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Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Othello

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 25, 2020 • ( 0 )

Of all Shakespeare’s tragedies . . . Othello is the most painfully exciting and the most terrible. From the moment when the temptation of the hero begins, the reader’s heart and mind are held in a vice, experiencing the extremes of pity and fear, sympathy and repulsion, sickening hope and dreadful expectation. Evil is displayed before him, not indeed with the profusion found in King Lear, but forming, as it were, the soul of a single character, and united with an intellectual superiority so great that he watches its advance fascinated and appalled. He sees it, in itself almost irresistible, aided at every step by fortunate accidents and the innocent mistakes of its victims. He seems to breathe an atmosphere as fateful as that of King Lear , but more confined and oppressive, the darkness not of night but of a close-shut murderous room. His imagination is excited to intense activity, but it is the activity of concentration rather than dilation.

—A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy

Between William Shakespeare’s most expansive and philosophical tragedies— Hamlet and King Lear —is Othello, his most constricted and heart-breaking play. Othello is a train wreck that the audience horrifyingly witnesses, helpless to prevent or look away. If Hamlet is a tragedy about youth, and Lear concerns old age, Othello is a family or domestic tragedy of a middle-aged man in which the fate of kingdoms and the cosmos that hangs in the balance in Hamlet and Lear contracts to the private world of a marriage’s destruction. Following his anatomizing of the painfully introspective intellectual Hamlet, Shakespeare, at the height of his ability to probe human nature and to dramatize it in action and language, treats Hamlet’s temperamental opposite—the man of action. Othello is decisive, confident, and secure in his identity, duty, and place in the world. By the end of the play, he has brought down his world around him with the relentless force that made him a great general turned inward, destroying both what he loved best in another and in himself. That such a man should fall so far and so fast gives the play an almost unbearable momentum. That such a man should unravel so completely, ushered by jealousy and hatred into a bestial worldview that cancels any claims of human virtue and self-less devotion, shocks and horrifies. Othello is generally regarded as Shakespeare’s greatest stage play, the closest he would ever come to conforming to the constrained rules of Aristotelian tragedy. The intensity and focus of Othello is unalleviated by subplots, comic relief, or any mitigation or consolation for the deterioration of the “noble Moor” and his collapse into murder and suicide. At the center of the play’s intrigue is Shakespeare’s most sinister and formidable conceptions of evil in Iago, whose motives and the wellspring of his villainy continue to haunt audiences and critics alike. Indeed, the psychological resonances of the drama, along with its provocative racial and gender themes, have caused Othello, perhaps more than any other of Shakespeare’s plays, to reverberate the loudest with current audiences and commentators. As scholar Edward Pechter has argued, “During the past twenty-five years or so, Othello has become the Shakespearean tragedy of choice, replacing King Lear in the way Lear had earlier replaced Hamlet as the play that speaks most directly and powerfully to current interests.”

Shakespeare derived his plot from Giraldi Cinthio’s “Tale of the Moor,” in the story collection Hecatommithi (1565), reshaping Cinthio’s sensational tale of jealousy, intrigue, and murder in several key ways. In Cinthio’s story, Alfiero, the scheming ensign, lusts after the Moor’s wife, named Disdemona, and after she spurns his advances, Alfiero seeks vengeance by accusing her of adultery with Cassio, the Moor’s lieutenant. Alfiero, like Iago, similarly arouses the Moor’s suspicions by stealing Disdemona’s handkerchief and planting it in Cassio’s bed-room. However, the Moor and Alfiero join forces to kill Disdemona, beating her to death with a stocking filled with sand before pulling down the ceiling on her dead body to conceal the crime as an accident. The Moor is eventually captured, tortured, and slain by Disdemona’s relatives, while the ensign dies during torture for another crime. What is striking about Shakespeare’s alteration of Cinthio’s grisly tale of murder and villainy is the shift of emphasis to the provocation for the murder, the ennobling of Othello as a figure of great stature and dignity to underscore his self-destruction, and the complication of motive for the ensign’s actions. Cinthio’s version of Iago is conventionally driven by jealousy of a superior and lust for his wife. Iago’s motivation is anything but explainable in conventional terms. Dramatically, Shakespeare turns the focus of the play from the shocking crime to its causes and psychic significance, trans-forming Cinthio’s intrigue story of vile murder into one of the greatest dramatic meditations on the nature of love and its destruction.

What makes Othello so unique structurally (and painful to witness) is that it is a tragedy built on a comic foundation. The first two acts of the play enact the standard pattern of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies. The young Venetian noblewoman, Desdemona, has eloped with the middle-aged Othello, the military commander of the armed forces of Venice. Their union is opposed by Desdemona’s father, Brabantio, and by a rival for Desdemona, Roderigo, who in the play’s opening scenes are both provoked against Othello by Iago. Desdemona and Othello, therefore, face the usual challenges of the lovers in a Shakespearean comedy who must contend with the forces of authority, custom, and circumstances allied against their union. The romantic climax comes in the trial scene of act 1, in which Othello success-fully defends himself before the Venetian senate against Brabantio’s charge that Othello has beguiled his daughter, “stol’n from me, and corrupted / By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks.” Calmly and courteously Othello recounts how, despite the differences of age, race, and background, he won Desdemona’s heart by recounting the stories of his exotic life and adventures: “She loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them.” Wonder at Othello’s heroic adventures and compassion for her sympathy have brought the two opposites together—the young, inexperienced Venetian woman and the brave, experienced outsider. Desdemona finally, dramatically appears before the senate to support Othello’s account of their courtship and to balance her obligation to her father and now to her husband based on the claims of love:

My noble father, I do perceive here a divided duty: To you I am bound for life and education; My life and education both do learn me How to respect you; you are the lord of duty; I am hitherto your daughter. But here’s my husband; And so much duty as my mother show’d To you, preferring you before her father, So much I challenge that I may profess Due to the Moor, my lord.

