Othello

In brief

Othello, a Moorish general in the service of Venice, secretly marries Desdemona, daughter of the senator Brabantio. Iago, his ensign, passed over for promotion in favour of Michael Cassio, tells Brabantio in the foulest terms he can find. The Senate needs Othello against the Turks, so the marriage stands, and Desdemona goes with him to Cyprus, where a storm destroys the Turkish fleet. Iago gets Cassio disgraced, advises him to ask Desdemona to plead for him, and persuades Othello that her pleading proves an affair. A handkerchief, Othello’s first gift to her, taken by Iago’s wife Emilia, supplies the evidence. Othello strikes Desdemona in public and smothers her in her bed. Emilia exposes her husband, who kills her. Othello stabs himself, and Iago, wounded and under arrest, refuses to say another word.

The argument

The companion page on Hamlet calls that play a demand for proof. Here the same demand is made, “Give me the ocular proof” (3.3), and a stolen handkerchief meets it. The old explanations are that Iago is a genius or that Othello is a credulous barbarian, and I think neither is right. For the first long stretch of the temptation scene Iago asserts almost nothing. He repeats Othello’s words back until Othello supplies the meaning: “By heaven, he echoes me, / As if there were some monster in his thought” (3.3). The monster is already available, because Venice put it there.

Look at what the city has said to this man before Iago opens his mouth. Iago has shouted of “an old black ram” (1.1) under a senator’s window. Brabantio, who “lov’d me, oft invited me” (1.3), now cannot believe his daughter would run to “the sooty bosom / Of such a thing as thou” (1.2) without witchcraft. Even the friendly Duke gives the game away: “Your son-in-law is far more fair than black” (1.3). So when Iago says “I know our country disposition well” (3.3), he claims an expertise Othello really does lack, and the doubt lands where it was prepared: “Haply, for I am black” (3.3). Iago only has to remind a soldier at home on any battlefield that he is a stranger in every drawing room. The poison works because it is the local water.

Iago’s silence

When Othello finally asks, the answer is a refusal: “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. / From this time forth I never will speak word” (5.2). This is usually taken as a mystery of evil. Coleridge’s phrase, on the soliloquy that closes Act 1, is “the motive-hunting of motiveless malignity”. Iago does offer reasons: the lost lieutenancy, a rumour about Othello and Emilia, a suspicion about Cassio too, a desire for Desdemona. They do not add up, and he does not seem to need them to.

I do not think he is motiveless, because the injured vanity of his first speech is real, but no motive is the size of what he does. And I read the silence as the last move of his method rather than a riddle. He has spent the play withholding, so that others fill the gap with their own fears, and he withholds once more. Othello’s question is a plea: “Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil / Why he hath thus ensnar’d my soul and body?” An explanation would make this a story about a devil and his victim, and Othello has already looked for the cloven hoof: “I look down towards his feet; but that’s a fable.” The silence refuses him the excuse. What they know is what they believed, and who believed it.

The silence has a partner. Minutes earlier Iago tells his wife to hold her tongue and she answers “I will not charm my tongue; I am bound to speak” (5.2). She speaks and is killed, and he stops speaking and lives, at least until the curtain, with only a promise that “Torments will ope your lips.” Lodovico’s last order is to cover the bed: “The object poisons sight; / Let it be hid.”

Desdemona

The stage tradition made her a pale sufferer, but Desdemona is the one who chose. She took the hint in Othello’s stories and gave him one back (1.3), eloped, and then spoke up in front of the Senate and her father: “I do perceive here a divided duty.” She says what she wants, “That I did love the Moor to live with him”, and she refuses to be left behind in Venice while he goes to war, because then “The rites for which I love him are bereft me” (1.3). Othello calls her “my fair warrior” (2.1), and he is right.

She is funny and tactical. Waiting on the quay for a husband who may have drowned, she trades insults with Iago, and tells us why: “I am not merry, but I do beguile / The thing I am by seeming otherwise” (2.1). She takes up Cassio’s cause like a lobbyist, promising “I’ll watch him tame, and talk him out of patience” (3.3). That energy is what Iago turns into evidence. She can also lie when frightened, as she does about the handkerchief: “It is not lost” (3.4).

