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An Analysis of THE TRAGEDY OF OTHELLO, THE MOOR OF VENICE – by Joseph Suglia

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An Analysis of The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice (Shakespeare) by Joseph Suglia

PART ONE

A question that arises in the minds of readers of The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice is inescapably the following: “Why does Iago have a pathological hatred for Othello?”  Well, why does anyone hate anyone?  Why does anyone love anyone?  The sources of hatred, as of love, are largely unconscious.  Hatred and love are not the products of conscious agency.  They are feelings that appear inexplicably in the mind.  The unconscious sources of human behavior can be marked in literature, however.  We are dealing here with a literary fabrication, a figure made of paper and ink, not a human being, and there might be textual clues that would explain Iago’s seething hatred for Othello.

There seem to be four hypotheses for the grounds of Iago’s vehement antipathy toward Othello:

  • Iago resents Othello for choosing Michael Cassio as his lieutenant.

Othello passes over Iago for promotion to lieutenant and instead selects him as his ensign or “ancient.”  He becomes someone who delivers Othello’s letters and carries his luggage.  Iago inveighs against the election of Cassio, whom he considers someone who has a merely theoretical knowledge of the science of death, a “great arithmetician… [t]hat never set a squadron in the field / Nor the division of a battle knows / More than a spinster” [I:i].  And yet Othello does raise Iago to the lieutenancy in Act Three, Scene Three.  Why, then, would Iago continue to hold a grudge?

  • Iago abominates Othello because he suspects that Othello has slept with his wife, Emilia.

This is mere rumor, and Iago knows that the rumor is probably a canard: “I hate the Moor / And it is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets / He’s done my office. I know not if’t be true, / But I for mere suspicion in that kind / Will do as if for surety” [I:iii].  Iago admits that he has no evidence to support this hypothesis, and it doesn’t matter to him one way or the other whether Othello has cuckolded him.  Iago seizes upon the rumor as a pretext for his boundless negativity.

  • Iago is sexually jealous of Othello.  He is desirous of Desdemona, Othello’s wife.

This interpretation is not altogether without evidence, but it is not a comprehensive interpretation.  If Iago is sexually possessive of Desdemona, why, then, would he offer her to Roderigo?: “[T]hou shalt enjoy her—therefore make money” [I:iii].

Iago makes his lust for Desdemona plain in the following lines: “Now I do love her too, / Not out of absolute lust—though peradventure / I stand accountant for as great a sin— / But partly led to diet my revenge, / For that I do suspect the lusty Moor / Hath leaped into my seat, the thought whereof / Doth like a poisonous mineral gnaw my inwards…” [II:i].  This passage makes it clear that “love,” for the immoralist Iago, is the mere scion of lust and that his desire for Desdemona is really the desire to screw Othello over.  He cannot bear the thought that Othello has “leaped into his seat”—which is to say that Iago’s rivalrous-emulous identification with Othello takes precedence over his carnal interest in Desdemona.

  • Iago despises Othello for his race.

It is true that Iago repeatedly calls Othello “the Moor.”  Depriving someone of a proper name, and replacing that person’s proper name with a common noun, is a common way of depersonalizing someone.  George W. Bush engaged in this linguistic practice quite often, renaming Vladimir Putin “Ostrich Legs,” Tony Blair “Landslide,” Silvio Berlusconi “Shoes,” and John Boehner “Boner.”

There is no question that Iago uses ugly racist language: Othello is nominated “an old black ram [that is] tupping [Brabantio’s] white ewe” [I:i]; he is “a Barbary horse” that covers his daughter; “you’ll have your nephews neigh to you, you’ll have courses for cousins and jennets for germans” [Ibid.].  Consider the audience to whom this language is addressed.  Iago’s invective might be used for purely rhetorical purposes, in order to produce specific effects within Brabantio, Desdemona’s father.  Brabantio is clearly a hardcore racist idiot who thinks that all North Africans are witches and warlocks and that Othello, therefore, could only win his daughter through ensorcellment: “Damned as thou art, thou hast enchanted her” [I:ii].  He makes this point with deadening repetitiousness.  He cannot conceive of his daughter “fall[-ing] in love with what she feared to look on” and cannot comprehend why she would reject the wealthy “curled darlings” [I:iii] of the state in favor of the Moor.

