Othello

Lena Cowen Orlin

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781350310407
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Teatro

With its focus on gender, power, race, sexuality, and violence, Othello is an important site for new critical approaches to the study of Shakespeare's works. Both criticism and culture are represented in this collection of recent essays which provides readers with examples of feminist, new-historicist, cultural materialist, deconstructive, and post-colonial perspectives on Othello. With discussions of recent stage and screen productions, and analysis of the use of the play in such contemporary events as the O.J. Simpson murder trial, this compelling critical volume presents a wide variety of ways of understanding the continuing significance of Shakespeare's play both in his own time and in ours.

1

‘Let it be Hid’: The Pornographic Aesthetic of Shakespeare’s Othello

LYNDA E. BOOSE

Utter my thoughts? Why, say they are vile and false:

As where’s that palace, whereinto foul things

Sometimes intrude not? who has a breast so pure,

But some uncleanly apprehensions

Keep leets and law-days, and in session sit

With meditations lawful?

(Othello 3.3.140–5)¹

The final act of Othello visually confronts its audience with what is arguably the most unforgettable stage tableau in all of Shakespeare. Before the forces of institutional morality burst in and feebly attempt to assert control over the chaos of the bedroom, the audience has been led into the forbidden space of this hitherto offstage room – the imagined chamber towards which the play has always pointed, the place which it has repeatedly eroticized, and the space which until now it has kept discreetly hidden, blocked from audience view behind one of a number of fictive doors that we have consented to imagine. In the closing act, when the final door to the play’s last bedroom figuratively swings open, we are allowed/compelled to be the only witnesses to the act of erotic violence that we have already been induced to see: Desdemona strangled on her wedding sheets, dying in suggestive paroxysms in the violent embrace of the alien black husband.

All Shakespearean tragedy ends with control returning to the representative forces of social order. But in the other tragedies, those forces are not only considerably more successful, but they conclude the play by paying tribute to, not trying to erase and avoid, the tableau of tragic violence: Hamlet is elevated to the stage like a soldier and given funeral accolades; Lear’s endurance receives an awed encomium from the play’s survivors; Octavius Caesar grudgingly orders that tribute be paid to Antony and Cleopatra before ordering everyone back to Rome; and even the spiked head of the slaughterous Macbeth is implicitly honoured as it is raised up to tower over the victors below. By contrast, the ending of Othello provides no eulogy but only what New Cambridge editor Norman Sanders calls ‘Cassio’s lip service remark, “For [Othello] was great of heart”, standing for the final panegyric’.² Moreover, beyond even the omitted tribute, what this play’s concluding spokesman presents as formula for the reassertion of order is an explicit indictment of not only the tragic loading on the bed but those who watch it – the viewers who are, implicitly, the play’s own audience: ‘The object poisons sight, / Let it be hid’ (5.2.365–6). The play then concludes in aversion and avoidance, with Lodovico beating a hasty retreat, determined to cover up the picture on the bed and then go ‘straight aboard, and to the state’ (371), avoiding as quickly as possible that condemned sign of a now hidden sign, the bed and its euphemized ‘loading’ (F) or ‘lodging’ (Q1 and 2) that are together said to poison sight.

In the final moments of this play, the ‘object’ of such consternation and that which infects its watchers is ultimately identified as the ‘work’ of Iago, the figure from whom most of the play’s ubiquitous commands to ‘look … watch … see’ have emanated and the nasty little fellow to whom an audience owes a substantial amount of its own fascination with this particular Shakespeare tragedy. From Othello’s opening scene, the audience’s ears have been filled with references to ‘looking’, usually spoken by Iago and repeatedly phrased in either the imperative that commands the listener’s visual attention, or in rhetorical questions that solicit it while simultaneously assuming compliance. The ‘look’ command, since Iago’s initial use of it on Brabantio, has been, throughout the play, directed towards an increasingly sexualized image, yet an image that, until the final act, has been available only through the participatory act of imagining it. Only with Lodovico’s last use of the ubiquitous injunction – ‘Look on the tragic loading of this bed’ (364–5) – does the command make contact with its at-last literal and concrete referent, the sexual scene now elevated in mute display on the play’s at-last visible bed. But precisely as the fetishized object of aesthetic gratification becomes visually available to its viewers, that same spectacle is suddenly condemned, enclosed, and the watchers of it, rebuked – ‘the object poisons sight, / Let it be hid’. And at this moment, the inclusive implication of Iago’s earlier rhetorical questions, such as the one that appears here as epigraph, should likewise become clear. To Othello’s increasingly voyeuristic demands to ‘Make me to see’t, or at the least so prove it …’ (3.3.370), where proof becomes merely an afterthought to seeing, and to his pleas for a ‘satisfaction’ that is increasingly bound up with ‘ocular proof’, Iago had responded with a damning question that explicitly implicates the audience in his tawdry pact: ‘Would you, the supervisor, grossly gape on? / Behold her topped?’ (3.3.395–7). By the end of this play, the audience – the ultimate ‘super-visors’ of it – have indeed grossly gaped.³

Yet in taking the audience through that final fictive door and into the bedroom space to be discovered within the voyeuristic fantasy they came to see, this tragedy fulfils the aesthetic conditions which, again in Iago’s voice, it had explicitly laid out:

What then? How then?