Both Desdemona and Othello defy by their words and gestures the calumnies heaped upon them by Roderigo and Brabantio and vindicate the imperatives of the heart over parental authority and custom. As in a typical Shakespearean comedy, love, tested, triumphs over all opposition.

Vindicated by the duke of Venice and the senate, Othello, accompanied by Desdemona, takes up his military duties in the face of a threatened Turkish invasion, and the lovers are given a triumphal wedding-like procession and marriage ceremony when they disembark on Cyprus. The storm that divides the Venetian fleet also disperses the Turkish threat and clears the way for the lovers’ happy reunion and peaceful enjoyment of their married state. First Cassio lands to deliver the news of Othello’s marriage and, like the best man, supplies glowing praise for the groom and his bride; next Desdemona, accompanied by Iago and his wife, Emilia, enters but must await news of the fate of Othello’s ship. Finally, Othello arrives giving him the opportunity to renew his marriage vows to Desdemona:

It gives me wonder great as my content To see you here before me. O my soul’s joy, If after every tempest come such calms, May the wind blow till they have wakened death, And let the labouring barque climb hills of seas Olympus-high, and duck again as low As hell’s from heaven. If it were now to die ’Twere now to be most happy, for I fear My soul hath content so absolute That not another comfort like to this Succeeds in unknown fate.

The scene crowns love triumphant. The formerly self-sufficient Othello has now staked his life to his faith in Desdemona and their union, and she has done the same. The fulfillment of the wedding night that should come at the climax of the comedy is relocated to act 2, with the aftermath of the courtship and the wedding now taking center stage. Having triumphantly bested the social and natural forces aligned against them, having staked all to the devotion of the other, Desdemona and Othello will not be left to live happily ever after, and the tragedy will grow out of the conditions that made the comedy. Othello, unlike the other Shakespearean comedies, adds three more acts to the romantic drama, shifting from comic affirmation to tragic negation.

Iago reviews Othello’s performance as a lover by stating, “O, you are well tuned now, / But I’ll set down the pegs that make this music.” Iago will now orchestrate discord and disharmony based on a life philosophy totally opposed to the ennobling and selfless concept of love demonstrated by the newlyweds. As Iago asserts to Roderigo, “Virtue? A fig!” Self-interest is all that matters, and love is “merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will.” Othello and Desdemona cannot possibly remain devoted to each other, and, as Iago concludes, “If sanctimony and a frail vow betwixt an err-ing barbarian and a super-subtle Venetian be not too hard for my wits, and all the tribe of hell, thou shalt enjoy her.” The problem of Iago’s motivation to destroy Othello and Desdemona is not that he has too few motives but too many. He offers throughout the play multiple justifi cations for his intrigue: He has been passed over in favor of Cassio; he suspects the Moor and Cassio with his wife, Emilia; he is envious of Cassio’s open nature; and he is desirous of Desdemona himself. No single motive is relied on for long, and the gap between cause and effect, between the pettiness of Iago’s grudges and the monstrousness of his behavior, prompted Samuel Taylor Coleridge in a memorable phrase to characterize Iago’s “motiveless malignity.” There is in Iago a zest for villainy and a delight in destruction, driven more by his hatred and contempt for any who oppose his conception of jungle law than by a conventional naturalistic explanation based on jealousy or envy. Moreover, Shakespeare, by deliberately clouding the issue of Iago’s motive, finds ever more sinister threats in such a character’s apparently bottomless and unmerited hatred and capacity for evil.

Iago will direct the remainder of the play, constructing Othello’s down-fall out of the flimsiest evidence and playing on the strengths and weaknesses of Othello’s nature and the doubts that erode Othello’s faith in Desdemona. Act 3, one of the wonders of the stage, anatomizes Othello’s psychic descent from perfect contentment in his new wife to complete loathing, from a worldview in which everything is as it appears to one in which nothing is as it seems. Iago leads Othello to suspect that love and devotion are shams disguising the basest of animalistic instincts. Misled by the handkerchief, his love token to Desdemona, that Iago has planted in Cassio’s room and by a partially overheard conversation between Iago and Cassio, Othello, by the end of act 3, forsakes his wife and engages himself in a perverse version of the marriage ceremony of act 2 to Iago. As the pair kneels together, they exchange vows:

Iago: Witness you ever-burning lights above, You elements that clip us round about, Witness that here Iago doth give up The execution of his wit, hands, heart To wronged Othello’s service. Let him command, And to obey shall be in me remorse, What bloody business ever.

Othello: I greet thy love, Not with vain thanks, but with acceptance bounteous, And will upon the instant put thee to’t. Within these three days let me hear thee say That Cassio’s not alive.

Iago: My friend is dead. ’Tis done at your request; but let her live.

Othello: Damn her, lewd minx! O, damn her, damn her! Come, go with me apart. I will withdraw To furnish me with some swift means of death For the fair devil. Now art thou my lieutenant.

Iago: I am your own for ever.

