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Bickley, Pamela , and Jenny Stevens. "Othello: Sex, race and suggestibility." Essential
Shakespeare: The Arden Guide to Text and Interpretation. London: Bloomsbury Arden
Shakespeare, 2013. 119–140. Arden Shakespeare. Drama Online. Web. 2 Aug. 2020.
<http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781408174692.ch-006>.

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Copyright © Pamela Bickley. Jenny Stevens. All rights reserved. Further reproduction or
distribution is prohibited without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
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 Othello
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DOI: 10.5040/9781408174692.ch-006
Page Range: 119–140

Tracing the history of Othello in performance is in some respects to trace the history of
attitudes to race over the past four centuries. The slave trade, racial segregation and
state apartheid all asserted themselves after the text’s original production and form an
inevitable filter through which audiences today view the play. Not surprisingly, the
drama brings us to consider some uncomfortable questions, even in what is generally
considered to be a multicultural age.

This chapter

examines a relatively new critical approach that advocates rooting our study of
Shakespeare in the material present

considers the presentation of sexuality in the play in the context of early modern
attitudes

analyzes how Othello makes its readers and audiences conscious of the workings
of language

explores how one of the major directors of Shakespeare on film visually translates
the imagery and themes of the tragedy

Presentism: ‘The new kid on the Shakespeare block’

For none of us can step beyond time. It can’t be drained out of our experience.
  --(Shakespeare in the Present, 2002, 3)

So wrote Terence Hawkes in a work that is commonly regarded as the ‘presentist’

manifesto. As a critical practice, presentism takes the here-and-now as the inevitable
starting point of textual investigation, insisting on the inescapability of current
perspectives. While such a theoretical label might imply an adversarial relationship to
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historicism, its proponents insist that it is by no means advocating a relapse into the belief
that literature holds universal, unchanging truths, or an assumption that the present is
always superior to the past. As presentists see it, new historicism has developed into a
critical orthodoxy, guilty of overstating the alterity of Shakespeare’s time and of
privileging the past over the present. An over-zealous attention to the minutiae of the
recorded early modern world, so presentists argue, has left us fearful that our response to
a Shakespeare play might be risibly anachronistic (though it must be said that the
anachronistic is more troubling for us today than it would have been for Shakespeare and
his audiences). One possible consequence of this is that the aesthetic impact of literary
texts is sidelined in favour of what Kiernan Ryan has typified as ‘the endless studies bent
on shackling Shakespeare to everything from maps and money to cooking and cosmetics’
(‘Troilus and Cressida: The Perils of Presentism’ in Presentist Shakespeares, Hugh Grady
 and Terence Hawkes (eds), 2007, 168). Presentism strives to re-attach us to the literary
work, to restore the pleasure and freedom of interpretation, while remaining ‘committed
to a theoretical situatedness in our own cultural and political moment’ (Hugh Grady,
‘Shakespeare Studies, 2005: A Situated Overview’, Shakespeare, 1, 114).
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Othello seems to invite a presentist reading more than the other major tragedies, its
world being relatively more familiar to us than that of kings and princes. Its focus on a
relationship between a black man and a white woman also makes it of particular interest
to twenty-first-century audiences for whom race continues to be a highly controversial
issue. Although some critics argue that Shakespeare’s age was ‘pre-racial’ and,
consequently, to view Othello through the lens of current race relations is wrong-headed,
presentists such as Evelyn Gajowski encourage a critical reading situated in the moment,
so as to ‘gain a heightened awareness of the narrative of human history as an ongoing,
imbricated (and imbricating) process’ ( Presentism, Gender, and Sexuality in Shakespeare,
2009, 7). The contemporary resonance of Othello came strongly to the fore when Barack
Obama gained victory in the 2008 US presidential election. Connections were made, and
continue to be made, between the fictional hero’s eloquence and that of the first African
American president, between Othello’s situation as the saviour of the Venetians and
Obama’s as the man promising to bring vital change to the United States. In 2009, a
seminar addressing the question ‘Is Obama an Othello for our times?’ was held at the
Warwick Arts Centre. Whilst acknowledging the dangers of making too literal-minded a
comparison, panellists explored correspondences between Obama’s and Othello’s Islamic
roots and the weight of the representational force that both the fictional and the real-life
hero carry. They also agreed that, though it is tempting to regard the racist attitudes
reflected in a drama of 1604 from a certain altitude of ‘knowing better’, there are still
plenty of potential Iagos in a country where racial divides remain active and powerful.

