The probabilities are that having finished All’s Well in the second half of 1602 Shakespeare began writing Othello early in 1603. The first production of Othello we hear of is at Court on 1 November 1604, to be shortly followed by the first recorded performance of Measure for Measure, also at Court, in December 1604. These two plays have one very important thing in common; they both derive from short stories in Giraldi Cinthio’s series of moralized tales entitled Gli Hecatommithi, first published in 1565. It seems likely that Shakespeare read both these tales in Italian, for there is a probable verbal echo in the Disdemona story in the Moor’s demand for ocular proof of his wife’s infidelity (III, iii, 361) and Cinthio’s Italian: ‘If you do not make me…see with my eyes’ (‘se no mi fai…veder cogl’occhi’). No English translation seems to have been available, though Shakespeare could have made use of a French version of both tales. It seems certain that the two plays were written close together and that Othello must be the earlier. The main reason for concluding this is that Measure for Measure is unmistakably a Jamesean play and must have been begun after the accession of James I to the English throne in March 1603. It makes very extensive use of themes close to James’s heart and in particular of James’s book on kingship, Basilikon Doron (as we shall see in the next chapter) and it seems possible that the performance on 26 December 1604 was its first presentation. Othello also shows some influence of the King in Shakespeare’s introduction of the war between Venetians and Turks in and around Cyprus that James had commemorated in his poem Lepanto, reprinted in 1603. Cinthio’s story makes no mention of the Turkish wars and it seems likely—as Emrys Jones has argued1—that Shakespeare introduced the war theme as a complimentary gesture towards the new monarch. There is no actual echo of James’s poem in Othello (Shakespeare derives his details of the war from Richard Knolles’s General History of the Turks (1603), a book Knolles had dedicated to James). The connection between Othello and the King is therefore distinct, but peripheral, whereas the reflection of the King’s ideas in Measure for Measure is far-reaching and fundamental. A reasonble conjecture would be that Shakespeare conceived and started writing Othello just before the accession of James and then included the Turkish connection as an early afterthought. Its first public performance would necessarily have to be delayed until after March 1604 when the theatres reopened after a year’s closure because of the plague.2
Measure for Measure was certainly made to the King’s measure, whereas Othello was not. On the contrary, its unusually domestic emphasis would suggest a popular audience3 and in particular it would suggest a Globe reply to Heywood’s apparently highly successful4 domestic tragedy, A Woman Killed with Kindness at the Rose in late February or early March 1603—just before the King’s accession. In terms of its dramaturgy, Othello is the most clearly ‘popular’ play since Hamlet. We can conjecture, I think, on the evidence of its subsequent stage history, that All’s Well that Ends Well was not a success; its mythological treatment of romance was probably neither romantic enough nor spectacular enough in its employment of myth to suit the less sophisticated of the Globe audience. A return to affective tragedy—a mode that had provided Shakespeare with his last unequivocal success—was therefore to be expected, especially with Heywood demonstrating so convincingly its appeal in a rival theatre. Othello follows Hamlet in appealing both to the more sentimentally inclined and to the wiser sort—indeed in its combination of heart-rending pathos and in its highly sophisticated aesthetic patterning, Othello shows Shakespeare at his most professionally skilful in catering for the full range of his audience.
It is sometimes argued that there is a special connection between All’s Well and Measure for Measure5 and both have come to be incorporated under the misleading (and misconceived) label of ‘problem plays’. The emphasis of All’s Well is not on problems, but on solutions, as we have seen, nor is it in any sense problematic; Measure for Measure on the other hand delights in the pursuit of rather esoteric theological problems, no doubt to the approval of the pedantic James. Clearly the two plays are not unrelated, but similarities have been exaggerated. There is some resemblance in tone between the two plays in the sense that they both have a somewhat disillusioned air, but whereas this is apparent in All’s Well it is real in the later play. There is little, if anything, of the mythic quality of All’s Well in Measure for Measure, which explores its intellectual themes with a more determined realism and a greater concern for its characters as personalities. Nor have the heroines more than a superficial resemblance: Helena is essentially a symbol of God’s power in her play, while Isabella is all too human a figure, who, like Bertram, has to undergo a voyage of spiritual change that will lead her to becoming a different person at the end of the play from the woman we see in the beginning. Dramaturgically All’s Well is essentially mythic, Measure for Measure thematic in structure. The affinities between All’s Well and Othello are, on the other hand, more fundamental. Both plays centre on the discord between love and war, both alike identifying love with femininity and war with masculinity. Both plays show the feminine as constructive, the masculine as destructive. Othello, like Bertram, is a man who has not come to terms with the world of domesticity, and is a stranger to it:
For since these arms of mine had seven years’ pith,
Till now some nine moons wasted, they have us’d
Their dearest action in the tented field,
And little of this great world can I speak,
More than pertains to feats of broil, and battle…
(I, iii, 83–7)6
In Othello’s case the sexual immaturity is all the more alarming because he is no boy and lacks the easy malleability that reconciles Bertram to his sexual responsibilities. The outcome is, therefore, tragic; for Othello, who cannot bend, must break, and breaks not only himself but the wife who has too readily accepted the romantic view of the heroic world that her husband projects.
The thematic preoccupations of Othello are, then, remarkably similar to those of All’s Well and suggest a continuation of that marriage debate that converts the frivolous Helen of the Trojan war to the life-bringing Helena and now re-explores the tragedy of sexual mistrust between men and women that had been a sub-theme of Hamlet. It was no doubt this that attracted Shakespeare to the Hecatommithi, whose introduction proclaims the intention of demonstrating that human love can only find its true expression in marriage. Giraldi presents the stories as contrasting examples of ‘how peace in love may be obtained’.7 Don Fabio, the leader of the group of five men and five women who tell the tales on the way from Rome to Marseilles, starts the debate by asserting that true love can only be found in marriage:
And because I do not see any love among us…which is not wholly appetite except that which is between husband and wife, I hold without any doubt that in the love of which we speak there cannot be a quiet and reposeful life except where husbands and wives…join together, seeking wisdom and prudence, and desiring honest repose so as to live peacefully in this mortal state.8
Don Fabio is challenged by Don Ponzio, who claims that marriage may be fraught with unhappiness:
In this more than in any other affair it is needful to take reason and counsel for guide, and with discerning eye to consider the quality, manners, life and habits of the men or women, their mothers, fathers, families, antiquity, rank, and other such factors which are manifest signs of the natures and lives of other people.9
The stories told by each of the party in turn illustrate a variety of problems round this central theme, some supporting Don Fabio’s viewpoint, some against. The theme of the third day is ‘The infidelity of husbands and wives’ and it is in the course of this day’s story-telling that Don Curzio tells the story of Disdemona.
If the thematic preoccupations of Othello show continuity and progression, the dramaturgy does not. In dramatic technique Othello completely abandons the myth-making purposes of All’s Well, indeed Shakespeare goes out of his way to demythologize his material in this play (as we shall see), to centre his dramatic interest in the play of personality. In this Othello is partly a return to well-tried methods, for here Shakespeare returns to his predilection for treating characters as people and asks us to respond to his fictional world with real emotion. But there is also a very important shift in Shakespearean technique in this play, a moral detachment appears that sees the tragedy of the lovers not so much as part of a system of praise and blame, as of aesthetic contrast: the black and white opposition of the play, in all its subtlety, is an accurate indication of an aesthetic dominance.
Shakespeare’s rejection of symbolic characterization is nowhere clearer than in his treatment of Desdemona. In All’s Well the heroine not only plays an exceptionally active role as symbol of love’s power, but she is also presented, as we saw, without too much regard for either romantic convention or even psychological plausibility in her combination of personal humility with confident determination. Desdemona, in contrast, is not only an exceptionally passive heroine, resembling Ophelia in her willingness to suffer the hero’s vituperations with little complaint, but she is also presented in strongly personal terms as a suffering human being. The scene (V, iii) in which Emilia prepares Desdemona for what proves to be her death bed is surely one of the most affecting scenes in all Shakespeare, rivalling in pathos Ophelia’s mad scene in Hamlet. It is noticeable how particular and how domestic Shakespeare keeps this scene between the two women:
(IV, iii, 18–30)
The small domestic details—the unpinning of the gown, the instruction about the precise sheet to go on the bed, the reference to the maid called Barbary and then the discussion of the Venetian ambassador Lodovico as what some modern ladies would call ‘male crumpet’ that follows—all suggest a real and actual world which we are invited to share. Heywood’s tragedy shows a similar concern with domestic minutiae. But it is not only that we are encouraged to believe in the world of Othello as a world of solid actuality, we are equally invited to respond to the emotions of the two characters. Desdemona’s premonitions of the disaster to come and the ‘willow’ lament that she cannot get out of her head are charged with a pathos that conveys itself directly to the audience. The contrast between the sensitive Desdemona, sensing a tragic outcome that she has not yet consciously defined, and the coarser-grained but well-meaning Emilia, chattering about women’s rights, is a poignant reminder of the gap between justice and power that emerges from their particular personalities.