Iago, the reptilian-Machiavellian manipulator, might be playing on the racist sympathies of Brabantio in the way that a clever lawyer might stir up the racist antipathies of a jury without being a racist him- or herself.  While it is possible that there is a racial element in Iago’s hatred for Othello, his hatred is not reducible to racism or racialized nationalism.

Iago’s hatred for Othello is an absolute hatred—a hatred absolved from qualification, from relation.  A textual clue for the unconscious sources of his hatred is contained in the following lines: “Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago… I am not what I am” [I:i].

Were Iago the Moor, Iago would not be Iago: Am I alone in hearing in this line an unforgiving self-contempt and the desire to become Othello?  Whenever a human being encounters a stranger, the question is always the same: “Who are you?”  In other words: Who are you in relation to me?  Are you similar to me?  Are you different from me?  To what degree are you different from me?  How do I measure myself against you?  In the case of the stalker Iago, there is, I suspect, the painful consciousness of his own inferiority vis-à-vis Othello and the painful desire to become Othello, which is an absolute impossibility.  This is the meaning of the last line quoted: “I am not what I am.”  Iago is not identical to himself because he identifies himself intimately and yet impossibly with Othello.  If you are obsessed with someone, you desire to become the person with whom you are obsessed.  This will never happen, but what will happen is that you will no longer be your own, you will no longer be yourself, for the object of your obsession will engulf you.

Iago’s rivalry with Othello embodies the dialectic of the self in relation to the other human being.  There is, on the one hand, the self-assumption of the self–which is based on the differentiation of the self from the other human being–and, on the other hand, the becoming-other (Anderswerden) that Hegel describes in The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807).  In the lines cited above, Iago articulates how he imagines himself as other-than-himself–how he exteriorizes himself as Othello–and recuperates himself from this self-exteriorization.

PART TWO

Would Othello have murdered Desdemona even without Iago’s deceptions and interferences?  This, of course, is a silly question from a philological point of view, since we only have the text and any speculation about “what would have happened” outside of the text is absurd.  However, it is important to think through the necessity or the non-necessity of Iago in relation to the act of uxoricide that Othello performs.

Let me rephrase the question, then: How integral is Iago to the act of uxoricide that Othello performs?

My interpretation is that Iago plays a non-essential role in the murder of Desdemona.  He externalizes a jealous rage that is already within Othello.  Iago echoes prejudices and suspicions that are already seething inside of him.  From the third scene of the third act:

OTHELLO: Was not that Cassio parted from my wife?

IAGO: Cassio, my lord? no, sure, I cannot think it / That he would steal away so guilty-like / Seeing you coming.

Notice that Iago is merely reflecting Othello’s suspicions.  Iago is reactive, not active.  It is Othello, not Iago, who questions Cassio’s honesty:

OTHELLO: Is [Cassio] not honest?

IAGO: Honest, my lord?

OTHELLO: Honest? Ay, honest.

IAGO: My lord, for aught I know.

OTHELLO: What does thou think?

IAGO: Think, my lord?

OTHELLO: Think, my lord! By heaven, thou echo’st me / As if there were some monster in thy thought / Too hideous to be shown.  Thou dost mean something, / I heard thee say even now thou lik’st not that / When Cassio left my wife: what didst not like?

The monster does not dwell in Iago’s thought, but in Othello’s.  Iago draws out the monstrous thoughts that have been devouring Othello for some time.  It is Othello who does not like the way in which Cassio slinks away from Desdemona when her husband approaches.  It is Othello who finds Cassio’s behavior suspect, not Iago.  Iago eschews direct accusation and instead employs innuendo.

It is often said, as I discussed above, that Othello is a victim of racism and nationalism.  One should not also forget that Othello has nationalist prejudices of his own, absorbing, as he does, the idea that all Venetian women are whores—hence, his rush to judge Desdemona as licentiously “liberal” as he inspects her hand: “This hand is moist, my lady…  This argues fruitfulness and liberal heart: / Hot, hot, and moist. This hand of yours requires / A sequester from liberty, fasting and prayer, / Much castigation, exercise devout, / For here’s a young and sweating devil, here, / That commonly rebels.  ’Tis a good hand, / A frank one” [III:iv].

