Othello Read online

  (II.2.40-44)

  Editors have three early texts of this play to work from, two quarto texts and the folio. Here is how the First Quarto (1597) reads: Whats Montagne? It is nor band nor foote,

  Nor arme, nor face, nor any other part.

  Whats in a name ? That which we call a Rofe,

  By any other name would smell as sweet:

  Here is the Second Quarto (1599): Whats Mountague ? it is nor hand nor foote,

  Nor arme nor face, o be fome other name

  Belonging to a man.

  Whats in a name that which we call a rose,

  By any other word would smell as sweete,

  And here is the First Folio (1623):

  There is in fact no early text that reads as our modern text does - and this is the most famous speech in the play. Instead, we have three quite different texts, all of which are clearly some version of the same speech, but none of which seems to us a final or satisfactory version. The transcendently beautiful passage in modern editions is an editorial invention: editors have succeeded in conflating and revising the three versions into something we recognize as great poetry. Is this what Shakespeare "really" wrote? Who can say? What we can say is that Shakespeare always had performance, not a book, in mind.

  Books About the Shakespeare Texts

  The standard study of the printing history of the First Folio is W. W. Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio (1955). J. K. Walton, The Quarto Copy for the First Folio of Shakespeare (1971), is a useful survey of the relation of the quartos to the folio. The second edition of Charlton Hinman's Norton Facsimile of the First Folio (1996), with a new introduction by Peter Blayney, is indispensable. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, keyed to the Oxford text, gives a comprehensive survey of the editorial situation for all the plays and poems.

  THE GENERAL EDITORS

  Introduction

  WHY HAS OTHELLO always stood slightly apart from the other tragedies generally acknowledged to be among Shakespeare's supreme achievements? Regularly grouped with Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, it is sometimes described as the most dramatic, the most playable, of the great tragedies, but such praise often masks a dubious assessment of its artistic status. Even those who most admire it, however, agree that Othello exhibits distinctive qualities that separate it from its dramatic kin. First, its title character is different. The Moor of Venice differs conspicuously from the other tragic heroes, differs from the English audience for which he was created, differs from the rest of the cast of Othello. The playwright takes pains to depict Othello as the alien whose strangeness is both fascinating and threatening. Second, the play's subject is unusual for tragedy, neither a struggle for control of the state nor a study of ancient heroism nor royal biography. Rather, Othello is about love - its beauty, its fragility, its vulnerability to hate. The passions represented seem private or perhaps narrow, not historically momentous. Here the battle for power is domestic, emotional, and personal.

  George Bernard Shaw, commenting on Verdi's operatic version, mischievously remarked that "instead of Otello being an Italian opera written in the style of Shakespeare, Othello is a play written by Shakespeare in the style of Italian opera. It is quite peculiar among his works in this respect . . . and the plot is a pure farce plot." Shaw's flippant analysis is not atypical. Othello and Othello are distinctive in having earned the condescension, even scorn, of certain eloquent critics, from Thomas Rymer in the seventeenth century to F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot in the twentieth. Rymer belittled the play's pretensions to tragic grandeur, lampooning it as a sign of what happens when "Maidens of quality . . . run away with Blackamoors." Eliot pitilessly complained that in the final, lyrical speech before his suicide Othello was "thinking about himself," "endeavouring to escape reality," and merely "cheering himself up."

  It is doubtful that such reactions would have surprised the playwright. Shakespeare must have known that audiences would find his exotic hero unsettling, and he must have wanted it that way. So many of his dramatic choices in Othello seem original or surprising that they imply a deliberate effort to frustrate the expectations of the audience. All tragedy, of course, depends upon the confounding of expectation, and playwrights from Aeschylus forward have prized and magnified the ironies of a spectacular reversal of fortune. But in choosing and adapting a short story about a foolish captain who murders his wife, a tale first published in Italian by Giraldo Cinthio in 1565, Shakespeare has repeatedly made the difficult, the original choice. In the nature of his hero, the presentation of his villain, the addition and deepening of the minor figures, the pace of the action, the metadramatic layering, the risky reference to the staples of comedy - in each of these important respects, as in lesser ones, he has sought the unexpected effect. Examined in theatrical and historical context, Othello emerges as the product of an artistic imagination enlarging the boundaries of the theatrical medium, overturning conventions but using the spectator's familiarity with those conventions to intensify the force of their rejection. And placed in the context of its creator's career, the play becomes a skeptical review of his own ten-year commitment to the affirmations of comedy and the benefits of theatrical illusion.

