[from Renaissance Self-Fashioning]
Spenser and Marlowe
are, from the perspective of this study, mighty opposites, poised in
antagonism as radical as that of More and Tyndale in the 1530s. If Spenser
sees human identity as conferred by loving service to legitimate
authority, to the yoked power of God and the state, Marlowe sees identity
established at those moments in which order—political, theological,
sexual—is violated. If repetition for Spenser is an aspect of the patient
labor of civility, for Marlowe it is the means of constituting oneself in
an anonymous void. If Spenser's heroes strive for balance and control,
Marlowe's strive to shatter the restraints upon their desires. If in
Spenser there is fear of the excess that threatens to engulf order and
seems to leave an ineradicable taint on temperance itself, in Marlowe
there is fear of the order that threatens to extinguish excess and seems
to have always already turned rebellion into a tribute to authority. If
Spenser writes for an aristocratic and upper‑middle‑class audience in a
self‑consciously archaizing manner, thereby participating in the
decorative revival of feudal trappings that characterized Elizabethan
courtly ritual, Marlowe writes for the new public theater in a blank verse
that must have seemed, after the jog‑trot fourteeners of the preceding
decades, like reality itself. If Spenser holds up his "other world" to the
gaze of power and says, "Behold! This rich beauty is your own face,"
Marlowe presents his and says, "Behold! This tragi‑comic,
magnificent deformity is how you appear in my rich art." If Spenser's art
constantly questions its own status in order to protect power from such
questioning, Marlowe undermines power in order to raise his art to the
status of a self‑regarding, self‑justifying absolute.
There is not, of
course, anything in Spenser or Marlowe comparable to the violent
polemical exchange between More and Tyndale, but there is at least one
resonant moment of conjunction that will serve to exemplify the opposition
I have just sketched here. In book 1, canto 7 of The Faerie Queene,
dismayed by the news that Redcrosse has been overthrown by the giant
Orgoglio, Una providentially encounters Prince Arthur, the embodiment of
Magnificence—the virtue, according to the letter to Ralegh, that "is the
perfection of all the rest, and containeth in it them all." This is
Arthur's first appearance in the poem, and there follows an elaborate
description of his gorgeous armor, a description that includes the
following stanza on his helmet's crest:
Vpon the top of all
his loftie crest,
A bunch of haires discolourd diuersly,
With sprincled pearle, and gold full richly drest,
Did shake, and seem'd to daunce for iollity,
Like to an Almond tree ymounted hye
On top of greene Selinis all alone,
With blossomes braue bedecked daintily;
Whose tender locks do tremble euery one
At euery little breath, that vnder heauen is blowne.
(1.7.32)
As early as the late
eighteenth century, a reader records his surprise to find this passage
almost verbatim in part 2 of Tamburlaine. It occurs in the scene
in which Tamburlaine is drawn on stage in his chariot by the captive
kings, "with bits in their mouths," the stage direction tells us, "reins
in his left hand, in his right hand a whip, with which he scourgeth them."
Exulting in his triumphant power, Tamburlaine baits his captives, hands
over the weeping royal concubines to satisfy the lust of his common
soldiers, and—his own erotic satisfaction—imagines his future conquests:
Through the streets
with troops of conquered kings,
I'll ride in golden armor like the Sun,
And in my helm a triple plume shall spring,
Spangled with Diamonds dancing in the air,
To note me Emperor of the three‑fold world,
Like to an almond tree ymounted high,
Upon the lofty and celestial mount,
Of ever green Selinus quaintly decked
With blooms more white than Hericina's brows,
Whose tender blossoms tremble every one,
At every little breath that thorough heaven is blown.
(4.3.4094‑4113)
What is sung by
Spenser in praise of Arthur is sung by Tamburlaine in praise of himself;
the chivalric accoutrement, an emblem of Arthur's magnanimous knighthood
is here part of Tamburlaine's paean to his own power lust. Lines that for
Spenser belong to the supreme figure of civility, the chief upholder of
the Order of Maidenhead, the worshipful servant of Gloriana, for Marlowe
belong to the fantasy life of the Scythian Scourge of God. Marlowe's scene
is self‑consciously emblematic, as if it were a theatrical improvisation
in the Spenserean manner, but now with the hero's place taken by a
character who, in his sadistic excess, most closely resembles Orgoglio.
And even as we are struck by the radical difference, we are haunted by the
vertiginous possibility of an underlying sameness. What if Arthur and
Tamburlaine are not separate and opposed? What if they are two faces of
the same thing, embodiments of the identical power? Tamburlaine's is the
face Arthur shows to his enemies or, alternatively, Arthur's is the face
Tamburlaine shows to his followers. To the Irish kern, Spenser's Prince of
Magnanimity looks like the Scourge of God; to the English courtier,
Marlowe's grotesque conquerer looks like the Faerie Queene.
How shall we
characterize the power that possesses both faces and can pass from one to
the other? In a famous passage in The Prince, Machiavelli writes
that a prince must know well how to use both the beast and the man, and
hence the ancients depicted Achilles and other heroes as educated by
Chiron the centaur. This discussion is an early instance of the
celebration of psychic mobility that has continued to characterize
discussions of Western consciousness to the present time. Thus in his
influential study of modernization in the Middle East, The Passing of
Traditional Society, the sociologist Daniel Lerner defines the West
as a "mobile society," a society characterized not only by certain
enlightened and rational public practices but also by the inculcation in
its people of a "mobile sensibility so adaptive to change
that rearrangement of the self‑system is its distinctive mode." While
traditional society, Professor Lerner argues, functions on the basis of a
"highly constrictive personality" (51), one that resists change and is
incapable of grasping the situation of another, the mobile personality of
Western society "is distinguished by a high capacity for identification
with new aspects of his environment," for he "comes equipped with the
mechanisms needed to incorporate new demands upon himself that arise
outside of his habitual experience" (49). Those mechanisms Professor
Lerner subsumes under the single term empathy, which he defines as
"the capacity to see oneself in the other fellow's situation" (50). In the
West, this capacity was fostered first by the physical mobility initiated
by the Age of Exploration, then confirmed and broadened by the mass media.
"These," he writes, "have peopled the daily world of their audience with
sustained, even intimate, experience of the lives of others. 'Ma Perkins,'
'The Goldbergs,' 'I Love Lucy'—all these bring us friends we never met,
but whose joys and sorrows we intensely share' " (53). And the
international diffusion of the
mass media
means a concomitant diffusion of psychic mobility and hence of
modernization: "In our time, indeed, the spread of empathy around the
world is accelerating" (52).
To test the rate of
this acceleration, Professor Lerner devised a set of questions that he and
his assistants put to a cross‑section of the inhabitants of the Middle
East, to porters and cobblers, as well as grocers and physicians. The
questions began, "If you were made editor of a newspaper, what kind of a
paper would you run?" and I confess myself in complete sympathy with that
class of respondents who, like one shepherd interviewed in a village near
Ankara, gasped "My God! How can you say such a thing? . . . A poor
villager . . . master of the whole world" (24). Professor Lerner
invariably interprets such answers as indicative of a constrictive
personality incapable of empathy, but in fact the Turkish shepherd, with
his Tamburlainian language, reintroduces the great missing term in the
analysis of modernization, and that term is power. For my own part,
I would like in this chapter to delineate the Renaissance origins of the
"mobile sensibility" and, having done so, to shift the ground from "I Love
Lucy" to Othello in order to demonstrate that what Professor
Lerner calls "empathy," Shakespeare calls "Iago."