Nor does she simply submit. “By heaven, you do me wrong”, she tells him, and when he calls her a strumpet she says “No, as I am a Christian” (4.2). With Emilia that night she is curious rather than innocent, asking twice about adultery “for all the world” (4.3). In the last scene she argues for her life and bargains it down: “Kill me tomorrow; let me live tonight!” Then “But half an hour!” (5.2).

Then she revives for a moment, is asked who did this, and says “Nobody; I myself. Farewell. / Commend me to my kind lord” (5.2). It is often called forgiveness or surrender, but see what it does: Othello at once uses it to damn her, “She’s like a liar gone to burning hell.” I find it the most active thing anyone says in the scene. It is a lie, told with her last breath against the evidence, and for one line it takes the story out of the hands of the men in the room. It does not save her and it should not comfort us, and it was still her decision.

The shape of the play

Everything on Cyprus happens in about a day and a half, yet Othello speaks of “the act of shame / A thousand times committed” (5.2), and Bianca complains “What, keep a week away?” (3.4). John Wilson drew attention to this double clock in Blackwood’s in 1849–50. No one on stage has the time to check, and nor do we.

The voices

G. Wilson Knight called it “the Othello music”: the rolling verse of “Like to the Pontic Sea” (3.3). Iago prefers prose, all appetite and accounts: “Put money in thy purse” (1.3). The drama of the middle acts is that one idiom infects the other, until Othello falls into fragments, “Pish! Noses, ears, and lips” (4.1), and faints. His last speech recovers the music, and T. S. Eliot complained in 1927 that he is “cheering himself up”. That is fair, and yet the speech ends by casting him as both the Venetian and the Turk he once killed for Venice, an exact account of what the city made of him.

Two Othellos

Thomas Walkley published the Quarto in 1622, and the Folio followed in 1623. The Folio has about 160 lines the Quarto lacks and the Quarto about a dozen the Folio lacks. The Quarto swears, as in Iago’s “Zounds sir you are robd”, where the Folio has “Sir, y’are rob’d”; the usual explanation is the 1606 Act against profanity on stage. A single word can change a marriage: Desdemona gave Othello “a world of sighes” in the Quarto and “a world of kisses” in the Folio. Othello’s last speech has “the base Indian” in the Quarto and “the base Iudean” in the Folio.

The large differences change the women. Only the Folio has Desdemona sing the willow song; in the Quarto she mentions it and moves on. Only the Folio has Emilia’s great speech, “Let husbands know / Their wives have sense like them” (4.3), her dying song, and Desdemona kneeling to Iago in 4.2. Only the Quarto gives the smothered Desdemona a cry, “O Lord, Lord, Lord.” Whether the Folio’s lines are later additions, as E. A. J. Honigmann’s work on the texts (1996) favours, or passages cut from the Quarto is not settled. If it was revision, Shakespeare’s second thoughts made the women harder to dismiss.

The free text linked here, Gutenberg’s #1531, names no editor and mixes the two. It has the Folio’s longer passages and “Judean”, but the Quarto’s “sighs” and its oaths, and it drops the Quarto’s cry.

How it was made

The source is a story in Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi (1565), in which only Disdemona has a name. The Ensign wants the Moor’s wife and turns on her when she ignores him, and the two men beat her to death with a stocking full of sand and bring the ceiling down to hide it. Disdemona fears she will be a warning to Italian girls not to marry against their parents’ wishes. Shakespeare keeps the handkerchief and adds the compression, the Turkish war, Roderigo, Brabantio and a hero of real standing. The play was performed at court on 1 November 1604.

Race on the stage

For most of its history white actors played Othello in dark make-up. Coleridge, who supplied the phrase about Iago, also argued in 1818 that it would be “something monstrous” to think of Desdemona falling for a “veritable negro”. He could not bear what Iago says, and said it anyway.

