Othello

Overview

Othello is about three thousand lines and it is the tightest of the great tragedies. Hamlet has a country and a war and a ghost; Lear has two plots and a kingdom. This play has a marriage, a lie, and four days.

The structure is unusual in two ways. First, the villain is the largest part: Iago has more lines than Othello, more than any Shakespearean character except Hamlet, and he speaks directly to the audience thirteen times. We are his confidants. He explains the plan before executing it, and we watch it work.

Second, the play accelerates. The first act is in Venice and is orderly: an elopement, an accusation, a hearing, a decision. Everything after it is in Cyprus, a garrison island outside the reach of Venetian law, and the pace becomes unbearable. Scholars call it double time, because the play simultaneously suggests a few days, which the action requires, and long enough for an affair to have occurred, which the accusation requires. In performance nobody notices, which is itself a comment on how the thing works.

The source is a novella by Cinthio, in which the ensign is in love with Desdemona and has an ordinary motive. Shakespeare removed the motive.

What happens

Iago and Roderigo wake Brabantio in the night to tell him his daughter has eloped with Othello, and they do it in the most racially inflammatory terms available. Brabantio brings a charge of witchcraft before the Senate. Othello defends himself by describing how he courted her, by telling the story of his life, the battles, the slavery, the escapes, and says she loved him for the dangers he had passed and he loved her that she did pity them. Desdemona is sent for, and speaks for herself, and the Senate finds for them. It also sends Othello to Cyprus at once.

The Turkish fleet is destroyed by a storm before anyone arrives, which removes the play’s only external threat in a single line and leaves the characters nothing to do but each other.

Iago’s plan is laid out to us in pieces. He has been passed over for the lieutenancy in favour of Cassio, a Florentine with theory and no field experience. He also says he suspects Othello has slept with his wife Emilia, and that he suspects Cassio too, and then that he simply hates the Moor. He never settles on one.

He gets Cassio drunk, provokes a brawl, and has him stripped of his commission. Then he advises Cassio to ask Desdemona to intercede, which she does, warmly and repeatedly, which supplies the evidence for the next stage.

The temptation scene in the third act is the centre of the play and one of the great technical achievements in English drama. Iago says almost nothing direct. He repeats Othello’s words back as questions, declines to explain what he means, begs not to be asked, warns against jealousy while producing it, and asks Othello to observe his wife without appearing to. Within a few hundred lines Othello is demanding proof and threatening murder.

The handkerchief is the only physical evidence and it is nothing: an heirloom Othello gave Desdemona, dropped, picked up by Emilia, handed to her husband because he had asked for it a hundred times, planted in Cassio’s room. Othello stages an overhearing in which Cassio laughs about his mistress Bianca and Othello believes he is laughing about Desdemona.

The last act is quick and terrible. Othello comes to the bedroom with a speech about the cause, kisses her, and smothers her while she is still protesting. Emilia hammers on the door, sees what has happened, works out what her husband has done, and says so in front of everyone, knowing what it will cost. Iago stabs her. Letters found in Roderigo’s pocket confirm everything. Othello wounds Iago, makes a last speech asking to be reported accurately, and kills himself. Asked to explain, Iago says he will never speak another word, and he does not.

How to read it

Watch Iago’s method rather than his motives. Track how often he asserts anything, as opposed to repeating, pausing, or refusing to say. The mechanism is the play.

Read the temptation scene in Act III scene 3 slowly and count the lines it takes. The speed is the horror, and readers who find Othello credulous usually have not noticed how little Iago actually claims.

Notice what happens to Othello’s language. He begins with the most sonorous verse in Shakespeare, the great Senate speech, and by the fourth act he is speaking in Iago’s short fragments and finally collapses into prose and incoherence. The disintegration is audible.

Pay attention to Emilia. She is a servant, she handles the handkerchief without understanding, she speaks the most radical lines in the play about what wives are owed, and she chooses to tell the truth knowing her husband will kill her for it.

Do not skip the racial language or treat it as background. Iago, Roderigo and Brabantio use it constantly and deliberately, and the play makes it the medium in which the plot works: the suspicion that Desdemona must have been unnatural to choose him is the crack Iago widens. The performance history matters too, since the role was played in blackface by white actors well into the twentieth century, and Ira Aldridge and Paul Robeson faced organised hostility for taking it.

Questions it raises

• Why does Othello believe him? Is it credulity, the insecurity of an outsider, a soldier’s trust in a subordinate, or something in the marriage itself?
• Iago gives several motives and keeps none. Is he unknowable by design, self-deceived, or simply lying to us as well?
• Desdemona defends herself brilliantly in Act I and barely at all in Act V. What happens to her?
• Emilia tells the truth and is killed for it. Is her speech in Act IV the play’s own view, and does the play support her?
• Othello’s last speech asks to be remembered as one who loved too well and was not easily jealous. Is either claim true?
• Iago refuses to explain at the end. Does that withholding make the play deeper, or is it the dramatist declining a question he cannot answer?