Presentism calls for a heightened awareness that our approach to a play such as Othello
will inevitably be influenced by the period in which we live. Such awareness is not,
however, to be gained simply by focusing on what we find ‘relevant’ to our present
circumstances. Any study of the play’s treatment of race will require alertness to the fact
that notionsof racism have differed vastly over the centuries and even the past few
decades. The same applies to the interprative focus on the play. That race is a principal
area of critical interest in the twenty-first century is evident from the introductions and
notes provided in the most up-to-date scholarly editions of Othello, though it was not
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until the 1960s and 1970s, a time which saw the establishment of the Commission for
Racial Equality and the Race Relations Act in Britain, that sustained critical studies of
Shakespeare and what was then termed ‘colour’ began to be published. And even with
the influence of ground-breaking articles such as G. K. Hunter’s ‘Elizabethans and
Foreigners’ (SS, 17, 1964), it would take until the 1980s for the postcolonial criticism which
informs so much of today’s discussion of Othello to emerge.

The critical practices which have been most influential on recent readings of Othello –
postcolonial theory and feminist theory – are, in fact, inherently presentist, situating their
approach to the play in current gender and race politics. A presentist approach to Othello
generates a rich diversity of interpretation. Some critics promote the play as a compelling
example of Shakespeare’s ability to see beyond immediate circumstances to a vision of a
better world where love transcends difference. First staged at a time when inter-racial
marriage would have been viewed by most audience members as aberrant, the lovers’
 courage in defying the decorum of Venetian society is seen as an ideal to be aspired to,
an argument against bigotry, reaching out to what Bakhtin termed a ‘superaddressee’,
one ‘whose absolutely just responsive understanding is presumed … in distant historical
time’ (Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (eds),
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1986, 126). There is plenty in Othello to support such a view: it is the first early modern
drama to present a Moor who has anything other than despicable features, let alone one
who – for the first two acts of the play at least – is presented as noble, eloquent and
respected by European society. Karen Newman, in her article ‘“And wash the Ethiop
white”: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello’,goes so far as arguing that
‘Shakespeare’s play stands in a contestatory relation to the hegemonic ideologies of race
and gender in early modern England’ (in Shakespeare Reproduced: the Text in History and
Ideology, Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O’Connor (eds), 1987, 157).
Regarding Shakespeare as a prescient proponent of an anti-racist agenda is undeniably
appealing, yet as Emma Smith points out in her succinct and comprehensive study of the
play: ‘it is disquieting to have to acknowledge that, on occasion, his plays fail to buttress
contemporary tolerant opinion’ (Othello, 2005, 39). How the hero’s transformation from
eloquent warrior to vengeful murderer is accounted for is central to an interpretation of
the play’s racial politics. Mid-point in the drama and about half-way through what is
commonly known as the ‘Temptation Scene’, Othello soliloquizes:

                              Haply for I am black

And have not those soft parts of conversation
That chamberers have, or for I am declined
Into the vale of years – yet that’s not much –
She’s gone, I am abused, and my relief
Must be to loathe her. O curse of marriage
That we can call these delicate creatures ours
And not their appetites!
  --(3.3.267–74)

It is a speech that captures in miniature the ambivalent nature of the play. We hear in the
rhythms and hesitations of the lines Othello’s movement from self-doubt to a fleeting rally
of confidence, followed by a retreat into the generalizing habit of misogyny. Othello
considers his colour, his culture, and his age to be viable reasons for his wife’s infidelity, his
articulation of three possibilities complicating a straightforward reading of his situation.
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Nonetheless, the primary position of ‘black’ in the speech, its inseparability from the lack
of ‘soft parts of conversation’, and his apparent dismissal of age as asignificant factor
(though the grammar is ambiguous here) all point to skin colour as the hero’s chief
‘disadvantage’. If read as confirmation that a Venetian world view has finally infiltrated the
hero, these lines support an idea of Shakespeare as a playwright both of and beyond his
age, who gives us in Othello a glimpse of what might be before reminding us of what is.
The audience is encouraged to place blame not on the black ‘outsider’, but on the white
majority whose values have corrupted him.

