Syracuse University
‘I’faith, is’t true?’
OTHELLO 3.4.771
‘Is it true think you?’
THE WINTER’S TALE, 4.4.2662
Most modern readers regard the early modern opposition to literature as the manifestation of a benighted fanaticism, now mercifully extinct among all right-thinking people. Even twentieth-century literary Marxists, who viewed the Puritans as the vanguard of the political changes that eventually led to parliamentary democracy, stumbled with some embarrassment over the historical contradiction that this brand of Protestantism was accompanied by an often violent antipathy towards literature – at least until later in the seventeenth century when Milton handily saved the day. Importantly the Puritans opposed not just specific books but the entire category of literary expression. My own view is that we do not take the Puritan suspicion of ‘poesie’ (a term which covered all forms of imaginative writing) with nearly the seriousness it deserves. There is after all something if not actively suspect, then at least worthy of investigation and intellectual attention, about the whole business of being absorbed in fictionality, which is further complicated by the long-standing denigration of fiction as feminine. Although storytelling was always disparaged by virtue of its association with women (for example, old-wives tales and nursery stories), with the advent of the novel, the argument that fiction was itself feminine gathered momentum.3 Whether understood to be ‘natural’ or culturally ‘produced’, assertions about the affinity between femininity and fiction seem to be at least in part based on empirical evidence: Amazon reports most readers of fiction are women, and according to Franco Moretti, this has been true for at least 300 years.4
If the consumers of Autolycus’s ballads in The Winter’s Tale and Desdemona (whose heart is won by storytelling) are anything to go by, however, women’s love affair with fiction was indeed already well-established in the Elizabethan and Jacobean world. Yet, there is not much to connect the lower-class, rustic Mopsa with the Italian urbanite, Desdemona, except that during the ritual of courtship both characters enjoy stories of marvels and monsters and both receive traditional tokens of affection and commitment: ‘ribbons and gloves’ in the case of Mopsa (4.4.234) and ‘a handkerchief / Spotted with strawberries’ (3.3.437–8) in the case of Desdemona. Mopsa’s ‘Is’t true?’ occurs in response to Autolycus’s narrative of an ostensibly new, true story (now printed as a ballad) of the usurer’s wife who gave birth to bags of money and developed an unnatural appetite for toads. Desdemona’s life is closer to that of the ballad’s wife than to Mopsa’s.5 The wife’s fate is arguably punishment for a transgressive match, a point intimated by her rustic friend Dorcas’s response to the story: ‘Bless me from marrying a usurer’ (4.4.268).
While the fictionality of Autolycus’s ballad is undeniable, the veracity of the story of the origins and provenance of the handkerchief is far more problematic. Othello advances truth claims about this ‘antique token’ (5.2.214) and since they are made within the context of tragedy, the audience must take them seriously. In his first account, the handkerchief has maternal and entirely female origins having been given to Othello’s mother by an Egyptian ‘charmer’. Because it is part of his attempt to wrest evidence of adultery from Desdemona, this account possesses the moral agenda of a fable: ‘[W]hile she kept it, / ’Twould make her amiable and subdue my father … / … but if she lost it / … my father’s eye / Should hold her loathed’ (3.4.59–64).Yet, at the end of the play, when Othello claims that it was a keepsake ‘my father gave my mother’ (5.2.215), the napkin has become a patriarchal object. From the vantage point of these contradictory histories of the handkerchief, this essay briefly considers the relationship between tragedy, complete with its complex gender coding, and fictionality itself.
