William Shakespeare, Othello (c. 1603)
I have a Works of Shakespeare that I picked up at a jumble sale for $4.50. It has a padded cover and gilt-edged pages, making it feel more like an object for a shelf rather than a book to feast upon. The tiny typeface suggests it is not a volume that you could read comfortably. Yet this Works is a chest of drawers with little things hidden inside. There is a presentation plate that indicates the book was awarded to Miss M. O’Loughlin as Dux of the School at the Convent Notre Dame de Sion High School in Bairnsdale in Victoria at Christmas in an unspecified year, I’d say in the 1920s. The plate also acknowledges Miss M. O’Loughlin’s success in English, French, Geography, Music, Physiology and Maths. There was a moment, back in time, when this impressive volume was the centrepiece of the final gathering of a regional school community.
There are two bookmarks inside which tell a different, more private, story. They are both made by hand from scraps of ribbon and cardboard. The first says: ‘Happy Christmas to my darling little Molly from her old mother. Sion. Xmas 1920.’ I suspect the ‘old mother’ was a nun who clearly loved teaching Molly, the prize student. It was lodged in the final scene of Othello. The second says: ‘Hail Glorious St Patrick Sale 1920’, and had found its way into the pages of The Tempest (see Chapter 2). The book acknowledges the achievement of a bright young woman who, in the years immediately following the destruction of war, was a source of hope and pride. Perhaps she found her way to university. Who knows? But the book is also a shrine to a relationship between a teacher and a student, and those bookmarks meant enough to Molly that she moved them into the prize, turning it from a trophy into a small tribute to her teacher.
I love teaching Shakespeare and tell my students, perhaps hopefully, that they should have read the entire Complete Works by the time they are twenty-five. One time, a boy called Pat responded gleefully: ‘Challenge accepted.’ If every teenager were like that, you’d pay money to take the class. But they aren’t. So I tell them that if they are only going to read one play, then make it Othello.
~
I encountered Othello when I was at school, which must have been soon after it was first performed. In those days—actually less than a decade after the assassination of Martin Luther King—our attention was drawn to the manner in which Shakespeare handles issues of race. These are live wires, even now.
Othello, a military general and a Moor, is black. He falls in love with and marries a young white Venetian woman called Desdemona. This is such a scandal that the marriage takes place in secret: the city of Venice accepts Othello because he is useful and has ‘done the state some service’. They want his military prowess but they don’t want him, at least not as a family member. Iago, Othello’s third-in-command, sets out to slowly and inexorably destroy the relationship between Othello and Desdemona.
I have never taught a student who was not fascinated by the subtlety and skill Iago brings to the art of destruction. William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, bemoaned the fact that the devil had all the best tunes. Iago certainly leads the band in Othello; he even uses the image of music to describe the way he plays Othello. He manipulates everyone, except possibly his wife, Emilia, who knows what he’s like.
In the first scene, Iago, along with a poor fool called Roderigo whom Iago uses as both a toy and a moneybox, stands beneath the window of Brabantio, Desdemona’s father, and, under cover of dark, tells Brabantio that his daughter is being screwed by a black man: ‘You’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse.’ Barbary horses came from Africa. There is a connection between being an animal and black. Even more explicitly, Iago yells:
Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
Is tupping your white ewe.
The emphasis on ‘now, now, very now’ creates an immediate visual picture for the distressed father. Iago, apart from all else, is a pornographer. His approach to sexuality is entirely visual: he is a spectator who reduces others to the same level of looking through windows. In the middle of the play, after Iago has said ‘look to your wife’ and has begun to insinuate his poison into Othello’s mind, Othello demands visual evidence of Desdemona’s infidelity: ‘Give me the ocular proof.’ Iago creates a pornographic scene to dissuade Othello:
Would you, the supervisor, grossly gape on,
Behold her topped?
Confronted with this image, Othello will tragically settle for ‘imputation and strong circumstances’.
The theme of race infiltrates the whole play. No matter what he does, Othello will always be the lover with a ‘sooty bosom’.