The inspection of Desdemona’s hand was Othello’s idea, not Iago’s.  Othello impulsively believes Iago’s every word condemning Desdemona, for Othello has already condemned Desdemona in his mind.  Just as Othello impulsively believes Iago’s every word condemning Desdemona, and denies Emilia’s every word defending her, Desdemona impulsively takes the side of Cassio, pledging to be his mediator until the end.  Both Othello and Desdemona are impulsive, acting without evidence.

Nor is Desdemona entirely innocent in her own annihilation.  When she falls in love with Othello, Desdemona falls in love with what she once and always has feared to look upon.  She loves Othello because of his violence, not despite his violence.  Desdemona is what psychologists call a “hybristophiliac”: someone who, like Rhianna or Bonnie Parker, is sexually attracted to violent criminals.  She is originally drawn to Othello for his adventurous exoticism and his proximity to death.  As Othello puts it in the first act of the play: “[Desdemona] loved me for the dangers I had passed” [I:iii].  Iago suggests to Roderigo that Desdemona will grow tired of Othello’s differentness and seek out another lover: “[Desdemona] must change for youth; when she is sated with [Othello’s] body she will find the error of her choice; she must have change, she must” [I:iii].  Is Iago wrong?  As Rene Girard suggests in A Theatre of Envy, Othello could eventually be replaced by a younger version of himself, for, in marriage, what husband could escape the crushing banalizations of the everyday?  The “extravagant and wheeling stranger” [I:i] would become a boring and bored husband like any other.  Othello, if he does not solidify his role as the death-giving general, is doomed to disintegrate into a cuckold.

In a sense, Othello is never other than who he appears to be.  By contrast, following Harold Bloom, Iago is engaged in a war against being.  Iago is anti-being or nothingness: He is not what he is.  When Iago says, “For I am nothing, if not critical” [II:i], this may be taken literally: He is divided against himself.  Othello, on the other hand, is always only what he is.  From the beginning of the play until its terrifying end, Othello is the violent warrior who loves death more than he loves love.

Joseph Suglia

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An analysis of MEASURE FOR MEASURE (Shakespeare)

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An Analysis of MEASURE FOR MEASURE (Shakespeare)

by Dr. Joseph Suglia

No play in the Shakespearean canon is as politically radical as Measure for Measure, suggesting, as it does, that all political authority is corrupt at its core.  It is the antithesis of The Tragedy of Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s most reactionary play.

The title, Measure for Measure, is richly ambiguous.  It refers directly to the Hebraic and Christian Bibles–in particular, to the Sermon on the Mount: “With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again” [Matthew 7:2].  This is Jesus’ endorsement of divine justice.  While Jesus repudiates the endless cycle of human eye-for-an-eye violence, he has no problem endorsing a divine lex talionis.

In Shakespeare’s play, the character Angelo, who is no angel, makes of himself a figure of divine justice.  He is invested with secular authority, as well.  Before Vincentio, Duke of Vienna, withdraws from the city, he deputizes Angelo, delegating to him all of the powers of the state:

 Mortality and mercy in Vienna / Live in thy tongue, and heart [I:i].

Well, mortality does, at least.  But no mercy lives in Angelo’s reptilian heart.

The Duke only pretends to withdraw from Vienna and to migrate to Poland (others say to Russia or Rome); all the while, he remains in the city, disguised as a friar.

In the Duke’s (apparent) absence, Angelo sentences to death a young man named Claudio for lechery.  Claudio is betrothed to his beloved Juliet, but their marriage has not yet been consecrated:

[S]he is fast my wife, / Save that we do the denunciation lack / Of outward order [I:ii].

“Outward order” is indeed the problem of the play.  She has been impregnated out of wedlock.  For this, the sin of fornication, Claudio is to be beheaded.

Angelo is a theocrat who does not distinguish between secular and religious authority.  He recognizes no nuance, no degree between offenses.  Every crime is equal to him.  In accordance with his absolutist morality, all of the bordellos in Vienna are ordered to be plucked down [I:ii].  When the demi-god Authority [I:ii] hammers down on the city of Vienna, it knows no distinction between murder and fornication.  Prostitution is a secular and a spiritual offense in Angelo’s eyes.  Unlicensed sex is the same as murder and deserves the same penalty as murder:

To pardon him that hath from nature stolen / A man already made, as to remit / Their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven’s image / In stamps that are forbid.  ’Tis all as easy / Falsely to take away a life true made, / As to put mettle in restrained means / To make a false one [II:iv].

