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OTHELLO 8
What is the peculiarity of Othello? What is the distinctive impression
that it leaves? Of all Shakespeare's tragedies, I would answer, not even
excepting King Lear, Othello is the most painfully exciting and the
most terrible. From the moment when the temptation of the hero begins,
the reader's heart and mind are held in a vice, experiencing the
extremes of pity and fear, sympathy and repulsion, sickening hope and
dreadful expectation. Evil is displayed before him, not indeed with the
profusion found in King Lear, but forming, as it were, the soul of a
single character, and united with an intellectual superiority so great
that he watches its advance fascinated and appalled. He sees it, in
itself almost irresistible, aided at every step by fortunate accidents
and the innocent mistakes of its victims. He seems to breathe an
atmosphere as fateful as that of King Lear, but more confined and
oppressive, the darkness not of night but of a close-shut murderous
room. His imagination is excited to intense activity, but it is the
activity of concentration rather than dilation.
I will not dwell now on aspects of the play which modify this
impression, and I reserve for later discussion one of its principal
sources, the character of Iago. But if we glance at some of its other
sources, we shall find at the same time certain distinguishing
characteristics of Othello.
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One of these has been already mentioned in our discussion of
Shakespeare's technique. Othello is not only the most masterly of the
tragedies in point of construction, but its method of construction is
unusual. And this method, by which the conflict begins late, and
advances without appreciable pause and with accelerating speed to the
catastrophe, is a main cause of the painful tension just described. To
this may be added that, after the conflict has begun, there is very
little relief by way of the ridiculous. Henceforward at any rate Iago's
humour never raises a smile. The clown is a poor one; we hardly attend
to him and quickly forget him; I believe most readers of Shakespeare, if
asked whether there is a clown in Othello, would answer No.
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In the second place, there is no subject more exciting than sexual
jealousy rising to the pitch of passion; and there can hardly be any
spectacle at once so engrossing and so painful as that of a great nature
suffering the torment of this passion, and driven by it to a crime which
is also a hideous blunder. Such a passion as ambition, however terrible
its results, is not itself ignoble; if we separate it in thought from
the conditions which make it guilty, it does not appear despicable; it
is not a kind of suffering, its nature is active; and therefore we can
watch its course without shrinking. But jealousy, and especially sexual
jealousy, brings with it a sense of shame and humiliation. For this
reason it is generally hidden; if we perceive it we ourselves are
ashamed and turn our eyes away; and when it is not hidden it commonly
stirs contempt as well as pity. Nor is this all. Such jealousy as
Othello's converts human nature into chaos, and liberates the beast in
man; and it does this in relation to one of the most intense and also
the most ideal of human feelings. What spectacle can be more painful
than that of this feeling turned into a tortured mixture of longing and
loathing, the 'golden purity' of passion split by poison into fragments,
the animal in man forcing itself into his consciousness in naked
grossness, and he writhing before it but powerless to deny it entrance,
gasping inarticulate images of pollution, and finding relief only in a
bestial thirst for blood? This is what we have to witness in one who was
indeed 'great of heart' and no less pure and tender than he was great.
And this, with what it leads to, the blow to Desdemona, and the scene
where she is treated as the inmate of a brothel, a scene far more
painful than the murder scene, is another cause of the special effect of
this tragedy.[86]
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The mere mention of these scenes will remind us painfully of a third
cause; and perhaps it is the most potent of all. I mean the suffering of
Desdemona. This is, unless I mistake, the most nearly intolerable
spectacle that Shakespeare offers us. For one thing, it is mere
suffering; and, ceteris paribus, that is much worse to witness than
suffering that issues in action. Desdemona is helplessly passive. She
can do nothing whatever. She cannot retaliate even in speech; no, not
even in silent feeling. And the chief reason of her helplessness only
makes the sight of her suffering more exquisitely painful. She is
helpless because her nature is infinitely sweet and her love absolute. I
would not challenge Mr. Swinburne's statement that we pity Othello
even more than Desdemona; but we watch Desdemona with more unmitigated
distress. We are never wholly uninfluenced by the feeling that Othello
is a man contending with another man; but Desdemona's suffering is like
that of the most loving of dumb creatures tortured without cause by the
being he adores.