  Discussion of tragedy often begins with a treatment of the hero, and here such a procedure is especially appropriate because the play seems to demand immediate attention to its characters. For the twenty-first-century reader or playgoer, particularly in America, the problem of race is likely to be the primary consideration. This is a normal response, since every perceiver brings to every work of art a distinctive set of cultural determinants, an internalized batch of assumptions, opinions, blind spots, and wishes. That personal response should not be dismissed, since readers today cannot ignore the cultural centrality of race and its associated social and moral problems - slavery, oppression, intolerance, resentment, prejudice, and class conflict. Present concerns should be supplemented, however, with an awareness of the theatrical, historical, and cultural conditions obtaining when the play was written and first performed. To do so is not to suppress our own reactions or to minimize the play's relevance to current social or ethical issues. It is, rather, to understand our own reactions better by examining what the work might have meant to an earlier, different generation of people. Absorbing the prominent strain of black and white imagery in the text, our consciousness of race probably prompts us to think of the title character as an African, specifically a sub-Saharan African. This is how he is usually played in the modern theater. To the audience at the Globe, however, Othello's origins and appearance were probably less definite.

  The Tragedy of Othello the Moor of Venice. It is worth pondering the distinctive mixture of associations the folio title would have ignited in the early modern mind. "Othello" is an unusual name, apparently a Shakespearean coinage (his counterpart in the source is unnamed). It sounds exotic or at least Mediterranean, deriving perhaps from an existing Italian name, "Otello," and (perhaps also) suggesting the North African "Otho" or "Othoman" or "Ottoman." Even stranger is the combination of locative nouns that follows the name, suggesting inconsistency, hybridity, the crossing of cultures. To begin with "Moor," the Oxford English Dictionary is of some help. In the ancient world, a Moor was

  a native of Mauretania, a region of Northern Africa corresponding to parts of Morocco and Algeria. In later times, one belonging to the people of mixed Berber and Arab race, Muslim in religion, who constitute the bulk of the population of North-western Africa, and who in the 8th c. conquered Spain. In the Middle Ages, and as late as the 17th c., the Moors were commonly supposed to be mostly black or very swarthy (though the existence of "white Moors" was recognized), and hence the word was often used for "negro"; cf. BLACKAMOOR.

  Clearly the noun has meant different things to different people in different cultures at different times. The disparity between fact and opinion ("commonly supposed") is implicit here, even the disparity between opinions ("commonly supposed to be mostl
y black . . . though the existence of 'white Moors' was recognized"). When Iago disparages Othello as "a Barbary horse," he identifies him with the North African Muslim nation of Barbary, home of the Berbers. But the Moor has left his homeland and is now employed by the Duke of Venice, a city with a definite reputation in the seventeenth century. Venice was a hybrid, a metropolis on the Italian peninsula and yet a separate republic with widespread economic interests; unquestionably it was one of the centers of European civilization. Yet various texts of the period (e.g., Ben Jonson's Volpone) attest to the English opinion of Venice as dangerous and alluring, and indeed throughout the world the city was famous for its courtesans, its sophistication and potential treachery, its mystery. Shakespeare's Venetian senators are nobody's fools - they instantly penetrate the Turks' nautical trick (I.3) - and Iago, when he impugns Desdemona's fidelity, summons up images of the notoriously duplicitous Venetian female. The sum of these conflicting signals is that none of the nouns in the title - not even "Tragedy" - is stable or plain in its signification.