***
Female susceptibility to fiction – which amounts to gullibility in the case of Mopsa, ‘I love a ballad in print, a-life, for then we are sure they are true’ (4.4.260–1) is typically adduced as evidence of inferior intellectual capacity, a failure to grasp reality in a rational and objective manner. Othello’s potent narrative has worked upon Desdemona’s ‘delicate youth’ (1.2.74) and enervated her senses, making her physically, sexually vulnerable to that which ‘weakens motion’ (1.2.75). Telling stories, in other words, is the early modern equivalent of Rophynol, ‘drugs or minerals’ (1.2.74). A story ‘Hath thus beguiled your daughter of herself’ (1.3.67, my emphasis), and the power of fiction to evacuate agency (both male and female) is one of its most dangerous characteristics. Fiction is a form of pleasure and a form of abuse: ‘She is abused’ (1.3.61).Yet Brabantio arrives at this conviction about Othello’s ‘mighty magic’ (1.3.93) only because of his own susceptibility to reading: ‘Have you not read … / Of some such thing?’ (1.1.171–2).6
Othello’s story is, however, ostensibly not just ‘made up’. That is, it purports to be a ‘travailous history’ (1.3.140).7 The adjective here indicates not only Othello’s past hardships but also that this is not some light, frivolous or fanciful tale. It is not fiction but autobiography – that is, if we can accept (as the play encourages us to do) that Desdemona ‘seriously inclines’ to believe that stories about ‘men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders’ (1.3.145–6) are indeed a factually verifiable aspect of Othello’s experience. This is a different although very much thematically related form of information from the estimations of the number of ships in the Turkish fleet, which preface Othello’s great autobiographical speech. The reckonings about the fleet are contradictory, but Montano’s is the report that wins out in part because: ‘Your trusty and most valiant servitor / Prays you to believe him’ (1.3.41–3).8 Similarly, history is a respectable category of fiction, a story that is dignified by its assertion of veracity and facticity.9 When in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries women became completely identified with those ‘bad’ kinds of fictions called ‘novels’ and ‘romances’, Defoe, Richardson and Fielding called their fictions ‘histories’ precisely in order to exempt themselves from the taint of femininity.
The forms of attention that attach to listening to a story are, here and elsewhere in Shakespeare, also marked by gender difference. There is more than a hint of unsophisticated credulity in Desdemona’s ‘greedy ear’:
This to hear
Would Desdemona seriously incline,
But still the house affairs would draw her thence,
Which ever as she could with haste dispatch
She’d come again, and with a greedy ear
Devour up my discourse.
(1.3.146–51)
This act of listening is reminiscent of the young princes Guiderius and Arviragus who attend to the war stories in Cymbeline.10 Whereas Desdemona is characterized as a ‘pliant’ (1.3.152) consumer, the boys immediately transform what they hear into action: ‘in posture / That acts my words’ (3.3.94–5).11 Desdemona’s greedy ears, her voracious consumption of the story, are arguably mitigated by her serious inclination – that is, her careful, curious, eager attention and the physical posture ‘serious inclination’ suggests. Desdemona attends the story in ‘a pliant hour’, the time when she has the leisure to listen. ‘Pliant’ also connotes yielding and succumbing to Othello’s sexual advances.12 There is no such pliability in the princes who do not absorb the story so much as immediately express it. The princes’ agency is never in question, whereas Othello admits that he ‘often did beguile her [Desdemona] of her tears’ (1.3.157, my emphasis). ‘Beguile’ has connotations both of fraud, cunning (guile) and magical deceit.13 However, the boys in Cymbeline are incapable of the kind of sympathy exhibited by Desdemona’s ‘world of sighs’ (1.3.160) – or, according to the Folio, a ‘world of kisses’:
’Twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful!
(1.3.162)
It is her seriousness and empathy that separates Desdemona from the entertainingly dizzy-headed frivolity of Mopsa and Dorcas. They, of course, want to believe what they hear is true, and Autolycus is happy to oblige with comic verification: ‘Here’s the midwife’s name to’t, one Mistress Tale-Porter’ (4.4.269–70). In contrast, when Desdemona hears the story of the handkerchief, she believes it, even while wishing it to be a fabrication. Importantly, her interrogatives, ‘I’faith, is’t true?’ and ‘Is’t possible?’ do not follow the narratives performed in the rites of courtship but rather serve as the sequel to the macabre yet lyrical post-nuptial tale of the origin and provenance of the handkerchief. It is only at this critical moment, and importantly not before, that Desdemona shares Mopsa’s admixture of credulity and doubt about tall tales. This incipient, new-found scepticism represents a volte face from her earlier trustful attention to Othello’s (literally) outlandish accounts of his exotic adventures.14
Barbara Hardy has demonstrated that Othello, which begins with Othello’s life story and ends with Emilia’s revelations, is ‘a play about the ethics of narrative’15 and a ‘performance of telling’.16 The intimation of duplicity inherent in Othello’s double story of the handkerchief plays out the Puritan commonplace that all fictions are lies. Further, the first napkin story potentially undermines Othello’s assertion in 1.3 that he used no enchantments to win Desdemona’s heart.17 Othello’s use of the object wrought by an enchantress, a ‘charmer’ who ‘could almost read / The thoughts of people’ (3.4.59–60), is precisely one of the ‘indirect … courses’ that he is initially charged with using to ‘subdue’ (a word first uttered in the Senate’s charges against him) Desdemona’s affections (1.3.113). Clearly, if the handkerchief is meant to have the power to ‘subdue’18 husbands, it has failed miserably because Desdemona dropped it in the process of trying to quell the headache induced by Othello’s belief that his brow now bears the cuckold’s horns: ‘Your napkin is too little, / Let it alone’ (3.3.291–2). There is more at play here than sheer inconsistency in these narratives about the handkerchief. This is at a point in the play after Othello has sworn on his knees with Iago to kill his wife. Thus, far from being a neutral, objective narrative, this is a story intended to terrify her – just as the jealous husband, Harebrain, in Middleton’s comedy A Mad World My Masters seeks to control his wife with horrific stores of damnation: ‘Terrify her, terrify her!’ (1.2).
