Shakespeare’s Invention of Othello: A Study in Early Modern English PDF
Preview Shakespeare’s Invention of Othello: A Study in Early Modern English
SHAKESPEARE'S INVENTION OF OTHELLO CONTEMPORARY INTERPRETATIONS OF SHAKESPEARE Derek Cohen SHAKESPEAREAN MOTIVES Martin Elliott SHAKESPEARE'S INVENTION OF OTHELLO Graham Holderness, Nick Potter and John Turner SHAKESPEARE: THE PLAY OF HISTORY Murray J. Levi th SHAKESPEARE'S ITALIAN SETTINGS AND PLAYS Lachlan Mackinnon SHAKESPEARE THE AESTHETE Peter Mercer HAMLET AND THE ACTING OF REVENGE Further titles in preparation Series Standlna Order If you would like to receive future titles in this series as they are published, you can make use of our standing order facility. To place a standing order please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address and the name of the series. Please state with which title you wish to begin your standing order. (If you live outside the UK we may not have the rights for your area, in which case we will forward your order to the publisher concerned.) Standing Order Service, Macmillan Distribution Ud, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG212XS, England. Shakespeare's Invention of Othello A Study in Early Modem English Martin Elliott M MACMILLAN PRESS © Martin Elliott 1988 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1988 978-0-333-44162-6 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1988 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG212XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Elliott, Martin Shakespeare's invention of Othello: a study in early modem English.- ( Contemporary interpretations of Shakespeare) 1. Shakespeare, William. Othello I. Title II. Series 822.3'3 PR2829 ISBN 978-1-349-09519-3 ISBN 978-1-349-09517-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-09517-9 Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction. Twentieth-Century Othello: A Critical Survey of Some Critics vii 1 'But to be free, and bounteous to her minde' 1 2 'But that I loue the gentle Desdemona' 54 3 'Who can controll his Fate?' 75 4 'I must be found' (i) 107 5 'I must be found' (ii) 139 6 'I must be found' (iii) 186 l'\/otes 239 Bibliography 262 Index 276 Acknowledgements My gratitude to Warren Chernaik, who helped before the book was finished, and to Barbara Everett and Elizabeth Brennan, who helped thereafter. Any errors, of course, are my own. M.S.E. Vl Introduction Twentieth-Century Othello: A Critical Survey of Some Critics The seminal criticisms of Othello from the earlier years of this century infrequently engaged with the text in any detail or at any length. And this very lack of engagement resulted, usually, in work that was powerful opinion rather than substantiated argument. This critical feature is evident in, for example, G. Wilson Knight's 'The Othello Music' (The Wheel of Fire, London, 1930). This superb essay is still, I find, the closest we have to a definitive interpretation of the play; but in his treatment of the characters as 'suggestive symbols rather than human beings' (p. 97) Wilson Knight does tend himself to write 'poetically' - and often movingly-rather than with any textual analysis. In considering Othello's language he writes truly of its picturesque exoticism, its solidity, above all its pre dominant quality of 'separateness' which keeps image from image, the heavens from the human, and Othello from the world of Venice. Moreover, he writes of the dramatic value of this style -which is that its solid but sentimental character is bound to provoke the attack of the unsolid and cynical Iago: 'a spirit of negation, colour less and undefined' attempts 'to make chaos of a world of stately, architectural, and exquisitely coloured forms' (p. 119). All this is fundamentally true, and does much to illuminate the play's main dramatic movement as well as its symbolism. At the same time, however, Wilson Knight supplies little in the way of a textual demonstration of what he says. And there are occasions, indeed, when he seems to be celebrating Othello's style rather than explor ing it. He writes of 'the exquisitely moulded language, the noble cadence and chiselled phrases of Othello's poetry' (p. 106), attemp ting to define it in terms of other crafts. Or he describes it as having 'an architectural stateliness of quarried speech, a silver rhetoric' (p. 103). On the whole, these accumulated cross-references tell us more about Wilson Knight's 'poetic' response than they do about the Vil viii Introduction literary means by which Othello was invented. Moreover, Wilson Knight's central metaphor of Othello's 'music' remains curiously undeveloped in his essay. 'Music' as the literary expression of the muse is etymologically just; but it also has suggestions of sound rather than literal sense; and it was F. R. Leavis, not Wilson Knight, who (indirectly) developed the metaphor's implications when he defined Othello as an ignoble character disguised in beautiful lan guage. Indeed, Leavis elsewhere, in 'Mr Eliot and Milton', asserted that terms such as 'music' and 'musical' are sometimes not 'respect able instruments of criticism' but 'mere confusing substitutes for the analysis ... unperformed'. 