To help us return from
the contemporary Middle East to the early seventeenth century, let us
dwell for a moment on Professor Lerner's own concept of Renaissance
origins: "Take the factor of physical mobility," he writes, "which
initiated Western take‑off in an age when the earth was underpopulated in
terrns of the world man‑land ratio. Land was to be had, more or less, for
the finding. The great explorers took over vast real estate by planting a
flag; these were slowly filled with new populations over generations"
(65). It didn't exactly happen this way. Land does not become "real
estate" quite so easily, and the underpopulation was not found but created
by those great explorers. Demographers of Mesoamerica now estimate, for
example, that the population of Hispaniola in 1492 was 7‑8 million,
perhaps as high as 11 million. Reduction to that attractive man‑land ratio
was startlingly sudden: by 1501, enslavement, disruption of agriculture,
and, above all, European disease had reduced the population to some
700,000; by 1512, to 28,000. The unimaginable massiveness of the death
rate did not, of course, go unnoticed; European observers took it as a
sign of God's determination to cast down the idolaters and open the New
World to Christianity.
With the passage from
the sociologist's bland world of ceremonial flag‑planting in an empty
landscape to violent displacement and insidious death, we have already
moved toward Shakespeare's tragedy, and we move still closer if we glance
at an incident recounted in 1525 by Peter Martyr in the Seventh Decade
of De orbe novo. Faced with a serious labor shortage in the gold
mines as a result of the decimation of the native population, the Spanish
in Hispaniola began to raid neighboring islands. Two ships reached an
outlying island in the Lucayas (now called the Bahamas) where they were
received with awe and trust. The Spanish learned through their
interpreters that the natives believed that after death their souls were
first purged of their sins in icy northern mountains, then borne to a
paradisal island in the south, whose beneficent, lame prince offered them
innumerable pleasures: "the souls enjoy eternal delights, among the
dancings and songs of young maidens, and among the embracements of their
children, and whatsoever they loved heretofore; they babble also there,
that such as grow old, wax young again, so that all are of like years full
of joy and mirth." When the Spanish understood these imaginations, writes
Martyr, they proceeded to persuade the natives "that they came from those
places, where they should see their parents, and children, and all their
kindred and friends that were dead: and should enjoy all kind of delights,
together with the embracements and fruition of beloved things" (625). Thus
deceived, the entire population of the island passed "singing and
rejoicing," Martyr says, onto the ships and were taken to the gold mines
of Hispaniola. The Spanish, however, reaped less profit than they had
anticipated; when they grasped what had happened to them, the Lucayans,
like certain German Jewish communities during the Crusades, undertook mass
suicide: "becoming desperate, they either slew themselves, or choosing to
famish, gave up their faint spirits, being persuaded by no reason, or
violence, to take food" (625).
Martyr, it appears,
feels ambivalent about the story. He is certain that God disapproves of
such treachery, since many of those who perpetrated the fraud subsequently
died violent deaths; on the other hand, he opposes those who would free
enslaved natives, since bitter experience has shown that even those
Indians who have apparently been converted to Christianity will, given the
slightest opportunity, revert to "their ancient and native vices" and turn
savagely against those who had instructed them "with fatherly charity"
(627). But, for our purposes, Martyr's ambivalence is less important than
the power of his story to evoke a crucial Renaissance mode of behavior
that links Lerner's "empathy" and Shakespeare's Iago: I shall call that
mode improvisation, by which I mean the ability both to capitalize
on the unforeseen and to transform given materials into one's own
scenario. The spur‑of‑ the ‑moment quality of improvisation is not as
critical here as the opportunistic grasp of that which seems fixed and
established. Indeed, as Castiglione and others in the Renaissance well
understood, the impromptu character of an improvisation is itself often a
calculated mask, the product of careful preparation. Conversely, all
plots, literary and behavioral, inevitably have their origin in a moment
prior to formal coherence, a moment of experimental, aleatory impulse in
which the available, received materials are curved toward a novel shape.
We cannot locate a point of pure premeditation or pure randomness. What is
essential is the Europeans' ability again and again to insinuate
themselves into the preexisting political, religious, even psychic
structures of the natives and to turn those structures to their advantage.
The process is as familiar to us by now as the most tawdry business
fraud, so familiar that we assume a virtually universal diffusion of the
necessary improvisational talent, but that assumption is almost certainly
misleading. There are periods and cultures in which the ability to insert
oneself into the consciousness of another is of relatively slight
importance, the object of limited concern; others in which it is a major
preoccupation, the object of cultivation and fear. Professor Lerner is
right to insist that this ability is a characteristically (though not
exclusively) Western mode, present to varying degrees in the classical
and medieval world and greatly strengthened from the Renaissance onward;
he misleads only in insisting further that it is an act of imaginative
generosity, a sympathetic appreciation of the situation of the other
fellow. For when he speaks confidently of the "spread of empathy around
the world," we must understand that he is speaking of the exercise of
Western power, power that is creative as well as destructive, but that is
scarcely ever wholly disinterested and benign.
To return to the
Lucayan story, we may ask ourselves what conditions exist in Renaissance
culture that make such an improvisation possible. It depends first upon
the ability and willingness to play a role, to transform oneself, if only
for a brief period and with mental reservations, into another. This
necessitates the acceptance of disguise, the ability to effect a divorce,
in Ascham's phrase, between the tongue and the heart. Such role‑playing in
turn depends upon the transformation of another's reality into a
manipulable fiction. The Spanish had to perceive the Indians' religious
beliefs as illusions, "imaginations" as Martyr's English translator calls
them. Lucayan society, Martyr observes, is based upon a principle of
reverent obedience fostered by a set of religious fables that "are
delivered by word of mouth and tradition from the Elders to the younger,
for a most sacred and true history, insomuch as he who but seemed to think
otherwise, should be thrust out of the society of men" (623). The Lucayan
king performs the supreme sacral functions and partakes fully in the
veneration accorded to the idols, so that if he were to command one of his
subjects to cast himself down from a precipice, the subject would
immediately comply. The king uses this absolute power to ensure the just
distribution, to families according to need, of the tribe's food, all of
which is stored communally in royal granaries: "They had the golden age,
mine and thine, the seeds of discord, were far removed from
them" (618). Martyr then perceives the social function of Lucayan
religious concepts, the native apparatus for their transmission and
reproduction, and the punitive apparatus for the enforcement of belief. In
short, he grasps Lucayan religion as an ideology, and it is this
perception that licenses the transformation of "sacred and true history"
into "crafty and subtle imaginations" (625) that may be exploited.
If improvisation is
made possible by the subversive perception of another's truth as an
ideological construct, that construct must at the same time be grasped in
terms that bear a certain structural resemblance to one's own set of
beliefs. An ideology that is perceived as entirely alien would permit no
point of histrionic entry: it could be destroyed but not performed. Thus
the Lucayan religion, in Martyr's account, is an anamorphic
representation of Catholicism: there are "images" carried forth with
solemn pomp on "the holy day of adoration"; worshipers kneel reverently
before these images, sing "hymns," and make offerings, "which at night the
nobles divide among them, as our priests do the cakes or wafers which
women offer" (622); there are "holy relics" about which the chief priest,
standing in his "pulpit," preaches; and, as we have seen, there is
absolution for sin, purgatory, and eternal delight in paradise. The
European account of the native religion must have borne some likeness to
what the Lucayans actually believed; why else would they have danced,
singing and rejoicing, onto the Spanish ships? But it is equally important
that the religion is conceived as analogous to Catholicism, close enough
to permit improvisation, yet sufficiently distanced to protect European
beliefs from the violence of fictionalization. The Spanish were not
compelled to perceive their own religion as a manipulable human
construct; on the contrary, the compulsion of their own creed was
presumably strengthened by their contemptuous exploitation of an analogous
symbolic structure.
This absence of
reciprocity is an aspect of the total economy of the mode of improvisation
that I have sketched here. For what we may see in the Lucayan story is an
early manifestation of an exercise of power that was subsequently to
become vastly important and remains a potent force in our lives: the
ownership of another's labor conceived as involving no supposedly
"natural" reciprocal obligation (as in feudalism) but rather functioning
by concealing the very fact of ownership from the exploited who believe
that they are acting freely and in their own interest. Of course, once the
ships reached Hispaniola, this concealed ownership gave way to direct
enslavement; the Spanish were not capable of continuing the improvisation
into the very mines. And it is this failure to sustain the illusion that
led to the ultimate failure of the enterprise, for, of course, the
Spanish did not want dead Indians but live mineworkers. It would take
other, subtler minds, in the Renaissance and beyond, to perfect the means
to sustain indefinitely an indirect enslavement.