Ira Aldridge, born in New York in 1807, played Othello in London in 1825, aged seventeen, and took the part to Covent Garden in April 1833 after Edmund Kean collapsed in it. Reviewers attacked him in racist terms and the engagement ended after two performances. He worked on across the provinces and Europe, and died in Łódź in 1867. Paul Robeson played it at the Savoy in 1930 opposite Peggy Ashcroft, the first Black Othello in Britain since Aldridge. His Broadway run of 1943 reached 296 performances, and he played it again at Stratford in 1959.

Laurence Olivier’s performance at the National Theatre in 1964, filmed in 1965, went the other way. In full blackface, with a walk “like a soft black leopard”, he rolled his eyes in a manner that reminded one columnist of Al Jolson. All four principals were nominated for Oscars, and it is very hard to watch now.

How it is read now

Since the 1980s the part has generally gone to Black actors, which has not ended the problem. Hugh Quarshie asked in a lecture in 1998 whether a Black actor risks “making racial stereotypes seem legitimate and even true”, and he played it for the RSC in 2015. Ben Okri put it plainly: “It hurts to watch Othello.” Mythili Kaul’s collection of essays by Black writers (1996) moved the question from whether the play is racist to how it works on audiences.

The domestic reading has sharpened alongside. A modern audience recognises the sequence: questioning, accusation, a blow in front of guests, “My lord, this would not be believ’d in Venice” (4.1), then an interrogation in the bedroom and a killing he calls justice: “It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul” (5.2). English law has since 2015 had an offence of controlling or coercive behaviour, and Emilia got there first: the jealous “are not ever jealous for the cause, / But jealous for they are jealous” (3.4).

The two readings pull against each other. Read for race alone, the murder seems done to Othello. Read for violence alone, a Black man killing a white wife becomes the image Quarshie feared. The play has an answer that is too rarely noticed: there are two wife-killers in the last scene. Iago stabs Emilia in front of everyone for speaking, and the white husband’s act is passed over in a line while the Black husband’s fills the stage. An honest production makes us see both.

The people

Othello is calm and magnificent in the first act: “Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them” (1.2). He knows the value of what he has: “when I love thee not, / Chaos is come again” (3.3).

Emilia

Emilia takes the handkerchief to please a husband she knows is dangerous, and she keeps quiet while Desdemona looks for it. That complicity is what makes her final turn the moral climax of the play.

Readers and critics

Thomas Rymer’s A Short View of Tragedy (1693) is the first sustained attack, vicious, funny and useful. Rymer called the play “a Bloody farce, without salt or savour”, offered as its moral a warning to wives to look well to their linen, and asked “Why was not this call’d the Tragedy of the Handkerchief?” His racism is on the surface, but he saw how much hangs on a trifle. A. C. Bradley’s noble Othello (1904) met its reply in F. R. Leavis’s “Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero” (1937), where Iago merely exploits a man already in love with himself. The play needs both to be true.

Afterlives

Verdi and Boito’s Otello (1887) begins on Cyprus and gives Iago a credo. Orson Welles filmed the play in 1951, and Oliver Parker in 1995 with Laurence Fishburne. Omkara (2006) moves it to Uttar Pradesh. The best recent responses talk back. Djanet Sears’s Harlem Duet (1997) tells the story of the Black woman Othello left. Toni Morrison’s Desdemona (2011), with Rokia Traoré’s music, gives the dead woman words she never had. Lolita Chakrabarti’s Red Velvet (2012) stages Aldridge’s Covent Garden nights.

How to read it

Get an edition that marks the differences. Honigmann’s Arden, reissued in 2016 with an introduction by Ayanna Thompson, and Michael Neill’s Oxford (2006) are the ones to have. The Folger text is free online, and so are the Quarto and Folio at the Internet Shakespeare Editions.
Read 3.3 slowly. Mark what Iago asserts and what Othello supplies.
Read 4.3 twice. Then read it in the Quarto, and see how much of the women disappears.

Toni Morrison, Desdemona (2011). The answer from the far side of death.
Caryl Phillips, The Nature of Blood (1997). A novel in which Othello tells his own story in Venice.
William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (about 1597). The same city and its uses for a stranger.