Othello

The RSC Shakespeare
Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen
Chief Associate Editors: Héloïse Sénéchal and Jan Sewell
Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro, Dee Anna Phares

Othello
Textual editing: Dee Anna Phares
Introduction and “Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater”: Jonathan Bate
Commentary: Héloïse Sénéchal
Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Esme Miskimmin
In Performance: Karin Brown (RSC stagings), Jan Sewell (overview)
The Director’s Cut (interviews by Jonathan Bate and Kevin Wright):
Trevor Nunn and Michael Attenborough
Playing Iago: Antony Sher

Editorial Advisory Board
Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director, Royal Shakespeare Company
Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK
Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia
Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature, Université de Genève, Switzerland
Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan
Jacqui O’Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company
Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA
James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, USA
Tiffany Stern, Professor of English, University of Oxford, UK

Introduction
      
Venice
      
“The Moor”
      
Iago and Othello

About the Text

Key Facts

The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice

Textual Notes

Quarto Passages That Do Not Appear in the Folio

Scene-by-Scene Analysis

Othello
in Performance: The RSC and Beyond
      
Four Centuries of
Othello:
An Overview
      
At the RSC
      
The Director’s Cut: Interviews with Trevor Nunn and Michael Attenborough
      
Antony Sher on Playing Iago

Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater
      
Beginnings
      
Playhouses
      
The Ensemble at Work
      
The King’s Man

Shakespeare’s Works: A Chronology

The History Behind the Tragedies: A Chronology

Further Reading and Viewing

References

Acknowledgments and Picture Credits

For Shakespeare’s original audience, the title
The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice
would have instantly suggested a meeting of the familiar and the strange, of East and West. “Venice” was synonymous with European sophistication, “Moor” with the atmosphere of the Orient. Yet the short Italian novel on which the play is based makes little of the Moor’s status as an outsider. Written by Giraldi Cinthio, it was one of a series of exemplary stories concerning marital infidelity. Its purpose was to show how “it sometimes happens that without any fault at all, a faithful and loving lady, through the insidious plots of a villainous mind, and the frailty of one who believes more than he need, is murdered by her faithful husband.” In Venice, a Moor, dear to the Senate because he has served the interests of the republic in battle, marries a virtuous lady called Disdemona. The Venetian lords decide to change the guard in Cyprus and the Moor is chosen as commandant. Disdemona insists on going with him; they arrive safely in Cyprus (no storm, no Turks). The Moor’s ensign or standard-bearer falls in love with Disdemona, who does not reciprocate. The ensign assumes that this is because she is in love with his superior, the corporal. His love for Disdemona turns to hate and he decides that if he cannot have her, nor should the Moor. He accordingly plots to make the Moor jealous of the corporal, thus destroying them both.

Venice was notorious for the number and openness of its courtesans, and the laxness of its wives. It was the pleasure capital of Europe, a city of sexual tourism. Cinthio’s Disdemona, however, is “impelled not by female appetite but by the Moor’s good qualities”: she is an atypical Venetian woman. Shakespeare intends his Desdemona to be regarded in the same way, even as the men in the play exploit the stereotypical image of Venetian women. Iago pumps up Rodorigo’s desire on the quayside with talk of female lechery and he plays on Othello’s fear that his wife might revert to type, reminding the Moor that Venetian women are habitual sexual deceivers:

Visiting Venice in the 1590s, Sir Henry Wotton remarked on the difficulty of distinguishing between whores and virtuous wives on the streets. The presence in the play of Bianca the courtesan (“A housewife that by selling her desires / Buys herself bread and cloth”) is telling in this regard. In the overhearing scene, Othello fails to make exactly the distinction as to which woman, his wife or the courtesan, Iago and Cassio are talking about. Iago’s seemingly casual references to Desdemona’s “appetite” and “will,” his view of Venetian women as sexual beasts, soon cause Othello to be convinced that his wife’s hand is hot and moist, traditional signs of sexual license. The division between wife and whore is horribly dissolved in the fourth act, where home is turned to brothel, and Desdemona twice called “strumpet” and thrice “whore,” culminating in the savage lines “I took you for that cunning whore of Venice / That married with Othello.” Only when he has killed her does he rediscover the true coldness of her chastity—though just because Othello speaks of Desdemona thus, we should not regard her as the icy maiden of Petrarchan poetic tradition. In the scene before Othello’s arrival in Cyprus she proves herself adept in feisty and sexually knowing banter with her male interlocutors. And at the very beginning of the play she has shown extraordinary strength of character in going against her father’s will, eloping with Othello and then insisting on accompanying him to the frontier zone of Cyprus.