This sense of particularity is all the more remarkable because Desdemona’s pedigree dramatically would seem to relate her to the exemplary role of obedient wife, beloved of Elizabethan theory. Shakespeare had no doubt glanced, during his work on Othello, at the newly printed quarto of Patient Grissil of 1603. There is some slight hint of a connection between the two plays, both in the conversation between Babulo, the clown, and Laureo on the subject of monsters, in which creatures are described as ‘without heads, having their eyes, nose and mouths in their breasts’ (V, i, 25)10 and also in the incongruous Welsh of the termagant Gwenthyan, who has a fondness for swearing by Iago (St James). Written jointly by Dekker, Haughton and Chettle for the Admiral’s Men, Patient Grissil was first performed early in 1600 (probably at the Rose playhouse) and was, in Professor Hoy’s words ‘evidently successful’.11 In it Shakespeare could not only have found the archetypal obedient wife, but also a strongly affective treatment in the Dekkerian manner. The play retains its function as an ‘exemplum’ of patience: ‘Patience hath won the prize’ we are assured in the final scene (V, ii, 273), but the exemplary element does not preclude a strong emphasis on the pathos of Grissil’s suffering. The most notable example of this affectiveness in the play does not involve Grissil (whose role almost inevitably invites pathos) but the wayward and tyrannical Marquis, Grissil’s husband. One of the trials Grissil is forced to undergo as a test of her Christian patience is to have her twin babies taken from her. In the beginning of Act IV, scene i (by Chettle, according to Hoy)12 we find the Marquis troubled that he must inflict suffering on his wife and, in a sentimental manner we would not usually associate with Elizabethan paternity, expressing his joy in fatherhood:
| Marquis | Give me this blessed burthen, pretty foole |
| With what an amiable looke it sleepes, | |
| And in that slumber how it sweetly smiles, | |
| And in that smile how my heart leapes for joy… |
(IV, i, 3–6)
The transformation of the stern marquis of the Chaucerian exemplum into sentimental hero shows how far the popular stage had taken to heart the Shakespearean lesson by 1600. Patient Grissil is not by any means the only play to portray the patient wife around this time, indeed a whole spate of plays adopted the theme, such as Middleton’s Phoenix (1603–4), Heywood’s Wise Woman of Hogsden (c. 1604), Marston’s Dutch Courtesan (c. 1604); and the anonymous plays London Prodigal and Fair Maid of Bristow, the last two being Globe plays of around 1604. Patient Grissil’s printing may have helped generate the fashion.
Desdemona takes obedience almost to the exemplary lengths of Grissil, but while Shakespeare exploits her passivity to the full for its pathos, he studiously avoids associating it with the theme of Christian patience, which is an explicit theme of Dekker’s play. Othello characteristically avoids such mythologizing. Desdemona is not presented as a type of Christian fortitude, but as a woman desperately struggling to come to terms with a male violence whose causes she cannot imaginatively comprehend. That the drama is one of psychological mismatch, not of ideology, is equally and more surprisingly demonstrated by the use to which Christian ideology is put in the play’s patterning.
It has frequently been remarked how dominant the images of the morality drama are in Othello. Repeatedly the play makes use of the terminology of the psychomachia. The application of these references too are consistent and clear, with Desdemona presented as the angel of light in opposition to Iago’s diabolical darkness, and with Othello the figure of Everyman, for whose soul the war between good and evil is waged. A process akin to beatification of Desdemona seems to take place in the course of the play, beginning with Cassio’s greeting of the ‘divine Desdemona’ (II, i, 73) on their arrival in Cyprus:
Ye men of Cyprus, let her have your knees:
Hail to thee, lady! and the grace of heaven,
Before, behind thee, and on every hand,
Enwheel thee round!
(II, i, 84–7)
As Ben Jonson remarked on another occasion: ‘if it had been written of the Virgin Mary it had been something’. The sense that Desdemona has a semidivine status gathers strength towards the end of the play, especially in Othello’s references to her. To Emilia any thought against Desdemona’s fidelity should bring divine retribution on the accuser (IV, ii, 15–16). To Othello, life without Desdemona’s love is ‘perdition’ and ‘chaos’ come again (III, iii, 91–3) and, more extraordinary, her death is seen as an apocalyptic moment in which the whole of nature is disrupted:
O, insupportable! O heavy hour!
Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse
Of sun and moon, and the affrighted globe
Should yawn at alteration.
(V, ii, 99–102)
It was Theobald in the eighteenth century who first suggested an allusion here to the Crucifixion and certainly the association is not forced. Desdemona, it seems, is in the process of deification, a process that has arrived, at least for Othello, by the time he recognizes his tragic mistake and that Desdemona was indeed—as Emilia asserts—‘heavenly true’ (V, ii, 138). As he prepares to kill himself he sees her judging him from Heaven:
when we shall meet at count,
This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven,
And fiends will snatch at it: cold, cold, my girl,
Even like thy chastity; O cursed slave!
Whip me, you devils,
From the possession of this heavenly sight,
Blow me about in winds, roast me in sulphur,
Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!
(V, ii, 274–81)
Othello is in a state of total hysteria when he utters these lines, he has not long since been cursing Desdemona:
| Othello | She’s like a liar gone to burning hell, |
| ’Twas I that killed her. | |
| Emilia | O, the more angel she, |
| And you the blacker devil! | |
| Othello | She turn’d to folly, and she was a whore. |
| Emilia | Thou dost belie her, and thou art a devil. |
| Othello | She was false as water. |
(V, ii, 130–5)
Here the language of the morality play is shared equally by Othello and Emilia, yet its function is not to establish Desdemona’s or Othello’s true place in a mythology of good and evil, but to reveal the irony that Othello’s derangement has completely reversed normal values. One function of this simplifying pattern of Christian images is to make possible, by its very clarity, a spectacular play of paradoxical oppositions with a common base in the black/white opposition of the hero and heroine. In these terms the paradox here is that the white Desdemona should be accused of blackness by the black Othello (whose inner whiteness has been blackened by the black white man, Iago—and so on).13 In this way the moral problems that the play confronts are constantly diverted towards aesthetic ends. We ought to note that Shakespeare got a hint of this play of opposites in Giraldi’s treatment of his tales in Gli Hecatommithi, where at one point after demonstrating ‘it is better burying women than marrying them’14 Don Fabio comments: ‘che non é cosa nel mondo così buona, ne così santa che non habbia le sue contradittioni’ (for there is nothing in the world so good or holy that does not have its contradictions). Othello is clearly not a devil, but a man caught up in a perplexity of contradiction from which he cannot free himself, a victim not an initiator of evil. The morality pattern is here being used—as it is throughout the play—not to assert the myth of good and evil, but to highlight the gap between perception and truth. Othello’s ‘she was false as water’ is particularly revealing here, for it reverses the mythic expectations that associate water with cleansing and regeneration. Othello’s image is an image of subconscious as well as conscious mistrust. Desdemona is seen as belonging to a hostile medium, the female element of water, where a man can have no firm footing. The later remark ‘Cold…even like thy chastity’ (V, ii, 275–6) is similarly revealing, for it suggests a psychological hostility in Othello, a puzzlement concerning female sexuality that belies (presumably) the actual facts of his sexual relations with her. Her sexuality is ‘cold’ because (unlike a man’s) it remains undemonstrated in crude physiological terms. Shakespeare develops a kind of counterpoint throughout the play in which the complexity of actual character is seen against a grid of clear and simple moral typology. The assertion of Desdemona’s ‘divinity’ is a reminder that she is completely innocent, even though her actual behaviour is sometimes indiscreet and compromising. Take the scene, for instance, immediately after Cassio’s ecstatic greeting of Desdemona (II, i, 85–8). No sooner is the greeting over than Shakespeare gives us a bawdy interchange between Iago and Desdemona in which she deliberately encourages Iago to express his cynical view of women. The contrast between the holy Desdemona and the sexually alert young woman is a deliberate demythologizing that reminds us that we are not dealing with the Virgin Mary here, but with a young bride whose admiration for her black husband has led her to defy her father and insist against her husband’s initial judgement on accompanying him to the wars (I, iii, 235–59). This does not invalidate Cassio’s ecstatic comments; on the contrary Cassio’s reverence keeps us aware of the basic truth that Desdemona, for all her womanly actuality, is essentially a woman of virtue and purity. The mythological grid helps us chart our way through the complexities of the actual world, where devils can appear honest and angels are seen as whores. In Othello myth is at the service of actuality; the method of All’s Well is reversed. This can again be illustrated in Desdemona’s dying words: ‘A guiltless death I die’ (V, ii, 125) which would, taken strictly in mythic terms, imply a purity that no Christian could claim. This is not, however, mythic statement, but the assertion that essentially Desdemona is innocent of the charges that Othello has brought against her. The mythic language simplifies and clarifies the actuality. In All’s Well the significance of the actual events can only be understood in terms of the underlying myth: in Othello the mythic references can only be understood in terms of the psychological reality.