What shall I say? Where’s satisfaction?

It is impossible you should see this,

Were they as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys,

As salt as wolves in pride, and fools as gross

As ignorance made drunk. But yet, I say,

If imputation and strong circumstances,

Which lead directly to the door of truth,

Will give you satisfaction, you might have’t.

(3.3.401–9)

As most academics who teach Shakespeare know, the question the observant student wants to ask is the prurient one that is built into the text of this play: whether Othello and Desdemona did or did not consummate their marriage. The question is unavoidable. It is layered into the dynamics of the drama in a way that it is not, for instance, in Romeo and Juliet. Because we know what happened in Juliet’s bedroom, the consummation never becomes an issue of obsessive curiosity to the audience. The dramatic construction of Othello, however, seduces its readers and watchers into mimicking Iago’s first question to Othello: ‘Are you fast married?’ (1.2.11). What is important is not any presumed answer to the question, which can probably be argued either way. What is important is the fact that we need to ask it.

If Hamlet is, as Stephen Booth has famously said, a play about an audience that can’t make up its mind,⁴ then Othello is one about an audience that finds itself aroused by, trapped within and ultimately castigated for its prurience. And the audience implied by this play and structured into it from its opening scene is definitively masculine in gender: from Iago’s arousal of the first male watcher of the play with his injunction to ‘Look to your house, your daughter, and your bags’ (1.1.80), men are the lookers and women are the objects to be looked at, trapped within and constructed by the pornographic images transmitted inside of an increasingly lethal circuitry of male discourse that is constructed by and itself constructs this play’s disturbing male bond.

The dynamic linking any play to its audience is no doubt inherently a voyeuristic suture. But Othello exploits that linkage more relentlessly than does any other play in the canon. And although images of erotic violence enacted on a bed may be all too familiar by the twenty-first century to make us uneasy with what they invite, my own rough survey of pre-Shakespearean playscripts suggests that Othello may have been one of the first (extant) plays of its kind in English drama.⁵ Although in pre-Othello plays an audience might hear about some salacious act that had occurred offstage, texts and prop records indicate that before Othello the bed had, in general, been restricted on stage to its use as a deathbed – as a place for kings like Henry IV to die. A Woman Killed With Kindness and the arbour scene in The Spanish Tragedy might both be candidates for the first sexually suggestive stagings of the bed with the woman on it. But nothing extant prior to Othello approximates its use as a staging area for sexual violence, a kind of drama that collapses the poles of the word ‘death’ and brings to full representation the orgasmic undertones always present in the Elizabethan use of this term.⁶ And Shakespeare’s apparent transgression of the previously observed limits of stage decorum may itself have served as something of a catalyst to open the way for the sex and violence sensationalism that shortly afterwards flooded the Jacobean and later the Restoration stage.

In Othello, Shakespeare seems to have been shaping a new kind of dramaturgy. Through a dramatic construction that critics from A. C. Bradley on have uneasily recognized as being somehow ‘different’ from that of the other major tragedies,⁷ this play holds up a mirror that mercilessly exposes the complicity of the audience’s spectatorship. On the first two of the three successive bridal nights of the play’s construction, Othello and Desdemona are isolated behind the bedroom door while the audience of watchers is turned over to the control of Iago, positioned as participants in the increasingly violent, masculine anti-epithalamion he orchestrates without. The spatial design solicits attention inward. More damningly, however, the voyeuristic desire for dramatic satisfaction aroused by the construction of the first two nights compels the action of the climactic third one and implicates the play’s watchers in the amorphous ‘cause’ that Othello’s lines allude to as he enters the bedroom on the final night, bringing with him not only the violence from the street outside but, at long last, the voyeuristic desires of the audience: ‘It is the cause, it is the cause’ (5.2.1).

It is in the bedroom where this play consummates its union with its audience – and that same space of viewer gratification is where the play likewise dis-covers the audience as its ‘guilty creatures sitting at a play’, left at the end of the fantasy castigated for their voyeurism and, as the forces of moral order exit for Venice, dramatically abandoned within the indicted fantasy. Characteristically, in what one might even call nearly a condition of Shakespearean tragic catharsis, a Shakespeare tragedy always provides, at closure, a viable secondary figure in whom the masculine desires of the audience may find a sufficiently heroic site for transfer and displacement.⁸ But in Othello, there is no Horatio, no Macduff, no Edgar, no Octavius, nor are there any other mitigatingly heroic rituals available to absorb the masculine anxieties that this tragedy seems designed to arouse. The figure who occupies the requisite structural position in Othello is Cassio, but Cassio’s all too apparent character weaknesses plus the fact that the play leaves him disabled and implicitly rendered impotent by the wound in his thigh, all work to disqualify him as any kind of acceptable model. By refusing to provide any such escape hatch, the play leaves its audience trapped within a highly problematic identity polarized between Othello and Iago. And it seems likely that this uncomfortable male position is the key gender factor that, along with the racial factor, has worked to give Othello a special place in the 400 years of Shakespearean cultural legacy.