I have called
improvisation a central Renaissance mode of behavior, but the example on
which I have focused is located on a geographical margin and might only
seem to bear out Immanuel Wallerstein's theory that Western Europe in the
sixteenth century increasingly established its ownership of the labor and
resources of those located in areas defined as peripheral. But I would
argue that the phenomenon I have described is found in a wide variety of
forms closer to home. It may be glimpsed, to suggest two significant
instances, in the relation of Tudor power to Catholic symbolism and the
characteristic form of rhetorical education.
The Anglican Church
and the monarch who was its Supreme Head did not, as radical Protestants
demanded, eradicate Catholic ritual but rather improvised within it in an
attempt to assume its power. Thus, for example, in the Accession Day
celebration of 1590, we are told that the queen, sitting in the Tilt
gallery, "did suddenly hear a music so sweet and so secret, as every one
thereat greatly marvelled. And hearkening to that excellent melody, the
earth as it were opening, there appears a Pavilion, made of white Taffeta,
being in proportion like unto the sacred Temple of the Virgins Vestal.
This Temple seemed to consist upon pillars of porphyry, arched like unto
a Church, within it were many lamps burning. Also, on the one side an
Altar covered with cloth of gold; and thereupon two wax candles burning in
rich candlesticks; upon the Altar also were laid certain Princely
presents, which after by three Virgins were presented unto her Majesty."
This secular epiphany permits us to identify two of the characteristic
operations of improvisation: displacement and absorption. By
displacement I mean the process whereby a prior symbolic structure is
compelled to coexist with other centers of attention that do not
necessarily conflict with the original structure but are not swept up in
its gravitational pull; indeed, as here, the sacred may find itself
serving as an adornment, a backdrop, an occasion for a quite secular
phenomenon. By absorption I mean the process whereby a symbolic structure
is taken into the ego so completely that it ceases to exist as an external
phenomenon; in the Accession Day ceremony, instead of the secular prince
humbling herself before the sacred, the sacred seems only to enhance the
ruler's identity, to express her power.
Both displacement and
absorption are possible here because the religious symbolism was already
charged with the celebration of power. What we are witnessing is a shift
in the institution that controls and profits from the interpretation of
such symbolism, a shift mediated in this instance by the classical
scholarship of Renaissance humanism. The invocation of the Temple of the
Vestal Virgins is the sign of that transformation of belief into ideology
that we have already examined; the Roman mythology, deftly keyed to
England's Virgin Queen, helps to fictionalize Catholic ritual sufficiently
for it to be displaced and absorbed.
This enzymatic
function of humanism leads directly to our second instance of domestic
improvisation, for the cornerstone of the humanist project was a
rhetorical education. In The Tudor Play of Mind, Joel Altman has
recently demonstrated the central importance for English Renaissance
culture of the argumenturn in utramque partem, the cultivation of
the scholar's power to speak equally persuasively for diametrically
opposed positions. The practice permeated intellectual life in the early
sixteenth century and was, Altman convincingly argues, one of the
formative influences on the early drama." It is in the spirit of such
rhetorical mobility that Erasmus praises More, as we have seen for his
ability "to play the man of all hours with all men" and that Roper
recalls the young More's dazzling improvisations in Cardinal Morton's
Christmas plays.
The hagiographical
bias of Roper's and most subsequent writing on More has concealed the
extent to which this improvisational gift is closely allied to a control
of power in the law courts and the royal service: the mystification of
manipulation as disinterested empathy begins as early as the sixteenth
century. As a corrective, we need only recall More's controversial works,
such as The Confutation of Tyndale's Answer, whose recurrent method
is through improvisation to transform the heretic's faith into a fiction,
then absorb it into a new symbolic structure that will ridicule or consume
it. Thus Tyndale had written: "Sin we through fragility never so oft, yet
as soon as we repent and come into the right way again, and unto the
testament which God hath made in Christ's blood: our sins vanish away as
smoke in the wind, and as darkness at the coming of light, or as thou cast
a little blood or milk into the main sea." More responds by maliciously
improvising on Tyndale's text: "Neither purgatory need to be feared when
we go hence, nor penance need to be done while we be here, but sin and be
sorry and sit and make merry, and then sin again and then repent a little
and run to the ale and wash away the sin, think once on God's promise and
then do what we list. For hoping sure in that, kill we ten men on a day,
we cast but a little blood into the main sea." Having thus made a part of
his own, More continues by labeling Tyndale's argument about penance as
"but a piece of his poetry—an explicit instance of that fictionalization
we have witnessed elsewhere and concludes, "Go me to Martin Luther . . . .
While that friar lieth with his nun and woteth well he doth nought [i.e.,
knows he does evil], and saith still he doth well: let Tyndale tell me
what repenting is that. He repenteth every morning, and to bed again every
night; thinketh on God's promise first, and then go sin again upon trust
of God's testament, and then he calleth it casting of a little milk into
the main sea."
Improvisation here
obviously does not intend to deceive its original object but to work upon
a third party, the reader, who might be wavering between the reformers and
the Catholic Church. If the heretic speaks of sin redeemed by God's
testament as milk, More returns that milk to sin, then surpasses the
simple reversal by transforming it to semen, while he turns the sea that
imaged for Tyndale the boundlessness of divine forgiveness into the sexual
insatiability of Luther's nun.
These perversions of
the reformer's text are greatly facilitated by the fact that the text was
already immersed in an intensely charged set of metaphorical transform
ations—that is, More seizes upon the brilliant instability of Tyndale's
prose with its own nervous passage from Christ's blood to sin conceived
progressively as smoke, darkness, blood, and finally milk. More's artful
improvisation makes it seem that murder and lust lay just beneath the
surface of the original discourse, as a kind of dark subtext, and he is
able to do so more plausibly because both violence and sexual anxiety are
in fact powerful underlying forces in Tyndale's prose as in More's. That
is, once again, there is a haunting structural homology between the
improviser and his other.
I would hope that by
now Othello seems virtually to force itself upon us as the supreme
symbolic expression of the cultural mode I have been describing, for
violerice, sexual anxiety, and improvisation are the materials out of
which the drama is constructed. To be sure, there are many other
explorations of these materials in Shakespeare—one thinks of Richard III
wooing Anne or, in comedy, of Rosalind playfully taking advantage of the
disguise that exile has forced upon her—but none so intense and radical.
In Iago's first soliloquy, Shakespeare goes out of his way to emphasize
the improvised nature of the villain's plot:
Cassio's a proper man,
let me see now,
To get this place, and to make up my will,
A double knavery how,how? let me see,
After some time, to abuse Othello's ear,
That he is too familiar with his wife:
He has a person and a smooth dispose,
To be suspected, fram'd to make women false:
The Moor a free and open nature too,
That thinks men honest that but seems to be so:
And will as tenderly be led by the nose
As asses are.
I ha't, it is engender'd; Hell and night
Must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light.
(1.3.390‑402)
We will try shortly to
cast some light on why Iago conceives of his activity here as sexual; for
the moment, we need only to observe all of the marks of the impromptu and
provisional, extending to the ambiguity of the third‑person pronoun: "to
abuse Othello's ear / That he is too familiar with his wife." This
ambiguity is felicitous; indeed, though scarcely visible at this point, it
is the dark essence of Iago's whole enterprise which is, as we shall see,
to play upon Othello's buried perception of his own sexual relations with
Desdemona as adulterous.