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Turning from the hero and heroine to the third principal character,
we observe (what has often been pointed out) that the action and
catastrophe of Othello depend largely on intrigue. We must not say
more than this. We must not call the play a tragedy of intrigue as
distinguished from a tragedy of character. Iago's plot is Iago's
character in action; and it is built on his knowledge of Othello's
character, and could not otherwise have succeeded. Still it remains true
that an elaborate plot was necessary to elicit the catastrophe; for
Othello was no Leontes, and his was the last nature to engender such
jealousy from itself. Accordingly Iago's intrigue occupies a position in
the drama for which no parallel can be found in the other tragedies; the
only approach, and that a distant one, being the intrigue of Edmund in
the secondary plot of King Lear. Now in any novel or play, even if the
persons rouse little interest and are never in serious danger, a
skilfully-worked intrigue will excite eager attention and suspense. And
where, as in Othello, the persons inspire the keenest sympathy and
antipathy, and life and death depend on the intrigue, it becomes the
source of a tension in which pain almost overpowers pleasure. Nowhere
else in Shakespeare do we hold our breath in such anxiety and for so
long a time as in the later Acts of Othello.
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One result of the prominence of the element of intrigue is that
Othello is less unlike a story of private life than any other of the
great tragedies. And this impression is strengthened in further ways. In
the other great tragedies the action is placed in a distant period, so
that its general significance is perceived through a thin veil which
separates the persons from ourselves and our own world. But Othello is
a drama of modern life; when it first appeared it was a drama almost of
contemporary life, for the date of the Turkish attack on Cyprus is 1570.
The characters come close to us, and the application of the drama to
ourselves (if the phrase may be pardoned) is more immediate than it can
be in Hamlet or Lear. Besides this, their fortunes affect us as
those of private individuals more than is possible in any of the later
tragedies with the exception of Timon. I have not forgotten the
Senate, nor Othello's position, nor his service to the State;[87] but
his deed and his death have not that influence on the interests of a
nation or an empire which serves to idealise, and to remove far from our
own sphere, the stories of Hamlet and Macbeth, of Coriolanus and Antony.
Indeed he is already superseded at Cyprus when his fate is consummated,
and as we leave him no vision rises on us, as in other tragedies, of
peace descending on a distracted land.
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The peculiarities so far considered combine with others to produce
those feelings of oppression, of confinement to a comparatively narrow
world, and of dark fatality, which haunt us in reading Othello. In
Macbeth the fate which works itself out alike in the external conflict
and in the hero's soul, is obviously hostile to evil; and the
imagination is dilated both by the consciousness of its presence and by
the appearance of supernatural agencies. These, as we have seen, produce
in Hamlet a somewhat similar effect, which is increased by the hero's
acceptance of the accidents as a providential shaping of his end. _King
Lear_ is undoubtedly the tragedy which comes nearest to Othello in the
impression of darkness and fatefulness, and in the absence of direct
indications of any guiding power.[88] But in King Lear, apart from
other differences to be considered later, the conflict assumes
proportions so vast that the imagination seems, as in Paradise Lost,
to traverse spaces wider than the earth. In reading Othello the mind
is not thus distended. It is more bound down to the spectacle of noble
beings caught in toils from which there is no escape; while the
prominence of the intrigue diminishes the sense of the dependence of the
catastrophe on character, and the part played by accident[89] in this
catastrophe accentuates the feeling of fate. This influence of accident
is keenly felt in King Lear only once, and at the very end of the
play. In Othello, after the temptation has begun, it is incessant and
terrible. The skill of Iago was extraordinary, but so was his good
fortune. Again and again a chance word from Desdemona, a chance meeting
of Othello and Cassio, a question which starts to our lips and which
anyone but Othello would have asked, would have destroyed Iago's plot
and ended his life. In their stead, Desdemona drops her handkerchief at
the moment most favourable to him,[90] Cassio blunders into the presence
of Othello only to find him in a swoon, Bianca arrives precisely when
she is wanted to complete Othello's deception and incense his anger into
fury. All this and much more seems to us quite natural, so potent is the
art of the dramatist; but it confounds us with a feeling, such as we
experience in the Oedipus Tyrannus, that for these star-crossed
mortals--both [Greek: dysdaimones]--there is no escape from fate, and
even with a feeling, absent from that play, that fate has taken sides
with villainy.[91] It is not surprising, therefore, that Othello
should affect us as Hamlet and Macbeth never do, and as King
Lear
does only in slighter measure. On the contrary, it is marvellous that,
before the tragedy is over, Shakespeare should have succeeded in toning
down this impression into harmony with others more solemn and serene.
But has he wholly succeeded? Or is there a justification for the fact--a
fact it certainly is--that some readers, while acknowledging, of course,
the immense power of Othello, and even admitting that it is
dramatically perhaps Shakespeare's greatest triumph, still regard it
with a certain distaste, or, at any rate, hardly allow it a place in
their minds beside Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth?