Angelo’s moralism is anti-sexual, and what is anti-sexual is anti-life.  It is also, of course, an unreachable ideal.  As Lucio puts it, it is impossible to extirpate human sexuality.  You might as well condemn the sparrows for lechery.  Pompey’s question (to Escalus) is a propos: “Does your worship mean to geld and splay all the youth of the city?” [II:i].  Indeed, Angelo’s New Vienna is much like Giuliani’s Times Square in the 1990s.  Like Giuliani, Angelo would desexualize the city, eunuchizing its populace.

A more measured justice, against the moralistic extremism of Angelo, is represented by Vincentio.  And this is the second connotation of the title: As opposed to the absolutism of measure-for-measure religious violence, a more moderate, more measured secular justice is desirable.

There is a third connotation in the play’s title that I would like to illuminate.  The entire play is a web of substitutions.  Measure for Measure means, in this context, taking one thing for another.  Angelo replaces Vincentio—when the surrogate takes the place of the original, disaster results.  Ragozine’s head replaces Claudio’s head.  The violation of Isabella’s virginity would substitute for Claudio’s death.  There are linguistic transpositions, as well:  Pompey says, “benefactor” instead of “malefactor,” “varlets” instead of “honourable men,” “Hannibal” instead of “cannibal,” etc. [II:i].

* * * * *

Claudio asks his sister Isabella (by way of Lucio, friend to Claudio) to prostrate herself before the deputy and plead for his life.  He knows the erotic power that she radiates:

For in her youth / There is a prone and speechless dialect / Such as move men [I:ii]

Venice is a city of pimps and whores, a pornocracy, and in that pornocracy, brother prostitutes sister.  Or he would do so.  Claudio would be his sister’s procurer.  One should recall that “prone” connotes “lying down.”  It is unclear what the denotative meaning is supposed to be.  “Move” suggests the contagion of sexual desire.  Her words would not be a logical appeal, an appeal by reason to reason, but an erotic appeal, an appeal by reason to the libido.

Isabella isn’t a very strong advocate for her brother’s life.  “I’ll see what I can do” [I:iv], she tells Lucio.  And she gives up far too easily when her petition is rejected.  During the first interview with Angelo, she says, weakly, “O just but severe law!  I had a brother, then: heaven keep your honour” [II:ii].  After her appeal seems to be rejected during the second interview, she says, unimpressively, “Even so.  Heaven keep your honour” [II:iv].

Isabella’s argument for her brother’s life is a biblical one: Hate the sin, but not the sinner.  Angelo sees himself as a vehicle for divine law.  It is the law, not he, who is responsible for condemning her brother to death.  Both Isabella and Angelo depersonalize in their arguments for and against the death penalty as punishment for “illegitimate” sexual intercourse.  Here is what Isabella says at the beginning of her argument:

There is a vice that most I do abhor, / And most desire should meet the blow of justice; / For which I would not plead, but that I must; / For which I must not plead, but that I am / At war ’twixt will and will not [I:ii].

Who would consider this a strong appeal for someone’s life?  If your brother were sentenced to death, I would hope that you would plead more forcefully.  She speaks of her brother’s death with such flippancy that one must question whether or not she even cares if he will die:

Dar’st thou die? / The sense of death is most in apprehension; / And the poor beetle that we tread upon / In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great / As when a giant dies [III:i].

The Duke, disguised as Friar Lodowick, says nearly the same thing to Claudio: Be absolute for death, since it is better to die than to live fearing death.  The argument is specious.

Like all moralists, Angelo is a sanctimonious hypocrite.  When Isabella pleads with the corrupt deputy for mercy, he makes a bargain: Only if Isabella surrenders her body to Angelo’s sexual desires will her brother be released from the death sentence.  As commentators have suggested before me, Isabella is more concerned with her own vanity, her narcissistic self-regard, than with her brother’s mortality:

Is’t not a kind of incest, to take life / From thine own sister’s shame? [III:i].