What I have called the
marks of the impromptu extend to Iago's other speeches and actions through
the course of the whole play. In act 2, he declares of his conspiracy,
"'tis here, but yet confus'd; / Knavery's plain face is never seen, till
us'd," and this half‑willed confusion continues through the agile, hectic
maneuvers of the last act until the moment of exposure and silence. To
all but Roderigo, of course, Iago presents himself as incapable of
improvisation, except in the limited and seemingly benign fonn of banter
and jig. 16 And even here, he is careful, when Desdemona asks him to
improvise her praise, to declare himself unfit for the task:
I am about it, but
indeed my invention
Comes from my pate as birdlime does from frieze,
It plucks out brain and all: but my Muse labours,
And thus she is deliver'd.
(2.1.125-28)
Lurking in the homely
denial of ability is the image of his invention as birdlime, and hence a
covert celebration of his power to ensnare others. Like Jonson's Mosca,
Iago is fully aware of himself as an improviser and revels in his ability
to manipulate his victims, to lead them by the nose like asses, to
possess their labor without their ever being capable of grasping the
relation in which they are enmeshed. Such is the relation Iago establishes
with virtually every character in the play, from Othello and Desdemona to
such minor figures as Montano and Bianca. For the Spanish colonialists,
improvisation could only bring the Lucayans into open enslavement; for
Iago, it is the key to a mastery whose emblem is the "duteous and
knee‑crooking knave" who dotes "on his own obsequious bondage"
(1.1.45‑46), a mastery invisible to the servant, a mastery, that is,
whose character is essentially ideological. Iago's attitude toward Othello
is nonetheless colonial: though he finds himself in a subordinate
position, the ensign regards his black general as "an erring barbarian"
whose "free and open nature" is a fertile field for exploitation. However
galling it may be to him, Iago's subordination is a kind of protection,
for it conceals his power and enables him to play upon the ambivalence of
Othello's relation to Christian society: the Moor at once represents the
institution and the alien, the conqueror and the infidel. Iago can conceal
his malicious intentions toward "the thick‑lips" behind the mask of
dutiful service and hence prolong his improvisation as the Spaniards
could not. To be sure, the play suggests, Iago must ultimately destroy the
beings he exploits and hence undermine the profitable economy of his own
relations, but that destruction may be long deferred, deferred in fact
for precisely the length of the play.
If Iago then holds
over others a possession that must constantly efface the signs of its own
power, how can it be established, let alone maintained? We will find a
clue, I think, in what we have been calling the process of
fictionalization that transfonns a fixed symbolic structure into a
flexible construct ripe for improvisational entry. This process is at
work in Shakespeare's play, where we may more accurately identify it as
submission to narrative self‑fashioning. When in Cyprus Othello and
Desdemona have been ecstatically reunited, Iago astonishes Roderigo by
informing him that Desdemona is in love with Cassio. He has no evidence,
of course—indeed we have earlier seen him "engender" the whole plot
entirely out of his fantasy—but he proceeds to lay before his gull all of
the circumstances that make this adultery plausible: "mark me, with what
violence she first lov'd the Moor, but for bragging, and telling her
fantastical lies; and she will love him still for prating?" (2.1.221‑23).
Desdemona cannot long take pleasure in her outlandish match: "When the
blood is made dull with the act of sport, there should be again to inflame
it, and give satiety a fresh appetite, loveliness in favor, sympathy in
years, manners and beauties" (2.1.225‑29). The elegant Cassio is the
obvious choice: "Didst thou not see her paddle with the palm of his hand?"
Iago asks. To Roderigo's objection that this was "but courtesy," Iago
replies, "Lechery, by this hand: an index and prologue to the history of
lust and foul thoughts" (2.1.251‑55). The metaphor makes explicit what
Iago has been doing all along: constructing a narrative into which he
inscribes ("by this hand") those around him. He does not need a profound
or even reasonably accurate understanding of his victims; he would rather
deal in probable impossibilities than improbable possibilities. And it is
eminently probable that a young, beautiful Venetian gentlewoman would tire
of her old, outlandish husband and turn instead to the handsome, young
lieutenant: it is, after all, one of the master plots of comedy.
What Iago as inventor
of comic narrative needs is a sharp eye for the surfaces of social
existence, a sense, as Bergson says, of the mechanical encrusted upon the
living, a reductive grasp of human possibilities. These he has in
extraordinarily full measure. "The wine she drinks is made of grapes," he
says in response to Roderigo's idealization of Desdemona, and so reduced,
she can be assimilated to Iago's grasp of the usual run of humanity.
Similarly, in a spirit of ironic connoisseurship, he observes Cassio's
courtly gestures, "If such tricks as these strip you out of your
lieutenantry, it had been better you had not kiss'd your three fingers so
oft, which now again you are most apt to play the sir in: good, well
kiss'd, an excellent courtesy" (2.1.171‑75). He is watching a comedy of
manners. Above all, Iago is sensitive to habitual and selflimiting forms
of discourse, to Cassio's reaction when he has had a drink or when someone
mentions Bianca, to Othello's rhetorical extremism, to Desclemona's
persistence and tone when she pleads for a friend; and, of course, he is
demonically sensitive to the way individuals interpret discourse' to the
signals they ignore and those to which they respond.
We should add that
Iago includes himself in this ceaseless narrative invention; indeed, as
we have seen from the start, a successful improvisational career depends
upon role‑playing, which is in turn allied to the capacity, as Professor
Lerner defines empathy, "to see oneself in the other fellow's situation."
This capacity requires above all a sense that one is not forever fixed in
a single, divinely sanctioned identity, a sense Iago expresses to Roderigo
in a parodically sententious theory of self‑fashioning: "our bodies are
gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners, so that if we will plant
nettles, or sow lettuce, set hyssop, and weed up thyme; supply it with one
gender of herbs, or distract it with many; either to have it sterile with
idleness, or manur'd with industry, why, the power, and corrigible
authority of this, lies in our wills" (1.3.320‑26). Confident in his
shaping power, Iago has the role‑player's ability to imagine his
nonexistence so that he can exist for a moment in another and as another.
In the opening scene he gives voice to this hypothetical self‑cancellation
in a line of eerie simplicity: "Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago"
(1.1.57). The simplicity is far more apparent than real. Is the "I" in
both halves of the line the same? Does it designate a hard, impacted
self‑interest prior to social identity, or are there two distinct, even
opposing selves? Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago, because the "I"
always loves itself and the creature I know as Iago hates the Moor he
serves or, alternatively, because as the Moor I would be other than I am
now, free of the tonnenting appetite and revulsion that characterize the
servant's relation to his master and that constitute my identity as Iago.
I would be radically the same / I would be radically different; the
rapacious ego underlies all institutional structures / the rapacious ego
is constituted by institutional structures.
What is most
disturbing in Iago's comically banal and fathomless expression—as for
that matter, in Professor Lerner's definition of empathy—is that the
imagined self‑loss conceals its opposite: a ruthless displacement and
absorption of the other. Empathy, as the German Einfürhlung
suggests, may be a feeling of oneself into an object, but that object may
have to be drained of its own substance before it will serve as an
appropriate vessel. Certainly in Othello, where all relations are
embedded in power and sexuality, there is no realm where the subject and
object can merge in the unproblematic accord affirmed by the theorists of
empathy. As Iago himself proclaims, his momentary identification with the
Moor is a strategic aspect of his malevolent hypocrisy:
In following him, I
follow but myself.
Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,
But seeming so, for my peculiar end.
(1.1.58‑60)
Exactly what that
"peculiar end" is remains opaque. Even the general term "self‑interest" is
suspect: Iago begins his speech in a declaration of self‑ intere st‑"I
follow him to serve my turn upon him‑‑and ends in a declaration of
self‑division: "I am not what I am."21 We tend, to be sure, to hear the
latter as "I am not what I seem," hence as a simple confirmation of his
public deception. But "I am not what I am" goes beyond social feigning:
not only does Iago mask himself in society as the honest ancient, but in
private he tries out a bewildering succession of brief narratives that
critics have attempted, with notorious results, to translate into motives.