Othello is ill at ease with Iago’s language of double entendre because he is an “extravagant and wheeling stranger” who works within a very different poetic register. His verbal sphere is rich in allusion to an exotic other world filled with Arabian trees and turbaned Turks in Aleppo, not to mention “the Anthropophagi and men whose heads / Grew beneath their shoulders.” “Valiant Othello, we must straight employ you / Against the general enemy Ottoman,” says the Duke of Venice early in the play. The audience hears a consonance between the names of the captain-general “Othello” and the general enemy “Ottoman.” This would have been especially apparent if, as is likely, the original pronunciation of the hero’s name was Italianized as “Otello.” Othman was the name of the founder of the mighty Ottoman or Turkish empire, the great rival civilization to Christianity. Othello’s name suggests his origin in the Ottoman territories, against which he is now fighting. The clash of Christian against Turk was one of Shakespeare’s major additions to his source.

To Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Turk, Arab, and Moor all represented the Islamic “other,” but they were not necessarily homogenized into a single image of generic “barbarianism.” Arabic culture was frequently associated with learning and civilization, in contrast to the prevailing images of Turk and Saracen. A Barbar could be “brave” rather than “barbarous”: George Peele’s
Battle of Alcazar in Barbary
, a play based on real recent historical events, has both “a barbarous Moor, / The negro Muly Hamet” and a “brave Barbarian Lord Muly Molocco.” A Moor could help you out in your war against the Turk—or, for that matter, the Spaniard. How you judged the Islamic “other” depended not only on ideological stereotype but also on the particularities of diplomatic liaison and changing allegiance in a world of superpower rivalry. At the end of
Alcazar
, the evil Moor Muly Mahamet is defeated. The throne of Barbary goes to Abdelmelec’s virtuous brother, who is also called Muly Mahamet and who was a real historical figure. His ambassador, Abd el-Oahed ben Messaoud, visited the Elizabethan court in 1600 in order to explore the possibility of forming an alliance to conquer Spain with a mixture of the English navy and African troops. Shakespeare’s company played at court that Christmas, so he may have seen the Barbarian delegation in the flesh. The surviving portrait of the ambassador is perhaps the best image we have of what Shakespeare intended Othello to look like.

Peele’s play mingled historical matter with a more general sense of the barbarian, the other, the devilish—bad Muly Mahamet surrounds himself with demonic and underworld associations. Audiences would have come to
The Moor of Venice
with the expectation of something similar, but witnessed a remarkable inversion whereby a sophisticated Venetian is the one who comes to be associated with the devil and damnable actions. So evil is Iago’s behavior that at the end of the play, Othello not only calls him a “demi-devil” but half expects him to have the cloven foot of Lucifer.

1.
A noble Moor: the Barbary ambassador painted in London, 1600.

Othello is initially referred to (by Rodorigo and Iago) not by his name, but as “him” and then “his Moorship” and then “the Moor.” Depriving someone of their name and referring to them solely in terms of their ethnic origin is a classic form of racism. In Shakespeare’s other Venetian play, something similar happens with “the Jew.” In early modern English, however, the primary usage of the term “Moor” was as a religious, not a racial, identification: Moor meant “Mohammedan,” that is to say Muslim. The word was frequently used as a general term for “not one of us,” non-Christian. To the play’s original audience, the opposite of “the Moor” would have been not “the white man” but “the Christian.”

One of the most striking things about the figure of Othello would accordingly have been that he is a committed Christian. The ground of the play is laid out in the first scene, when Iago trumpets his own military virtues, in contrast to Cassio’s “theoretical” knowledge of the art of war (Cassio comes from Florence, home of such theorists of war as Machiavelli):

These lines give an immediate sense of confrontation between Christian and heathen dominions, with Rhodes and Cyprus as pressure points. Startlingly, though, the Moor is fighting for the Christians, not the heathens.

Again, consider Othello’s response to the drunken brawl in Cyprus:

Such Christian language in the mouth of a Moor, a Muslim, is inherently a paradox. It suggests that Othello would have been assumed to be a convert. The “baptism” that Iago says he will cause Othello to renounce would have taken place not at birth but at conversion. The action of the play reconverts Othello from Christianity, through the machinations of Iago. In this sense, it is fitting that Iago appeals to a “Divinity of hell” and that Othello acknowledges at the end of the play that he is bound for damnation.

