloquent statement on the “divided duty” she perceives: “respect” for the father who has given her “life and education,” but a more compelling devotion to her new husband. She cites as precedent her own mother’s “duty” to Brabantio, “preferring you before her father” (ll. 186–89).
Brabantio had chosen this public forum as a means of pressuring Desdemona to resume her former role. But with great poise and dignity she has stood her ground, and his ploy backfires: not only his political allies but the child of his loins have denied him, and the hearing becomes the scene not of her but of his humiliation. Brabantio is stung into vindictiveness. First, he denigrates the family bond: “I had rather to adopt a child than get it.” Then he imagines vicarious vengeance on other daughters if he had them, for Desdemona’s “escape” would “teach [him] tyranny”—to keep them in manacles (ll. 191–98). He again insults his new son-in-law, addressing Othello by his racial designation, “Moor,” and telling him that, had he not won Desdemona already, Brabantio would “with all [his] heart … keep [her] from thee” (ll. 192–95). The intimate pronoun signals not affection but contempt.
The Duke tries to intervene in this painful public quarrel and “help” the lovers back into the father’s graces. But Brabantio turns aside his consoling aphorisms with cutting sarcasm and shifts the focus to the military crisis. Othello agrees to lead the campaign against the Turks, asking only “fit” accommodation for his bride while he is away. The Duke responds, “If you please, be’t at her father’s” (ll. 239–40), the usual abode for a wife whose husband was absent. But Brabantio cuts him off, completing his blank verse line with the curt “I will not have it so.” The negation is immediately echoed by both Othello and Desdemona. She elaborates: “I would not there reside / To put my father in impatient thoughts” (ll. 241–42)—tactfully avoiding accusation and focusing instead on the issue of his undisturbed tranquility.
Out of this stalemate arises Desdemona’s impulsive request to accompany her husband to the scene of battle. She couches her plea in the most idealistic terms: She has “consecrate[d]” not only her “fortunes” but her “soul” to Othello’s “honors and his valiant parts” (ll. 253–54). The religious allusions suggest the fervor of the young bride’s commitment. She professes to the assembled company her devotion to “the very quality of [her] lord,” and adds, “I saw Othello’s visage in his mind” (ll. 251–52). This platonic conception of the essential Othello directly counters her father’s disparaging view of his mere outside. It is an ideal that Desdemona will persist in maintaining against all evidence of the actual man’s fearful decline.
For the moment, however, Othello’s idealism equals his bride’s. He asserts that he wants her to accompany him not to “please the palate of [his] appetite”—for physical gratification—“but to be free and bounteous to her mind” (I.iii.262–65). The Duke, pragmatist that he is, leaves the decision to the newlyweds, “either for her stay or going,” demanding only “haste in the preparations.” He makes one last attempt to ingratiate Othello with Brabantio: “noble signior / If virtue no delighted beauty lack, / Your son-in-law is far more fair than black” (ll. 288–90). The light rhyme suggests his own ingrained bigotry. Brabantio’s response is to bestow not a parting blessing but a curse:
Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see:
She has deceived her father, and may thee [ll. 292–93].
His words reflect his adamant belief in male authority. For the moment, Othello seems above such bias. He defends Desdemona nobly: “My life upon her faith.” But his father-in-law’s warning will return to haunt him when he has lost faith in himself. The agent of that loss is at hand: Othello sends Desdemona off in the care of “honest Iago,” the very man bent on destroying the new marriage.
But Iago alone could not undermine so seemingly perfect a union. What causes the love to deteriorate horrifically into murder and suicide? For one thing, the lovers do not know each other very well: the courtship has been brief and superficial. Also, the couple relocates to an unfamiliar place that is hostile to romance and to women. But the most important factor is Brabantio’s unyielding rejection. When Brabantio first lodged his complaint, the Duke questioned him about the cause of his laments for his daughter: “Dead?” The father responded, “Ay, to me” (I.iii.59). The rest of the play shows the effect of that cruel decree.