  Was Shakespeare's Othello black? The question itself demands interrogation, specifically the word "black." In twenty-first-century terms, the answer is "no." Othello was first acted by Richard Burbage, the principal tragedian of the King's Men, who played Richard III and probably Hamlet; he is unlikely to have resembled what would today be considered an African. But in early modern terms, the answer could be some form of "yes." The Elizabethan ideal of human beauty was what was called "fair," meaning light skin and either light brown or blond hair. Its opposite, the brunet, or person with darker skin or black hair, was known as "black" or "dark." Desdemona distinguishes, in her banter with Iago upon landing at Cyprus, between the "fair" (or blond) woman and the "black" (or dark) woman. Such definitions are also pertinent to the identity of the "Dark Lady" of Shakespeare's sonnets, "a woman colored ill" (Sonnet 144). In other words, Burbage's physical appearance may have been sufficiently "dark" or "black" to prompt, or at least to correspond to, the trait's development in Shakespeare's text.

  Throughout the first scene Iago and Roderigo trade racist insults about Othello: "thick-lips," "lascivious Moor," "old black ram," "Barbary horse." But since these epithets proceed from hatred, which tends to foster caricature, they are not reliable guides to appearance. Burbage might have worn cork makeup to appear swarthy or ostensibly African: at court in 1605, Queen Anne and her ladies applied burnt cork to their faces and forearms when they performed in Jonson's Masque of Blackness. The question of this Moor's identity is further muddled by the matter of dress: since the London theater companies were known for impressive costumes, we might suppose that robes or other distinctive clothing might have been used to suggest Othello's lineage. But it is just as likely, given his profession, that Othello was dressed as a Venetian general. Or, considering the sketchy evidence about costuming on the early modern stage, Burbage's Moor may also have looked something like a Londoner, in doublet and hose. All of these qualifications and inconsistencies suggest that we cannot know exactly what Shakespeare's audience would have assumed about Othello's race.

  In fact, we cannot know what Shakespeare's audience thought about the question of "race" at all. Categories of nationality and ethnicity in Shakespeare's England seem to have been more fluid than we are inclined to think or at least not to have existed in the relatively definite forms that obtain today. People recognized different racial characteristics and national types, of course, and these were often the source of prejudice. Queen Elizabeth signed a proclamation to deport some eighty-nine "Negroes and Blackamoors," at least partly because they were taking work away from native-born Englishmen: the text of the order refers repeatedly to "people of that kind." Othello's "kind" is entangled with the similarly complex matter of social station. Shakespeare has taken pains to emphasize the Moor's aristocratic roots - "I fetch my life and being / From men of royal siege [rank]" (I.2.21-22) - to insist that in global terms his status is no less exalted than that of Desdemona and her father. The effectiveness of his effort is illustrated in the writing of Charles Gildon, a critic who in 1694 published a passionate refutation of Thomas Rymer's bigoted analysis:

  There is no reason in the nature of things why a Negro of equal Birth and Merit should not be on an equal bottom with a German, Hollander, French-man, &c. . . . Othello being of Royal Blood and a Christian, where is the disparity of the Match? If either side is advanc'd, 'tis Desdemona.

  Gildon's views on race and intermarriage, probably not what we would expect from a late-seventeenth-century Englishman, attest to the difficulty of safely generalizing about early modern audiences' responses to Othello.

  We may confidently declare, however, that a Moor was not an obvious choice as the hero of a tragedy circa 1604. Many Londoners had seen Africans in their city, owing to increased commerce with the southern hemisphere and the West Indies, and Elizabeth received an ambassador and his retinue from the King of Barbary in 1600 and 1601. This envoy may even have seen the performances by the Lord Chamberlain's Men at court during his stay; more to the point, they (and their principal playwright) may have seen him. Many Londoners had seen Moors on the stage in the 1590s, notably in plays by George Peele and Christopher Marlowe, and in the collaborative Lust's Dominion (1600). Shakespeare himself had already depicted two. In Titus Andronicus, Aaron is the wicked accomplice of Tamora, vicious Queen of the Goths; to the Elizabethan spectator, the darkness of his skin denoted the impurity of his soul. The physical appearance of the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice is not so explicitly described, although Portia sends him away with a swipe at his "complexion." As a rule Elizabethan playwrights employed their Moorish characters as manifestations of the Other, strangers or aliens whose obvious physical difference raised disturbing questions about community and nationhood, cultural difference, and unarticulated assumptions about social organization. In The Merchant of Venice the alien status of the Moroccan prince is matched by that of his Aragonian counterpart - in the 1590s Spaniards were often depicted as demonic - and by one of Shakespeare's most memorable and troubling outsiders, Shylock the Jew. These theatrical predecessors can often evoke derision, occasionally scorn, and sometimes even sympathy and respect from other characters and from the audience, but none displays the kind of charisma or invites exactly the degree of admiration that Othello inspires. The meaningful hybridity latent in the phrase "The Moor of Venice" is reflected in Othello's status as both stranger and hero.

