Othello

Late at night in Venice, Iago and Roderigo wake the senator Brabantio at his window to tell him that his daughter Desdemona has eloped with Othello, the black North African general in Venetian service. Brabantio raises an armed search-party; meanwhile the Senate, in emergency session over a Turkish fleet bearing down on Cyprus, summons Othello for the command. The two parties meet at the Senate. Brabantio accuses Othello of having bewitched his daughter; Othello answers with a long account of the courtship (She loved me for the dangers I had pass’d, / And I loved her that she did pity them); Desdemona, called to testify, confirms her allegiance to her husband; Brabantio gives up his case with the bitter parting shot, Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see: / She has deceived her father, and may thee. Othello is sent to Cyprus that night; Desdemona will follow under Iago’s escort.

The Cyprus storm scatters the Turkish fleet before the battle is joined, and what follows is not a war play but a domestic-tragedy play set on a wartime garrison. Iago goes to work. Step one: get Cassio, the lieutenant whose promotion he resents, drunk on duty, provoke a brawl, and have Othello strip him of his commission. Step two: counsel the disgraced Cassio to win his way back into Othello’s favour by approaching Desdemona, who will (Iago knows) intercede with her husband on Cassio’s behalf. Step three: poison Othello’s ear, while Desdemona is doing exactly this, with the suggestion that her intercession is itself the evidence of an affair.

The mechanism works. By the end of Act 3, Othello is convinced that Desdemona and Cassio are lovers; by the end of Act 4, he has agreed with Iago that Desdemona must die. The handkerchief Othello gave Desdemona as his first gift — lost by her, picked up by Emilia (Iago’s wife), planted by Iago in Cassio’s lodgings — becomes the “ocular proof” that finally collapses Othello’s remaining doubt. He strikes Desdemona in public. He instructs Iago to kill Cassio; he plans to kill Desdemona himself, by suffocation, in her own bed.

The night the murder is set, Iago’s plot starts to come apart. Iago’s attack on Cassio goes wrong; Cassio is wounded but not killed; Roderigo, who has been Iago’s dupe and paymaster from the start, is silenced before he can talk. Othello smothers Desdemona in her bed. Emilia walks in, sees what has happened, and — in the play’s great act of moral witness — betrays her husband to expose him: she was the one who picked up the handkerchief; Iago made her give it to him; the “proof” was forged. Iago stabs her dead on the spot and is taken into custody. Othello, the play’s final calculation gone, kills himself beside Desdemona’s body. Iago refuses, in his last line, to explain himself: Demand me nothing: what you know, you know. / From this time forth I never will speak word.

Written around 1603 — in the first year of King James I’s reign, just after Shakespeare’s company became the King’s Men — Othello is the second of the four major tragedies (Hamlet, Othello, Lear, Macbeth) and the only one of them to take a domestic relationship as its centre. The earliest record of a performance is 1 November 1604, at court. It survives in two early texts: the 1622 Quarto (Q1) and the 1623 First Folio (F1), which differ in roughly a hundred and sixty lines and many small readings. The Globe edition reproduced here follows the standard nineteenth-century combination of the two.

The source is a short Italian prose tale by Giovanni Battista Giraldi (called Cinthio), the seventh story in the third decade of his Hecatommithi (1565). Cinthio’s tale gives Shakespeare the basic shape — a Moorish captain in Venetian service who marries Disdemona, takes her to Cyprus, is poisoned by his ensign’s slander, kills her, and dies pursuing his revenge. Cinthio’s only named character is Disdemona; the ensign, the captain, and the lieutenant are unnamed. Shakespeare names them Othello, Iago, Cassio, and Roderigo, gives Iago a wife (Emilia), gives the courtship a long opening scene in Venice, and changes the method of murder from clubbing to suffocation. Most importantly, he gives the ensign — the cipher of Cinthio’s tale — the most psychologically dense second part in the canon.