Desdemona has been charged with weakness and gullibility in the face of Othello’s increasing rage. But if she is merely a fool and Othello a brute, the play is reduced to a farce in which we lose sympathy for the lovers and simply relish Iago’s machinations. In fact, Desdemona does not lack courage or wit: She has been bold and eloquent in defense of her love, even before an assembly of the most powerful men in the state. But because her devotion to Othello has cost her so much—father, society, home—she clings to her absolute concept of his worth. Without Brabantio’s paternal protection and advice, Desdemona has no one to shield her from Iago’s schemes. Brabantio has provided his daughter neither the emotional means to independence nor the continued shelter that her naiveté requires. She has dared to defy his will, and, feeling abandoned, he abandons her, concealing his hurt with anger. Brabantio does not witness the dire results of his rejection: he makes no further appearances in the play. But, as we discover in the end, the sentence that he passes on her—isolation and death—will fall on him as well.
Desdemona suffers this fate partly because she is what she seems, the “jewel” of “perfection” that both her father and her husband conceive her to be: in Othello’s words, an “entire and perfect chrysolite” (V.ii.146). But the metaphor has an ominous ring: a woman should not be seen as a possession, whose beauty and purity reflect well on its owner. The concept of ideal femininity that the play presents literally, rather than metaphorically, is equally troubling. Fittingly, it is offered by the villain.
Iago has conducted Desdemona safely to Cyprus and they are waiting through a terrible storm for the arrival of Othello’s ship. With noble self-possession, she tries to “beguile” her anxiety by engaging the ensign in repartee. Since he has insulted his wife Emilia and women in general, the new bride demands archly: “How wouldst thou praise me?” (II.i.124). Instead of addressing her, he continues to mock the whole female sex until she demands that he describe “a deserving woman indeed”—someone that even “malice itself” must revere. Iago complies with a description that in fact fits the character of his interlocutor: “ever fair, and never proud,” “ha[s] tongue at will and yet [is] never loud,” “being angered, her revenge being nigh / [Bids] her wrong stay, and her displeasure fly”; “Sees suitors following, and not look[s] behind” (ll. 148–56). In short, beautiful, articulate, modest, poised, faithful—and conveniently subservient to masculine authority: Brabantio’s very ideal. Typically, Iago gives it a misogynistic twist: Even if such a paragon existed, he concludes, her only functions would be “to suckle fools and chronicle small beer”—produce worthless offspring and tend petty household accounts. Desdemona denounces this “lame and impotent conclusion” and calls Iago a “profane and liberal counsellor” (ll. 160–63). But she misses the genuine spite underlying his wit. In turning to “malice itself” for praise, she has once again trusted in those incapable of cherishing her intrinsic value.
Iago has maintained to Roderigo that this marriage consists merely of “sanctimony and a frail vow between an erring barbarian and a supersubtle Venetian” (I.iii.352–53). In fact, he does not think that Desdemona is promiscuous or hypocritical—that she could be anything but sincere and steadfast. He believes something more dangerous: that her essential goodness is a weakness, out of which he can “make the net / That shall enmesh them all” (II.iii.343–45).
Iago begins by reinforcing the stereotype of the young wife wearying of an old husband, practicing first on the gullible Roderigo. “She must change for youth,” he tells the smitten suitor, “when she is sated with his body, she will find the error of her choice” (I.iii.347–48). After he and Roderigo have watched the passionate reunion at the harbor, he comments scornfully: “Her eye must be fed; and what delight shall she have to look upon the devil?” (II.i.223–24). Elizabethans thought of the devil as black, so the allusion is a slur on both Othello’s spirituality and his race. “To give satiety a fresh appetite,” Iago continues, warming to his subject, Desdemona would require “loveliness in favor, sympathy in years, manners and beauties; all of which the Moor is defective in.” Inevitably, he predicts, she will “begin to heave the gorge” (ll. 226–30)—sicken of that diet and vomit. Again, this is an exaggerated version of Brabantio’s bigotry and chauvinism.
The villain uses these same ideas, put in less crude terms, to persuade Othello that Desdemona could not possibly love him. Pretending to be a sympathetic confidante, he says that he wishes to protect Othello’s “free and noble nature” from becoming the means to his abuse. In fact, that is exactly the ploy that Iago is in the process of using. At first, Othello resists the terrible suggestion by means of logic:
’Tis not to make me jealous
To say my wife is fair, feeds well, loves company,
Is free of speech, sings, plays, and dances;
Where virtue is, these are more virtuous [III.iii.183–86].