The language of myth also has a subtler role to play in Othello and this is to reinforce the sense of incompatibility between the sexes. The association of Desdemona with the angelic and the pure, and increasingly, the association of Othello with darkness and evil, heightens the sense that female and male are separated by an unbridgeable divide that eventually becomes, in Othello’s mind, the vision of his being hurled at the Last Judgement into hell-fire by a glance from the beatified Desdemona. This opposition between ‘dark’ and ‘white’ sexuality had made its appearance years earlier in one of the most famous of the Dark Lady Sonnets. In Sonnet 144, however, the roles are reversed; it is feminine sexuality that is seen as dark and diabolic and male as white (fair) and angelic:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour’d ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride.
Here the same patterns of dark and light emerge with an effect that is not primarily aesthetic, but psychological: the hell to which women constantly tempt men and that leads to the ‘firing out’ of venereal disease, expresses a profound hostility to the hidden nature of women’s sexuality. The dark/light opposition is an emphasis on sexual difference, made all the more emphatic by the sexual sameness of the friend. The ‘otherness’ of femininity is vividly expressed in the sonnet by the revival of the medieval identification of the vagina with the mouth of hell15 in the line: ‘I guess one angel in another’s hell’. In Othello the opposition remains as firmly entrenched, only the gender values have been reversed. The male/female opposition is again seen as absolute, but now that opposition is expressed in terms of female ‘whiteness’ and angelic purity against the demonic and dark forces of male sexuality and violence. There is also in Othello an important shift in Shakespeare’s response to the contrast, which is treated less as a subject of moral outrage and more as a subject of aesthetic patterning, much as Renaissance painters liked to hit off colour contrasts in the painting of male and female flesh.16
Certainly this sense of male and female contrast dominates the play. Even Cassio, who is clearly both attractive to women and attracted by them, (‘He has a person and a smooth dispose…fram’d to make women false’, I, iii, 395–6) shows his essential hostility to female ‘otherness’ in his contemptuous treatment of the infatuated Bianca (IV, i, 106ff). The most acute expression of this opposition is in Iago’s relation to Desdemona. Desdemona’s world is presented in markedly domestic terms, in a preoccupation with bed-linen, needlework (IV, i, 197), her fan, her gloves and mask (IV, ii, 8), her nightclothes—and it is yet another of the play’s paradoxes that it is a handkerchief that brings her downfall. What other Shakespearean heroine would argue her case in terms of looking after her husband’s health:
Why, this is not a boon,
’Tis as I should entreat you wear your gloves;
Or feed on nourishing dishes, or keep you warm,
Or sue to you, to do a peculiar profit
To your own person…
(III, iii, 77–81)
Iago’s world, like that of the other principal male figures in the play, is the army, the world of war. Shakespeare is yet again exploring the Mars/Venus conjunction. But whereas Othello’s lack of domesticity has led him into seeing women in romantic terms, Iago has an explicit hostility to women. If Othello tends to see women as saints, Iago sees them unequivocally as whores:
since I could distinguish between a benefit and an injury, I never found a man that knew how to love himself: ere I would say I would drown myself, for the love of a guinea-hen, I would change my humanity with a baboon.
(I, iii, 312–16)
Iago frequently uses animal imagery to describe sexual relationships. He had earlier described Othello’s relationship with Desdemona to Brabantio as ‘an old black ram…tupping your white ewe’ (I, i, 88–9) and again as ‘you’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse’ (I, i, 111–12). Later he conjures up a picture of Cassio and Desdemona together in similar terms: ‘as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys,/As salt as wolves, in pride…’ (III, iii, 409–10). He sees sexual intercourse as essentially a dehumanizing process in which the female body is an instrument for working off the sensual madness that man’s reason fails to control:
If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason, to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most preposterous conclusions. But we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts; whereof I take this, that you call love, to be a sect, or scion.
(I, iii, 326–33)
Not surprisingly Freudian interpretations of the play have seen in Iago the attitudes of the male homosexual and Lawrence Olivier gave a homosexual reading of the part (with advice from Ernest Jones) in a production of the 1930s.17. Certainly the depths of Iago’s hostility towards Desdemona and his contemptuous attitude to his wife—a contempt that ends in her murder—are best explained in psychological terms as paranoia. There is also a marked contrast between the animal imagery he habitually uses to describe heterosexual intercourse with the almost lyrical description he gives homosexual foreplay in his account of the imagined encounter in bed between himself and Cassio:
And then, sir, would he gripe and wring my hand,
Cry out, ‘Sweet creature!’ and then kiss me hard,
As if he pluck’d up kisses by the roots,
That grew upon my lips, then laid his leg
Over my thigh, and sigh’d, and kiss’d, and then
Cried ‘Cursed fate, that gave thee to the Moor!’
(III, iii, 427–32)
Whether we interpret this as a sign of Iago’s latent (or actual) homosexuality, or simply as Iago’s imaginative skill in working on Othello’s insecurity, the effect of the hostile references to feminine sexuality is to create a sense of the essential opposition between the sexes. Iago’s hostility to women generates a sense in the play of two hostile worlds of male and female which Othello finds himself unable to bridge. Iago plays constantly on Othello’s ignorance of women and their ways in presenting Desdemona as both incomprehensible and ‘unnatural’:
| Othello | And yet how nature erring from itself— |
| Iago | Ay, there’s the point: as, to be bold with you, |
| Not to affect many proposed matches, | |
| Of her own clime, complexion, and degree, | |
| Whereto we see in all things nature tends; | |
| Fie, we may smell in such a will most rank, | |
| Foul disproportion; thoughts unnatural. | |
| But pardon me: I do not in position Distinctly speak of her, though I may fear Her will, recoiling to her better judgement, |
May fall to match you with her country forms,
And happily repent.
(III, iii, 231–42)
Here Iago manages to insinuate both that there is an essential incompatibility between Othello and Desdemona in terms of ‘clime, complexion and degree’ (points Othello clearly takes to heart a little later, III, iii, 267–70) and that there is something perverse and unnatural in Desdemona’s sexual preferences. The intense language suggests a nausea towards feminine sexuality in general: ‘we may smell in such a will most rank,/Foul disproportion’. Moreover the tortured language here suggests an impossibility of speaking rationally on the subject of women’s sexuality. The last sentence in particular, whether we accept the punctuation of the folio (and Arden) as here, or place a semi-colon after ‘Distinctly speak of her’ (as in the New Cambridge Shakespeare) is particularly tortuous and seems to be both suggesting that ‘haply’ Desdemona’s judgement may chance (‘fall’) to coincide with her marital obligations and contradictorily casting doubt on it at the same time (‘though I may fear her will’). The doubt becomes more insistent because of the sexual overtones of ‘will’ and especially of ‘country forms’ (we recollect Hamlet’s ‘country matters’).
Just as Desdemona is associated with the imagery of heaven, so Iago, throughout the play, is attended by images of hell. But again these references have a metaphorical rather than literal function: Iago is like the devil in his behaviour, but he is not the devil, simply a man possessed by hatred, especially of women. Othello makes the distinction himself:
I look down towards his feet, but that’s a fable,
If that thou be’st a devil, I cannot kill thee.
(V, ii, 287–8)
Othello’s phrase ‘but that’s a fable’ reveals the demythologizing principle that characterizes the play. In promptly wounding him Othello demonstrates in action what his words have asserted, that the language of heaven and hell is merely illustrative and that the reality lies in the everyday world of mortal men and women. The diabolical role that Iago assumes is essentially that, a part assumed to express a state of mind:
How am I then a villain,
To counsel Cassio to this parallel course,
Directly to his good? Divinity of hell!
When devils will their blackest sins put on,
They do suggest at first with heavenly shows,
As I do now…
(II, iii, 339–44)
‘As I do now’ suggests difference as well as similarity: Iago will behave as if he were a devil in adopting diabolic stratagems. Accordingly Shakespeare is careful to suggest human motives for Iago’s behaviour: Othello has passed him over for promotion in favour of Cassio, he even claims at one point to be a rival for Desdemona’s love (II, i, 286) and (less plausibly still) he claims that he suspects Othello of adultery with his wife:
And it is thought abroad, that ’twixt my sheets
He’s done my office; I know not if’t be true…
Yet I, for mere suspicion in that kind,
Will do, as if for surety…
(I, iii, 384–8)
It is true that the hatred expressed here does not seem commensurate with the suspicion, but this suggests some hidden psychological prompting such as the thwarted homosexuality some have read into the relationship. The reasons Iago gives for his hatred of Othello look like rationalizations, but that merely confirms them as of psychological, not supernatural import. You cannot demythologize, however, without evoking mythic patterns. Something of Iago’s diabolic descent from earlier drama remains and Iago is closer to his mythic origins than either Othello or Desdemona.