The play’s Venice is more accurately drawn than its other settings are. The vocabulary is specifically Venetian: the Signiory, the magnifico, the special officers of night, the Sagittary lodging, the Doge in council at midnight on military business, gondoliers as common-hire carriage, even the small fact that mountebanks sold their potions in the city’s piazzas. Shakespeare had not been to Venice; he was reading. The Cyprus setting is also exact. Cyprus was a Venetian colony from 1489 until its fall to the Ottomans in 1570–1571 (the year of the great Christian victory at Lepanto, in which Venetian galleys formed part of the fleet). By 1603, Cyprus had been under Ottoman rule for thirty years, but the play places its action in the period before the fall, with a Turkish fleet still bearing down on a still-Venetian island.

Othello himself is a black man in a Christian European court at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Shakespeare’s own England had a small black population — perhaps a few thousand, mostly in London — and Queen Elizabeth had issued an edict in 1601 calling for the expulsion of “divers blackamoores brought into these realmes,” an edict which was largely unenforced. Discussion of Africans and Moors in printed English of the period is mixed: travel-narratives, Leo Africanus’s Description of Africa (in English by 1600), and the long-running cultural fact of Mediterranean trade with North Africa, give the period a more textured picture than the modern shorthand suggests. The word Moor itself is ambiguous in Shakespeare; it covers both North African Berber/Arab populations and Sub-Saharan Africans, and is the subject of a long scholarly debate about exactly how the role was conceived. The play is unambiguous, however, that Othello is dark-skinned: Iago’s old black ram, Roderigo’s thicklips, Brabantio’s sooty bosom, the Duke’s pun far more fair than black, all foreclose the question.

The role’s performance history is itself a piece of the play’s historical context. From the seventeenth through the nineteenth century the part was almost always played by white actors in dark makeup. The great change came with Ira Aldridge (the first major black actor to play the part, in the 1820s on the English provincial circuit and across Europe), Paul Robeson (London 1930, New York 1943–1944, in a production that became a Broadway landmark for the integration of American theatre), and the generation since Laurence Olivier’s 1964 black-makeup performance, after which the role has been understood, in most major English-language productions, to require a black actor.

Race, and the work language does to it. Othello is the only Shakespeare tragedy with a black protagonist, and the play’s opening four hundred lines are saturated with a vocabulary that does not let the audience forget it: the Moor, the thicklips, an old black ram, a Barbary horse, a lascivious Moor, sooty bosom, far more fair than black. What the play does with this vocabulary is more complicated than what the vocabulary does on its own. The man the words describe is, by every direct comparison, more dignified and more rational than the men using them. The play allows the racial language; it does not endorse it. But it also does not pretend the language has no force — Iago’s plot works partly because he knows how to play on Othello’s sense of being an outsider, and Othello’s own self-image fractures in part along the lines the racial vocabulary of Acts 1 and 2 has already drawn.

Iago, and the puzzle of motive. Iago is one of the most analysed figures in Shakespeare, and the standard puzzle about him is that he offers, over the course of the play, several different reasons for hating Othello — the Cassio promotion, the rumour that Othello has slept with Emilia (twixt my sheets / He has done my office), a possible sexual fixation on Desdemona, a generalised pleasure in destroying others — without any of them quite accounting for the scale of what he does. Coleridge’s phrase, motiveless malignity, has lasted because it names the gap. The play, with the “put money in thy purse” soliloquy and the “hell and night” couplet, gives Iago a kind of professional pleasure in destruction that is its own motive: he loves the work.

Honesty and seeming. The word honest appears in this play more than in any other Shakespeare — some fifty-three times, of which the great majority are applied to Iago. The play’s most consistent piece of dramatic irony is that everyone calls the most deceitful man in it honest Iago. The pattern of seeming-vs.-being runs through the whole text: Iago’s self-introduction in 1.1 (I am not what I am), Othello’s perfect soul in 1.2, Desdemona’s visage in his mind in 1.3, the handkerchief that “proves” what it cannot have witnessed in 3.3. The play asks, more sharply than any other in the canon, what kind of evidence can ever ground a judgment about another person.