Besides, he reasons, “she had eyes, and chose me.” But soon Iago is posing as the expert on Venetian sexual norms: “I know our country disposition well,” he claims (l. 201). As such, he sees in Desdemona’s attraction to a Moor “a will most rank” and “thoughts unnatural.” Taking his cue from Brabantio, he ignores Desdemona’s preferences and presents himself as the definer of the “natural.” A desirable husband, he asserts, must be “Of her own clime, complexion, and degree” (ll. 229–33).
Iago alludes more directly to Brabantio’s views by echoing the old man’s parting warning:
She did deceive her father, marrying you;
…She that, so young, could give out such a seeming
To seel her father’s eyes up close as oak—
He thought ’twas witchcraft [III.iii.206; 209–11].
Iago exaggerates this charge, using the oak simile to depict Desdemona as preternaturally manipulative. His specialty is the graphic word picture that burns itself into the listener’s imagination. He uses the same technique to demean the courtship and to slip in another insult to Othello’s appearance: “when she seemed to shake and fear your looks, / She loved them most” (ll. 207–08). As with Brabantio, Desdemona’s devotion to Othello is made to look like treachery.
Othello, who only moments before had been defending his wife, starts to accept this reading of his own worth and hers. Perhaps, he reasons, because he is “black,” lacks the courtier’s “soft parts of conversation,” and is “declined / Into the vale of years” (III.iii.263–66), Desdemona has deserted him for the handsome young Florentine, Cassio. He has already begun to think of her as less than human—a “haggard” (wild hawk)—and to call love “appetite” (ll. 260, 270).
Desdemona is not blind to the change in Othello’s mood, but she sees it only in terms of his comfort. Ever solicitous, she asks: “Are you not well?” (III.iii.283). He replies that he has a headache—traditional complaint of the cuckold, whose pain is caused by his sprouting horns. She takes him literally and attempts to apply the folk remedy of binding his forehead with her handkerchief. Othello knocks it aside with a curt dismissal: “Your napkin is too little” (l. 287). In her concern for his affliction, she lets it drop unnoticed. It is the symbolic climax of their relationship. The handkerchief, a courtship gift that Desdemona treasured, will become the circumstantial evidence that convicts her of adultery in Othello’s eyes. But those eyes have already been tainted by Brabantio’s imputation, distorted into guilt by Iago. The handkerchief is “too little” to encompass Othello’s jealousy. Nothing that Desdemona thinks to do from this point on can compensate her husband for his supposed loss. Long before the phrase spousal abuse came into popular usage, Shakespeare understood its nature. The wife who ignores the hostile signs or assumes that faults in herself cause her husband’s rage only puts herself in greater peril.
Desdemona’s situation is complicated by the military setting. After Iago has engineered Cassio’s dismissal for dereliction of duty, the disgraced lieutenant asks her to plead his case to Othello. He is acting on the advice of Iago, who has praised her “free,” “kind,” “blessed disposition,” and sworn that the infatuated Othello would do anything she asked (II.iii.305–06).
Desdemona reacts to Cassio’s plea exactly as Iago predicted. She assures him: “I will do all my abilities in your behalf” (II.iii.1–2). That includes, she says, petitioning Othello to restore Cassio’s lieutenancy to the point that “his bed shall seem a school, his board a shrift” (l. 24). She takes up his cause for disinterested motives. She judges Cassio, rightly, as “one that truly loves” Othello, and that “err[ed] in ignorance, not in cunning” (ll. 48–49). She goes so far as to excuse his “trespass” as so petty that it would scarcely merit “a private check” (ll. 64,67), rather than the public shame and loss of rank that Cassio has in fact suffered. But this reaction reveals the other side of Desdemona’s pure nature: she is too compassionate and unworldly to function in a military realm. A ruling general cannot be so lenient toward an officer who has failed in his duty and endangered the post he was assigned to guard. Worse, she seems oblivious to the suspicious appearance of the situation: a beautiful bride fervently defending a charming courtier.