Whatever obscurities lie in Iago’s motivation, there is nothing obscure in the workings of Othello’s mind—as Iago himself recognizes:
The Moor a free and open nature too,
That thinks men honest that but seems to be so:
And will as tenderly be led by the nose…
As asses are.
(I, iii, 397–400)
It is Iago’s function to exploit the great differences in background, age, race, between Othello and Desdemona in expressing his comprehensive contempt for mankind. This is made comparatively easy by Othello’s ignorance of women and conversely by his confidence in his assessment of men:
This fellow’s of exceeding honesty,
And knows all qualities, with a learned spirit,
Of human dealing: if I do prove her haggard,
Though that her jesses were my dear heart-strings,
I’ld whistle her off, and let her down the wind,
To prey at fortune. Haply, for I am black,
And have not those soft parts of conversation
That chamberers have, or for I am declin’d
Into the vale of years—yet that’s not much—
She’s gone, I am abus’d, and my relief
Must be to loathe her: O curse of marriage,
That we can call these delicate creatures ours,
And not their appetites! I had rather be a toad,
And live upon the vapour in a dungeon,
Than keep a corner in a thing I love
For others’ uses…
(III, iii, 262–77)
As with Iago, beneath the level of plausible explanations for his hostility—his colour, his age, lack of domesticity—lies a much more fundamental sense of women’s ‘otherness’. Even Othello himself feels the inadequacy of the rationalizations in the dismissive ‘yet that’s not much’, half-recognizing, through the imagery of revulsion, the more potent antagonism in the nature of feminine sexuality itself. Significantly Othello (like Iago) resorts to animal images to express his sense of Desdemona’s wildness in the image of the hawk (the role of the male is, ironically in the circumstances, seen as to domesticate, to tame the wildness) and this then becomes subtly intertwined with more sinister images. The hostility aroused by the thought of the contrast between feminine ‘delicacy’ and the unbridled sexual appetite that this delicacy conceals leads to the image of the toad living upon the vapour of a dungeon. The toad/dungeon imagery, ostensibly referring to Othello himself, is suggestively juxtaposed with the sexual imagery of corner/thing/uses,18 which associate sexuality, and female sexuality in particular, with the unsavoury and the unhealthy. Iago, Othello assures Emilia, ‘hates the slime/That sticks on filthy deeds’ (V, ii, 149–50), again setting up an underlying antithesis between the clean and sanitary male and the slippery, unhealthy world he encounters in consort with the feminine. The romantic view of women that prompted Othello’s elopement is here shown to be the sentimental side to a hostility to femininity he shares with Iago. Nowhere does Othello reveal his preferences more clearly than in the alacrity with which he prepares to abandon Desdemona for the wars (I, iii, 229–39) and in his willingness to forgo the trivialities of love for the ‘serious…business’ of war. For all Othello’s function as victim of Iago’s diabolical scheming he is revealed at a more fundamental psychological level to be one with Iago in his incomprehension of female ‘otherness’.
Here again, then, the mythological role of ‘everyman’ that Othello could be expected to assume in the morality pattern of the play is fundamentally undermined by the emphasis on individual psychology. As ‘everyman’ figure, at the centre of the war between good and evil for the possession of his soul, we might expect that his natural, instinctive leanings would be towards the good, whereas we find a superficial attraction to Desdemona that conceals a latent incomprehension and hostility. Equally the morality pattern would lead us to expect that Othello must face a fundamental choice between good and evil, for if there is no choice there can be no sin. Heywood’s Woman Killed With Kindness makes that particularly clear. Again Othello defies the logic of this pattern. The very depth of his hostility preempts any possibility of choice, he is already at the beginning of the play ‘of the devil’s party without knowing it’.
It is partly for this reason that Othello, in all logic (if not in natural sympathy) cannot be held fully responsible for killing his wife, in the light of his conviction that in doing so he is protecting other men from similar deception (‘she must die, else she’ll betray more men’—V, ii, 6). This thought may be mad, but it is not strictly criminal. The strange logic of Othello’s mind has convinced him that femininity itself is the enemy that must be extirpated to free men for the healthy pursuit of war, which paradoxically he associates with peace and contentment:
I had been happy if the general camp,
Pioners, and all, had tasted her sweet body,
So I had nothing known: O now for ever
Farewell the tranquil mind, farewell content:
Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars,
That makes ambition virtue: O farewell,
Farewell the neighing steed, and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife;
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!
And, O ye mortal engines, whose wide throats
The immortal Jove’s great clamour counterfeit;
Farewell, Othello’s occupation’s gone.
(III, iii, 351–63)
The opening image of the hidden ‘pioners’, moling it in the dark of Desdemona’s body is starkly contrasted with the open male world of light and healthy energy surrounding the activities of glorious war. Here again, and massively, are the dark/light paradoxes at work. It is difficult to realize fully that the splendid image of the ‘mortal engines’ that challenge comparison with divine thunder refer to the cannon that wreak such destruction on the battlefield; and this in spite of some undercutting of the pomp and circumstance in the punning return to sexual imagery at the end.19
It is interesting that we do not immediately reject what is after all a particularly perverse view of war, as Othello describes it. On the contrary the tendency of our sympathy is to support war’s ‘healthiness’ against the treacherous world of human sexuality. Were this not the case Othello would seem little better than a madman. Shakespeare achieves his paradoxical feat largely by keeping strictly moral considerations in the background throughout Othello. We are not being asked to judge war for what it is, so much as admire its spectacle as an aesthetic event, and this is thoroughly characteristic of the play. The very treatment of the character of Othello illustrates the same tendency. It is a commonplace of Othello criticism that the hero constantly seems to be dramatizing himself, adopting some heroic role that he sees himself fulfilling.20 So the reason he gives for Desdemona’s love for him is that she ‘pities the tale of him’ (to adapt Sidney’s phrase):
She lov’d me for the dangers I had pass’d,
And I lov’d her that she did pity them.
(I, iii, 167–8)
Critics have felt the need to explain this self-dramatization in psychological terms as a sign of Othello’s immaturity and this testifies to the sense of individuality that the characterization encourages throughout the play. But equally important is the distancing from too close an identification with the hero that this technique achieves. This is in marked contrast to Shakespeare’s presentation of Hamlet. One clear indication of the difference between the two plays in this respect is in Shakespeare’s use of soliloquy in Othello. Whereas in Hamlet soliloquy serves to bring us close to the inner workings of Hamlet’s mind, in Othello soliloquy is used more as we saw it in Hamlet’s rivals, Lust’s Dominion and Hoffman, as a means of defining the speaker’s role rather than revealing inner thoughts. Thus Iago, the prime mover of the action, is given rather more soliloquy than Othello, as, for instance, when he explains to the audience his intentions towards Othello at the end of Act I (I, iii, 381ff), lays out his plot (II, i, 281ff) or both defines his role and further explains his plotting (II, iii, 327ff). Othello is given only one extended soliloquy, in which he presents his inner thoughts (III, iii, 262ff) and even this is quite unlike a Hamlet set-piece, serving to record the conclusions Othello has come to rather than (as with Hamlet) presenting the inner tensions and dilemmas which prevent decisions from being made. We are not, that is, being invited in Othello to share the hero’s bafflement, but rather being given information that points us towards the denouement. Moreover this particular soliloquy in Act III is closely bound up with the action in ways that the positioning of Hamlet’s soliloquies preclude. Iago has just left Othello, having sown the seeds of doubt in Othello’s mind, and we watch Othello trying to adjust to the new information in preparing for the entry of Desdemona twenty-two lines later. Similarly the short soliloquy Othello is given on his entry into Desdemona’s bedroom, prior to her murder, is closely bound up with the action of the murder, a dramatic pause before the onslaught, which is superbly effective in heightening the pathos but does nothing to close the emotional gap betwen the protagonist and the audience.
Shakespeare’s dramaturgy in this play, then, while insisting on the individuality of the characters and exploiting the action affectively, also contrives an element of detachment that leaves us as much spectators of the ironic pattern of events as emotional participants in them. In Hamlet we readily identify ourselves with the hero: in Othello we sympathize with a man who is essentially different from ourselves. This is partly because the play presents Othello as an outsider and misunderstandings caused by his status as an outsider are a crucial element in his downfall. It is even more to do with that rhetorical presentation, that ‘Othello music’, that wraps around him and prevents the reader penetrating beneath the public carapace, as one can with Hamlet. Even the moments of intense passion are peculiarly theatrical. It is thoroughly appropriate that his distress at the thought of his wife’s infidelity should express itself in the melodramatically visual form of an apoplectic fit. That it is the Shakespearean method of presentation of character in the play, rather than the peculiar circumstances of his isolation, that creates the distance between the expressed emotions and the audience can be illustrated from our response to Desdemona. She, like her husband, is a figure with whom we can very readily sympathize, but with whom it is extremely difficult to identify. She too possesses a ‘stagey’ quality in her almost fanatical refusal to challenge her husband’s fantasies, which in the event kills him with her kindness. This gives her an heroic quality that complements her husband’s, but it emphasizes her difference from us. Like Othello, she conforms to the Aristotelian requirement (in what is in some respects a remarkably Aristotelian play) that the major figures of tragedy should be ‘better than average’. Here the pattern of Christian references (the ‘myth grid’) plays a crucial role. Associating Desdemona with the angelic constantly reminds us of her difference from the ordinary, which her whiteness, in opposition to her husband’s blackness, helps to reinforce in aesthetic terms.