The notion of conversion was crucial in the Elizabethan perception of the relationship between European Christianity and the Ottoman empire. The phrase to “turn Turk” entered the common lexicon. Islam was as powerful an alien force to Europeans in the sixteenth century as communism was to Americans in the twentieth. To turn Turk was to go over to the other side. It could happen in a number of different ways: some travelers converted by a process of cultural assimilation, others who had been captured and enslaved did so in the belief that they would then be released. It is easy to forget how many English privateers became Ottoman slaves—on one occasion, two thousand wives petitioned King James and Parliament for help in ransoming their husbands from Muslim captivity.

If Shakespeare read all the way through Richard Knolles’
General History of the Turks
, one of the books to which he seems to have turned during his preparation for the writing of
Othello
, he would have learned that once every three years the Turks levied a tax on the Christians living in the Balkans: it took the form of ten to twelve thousand children. They were deported and converted (circumcised), then trained up to become soldiers. They formed a highly feared cadre in the Turkish army known as the Janissaries—there is an elite guard of them in
The Battle of Alcazar
, while Bajazet’s army in Christopher Marlowe’s
Tamburlaine the Great
combines “circumcisèd Turks / And warlike bands of Christians renegade.” Othello is a Janissary in reverse: not a Christian turned Muslim fighting against Christians, but a Muslim turned Christian fighting against Muslims. Although the captain-general of the Venetian army was always a “stranger,” conversion in Othello’s direction, from Muslim to Christian, was much rarer than the opposite turn.

The second Elizabethan sense of the word “Moor” was specifically racial and geographical: it referred to a native or inhabitant of Mauretania, a region of north Africa corresponding to parts of present-day Morocco and Algeria. This association is invoked when Iago falsely tells Rodorigo toward the end of the play that Othello “goes into Mauritania and taketh away with him the fair Desdemona.” Ethnic Moors were members of a Muslim people of mixed Berber and Arab descent. In the eighth century they had conquered Spain. This may be the association suggested by Othello’s second weapon, his sword of Spain.

Given that the Spanish empire was England’s great enemy, there would have been a certain ambivalence about the Moors—they may have overthrown Christianity, but at least it was Spanish Catholic Christianity. Philip II’s worst fear was an uprising of the remaining Moors in Granada synchronized with a Turkish invasion, just as Elizabeth I’s worst fear was an uprising of the Irish synchronized with a Spanish invasion. As it was, the Turks took a different turn: in 1570, shortly after the end of the Morisco uprising and Philip’s ethnic cleansing of Granada, they attacked Cyprus.

The alliance of European Christians against the Ottomans was uneasy because of post-Reformation divisions in Europe itself. Independent lesser powers such as Venice and England found themselves negotiating for footholds in the Mediterranean theater. Hence the diplomatic maneuvering that brought the Barbary ambassadors to London—and hence also the blow to Venice caused by the loss of Cyprus in 1571. Shakespeare changes history. He sees off the Turk and implies instead that the real danger to the isle comes from the internal collapse of civil society. Venice regarded Cyprus as a key Christian outpost against the Turk, but what happens in the play is that it is turned heathen from within rather than without. There is deep irony in Iago’s “Nay, it is true, or else I am a Turk,” for it
is
Iago who does the Turkish work of destroying the Christian community. All three major characters invert audience expectation: Othello is a counter-Janissary, Desdemona is—contrary to ethnic stereotyping—a Venetian lady who is not lascivious, and Christian Iago is a functional Turk.

Othello dies on a kiss, an embrace of black and white, perhaps a symbolic reconciliation of the virtues of West and East, Europe and Orient, but the public image he wants to be remembered by in the letter back to Venice is of confrontation between Christian and Turk, with himself as the defender of Christianity in Aleppo, a point of eastern extremity in Syria. In smiting himself, Othello recognizes that he has now become the Turk. By killing Desdemona he has renounced his Christian civility and damned himself. He symbolically takes back upon himself the insignia of Islam—turban, circumcision—that he had renounced when he turned Christian. He has beaten a Venetian wife and traduced the state. He has been turned Turk. Not, however, by the general Ottoman but by the supersubtle Venetian, the “honest” Iago.