These inner narratives‑shared, that is, only with the audience
continually promise to disclose what lies behind the public deception,
to illuminate what Iago calls "the native act and figure" of his heart,
and continually fail to do so; or rather, they reveal that his heart is
precisely a series of acts and figures, each referring to something else,
something just out of our grasp. "I am not what I am" suggests that this
elusiveness is permanent, that even self-interest, whose transcendental
guarantee is the divine "I am what I am," is a mask. Iago's constant
recourse to narrative then is both the affirmation of absolute
self‑interest and the affirmation of absolute vacancy; the oscillation
between the two incompatible positions suggests in Iago the principle of
narrativity itself, cut off from original motive and final disclosure. The
only termination possible in his case is not revelation but silence.
The question remains
why anyone would submit, even unconsciously, to Iago's narrative
fashioning. Why would anyone submit to another's narrative at all? For an
answer we may recall the pressures on all the figures we have considered
in this study and return to our observation that there is a structural
resemblance between even a hostile improvisation and its object. In
Othello the characters have always already experienced submission to
narrativity. This is clearest and most important in the case of Othello
himself. When Brabantio brings before the Signiory the charge that his
daughter has been seduced by witchcraft, Othello promises to deliver "a
round unvarnish'd tale . . . / Of my whole course of love" (1.3.90‑91),
and at the heart of this tale is the telling of tales:
Her father lov'd me,
oft invited me,
Still question'd me the story of my life,
From year to year; the battles, sieges, fortunes,
That I have pass'd:
I ran it through, even from my boyish days,
To the very moment that he bade me tell it.
(1.3.128‑33)
The telling of the
story of one's life the conception of one's life as a story—the conception
of life as a story—is a response to public inquiry: to the demands of the
Senate, sitting in judgment or, at the least, to the presence of an
inquiring community. When, as recorded in the fourteenthcentury documents
Le Roy Ladurie has brilliantly studied, the peasants of the Languedoc
village of Montaillou are examined by the Inquisition, they respond with a
narrative performnance: "About 14 years ago, in Lent, towards vespers, I
took two sides of salted pork to the house of Guillaume Benet of
Montaillou, to have them smoked. There I found Guillemette Benet warming
herself by the fire, together with another woman; I put the salted meat in
the kitchen and left." And when the Carthaginian queen calls upon her
guest to "tell us all things from the first beginning, Grecian guile, your
people's trials, and then your joumeyings," Aeneas responds, as he must,
with a narrative of the destiny decreed by the gods. So too Othello
before the Senate or earlier in Brabantio's house responds to questioning
with what he calls his "travel's history" or, in the Folio reading, as if
noting the genre, his "traveler's history." This history, it should be
noted, is not only of events in distant lands and among strange peoples:
"I ran it through," Othello declares, from childhood "To the very moment
that he bade me tell it." We are on the brink of a Borges‑like narrative
that is forever constituting itself out of the materials of the present
instant, a narrative in which the storyteller is constantly swallowed up
by the story. That is, Othello is pressing up against the condition of all
discursive representations of identity. He comes dangerously close to
recognizing his status as a text, and it is precisely this recognition
that the play as a whole will reveal to be insupportable. But, at this
point, Othello is still convinced that the text is his own, and he
imagines only that he is recounting a lover's performance.
In the 45th sonnet of
Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, Astrophil complains that while
Stella is indifferent to the sufferings she has caused him, she weeps
piteous tears at a fable of some unknown lovers. He concludes,
Then think my dear,
that you in me do read
Of Lovers' ruin some sad Tragedy:
I am not I, pity the tale of me.
In Othello it
is Iago who echos that last line—"I am not what I am," the motto of the
improviser, the manipulator of signs that bear no resemblance to what they
profess to signify‑but it is Othello himself who is fully implicated in
the situation of the Sidney sonnet: that one can win pity for oneself
only by becoming a tale of oneself, and hence by ceasing to be oneself. Of
course, Othello thinks that he has triumphed through his narrative
self-fashioning:
she thank'd me,
And bade me, if I had
a friend that lov'd her,
I should but teach him
how to tell my story,
And that would woo
her. Upon this hint I spake:
She lov'd me for the
dangers I had pass'd,
And I lov'd her that
she did pity them.
(1.3‑163‑68)
But Iago knows that an
identity that has been fashioned as a story can be unfashioned,
refashioned, inscribed anew in a different narrative: it is the fate of
stories to be consumed or, as we say more politely, interpreted. And even
Othello, in his moment of triumph, has a dim intimation of this fate: a
half‑dozen lines after he has recalled "the Cannibals, that each other
eat," he remarks complacently, but with an unmistakable undertone of
anxiety, that Desdemona would come "and with a greedy ear / Devour up my
discourse" (1.3.149‑50).
Paradoxically, in this
image of rapacious appetite Othello is recording Desclemona's
submission to his story, what she calls the consecration of her soul
and fortunes "to his honors and his valiant parts" (1.3.253). What he has
both experienced and narrated, she can only embrace as narration:
my story
being done,
She gave me for my
pains a world of sighs;
She swore i' faith 'twas strange, 'twas passing strange;
'Twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful;
She wish'd she had not heard it, yet she wish'd
That heaven had made her such a man.
(1.3.153)
It is, of course,
characteristic of early modern culture that male submission to narrative
is conceived as active, entailing the fashioning of one's own story
(albeit within the prevailing conventions), and female submission as
passive, entailing the entrance into marriage in which, to recall
Tyndale's definition, the "weak vessel" is put "under the obedience of her
husband, to rule her lusts and wanton appetites." As we have seen, Tyndale
explains that Sara, "before she was married, was Abraham's sister, and
equal with him; but, as soon as she was married, was in subjection, and
became without comparison inferior; for so is the nature of wedlock, by
the ordinance of God .1127 At least for the world of Renaissance
patriarchs, this account is fanciful in its glimpse of an original
equality; most women must have entered marriage, like Desdemona, directly
from paternal domination. "I do perceive here a divided duty," she tells
her father before the Venetian Senate; "you are lord of all my duty,"
but here's my husband:
And so much duty as my mother show'd
To you, preferring you before her father,
So much I challenge, that I may profess,
Due to the Moor my lord.
(1.3.1855‑89)
She does not question
the woman's obligation to obey, invoking instead only the traditional
right to transfer her duty. Yet though Desdemona proclaims throughout the
play her submission husband—"Commend me to my kind lord," she gasps in her
dying words‑that submission does not accord wholly with the male dream of
female passivity. She was, Brabantio tells us,
A maiden
never bold of spirit,
So still and quiet, that her motion
Blush'd at her self,
(1.3‑94‑96)
yet even this
self‑abnegation in its very extremity unsettles what we may assume was her
father's expectation:
So opposite to
marriage, that she shunn'd The wealthy curled darlings of our nation.
(1.2.67‑68)
And, of course, her
marriage choice is, for Brabantio, an act of astonishing disobedience,
explicable only as the somnambulistic behavior of one bewitched or
drugged. He views her elopement not as a transfer of obedience but as
theft or treason or a reckless escape from what he calls his "guardage."
Both he and Iago remind Othello that her marriage suggests not submission
but deception:
She did deceive her
father, marrying you;
And when she seem'd to shake and fear your looks,
She lov'd them most.
(3.3.210‑11)
As the sly reference
to Othello's "looks" suggests, the scandal of Desdemona's marriage
consists not only in her failure to receive her father's prior consent but
in her husband's blackness. That blackness‑the sign of all that the
society finds frightening and dangerous‑is the indelible witness to
Othello's permanent status as an outsider, no matter how highly the state
may value his services or how sincerely he has embraced its values. The
safe passage of the female from father to husband is irreparably
disrupted, marked as an escape: "O heaven," Brabantio cries, "how got she
out?" (1.1.169).
Desdemona's relation
to her lord Othello should, of course, lay to rest any doubts about her
proper submission, but it is not only Brabantio's opposition and Othello's
blackness that raise such doubts, even in the midst of her intensest
declarations of love. There is rather a quality in that love itself that
unsettles the or‑thodox schema of hierarchical obedience and makes
Othello perceive her submission to his discourse as a devouring of it. We
may perceive this quality most clearly in the exquisite moment of the
lovers' reunion on Cyprus:
othello It
gives me wonder great as my content
To see you here before me: 0 my soul's joy,
If after every tempest come such calmness,
May the winds blow,
till they have waken'd death,
And let the labouring bark climb hills of seas,
Olympus‑high, and duck
again as low
As hell's from heaven.