This scene has suggested to some critics that Iago’s true motivation for destroying the marriage of Desdemona and Othello is a repressed homosexual love for Othello. An equal case can be made that Iago here completes his role as Vice, borrowed from the medieval morality plays, sealing the Faustian bargain for Othello’s soul in this mock or black marriage scene.

The play moves relentlessly from here to catastrophe as Othello delivers justice to those he is convinced have wronged him. As he attempts to carry out his execution of Desdemona, she for the first time realizes his charges against her and his utter delusion. Ignoring her appeals for mercy and avowals of innocence, Othello smothers her moments before Emilia arrives with the proof of Desdemona’s innocence and Iago’s villainy. Othello must now face the realization of what he has done. He turns to Iago, who has been brought before him to know the reason for his actions. Iago replies: “Demand me nothing; what you know, you know: / From this time forth I never will speak word.” By Iago’s exiting the stage, closing access to his motives, the focus remains firmly on Othello, not as Iago’s victim, but as his own. His final speech mixes together the acknowledgment of what he was and what he has become, who he is and how he would like to be remembered:

I have done the state some service, and they know’t. No more of that. I pray you, in your letters, When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate, Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak Of one that loved not wisely but too well, Of one not easily jealous but, being wrought, Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand, Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe.

Consistent with his role as guardian of order in the state, Othello carries out his own execution, by analogy judging his act as a violation reflected by Venice’s savage enemy:

And say besides, that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk Beat a Venetian and tradu’d the state, I took by th’ throat the circumcisèd dog, And smote him—thus.

Othello, likewise, has “tradu’d the state” and has changed from noble and valiant Othello to a beast, with the passion that ennobled him shown as corrosive and demeaning. He carries out his own execution for a violation that threatens social and psychic order. For the onlookers on stage, the final tableau of the dead Desdemona and Othello “poisons sight” and provokes the command to “Let it be hid.” The witnesses on stage cannot compute rationally what has occurred nor why, but the audience has been given a privileged view of the battle between good and evil worked out in the private recesses of a bedroom and a human soul.

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Plays

Othello Oxford Lecture by Emma Smith

Internet Shakespeare Editions

Life & Times
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About this text.

Title : Othello: A Survey of Criticism
Author : Jessica Slights

ISBN: 978-1-55058-466-0

Edition: Othello
A Survey of Criticism
Introduction
A History of Performance
Textual Introduction
Bibliography
Othello, Modern
Othello, Quarto 1, 1622 (Old-spelling transcription)
Othello, Folio 1, 1623 (Old-spelling transcription)
The Battle of Alcazar (Selection)
Cinthio's Tale
A Godly Form of Household Government
A Table of Human Passions
Coryat's Crudities
Counsel to the Husband
Letters Permitting Deportation of Blackamoors from England
Certain Tragical Discourses
The Passions of the Mind
Boston Public Library
British Library
Brandeis University
New South Wales
Second Folio
Third Folio
Fourth Folio
Works Rowe, Vol.5
Works Theobald, Vol.7

1 Othello has always been a popular play with acting companies and audiences, and over the centuries it has occasioned considerable and varied response among scholars. While many critics have regarded it as one of Shakespeare's most successful plays, there have been vocal detractors, both early in the play's life and more recently. The flash point of critical controversy has most often been the race and social status of its title character, but significant debates have also arisen about the play's dramatic structure, its representation of women, and the powerfully disturbing figure of Iago. The following discussion sketches in broad strokes some of the most influential literary critical approaches to Othello , including character criticism, formalism, psychoanalysis, and a range of politically inflected approaches such as feminism and new historicism.

2 As early as the final decade of the seventeenth century, Othello was criticized for depicting a man of color as a tragic hero. Thomas Rymer (c. 1641-1713), whose A Short View of Tragedy appeared in 1693, is notable for providing the first major published criticism of the play, and also for the intensity of his dislike of Othello and its titular hero. Attacking the play as merely an unfortunate and implausible stage adaptation of the Italian prose tale from which its plot derives, Rymer argues that Othello ignores a number of key principles of dramatic composition, specifically the neoclassical prescription that a play ought to trace, in real time and a focused manner, the events of a single day in a single location. He saves his most virulent attacks, however, for what he presents as the play's violation of the conventions of a natural hierarchy that positions people of color firmly below white Europeans, and non-Christians below Christians. Discussing Othello's rank in the Venetian military, Rymer argues:

The character of that state [i.e., Venice] is to employ strangers in their wars, but shall a poet thence fancy that they will set a negro to be their general, or trust a Moor to defend them against the Turk? With us, a Blackamoor might rise to be a trumpeter, but Shakespeare would not have him less than a lieutenant-general. . . . Nothing is more odious in nature than an improbable lie, and, certainly, never was any play fraught, like this of Othello , with improbabilities. (91-92)

Of the many attacks on nature for which Rymer holds Othello responsible, he clearly considers its depiction of the marriage of a senator's daughter to a military commander irksome, and its portrayal of a man of color in the illustrious rank of general truly loathsome.

3 Although Rymer's hostility to Othello and his overt racism make unpleasant reading for modern critics, A Short View of Tragedy is not without valuable perceptions about the play, and it is worth noting that Rymer is the first published critic to recognize (however disapprovingly) that language or "talk" is the basis of Othello's courtship of Desdemona:

Shakespeare, who is accountable both to the eyes and to the ears, and to convince the very heart of an audience, shows that Desdemona was won by hearing Othello talk . . . . This was the charm, this was the filter, the love powder that took the daughter of this noble Venetian [i.e., Brabantio]. This was sufficient to make the blackamoor white and reconcile all, though there had been a cloven foot into the bargain. (89-90).

