Othello: A Critical Reader

Robert C. Evans

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781472520388
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik von Shakespeare

Othello has long been, and remains, one of Shakespeare's most popular works. It is a favourite work of scholars, students, and general readers alike. Perhaps more than any other of Shakespeare's tragedies, this one seems to speak most clearly to contemporary readers and audiences, partly because it deals with such pressing modern issues as race, gender, multiculturalism, and the ways love, jealousy, and misunderstanding can affect relations between romantic partners. The play also features Iago, one of Shakespeare's most mesmerizing and puzzling villains. This guide offers students and scholars an introduction to the play's critical and performance history, including notable stage productions and film versions. It includes a keynote chapter outlining major areas of current research on the play and four new critical essays. Finally, a guide to critical, web-based and production-related resources and an annotated bibliography provide a basis for further research.

1

The Critical Backstory

Richard Harp and Steven Hrdlicka

This chapter will first very briefly survey some of the criticism written about Othello before 1800 and then consider particular characters/topics that have interested critics, such as ‘Race’, ‘Iago’, ‘Heroism’, ‘Religion’, ‘Philosophy’ and ‘Marriage’, as well as pedagogical methods that might be used to teach the play such as ‘Close Reading’.

Serious criticism of Othello began with Thomas Rymer’s A Short View of Tragedy (1693). Rymer applied to Othello the neoclassical principles of his day, but he did this so rigidly that the play inevitably could not measure up. Rymer argued that: drama was meant to be improving; it should not present men and women as they are but rather as they ought to be; and if the demands of the plot made this impossible, there should at least be an edifying moral available. But there was no such moral for Othello and Rymer mocked various ones that might be applied – for example: all ‘Maidens of Quality’ must be careful when ‘they run away with Blackamoors’ without their parents’ consent; or ‘all good Wives [should] look well to their Linnen’; or jealous husbands must have their proof ‘be Mathematical’.1 Rymer also found it highly unlikely that a white Venetian woman could love a black man.

Rymer thought the importance given to the handkerchief absurd (‘So much ado, so much stress, so much passion and repetition about an Handkerchief? Why was not this call’d the Tragedy of the Handkerchief?’). Thus it is no surprise to him that the play has no moral: ‘What instruction can we make out of this Catastrophe? … Is not this to envenome and sour our spirits, to make us repine and grumble at Providence and the government of the World? If this be our end, what boots it to be Vertuous?’ Further, Rymer thought the characters in the play are not true-to-life, as Iago bears few aspects of the soldier and in Desdemona there is nothing ‘that is not below any Countrey Chamber-maid with us’.2

Rymer’s objections were unusually strong. They are not absurd, given his adherence to neoclassical principles, but their sarcasm indicates an unusual personal antipathy, perhaps in (large?) part because of the play’s interracial love affair and marriage. Such at least some of his language would suggest: ‘Should the Poet have provided such a Husband for an only Daughter of any noble Peer in England the Black-amoor must have chang’d his Skin to look our House of Lords in the Face.’3

The editor and critic Charles Gildon gave in 1694 the best contemporary rebuttal to Rymer. It is especially striking to see Gildon defending the play’s racially diverse lovers: ‘Unless he [Rymer] can prove that the Colour of a Man alters his Species and turns him into a Beast or Devil ’tis such a vulgar error to allow nothing of Humanity to any but our own Acquaintance of the fairer hew.’ Even more positively, Gildon affirmed that those who know something of the history of Africa must grant that there are ‘Negroes’ there who are ‘not only greater Heroes … but also much better Christians (where Christianity is profess’d) than we of Europe generally are. They move by a nobler Principle, more open, free and generous, and not such slaves to sordid Interest.’ Gildon also effectively countered Rymer’s view on Othello’s lovemaking sentiments by comparing them favourably with those of Aeneas to Dido in Virgil’s The Aeneid (thus confronting Rymer the classicist on his own turf) and appealing to human nature as the cause of the tragic action: ‘the fatal Jealousie of Othello and the Revenge of Iago are the natural Consequences of our ungovern’d Passions’. Concerning the alleged triviality of the handkerchief’s being the cause of Othello’s violence – which would exercise many other critics after Rymer – Gildon provides the following moral for the play: ‘Jealousie is a fear of loosing a good we very much value and esteem, arising from the least causes of Suspicion.’4 These bracing remarks lead to this comment from Russ McDonald: ‘Gildon’s views on race and intermarriage, probably not what we would expect from a late-seventeenth-century Englishman, attest to the difficulty of safely generalizing about early modern audiences’ responses to Othello.’5