In performance, Othello has been simultaneously one of the most popular of all the plays and one that has also disturbed its audiences in peculiarly noteworthy ways, confronting them as it does with the taboo issues of not only sexual violence but the ugliness of racism played off against the deepest white racist fears of miscegenation.⁹ Yet another factor that no doubt accounts for the peculiar anxieties that have historically attended Othello is the way it substantively differs from its counterparts in its refusal to gratify the audience’s need for the retributive justice that is an important condition for the dispersal of anxiety and aggression that is in drama called catharsis. Not only do the forces of political order refuse to legitimate the role of Othello’s watchers, but they refuse to mete out any genuine retribution to the salacious little villain whose ‘work’ has lured the audience into the space of condemnation. With the exceptions of Aaron the Moor and Iago, all of Shakespeare’s tragic villains repent their evil; but Aaron is sentenced to a horrific death, while Iago – as opposed to all other villains in the tragedies – exits the play neither killed on stage nor with any such condign punishment even suggested. What ultimately is most problematic about Iago is the audience’s own relation to him – something that might be called, in D. H. Lawrence’s phrase, ‘the fascination of the revulsion’.

Despite the fact that from the play’s opening scene the audience has been aware of the sordidly vicious, misogynist and racist nature of the vision that this ‘Ensign’ holds up as a standard for all men to rally around, it is nonetheless to this same jocularly obscene, inexplicably attractive force of malignity that all male characters in the text are drawn and to whom an audience owes a large amount of its theatrical pleasure. It is Iago who repeatedly stands at the fictive boundary of the play, talking to the audience, confiding in them and luring them into a tawdry complicity that depends upon their tacit consent to be given access to what Iago alternately calls his ‘heavenly shows’ and ‘dangerous conceits [that] are in their natures poisons’ (3.3.331). Through such consent, an audience yields to Iago, much as does Othello, the role of leading them inward into the doubly represented space of the play’s forbidden, offstage room and the mind’s unacknowledgeable fantasies. Iago plays the pander who opens the door to the listener’s pornographic imagination. And through the figure of Iago, Shakespeare’s play mirrors a specific triad of concerns – political, social and literary – that had suddenly emerged into cultural consciousness at the end of the sixteenth century as a result of England’s recent contact with a type of literature we would today label pornography.¹⁰ Far more than a genuine ‘character’ with discernably coherent motivation, Iago is a role, a strategy within the Othello text that shapes this play’s construction.

Pornography in its original literary manifestation is by definition male-authored and subscribed – not only authored by a male but subscribed by a culture which deprecates the feminine and invests the masculine with sexual desire accompanied by fear, guilt and loathing of female sexuality. Although its ideological functions are undoubtedly numerous, the primary job that pornographic literature fulfils in its unacknowledged bond with a culture is providing a medium for reconstituting and circulating the society’s norms about male power and male dominance. Its special authority lies in the way that it codes itself inside of transgressive, often violent sexual narratives that only seem to oppose the cultural authority by which they are tacitly enabled. As a medium for reifying masculine dominance, pornography has been, correspondingly, a medium for constructing feminine subservience, often in narrative forms of erotic bondage.

Since pornography as a genre is thus a primary carrier for all the culture’s erotic ‘master plots’ and often repeats the very same stories that recur in romance and other institutionally more legitimate forms, pornography has a way of lurking beneath, and tacitly working as pattern for, the only erotic fantasies the culture knows how to construct – the kinds of fantasies defined by the gendered polarization of both cultural and physical power that underlie and seep into Desdemona’s thrilled desire to be ‘subdued / Even to the utmost pleasure of my lord’ (1.3.246–7), or her determination to be passive, unprotesting, obedient and ever the ‘gentle Desdemona’ even when she is subjected to Othello’s phy...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• General Editors’ Preface
• Introduction
• 1. ‘Let it be Hid’: The Pornographic Aesthetic of Shakespeare’s Othello
• 2. Cultural Materialism, Othello and the Politics of Plausibility
• 3. Charivari and the Comedy of Abjection in Othello
• 4. Impertinent Trifling: Desdemona’s Handkerchief
• 5. Brothers of the State: Othello, Bureaucracy and Epistemological Crisis
• 6. Othello on Trial
• 7. Othello’s Identity, Postcolonial Theory and Contemporary African Rewritings of Othello
• 8. Race-ing Othello: Re-Engendering White-Out
• 9. Black and White, and Dread All Over: The Shakespeare Theatre’s ‘Photonegative’ Othello and the Body of Desdemona
• Further Reading
• Notes on Contributors
• Index