The shades that Desdemona does not see with her innocent eyes Iago is quick to perceive with his cynical ones. Soon he is providing Othello with the “ocular proof” (III.iii.360)—the appearance of guilt—that the general demands. First, Othello accepts that Cassio’s hasty exit is evidence of a liaison between the courtier and the bride, rather than what it is: shame before the revered officer whom he has failed. A corrosive tissue, woven of such circumstantial evidence, innuendoes, and outright lies, torments Othello until he is entirely persuaded of Iago’s twisted views:
Her name, that was as fresh
As Dian’s visage, is now begrimed and black
As mine own face [ll. 386–88].
He cannot see that he is basing his judgment solely on externals—Desdemona’s supposed reputation and his own supposedly repellent appearance, offered by a supposedly authoritative male comrade—exactly Brabantio’s reductive credo.
By the time Iago has convinced Othello that he saw Cassio “wipe his beard” with the handkerchief—a singularly contemptuous and suggestive act—the once supremely poised general is “eaten up with passion” (III.iii.391). He cries, “I’ll tear her all to pieces!” (l. 431). Othello regains only enough control to put a ceremonial face on his rage. Kneeling, he pledges vengeance “in the due reverence of a sacred vow” (l. 461)—this from a man who only a short time before made a similarly fervent vow to his new wife. To underline that blasphemy, Shakespeare has Iago kneel beside him and pledge his “wit, hands, heart” (l. 466) to Othello. This is a perverse echo of the marriage ceremony, and at the same time a satanic rite. Convinced that Desdemona is a “fair devil” (l. 479), Othello gives his soul to the real demon. The act ends with Iago’s chilling seal on that pact: “I am your own for ever.”
At first Desdemona refuses even to acknowledge the dire change in her husband. Fretting over the missing handkerchief, she professes herself relieved that Othello is not the sort of man to be made suspicious by the loss of his special gift. She assures Emilia:
my noble Moor
Is true of mind, and made of no such baseness
As jealous creatures are… [III.iv.26–28].
The worldly maidservant questions this callow assertion: “Is he not jealous?” But Desdemona remains determinedly optimistic. When Othello observes that her hand is “moist,” she responds cheerfully, “It hath yet felt no age nor known no sorrow” (l. 37). She ignores—or misses—his implication: according to Elizabethan physiology, a moist palm is a sign of lasciviousness. When his accusation becomes more explicit and his tone threatening, she is stunned: “Why do you speak so startlingly and rash?” (l. 79). The question has a childlike directness. She admits that he has changed only when his once-eloquent diction is reduced to curses and obsessive demands for “The handkerchief!” Watching him stalk off, she expresses amazement: “My lord is not my lord; nor should I know him, / Were he in favor as in humor altered” (ll. 124–25). But it is telling—and ominous—that she sees the alteration as superficial, a question of mood (“humor”). She will not relinquish her image of his essential nobility.
Desdemona applies the same high standards of integrity to her own conduct. Generously, she assures the despairing Cassio that she will continue to petition for his reinstatement: “What I can do I will; and more I will / Than for myself I dare” (III.iv.130–31). She tries to convince herself that political troubles, originating either in Venice or in Cyprus, have “puddled [Othello’s] clear spirit” (105). Again, she insists on seeing this spirituality as his fundamental nature. When Emilia at last convinces her that he is jealous, Desdemona protests, “Alas the day! I never gave him cause” (l. 158). Emilia rejects the naive assumption: “Jealousy,” she says, is a solipsistic “monster,” “begot upon itself, born of itself.” Desdemona’s response is to pray that “heaven” will “keep that monster from Othello’s mind” (ll. 161–63). She is still speaking in the future tense. It takes public humiliation at Othello’s hands to convince her that the monster has struck.
By this point, Othello has completely succumbed to Iago’s falsehoods. He ignores his instinctive approbation of Desdemona: “A fine woman! a fair woman! a sweet woman!”—a talented musician, a beauty, a speaker of “high and plenteous wit” (IV.i.174–75; 186–87). Those gifts can only rankle if she is lavishing them on his junior officer. He can cope with his hurt only by turning it to fury, by converting painful feelings to brutal actions. “My heart is turned to stone,” he tells Iago. “I strike it, and it hurts my hand” (ll. 179–80). In this dangerous mood, he is both self-destructive and sadistic. Consummate soldier that he is, Othello sees cleansing violence as the readiest remedy. He vows to murder his supposed betrayer “this night.” His satanic confidante is ready with the means: to “strangle her in her bed, even the bed she hath contaminated” (ll. 202–03). Othello professes himself “pleased” by the “justice” of the scheme.
Into this explosive situation walks Lodovico, the ambassador from Venice, come to greet the “worthy general” and his fair cousin. The unsuspecting Desdemona appeals to this new party to mend the “unkind breach” (IV.i.219) between Othello and Cassio. The recurrence to that sore topic sets Othello frowning and mumbling ominous asides as he pores over the dispatch from Venice. Desdemona is puzzled by his mood: “What, is he angry?” (l. 228) she asks naively. When she attempts to comfort him with affectionate words—“Why, sweet Othello”—he shouts “Devil!” and strikes her. Her reaction is dignified and respectful of his authority: “I have not deserved this” (l. 235). It is left to Lodovico to express shock and to defend her. Othello, beside himself, commands: “Out of my sight!” (l. 240). Her dutiful response, “I will not stay to offend you,” recalls her comment on her father’s objection to her remaining in his house: An angry man must be spared the sight of a woman who has provoked him. The credo of the abused wife was taught Desdemona at home.
Othello is not through humiliating her, however. He calls Desdemona back, mocks her compliance as evidence of concupiscence—“Sir, she can turn, and turn, and yet go on / And turn again” (to various partners)—and her tears as feigned: “O well-painted passion!” (IV.i.246–50). With a final “Hence, avaunt!”—the command used to exorcise devils—he dismisses Desdemona from their presence. Lodovico, who has not seen the couple since their loving declaration before the senate, is astonished by the terrible change in Othello.
Yet even this public shaming does not teach the young wife sufficient fear of her own danger. When next she sees Othello, he has summoned her for private questioning. Only then, after all his conference with Iago and the excruciating public quarrel does he state his suspicions explicitly. His purpose is not to give her a fair hearing. We have seen from his preceding inquisition of Emilia that he is convinced that Desdemona is “a subtle whore” (IV.ii.21). He dismisses the maid’s staunch defense of her mistress as a mass of lies and Desdemona’s frequent recourse to prayer as hypocrisy. The form of his dismissal to Emilia reflects his cynicism: “Leave procreants alone and shut the door; / Cough or cry hem if anybody come” (ll. 28–29). The man who a short time earlier swore that his love for his wife was entirely spiritual is now treating her as though she is a prostitute and her servant the madam of a brothel. In happier times, Desdemona responded indulgently to Othello’s whims: “Be as your fancies teach you; / Whate’er you be, I am obedient” (III.iii.88–89). Now in these dire circumstances, she maintains her former graciousness. Her greeting to the man who has just struck her in public is “My lord, what is your will? … What is your pleasure?” (IV.ii.24–25).
When he begins abusing her anew, Desdemona senses his mood but not his purpose: “I understand the fury in your words, / But not the words” (IV.ii.33–34). Even when he calls her “false as hell,” she is baffled: “To whom, my lord? With whom? How am I false?” She assures him that “heaven” is her witness to what she is: “your wife … your true and loyal wife.” Desdemona retains the naive conviction that guiltlessness will save her. She still cannot take in the full import of Othello’s accusation. She poses the unlikely theory that he is angry because he believes that her father has caused him to be recalled to Venice. She is eager to exonerate herself and to share his pain: “Lay not your blame on me. If you have lost him, / Why I have lost him, too” (ll. 46–47). This is the one time that Desdemona expresses her hurt at her father’s rejection and suggests the price she has paid to leave his sheltered home.
It takes Othello’s explosion of Job-like self-pity for Desdemona to admit, still tentatively, the cause for his fury: “I hope my noble lord esteems me honest” (i.e., chaste) (IV.ii.65). His response is to slander her outright in a crescendo of lewd epithets: “whore,” “public commoner,” “impudent strumpet!” Finally stung to indignation, she takes a stand, denying his accusations with the strongest oaths she knows: “By heaven, you do me wrong!” “No, as I am a Christian!” “No, as I shall be saved!” (ll. 82–87). He is too far gone to credit her piety. Calling Emilia back, he offers her money and asks her to keep customers’ “counsel.” Then he stalks off.
