Othello Page 5
The most colorful of these paranoid husbands appears in Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour (1598), a play Shakespeare himself had acted in. We cannot know whether or not his own experience on the comic stage prompted him to explore the tragic implications of sexual suspicion. Nor can we say whether he knew such impulses personally, as a biographical reading of the sonnets would suggest. In either or both cases, Shakespeare deliberately invokes the language, the imaginative delirium, and the furious motion of the comic type in his creation of Othello. Here is Jonson's suspicious husband, a paranoid merchant whose name, Thorello, must in this context be taken as significant:
Who will not judge him worthy to be robbed,
That sets his doors wide open to a thief
And shows the felon where his treasure lies?
Again, what earthy spirit but will attempt
To taste the fruit of beauty's golden tree
When leaden sleep seals up the dragon's eye?
(Every Man in His Humour,
quarto text, III.1.14-21)
A Jacobean audience would have been unlikely to miss Othello's appropriation of such language: the comic husband's metaphors of robbery, his rhetorical questions, his laments at being tortured by knowledge, his obsession with images of bestiality, his increasing misogyny, his fantasies of brutal revenge. "I found not Cassio's kisses on her lips. He that is robbed, not wanting what is stol'n, Let him not know't, and he's not robbed at all" (III.3.341-43): this wish for oblivion is only one of many moments when Othello's speech and thought intersect with those of his comic double. To an audience anticipating tragedy, recognition of such parallels must have been disorienting. Confronted with comic traits in a tragic environment, the spectator is tempted toward the conventional, scornful response and is baited with the false promise of resolution. But laughter is forestalled by the seriousness of the context and consciousness of the tragic mode, and providence fails to intervene. The tragic hero's descent into such unseemly behavior increases the depth and intensifies the significance of the tragic fall. In fact, the condescension Othello's behavior has evoked in critics over the centuries suggests that the playwright's audacious stroke was a success.
Shakespeare's identification of Othello with Thorello is one element in a comprehensive strategy: he has refitted the machinery of comedy to augment the tragic power of the play. (Romeo and Juliet is another tragedy that makes use of just such cues; similarly, the multiple versions of the Lear story, before Shakespeare took it up, end happily.) The dramatist frames the story of Othello as a comedy gone wrong, a look at what happens after the wedding banquet, Act Six of one of his romantic comedies. The first act resembles a comedy in miniature: the setting of the first two scenes, the street, is a convention not of tragedy but of Roman and Italian comedy. The action involves an elopement between a man and a young woman, a clever subordinate who serves the hero, a competitor for the hand of the bride, an irascible father seeking to undo the marriage, and a public recognition and sanction of the union. A veteran theatergoer might have noted the parallels with Much Ado About Nothing (1598), a comedy also derived from Italian sources: the "Italian" setting, a slandered bride, a conniving, hateful officer, and an irrational, inexperienced bridegroom. Even the journey to Cyprus, a dangerous and unstable island, famous as the birthplace of Venus, inverts the Shakespearean journey to a green world that fosters revelation and emotional reordering in the romantic comedies.
These comic affinities enrich Shakespeare's tragic representation by producing an unsparing critique of comic optimism. The correspondences are not exact, of course, and most pertain to the opening movement of the tragedy, but such comic staples invite familiar reactions that the playwright then foils by driving the narrative in a contrary direction. The resemblances of setting and character matter less than the meanings to which they contribute and the responses to which an audience is prompted. Othello is a penetrating examination of the nature of evil, particularly its destructive capacity in the realm of love. A precondition of appreciating that portrayal is recognizing Shakespeare's challenge to the affirmations that normally attend the comic ending.