Marriage, and the cost of love built on narrative. Othello and Desdemona’s courtship is, by Othello’s own account, a courtship of stories: he told her of his life, she fell in love with the dangers, he with her response to the dangers. The marriage is one of the most exact in Shakespeare and one of the most fragile. Its fragility is part of the play’s argument: a love built on the storyteller-and-listener arrangement, on what you have been told rather than on long shared life, can be redirected by another storyteller. Iago’s tools are not poisons or potions but words; he tells Othello another story, and Othello, for a long stretch of the play, takes it.

Sexual jealousy. The play’s most direct subject. Jealousy in Othello is not background; it is the central machinery. The play is also famously analytical about it: Iago’s description of the “green-eyed monster” in 3.3 (it is the green-ey’d monster which doth mock / The meat it feeds on) is one of the most-quoted accounts of jealousy in any language, and it comes from the man producing the jealousy, who is therefore both prosecutor and pathologist. The play tracks jealousy as a kind of cognitive collapse — the man who was, at 1.2, a model of calm professional command becomes, in 4.1, a man who falls into a trance and cannot complete a sentence. The play’s pessimism is that this can happen to anyone, fast.

Women, and the limits of speech. Desdemona, Emilia, and Bianca are the three women of the play, and their roles divide the moral work. Desdemona is the embodiment of the marriage’s frame — loyal, loving, articulate when she can be, silenced when the play’s violence comes for her. Emilia, who has only a small part for most of the play, takes over the moral centre in Act 5 with the great recognition scene at Desdemona’s body: she tells the truth, names her husband, and dies for it. Bianca, the Cypriot prostitute who loves Cassio, is the figure the play treats with the least dignity but also with a certain hard sympathy: she is the only woman in the play who is open about being in love and being used. Together the three are one of the most exact studies of women’s position in an honour-culture marriage in early modern drama.

Othello is the most domestic of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Hamlet is about a state, Lear about a kingdom, Macbeth about a throne; Othello is about a marriage. The whole tragic engine fits in a bedroom, and that intimacy is part of what makes it the most claustrophobic and most psychologically exact play in the canon.

It is also the play in which Shakespeare wrote his most psychologically complete villain. Iago is on stage longer than Othello, gives more soliloquies than any other character in any Shakespeare play, and runs the plot with a transparency that no other Shakespearean schemer matches — he tells the audience what he is going to do and then does it, and the dramatic suspense is therefore not will it work but how can it possibly be working. The answer the play gives is uncomfortable: nothing about Iago’s method is particularly subtle, and the people he deceives are not particularly stupid. The deception works because Iago is patient, professional, and has the patience to plant something and then leave it. It is one of the most exact dramatic studies of how human harm gets done.

The play has also been, since the early nineteenth century, one of the central texts in the long conversation about race and theatre. Ira Aldridge’s tour, Paul Robeson’s 1943 Broadway production (the first New York staging with a black actor in the title role, breaking a 300-year colour bar), the post-Olivier consensus that the part requires a black actor, the more recent productions that have made Iago’s racism the visible engine of the plot rather than its background colour — these are part of the play’s living history. The text was written in 1603, but the cultural argument it engages is in no sense finished.

Critically, the play has been read as a study of jealousy (the longest tradition), as a tragedy of inarticulacy (Othello’s inability to ask Desdemona the direct question that would dissolve everything), as a study of the dignity of black masculinity and what happens when that dignity is exposed to a hostile environment, as a meditation on the patriarchal honour-culture that requires women to be both possessions and witnesses, and as a piece of moral theory about the limits of evidence. None of these readings exhausts the play. It keeps being one of the four or five plays in English that the next century always seems to find newly necessary.