Harold Bloom might have been correct when he asserted that Isabella is unable to distinguish sexuality from incest.  Notice that Isabella not only accuses her brother of incest for attempting to recruit his sister as an advocate, but claims that he cohabitated with her cousin [I:iv].

Though her basic position might be an anti-sexual one, others have noticed before me that Isabella uses an erotic language to persuade the corrupt magistrate Angelo:

Go to your bosom, / Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know / That’s like my brother’s fault.  If it confess / A natural guiltiness, such as is his, / Let it sound a thought upon your tongue / Against my brother’s life [II:ii].

Angelo’s aside:

She speaks, and ’tis such sense / That my sense breeds with it [II:ii].

William Empson pointed out, cogently, that the first “sense” connotes reason, while the second “sense” connotes sensuality.  Angelo is clearly turned on by Isabella’s coldness (and rationality).  The colder (and more rational) she appears, the more he desires her (of course).  Isabella wishes “a more strict restraint” than her nun colleagues enjoy [I:iv].  She plays on Angelo’s masochism AND sadism:

[W]ere I under the terms of death, / Th’impression of keen whips I’d wear as rubies, / And strip myself to death as to a bed / That longing have been sick for, ere I’d yield / My body up to shame [II:iv].

There is no question that Isabella is trying to turn Angelo on by talking about “stripping herself.”  Nor is there any question that she is succeeding.  There is no question, either, that Isabella is exciting Angelo’s masochism by her refusal to submit to his sexual will.  She is quite revealing when she says to Angelo: “I had rather give my body than my soul” [II:iv].  And yet she never gives her body to the reprobate deputy.  When Angelo, in one of Shakespeare’s wondrous soliloquies, listens to himself speak, we get a glimpse into the character’s inner experience:

Dost thou desire her foully for those things / That make her good? [II:ii].

The question is rhetorical.  Angelo is thrilled by the idea of violating her celibacy.  Polluting what is holy and dragging it down into the mud–that is what excites him.  He is corrupt.  Why shouldn’t everyone else in the world be?  I hear in Angelo’s “We are all frail” [II:iv] a failed attempt at identification with Isabella: He can never be as pure as she, so she must become as impure as he.

*****

As I stated at the beginning of this analysis, Measure for Measure suggests that corruption is inherent to the structure of all political authority.  The Duke has the same designs as his substitute.  After all, both Angelo and Vincentio desire and pursue the same person: the celibate Isabella.

When the Duke visits Friar Thomas, the former quickly waves away the idea that he could ever have a sexual thought:

No.  Holy father, throw away that thought; / Believe not that the dribbling dart of love / Can pierce a complete bosom [I:iii].

This is trickery.  The Duke might not seem as aggressively amorous as Angelo or as libertine as Lucio, but he does desire women or, at least, a particular woman: Isabella.

Is Duke Vincentio indeed a “gentleman of all temperance” [III:ii]?  According to Lucio, “He’s a better woodman than thou tak’st him for” [IV:iii].  A “woodman” is a hunter of women.  What if Lucio is telling the truth?  And why does the thin-skinned Duke castigate and punish Lucio for having insinuated that the latter has a pulse?

Is the Duke’s self-withdrawal and self-disguising a cunning stratagem to seduce Isabella?  This cannot be exactly the case, for the Duke never, in fact, seduces Isabella.  He commands her to marry him.  And then the Duke compels others to be married, whether they want to be married or not: Lucio is forced to marry the punk Kate Keep-down and Angelo is forced to marry Mariana, whom he abandoned once the dowry was lost.  As they enter into compulsory matrimony, the Duke must say goodbye to the “life remov’d” [I:iii] as the novice nun Isabella must say goodbye to her celibacy and dedication to things atemporal.

Isabella never says a word after the Duke compels her to marry him.  Her silence is ear-splitting.  How are we to understand Isabella’s silence?  Is it the silence of shock?  The silence of assent?  And who is Varrius, and why does he have nothing to say?

Reading the play is like looking into an abyss.  Every depth leads to a deeper profundity.  It would be impossible to exhaust the meanings that this magnificent play generates.

Joseph Suglia

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