Othello was performed at court on November 2, 1604, perhaps as a new play, perhaps new only to the new king. A scholarly effort to push composition of the play as far back as 1602 has reopened the question of its date, but wherever between 1602 and 1604 we place it, we must acknowledge that the tragedy appeared at a pivotal moment in Shakespeare's creative life. The five years between 1599 and 1604 represent an unsettled period in his artistic development, a phase that sees a transition from the comedies and histories that dominated his first decade to the tragedies and romances that characterized the second. A list of titles from this period, even though their precise chronology is uncertain, indicates the vast range of tonal emphasis: As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Henry V, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure. Most of these plays display the characteristics of more than one dramatic mode. Structurally, Henry V is a comedy ending in a marriage, although the price of its "festive" conclusion is high. Troilus embodies a kind of formal impasse, poised between comedy and tragedy. In moving from comedy to tragedy, the playwright was testing permutations of the major dramatic modes, shading the comedies with potentially tragic insights and drawing upon comic contrasts in telling a tragic story. Whether Othello was written in the middle of this phase or even last in the sequence of works, it clearly partakes of and benefits from what might be called their tonal ambiguity or formal instability. Shakespeare seems to have been exploring the interdependence of comedy and tragedy, exploiting the effects of each mode to test their antithetical conceptions of experience. Tragedy investigates and represents the nature of evil by allowing glimpses of harmony and comic solution. Thus Shakespeare's repeated reference to comic convention sharpens the definition of evil by teasing the audience with intimations of its opposite.
The evil that haunts Othello is especially engrossing because it is intimately related to Shakespeare's own livelihood. In telling a story of deception and revenge the playwright confronts the dangers of illusion, the malignancy of the imagination, the threat of theater itself. Imagination is the great affirmative faculty in most of his comedies, serving Petruchio and Rosalind and other well-meaning lovers and players as a creative, therapeutic, unifying force. A Midsummer Night's Dream is the playwright's defense of fantasy and, beyond that, his supreme apology for the stage. In the darkness of the Athenian wood, imagination is associated with dreams, vision, fantasy, fancy, fiction, and finally with love. It is a source of joy, of revelation, of access to the divine. In the last scene of Dream, the benighted Duke Theseus reflects condescendingly on the uses of imagination and associates it with the lunatic, the lover, and the poet. Some eight years after composing that derisive indictment, Shakespeare himself begins to take seriously the pernicious effects of the faculty that he has been accustomed to celebrate, confronting and criticizing the imaginative sources of his own art.
The turn to tragedy both results from and helps to nourish Shakespeare's growing anxiety about the fraudulence of theatricality and disgust at the ease with which the creative faculty may be abused. The mature comedies stage previews of this peril, as in Twelfth Night, where Malvolio confuses erotic fantasies with facts. But the tragic frame presents the consequences of the depraved or perverted imagination as fatal, not risible: in Othello creativity serves murder and revenge. Theseus's lunatic, lover, and poet all appear in Othello, albeit in fragmented and burlesqued forms. Narcissism is the only kind of love Iago displays, but he is both a poet, or maker of fictions, and a lunatic, a man whose imagination has poisoned him so that he takes pleasure in the invention and performance of malicious acts. Othello as lover is the key to the plot, of course, but he is also a spinner of tales whose own responsive imagination Iago manages to contaminate with filthy images, and by the fourth act he has descended into a kind of madness. Desdemona, too, is credited with imaginative insigh
t. Not only does she respond empathetically to Othello's exotic tales, but she also "saw Othello's visage in his mind" (I.3.252): looking beyond the body to the heart and spirit, she loves so profoundly that she seems to legitimize Theseus's scornful remark about the lover's seeing "Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt." The principal players, in other words, all embody or are associated with some aspect of the imagination, and they either misuse or are themselves abused by the very quality that Shakespeare had spent the first decade of his career affirming.
