Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth
been made wildly jealous. But up to this point, where Iago is dismissed,
Othello, I must maintain, does not show jealousy. His confidence is
shaken, he is confused and deeply troubled, he feels even horror; but he
is not yet jealous in the proper sense of that word. In his soliloquy
(III. iii. 258 ff.) the beginning of this passion may be traced; but it
is only after an interval of solitude, when he has had time to dwell on
the idea presented to him, and especially after statements of fact, not
mere general grounds of suspicion, are offered, that the passion lays
hold of him. Even then, however, and indeed to the very end, he is quite
unlike the essentially jealous man, quite unlike Leontes. No doubt the
thought of another man's possessing the woman he loves is intolerable to
him; no doubt the sense of insult and the impulse of revenge are at
times most violent; and these are the feelings of jealousy proper. But
these are not the chief or the deepest source of Othello's suffering. It
is the wreck of his faith and his love. It is the feeling,
If she be false, oh then Heaven mocks itself;
the feeling,
O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!
the feeling,
But there where I have garner'd up my heart,
Where either I must live, or bear no life;
The fountain from the which my current runs,
Or else dries up--to be discarded thence....
You will find nothing like this in Leontes.
Up to this point, it appears to me, there is not a syllable to be said
against Othello. But the play is a tragedy, and from this point we may
abandon the ungrateful and undramatic task of awarding praise and blame.
When Othello, after a brief interval, re-enters (III. iii. 330), we see
at once that the poison has been at work and 'burns like the mines of
sulphur.'
Look where he comes! Not poppy, nor mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou owedst yesterday.
He is 'on the rack,' in an agony so unbearable that he cannot endure the
sight of Iago. Anticipating the probability that Iago has spared him the
whole truth, he feels that in that case his life is over and his
'occupation gone' with all its glories. But he has not abandoned hope.
The bare possibility that his friend is deliberately deceiving
him--though such a deception would be a thing so monstrously wicked that
he can hardly conceive it credible--is a kind of hope. He furiously
demands proof, ocular proof. And when he is compelled to see that he is
demanding an impossibility he still demands evidence. He forces it from
the unwilling witness, and hears the maddening tale of Cassio's dream.
It is enough. And if it were not enough, has he not sometimes seen a
handkerchief spotted with strawberries in his wife's hand? Yes, it was
his first gift to her.
I know not that; but such a handkerchief--
I am sure it was your wife's--did I to-day
See Cassio wipe his beard with.
'If it be that,' he answers--but what need to test the fact? The
'madness of revenge' is in his blood, and hesitation is a thing he never
knew. He passes judgment, and controls himself only to make his sentence
a solemn vow.
The Othello of the Fourth Act is Othello in his fall. His fall is never
complete, but he is much changed. Towards the close of the
Temptation-scene he becomes at times most terrible, but his grandeur
remains almost undiminished. Even in the following scene (III. iv.),
where he goes to test Desdemona in the matter of the handkerchief, and
receives a fatal confirmation of her guilt, our sympathy with him is
hardly touched by any feeling of humiliation. But in the Fourth Act
'Chaos has come.' A slight interval of time may be admitted here. It is
but slight; for it was necessary for Iago to hurry on, and terribly
dangerous to leave a chance for a meeting of Cassio with Othello; and
his insight into Othello's nature taught him that his plan was to
deliver blow on blow, and never to allow his victim to recover from the
confusion of the first shock. Still there is a slight interval; and when
Othello reappears we see at a glance that he is a changed man. He is
physically exhausted, and his mind is dazed.[100] He sees everything
blurred through a mist of blood and tears. He has actually forgotten the
incident of the handkerchief, and has to be reminded of it. When Iago,
perceiving that he can now risk almost any lie, tells him that Cassio
has confessed his guilt, Othello, the hero who has seemed to us only
second to Coriolanus in physical power, trembles all over; he mutters
disjointed words; a blackness suddenly intervenes between his eyes and
the world; he takes it for the shuddering testimony of nature to the
horror he has just heard,[101] and he falls senseless to the ground.
When he recovers it is to watch Cassio, as he imagines, laughing over
his shame. It is an imposition so gross, and should have been one so
perilous, that Iago would never have ventured it before. But he is safe
now. The sight only adds to the confusion of intellect the madness of
rage; and a ravenous thirst for revenge, contending with motions of
infinite longing and regret, conquers them. The delay till night-fall is
torture to him. His self-control has wholly deserted him, and he strikes
his wife in the presence of the Venetian envoy. He is so lost to all
sense of reality that he never asks himself what will follow the deaths
of Cassio and his wife. An ineradicable instinct of justice, rather than
any last quiver of hope, leads him to question Emilia; but nothing could
convince him now, and there follows the dreadful scene of accusation;
and then, to allow us the relief of burning hatred and burning tears,
the interview of Desdemona with Iago, and that last talk of hers with
Emilia, and her last song.
But before the end there is again a change. The supposed death of Cassio
(V. i.) satiates the thirst for vengeance. The Othello who enters the
bed-chamber with the words,
It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,
is not the man of the Fourth Act. The deed he is bound to do is no
murder, but a sacrifice. He is to save Desdemona from herself, not in
hate but in honour; in honour, and also in love. His anger has passed; a
boundless sorrow has taken its place; and
this sorrow's heavenly:
It strikes where it doth love.