This element of detachment is not so strong that we find ourselves standing in indifferent aloofness from the participants, and the Victorian lady who is supposed to have shouted from the gallery ‘Oh you great black fool, can’t you see, can’t you see?’ was genuinely (if apocryphally) responding to a play that presents character in vividly human terms. Nor is the feeling of detachment sufficient to prompt the clarity of moral judgement that is characteristic of the kind of satirical alienation we find in Jonson’s plays. At the end of the play no clear moral judgement of the hero emerges; this is largely because he is presented so much more as a victim than as an instigator of the tragedy. Othello’s flaw is, in moral terms, something of a virtue: to believe too readily and too naïvely in Iago’s ‘honesty’. The decision to kill Desdemona is made in good faith. The essential error is one of ignorance, not moral turpitude. Here again Shakespeare, whether consciously or not, adopts Aristotelian criteria, for in Aristotle’s discussion of fear and pity he declares his approval of tragic plots in which ‘the character should act in ignorance and only learn the truth afterwards’21 and the concept of hamartia seems to involve the hero’s ignorance rather than wilful perversity. Aristotle also, in the same section of the Poetics advocates plots
when the sufferings involve those who are near and dear to one another, when for example brother kills brother, son father, mother son, or son mother, or if such a deed is contemplated, or something else of the kind is actually done, then we have a situation of the kind to be aimed at.22
The killing of a wife would presumably fit this category, and this is unique to Othello among Shakespeare’s tragedies. Certainly the ending of Othello evinces more unequivocally than any of his other tragedies that evocation of pity and fear that Aristotle claims to be the necessary emotions for achieving that mysterious ‘catharsis’ that he sees as the end of tragedy.
The lack of serious moral conclusion was one of the principal objections to Othello put forward by Thomas Rymer in his attack on the play in the Short View of Tragedy (1692) where he complains that the play teaches little more than that ladies should look after their linen.23 His objections may be somewhat provocatively expressed (though later endorsed by T.S. Eliot) but they rightly bear witness to the play’s refusal to yield a satisfactory pattern of moral statement. Had Rymer (a classical scholar) been as much of a neo-classicist as some of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, he would have applauded Shakespeare’s ‘Aristotelianism’ here too, for the aesthetic, rather than the moral, effect of tragedy is emphasized by the Italian theorist Castelvetro in his commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics of 1570.24 It is unlikely that this Aristotelianism was accidental, for Othello was written at a time when the Jacobean popular stage was just beginning to come to terms with the new classicism, led by George Chapman (whose experiments in a more austere classical tragedy were about to commence) and the proselytizing of Jonson. One of the influences on Shakespeare in this respect was undoubtedly Jonson’s recent experiment in classical tragedy, Sejanus, a play for which the neo-classical rules are specifically invoked.
We cannot be as certain that Shakespeare had attended a performance of Heywood’s Woman Killed With Kindness as we can that he was intimate with Sejanus, but a study of the two plays is equally instructive in the light it throws on Othello, in terms of similarity as well as difference. Shakespeare could easily have seen Heywood’s tragedy at the Rose playhouse (probably), which was only a stone’s throw from the Globe in Southwark, sometime late in January, February or early March 1603. He was very unlikely to have been able to read it in preparing Othello, for it did not appear in print until 1607. He would have wanted to see a successful play by a rival firm on his doorstep (the second quarto of 1617 tells us the play ‘hath been oftentimes acted’) and there is enough in common between his only attempt at domestic tragedy (Romeo and Juliet is not quite that) and Heywood’s to make it plausible that Woman Killed With Kindness was a seminal influence on Othello. If he had joined the audience of the Rose for one of these early performances he would have been immediately struck by the play’s domesticity, which marks it out from almost all other Jacobean tragedies. It is not that this is tragedy of the lower classes, for the central figures are indeed (like those of Othello) all gentlefolk; we are assured in the first scene that the husband and wife, John and Anne Frankford, at the centre of the tragedy, are ‘both…descended nobly’ (i, 68) and Frankford himself later boasts ‘I am a gentleman…a king’s no more’ (iv, 3, 4). In spite of this insistence on class status, which Heywood exploits for comic purposes in his contrasted handling of the servants, the overall impression given by the play is of spectacularly ordinary people going about their daily tasks. Even the tragedy itself, if it leads to unusual consequences, is the result of the kind of temporary infatuation between wife and lodger that has hardly ever rated as especially newsworthy in any age. That this impression of ordinariness is deliberate Heywood makes clear from the prologue, which warns its audience:
Look for no glorious state, our Muse is bent
Upon a barren subject, a bare scene…
Nor is this ordinariness merely a matter of its homely setting in Yorkshire and its down-to-earth references to domestic detail, though these are important features of the play; it also rests in Heywood’s view of his characters. These are distinguished mostly by a common sense and decency that (as so often in real life) break down under the stress of momentary passion. Even the villain (though in a theatre fraught with machiavels and bloody revengers the term seems inappropriate for Wendoll) attempts valiantly to resist his infatuation for his host’s wife, before he plunges into a sin that can hardly be thought of as out of the ordinary:
I am a villain if I apprehend
But such a thought; then to attempt the deed—
Slave, thou art damn’d without redemption.
I’ll drive away this passion with a song.
A song! Ha, ha! A song, as if, fond man,
Thy eyes could swim in laughter, when thy soul
Lies drench’d and drowned in red tears of blood.
I’ll pray, and see if God within my heart
Plant better thoughts. Why, prayers are meditations,
And when I meditate—O God, forgive me—
It is on her divine perfections.
(vi, 1–11)
Far from wallowing in his evil, Iago-like, Wendoll appears increasingly as a pathetic, faintly ludicrous figure as he runs across the stage in his nightshirt, caught in the bedroom act with Frankford’s wife. His last despairing appeal and rejection by the penitent Anne Frankford affords him our considerable sympathy:
She’s gone to death, I live in want and woe,
Her life, her sins, and all upon my head,
And I must now go wander like a Cain
In foreign countries and remoted climes…
(xvi, 124–7)
It is typical of a Heywood character, however, that even this grief and remorse is to be put to sensible use, for Wendoll’s last words are to assure us that he’ll make good use of his time abroad learning foreign languages, so ‘At my return I may in court be rais’d’ (xvi, 136). Heywood has much in common with Defoe, both in his willingness to record people as they are and in his unshakeable faith in the basic decency and common sense of humanity.
Clearly Othello’s domesticity is a very different affair from this. The deliberately low-key presentation of character through a linguistic medium that is (Defoe-like) as unpretentious as it is efficient, contrasts vividly with the tone of the Othello music. Othello’s splendid rhetoric, his grandeur as an heroic figure, is as important in creating a sense of tragic dignity for this play as it is for creating that perceptible distancing effect we discussed earlier. Yet, as we saw, the insistence on dramatic detail characteristic of both plays gives to both a sense that we are dealing with real people in real places. It is true that Venice and Cyprus provide an exotic background for the action that again tends to heighten the dignity of the tone by removing it from everyday English experience, but the Venetian world depicted is genuinely historical, a world of Doges and argosies, of Turkish invasions and Venetian counter-diplomacy, very different—say—from the symbolic Babylonian Venice of Volpone. In Heywood’s play factual detail—whether it is the marks made by the hobnail boots on the hall floor by the dancers (i, 90) or the stage directions at the beginning of scene viii instructing the servants in detail on the clearing of the dinner-table, or, most poignantly, Frankford’s sending of Anne’s lute after her into exile because he cannot bear that it should remind him of her (scene xvi)—help to create that world of the familiar, everyday life of its audience that must have made it a most unusual theatrical experience in its day, for such homely detail was normally confined to comedy. In Othello the domestic detail is used more sparingly and more subtly to distinguish Desdemona’s world of the feminine from Othello’s ‘pomp and circumstance of glorious war’, but in both plays a sense of actuality is created that fixes the action of the play in the here and now of human experience. And just as Shakespeare uses his mythological Christian references to guide us through this world, so Heywood’s Christianity is essentially at the service of the realism. Like Othello, Woman Killed With Kindness abounds in Christian reference. In Heywood’s tragedy—much more than in Othello—the characters live (as Elizabethan man clearly did) in a world of constant Christian awareness. In crises especially, they resort to the comforts (or discomforts) of their religion as readily as we resort (for similar reasons) to our televisions; whether it is the servingman Jenkins praying that his mistress, Anne, may be preserved from sin: ‘God keep my mistress chaste and make us all His servants’ (xii, 13–14) or Anne herself realizing the consequence of her sin: ‘O what a clog unto the soul is sin’ (xi, 103). Indeed the consciousness of sin, of the doctrine of the fall (explicitly referred to in Anne’s first consciousness of her shame: ‘Women that fall not quite bereft of grace/Have their offences noted in their face’, vi, 156–7) provides the basis of the tragedy. In this sense the Christianity is far more deeply embedded in the morality of Heywood’s play than it is in Othello, where, as we saw, Othello’s ‘guilt’ is largely unrelated to an awareness of sin. In Woman Killed With Kindness choice betweeen good and evil is a condition for all men, as is made explicit when Wendoll is at the point of being swept away by his passion:
I will not! Zounds, I will not! I may choose,
And I will choose. Shall I be so misled?