Later in the eighteenth century Samuel Johnson removed Othello from Rymer’s straitjacket of adherence to ‘rules’ and to the unities of action, time and place. Johnson noted that ‘nothing is essential to the fable [plot] but unity of action, and as the unities of time and place arise evidently from false assumptions’ and detract from the ‘variety’ that is one of the drama’s attractions. He believed that there is nothing wrong, for example, with Othello’s first act taking place in the city of Venice and the second act on the island of Cyprus: those who would object share the same small-mindedness of Voltaire, who could not understand the largeness of Shakespeare’s vision. Also (unlike Rymer) Johnson found nothing unsuitable in Desdemona’s having fallen in love with the Moor’s narration of the marvellous travels and exploits he had undergone: ‘It is no wonder that, in any age, or in any nation, a lady – recluse, timorous, and delicate – should desire to hear of events and scenes which she could never see and should admire the man’ who had done deeds far beyond her reach.6

Johnson’s biographer James Boswell, however, also thought that the play lacked a moral and once questioned Johnson on this by-now-standard critical topic. Johnson replied vigorously – as he often did when Boswell expressed a decisive point of view of his own – that the play had more morals ‘than almost any play’, such as the importance of a person’s marrying someone of his own status and of his not giving in too quickly to jealousy. In general Johnson found the play beautiful, admiring particularly the nobility of Othello, who was ‘boundless in his confidence, ardent in his affection, inflexible in his resolution, and obdurate in his revenge’. In addition, Johnson thought Iago had a ‘cool malignity’ and that Desdemona showed Shakespeare’s ‘skill in human nature as … it is vain to seek in any modern writer’. Johnson’s balanced, antithetical style is well suited to his incisive analysis of the play; he could, for example, easily summarize a minor (but important) character such as Emilia, whose virtue was ‘worn loosely but not cast off, easy to commit small crimes but quickened and alarmed at atrocious villainies’.7 John Dryden had said that Shakespeare needed not the ‘spectacles of Books to read Nature’;8 Samuel Johnson was able to read Shakespeare’s plays with the same facility.

Discussions of race: The nineteenth century

For most of the eighteenth century, Meredith Anne Skura has observed, in an important and carefully argued article on the role of race in the play, ‘Othello was a tragic hero whose colour was irrelevant and whose greatness and savagery could be considered together without contradiction. Once his colour became important, that union was no longer possible.’9 And his colour did indeed become important in the nineteenth century. Early in the century, for example, Samuel Taylor Coleridge asked if we can imagine Shakespeare ‘so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth – at a time, too, when negroes were not known except as slaves’. Coleridge, a learned man, showed some historical ignorance himself here, as white Christians were just as likely to be slaves in the Mediterranean world of Othello as were black Africans. Further, Coleridge could not – or would not – imagine a black Othello on the stage: ‘it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro. It would argue a disproportionateness, a want of balance, in Desdemona, which Shakespeare does not appear to have in the least contemplated.’10

Whether Othello had black or only light brown skin colour concerned Coleridge and his age. The essayist Charles Lamb, for instance, said that while one may restrain his revulsion over the love relationship between Othello and Desdemona when reading the text, it is nearly impossible to do so while watching a production. In the latter case, the senses overpower the observer’s reason. Reading the play, says Lamb, allows for the ‘triumph of virtue over accidents, of the imagination over the senses’, while watching the play so focuses upon physical action that one is negatively affected by the ‘courtship and wedded caresses of Othello and Desdemona’.11 As a result a light brown or tawny skin colour was proposed for Othello because some held that the Moors descended from Caucasians who had occupied Spain from the early Middle Ages until 1492. Most actors until Edward Kean (1787–1833) had played Othello in black face – the text is specific about his dark colour – but Kean used a brown skin colour and thereafter this became a fashion. Even where Charles Knight, who edited Shakespeare’s play in 1843, acknowledged that it was by no ‘means improbable that Othello was represented as a Negro’ in early productions, he argued that the ‘whole context of the play is against the notion’.12 Perhaps the vicious eighteenth-century slave trade made critics reluctant to imagine Othello as black.13 Henry Reed at any rate even suggested that if a black Othello were married to the ‘bright, fair-faced Venetian lady’, one might be tempted to think that this ‘monstrous alliance’ received its just deserts in its ‘fearful catastrophe’.14

This nineteenth-century discussion about Othello’s dark skin colour also resulted in some burlesque and farcical productions of the play. After the Civil War a number of outright travesties were even produced; in one such ‘a minstrel Othello with an Irish Iago’ were paired ‘in order to include immigrants in its racial abuse’.15 Critical comments such as these by Mary Preston were also not uncommon: ‘I have always imagined its hero a white man. It is true the dramatist paints him black, but this shade does not suit the man … Shakespeare was too correct a delineator of human nature to have coloured Othello black, if he had personally acquainted himself with the idiosyncrasies of the African race.’16 One other commentator of that era, however, J. E. Taylor, stated that Othello’s dark skin ‘in no degree affects the character of the Moor’.17