Alone with the older woman, Desdemona says that she is “half asleep” (IV.ii.97)—too shocked even to weep. When Emilia asks what is wrong with her “lord,” Desdemona replies, “I have none” (l. 102). Othello has deteriorated to the point that she no longer recognizes him. But her own identity is also in flux. For counsel, she turns to her worst enemy: “Am I that name, Iago?” she asks pathetically. She cannot bring herself even to pronounce the vile word.
When Emilia, vulgar and candid, speaks for her, saying Othello “bewhored her,” Desdemona confirms the term with another circumpraxis: “such as she said my lord did say I was” (ll. 116–19). Othello’s fury has overwhelmed her. She is, she tells them, “a child to chiding”; the mild verb again puts her husband’s abuse in euphemistic terms. Again, it is Emilia who expresses the indignation that is called for: this slander is an ironic reward for all that Desdemona has “forsaken” in the name of this marriage: “many noble matches, / Her father, her country, and her friends” (ll. 125–26). Desdemona herself is stoic and self-effacing, accepting the abuse as her “wretched fortune” and vowing to continue to “love [Othello] dearly” even if he should subject her to “beggarly divorcement” (ll. 157–58). She senses that he may have a worse fate in store for her: “his unkindness may defeat my life,” she says, “But never taint my love” (ll. 161–62). This sounds like a description of pining away from unrequited love. But there are also hints that she fears a more violent demise.
Desdemona tells Emilia to obey Othello’s orders that her wedding sheets be laid on their bed and the serving woman be dismissed for the night. “We must not now displease him” (IV.iii.16), she counsels, and says that she loves him so devotedly “that even his stubbornness, his checks, his frowns … have grace and favor in them” (ll. 19–20). We have seen enough of Brabantio’s temper to guess that she is accustomed to such expressions of male authority. Yet Desdemona understands something of the risk she is taking. Her mood as she undresses is melancholy. She asks Emilia to promise that, should she die first, the maid will use one of the wedding sheets as her shroud. And she is haunted by a song once sung by her mother’s maid Barbary. The associations are ominous: “She was in love; and he she loved proved mad / And did forsake her” (ll. 26–27). The song “expressed her fortune / And she died singing it.” Now Desdemona cannot resist singing it herself. The most prescient line is “Let nobody blame him; his scorn I approve” (l. 50). Barbary, too, was passive and forgiving. Emilia is their temperamental opposite. Her long speech blaming wives’ “frailty” on men’s mistreatment concludes with an injunction to revenge: “Then let them use us well; else let them know, / The ills we do, their ills instruct us so” (ll. 101–02). Desdemona counters by advocating not that women best a bad example but turn the other cheek, remain paragons and so set a standard that will “mend” the “bad.” It is her old credo, which she will follow to the death.
Othello returns, obsessed with the self-glorifying concept that he is bearing the “sword” of “Justice” (V.ii.17) and that Desdemona must be the “sacrifice” (l. 65) on that cold altar. Only when he tells her to confess herself because he “would not kill her soul” does she fully realize her peril. “I hope you will not kill me,” she gasps. She admits her own “fear,” but she still makes the naive error of connecting suffering with guilt: “Why I should fear I know not, / Since guiltiness I know not; but yet I fear” (ll. 35, 38–39).
Desdemona’s senses are painfully alert. She sees Othello’s restless gestures with a child’s awe of her chastiser, and she accepts his command to “be still!” (V.ii.46). But when he accuses her of taking Cassio as her lover, she is staunch in defense of her innocence. “I never…,” she swears, denying in turn each article of Othello’s accusations. The news that Cassio has been murdered causes her to break down, weeping equally at his betrayal and her own terror. Othello takes the tears as confirmation of adultery, and he moves in for the kill. Her pleas become more desperate as she bargains for time—“tomorrow,” “but half an hour,” “but while I say one prayer!” (l. 83). In these last moments, she fights him with all her strength: on stage, this can be a horrifyingly protracted struggle. Othello is inexorable; he smothers her as she cries once more to heaven: “O Lord, Lord, Lord!”