Or shall I purchase to my father’s crest
The motto of a villain?
(vi, 93–6)
Yet Heywood also uses Christian reference in his play as Shakespeare does in Othello, to highlight a character’s standing and point up the ironies inherent in the action. So Susan, the heroine of Heywood’s sub-plot and Anne Frankford’s foil, is described (rather like Desdemona) as ‘an angel in a mortal shape’ (vii, 100), while Wendoll’s role as villain is (somewhat unfairly) given emphasis and clarity by associating him with the devil. To Nicholas the serving man, for instance, Wendoll is the devil: ‘The Devil and he are all one in my eye’ (iv, 88). As in Othello, these references to psychomachia roles can be used to point up ironies, as when Frankford, detecting the sexual innuendo between his wife and Wendoll, remarks: ‘My saint’s turn’d devil’ (viii, 151) or when he acknowledges he must resort to trickery ‘To try two seeming angels’ (xi, 2). This use of psychomachia language is not unusual in Jacobean drama, but it differs from the genuinely allegorical use of psychomachia roles that we find, for instance, in Middleton’s comedies, most notably in Mad World, but also elsewhere. In Woman Killed With Kindness and Othello the language of the morality play comes to be used as a guide to the nature of actuality depicted on stage—in both plays the metaphysical system is at the service of the realism rather than a representation of an alternative reality. Indeed Heywood’s determination to keep his play firmly anchored in middle-earth can be illustrated from one of the very rare excursions his play makes towards a transcendental reality. Frankford, with his world falling apart, imagines the possibility of recalling past time to reconstitute the world of innocence that is now lost for ever:
O God, O God, that it were possible
To undo things done, to call back yesterday;
That Time could turn up his swift sandy glass,
To untell the days, and to redeem these hours;
Could, rising from the west, draw his coach backward,
Take from the account of time so many minutes,
Till he had all these seasons call’d again,
Those minutes and those actions done in them,
Even from her first offence; that I might take her
As spotless as an angel in my arms.
But O! I talk of things impossible,
And cast beyond the moon. God give me patience.
(xiii, 52–64)
Frankford (and Heywood) are far too sensible and practical to see this flight of the imagination as anything other than fantasy, though it is interesting that Heywood—as a practical man of the theatre—indulges in just that ‘impossible’ double time for which Othello is notorious. For, like Othello, Woman Killed With Kindness syncopates an actual time (running over several years) into a sense of concentrated stage time, a phenomenon that is clearly illustrated by the introduction, in scene xiii, of two children of the Frankford marriage, which had taken place in the first scene of the play.
Another important feature that links both plays is the central role of paradox. In Heywood’s tragedy the ironies that are highlighted by psychomachia references are used with less skill and appropriateness than in Othello: Iago makes a convincing surrogate for the devil, whereas Wendoll does not, but in both plays this verbal simplification into black and white enables the playwrights to explore the central paradox of the contrast between intention and result. The very title of Heywood’s play points to the central paradox that Frankford’s good intention in forgiving his wife ends by killing her, while the pun on ‘kindness’ (consanguinity) introduces the further paradox that she is killed by her nearest and dearest. The paradox that kindness can be crueller than cruelty is equally illustrated by Desdemona’s response to Othello. Heywood explores his paradox not only in the main action, but in the sub-plot where Sir Charles Mountford’s crime of murder is met by the generosity of his enemy, Sir Francis Acton, in paying the debts Sir Charles incurs in his successful defence at law. In both cases forgiveness paradoxically places an intolerable burden of guilt on the forgiven, as Sir Charles makes explicit when he persuades his sister Susan to agree to sleep with Sir Francis in repayment of the debt:
Thy honour and my soul are equal in my regard,
Nor will thy brother Charles survive they shame.
His kindness like a burden hath surcharged me,
And under his good deeds I stooping go,
Not with an upright soul.
(xiv, 61–5)
Similarly Frankford’s forgiveness of his wife in the main plot inflicts a psychological burden of guilt that she cannot sustain and so she starves herself to death from shame. The outcome of the sub-plot provides thematic contrast in ending happily with Sir Francis Acton doing the decent thing and agreeing to marry the impoverished Susan. Heywood’s exploration of paradox in the main plot lacks the dazzling clarity and therefore the aesthetic effectiveness of Shakespeare’s manipulation of paradox in Othello. Instead Heywood throws out paradoxical suggestions that the action fails to explore. Anne’s initial reaction to her husband’s kindness is paradoxically to accuse him of failing in his moral duty:
He cannot be so base as to forgive me,
Nor I so shameless to accept his pardon.
(xiii, 139–40)
This suggestion is again taken up by Anne’s brother, Sir Francis Acton, only to be set aside:
My brother Frankford show’d too mild a spirit
In the revenge of such a loathed crime;
Less than he did, no man of spirit could do.
I am so far from blaming his revenge
That I commend it.
(xvii, 16–20)
Here, interestingly, Acton assumes Frankford’s leniency is not Christian kindness but a subtler kind of revenge, and strictly Frankford’s decision to exile his wife rather than kill her is revenge, not forgiveness, as Frankford himself at one point seems to acknowledge:
I’ll not martyr thee
Nor mark thee for a strumpet, but with usage
Of more humility torment thy soul
And kill thee even with kindness.
(xiii, 153–6)
This sublety would become a machiavel, but Frankford is not seriously criticized in the play and indeed the presentation of his character makes it clear that we are genuinely meant to see his behaviour as an act of Christian kindness. Nevertheless Heywood suggests a further paradox here, that forbearance can be a more effective form of revenge than open aggression. Heywood hints at a clash between two (or more) value systems—the Christian doctrine of patience and the pagan doctrine of honour—but is content to leave the problem as the kind of problem inherent in day-to-day living rather than as a subject for intellectual examination. This is the technique of Hamlet, not of Othello, and indeed in its constant appeal to the audience’s emotion Woman Killed With Kindness comes closer than is usual with Heywood (in spite of the characteristic pace of its action) to the affective drama of Shakespeare’s earlier period.
Shakespeare’s use of paradox in Othello is both clearer and more profound than Heywood’s and ultimately contributes to that sense of distancing that is such a particular feature of the play. At times Othello might almost be a paradoxical and ironic comment on the action of Woman Killed With Kindness. Frankford’s bitter feelings as he stands by the bedroom door (‘that door that’s bawd unto my shame’) leading to his ‘polluted bedchamber,/Once my terrestrial heaven, now my earth’s hell’ (xiii, 15–16) are, as it were, the actuality mirrored in Othello’s fantasies as he accuses Desdemona of adultery and bids Emilia turn the key on ‘the gates of hell’ she guards (IV, ii, 94). The interview between Frankford and his servant Nicholas, in which Nicholas reveals his suspicions of Anne, has a similar relationship to the malicious fantasies of Iago as he torments Othello with accounts of Desdemona’s unfaithfulness. Frankford’s tormented response to the truth works at the level of Othello’s dreams:
Thou hast kill’d me with a weapon whose sharp’ned point
Hath prick’d quite through and through my shivering heart.
Drops of cold sweat sit dangling on my hairs
Like morning’s dew upon the golden flowers,
And I am plung’d into a strange agony.
(viii, 56–60)
Othello provides a constant ironic commentary on the central assumptions of the male world of Woman Killed With Kindness where the ‘treasure’ of Susan’s chastity that Charles successfully barters to free himself from obligation to Sir Francis Acton, becomes the ‘pearl’ that Othello throws away, like the base Indian. The action of Shakespeare’s tragedy is a sustained and malign fantasy created by Iago out of the kind of actuality represented in Heywood’s play. None of this, of course, proves, or is intended to prove that Shakespeare had seen a performance of Woman Killed With Kindness before writing Othello, but a comparison of the two plays highlights qualities in Shakespeare’s tragedy that help to clarify the nature of Shakespeare’s achievement.