Othello may be read as an allegory of that career, a kind of artistic biography in which the brief symbiotic marriage of tragedy and comedy (in, say, Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure) comes to an end, and tragedy smothers comedy. According to this scenario, the part of the angry father is taken by Sir Philip Sidney, who had warned, in the Apology for Poetry, against dramatic miscegenation, against mixing the kings of tragedy and the clowns of comedy. But Shakespeare's rejection of the mixed form involves not just decorum but a philosophical metamorphosis. Increasingly conscious of the strength and ubiquity of evil in the mortal world, the playwright begins to distrust the representational fidelity of the comic mode and, artistically speaking, allows the suspicious and darker form to murder it. The subsequent tragedies, King Lear, Timon of Athens, and Macbeth, are among Shakespeare's most dispiriting works, somber expositions of the duplicity of theater and the danger of illusion as manifested in feigning daughters, flattering friends, equivocal witches. Comedy has very little place in these play-worlds. The comic cues and foils that function so ironically in Othello are striking because, for the next few years, Shakespeare banishes them from his drama. And then, turning from tragedy to romance, he will reverse the process, employing the structures and persons of tragedy to intensify the felicity of the comic or romantic ending.
Tragedy has proven a durable and esteemed form through the centuries because it raises profound questions, elicits meanings from serious stories, explores the mysteries of experience. To see Othello as a tale of jealousy as Rymer and others have done is to mistake a partial manifestation of the play's subject for the subject itself. Jealousy is an emotional symptom. The real subject of Othello is the fragility of love, its inability to survive the corrosive conditions of a tragic world. Likewise, Iago is not ultimately responsible for the tragedy: he supplies the weapon, but Othello uses it on himself. Shakespeare represents and permits the audience to savor the potential joys of human love - physical, emotional, spiritual - and then depicts the brutal self-destruction of those possibilities. Looking hard at human experience through the dark filter of tragedy, the playwright portrays the vulnerability of mortals, even the most gifted and accomplished, to the forces of hatred and fear within themselves.
If Othello's tragedy is the paradoxical self-annihilation of his imaginative talent, a trait that ought to be beneficent and consolatory, then it is hard not to see Shakespeare the artist as exploring his own distinctive vulnerability. At the same time, however, he could not have been unaware of the ironic triumph that the play itself constitutes, an imaginative tour de force about the hazards of the imagination. Perhaps it is troubling to read Othello as Shakespeare's self-indictment, and yet the corollary to that reading is the recognition that his self-scrutiny produced a work of art that still disturbs, moves, and even consoles us.
RUSS MCDONALD University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Note on the Text
OTHELLO PRESENTS AN EDITOR with formidable textual problems. The play was first printed in quarto (Q) by Thomas Walkley in 1622, just a year before its appearance in the collection known today as the First Folio (F). The two texts are substantially different. F contains more than 150 lines not found in Q; Q has some 16 lines absent from F. And this is only the beginning: the two texts also exhibit more than 1,000 lexical variants. One obvious and important discrepancy is that Q omits Desdemona's "Willow Song." Another is that F omits virtually all instances of profanity and direct references to the deity, in keeping with the Parliamentary statute of 1606 forbidding blasphemy in stage plays. For example, at V.2.219, F gives Emilia the line "Oh heauen! oh heauenly Powres!" In Q she says, "O God! O heauenly God!" It appears, then, that the copy text for Q originated either before 1606 or else much later, when the decree was no longer strictly enforced. But even this is not certain.
The stumbling block in any effort to produce a modern text is that no one has been able to establish decisively the nature of the manuscripts used in the preparation of Q and F. Was Q based on an authorial manuscript? Was F? Was either printed from a theater promptbook? If so, was it F or Q? Might there have been more than one authorial manuscript, or a scribal and an authorial manuscript? Was F perhaps printed from Q, with reference to an authorial manuscript or prompt copy as a source for corrections? Many theories and diagrams and solutions have been proposed, and none has taken hold. Readers interested in pursuing the details and the implications of these problems are urged to consult Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, John Jowett, and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford, 1987), E.A.J. Honigmann, The Texts of "Othello" and Shakespearian Revision (1996), the discussions of text in Honigmann's Arden edition (1997) and Norman Sanders's New Cam-bridge edition (1984), and Scott McMillin, "The Othello Quarto and the 'Foul-Paper' Hypothesis," Shakespeare Quarterly, 51 (2000): 67-85.