That cry could be Desdemona’s last word, but Shakespeare gives her a more eloquent end. She revives to profess her innocence once more—“A guiltless death I die” (V.ii.123), and to spend her last breath in service to Othello. Emilia, who has burst in, demands to know who has attacked her mistress. Desdemona, who had managed to say that she has been “falsely murdered,” now utters that the killer is “Nobody—I myself” (ll. 118, 125). Her last request is a final assertion of Othello’s noble nature: “Commend me to my kind lord” (l. 126). By telling a lie on her death bed, Desdemona, a devout Christian, has willfully committed a mortal sin. Othello, who has shown grace only in the wish to spare her soul, now cries wildly, “She’s like a liar gone to burning hell! / ’Twas I that killed her.” Emilia immediately perceives the charity in Desdemona’s act and pronounces her an “angel” for this self-sacrifice and Othello “the blacker devil” (ll. 130–32).
Although he is heartbroken at the loss of Desdemona, Othello still believes her guilty. The combined testimonies of Emilia, Roderigo, and the revived Cassio convince him that she was indeed the “entire and perfect chrysolite” she seemed, loyal and chaste. Her pure example sparks a restoration of his noble demeanor, and in his last moments, Othello regains both the idealism and the valor that Desdemona insisted were his essential nature. He calls his acts “unlucky” and himself “one that loved not wisely but too well” (ll. 341–44). “Nought did I in hate,” he insists, “but all in honor” (l. 295).
But for all the sincerity of his suffering, in most ways Othello has learned nothing. These final claims, while noble sounding, are self-exculpating rationalizations. He never regrets his failure to heed his wife’s word nor to treat her as a person with an independent will. He still sees Desdemona as a priceless object—a “pearl”—and himself as a despicable alien—“the base Judean” who cast it away (V.ii.347). And he again turns to violent action to resolve an emotional crisis. His military creed demands revenge—but the guilty party is Othello himself. He recalls a moment of past glory, when he slew “a malignant and a turbaned Turk” who had “beat a Venetian and traduced the state” (ll. 353–54). Casting himself as both loyal subject and loathsome foreigner—ironically, his own and Brabantio’s initial opposing conceptions—he reenacts the execution. In the end, Othello shows no more mercy and little more understanding for himself than he did for Desdemona.
Not only Othello’s tragedy but that of the father-in-law who rejected him is solipsistic. Both the husband’s metaphors, of jewels and of military prowess, echo those of Brabantio at the beginning of the play. The ultimate irony is that although husband and father may seem at first to be diametrical opposites, they misjudge and mistreat Desdemona in remarkably similar ways. It is no accident that the couple whose union Brabantio refused to bless end by confirming his most dire misgivings. And the old father himself? Gratiano, another emissary from Venice, reports Brabantio’s fate as he stares down at Desdemona’s corpse:
I am glad thy father’s dead.
Thy match was mortal to him; and pure grief
Shore his old thread in twain. Did he live now,
This sight would make him do a desperate turn [V.ii.205–08].
Fittingly, Brabantio has died off-stage. The focus of the play has been on the daughter, not the father. But it is clear that he has borne the self-imposed sentence that he passed at the first news of Desdemona’s elopement: the rest of his life was “a despised time” filled with “naught but bitterness” (I.i.160–61). Not Iago’s malice but Brabantio’s invidious credo creates the net that enmeshes them all.
In these three plays, then, the more tragic the tone, the more deeply are father and daughter locked in a struggle over the worthiness of her suitor. In the comedy, Hermia pays little attention to Egeus’s objections to Lysander, and emerges with her choice secure and her father silenced by higher authority. Egeus’s own suffering is limited to anger and frustration. In the tragicomedy, Jessica not only ignores her father’s directives but robs him to attain marriage to the man she loves. There are hints, though, that the union is strained and that the daughter feels the burden of betraying her heritage. Shylock, like Egeus, is silenced by higher political authority—more than silenced, punished. Although he is still alive at the end of the play, he has suffered grave social and emotional harm. In the tragedy, Desdemona has eloped with the man she loves even before the play begins. She must still face her father’s bitter disapproval, however. She is so intent on proving Brabantio’s rejection of Othello unjust that she accompanies her husband to a hostile place and closes her eyes to his faults. Brabantio’s early overprotection and subsequent disownment of Desdemona combine to leave her virtually defenseless, and she falls prey to both her father’s and her husband’s abuse. The main catalyst to the tragedy is Brabantio’s rigid conception of the father-daughter bond. Like Juliet, Desdemona attains freedom of will only at the cost of self-destruction.