AKC 1 T&RS – Autumn Term 2007 – Afterlives
04/10/07
AKC 1 - 4 OCTOBER 2007
THE AFTERLIFE OF OTHELLO
DR SONIA MASSAI, KING'S COLLEGE LONDON
PLOT SUMMARY
Othello the Moor, a general employed by the Venetian state, has secretly married Desdemona, the
daughter of the senator Brabantio. Iago, an ensign nursing resentment against Othello, enlists the help of
Rodorigo, a disappointed suitor of Desdemona. They wake Brabantio in the middle of the night with the
news of his daughter’s elopement. Brabantio takes the case to the senate where, learning that she has
married Othello of her own accord, he disowns his daughter. Othello is immediately ordered to the
Venetian colony of Cyprus to repel a threatened Turkish invasion. Desdemona sails with her husband,
taking with them her companion Emilia, who is also Iago’s wife, and Othello’s lieutenant Michael Cassio,
newly promoted over Iago’s head. Once in Cyprus, Iago plants the suspicion in Othello’s mind that
Desdemona has been unfaithful to him with Cassio. He engineers a drunken brawl for which Cassio is
blamed and dismissed by Othello. Desdemona intercedes on Cassio’s behalf but her constant pleas to
Othello for his reinstatement only serve to convince Othello that Cassio is her lover. Iago acquires a
treasured handkerchief that belonged to Desdemona and uses it as ‘proof’ of the affair. Increasingly
maddened by jealousy, Othello orders Iago to kill Cassio and strangles Desdemona himself. Emilia
discloses her husband’s plot and Othello, tormented by grief and remorse, kills himself. Iago, after
murdering his own wife, is left to the justice of the Venetian state.
Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (eds), William Shakespeare: Complete Works, The RSC Shakespeare
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007), 2084-5.
Heinrich Hofmann (1824-1911)
OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS
François Boitard ?, Othello 5.2, from Rowe’s edition of 1709
Louis Du Guernier, Othello 5.2, from Rowe’s second edition of 1714
Hubert François Gravelot, Othello 5.2, from Theobald’s edition of 1740
Francis Hyman, Othello 5.2, from Jennens’s edition of 1773
William Leney, from a painting by J. Graham, Othello 5.2, 1799
Henry Fuseli, Othello 5.2, 1804
Anon. Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun Moorish Ambassador to Queen Elizabeth I, 1600
Still from Pier Paolo Pasolini, Che Cosa Sono Le Nuvole? (film, 1967)
Still from Pier Paolo Pasolini, Che Cosa Sono Le Nuvole? (film, 1967)
Diego Velasquez, Las Meninas 1656
AKC 1 T&RS – Autumn Term 2007 – Afterlives
1. Iago
I ha't, it is engender'd; Hell and night
Must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light.
(1.3.401-2)
2. Iago
Even now, very now, an old black ram
Is tupping your white ewe. (1.1.89-90)
…
You’ll have your daughter covered with a
Barbary horse you'll have your nephews
neigh to you; you'll have coursers for
cousins, and gennets for germans’ (1.1.1113)
…
‘Your daughter, and the Moor, are now making the beast
with two backs’ (1.1.115-7).
3. Iago
Faith, he to-night hath boarded a land carrack:
If it prove lawful prize, he's made for ever. (1.2.50-1)
4. Iago
In Venice they do let heaven see the pranks
They dare not show their husbands: their best conscience
Is not to leave’t undone, but kept unknown. (3.3.225-7)
5. Othello
I do not think but Desdemona’s honest.
Iago
Long live she so: and long live you to think so!
Othello
And yet how nature erring from itself –
Iago
Ay, there's the point: as, to be bold with you,
Not to affect many proposed matches,
Of her own clime, complexion, and degree,
Whereto we see in all things nature tends;
Fie, we may smell in such a will most rank,
Foul disproportion; thoughts unnatural. (3.3.229-7)
6. Othello
Think on thy sins.
Desdemona
They are loves I bear to you.
Othello
Ay, and for that thou diest. (5.2.44-6)
7. Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (1693)
This [play] may be a caution to all Maidens of Quality
how, without their Parents consent, they run away with
Blackamoors . . . Secondly, this may be a warning to all
good Wives that they look well to their Linen.
8 S. T. Coleridge, Essays and Lectures on Shakespeare
(1811)
It would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful
Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable Negro. It
would argue a disproportion, a want of balance, in
Desdemona, which Shakespeare does not appear to have in
the least contemplated.