By way of contrast, Michael Bristol’s contention that Othello is a ‘comedy of abjection’

(Big-time Shakespeare, 1996, 175–6), with Othello placed as its central comic monster,
renders the speech one of the play’s carnivalesque moments, played before an audience
‘for whom a racist sensibility was entirely normal’ (181). It is a view which, as its author
concedes, presents a severe challenge to modern sensibilities in its suggestion that, far
 from being a text which dramatizes the possibility of racial equality, it is instead ‘a highly
significant document in the historical constitution both of racist sensibility and of racist
political ideology’ (182), an insight that can only be gained from the vantage point of the
present.
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Unsurprisingly, given its broad sweep and the combative stance of some of its advocates,
presentism has its detractors. John Holbo, for example, sees it as ‘a species of error’
(Literature Compass, 5, 2008, 1097), falsely projecting elements of the present onto the
past and overstating the multi-perspectival nature of history. Yet grounding the study of
literary texts in the present has long been, and continues to be, the most rewarding – not
to mention the most feasible – option for teachers of Shakespeare at school level.
Presentism invites the undergraduate student to revisit such pre-university readings in the
light of a more sophisticated and conscious critical practice.

Sexuality in Othello
Nineteenth-century editors who set about making Shakespeare suitable for family reading
found Othello to be one of their toughest challenges. The preface to the tragedy in
Thomas Bowdler’s 1831 edition of The Family Shakspeare [sic], recommended it be
transferred ‘from the parlour to the cabinet’, presumably to be kept under lock and key
for ‘adults only’. Almost two centuries on, the presentation of the erotic in what E. A. J.
Honigmann describes as a ‘sex-drenched play’ (Arden 3, 52), continues to attract a more
than usually diverse range of interpretation.

Considering an early modern dramatization of sexuality from the vantage point of our
own time requires a degree of caution. That sexual desire and practices are the same the
world over and impermeable to changing times might seem commonsensical. However, as
the history of just the past half century clearly shows, what is deemed ‘natural’ human
behaviour is not set in stone, but defined by social, cultural and economic factors. That
sexuality is as much a construct as an essential biological drive is an intellectual position
which has dominated critical practice in recent years. One of the most influential
exponents of this idea is the cultural historian, Michel Foucault (1926–84). In the first part
of his three-volume history of sexuality, he insists:
Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in
check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually to uncover. It is the
name that can be given to a historical construct … a great surface network in which the
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stimulation of bodies, the intensification of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the

formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are
linked to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge and
power.
  --(The Will to Knowledge, 1990, 105–6)

Foucault regards Shakespeare’s time as the turning point in the history of sexuality, a time
when sexual behaviour started to be shaped by forces such as the judicial system and the
medical profession – forces which would grow increasingly powerful throughout the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
 Iago is the play’s self-styled sex expert. Playing on his status as experienced married man,
he offers Roderigo his ‘wisdom’ on the inherent instability of erotic desire and the need to
control ‘carnal stings’ (1.3.331). He puts his linguistic powers to work to plant a variety of
lewd visual scenarios into the imagination of his victims: Desdemona and Othello ‘making
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the beast with two backs’ (1.1.115) (to torment Brabantio); Desdemona and Cassio
‘paddling’ palms (to torment Roderigo); and Cassio laying his thigh over Iago and kissing
him, in the middle of an erotic dream of Desdemona (to torment Othello). Indeed, to
acquire a ‘feel’ for the bawdy of early seventeenth-century England one need look no
further than Iago, whose locker-room vernacular places him squarely in the military world,
ensuring that all take him for the blunt soldier, never stopping to question what might lie
beneath his plain-speaking exterior.
What clearly does lie beneath, though, is a seething hatred for his master. The image of
Othello conjured up by Iago beneath Brabantio’s window conforms to the contemporary
dramatic stereotype of the libidinous, predatory Moor, passed down from medieval
morality plays, and supplemented by empirical ‘evidence’ found in early modern
travelogues. Shakespeare’s depiction of Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus conforms in
most respects to stage type, announcing his lascivious plans to ‘wanton’ (1.1.520) with
Tamora, Queen of the Goths in his very first speech. The opening act of Othello could be
read as a direct challenge to such representations of the Moor figure. Iago’s crude
description of the black Othello ‘tupping’ (1.1.88) the white Desdemona seems to have
been set up for contradiction, as the so-called sex-beast proceeds to deal calmly and
authoritatively with Brabantio’s insults and with the pressing concerns of the imminent
invasion.