While Rymer takes Brabantio's part in understanding Othello's rhetorical skill as a kind of devilishness, the critic's insight that language is presented in the play as equal to the task of reconciling difference, if not finally of overcoming tragedy, is one that continues to inform modern readings of the play.

4 Othello was particularly popular with eighteenth-century critics, few of whom were convinced either by Rymer's strict views on neoclassical dramatic form or by his claim that the play's plot and characters were implausible. On the contrary, readers such as Samuel Johnson (1709-84), one of the most influential essayists and commentators of the period, defended the play specifically on the basis of its compelling portrait of human behavior. In this excerpt from the commentary in his 1765 edition of Shakespeare's plays, for instance, Johnson highlights the aesthetic value of Othello , and then argues that the play offers crucial insight into human nature:

The beauties of this play impress themselves so strongly upon the attention of the reader, that they can draw no aid from critical illustration. The fiery openness of Othello, magnanimous, artless, and credulous, boundless in his confidence, ardent in his affection, inflexible in his resolution, and obdurate in his revenge; the cool malignity of Iago, silent in his resentment, subtle in his designs, and studious at once of his interest and his vengeance; the soft simplicity of Desdemona, confident of merit, and conscious of innocence, her artless perseverance in her suit, and her slowness to suspect that she can be suspected, are such proofs of Shakespeare's skill in human nature, as, I suppose, it is vain to seek in any modern writer. (473)

As Johnson's comments suggest, the construction of Shakespeare as a national literary hero that was well underway by this time was firmly tied to the perception that he had a particular skill for creating convincingly human characters.

5 While critical interest in the dramatic portraits drawn by Shakespeare produced some engaging readings of his work, the developing conviction that literary texts could hold, as Hamlet would have it, "the mirror up to nature," contributed to the problematic assumption that that which is "natural" is at once fully consistent and apparent to everyone. As socially constructed notions about race, religion, nationality, gender, and class came to be presented instead as the product of an unalterable "nature" that recognized the inevitable superiority of a white, Christian, European, male elite, readings of Othello as a literary confirmation of this hierarchical view began to gain ground. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, for example, German poet and translator August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767-1845) reads Othello's descent into murderous jealousy not as a shocking reversal, but as the inevitable return of an innately barbarous man to his ostensibly uncivilized roots:

We recognize in Othello the wild nature of that glowing zone which generates the most ravenous beasts of prey and the most deadly poisons, tamed only in appearance by the desire of fame, by foreign laws of honour, and by nobler and milder manners. His jealousy is not the jealousy of the heart, which is compatible with the tenderest feeling and adoration of the beloved object; it is of that sensual kind which, in burning climes, has given birth to the disgraceful confinement of women and many other unnatural usages. A drop of this poison flows in his veins, and sets his whole blood in the wildest ferment. The Moor seems noble, frank, confiding, grateful for the love shown him; and he is all this, and, moreover, a hero who spurns at danger, a worthy leader of an army, a faithful servant of the state; but the mere physical force of passion puts to flight in one moment all his acquired and mere habitual virtues, and gives the upper hand to the savage over the moral man. (Lecture 25)

In Schlegel's view, nature dictates that that which is European is civilized and moral, while that which is Moorish is savage and immoral; Othello may have "acquired" a veneer of civilization, but he was born with savagery in his "blood," and it is this "poison" which causes his fall. While this gross oversimplification of the play based on racist stereotypes seems absurdly simpleminded now, its account of the association of Moorish identity with violent sensuality persisted, in various guises, throughout the nineteenth century.

6 As Romantic poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge's (1772-1834) comments on the play illustrate, the conviction that Othello depicts fundamental truths about human nature did not always lead to the sort of condemnation of its central character found in Schlegel. Favoring a view of Othello "not as a negro, but a high and chivalrous Moorish chief"—and thereby providing scholarly support for actor Edmund Kean's so-called "tawny" stage Othello—Coleridge reads the tragic hero's actions as the product not of innate and uncontrollable passions, or even of jealousy, but rather as the consequence of moral indignation and wounded honor, and he argues that by generating an empathetic response in the audience the play is finally sympathetic to Othello (2:350). Coleridge was also fascinated by the figure of Iago, and his assessment of the play's enigmatic villain as a "passionless character, all will in intellect" (1:49) influenced readings of the play for decades. Indeed, Coleridge's claim that Iago's final soliloquy is best understood as "the motive-hunting of motiveless malignity" (1:49) remains one of the most quoted assessments of Iago to this day.