But these days, we are more likely to bring another concern to an encounter with Othello. Othello is from an Islamic background and this too is used to demonise him. In the dying minutes of the play, when the full extent of a needless catastrophe has come to light, Othello stabs himself. As he does so, he imagines he is ‘a malignant and turbaned Turk’ whom he had once met in Aleppo, a city whose present tragedy bites the conscience of the world. Othello does not kill a Venetian general. He kills an upstart Muslim.
The Moor encounters a level of religious prejudice that would satisfy even the most rabid political commentator these days. At the very moment Iago is salivating over the ‘old black ram…tupping your white ewe’, he tells Brabantio: ‘the devil will make a grandsire of you.’ In other words, Othello is from the murkiest corner of the religious world, part of Satan’s tribe. Trying to explain how his daughter could have fallen for ‘such a thing as thou’, Brabantio insists that ‘thou has enchanted her’ and put her ‘in chains of magic’. The handkerchief that Desdemona mislays and which Iago then exploits to carry out his plans was first given to Othello’s mother by an Egyptian ‘charmer’ who put ‘magic in the web of it’. There is a haze of sorcery and witchcraft drawn over Othello’s spiritual upbringing. His wife, by way of contrast, is ‘divine Desdemona’.
The truth is both more simple and more complex. Shakespeare was fascinated by disguise and deception. He would hardly have been in the theatre business otherwise, and for him it was, indeed, first and foremost a business. It is astonishing that he created Othello two or three years after Hamlet, two or three years before Macbeth and King Lear. In the first decade of the seventeenth century Shakespeare was, to use a phrase my students prefer, on fire. He took the English language to places it had never been before. He said things about the human condition that had never been said in the same way. Yet for him it was a job. The name of the Globe Theatre suggested that, perched on the bank of the Thames, it could contain the entire world. But it was also a workplace where people had to be paid.
Iago is a master of deception. ‘I am not what I am,’ he tells Roderigo, and he means it.
Not I for love or duty,
But seeming so, for my peculiar end.
He pretends to be loyal to Othello; to support Michael Cassio, Othello’s second-in-command; and to counsel Desdemona. Nobody sees through him until it is too late. Othello is up against an irresistible force. But he is not entirely blameless. Early in the play, he talks about his upbringing. From the age of seven, he was a soldier. He has gone to all parts of the world, including the mystical lands of cannibals and the Anthropophagi described by Herodotus (see Chapter 37). Desdemona used to listen to these stories as he shared them with her father and fell in love with him:
She loved me for the dangers I had passed,
And I loved her that she did pity them.
This only is the witchcraft I have used.
Take those words in slow motion. Othello has not experienced much tenderness, so his response to Desdemona is understandable. But it is all about him. She loves him for his courage. He loves her because she loves him. What was ever in the relationship for Desdemona?
The word ‘honest’ is a character in the play. It is used on scores of occasions, each time with a slightly different shade of meaning. The manner in which this one word gains so many subtle flavours is a tour de force. It is also a clue to the slippery nature of evil. People have tried to identify Iago’s motives. He was passed over for promotion. He has a chip on his shoulder about being not as well bred as the guy who got the job, Cassio. He wants money. He thinks it’s possible Othello has slept with his wife. He could even have a crush on Othello and want to destroy his marriage. Perhaps he simply enjoys making trouble. Many other possible motives have been suggested as well. But the poet Coleridge, never at a loss for a word, described all this as ‘the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity’. It is a scandal that Iago survives at the end of the play. He vows that he will never say another word, and he doesn’t. He is taken away, silent and in chains:
Demand me nothing: what you know, you know:
From this time forth I never will speak word.
This is a powerful truth. Evil continues to walk the earth. It is often unexplained.
~
I have a special copy of Othello that was given to me at the end of his schooling by a fine young man whose father had died during that year. The illness had been sudden and devastating. Laurence, an only child, had a lot to think about, and he did that thinking with grace and honesty. He wrote inside the book: ‘Your guidance in my first year of literature helped me fall in love with the subject. Thank you for the friendly chats we often shared.’
I was touched by those words and the generosity towards others that they carried. It may be that Othello helped Laurence in that year. I like to think so. It is a work about the high price of love. It speaks across four hundred years.