Desdemona’s frank admission of her sexual feelings for Othello in front of the Senate
further challenges the stereotype of the lascivious Moor. Asked to confirm if she ‘was half
the wooer’ (1.3.176), she declares:

That I did love the Moor to live with him

My downright violence and scorn of fortunes
May trumpet to the world.
  --(1.3.249–51)

In rejecting wealth, convention and sexual reticence at this juncture, Desdemona is

confounding an entire belief system. For an aristocratic Venetian such as Brabantio,
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consensual sex between a black man and a white woman goes against ‘all rules of nature’
(1.3.102) and can only be explained if the Moor, true to his stereotype, is found to have
administered ‘mixtures powerful o’er the blood’ (1.3.105) to get his evil way. That his
daughter can publicly contradict this ‘natural’ explanation is a shock from which he never
recovers.
Shakespeare leaves the audience in no doubt that Desdemona is sexually attracted to
Othello. The imagery used to describe her reception of his travellers’ tales is that of the
appetite, commonly associated – both then and now – with erotic desire: ‘She’d come
again, and with a greedy ear/Devour up my discourse’ (1.3.150–1). Here, in one of the
play’s numerous role reversals, she plays the part of the courtly lover, giving Othello a
‘world of sighs’ (1.3.160) in reward for his exotic stories, as well as the hint that he should
 woo her. That Desdemona feels physical desire for a man is not in itself unusual – women
at the time were commonly held to be sexually rapacious – but that she should be free
and open about her longings for a Moor is highly transgressive.
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If Desdemona resembles Juliet in anticipating pleasure in the ‘amorous rites’ (Romeo and
Juliet, 3.2.8) of the marriage bed, her choice of an ethnically different lover is where any
similarity ends. Iago understands his society’s deep-rootedfear of miscegenation and
realizes that, while the Duke might have considered the national threat of Turkish invasion
as more pressing than that of a single inter-racial marriage, once peacetime resumes, so
too will normative attitudes. As if putting language back into kilter, he appropriates the
word ‘violence’, that he has heard Desdemona use to convince the Senate of her love for
Othello, to convince Roderigo to the contrary. The attraction was not love but ‘a violent
commencement in her’ (1.3.345), which is bound to burn itself out. Moreover, as if
rewinding the events of the play’s first act, he persuades Roderigo that Desdemona’s
‘delicate tenderness will find itself abused’ (2.1.229–30) and that she will veer to one of
the ‘curled darlings’ (1.2.68) that should have been her initial choice. As far as most
Venetians are concerned, ‘natural’ feeling is that which corresponds to societal norms: a
woman ‘naturally’ desires a man of her own class and colour – and preferably one chosen
by her father. What seems to lurk beneath this suppression of female agency, however, is
a strong fear of the uncontrollability of women’s sexuality, and it is this fear that Iago plays
on in his intimate conversations with Othello.
There can be no doubt that Iago’s instilling of European misogynistic attitudes into
Othello plays a major part in transforming him from a loving husband to a violent wife
abuser and that it is not, as some commentators have seen it, a simple matter of a
superficially ‘civilised’ man reverting to primitive type. Nonetheless, the play raises
questions about how far Othello has what the African American author and political
activist, W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), described as a ‘double-consciousness, this sense of
always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others’ (The Souls of Black Folk, 1903, 11),
a potentially corrosive perspective, with or without the malicious intentions of an Iago.
Just a few lines after Desdemona has declared her passionate love for her husband to the
Senate, Othello presents his feelings in somewhat contrasting terms. He insists that it is to
please Desdemona, and not to satisfy the erotic desires of a new husband, that drives him
to request his wife accompany him to Cyprus:

Vouch with me, heaven, I therefore beg it not

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To please the palate of my appetite,

Nor to comply with heat, the young affects
In me defunct, and proper satisfaction,
But to be free and bounteous to her mind.
  --(1.3.262–6)