04/10/07
9. Miss Preston, in D. Callaghan ‘“Othello was a White
Man”: Properties of Race on Shakespeare’s Stage’, in
Shakespeare Without Women (London and New York:
Routledge, 2000)
We may regard the daub of black upon Othello’s portrait
as an ebullion of fancy, a freak of imagination … one of
the few erroneous strokes of the great master’s brush, the
single blemish on a faultless work. … Othello was a white
man’
10. Arthur Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904)
I will not discuss further the question whether, granted that
Shakespeare’s Othello was a black, he should be
represented as a black in our theatres now. I dare say no.
… If I saw Othello coal-black with the bodily eye, the
aversion of our blood, an aversion which comes as near to
being physical as anything human can, would overpower
our imagination.
11. M.R.Ridley (ed.), Othello, The Arden Shakespeare
(London and New York: Routledge, 1958), li.
Now a good deal of … trouble arises, I think, from a
confusion of colour and contour. To a great many people
the word “Negro” suggests at once the picture of what they
would call a “nigger”, the woolly hair, thick lips, round
skull, blunt features, and burnt-cork blackness of the
traditional nigger minstrel. … There are more races than
one in Africa, and that a man is black in colour is no
reason why he should, even to European eyes, look subhuman. One of the finest heads I have ever seen on any
human being was that of a Negro conductor on an
American Pullman car. He had lips slightly thicker than an
ordinary European’s, and he had somewhat curly hair; for
the rest he had a long head, a magnificent forehead, a
keenly chiselled nose, rather sunken cheeks, and his
expression was grave, dignified, and a trifle melancholy.
He was coal-black, but he might have sat to a sculptor for
a statue of Caesar, or, so far as appearance went, have
played a superb Othello.
12. Michel Neill, ‘Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and
the Hideous in Othello’, in Shakespeare Quarterly 40
(1989), 393.
It would no more have been possible for Shakespeare to
“oppose racism” in 1604 … than for Marlowe to “oppose
anti-semitism” in 1590: the arguments simply could not be
constituted in those terms … Othello is a play full of racial
feeling – perhaps the first work in English to explore the
roots of such feeling’ and it can hardly be accidental that it
belongs to the period in English history in which
something we can now identify as a racialist ideology was
beginning to evolve under the pressures of nascent
imperialism.
AKC 1 T&RS – Autumn Term 2007 – Afterlives
04/10/07
13. Michel de Montaigne, ‘On Cannibals’ (1580)
17 Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man (1486).
I do not find that there is anything barbaric or savage
about this nation, according to what I’ve been told, unless
we are to call barbarism whatever differs from our own
customs. Indeed, we seem to have no other standard of
truth and reason than the opinions and customs of our
own country. … While we rightly judge their faults, we
are blind to our own. I think it is more barbaric to eat a
man alive than to eat him dead, to tear apart through
torture and pain a living body which can still feel, or to
burn it alive by bits, to let it be gnawed and chewed by
dogs or pigs. … Better to roast and eat him after he is
dead.
Imagine! The great generosity of God! The happiness of
man! To man it is allowed to be whatever he chooses to
be! As soon as an animal is born, it brings out of its
mother's womb all that it will ever possess. Spiritual
beings from the beginning become what they are to be for
all eternity. Man, when he entered life, the Father gave
the seeds of every kind and every way of life possible.
Whatever seeds each man sows and cultivates will grow
and bear him their proper fruit. If these seeds are
vegetative, he will be like a plant. If these seeds are
sensitive, he will be like an animal. If these seeds are
intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God. And
if, satisfied with no created thing, he removes himself to
the center of his own unity, his spiritual soul, united with
God, alone in the darkness of God, who is above all
things, he will surpass every created thing. Who could not
help but admire this great shape-shifter? In fact, how
could one admire anything else?
14. Aaron
Coal-black is better than another hue
In that it scorns to bear another hue,
For all the water in the ocean
Can never turn the swan's black legs to white,
Although she lave them hourly in the flood.
(Titus Andronicus, 4.2.99-103)
15. Shylock
Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the
same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the
same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and
cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is?