Many commentators have assumed that Shakespeare simply made an error in the double napkin narrative, one that is inconspicuous in performance.19 In so doing, such readings trivialize the handkerchief along the lines of that entertaining but nonetheless undeniably obtuse early commentator on the play, Thomas Rymer. For it is not the ontological status of the handkerchief itself that is momentous, but rather its discursive function. That is to say, what accords an object symbolic significance as talisman or fetish, is the story that attaches to it. Audiences tend not to notice the discrepancy in Othello’s mythmaking around the handkerchief, in part because he unequivocally asserts its truth in response to Desdemona’s horrified question: ‘Is’t possible?’ (3.4.70): ‘ ’Tis true … / And it was dyed in mummy, which the skillful / Conserved of maidens’ hearts’ (3.4.71–7).
The myth does not tell us how the maidens’ hearts were procured or whether they died of natural causes, or whether they were butchered specifically for the purpose of making the dye, black mummy, which denotes Othello’s alienation from all that is Venetian.20 There are ominous, indeed grisly, intimations here that resonate with Othello’s later promise to dispatch Desdemona by violent means: ‘I will chop her into messes!’ (4.1.197). In a recursive gesture characteristic of Ovidian myth, these violently dismembered ‘messes’ (‘portions of meat; pulpy or semi-liquid food’)21, bring us back to the spectre of ‘the cannibals that each other eat’ at the start of the play. While for her father, Desdemona is the victim of Othello’s potent narrative, here she is one of the greedy Anthropophagi, a devouring man-eater. Yet, Desdemona, who earlier listened to far-fetched stories of cannibalism, ‘the cannibals that each other eat, / The Anthropophagi’ (1.3.144–5), and would ‘with a greedy ear / Devour up my discourse’ (1.3.150–1), has by Act IV herself become, so to speak, a serving portion. E. A. J. Honigmann’s note on the somatically confused image of the ‘greedy ear’ that substitutes the ear for the mouth while intimating and foreshadowing the randomly butchered body parts of ‘messes’, shows that it has stronger implications than the sense that Desdemona has been hanging on Othello’s every word. In Macbeth what is being ingested is toxic but is devoured with indiscriminate animal appetite: ‘greedily devour the treacherous bait’ (3.1.128). Similarly, in Sonnet 129, the poet’s post-coital condition is described as ‘hated as a swallowed bayt, On purpose layd to make the taker mad’. Desdemona’s greed connotes the voracity of Erysichthon, who was punished by the gods with insatiable hunger, and who finally eats himself. He thus reached what Leonard Barkan calls ‘the outer limits of metamorphosis’.22 Indeed, the connection between this first story and the subsequent stories about the handkerchief is specifically Ovidian. The Metamorphosis is replete with images of cannibalism, and at the poem’s conclusion, the Pythagorean defence of vegetarianism argues that carnivores are cannibals.23 Leonard Barkan observes: ‘Cannibalism is the ultimate extension of metamorphosis and its ultimate crime. If transformation bridges organisms and the universe via a corporeal metaphor, then it can all be reduced to a terrible kind of eating.’24
In the double story of the handkerchief, then, we enter the complex and mysterious etiology of myth that undermines what Kenneth Gross calls ‘the artifactual status of the handkerchief’. This is a story not of beginnings, which belong to human history, but of origins, which belong to the quasi-divine territory of myth where there is no requirement either for linearity or consistency and where the story of human culture to be told over and over again is that of the necessity of exogamy and the fears that attend it.25
In Othello, both men and women are susceptible to the power of fiction, to the plausibility of misrepresentation. A further terrible suspicion looms, however, that the world is invented rather than known. By this I mean that inherent in Shakespeare’s tragic scepticism here is the fear that truth is not simply hidden and obfuscated in the slippery exchanges between appearance and reality and the world is not there waiting to be known, but is being variously created, wrought, remodelled, built, imagined, invented, demolished, desecrated or distorted by language and narrative strategy. Far from being the harmless entertainment for women that it is in The Winter’s Tale, in Othello there is a terrifying tragic apprehension of the power of fiction: to kill those who consume it.