7 In addition to prompting a reassessment of Iago, the nineteenth-century view of Shakespeare's characters as expressions of fundamental truths about human nature stimulated a growing interest in Desdemona. This attentiveness to the play's tragic heroine intersected with a notable increase in the number of women's voices contributing to public conversations in the realm of literary criticism, as female actors began lecturing and publishing on the roles they performed on stage, and as women slowly began to be admitted to the ranks of professional scholars of Shakespeare. Among the latter category, Anna Jameson (1794-1860) is notable as the author of the first substantial and systematic discussion of Shakespeare's female characters, a volume published first in 1832 as Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical , and later retitled simply Shakespeare's Heroines . Jameson challenges boldly many of her contemporaries by locating Othello 's tragedy not in the plight of its male hero, but rather in the character of its heroine, arguing that "the source of the pathos throughout—of that pathos which at once softens and deepens the tragic effect—lies in the character of Desdemona" (224). Discussing Desdemona at length, Jameson describes her in amusingly patronizing terms as "one in whom the absence of intellectual power is never felt as a deficiency, nor the absence of energy of will as impairing the dignity, nor the most imperturbable serenity as a want of feeling: one in whom thoughts appear mere instincts, the sentiment of rectitude supplies the principle, and virtue itself seems rather a necessary state of being, than an imposed law" (224). Desdemona is, on Jameson's account, a young woman who is neither clever nor dynamic, and whose dominant features—her goodness and gentleness—are both beyond her control and inadequate to ensure her survival: "Desdemona displays at times a transient energy, arising from the power of affection, but gentleness gives the prevailing tone to the character—gentleness in excess—gentleness verging on passivity—gentleness which not only cannot resent—but cannot resist" (218).

8 Jameson's work on Othello is also significant for locating the play's fundamental opposition not in the marriage of Desdemona and Othello, which so many of her contemporaries viewed as a hopeless mismatch, but in the relationship between Desdemona and Iago:

Had the colours in which [Shakespeare] has arrayed Desdemona been one atom less transparently bright and pure, the charm had been lost; she could not have borne the approximation; some shadow from the overpowering blackness of [Iago's] character must have passed over the sunbright purity of hers . . . . To the brutish coarseness and fiendish malignity of this man, her gentleness appears only a contemptible weakness; her purity of affection . . . only a perversion of taste; her bashful modesty only a cloak for evil propensities; so he represents them with all the force of language and self-conviction, and we are obliged to listen to him. (64)

Picking up on the play's discourse of color, Jameson argues convincingly that Othello 's horror lies not in the affectionate relationship of the white-skinned Desdemona and the black-skinned Othello, but rather in the profound clash between the virtuous Desdemona and the malevolent Iago.

9 Critical interest in Othello continued into the early twentieth century, when, thanks to A.C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), the play gained a place alongside Hamlet , King Lear , and Macbeth in the pantheon of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies. Bradley finds Othello "the most painfully exciting and the most terrible" of the tragedies, arguing that "the reader's heart and mind are held in a vice, experiencing the extremes of pity and fear, sympathy and repulsion, sickening hope and dreadful expectation" (131). In the midst of this maelstrom Bradley locates a thoroughly romanticized Othello, a noble and mysterious everyman whose destruction results from the cunning Iago's ability to turn his virtues against him and whose ruin speaks to a universal experience of tragedy. Like Othello, Desdemona is not a particularized character in Bradley's account, but a representative figure, "the 'eternal womanly' in its most lovely and adorable form, simple and innocent as a child, ardent with the courage and idealism of a saint," and the story of her love for the "noblest soul on earth" becomes for Bradley the story of anyone who has ever aimed high and been held back: "She met in life with the reward of those who rise too far above our common level" (150). While Bradley's brand of character criticism—his practice of treating the literary text as a "little world of persons" (28) populated by characters whose behavior could be explored just as one might discuss the behavior of one's neighbors—is the defining feature of his approach to Shakespeare's tragedies, he is also attuned to matters of dramatic structure. Of Othello , he argues that it was "not only the most masterly of the tragedies in point of construction, but its method of construction is unusual. And this method, by which the conflict begins late, and advances without appreciable pause and with accelerating speed to the catastrophe, is a main cause of the painful tension" (131). This analysis of the structural basis for the feelings of frantic and claustrophobic intensity generated in the play has gone on to shape the insights of many later critics.

10 Bradley's sympathetic reading of Othello , with its emphasis on Othello's nobility, Desdemona's saintliness, and Iago's central role as destroyer of their mutual and admirable love, has been enormously influential, although his approach has been attacked vigorously over the years, mostly notably in the 1930s by G. Wilson Knight, L.C. Knights, and F.R. Leavis, and again more recently by poststructuralist critics. For Knight, Bradley's Romantic reading of the play as an anatomy of generalized human nature misses the point completely. "In Othello ," Knight claims, "we are faced with the vividly particular rather than the vague and universal," and his own reading of the play focuses on explicating the symbolic function of its characters and celebrating what he calls the play's "formal beauty" (109). L.C. Knights's objection to Bradley, famously articulated in his mockingly-titled essay "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth" (1933), lies in what he sees as Bradley's refusal to acknowledge Shakespearean tragedy's status as poetry. Knights accuses Bradley of treating the plays as novels, an approach he claims leads to an erroneous emphasis on their psychological dimensions at the expense of their verbal constructions. In "Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero" (1937), F.R. Leavis contributes to this attack, finding Bradley's reading of Othello excessively sentimental, and accusing him of an over-identification with Othello that blinds him to what Leavis reads as the general's "self-approving self-dramatization" (142). For Leavis, Othello is not the naïve and noble victim of Iago's superior intellect, but an egoist whose "self-pride becomes stupidity, ferocious stupidity, an insane and self-deceiving passion" (146-47).