Even when, at the sight of her apparent obduracy, and at the hearing of
words which by a crowning fatality can only reconvince him of her guilt,
these feelings give way to others, it is to righteous indignation they
give way, not to rage; and, terribly painful as this scene is, there is
almost nothing here to diminish the admiration and love which heighten
pity.[102] And pity itself vanishes, and love and admiration alone
remain, in the majestic dignity and sovereign ascendancy of the close.
Chaos has come and gone; and the Othello of the Council-chamber and the
quay of Cyprus has returned, or a greater and nobler Othello still. As
he speaks those final words in which all the glory and agony of his
life--long ago in India and Arabia and Aleppo, and afterwards in Venice,
and now in Cyprus--seem to pass before us, like the pictures that flash
before the eyes of a drowning man, a triumphant scorn for the fetters of
the flesh and the littleness of all the lives that must survive him
sweeps our grief away, and when he dies upon a kiss the most painful of
all tragedies leaves us for the moment free from pain, and exulting in
the power of 'love and man's unconquerable mind.'
3
The words just quoted come from Wordsworth's sonnet to Toussaint
l'Ouverture. Toussaint was a Negro; and there is a question, which,
though of little consequence, is not without dramatic interest, whether
Shakespeare imagined Othello as a Negro or as a Moor. Now I will not say
that Shakespeare imagined him as a Negro and not as a Moor, for that
might imply that he distinguished Negroes and Moors precisely as we do;
but what appears to me nearly certain is that he imagined Othello as a
black man, and not as a light-brown one.
In the first place, we must remember that the brown or bronze to which
we are now accustomed in the Othellos of our theatres is a recent
innovation. Down to Edmund Kean's time, so far as is known, Othello was
always quite black. This stage-tradition goes back to the Restoration,
and it almost settles our question. For it is impossible that the colour
of the original Othello should have been forgotten so soon after
Shakespeare's time, and most improbable that it should have been changed
from brown to black.
If we turn to the play itself, we find many references to Othello's
colour and appearance. Most of these are indecisive; for the word
'black' was of course used then where we should speak of a 'dark'
complexion now; and even the nickname 'thick-lips,' appealed to as proof
that Othello was a Negro, might have been applied by an enemy to what we
call a Moor. On the other hand, it is hard to believe that, if Othello
had been light-brown, Brabantio would have taunted him with having a
'sooty bosom,' or that (as Mr. Furness observes) he himself would have
used the words,
her name, that was as fresh
As Dian's visage, is now begrimed and black
As mine own face.
These arguments cannot be met by pointing out that Othello was of royal
blood, is not called an Ethiopian, is called a Barbary horse, and is
said to be going to Mauritania. All this would be of importance if we
had reason to believe that Shakespeare shared our ideas, knowledge and
terms. Otherwise it proves nothing. And we know that sixteenth-century
writers called any dark North-African a Moor, or a black Moor, or a
blackamoor. Sir Thomas Elyot, according to Hunter,[103] calls Ethiopians
Moors; and the following are the first two illustrations of 'Blackamoor'
in the Oxford _English Dictionary_: 1547, 'I am a blake More borne in
Barbary'; 1548, '_Ethiopo_, a blake More, or a man of Ethiope.' Thus
geographical names can tell us nothing about the question how
Shakespeare imagined Othello. He may have known that a Mauritanian is
not a Negro nor black, but we cannot assume that he did. He may have
known, again, that the Prince of Morocco, who is described in the
_Merchant of Venice_ as having, like Othello, the complexion of a devil,
was no Negro. But we cannot tell: nor is there any reason why he should
not have imagined the Prince as a brown Moor and Othello as a
Blackamoor.
_Titus Andronicus_ appeared in the Folio among Shakespeare's works. It
is believed by some good critics to be his: hardly anyone doubts that he
had a hand in it: it is certain that he knew it, for reminiscences of it
are scattered through his plays. Now no one who reads _Titus Andronicus_
with an open mind can doubt that Aaron was, in our sense, black; and he
appears to have been a Negro. To mention nothing else, he is twice
called 'coal-black'; his colour is compared with that of a raven and a
swan's legs; his child is coal-black and thick-lipped; he himself has a
'fleece of woolly hair.' Yet he is 'Aaron the Moor,' just as Othello is
'Othello the Moor.' In the _Battle of Alcazar_ (Dyce's _Peele_, p. 421)
Muly the Moor is called 'the negro'; and Shakespeare himself in a single
line uses 'negro' and 'Moor' of the same person (_Merchant of Venice_,
III. v. 42).
The horror of most American critics (Mr. Furness is a bright exception)
at the idea of a black Othello is very amusing, and their arguments are
highly instructive. But they were anticipated, I regret to say, by
Coleridge, and we will hear him. 'No doubt Desdemona saw Othello's
visage in his mind; yet, as we are constituted, and most surely as an
English audience was disposed in the beginning of the seventeenth