If it were now to die,
'Twere now to be most happy, for I fear
My soul hath her
content so absolute,
That not another comfort, like to this
Succeeds in unknown fate.
desdemona
The heavens forbid
But that our loves and
comforts should increase,
Even as our days do
grow.
othello
Amen to that, sweet powers!
I cannot speak enough
of this content,
It stops me here, it
is too much of joy.
(2.1.183‑97)
Christian orthodoxy in
both Catholic and Protestant Europe could envision a fervent mutual love
between husband and wife, the love expressed most profoundly by Saint Paul
in words that are cited and commented upon in virtually every discussion
of marriage:
So men are bound to
love their own wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his own wife,
loveth himself. For never did any man hate his own flesh, but nourisheth
and cherisheth it, even as the Lord doth the congregation: for we are
members of his body, of his flesh and of his bones. For this cause shall a
man leave father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they
two shall be one flesh. This mystery is great, but I speak of Christ and
of the congregation.
Building upon this
passage and upon its source in Genesis, commentators could write,
like the Reformer Thomas Becon, that marriage is a "high, holy, and
blessed order of life, ordained not of man, but of God, yea and that not
in this sinful world, but in paradise that most joyful garden of
pleasure." But like the Pauline text itself, all such discussions of
married love begin and end by affirming the larger order of authority and
submission within which marriage takes its rightful place. The family, as
William Gouge puts it, "is a little Church, and a little Commonwealth . .
. whereby trial may be made of such as are fit for any place of authority,
or of subjection in Church or Commonwealth."
In Othello's ecstatic
words, the proper sentiments of a Christian husband sit alongside
something else: a violent oscillation between heaven and hell, a
momentary possession of the soul's absolute content, an archaic sense of
monumental scale, a dark fear‑equally archaic, perhaps‑of "unknown fate."
Nothing conflicts openly with Christian orthodoxy, but the erotic
intensity that informs almost every word is experienced in tension with
it. This tension is less a manifestation of some atavistic "blackness"
specific to Othello than a manifestation of the colonial power of
Christian doctrine over sexuality, a power visible at this point precisely
in its inherent limitation. That is, we glimpse in this brief moment the
boundary of the orthodox, the strain of its control, the potential
disruption of its hegemony by passion. This scene, let us stress, does not
depict rebellion or even complaint—Desdemona invokes "the heavens" and
Othello answers, "Amen to that, sweet powers!" Yet the plural here eludes,
if only slightly, a serene affirmation of orthodoxy: the powers in their
heavens do not refer unmistakably to the Christian God, but rather are the
nameless transcendent forces that protect and enhance erotic love. To
perceive the difference, we might recall that if Augustine argues,
against the gnostics, that God had intended Adam and Eve to procreate in
paradise, he insists at the same time that our first parents would have
experienced sexual intercourse without the excitement of the flesh. How
then could Adam have had an erection? just as there are persons,
Augustine writes, "who can move their ears, either one at a time, or both
together" and others who have "such command of their bowels, that they can
break wind continuously at pleasure, so as to produce the effect of
singing," so, before the Fall, Adam would have had fully rational, willed
control of the organ of generation and thus would have needed no erotic
arousal. "Without the seductive stimulus of passion, with calmness of mind
and with no corrupting of the integrity of the body, the husband would lie
upon the bosom of his wife," and in this placid union, the semen could
reach the womb "with the integrity of the female genital organ being
preserved, just as now, with that same integrity being safe, the menstrual
flow of blood can be emitted from the womb of a virgin .1135 Augustine
grants that even Adam and Eve, who alone could have done so, failed to
experience this "passionless generation," since they were expelled from
paradise before they had a chance to try it. Nevertheless, the ideal of
Edenic placidity, untried but intended by God for mankind, remains as a
reproach to all fallen sexuality, an exposure of its inherent violence.
The rich and
disturbing pathos of the lovers' passionate reunion in Othello
derives then not only from our awareness that Othello's premonition is
tragically accurate, but from a rent, a moving ambivalence, in his
experience of the ecstatic moment itself. The "calmness" of which he
speaks may express gratified desire, but, as the repeated invocation of
death suggests, it may equally express the longing for a final release
from desire, from the dangerous violence, the sense of extremes, the
laborious climbing and falling out of control that is experienced in the
tempest. To be sure, Othello welcomes this tempest, with its charge
of erotic feeling, but he does so for the sake of the ultimate
consummation that the experience can call into being: "If after every
tempest come such calmness . . . ." That which men most fear to look upon
in the storm—death—is for Othello that which makes the storm endurable.
If the death he invokes may figure not the release from desire but its
fulfillment‑for death is a common Renaissance term for orgasm‑this
fulfillment is characteristically poised between an anxious sense of
self‑dissolution and a craving for decisive closure. If Othello's words
suggest an ecstatic acceptance of sexuality, an absolute content, they
suggest simultaneously that for him sexuality is a menacing voyage to
reach a longed‑for heaven; it is one of the dangers to be passed. Othello
embraces the erotic as a supreme form of romantic narrative, a tale of
risk and violence issuing forth at last in a happy and final tranquillity.
Desdemona's response is in an entirely different key:
The heavens forbid But
that our loves and comforts should increase, Even as our days do grow.
This is spoken to
allay Othello's fear, but may it not instead augment it? For if Othello
characteristically responds to his experience by shaping it as a story,
Desdemona's reply denies the possibility of such narrative control and
offers instead a vision of unabating increase. Othello says "Amen" to this
vision, but it arouses in him a feeling at once of overflowing and
inadequacy:
I cannot speak enough
of this content, It stops me here, it is too much of joy.
Desdemona has once
again devoured up his discourse, and she has done so precisely in bringing
him comfort and content. Rather than simply confirming male authority, her
submission eroticizes everything to which it responds, from the
"disastrous chances" and "moving accidents" Othello relates, to his
simplest demands, to his very mistreatment of her:
my love doth so
approve him,
That even his stubbornness, his checks and frowns,— Prithee unpin me,—have
grace and favour in them.
(4.3.19‑21)
The other women in the
play, Bianca and Emilia, both have moments of disobedience to the men who
possess and abuse them—in the case of Emilia, it is a heroic disobedience
for which she pays with her life. Desdemona performs no such acts of
defiance, but her erotic submission, conjoined with Iago's murderous
cunning, far more effectively, if unintentionally, subverts her husband's
carefully fashioned identity.
We will examine more
fully the tragic process of this subversion, but it is important to grasp
first that Othello's loss of himself—a loss depicted discursively in his
incoherent ravings‑arises not only from the fatal conjunction of
Desdemona's love and lago's hate, but from the nature of that identity,
from what we have called his submission to narrative self‑fashioning. We
may invoke in this connection Lacan's observation that the source of the
subject's frustration in psychoanalysis is ultimately neither the silence
nor the reply of the analyst:
Is it not rather a
matter of frustration inherent in the very discourse of the subject? Does
the subject not become engaged in an ever‑growing dispossession of that
being of his, concerning which‑by dint of sincere portraits which leave
its idea no less incoherent, of rectifications which do not succeed in
freeing its essence, of stays and defenses which do not prevent his statue
from tottering, of narcissistic embraces which become like a puff of air
in animating it‑he ends up by recognizing that this being has never been
anything more than his construct in the Imaginary and that this construct
disappoints all of his certitudes? For in this labor which he undertakes
to reconstruct this construct for another, he finds again the
fundamental alienation which made him construct it like another one,
and which has always destined it to be stripped from him by
another.