11 Perhaps the most influential close reading of the language of Othello remains William Empson's 1951 essay "Honest in Othello ." Noting that the word "honest" appears so often throughout the play, Empson explores how this key term is used by various characters at significant junctures in the action, locating his discussion within an analysis of shifts in the word's meaning over time. According to Empson, Shakespeare is attentive to this semantic slippage and employs "honest," particularly as it is associated with Iago, as a means of acknowledging a gradual cultural shift toward individualism. Bernard Spivak's reading of Othello also afforded Iago particular attention, though his Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (1958) locates the play not within linguistic history but within the history of dramatic form. Noting that Othello shares a number of features with traditional morality plays, Spivak argues that Iago is best understood as a version of the stock character Vice, a personification of evil with a dangerously privileged relationship with the audience.

12 For critics a generation and more later, the suggestion that Othello criticism ought to consist in consideration of the play's generic antecedents, in appreciation and explication of what Knight had earlier called the "music" of its language (109), or in analysis of its thematic preoccupation with jealousy as this relates to a generalizable experience of action, emotion, and moral value began to seem at best naïve and at worst politically suspect. In the 1960s, critics on both sides of the Atlantic sought to understand Othello not as remote from the social and political effects of its historically specific sites of production and reception but as shaped by them. Influenced by the same impulses that propelled the American civil rights movement, many of these critics explored the play's relationship to early modern representations of race rather than its formal properties. This period produced such groundbreaking work as Eldred Jones's Othello's Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama (1965) and G.K. Hunter's " Othello and Colour Prejudice" (1967), which offered accounts of medieval and early modern discussions of blackness, traced the effect of racial prejudice on the reception of literary texts featuring characters of color, and so introduced productive ways of exploring race in/and Othello . Although the impact of this early work on race in history and drama was gradual, the trail it laid was developed in the 1980s in a series of influential books, including Elliott Tokson's The Popular Image of the Black Man in English Drama, 1550–1688 (1982), Anthony Barthelemy's Black Face, Maligned Race (1987), and Jack D'Amico's The Moor in English Renaissance Drama (1991). The collective effect of these studies was to remind readers of the prominence of black characters on the early modern stage and literary page, to prompt new thinking about the impact of pernicious stereotypes equating blackness with ugliness, disloyalty, and evil, and to encourage further investigation of the historical realities and enduring legacies of slavery. Othello criticism became increasingly politically charged as scholars debated the play's relation to modern conceptions of race and racism. For some the play came to be about "a black man whose humanity is eroded by the cunning and racism of whites" (Cowhig 7), while for others it was an antiracist polemic that "in its fine scrutiny of the mechanisms underlying Iago's use of racism, and in its rejection of human pigmentation as a means of identifying worth . . . continues to oppose racism" (Orkin 188).

13 Although attempts to carry issues of history and race to the center of the conversation about Othello gained ground in the 1960s, the determination persisted to read the play's characters and events as representative of a universal human experience. Bradleian character criticism had fallen out of favor, but the impulse to address the psychological complexities of Shakespeare's characters found fertile new ground in the insights of psychoanalytic theory. First published in the 1950s and reprinted a decade later, a series of influential psychoanalytic readings of the plays found a readership fascinated to explore links among Shakespeare, Freud, and the psychological dimensions of human sexuality. Martin Wangh's " Othello : The Tragedy of Iago," for instance, treats Iago as a case study in repressed homosexuality, arguing that the ensign's stifled erotic desire for Othello causes him to despise, and so to seek the destruction of, his rival for the general's affection, Desdemona. Building on Wangh's analysis of Iago as a paranoiac motivated by hatred for the wife of the man he cannot admit he desires, Gordon Ross Smith adduces a more general case for a psychoanalytic approach to Shakespearean drama on the grounds that it provides a "common sense" understanding of tragedy. "One may, if he wish," Ross argues, "continue to consider Othello a poetic melodrama creakily hinging upon an inexplicable villain and trivial mischance, but the sense of tragedy cannot be brought about by such elements" (182). Instead, in a move reminiscent of the character criticism that dominated in the previous century, he suggests that it is best to understand "all the major figures" of the play as "possible people caught in a net of circumstance which their characters make them unable to escape" (182).

14 The influence of psychoanalytic approaches to Shakespeare continued to be felt as feminist criticism and sexuality studies evolved throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and as Othello criticism began to consider the play's language, symbols, and characters in relation to such broader social institutions as marriage, religion, and law. In an oft-quoted 1975 article titled "Othello's Handkerchief: 'The Recognizance and Pledge of Love,'" for instance, Lynda Boose argues that the strawberry-spotted handkerchief given to Desdemona by her husband gathers a heavy symbolic burden in the course of the play as it comes to stand for that much larger expanse of fabric, the couple's wedding sheets, and thus for both "the sanctified union promising life and the tragic union culminating in death" (373). Similarly, Edward A. Snow's "Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Things in Othello " (1980) offers a symptomatic reading of Othello in which the "truth" (387) of its determination to expose a "pathological male animus toward sexuality" rooted in "the social institutions with which men keep women and the threat they pose at arm's length" (388) is both revealed and concealed by its theatrical and verbal discourses. Snow notes that the play's language and its "theatrical spectacle" (387) are marked by disavowal, denial, and introversion, and he calls on readers to "look for what resists dramatic foregrounding and listen for what language betrays about its speaker" (387), a process which reveals a world of sexual repression and misogyny in which the superego, the "voice of the father" upon which patriarchal social order is founded, is exposed as the site of "evil and malice" (410). Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) also finds in Othello the operations of a patriarchy based in sexual repression and the subordination of women. Reading Desdemona's proud claim "my heart's subdued / Even to the utmost pleasure of my lord" as a "moment of erotic intensity," Greenblatt argues that her forthright display of sexual submission, rather than reassuring Othello of her fidelity, plays into Iago's slanderous account of her as adulterous because it appears to confirm her as a sensual and desirous woman instead of as the sexually reluctant but obedient wife that marriage manuals and church doctrine taught men to expect and to value (250). Coppélia Kahn also accounted men's expectations about women's lustful nature responsible for Desdemona's death in her analysis of the intensity of early modern anxiety about cuckoldry in 1981's Man's Estate , while Marianne Novy focused her psychological account of gender relations in Othello on the paradoxical subconscious fantasy of "fusion with a woman both maternal and virginal" (133) that she argues forms the basis of Othello's desire for Desdemona.