1William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann, 3rd edn. Arden Shakespeare, 1996.
2William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. John A. Pitcher, 3rd edn. Arden Shakespeare, 2010.
3For critical accounts of this phenomenon, see Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York, 1987). Janet M. Todd, Feminist Literary History (New York, 1988). Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson And Fielding (Whitefish, MT, 2010). Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (Oxford and New York, 1986).
4Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London and New York, 2005), pp. 26–7.
5Lena Cowen Orlin points out that Desdemona’s disposition comports with another genre poised between the fictive ideal and the social real, namely that of the conduct book, ‘Desdemona’s Disposition’ in Shirley Nelson Garner and Madelon Sprengnether, Shakespearean Tragedy and Gender (Bloomington, IN, 1996), pp. 171–92.
6I am grateful to Deanne Williams for this point.
7James A. Knapp, ‘“Ocular Proof”: Archival Revelations and Aesthetic Response’, Poetics Today, 24, 4 (Winter 2003), 695–727, 715.
8Despite the editorial emendation of ‘believe’ to ‘relieve’ by Honigmann among others on grounds of military strategy, the juxtaposition of belief with truth and of appearance with reality in the Ottomans’ attempt to distract the Venetians with a ‘pageant’ of ships towards Rhodes rehearse what will be the crucial terms of this tragedy.
9Two important examinations of evidentiary standards are Frances E. Dolan, True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England, 1st edn (Philadelphia, 2013) and Holger Schott Syme, Theatre and Testimony in Shakespeare’s England: A Culture of Mediation (Cambridge and New York, 2012).
10Dympna Callaghan, Who Was William Shakespeare? An Introduction to the Life and Works, 1st edn (Oxford, 2013), pp. 215–16.
11William Shakespeare, Cymbeline, ed. Roger Warren (Oxford, 1998).
12William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. Michael Neill (New York, 2006), p. 224.
13Ibid.
14Iago also succumbs to storytelling in the form of gossip about Emilia’s alleged infidelity.
15Barbara Nathan Hardy, Shakespeare’s Storytellers: Dramatic Narration (London and Chester Springs, PA, 1997), p. 58.
16Ibid, p. 62.
17William Shakespeare, Othello: Texts and Contexts ed. Kim Hall (New York, 2006), p. 12. On the wider significance of witchcraft here, see Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca, NY, 1994), pp. 207–15.
18There is a connection here between the handkerchief and Sidney’s Old Arcadia where the recipe for the potion that makes Basileus appear dead is initially said to belong to the Kings of Cyprus but is subsequently discovered to have been manufactured by Gynacia’s grandmother to ‘subdue’ a young nobleman into marrying her. As David Houston Wood points out, both Sidney and Shakespeare’s stories involve the ‘representation of female autonomy and power,’ Time, Narrative, and Emotion in Early Modern England (Farnham, 2009), p. 62.
19Michael C. Andrews, ‘Honest Othello: The Handkerchief Once More’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 13, 2 (1 April 1973), 273–84 (283).
20Virginia Mason Vaughan, Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge and New York, 1994), p. 33.
21Neill, p. 336.
22Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven, CT, 1990), p. 92.
23Ibid.
24Ibid.
25Knapp, p.716.
26‘Metamorphosis is a figure for all the fears and necessities of exogamy, and so stories of metamorphosis are stories of pursuit, of travel, or unfamiliar and alien loves’, Barkan, p. 14.