Heywood’s tragedy and Jonson’s Sejanus are as far apart in dramaturgy as the popular Elizabethan stage would allow. In place of Heywood’s intricate double plotting we have a play observing neo-Aristotelian unity of action (if not of time) and minutely observant of its classical sources, which deal with exalted matters of state; in place of Heywood’s unashamed appeal to the audience’s emotions on behalf of ordinary, decent, English folk like themselves, we have a dry-eyed moralistic tragedy, sardonic in tone, concerning extraordinary people depicted at a particular moment of history remote from the audience’s experience in time and place. Yet Sejanus, dating, like Woman Killed With Kindness, from 1603 was certainly an influence on Othello and has to be taken into account in understanding the dramatic climate in which Othello was conceived and executed. That a later contemporary associated the two plays together is clear in Leonard Digges’s contrast (published in 1640) between Jonson’s failure and Shakespeare’s success:
oh how the Audience,
Were ravish’d, with what wonder they went thence,
When some new day they would not brooke a line,
Of tedious (though well laboured) Catiline;
Sejanus too was irkesome, they priz’de more
Honest Iago, or the jealous Moore.25
The audience referred to here was certainly the Globe because one of the contributors to the 1605 quarto of Sejanus (a certain Ev. B.) mentions seeing it there and also its hostile reception.26 We know that Shakespeare was intimately acquainted with Jonson’s play because the folio edition (1616) gives us a cast list of the ‘principall Tragoedians’, eight in all, in which Shakespeare’s name heads the second four-man column. This edition also tells us that the play was acted ‘in the year 1603’ and ‘by the Kings Majesties Servants’. As Herford and Simpson point out in their edition of the play, the theatres were closed (probably) from 19 March 1603 until March 1604 and, as Shakespere’s company did not become the King’s Men until 19 May 1603, we must assume the 1603 performance was a private one if we are to take the statement as an accurate record of the company’s title at the time of the first performance. It does seem possible, however, that the play had had a public performance (by the then-named Chamberlain’s Men) in early 1603, that is, at virtually the same time as Woman Killed With Kindness. In any case we can be fairly sure first that Sejanus was written for the Globe and second that Shakespeare had an important part in its first performance. Herford and Simpson conjecture that Shakespeare played the part of Tiberius Caesar.27 Jonson’s lines must certainly have been running in Shakespeare’s head at this time, but in spite of this it is remarkable that we can detect little verbal influence of Sejanus on Othello, a measure both of Shakespeare’s verbal exuberance and the stylistic gap between the two dramatists. It is also possible that Shakespeare’s was that ‘second pen’ that Jonson tells us, in his address to the reader, ‘had good share’ in the stage version of the text,28 a contribution that, characteristically, Jonson excised in preparing the play for the press. Chapman has also been suggested as the contributor, but Chapman, as far as we know, never worked for Shakespeare’s company and in any case would be more likely to collaborate at the literary level Jonson would respect and preserve, than at the level of popular stagecraft.
We can regard Sejanus, I think, as a product of that (mostly) friendly rivalry-cum-cooperation between Shakespeare and Jonson that lasted until Shakespeare’s death, which, in one version, we are told, was occasioned as a result of a drinking bout between himself, Jonson and Drayton.29 For Sejanus is a kind of purist’s ‘answer’ to Julius Caesar in exhibiting a treatment of Roman history that gives greater priority to both historical accuracy and moral statement, part of a rivalry that culminated in that most splendidly classical of all Jacobean plays, Coriolanus. The challenge to Julius Caesar is deliberate in Sejanus where the contrast between the ‘old liberty’ (I, 404) of the late Republic and the present Tiberian tyranny is an important part of Jonson’s theme. The historian Cordus is arraigned before the Senate in Act III for making this contrast. One of the accusations is:
Comparing men,
And times, thou praysest Brutus, and affirm’st
That Cassius was the last of all the Romanes.
(III, 390–2)
—a charge that Cordus is willing to accept and defend (III, 449–60). Afer, the government orator, sees this praise of Brutus and Cassius as a deliberate attack on the current regime:
To have a Brutus brought in paralell,
A parricide, an enemie of his countrie,
Rank’d, and preferr’d to any reall worth
That Rome now holds. This is most strangely invective.
Most full of spite, and insolent upbraiding.
Nor is’t the time alone is here dispris’d,
But the whole man of time, yea Caesar’s selfe
Brought in disvalew…
(III, 396–403)
The play as a whole clearly supports Cordus against Tiberius and his lickspittles, giving a decisive moral stance to the play in condemning tyranny and timeserving and upholding the rule of law. We need not be surprised that the play ran into trouble with the authorities.30 All this is an implicit criticism of Shakespeare’s treatment of the same theme, where the presentation of Julius Caesar, Brutus and Cassius is remarkably evenhanded. Jonson would no doubt regard this as moral irresponsibility, for he complains in the prefatory material of Volpone of ‘the present trade of the stage’ and seeks to counter in his own play those critics who (with some justification, he implies) ‘crie out, we never punish vice in our enterludes’.31
Jonson’s faithfulness to Rome in Sejanus is more a matter of historical than dramaturgical allegiance, in spite of the address to the reader which paraphrases Giraldi Cinthio’s defence of Seneca in claiming ‘truth of Argument, dignity of Persons, gravity and height of Elocution, fulness and frequency of sentence’.32 This is a clear echo of Giraldi’s argument that Seneca’s tragedy excels the Greek ‘nella prudenza, nella gravità, nel decoro, nella maesta, nelle sentenze’33 (it is notable that Jonson omits mention of ‘maesta’). Shakespeare’s Othello conforms to these requirements in gravity of tone, ‘dignity of persons’ (decoro) and ‘majesty’ rather more convincingly indeed than Sejanus, where in practice Jonson has emphasized ‘truth to argument’ above other considerations. It is characteristic of Jonson, however, that his critical defence should be at odds with his actual practice. We have to get behind this habitual critical smokescreen to try to see the play as Shakespeare saw it when he accepted it for production at the Globe (for we can assume that his opinion on what went on there and what didn’t was decisive at this stage of his career). We need to remind ourselves that the play that the King’s Men actually played was not the same as the Sejanus we now read and Jonson’s explanation of this seems to suggest that the contributions of the ‘second pen’ were quite substantial:
I would informe you, that this Booke, in all numbers, is not the same with that which was acted on the publicke Stage, wherein a second Pen had good share: in place of which I have rather chosen, to put weaker (and no doubt lesse pleasing) of mine own, then to defraud so happy a Genius of his right, by my lothed usurpation.34
This seems to imply also that the material substituted for that of the ‘second pen’ was new, not a reversion to previously written copy. Whether Shakespeare (or whoever it was) began on the collaboration from the beginning or required changes in preparation for the production is not clear, though the latter seems more likely as Globe plays (unlike those of the other playhouses) were not often collaborative efforts at this period. This is all the more likely because clearly Jonson spent a considerable time writing the play (his previous play, Poetaster, dates from the spring of 1601) and Jonson is said (by a contemporary diarist) to have shut himself off from the world at the time he was preparing his tragedy.35
What, then, would Shakespeare have seen in the play to justify his accepting it for the King’s Men, a decision, incidentally, that turned out to be an error of judgement in view of its hostile reception? Certainly any actor would relish the part of Tiberius, it is the best acting part of the play, with its combination of hypocritical humility and cunning ruthlessness. The relationship between Sejanus and Tiberius, where Sejanus constantly attempts to weave textures of deception around his master, must have provided more than a few clues in developing the relationship of Iago and Othello. Iago and Sejanus are both machiavels, both adept at manipulating others for their own purposes, yet both are presented in realistic terms as real people, not Grand Guignol monsters. One obvious difference in the relationship is that Iago succeeds, whereas Sejanus is completely outwitted by the superior cunning of Tiberius (a relation of villain to super-villain developed further in the Mosca—Volpone relationship and then in the Alchemist in the combination of Subtle and Face). In terms of the theatre (though few people have the opportunity of seeing it on stage) Tiberius and Sejanus dominate the play, and this is one of the problems with it. For Tiberius is not a tragic figure and Sejanus is only tragic in the superficial sense that he dies at the end of the play. Tiberius, indeed, must be played as a comic part, for his duplicity, his skill at saying one thing and meaning another, is of the essence of the double focus out of which the comic is generated. In creating Sejanus and Tiberius, Jonson, for all his Senecan intentions, falls back on the long native tradition exploited in the morality plays of the essential comedy of evil. The first appearance of Tiberius illustrates the point. As he enters ‘one kneels to him’ (as the stage direction requires), at which Tiberius launches into a characteristic exercise in false humility, to the hypocritical compliments of Sejanus and the fierce moralistic asides of Arruntius:
| Tiberius | Wee not endure these flatteries, let him stand; |
| Our empire, ensignes, axes, roddes, and state | |