Most editors and textual scholars have agreed that F is the superior text, although Q presents many readings that seem preferable. Many previous editors, faced with the problem of two different words (F's "Judean" versus Q's "Indian" in Othello's final speech, for example) and lacking bibliographical evidence to guide them, often made their textual choice on grounds of taste. In other words, they usually chose F, the slightly longer version, as their copy text, but substituted words or phrases from Q on a case-by-case basis. The present edition uses F as the copy text and attempts to maintain a relatively strict policy on substitution or emendation. Thus, F's reading is retained if it seems at all possible - i.e., if it can be made to make sense, even if Q's alternative seems more appealing logically or artistically. The rationale for this practice is that each of the first two printings, F and Q, offers a version of the play that was satisfactory to someone - author or actor or editor or compiler - at about the time the play was written; that F, even with its weaknesses, is probably the better of these two alternatives; and that to conflate the two texts by selecting preferable readings gives the modern reader a version unknown in the early seventeenth century. In cases where F is clearly corrupt or unintelligible, the Q reading (if available) has been accepted. The one major exception to such strict fidelity to F involves censorship: on the grounds that the oaths and references to God were removed from F in response to censorship, I have restored these words with reference to Q. In some very rare cases, when the compositors of F seem to have made an error, the Q reading has been substituted. For example, at II.1.42, F's "Arriuancie" is probably a result of eye-skip from "expectancie" in the previous line; thus, Q's "arriuance" has been adopted. Stage directions from the folio are in italics only; those supplied (from Q and from theatrical necessity) to fill out the performance are placed within brackets.
The text produced here is imperfect, but so must be any text of this play. Below are listed all cases in which this edition departs from F (except for typographical errors). The adopted reading is printed in italics, followed by its source in parentheses: Q is the First Quarto, of 1622; Q2 is the Second Quarto, of 1630; names are those of previous editors. The rejected folio reading is given in roman.
The Names of the Actors (printed at the end of the text in F)
I.1 1 Tush (Q) omitted 4 'Sblood (Q) omitted 28 other (Q) others 32 God (Q) omitted 65 full (Q) fall; thick-lips (Q) Thicks-lips 85 Zounds (Q) omitted 107 Zounds (Q) omitted 121 odd-even (Malone) odde Euen 152 pains (Q) apines 180 night (Q) might
I.2 34 duke (Q) Dukes 68 darlings (Q) Deareling 84 Where (Q) Whether 87 I (Q) omitted
I.3 59 ALL (Q) Sen. 106 DUKE (Q)
omitted 130 battles (Q) Battle; fortunes (Q) fortune 141 and (Q) omitted; heads (Q) head 143 other (Q) others 144 anthropophagi (Q) Antropophague 145 Do grow (Q) Grew 147 thence (Q) hence 155 intentively (Q) instinctiuely 201 Into your favor (Q) omitted 219 ear (Q) eares 230 couch (Pope) Coach 248 did (Q) omitted 263-64 heat - the young affects / In me defunct - (Capell) heat the yong affects / In my defunct, 270 instruments (Q) Instrument 299 worldly (Q) wordly; matters (Q) matter 326 beam (Theobald) braine 377 a snipe (Q) Snpe 380 H'as (Q) She ha's
II.1 33 prays (Q) praye 42 arrivance (Q) Arriuancie 65 ingener (Steevens) Ingeniuer 82 And bring all Cyprus comfort! (Q) omitted 88 me (Q) omitted 93 (Within) A sail, a sail! [A shot.] But hark. A sail! (Collier) But hearke, a Saile. / Within. A Saile, a Saile. 94 their (Q) this 213 hither (Q) thither 226 again (Q) a game 240 has (Q) he's 258-59 mutualities (Q) mutabilities 303 rank (Q) right