15 Irene Dash's sociological approach to Othello in Wooing, Wedding, and Power: Women in Shakespeare (1981) marked an important moment in the history of the play's reception as, for the first time, it focused critical attention on its depiction of the potential destructiveness for women of the institution of marriage. According to Dash, Othello explores the tragic possibilities for married women trapped within a patriarchal system that condones their subjection and even their abuse. Desdemona experiences "a slow loss of confidence in the strength of the self, always with the aim of adjusting to marriage" (104), and thus her death must be laid at the door of a sexist system that celebrates compliance and self-abnegation in wives rather than mutual respect in marriage. A few years later, Carol Thomas Neely's Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays (1985), with its nuanced understanding of history and its attentiveness to the operations of power within patriarchy, helped feminist criticism develop a more robust account of the role of marriage in the social and dramatic construction of early modern women. Her reading of Othello locates the characters within an early modern moment that celebrates a newly emerging ideal of companionate marriage even as it continues to advocate for women's subservience to their husbands. Desdemona and Emilia become, on Neely's reading, the victims not of marriage but of male characters who view them through the opposing but mutually reinforcing cultural lenses of romantic idealization and anxious misogyny. The legacy of feminist scholarship committed to exploring both the historical and political dimensions of Othello continued throughout the 1990s in the work of critics such as Lisa Jardine, who reads the accusations of adultery levied against Desdemona within the context of defamation cases involving real early modern women, and in the 2000s by critics such as Sarah Munson Deats, who reads the play within the context of early modern debates between the religious doctrines of obedience and conscience.

16 Gradually the discourses of race studies, psychoanalysis, feminism, new historicism, and sex/gender criticism began to coalesce as scholars became increasingly alert to the interplay of sexual politics and race in Othello and in history. In 1987's "'And wash the Ethiop white': Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello ," for instance, Karen Newman argued that Desdemona's love for Othello represents a direct threat to Venice because it embodies the twin dangers of freely expressed female desire and miscegenation. This take on the play was then developed by Ania Loomba who argued that "the 'central conflict' of the play . . . is neither between white and black alone, nor merely between men and women—it is both a black man and a white woman. But these two are not simply aligned against white patriarchy, since their own relationship cannot be abstracted from sexual or racial tension" ("Sexuality" 172). The work of male critics, too, integrated analysis of the play's psycho-sexual elements with historically aware discussions of its treatment of race and of gender. For example, picking up on Snow's earlier analysis of Iago's repressed sexuality and employing a similar hermeneutic of suspicion, Michael Neill's "'Unproper Beds'" (1989) finds in the play's curtained bed a potent symbol for an "unutterable" anxiety about interracial love and sex (394). Bruce Smith's pioneering work on homosexuality in early modernity also built on Snow's insights as it investigated the fraught relationship between masculine friendship and marriage in Shakespeare ( Homosexual Desire 1991). Smith's reading of Othello suggests that aspects of the relationship between Iago and Othello that might be characterized in modern terms as gay, are presented in the play as assertions of masculinity, while love of women is consistently associated with the threat of effeminacy.

17 The imbrication of scholarly discourses on gender and race found perhaps its clearest material confirmation in Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker's 1994 volume Women, "Race," and Writing in the Early Modern Period , a collection which included a number of essays that touched on Othello . Most notable was Parker's own "Fantasies of 'Race' and 'Gender'" which interrogates notions of monstrosity, barbarousness, and civility by locating in the play a series of "split chiastic exchanges and divisions" that see Desdemona and Othello trading cultural identities as they assume varied roles within the complexly racialized and gendered narratives of literary teratology and colonialism. In the same year, Ruth Vanita's work on Othello addressed directly the vexed issue of its relationship to both sexism and racism, arguing that "the play forcefully combats racism (which posits blacks and whites as essentially different) precisely by its presentation of Othello as not at all different from any white husband" (342). Vanita's article indicts not only the play's male bystanders but also its readers and audiences for silent collusion in Desdemona's murder, claiming that she "is killed not only by Othello and Iago but by all those who see her humiliated and beaten in public, and fail to intervene" (338). Virginia Mason Vaughan's Othello: A Contextual History (1994) embodied the scholarly commitment to recognizing literature and history as mutually constitutive modes of discourse, both intimately connected to expressions of, and struggles for, power. Locating the play within both the historical moment that participated in its original production and the multiple pasts within which it was received and reconstructed by successive generations of players, audiences, and readers, Vaughan's wide-ranging study presents Othello as an index of changing conceptions of race, religion, and gender, and as itself a powerful producer of cultural meaning. Joyce Green MacDonald's work on burlesques of Othello is another important example of the influence of cultural criticism on the practices of stage history. By exploring the vexed relationship of Othello to conventions of blackface minstrelsy codified in the first half of the nineteenth century (see Contextual Materials: , MacDonald demonstrates how Shakespeare's play became part of the complex process of both constructing and challenging ideas about race at a moment in history when "playing race became a deadly serious kind of cultural work" (234).