Shakespeare's military
hero, it may be objected, is particularly far removed from this
introspective project, a project that would seem, in any case, to have
little bearing upon any Renaissance text. Yet I think it is no accident
that nearly every phrase of Lacan's critique of psychoanalysis seems a
brilliant reading of Othello, for I would propose that there is a
deep resemblance between the construction of the self in analysis—at
least as Lacan conceives it—and Othello's self‑fashioning. The resemblance
is grounded in the dependence of even the innermost self upon a language
that is always necessarily given from without and upon representation
before an audience. I do not know if such are the conditions of human
identity, apart from its expression in psychoanalysis, but they are
unmistakably the conditions of theatrical identity, where existence is
conferred upon a character by the playwright's language and the actor's
performance. And in Othello these governing circumstances of the
medium itself are reproduced and intensified in the hero's situation: his
identity depends upon a constant performance, as we have seen, of his
"story," a loss of his own origins, an embrace and perpetual reiteration
of the norms of another culture. It is this dependence that gives Othello,
the warrior and alien, a relation to Christian values that is the
existential equivalent of a religious vocation; he cannot allow himself
the moderately flexible adherence that most ordinary men have toward
their own formal beliefs. Christianity is the alienating yet constitutive
force in Othello's identity, and if we seek a discursive mode in the play
that is the social equivalent of the experience Lacan depicts, we will
find it in confession. Othello himself invokes before the Venetian
Senate the absolute integrity of confession, conceived, it appears, not as
the formal auricular rite of penitence but as a generalized self‑scrutiny
in God's presence:
as faithful as to
heaven
I do confess the vices of my blood,
So justly to your grave ears I'll present
How I did thrive in this fair lady's love,
And she in mine.
(1.3.123‑36)
The buried
identification here between the vices of the blood and mutual thriving in
love is fully exhumed by the close of the play when confession has become
a virtually obsessional theme. Theological and juridical confession are
fused in Othello's mind when, determined first to exact a deathbed
confession, he comes to take Desclemona's life:
If you bethink
yourself of any crime,
Unreconcil'd as yet to heaven and grace,
Solicit for it straight . . . .
Therefore confess thee freely of thy sin,
For to deny each article with oath
Cannot remove, nor choke the strong conceit,
That I do groan withal: thou art to die.
(5.2.26‑28, 54‑57)
The sin that Othello
wishes Desdemona to confess is adultery, and her refusal to do so
frustrates the achievement of what in theology was called "a good,
complete confession." He feels the outrage of the thwarted system that
needs to imagine itself merciful, sacramental, when it disciplines:
thou dost stone thy
heart,
And makest me call what I intend to do
A murder, which I thought a sacrifice.
(5.2.64‑66)
We are at last in a
position to locate the precise nature of the symbolic structure into which
Iago inserts himself in his brilliant improvisation: this structure is the
centuries‑old Christian doctrine of sexuality, policed socially and
psychically, as we have already seen, by confession. To Iago, the
Renaissance skeptic, this system has a somewhat archaic ring, as if it
were an earlier stage of development which his own modem sensibility had
cast off. Like the Lucayan religion to the conquistadors, the orthodox
doctrine that governs Othello's sexual attitudes—his simultaneous
idealization and mistrust of women‑seems to Iago sufficiently close to be
recognizable, sufficiently distant to be manipulable. We watch him
manipulate it directly at the beginning of act 4, when he leads Othello
through a brutally comic parody of the late medieval confessional manuals
with their casuistical attempts to define the precise moment at which
venial temptation passes over into mortal sin:
iago To kiss in
private?
othello
An unauthoriz'd kiss.
iago Or to be
naked with her friend abed,
An hour, or more, not meaning any harm?
othello Naked
abed, Iago, and not mean harm?
It is hypocrisy
against the devil:
They that mean
virtuously, and yet do so,
The devil their virtue
tempts, and they tempt heaven.
iago So they do
nothing, 'tis a venial slip.
(4.1.2‑9)
Iago in effect assumes
an extreme version of the laxist position in such manuals in order to
impel Othello toward the rigorist version that viewed adultery as one of
the most horrible of mortal sins, more detestable, in the words of the
Eruditorium pent . tentiale, "than homicide or plunder," and hence
formerly deemed punishable, as several authorities remind us, by death.
Early Protestantism did not soften this position. Indeed, in the
mid‑sixteenth century, Tyndale's erstwhile collaborator, George Joye,
called for a return to the Old Testament penalty for adulterers. "God's
law," he writes, "is to punish adultery with death for the tranquillity
and commonwealth of His church." This is not an excessive or vindictive
course; on the contrary, "to take away and to cut off putrified and
corrupt members from the whole body, lest they poison and destroy the
body, is the law of love." When Christian magistrates leave adultery
unpunished, they invite more betrayals and risk the ruin of the realm, for
as Protestants in particular repeatedly observe, the family is an
essential component of an interlocking social and theological network.
Hence adultery is a sin with the gravest of repercussions; in the words of
the great Cambridge Puritan William Perkins, it "destroyeth the Seminary
of the Church, which is a godly seed in the family, and it breaketh
the covenant between the parties and God; it robs another of the precious
ornament of chastity, which is a gift of the Holy Ghost; it dishonors
their bodies and maketh them temples of the devil; and the Adulterer
maketh his family a Stews." It is in the bitter spirit of these
convictions that Othello enacts the grotesque comedy of treating his wife
as a strumpet and the tragedy of executing her in the name of justice,
lest she betray more men.
But we still must ask
how Iago manages to persuade Othello that Desdemona has committed
adultery, for all of the cheap tricks lago plays seem somehow inadequate
to produce the unshakable conviction of his wife's defilement that seizes
Othello's soul and drives him mad. After all, as lago taunts Othello, he
cannot achieve the point of vantage of God whom the Venetian women let
"see the pranks / They dare not show their husbands" (3.3.206‑7):
Would you, the
supervisor, grossly gape on,
Behold her topp'd?
(3.3.401‑2)
How then, without
"ocular proof" and in the face of both love and common sense, is Othello
so thoroughly persuaded? To answer this, we must recall the syntactic
ambiguity we noted earlier—"to abuse Othello's ear, / That he is too
familiar with his wife—and turn to a still darker aspect of orthodox
Christian doctrine, an aspect central both to the confessional system and
to Protestant self‑scrutiny. Omnis amator feruentior est adulter,
goes the Stoic epigram, and Saint Jerome does not hesitate to draw the
inevitable inference: "An adulterer is he who is too ardent a lover of his
wife." Jerome quotes Seneca: "All love of another's wife is shameful; so
too, too much love of your own. A wise man ought to love his wife with
judgment, not affection. Let him control his impulses and not be bome
headlong into copulation. Nothing is fouler than to love a wife like an
adultress . . . . Let them show themsleves to their wives not as lovers,
but as husbands." The words echo through more than a thousand years of
Christian writing on marriage, and, in the decisive form given them by
Augustine and his commentators, remain essentially unchallenged by the
leading continental Reformers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth
century, by Tudor ecclesiastical authorities, and even by Elizabethan and
Jacobean Puritans who sharply opposed so many conservative Anglican
doctrines. There is, to be sure, in all shades of Protestantism an attack
on the Catholic doctrine of celibacy and a celebration of married love, a
celebration that includes acknowledgment of the legitimate role of sexual
pleasure. But for Reformer as for Catholic, this acknowledgment is hedged
about with warnings, and restrictions. The "man who shows no modesty or
comeliness in conjugal intercourse," writes Calvin, "is committing
adultery with his wife," and the King's Book, attributed to Henry
VIII, informs its readers that in lawful matrimony a man may break the
Seventh Commandment "and live unchaste with his own wife, if he do
unmeasurably or inordinately serve his or her fleshly appetite or Just."