The lines can be read as a prime example of Othello’s ‘double-consciousness’. Aware of

how he appears through the eyes of a typical Venetian, he attempts to present himself as
sexually ‘defunct’, as unlike the prejudiced view of the hypersexual Moor as he can be. Yet
they could equally well be read as the shrewd words of an experienced general in a tight
spot. Where there is a tendency in our day to equate a strong sexual libido with
masculinity, the early modern view was rather different: too much sex weakened the male
 both physically and mentally. In declaring his resistance to the delights of conjugality,
then, Othello preserves his role as saviour of the nation, a role that has helped make his
marriage acceptable to the state in the first place.
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One influential critic, Valerie Traub, reads these same lines as expressing the speaker’s
sexual anxieties, anxieties which are ‘culturally and psychosexually over determined by
erotic, gender, and racial anxieties, including … the fear of chaos he associates with
sexual activity’ (Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama,
1992, 36). Others have read them as an indication of the sexual inadequacy which lies at
the centre of the couple’s marital problems, with much critical fuss being made about
whether or not the marriage is ever consummated. Some critics go so far as blaming
Desdemona’s murder on the frustration and anger which result from the sexual failure of
the wedding night. Ultimately, though, theories about the consummation of the marriage
can never go beyond mere conjecture. In Shakespearean drama, as in real life (the sex
trade and pornography permitting), sexual activity is hidden away; wecannot, to use
Iago’s memorably alliterative phrase, ‘grossly gape on’ (3.3.398).
If the consummation issue has sometimes led critics to be over-literal, consideration of the
sexual overtones of Desdemona’s murder have yielded rather more sophisticated
analyzes. It is a commonly held view that the killing of Desdemona materializes the early
modern association of death and sex. In Elizabethan English ‘to die’ could mean to
orgasm, a metaphor which carried with it a sense of oblivion and annihilation far removed
from our modern use of the verb ‘to come’. In stage and screen performances, Othello
often suffocates Desdemona in a manner evoking the throes of orgasm, a necro-erotic
coincidence which seems to be underscored, even ritualized, in the rhetorical patterning
of Othello’s dying words:

I kissed thee ere I killed thee: no way but this,

Killing myself, to die upon a kiss.
  --(5.2.356–7)

While Othello’s words seem to echo Romeo’s in Shakespeare’s earlier liebestod, they are
altogether more disturbing and involved. The psychosexual nature of this later hero calls
for far greater attention than that of his more youthful and more straightforward
predecessor.
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Othello and the power of language

The nature and significance of language is keenly explored in all of Shakespeare’s plays
and poetry, though Othello is especially notable for its insistence on making the audience
hyper-conscious of the words they hear spoken. As the play progresses, so the usual
transparency of verbal communication begins to thicken and, rather like when we are
made to think about the operation of breathing, the process is rendered strange and
unnatural.
Early modern attitudes to language were closely associated with biblical texts. In Genesis,
Adam is given the power to name ‘every living creature’ (2.19), so that speech becomes a
crucial sign of man’s dominion over the animal kingdom. On the other hand, the
proceeding story of the tower of Babel (11.1–9), tells of the loss of the ‘original’ Adamic
 language: a linguistic system wherein words were integral to the things they stood for,
rather than an arbitrary appellation. Language was seen, then, as both a privilege and a
curse, a contradiction that generated an ambivalent attitude to speech and writing.
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The Venice of Othello is circumscribed by text and speech codes. The Duke promises the
outraged Brabantio recourse to the ‘bloody book of law’ (1.3.68); Iago rails at the fact that
‘Preferment goes by letter’ (1.1.35); and Brabantio speculates that his daughter is
bewitched because he has read of ‘some such thing’ (1.1.172). The elopement of
Desdemona unsettles not only the decorum of Venetian society, but also its linguistic
sureties. The Duke’s speech to the aggrieved father, expressed in a series of rhyming
couplets (1.3.203–10), is met by a sarcastic mirror language:

So let the Turk of Cyprus us beguile,

We lose it not so long as we can smile;
He bears the sentence well that nothing bears
But the free comfort which from thence he hears.
               […]
But words are words: I never yet did hear
That the bruised heart was pierced through the ear.
  --(1.3.211–20)

Here, for all his anger, Brabantio retains the linguistic control associated with the Venetian
aristocracy in order to respond to the Duke in kind, his verbal imitation at the same time
exposing the leader’s speech as no more than a rhetorical brush-off.
Iago is both resentful and protective of the eloquence and bookishness of Venetian
aristocratic society. He sneers at Cassiofor being a ‘bookish theoric’ (1.1.23), while
evincing equal contempt for the military Othello’s ‘bombast circumstance’ (1.1.12). Clearly
disturbed that an outsider can take on Venetian discourse, he casts doubt on his ability to
sustain it. Referring back to Othello’s wooing of Desdemona through ‘bragging and
telling her fantastical lies’ (2.1.221), he asks Roderigo to consider whether she will ‘love
him still for prating?’(2.1.222); and, after he has exposed the fault lines in the hero’s non-
native language, derides his ‘unbookish jealousy’ (4.1.102), relishing the uncovering of
what he sees as the Moor’s inadequate learning.