(Merchant of Venice, 3.1.52-7)
18. Iago
’Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are
our gardens, to which our wills are gardeners: so that if
we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed
up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it
with many, either to have it sterile with idleness or
manured with industry, why, the power and corrigible
authority of this lies in our wills. If the beam of our lives
had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality,
the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us
to most preposterous conclusions. (1.3.333-40)
16. Caliban
19. T.Cartelli, Repositioning Shakespeare 1999
This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother,
Which thou tak'st from me. When thou cam'st first,
Thou strok'st me, and made much of me; wouldst give
Water with berries in 't; and teach me how
[me
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night: and then I lov'd thee,
And show'd thee all the qualities o' th' isle,
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile:
Curs'd be I that did so! All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own King
(The Tempest, 1.2.333-344)
Othello stages a fantasy of inclusion, a glamorous
bridging of differences, only to restate, in the starkest
manner, the terms of exclusion it seems initially to
discredit. The play is, in this sense, complicit with Iago in
systematically deconstructing the fantasy of interracial
and intercultural concord it stages
20. Othello
Are we turned Tuks, and to ourselves do that
Which heaven hath forbid the Ottomites?
For Christian shame, put by this barbarous brawl.
(2.3.152-4)
21. Othello
Set you down this,
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by th’throat the circumcised dog
And smote him, thus. [stabs himself]
AKC 1 T&RS – Autumn Term 2007 – Afterlives
22. Daniel J. Vitkus, ‘Early Modern Orientalism:
Representations of Islam in Sixteenth- and
Seventeenth-Century Europe,’ in David R. Blanks and
Michael Frassetto (eds), Western Views of Islam in
Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Perception of
Other (New York: St Martin’s P, 1999), 207-30
During the early seventeenth century, Muslim power was
brought home to British soil when the Barbary pirates
began to raid the English coastline and take captives, on
several occasions hauling their victims out of their homes
and churches in the West country and carrying them off
to be sold into slavery or held for ransom. In October
1617, a Turkish pirate ship was captured in the Thames
estuary.
23. Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the
Age of Discovery (New York: Columbia UP, 1999), 7
[t]he capture of ships, men and women increased and
confirmed the image of a forceful and powerful Islam. By
May 1626, it was reported that there were 3,000 British
captives in Algiers and 1,500 in Sali.
24. Lodovico
Look on the tragic loading of this bed:
This is thy work. The object poisons sight,
Let it be hid.
(5.2.408-10)
04/10/07
25. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1989), 4
From the eyes of the painter to what he is observing
there runs a compelling line that we, the onlookers,
have no power of evading: it runs through the real
picture and emerges form its surface to join the place
from which we see the painter observing us; this dotted
line reaches out to us ineluctably, and links us to the
representation of the picture.
26. Alberto Marchesini, Citazioni Pittoriche nel
Cinema di Pier Paolo Pasolini (1994), 110-1, 105
There is another audience beside those who become
involved with the theatrical event, a for-ever-changing
audience who, far off and detached, watch the film. We
are that audience. We also coincide with the audience
who watch a production of Othello in the little theatre,
and, as a result, Iago’s winks are addressed
simultaneously to two different audiences. … Iago’s
gaze, which is clearly aware of our complicity, has the
same ensnaring power as the painter’s gaze in the
painting, which we fall captives to.
…
Velasquez’s mirror and Pasolini’s dream, by abandoning
a mimetic intent, add to the motif of vision the far more
disquieting one of elision, of the untold, which represent
the most authentic feature of the puppets’ world.
Further Reading:
Cartelli, Thomas, Repositioning Shakespeare (London: Routeledge, 1999)
Hankey, Julie (ed.), Othello: Plays in Performance (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1987)
Kaplan, P. H. D., ‘The Earliest Images of Othello’, in Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988), 171-85
Loomba, Ania, Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989)
Massai, Sonia, ‘Subjection and Redemption in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Othello (1967)’, in Sonia
Massai (ed.), World-Wide Shakespeares: Local Appropriations in Film and Performance, ed. By
Sonia Massai (London: Routledge, 2005), 95-103
Neill, Michael, ‘Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello’, in Shakespeare
Quarterly 40 (1989), 383-412
Orkin, Martin, ‘Othello and the Plain Face of Racism’, in Shakespeare Quarterly, 38 (1987), 166
88
Rosenberg, Marvin, The Masks of ‘Othello’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961).
Vaughan, Virginia Mason, ‘Race Mattered: Othello in Late Eighteenth-Century England’, in
Shakespeare Survey 51 (1998), 57-66.
Full details about the AKC course, including copies of the handouts, can be found on the AKC
website at: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/akc. If you have any queries please contact the AKC Course
Administrator on ext 2333 or via email at dean@kcl.ac.uk. Please make a note in your diary that
the AKC Examination will take place on Monday 21 April between 14.30 and 16.30.
YOU MUST REGISTER FOR THE COURSE using the form on the website. You will need to
register for the exam separately, information will be provided next semester.