‘Othello’ criticism from Shakespeare is Hard,
But so is Life by Fintan O’Toole
OTHELLO IS SO TRAGIC
- If we approach Othello as a character with a ‘tragic flaw’ (eg
jealousy) then he doesn’t seem tragic, just stupid. He is so easily
manipulated by Iago – a man he didn’t even trust enough to
make his lieutenant, and he doesn’t ever try to check the
allegations that Iago makes. “He is driven demented by a
handkerchief. He is not tragic, merely pathetic.”
- “There is no Othello without Iago: it is Iago who draws out
his inner fears and longing, who makes him the character we see
and hear. … Iago is as much a tragic figure… as much caught
between one world and another,. …The title could be changed
from Othello to Iago. He has the soliloquies. He is the one who
most reveals himself to the audience. He is the most active
character in the play. (Othello for a hero, is strikingly passive…he
suffers, kills and dies). Iago has the longest part, not merely in
Othello, but in all of Shakespeare”
- Othello’s tragedy is personal. He is not the classical
Shakespearean hero (eg. A rule, prince etc like Lear, Macbeth,
Hamlet etc) whose tragedy involves disruption to the order of
nature / state / universe. Othello is not an active controller of
other’s lives, he is a VICTIM.
IMPORTANCE OF VENICE AS A SETTING
1)
For Elizabethan audience it was associated with money,
commerce and capitalism that was sweeping Europe and
challenging the old feudal system. Capitalism was the breaking
down of boundaries, e.g. trading with foreign nations – creating a
melting pot of people, “with one eye towards the Christian
civilisation of the West and with the other towards the Islamic
Infidels of the East.
2) Venice was also associated with “exotic vices and
unbridled passions”. It was fashionable for English playwrights
to set plays in Venice in the 16th C. The stereotype of Venice was
a land of the “atheistic, amoral political theorist” Machiavelli(Iago
is a version of the Macchiavellian villain); of intrigues and
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poisoners, of tight political plots. Also stereotype of Italian
passion run wild, e.g. women secretly unfaithful as norm
 Shakespeare uses both of these aspects. ‘It is essential to
the story that Venice {is a place that] allows a man of the ‘wrong
colour and of no social standing in a Christian republic, to become an
important figure in the state. Othello’s ascent from being a slave
(1:3:137) … to being responsible… is a kind of social mobility that
was a new, tenuous possibility in Elizabethan England.’
- “Venice is a place where black and white are literally no
longer opposites. … No Venetian, even Othello’s deadliest
enemies, however racist they may be, ever suggests that a black
outsider should not be allowed to lead the Venetian forces.”
- Cyprus – is a kind of “never never land” in the play, the play
moves there in the second act. However so many of the
connotations (e.g intrigue, sexual vice, decadence, dynamism) still
relate to Venice.
RACE IN OTHELLO
- “Othello is black but Othello, a man who engages our sympathies
more immediately and more directly than any other Shakespearian
tragic protagonist, could not possibly be black. How could a black
man be so noble, so engaging, so obviously capable of such
delicacy of feeling?” -- this has been at the heart of much criticism
through the ages. Thomas Ryder (Sh’s time) found the play
“implausible” because of this
- 19thC critics like Coleridge, thought Othello should be played as
“brown” for “it would be something monstrous to conceive of
this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable Negro.”
- A.C Bradley agrees (worried about a civilised audience feeling
digust at the sight of a real black man), “perhaps if we saw Othello
coal black with the bodily eye, the aversion of our blood…would
overpower our imagination.”
- However, we CANNOT see Othello as a play about racism in a
modern sense. S’s England WAS NOT a multi-racial society. But Sh
WAS conscious of race.
- Queen Elizabeth 1601 was “discontented at the great numbers of
Negars and blackamoors which a crept into the realm”.
- Sh knew about the “fear, revulsion and sexual disgust which
blackness could invoke in a contemporary audience.”
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- Stereotypes the play draws on shows Sh’s awareness of the
psychology of racism: Iago links O’s blackness to animality,
compares his sexuality to a Barbary horse. He is “warlike
Othello” (strong, athletic, savage), “an old black ram” (an image of
both the animal and the sexual), “the blacker devil.”
Key point – racism is NOT JUST the context in which O lives. Racism
has entered his mind and his soul.
“Iago’s brilliance lies not in what he puts into Othello’s mind, but what
he draws out of it. He takes what is already there (..shame and doubt)
and gives them visible substance.”
 e,g, as soon as O starts to believe Desdemona may be unfaithful,
O blames his skin colour (‘Haply for I am black.”) This shows O
himself cannot “suppress the idea within his own mind that D
must have been strange… to have married him.” His logic – “if he
is unworthy of her love, then she must be peverse for loving him,
and if she is peverse, then she must be unfaithful.”
- Othello’s self disgust: What O hates when he hates D is himself,
the image of his own blackness which he sees as her disgrace. (“My
name, that was as fresh/as Dians visage, is now begrimed and black as
mine own face.”)
IAGO AND OTHELLO – SIMILARITIES
- Iago understands O because he shares his fears (e.g. of being made
a cuckold) and his shame.
- Iago – “so filled with sexual disgust and hatred of women that he
cannont think of either sex/women without thinking of animals.”
He sees married men as a yoked beast of burden.
- He drains the humanity from everything, making it into something
either mechanical or animal.
- Iago’s disgust is very like O’s self-disgust. Iago also torments
HIMSELF with visions of his wife’s adultery. He even imagines O
as his tormentor! (He has long suspected the “Moor hath crept
into his seat”).
- He is a cuckold, uses this to “prove” D’s infidelity – “knowing
what I am, I known what she shall be”
- Iago takes on O’s association with blackness. In terms of
imagery, although O’s blackness is identified with the night, Iago
“makes darkness his proper element, taking the blackness of
Othello onto himself.” He dominates the night scenes. He always
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calls on the powers of blackness (“When devils do the blackest
sins put on..”) He believes he can turn white to black, D’s virtue
“into pitch.
- Othello starts speaking like Iago. O starts to take on I’s
imagery and style of speech. In the beg of play, Iago uses much
more prose than O does. I has a coarse, blunt style in contrast to
Os stately and deliberate poetic speech. But in the last act, the 2
minds begin to fuse together “as Iago’s words give shape to O’s
thoughts, so O starts to sound more and more like I”.
- O starts to turn people into animals in his imagery
- O begins to appeal to the devil and use diabolic imagery
- Each character is ‘freaking out’ over the changes to the
social structure.
- O is an eg of person succeeding under the “new world” order
where even someone like him can rise to power.
- Iago is part of the “old” world and is watching the old system
of” being swept away. He hates the fact a man is no longer valued by his
position in the social hierarchy (“preferment goes by letter and affection,
and not by the old gradation, where each second / stood heir to the
first..”). Iago should have “inherited” the position of lieutenant, instead
it goes to Cassio – an “arithmetician” and a “Florentine”.
- Florence was famed for its bankers and accountants.  Iago is
attacking the whole rise of capitalism in society that has eroded the
feudal system.,
- Iago’s vision of order is “essentially medieval” – where
emotional forces are kept in their place by reason, and reason by
emotions.
- Iago is trying to restore the old world of order, degree,
hierarchy, by new methods, those of cynical rationality.
He is caught in a contradiction – trying to restore justice with
injustice, lies to restore the truth, disorder to create order. His
character is a critique of both the old world and the new.
- I
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