Iago is often viewed by critics as the consummate rhetorician, whose social class denies
him the opportunity to show off his linguistic virtuosity in public, obliging him instead to
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test it out in private situations. Cassio makes the fatal, if understandable, error of
regarding Iago as more ‘soldier than … scholar’ (2.1.166). Placed in a position of superior
knowledge thanks to Iago’s frequent soliloquies, the audience realizes that nothing could
be further from the truth. He confides to them that he ‘must show out a flag and sign of
love/Which is indeed but sign’ (1.1.154–5), the hendiadys (‘flag and sign’) emphasizing the
doubleness which he professes.
Iago’s sophisticated understanding of language allows him to disrupt the linguistic
confidence and decorum of others. His verbal manipulations are exercised first on a
relatively easy target, Roderigo, then on the rather more challenging figure of Cassio and,
finally, on his ‘prize’ victim, Othello. In one scene, Iago attempts to force Cassio out of his
‘gentlemanly’ habit of speaking:
 CASSIO:   She’s a most exquisite lady.
IAGO:   And I’ll warrant her full of game.
CASSIO:   Indeed she’s a most fresh and delicate creature.
IAGO:   What an eye she has! methinks it sounds a parley to provocation.
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CASSIO:   An inviting eye; and yet methinks right modest.

  --(2.3.18–23)

Played out here is a tussle between two modes of discourse: that of courtly love and that
of a crude demotic. Iago’s following up of words such as ‘exquisite’ with the suggestive
metaphor of ‘full of game’ is not only an invitation to Cassio to lower his social standing
by taking on the idiom of common misogyny, it also draws attention to register and tone.
Is the language of courtly love no more than a verbal cover-up for brute physical desire?
Though Cassio’s reference to Desdemona’s ‘inviting eye’ seems to edge closer to Iago’s
mode of speaking, the second part of the line, strengthened by the strong medial
caesura, blocks Iago’s strategy, putting him firmly back in his place – but not for long.
Iago’s next tactic of loosening Cassio’s tongue with alcohol will see him brought down to
speaking ‘parrot’ (2.3.275).
Iago expends his greatest linguistic efforts on destroying the confident articulateness of
Othello. In the course of the play, he weaves false scenarios which, according to Terry
Eagleton, succeed in ‘punching a gaping hole in reality’ (William Shakespeare, 1986, 66)
and erode Othello’s faith in Desdemona. At other times, he proceeds through the lightest
of conversational touches. Take, for example, his treatment of Othello after Cassio’s exit
from visiting Desdemona:
IAGO:   Ha, I like not that.
OTHELLO:   What dost thou say?
IAGO:   Nothing my lord; or if – I know not what.
  --(3.3.34–6)

Here, what we presume to be a mumbled remark combines with Iago’s use of aposiopesis
in line 36 to plant doubt in Othello’s mind – a calculated omission setting him on his tragic
course.

Read 3.3.93–132 and analyze:

how the audience is made increasingly conscious of the relation between words and
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meanings
the verbal means by which Iago manipulates Othello

One word which is put under close scrutiny here is ‘honest’. As William Empson pointed
out in his essay ‘Honest in Othello’, ‘there is no other play in which Shakespeare worries a
word like that’ ( The Structure of Complex Words, 1951, 218). In the course of events, the
adjective is deliberately spotlighted, its meaning rendered labile. The repetition of
‘honest’ in this particular scene underscores Othello’s choice: to believe in the honesty of
Cassio, and by association his wife, or to take on board the insinuations of ‘honest Iago’.
Just as the word ‘honest’ is batted back and forth by the speakers, so the word ‘think’ is
repeated in mirrored speeches. In operation here is what the linguist Roman Jakobson
termed the ‘metalingual function’: a checking by one speaker that he is using the same
verbal code as his fellow speaker. Just as someone might ask an interlocutor to explain
 what is meant by a particular word or expression, so Iago’s reiteration of ‘think’ at the
start of line 108 suggests a need to confirm that he and Othello have a shared
understanding of the monosyllable. Under Iago’s control, the verb shifts from signifying
belief in Cassio’s honesty to an empty word used merely to humour the cuckolded
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general: ‘Why then I think Cassio’s an honest man.’ This transition is aided by Iago’s
dextrous manipulation of language at line 128. The placing of ‘I think’ immediately after ‘I
dare be sworn’ weakens the initial certainty, its parenthetical positioning holding it at a
sceptical remove from Iago’s affirmation that Cassio ‘is honest’.