  This product of Shakespeare's audacity is one of the most original and enigmatic characters in world drama. Othello is a man of extremes, an African prince who has spent his life in "the tented field," without a permanent home. Now commissioned to lead the forces of Venice, Othello protects the republic's interests from the "Turks," the barbarians with whom he himself is identified by his enemies and, probably, by a portion of the audience. Early-seventeenth-century Europeans thought of Moors, Turks, and Africans as pagan, but Othello is a Christian, a baptized convert whose Christianity is an important marker of his assimilation into Venice and the values of "civilization." In his marriage to Desdemona, he has traded independence and the masculine realm of the battlefield for emotional commitment and feminine companionship. Accustomed to "feats of broils and battle," Othello is an alien in this realm of domesticity, and Iago will exploit his naivete and diffidence about marriage and women generally. At the beginning of Act Two, the Venetians' sophisticated courtesies and badinage would seem to be predicated on Othello's absence. As soon as his ship lands at Cyprus, the verbal register changes drastically, from Cassio's praise of Desdemona as "a maid / That paragons description and wild fame" (II.1.61-62) to Othello's "O my fair warrior!" (181). The theatrical milieu further complicates the portrait, in that audiences are asked to reconcile the foreign and the familiar. At the first performances this manifestation of the Other was acted by the most famous tragedian in England, and Othello is rarely produced without a major player to take the title part. The strangeness of the character may distance us
, but at the same time we are attracted by Othello's undeniable star quality.

  All these incongruities are consistent with the conventions of tragedy. The tragic figure is usually constructed according to a paradox, as we know from King Lear - the king who is also a fool - and from Hamlet - the brilliant student for whom intelligence proves fatal. For centuries tragic playwrights have created powerful, charismatic men and women whose uncompromising faith in themselves is coupled with an indomitable will. They are devoted to their own subjective vision of the world and their place in it, and this commitment, reinforced by pride or what the Greeks called hubris, bestows upon them both great strength and great vulnerability. Antigone, with her unwavering moral resolution, will see her brother buried even at the cost of her own life. Oedipus will cleanse Thebes by finding and punishing the murderer within the gates. Tragic figures may be described as idealists, adhering to an elevated standard of conduct both admirable and impossible to sustain, and expecting such commitment from those around them. Always these men and women are absolutists, unwilling to bend their principles. As Helen Gardner puts it, "the tragic hero usurps the function of the gods and attempts to remake the world."1

  Othello's distinctive vision is both a product and a guarantor of his military career: he is the veteran leader impatient with failure, unwilling to waver between alternatives, accustomed to seeing things - the pun is unavoidable in this play - in terms of black and white. Uncertainty has no place in his world; indeed, to a military man, it is potentially fatal. Thus his rhetorical ploy before the Senate, "little of this great world can I speak" (I.3.86), is, ironically, fatally true. Like Hamlet, like Lear, he is an innocent. But the simplicity of Othello's construction of reality, his Platonic sense of good and evil - "men should be what they seem" (III.3.128), and his intuitive, martial code of action should not obscure his exceptionallyfertile and sensitive imagination. This imaginative gift is one source of his charisma. It underwrites his narrative and rhetorical success, in that he knows what will impress his listeners, from Brabantio and Desdemona in their initial meetings, to his senatorial judges, to the crowd of onlookers at the tragic conclusion. He imagines and wills himself into a world of nobility and integrity, an ideal realm in which officers do not fail in their duty, wives do not misplace love tokens, evil can be recognized, attacked, and destroyed.