Modern discussions of race

The eminent early twentieth-century critic A. C. Bradley regards it as ‘nearly certain’ that Shakespeare meant Othello to be a black man and not ‘a light-brown one’. He finds it amusing that earlier American critics abhorred this idea but is candid enough to observe the same concern in Coleridge. The reason Bradley assigns to critics’ prejudice in this regard is the Moor’s marriage to Desdemona, but their mistake, he proposes, is to regard the marriage as ‘Brabantio regarded it, and not as Shakespeare conceived it’; and he notes the irony of ‘our’ overlooking her loving a tawny-skinned person but then finding ‘it monstrous that she should love a black one’. And yet, even Bradley (like Lamb) thinks that audiences and readers are not as capable as Shakespeare in transcending such matters. Therefore he advises that Othello should not be presented on the stage as a black man, for an audience’s repugnance to such ‘comes as near to being merely physical as anything human can’.18 Nonetheless, the issue was not as prominent for most critics of this time as it had been for those of two or three generations earlier; for ‘most Victorians,’ says Michael Neill, ‘and their successors in the first half of the twentieth century, Othello’s difference was typically understood not so much as a matter of race, as of the cultural clash implicit in Iago’s contrast between ‘an erring barbarian and a super-subtle Venetian’ (1.3.356–7).19

Discussions of race in the play became more prominent in the 1950s and beyond, the era of the American Civil Rights movement and other African-American liberation activities. Lawrence Lerner saw the play as a ‘story of a barbarian who (the pity of it) relapses’ into violence,20 a reading reinforced by the 1964 Laurence Olivier stage interpretation of the character. Nonetheless, this performance also ‘helped to stimulate serious debate about the significance of race in the play’.21 Taking another direction was the influential study of Othello’s skin colour in G. K. Hunter’s 1967 British Academy article, ‘Othello and Colour Prejudice’. His argument defending Othello was an idealistic one – Othello represents ‘reality’ in the play, Iago ‘appearances’: Iago is the ‘white man with the black soul’ (and Hunter cited a number of historical references where blackness was associated with the devil) and ‘Othello is the black man with the white soul’. Helpful, too, was his citing of the Spanish debate between Juan Ginés de Sepulveda (1489–1573) and Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566). The former argued that American Indians were ‘slaves by nature’, while the latter emphasized their ‘natural capacity for devotion’. Previous Christian tradition could also warrant the spiritual potential of blackness, as, for example, when Philip baptized the Ethiopian eunuch in the Acts of the Apostles. Paraphrasing St Augustine, Hunter commented that ‘all nations are Ethiopians, black in their natural sinfulness; but … white in the knowledge of the Lord’.22

Hunter called ‘powerful’ the strain of criticism that goes back to A. W. Schlegel’s 1815 essay that paints Othello as ‘savage at heart’ whose ‘veneer of Christianity’ collapses under Iago’s assault. A stronger critical alternative was needed, though, than his suggestion (and attempted answer to T. S. Eliot’s remark that Othello was merely trying to cheer himself up in his final death speech) that the ‘perilous and temporary achievements of heroism’ have to be achieved ‘in our minds’, that ‘catharsis is achieved in … the Aleppo of the mind’.23 That such a fine and knowledgeable critic resorted to such vague formulations is a sign of real critical perplexity at this time with the play.

Protests in the 1980s and early 1990s against the South African practice of apartheid also helped bring into focus the play’s racial themes. Martin Orkin’s essay ‘Othello and the “Plain Face” of Racism’ found that in its exploration of Iago’s racism and in its portrayal of human nobility independent of skin colour ‘the play, as it always has done, continues to oppo...

Table of contents

• Arden Early Modern Drama Guides
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents 
• Series Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Timeline
• Introduction Robert C. Evans
• 1 The Critical Backstory Richard Harp and Steven Hrdlicka
• 2 ‘Let Me the Curtains Draw’: Othello in Performance Christopher Baker
• 3 Othello: The State of the Art Imtiaz Habib
• 4 New Directions: Othello, the Moor of London: Shakespeare’s Black Britons Matthew Steggle
• 5 New Directions: King James’s Daemonologie and Iago as Male Witch in Shakespeare’s Othello Robert C. Evans
• 6 New Directions: Othello, the Turks and Cyprus Raphael Falco
• 7 New Directions: Othello and His Brothers Lisa Hopkins
• 8 Teaching Othello: Materials and Approaches Alison V. Scott
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright