Table Of ContentSHAKESPEARE'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
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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.
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or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance
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Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to
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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