18 While work on Othello throughout the 1980s and 1990s was dominated by the impulse to contextualize in general and to historicize in particular, Edward Pechter's Othello and Interpretive Traditions (1999) offered a productively skeptical consideration of the drive to "embed" literary texts. Though keenly aware of Othello 's status as "the tragedy that speaks most directly and powerfully to current interests" (2), Pechter insists, pace the cultural critics, that the play must be recognized as distinct from the narrative of its critical and theatrical reproduction, even though the latter will inevitably "contaminate" every reading of the former. Pairing a sustained reading of the formal and affective qualities of Othello with analysis alert to both discontinuities and consistencies in almost 400 years of critical and theatrical response to the play, Pechter demonstrates that the interpretive traditions that have grown up around Othello often say more about the preoccupations of their creators than about the play they purport to elucidate.

19 Throughout the 2000s Othello criticism continued to benefit from the development of increasingly sophisticated accounts of the body, the self, race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and citizenship, while postcolonial theory offered useful frameworks within which questions about Othello's nature and his relationship to the people and institutions around him could be examined. Ania Loomba's Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (2002), for instance, maps the complex connections among race, religion, and colonialism in the play, suggesting that Othello is best understood as the product of a historical moment which understood ethnic identity as fluid: "Despite being a Christian soldier, Othello cannot shed either his blackness or his 'Turkish' attributes, and it is his sexual and emotional self, expressed through his relationship with Desdemona, which interrupts and finally disrupts his newly acquired Christian and Venetian identity" (96).

Mary Floyd-Wilson's English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (2003) also understands early modern notions of ethnicity and race as unstable. Situating Othello within the discourse of early modern geohumoralism—the myth that "variations in topography and climate produced variations in national characteristics" (133)—Floyd-Wilson argues that while early in the play Othello matches early modern constructions of southerners as cool and wise, he is later contaminated by Iago and becomes "hybrid—alienated from his Moorish complexion by an Italianate doubleness" (155). For Julia Reinhard Lupton, Othello is best located within a dramatic tradition preoccupied with the intertwining of religion and nation. In Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (2005), she argues that the play models a profound religious ambiguity in the figure of Othello, who seems at once a convert from paganism whose new faith is assumed to be stable and a convert from Islam whose conversion is immediately suspect. On Lupton's reading, Othello becomes increasingly Islamicized in the course of the play, and she presents his self-stabbing as an act of extreme circumcision, what she calls a "death into suicide" that affirms both his commitment to Venetian Christianity and his identity as a Muslim man even as it reveals the tragic cost of early modern Europe's refusal to allow him this hybrid identity.

20 Othello 's intersections with Islam have also fascinated a number of other critics, including Daniel Vitkus whose Turning Turk (2003) identifies the play as one of a series of early modern dramas about the rise of the Ottoman Empire and the complex commercial, political, and ideological space of the early modern Mediterranean. According to Vitkus, Othello participates in stereotypes about Muslim men as despotic, lustful, and emotionally undisciplined by presenting Othello as a Christianized Moor so overcome by jealousy that he reverts to "a version of the Islamic tyrant" (99) and then ensures his own damnation by committing suicide. Jonathan Burton's Traffic and Turning (2005) also takes up the idea of conversion in Othello , arguing that Othello tries to counter the destructive psychological effects of an intense desire to be accepted by Christian Europe with "purple speech, his position at the vanguard of Christendom's forces against the Turks . . . and his marriage to Desdemona," all actions which Burton claims authorize the Moor's place in Venice and simultaneously reveal his profound self-doubt (253). For Burton, as Othello begins to believe in "his own irredeemable difference," and to embrace the discourse of misogyny, he loses the ability to "unsettl[e] the meaning of his skin," and this inability becomes proof of his Christian faith (254). For Emily C. Bartels in Speaking of the Moor (2008), on the other hand, Othello is one of a range of early modern texts that represent the Moor not as a figure of "racial or cultural difference" but of cultural indeterminacy (194). According to Bartels, "the Moor's story is never exclusively his own—or, rather, is his own, if we understand that story as insistent on the extravagant interplay of cultures here and everywhere" (189). Instead of enlisting Othello as evidence of a hostile collision between Islamic East and Christian West, Bartels argues, critics ought to understand the play as a product of a historical moment in which overlapping concerns about race, religion, and nationalism were being negotiated within the militarily and commercially significant space of the Mediterranean, and ought to view its titular Moor as emblematic not of cultural discord but of proto-globalization.

21 While consensus is building around the notion of Othello as a text of the early modern Mediterranean, new work on connections between early modern London's black community and the city's playhouses (Habib 2013) and on links between sixteenth-century dyeing practices and the properties of Desdemona's handkerchief (Smith 2013) suggests that alternative historical contexts for the play will continue to emerge. The direction of Othello criticism will also be affected as literary criticism's longstanding commitment to cultural historicism comes under pressure from those who argue that explorations of context often come at the expense of literature's formal properties and affective registers, and as developments in the digital humanities enable fresh methods of exploring this engaging text.

Last Modified: 2019-01-11
Accessed on: 2019-01-11
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Literary Theory and Criticism

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Othello

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