As what is commonly known as the ‘Temptation Scene’ progresses, so Iago seems fired up
by his own verbal power, sounding more and more like the master out of the two men.
This status exchange reaches its completion with Othello’s‘sacred vow’ (3.3.464),
perfomative language that enacts his subordination to Iago. From this time forward, Iago
can sit back and observe the effects of his linguistic labours. When Lodovico, shocked at
having witnessed Othello strike Desdemona, asks Iago if he can offer any insights into his
master’s behaviour, he is told:

                    You shall observe him,

And his own courses will denote him so
That I may save my speech.
  --(4.1.278–80)

Iago’s withdrawal from language after his eventual capture signals his ultimate defeat and
carries an irony entirely characteristic of the tragic mode, not least as the final syllable he
pronounces is ‘word’. In an age when speech was viewed as a God-given gift, separating
man from the animals, his silence further signals that he has retreated from humanity itself.

Orson Welles’s Othello (1952)

Orson Welles was one of the most innovative adapters of Shakespeare, though of his
three Shakespeare films, Othello is probably the least well known. Filmed in numerous
locations in Morocco and Italy, the production took more than three years to complete, a
prolongation which played havoc with continuity – not to mention the nerves of the cast.
Forty years after it took the Palme d’Or at Cannes, a restored version was released with a
re-recorded musical score and properly synchronized dialogue, with many of its original
flaws ironed out. Not only did the restored version use 1990s technology to improve the
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film quality, it also made it more commercially available, helping to bring about a
reappraisal of what Jack J. Jorgens judged to be ‘an authentic flawed masterpiece’
(Shakespeare on Film, 1977, 175).
One of Welles’s most daring directorial decisions was to start the film where the text ends.
Living up to his own imperative that ‘any movie has to have a great opening’, the first five
minutes or so draw the viewer in with striking camera work inspired by the pioneering
cinematography of Sergei Eisenstein. Othello and Desdemona are carried on biers to the
sound of Latin chants and dissonant piano chords, creating an atmosphere fitting for the
grand sweep of tragedy. Iago looks down on this funeral scene, from his incarceration in a
cage suspended above the scene: a disturbing image that renders him both animal-like
and omniscient. In disrupting the play’s linearity in this way, Welles establishes the
ineluctability of the bloody outcome, creating his own macabre version of the Prologue
which prefaces the action of Romeo and Juliet.
 The film-goer is taken back to the opening of the play-proper by way of a narrative
voiceover, adapted from Shakespeare’s principal source, a story taken from Giraldi
Cinthio’s Hecatommithi (1565). Welles proceeds to edit and shape the text to his own
ends, cutting the whole to just over ninety minutes of screen time. Micheál Mac Liammóir,
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the Irish actor who played Iago, writes in his highly entertaining memoir of the film’s
production: ‘to-morrow we do a long speech … it comes in Act One, Scene One, God
knows in the film where it will be’ (Put Money in thy Purse, 1952, 137). And he had every
reason to fear the disorientating effects of Welles’s textual rearrangements, the excision
of the villain’s soliloquies being one of the most significant manipulations of the text.
Welles no doubt realized that if the soliloquies were played straight to camera, or via
voiceover, the balance of the film could be adversely affected (Iago is the third longest
role in Shakespeare). He chooses instead to demonstrate the duplicity of the Ensign in
scenes between Roderigo and Iago, selecting a few key lines from the asides and
soliloquies to transplant into their conversations. The impact of this is to remove the
audience’s complicity with Iago, placing them more in the role of distanced spectators.
Welles’s adaptation moves away from the common conception of Othello as a ‘domestic
tragedy’ to present apredominantly outdoor, military world. Establishing shots of
battlements and rows of armoured troops underline the orderliness of army life; the
military presence is also felt in the ‘off-duty’ drinking scene where Bianca carouses with
her lover sporting a soldier’s helmet. Othello seems very much part of this world at the
start of the film – before its image system works to convey his psychological breakdown
and fall from military grace. Diegetic sound motifs, such as the raging sea and the cries of
seagulls, and the non-diegetic pounding of piano chords and discordant choric singing
express his emotional turmoil and mark moments of crisis. The black-and-white film not
only serves as a means of expressing the play’s imagery of light and dark – and by
association the racial difference between Othello and Desdemona – it also allows for the
expressionistic use of shadows and silhouettes, suggestive of doubleness, uncertainty and
a lack of clear-sightedness.