The distaste to which I refer is due chiefly to two causes. First, to
many readers in our time, men as well as women, the subject of sexual
jealousy, treated with Elizabethan fulness and frankness, is not merely
painful but so repulsive that not even the intense tragic emotions which
the story generates can overcome this repulsion. But, while it is easy
to understand a dislike of Othello thus caused, it does not seem
necessary to discuss it, for it may fairly be called personal or
subjective. It would become more than this, and would amount to a
criticism of the play, only if those who feel it maintained that the
fulness and frankness which are disagreeable to them are also needless
from a dramatic point of view, or betray a design of appealing to
unpoetic feelings in the audience. But I do not think that this is
maintained, or that such a view would be plausible.
To some readers, again, parts of Othello appear shocking or even
horrible. They think--if I may formulate their objection--that in these
parts Shakespeare has sinned against the canons of art, by representing
on the stage a violence or brutality the effect of which is
unnecessarily painful and rather sensational than tragic. The passages
which thus give offence are probably those already referred to,--that
where Othello strikes Desdemona (IV. i. 251), that where he affects to
treat her as an inmate of a house of ill-fame (IV. ii.), and finally the
scene of her death.
The issues thus raised ought not to be ignored or impatiently dismissed,
but they cannot be decided, it seems to me, by argument. All we can
profitably do is to consider narrowly our experience, and to ask
ourselves this question: If we feel these objections, do we feel them
when we are reading the play with all our force, or only when we are
reading it in a half-hearted manner? For, however matters may stand in
the former case, in the latter case evidently the fault is ours and not
Shakespeare's. And if we try the question thus, I believe we shall find
that on the whole the fault is ours. The first, and least important, of
the three passages--that of the blow--seems to me the most doubtful. I
confess that, do what I will, I cannot reconcile myself with it. It
seems certain that the blow is by no means a tap on the shoulder with a
roll of paper, as some actors, feeling the repulsiveness of the passage,
have made it. It must occur, too, on the open stage. And there is not, I
think, a sufficiently overwhelming tragic feeling in the passage to make
it bearable. But in the other two scenes the case is different. There,
it seems to me, if we fully imagine the inward tragedy in the souls of
the persons as we read, the more obvious and almost physical sensations
of pain or horror do not appear in their own likeness, and only serve to
intensify the tragic feelings in which they are absorbed. Whether this
would be so in the murder-scene if Desdemona had to be imagined as
dragged about the open stage (as in some modern performances) may be
doubtful; but there is absolutely no warrant in the text for imagining
this, and it is also quite clear that the bed where she is stifled was
within the curtains,[92] and so, presumably, in part concealed.
Here, then, Othello does not appear to be, unless perhaps at one
point,[93] open to criticism, though it has more passages than the other
three tragedies where, if imagination is not fully exerted, it is
shocked or else sensationally excited. If nevertheless we feel it to
occupy a place in our minds a little lower than the other three (and I
believe this feeling, though not general, is not rare), the reason lies
not here but in another characteristic, to which I have already
referred,--the comparative confinement of the imaginative atmosphere.
Othello has not equally with the other three the power of dilating the
imagination by vague suggestions of huge universal powers working in the
world of individual fate and passion. It is, in a sense, less
'symbolic.' We seem to be aware in it of a certain limitation, a partial
suppression of that element in Shakespeare's mind which unites him with
the mystical poets and with the great musicians and philosophers. In one
or two of his plays, notably in Troilus and Cressida, we are almost
painfully conscious of this suppression; we feel an intense intellectual
activity, but at the same time a certain coldness and hardness, as
though some power in his soul, at once the highest and the sweetest,
were for a time in abeyance. In other plays, notably in the Tempest,
we are constantly aware of the presence of this power; and in such cases
we seem to be peculiarly near to Shakespeare himself. Now this is so in
Hamlet and King Lear, and, in a slighter degree, in Macbeth;
but
it is much less so in Othello. I do not mean that in Othello the
suppression is marked, or that, as in Troilus and Cressida, it strikes
us as due to some unpleasant mood; it seems rather to follow simply from
the design of a play on a contemporary and wholly mundane subject. Still
it makes a difference of the kind I have attempted to indicate, and it
leaves an impression that in Othello we are not in contact with the
whole of Shakespeare. And it is perhaps significant in this respect that
the hero himself strikes us as having, probably, less of the poet's
personality in him than many characters far inferior both as dramatic
creations and as men.
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