1 When, however, one considers Lea vis's own essay on Othello one finds a similar impressionism. This is surprising, given Leavis's stricture on the 'analysis ... unperformed'. Leavis, like Wilson Knight, quotes frequently; but his quotes, too, are left largely un examined. It seems that Leavis regards Othello's language not only as anti-Bradleyan but as self-evidently so; to the extent indeed that, at one point, Leavis clearly betrays the weakness of his argument. He writes, 'it does not seem to need arguing. If it has to be argued, the only difficulty is the difficulty, for written criticism, of going in detailed commentary through an extended text. The text is plain enough' (The Common Pursuit, p. 144). The topic here is Othello's prompt yielding to Iago's suggestions; but the working-method - assertion rather than demonstration - pertains to the whole of Leavis's essay on Othello. For example, Leavis quotes Iago's words to Othello beginning 'I would not have your free and noble nature I Out of self-bounty be abused' (III.iii) and observes, 'There in the first two lines is, explicitly appealed to by Iago, Othello's ideal conception of himself ... '(p. 145). There is nothing inaccurate in this; but the lines themselves carry a resonant lexicon - free, noble, bounty - that demands exegesis. Such an exegesis, of the kind I attempt in Chapters 1 and 2 below, discloses that Shakespeare's deployment of the ideas intrinsic in 'freedom' is crucial to an understanding of Othello's character and his 'fall'. To take another example: Leavis finds in Othello 'a curious and characteristic effect of self-preoccupation with his emotions rather than with Des demona in her own right' (p. 150); but instead of examining this highly important preoccupation - of such major importance that it has commandeered the whole of my Chapters 4-6 - Leavis merely quotes the last seven lines of 'It is the cause ... '(v.ii) and passes on. Introduction ix Textual analysis is also largely absent from A. C. Bradley's two printed lectures on Othello - they focus instead on the play's char acters and construction. Their view that 'the character of Othello is comparatively simple' and 'so noble ... that he stirs ... in most readers a passion of mingled love and pity which they feel for no other hero in Shakespeare'2 - a view less provocative in itself than Leavis's polemical response - has received much debate; but Bradley's general remarks (in an earlier lecture in the same book, 'The Substance of Shakespearean Tragedy') on the nature of Shake speare's four major tragedies are far less controversial. He grandly defines the drama of these plays: the drama of a single, outstanding protagonist who is brought to sudden calamity and death by a 'total reverse of fortune' (Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 4) and by his own 'characteristic deeds' (p. 7), whose internal conflict supplies the main dramatic interest, and whose drama impresses us with a strong sense of waste. This definition supplies a firm basis for any consideration of Othello - eighty years on, the Bradleyan notion of Shakespeare's sense of a tragic moral order, 'a passion for perfec tion' (p. 28) offset at times by an evil engendered within that same order, is still remarkably resonant when applied to Othello's idealism, Desdemona's innocent goodness and Iago's cynicism. Where Bradley's treatment of Othello itself is deficient, I feel, is in its lack of stylistic comment, its ignoring of the words by which the tragedy was, after all, created. Bradley quite often pays a kind of homage to Shakespeare by incorporating the dramatic poet's words - without comment-in his own text. For example: Othello 'has felt as no other man ever felt (for he speaks of it as none other ever did) the poetry of the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war' (p. 153). Or again: 'Anticipating the probability that Iago has spared him the whole truth, he (Othello) feels that in that case his life is over and his "occupation gone" with all its glories' (p. 159). What Bradley says in both instances is true; but the statements would have been considerably more substantial had the words pride, pomp, circumstance, glorious, occupation - even gone - been studied instead of being merely reset in the critic's prose. (The speech in which they occur suggests, in fact, that Othello has been able to use his military career in some degree as a means of self-extension by sight and sound. I study the speech in Chapter 5 below.) The works referred to above are not to be attacked for failing to do what they never intended. At the same time, it is hardly surprising that much of the other work on Othello has purposed not only to
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