Welles’s metonymic technique conveys the play’s imagistic patterns and thematic
concerns with impressive economy and impact. The drama’s iterative metaphors of
entrapment are captured in the visual textures of the film. Iron grilles and gates, slatted
ceilings and floors, and the cage that appears ominously at significant moments, all build
up a sense of incarceration and threat, the criss-cross shapes even being picked up in
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miniature in Desdemona’s hair net. We are reminded of the question of Othello’s

Christianity through the huge cross which is held aloft before the funeral procession, by
the altar piece in the crypt where the murder takes place and, on a smaller scale, by
Desdemona’s rosary. The firing of a cannon (both weapon and phallus) signals the
consummation of the marriage, as well as the moment when the husband becomes fully
convinced of his wife’s infidelity: a visual representation of the difficulties of sustaining a
marital relationship in a male, military environment. Clothing reinforces the hero’s
increasing vulnerability to Iago’s influence. Resplendent in robes befitting a Moor of ‘royal
siege’ (1.2.22) at the start of the film’s main action, he moves to the equally impressive
armour of the feted military leader. However, we soon see Iagoin the process of removing
his Captain’s armour, at the same time as informing him of the ‘pranks’ (3.3.205) of
 Venetian women. Once stripped of his steel carapace, Othello appears physically more
vulnerable and socially less elevated, dressed in a plain hooded cape: the aristocratic
Moor brought down to the nomadic outsider.
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The ocular imagery of the play is adapted especially well for the filmic mode. Outdoor
scenes show bright sunlight and wind impede characters’ vision at crucial moments, while
in indoor scenes sight is clouded by the smoke of incense or the mist of hot water.
Othello’s faltering sense of self is succinctly portrayed as, while listening to the
insinuations of Iago, he gazes in a mirror as if for the first time seeing himself as others see
him. Later, by way of ironic parallel, we see Roderigo attempt to see himself in the
makeshift mirror of the Turkish bath house, only to find his image clouded by steam. And
just after Othello has sworn himself to Iago forever, Welles includes a split-second shot of
two blind street beggars singing in unison, an image which seems to connect to what is
by this point the hero’s almost total blindness to the truth of his own situation.
Welles’s blacked-up face and the film’s refusal to make overt the racial issues of the play is
not entirely in tune with the sensibilities of our own more multi-ethnic age. But this should
not be allowed to detract from its very considerable filmic achievements, not least its
success in capturing some of the essential elements of the Shakespearean text in ‘brilliant
angular forms cut as it were out of blinding sunshine and shadow’ (Put Money in thy
Purse, 159–60).

Further thinking
Some presentists argue that recognizing your own feelings towards an emotionally
demanding text can serve as a valid and stimulating point of departure.Select any
scene from a Shakespearean tragedy which you find particularly affecting and try to
define your responses to it. If you can, ask fellow students to read the same scene so
that you can compare your reactions.
The handkerchief in Othello has attracted a wealth of critical comment. Lynda E.
Boose, for example, argues that it ‘not only spans the major issues of the play but also
reaches into man’s deepest cognitions about his sexuality, his myths, his religion, and
his laws’ (‘Othello’s Handkerchief: “The Recognizance and Pledge of Love”’, ELR, 5,
1975, 374). Can you think of stage properties of comparable significance in other
Shakespearean tragedies?
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Some critics have found in Othello affinities with the comedies. What links could you
find between Othello and the comedies covered in this book (try to think beyond
character to aspects of structure and language)?

Afterlives …
One of the best-loved and best-known operatic treatments of Shakespeare is Giuseppe
Verdi’s Otello, which premiered at Milan’s La Scala in 1887. Verdi worked with one of
Italy’s most esteemed composers and poets, Arrigo Boito, to produce what has been
described as the ‘perfect’ opera. The libretto distils the play to fewer than 800 lines and
omits Act 1 entirely, opening with the triumphant arrival of Otello in Cyprus. But what is
lost without the play’s Venetian perspective? And is the operatic Desdemona a figure of
passivity and resignation?