| Take not away our humane nature from us: | |
| Looke up, on us, and fall before the gods. | |
| Sejanus | How like a god, speakes Caesar! |
| Arruntius | There, observe! |
| He can indure that second, that’s no flattery. | |
| O, what is it, proud slime will not beleeve | |
| Of his owne worth, to heare it equall prais’d | |
| Thus with the gods? |
(I, 375–83)
This is good comic stuff, because both Tiberius and Sejanus know as well as we do that they don’t believe a word of what they say. The passage recalls most readily, not the grim solemnities of Senecan tragedy, but those scenes of comic villainy where Shakespeare has Richard of Gloucester and Buckingham act out their deceits before the citizenry of London in Richard III. The discrepancy between Sejanus’ obviously acceptable flattery and Tiberius’ pretended humility is so palpable that Arruntius’ intervention is clumsy and otiose. The effect of Arruntius’ moralizing—which continues throughout the play—is to spike the laughter, so that the immense comic potential of the play is never achieved. This is at the root of the play’s failure; the audience are invited to a comic spectacle and then not allowed to laugh. Jonson himself obviously realized something was wrong, for in his next play, Volpone, he uses a similar pair of crooks, but exploits them brilliantly for comic purposes, and he achieves this partly by suppressing the voice of virtue which proves such a clog to the comic energies of Sejanus. Jonson is so determined in the tragedy to apply the ‘Senecan’ principles of ‘dignity of persons’ and ‘gravity’ and to make explicit the moral purpose that the comedy is dissipated and repressed. The conflict is, in a sense, one between Jonson’s neo-classical dogmas and those natural instincts as both man and dramatist that express themselves best through the native forms. Arruntius’ phrase ‘proud slime’ is instructive here, for Arruntius is talking the language of Christian humility (the Douay Bible translates the Vulgate ‘Formavit igitur Dominus Deus hominem de limo terrae’ from Genesis 2:7 as ‘And the Lord God formed man of the slime of the earth’). The equivalent passage of Juvenal’s fourth satire, Book I (from which Jonson’s lines derive) merely says, referring to the Emperor Nero: ‘nihil est quod credere de se/non possit cum laudatur dis aequa potestas’—‘there is nothing godlike power will refuse to believe of itself when it is praised’.36 For all its strict dependence on classical sources the ethos of the play stems from Christian notions of sin and redemption. Jonson’s contemporaries quickly saw the relevance of his Rome to their own times and country, for Jonson tells Drummond that he was ‘called befor the Councell for his Sejanus and accused both of popperie and treason’.37 Presumably the government felt the play’s preferences for the ‘old liberty’ of the Roman republic had unwelcome modern implications. Chapman’s commendatory verses for the play see in it an admonition to statesmen:
Thy Muse yet makes it the whole sphaere and lawe
To all State lives; and bounds Ambitions strife…38
Even the stridency of Arruntius’ virtue derives at least in part from comic example, for his satiric commentary on the play’s action follows the pattern set by such earlier satiric voices as Asper and Macilente in Every Man Out of his Humour and Crites in Cynthia’s Revels. Arruntius’ language often partakes of the colourful excess of these predecessors, ironically adding to the impression of grotesque perversity the play gives, rather than to the ‘gravity and height of Elocution’ the address to the reader promises:
Way for my lord! proclaime his idoll lord-ship,
More then ten cryers, or sixe noise of trumpets!
Make legs, kisse hands, and take a scatter’d haire
From my lords eminent shoulder! See Sanquinius!
With his slow belly, and his dropsie! looke,
What toyling haste he makes! yet, here’s another,
Retarded with the gout, will be afore him!
Get thee liburnian porters, thou grosse foole,
To beare thy’obsequious fatnesse, like thy peeres…
(V, 451–9)
Nor is the language of scurrility confined to Arruntius. One of the most notable of the opposition to Tiberius’ tyranny, Caius Silius, who commits suicide in the Senate asserting his innocence, can equally sound this comic note on the same subject (largely taken from Juvenal), the flatterers of great ones who:
Laugh, when their patron laughes; sweat, when he sweates;
Be hot, and cold with him; change every moode,
Habit, and garbe, as often as he varies;
Observe him, as his watch observes his clocke;
And true, as turkise in the deare lords ring,
Looke well, or ill with him: ready to praise
His lordship, if he spit, or but pisse faire,
Have an indifferent stoole, or breake winde well…
(I, 33–40)
Even Agrippina, around whom the opposition gathers, like Silius deliberately made more virtuous than the sources suggest by Jonson’s careful selectivity, nevertheless contributes to the grotesqueness of the Sejanus world:
Were all Tiberius body stuck with eyes,
And ev’ry wall, and hanging in my house
Transparent, as this lawne I weare or ayre;
Yea, had Sejanus both his eares as long
As to my in-most closet: I would hate
To whisper any thought, or change an act…
(II, 450–5)
Jonson has a special delight in the grotesque, the incongruous, that gives these passages a vitality that the language of virtue in the play conspicuously lacks. Virtue, indeed, can often sound both pretentious and silly, as, for instance, when a little earlier in this same scene the subject turns on the mundane matter of Silius’ wife, Sosia, staying with Agrippina:
| Agrippina | Sosia stayes with us? |
| Silius | Shee is your servant, and doth owe your grace An honest, but unprofitable love. |
| Agrippina | How can that be, when there’s no gaine, but virtu’s? |
| Silius | You take the morall, not the politique sense. |
(II, 431–5)
Vitality in Sejanus courses through the veins of the evil more than of the good, and especially in the character of Sejanus himself, whose ‘scoffing with ambiguous words’ might well have supplied Milton with his model for Satan. In addition to his skill as the machiavel schemer of the play, he too shares the comic zest for the incongruous that oddly links him to his opponents. In the process of corrupting the physician Eudemes, for instance, when he persuades him to act as pandar between himself and Livia, wife to the virtuous Drusus, whom Sejanus poisons, he jokes at length in the language of the moral satirists on the traditional subject of women’s vanities:
Why, sir, I doe not aske you of their urines,
Whose smel’s most violet? or whose seige is best?
Or who makes hardest faces on her stool?
Which lady sleepes with her owne face, a nights?
Which puts her teeth off, with her clothes, in court?
Or, which her hayre? which her complexion?
And, in which boxe she puts it?
(I, 304–10)
In such a grotesque world, whose almost total corruption is frequently lamented, the rogue hero holds sway, and all the more so because in Sejanus the supreme rogue, Tiberius, remains in possession of his empire at the end of the play.
How then did Shakespeare view all this? Presumably he saw in the play a picture of a society dedicated to evil of the kind that he himself had depicted in Richard III, but here refined and justified by its classical credentials. Certainly it must have stimulated him to think again about the implications of neo-classical theory, with the result, as we have seen, that Othello is far more thoroughgoing in its Aristotelianism than anything Jonson attempted, for all his declared respect for the neo-classical ‘laws’ in Sejanus (as later in Volpone, where he asserts that ‘from no needful rule he swerveth’).39 Othello also fulfils the ‘Senecan’ requirements for tragedy as Giraldi enunciates them better than Seneca himself. At the same time, playing opposite (or at least close to) Burbage’s Sejanus must have revived Shakespeare’s moribund interest in the machiavel rogue, while he transformed the part he himself perhaps played by creating Othello under the influence of the noble figure Tiberius pretends to be. The choice of a sympathetic and noble hero opens up the possibility of genuine tragedy not available to Jonson’s rogue-centred play. The choice too of an heroic figure whose downfall principally involves not gross sin, but a fatal error of judgement, leads to that effect of detachment-with-sympathy that is essentially Aristotelian in character. Perhaps too Sejanus helped Shakespeare to re-focus on the problem of aesthetic distancing, adding fear and wonder as well as pity and woe to produce the cathartic effect of his tragedy, for such distancing is at the core of Jonson’s dramaturgy. Certainly Sejanus must have been one of the strongest of those influences that set Shakespeare on a course of exploration into classical methods that was to bear such fruit in Lear and Coriolanus and, in a radically different way, in Antony and Cleopatra.
It is probably no coincidence that Jonson’s next unaided play, Volpone, performed at the Globe in 1606, was also set in Venice, though a Venice markedly different from Shakespeare’s. Jonson’s choice of setting is not dictated by his sources and is all the more remarkable for coming shortly after the production of a revised version of Every Man in his Humour which changes the original Italian setting to London. E.K.Chambers suggests that the new version was made for a Court performance in February 1605.40 The prologue to the new version, moreover, fairly obviously cocks a snook at Shakespeare’s romantic dramaturgy and declares that, in contrast, his own play aims at a dramatic realism, with
deeds and language such as men do use,
And Persons such as Comedy would choose
When she would show an image of the times…
The London setting, subsequently adhered to in all Jonson’s later comedies except Volpone (if we include New Inn’s ‘Barnet’), plays its part in this new realism. In this context the choice of Venice for Volpone has special significance, for it suggests that Jonson’s city of sin was chosen in corrective contrast to the romantic and glamorous world of Othello, the Moor of Venice, whose concern with aesthetic effect must have smacked for Jonson of the escapism and moral irresponsibility castigated in Volpone’s ‘Address to the Universities’.