In the Augustinian
conception, as elaborated by Raymond of Pefiaforte, William of Rennes, and
others, there are four motives for conjugal intercourse: to conceive
offspring; to render the marital debt to one's partner so that he or she
might avoid incontinency; to avoid fornication oneself; and to satisfy
desire. The first two motives are without sin and excuse intercourse; the
third is a venial sin; the fourth‑to satisfy desire is mortal. Among the
many causes that underlie this institutional hostility to desire is the
tenacious existence, in various forms, of the belief that pleasure
constitutes a legitimate release from dogma and constraint. Thus when
asked by the Inquisition about her happy past liaison with the heretical
priest of Montaillou, the young Grazide Lizier replies with naive
frankness, "in those days it pleased me, and it pleased the priest, that
he should know me carnally, and be known by me; and so I did not think I
was sinning, and neither did he." "With Pierre Clergue," she explains, "I
liked it. And so it could not displease God. It was not a sin" (157). For
the peasant girl, apparently, pleasure was the guarantee of innocence:
"But now, with him, it does not please me any more. And so now, if he knew
me carnally, I should think it a sin" (151). A comparable attitude,
derived not from peasant culture but from the troubadours, evidently lies
behind the more sophisticated courtship of Romeo: "Thus from my lips, by
thine my sin is purged."
It should not surprise
us that churchmen, Catholic and Protestant alike, would seek to crush
such dangerous notions, nor that they would extend their surveillance and
discipline to married couples and warn that excessive pleasure in the
marriage bed is at least a potential violation of the Seventh Commandment.
"Nothing is more vile," says Raymond's influential summa, "than to love
your wife in adulterous fashion." The conjugal act may be without sin,
writes the rigorist Nicolaus of Ausimo, but only if "in the performance of
this act there is no enjoyment of pleasure." Few summas and no marriage
manuals take so extreme a position, but virtually all are in agreement
that the active pursuit of pleasure in sexuality is damnable, for as
Jacobus Ungarelli writes in the sixteenth century, those who undertake
intercourse for pleasure "exclude God from their minds, act as brute
beasts, lack reason, and if they begin marriage for this reason, are given
over to the power of the devil."
Confessors then must
determine if the married penitent has a legitimate excuse for intercourse
and if the act has been performed with due regard for "matrimonial
chastity," while Protestants who have rejected auricular confession must
similarly scrutinize their own behavior for signs that their pleasure has
been too "spacious." "Lust is more spacious than love," writes Alexander
Niccoles in the early seventeenth century; it "hath no mean, no bound . .
. more deep, more dangerous than the Sea, and less restrained, for the
Sea hath bounds, but it [lust] hath none." Such unbounded love is a kind
of idolatry, an encroachment upon a Christian's debt of loving obedience
to God, and it ultimately destroys the marital relationship as well.
Immoderate love, another Puritan divine warns, "will either be blown down
by some storm or tempest of displeasure, or fall of itself, or else
degenerate into jealousy, the most devouring and fretting canker that can
harbor in a married person's breast"
These anxieties, rich
in implication for Othello, are frequently tempered in Protestant
writings by a recognition of the joyful ardor of young married couples,
but there remains a constant fear of excess, and, as Ambrose observed
centuries earlier, even the most plausible excuse for sexual passion is
shameful in the old: "Youths generally assert the desire for generation.
How much more shameful for the old to do what is shameful for the young to
confess." Othello himself seems eager to ward off this shame; he denies
before the Senate that he seeks
To please the palate
of my appetite,
Nor to comply with
heat, the young affects
In me defunct . . . .
(1.3.262‑64)
But Desdemona makes no
such disclaimer; indeed her declaration of passion is frankly, though by
no means exclusively, sexual:
That I did love the
Moor, to live with him, My downright violence, and scorn of fortunes, May
trumpet to the world: my heart's subdued Even to the utmost pleasure of my
lord.
(1.3.248‑51)
This moment of erotic
intensity, this frank acceptance of pleasure and submission to her
spouse's pleasure, is, I would argue, as much as lago's slander the cause
of Desdemona's death, for it awakens the deep current of sexual anxiety in
Othello, anxiety that with Iago's help expresses itself in quite orthodox
fashion as the perception of adultery. Othello unleases upon Cassio‑"Michael
Cassio, / That came a‑wooing with you" (3.3.71‑72)—the fear of pollution,
defilement, brutish violence that is bound up with his own experience of
sexual pleasure, while he must destroy Desdemona both for her excessive
experience of pleasure and for awakening such sensations in himself. Like
Guyon in the Bower of Bliss, Othello transforms his complicity in erotic
excess and his fear of engulfment into a "purifying," saving violence:
Like to the Pontic sea
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellespont,
Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace,
Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble love,
Till that a capable and wide revenge
Swallow them up.
(3.3.460‑67)
His insupportable
sexual experience has been, as it were, displaced and absorbed by the act
of revenge which can swallow up not only the guilty lovers but‑as the
syntax suggests‑his own "bloody thoughts."
Such is the
achievement of Iago's improvisation on the religious sexual doctrine in
which Othello believes; true to that doctrine, pleasure itself becomes for
Othello pollution, a defilement of his property in Desdemona and in
himself.64 It is at the level of this dark, sexual revulsion that Iago has
access to Othello, access assured, as we should expect, by the fact that
beneath his cynical modernity and professed self‑love Iago reproduces in
himself the same psychic structure. He is as intensely preoccupied with
adultery, while his anxiety about his own sexuality may be gauged from
the fact that he conceives his very invention, as the images of
engendering suggest, as a kind of demonic semen that will bring forth
monsters. Indeed lago's discourse his assaults on women, on the
irrationality of eros, on the brutishness of the sexual actreiterates
virtually to the letter the orthodox terms of Ungarelli's attack on those
who seek pleasure in intercourse.
The improvisational
process we have been discussing depends for its success upon the
concealment of its symbolic center, but as the end approaches this center
becomes increasingly visible. When, approaching the marriage bed on which
Desdemona has spread the wedding sheets, Othello rages, "Thy bed, lust
stain'd, shall with lust's blood be spotted" (5.1.36), he comes close to
revealing his tormenting identification of marital sexuality‑limited
perhaps to the night he took Desdemona's virginity—and adultery. The
orthodox element of this identification is directly observed—
this
sorrow's heavenly,
It strikes when it
does love
(5.2.21‑22)
and on her marriage
bed / deathbed Desdemona seems at last to pluck out the heart of the
mystery:
othello Think
on thy sins.
desdemona They
are loves I bear to you.
othello And for
that thou diest.
desdemona That
death's unnatural, that kills for loving.
(5.2.39‑42)
The play reveals at
this point not the unfathomable darkness of human motives but their
terrible transparency, and the horror of the revelation is its utter
inability to deflect violence. Othello's identity is entirely caught up in
the narrative structure that drives him to turn Desclemona into a being
incapable of pleasure, a piece of "monumental alabaster," so that he will
at last be able to love her without the taint of adultery:
Be thus, when thou art
dead, and I will kill thee,
And love thee after.
(5.2.18‑19)
It is as if Othello
had found in a necrophilic fantasy the secret solution to the intolerable
demands of the rigorist sexual ethic, and the revelation that Cassio has
not slept with Desdemona leads only to a doubling of this solution, for
the adulterous sexual pleasure that Othello had projected upon his
lieutenant now rebounds upon himself.67 Even with the exposure of Iago's
treachery, then, there is for Othello no escape rather a still deeper
submission to narrative, a reaffirmation of the self as story, but now
split suicidally between the defender of the faith and the circumcised
enemy who must be destroyed. Lodovico's bizarrely punning response to
Othello's final speech—"O bloody period!"—insists precisely upon the fact
that it was a speech, that this life fashioned as a text is ended as a
text.
To an envious
contemporary like Robert Greene, Shakespeare seems a kind of green‑room
Iago, appropriating for himself the labors of others. In Othello
Shakespeare seems to acknowledge, represent, and explore his affinity to
the malicious improviser, but, of course, his relation to the theater and
to his culture is far more complex than such an affinity could suggest.
There are characters in his works who can improvise without tragic
results, characters who can embrace a mobility of desire—one of whose
emblems is the male actor playing a female character dressed up as a
male‑that neither Iago, nor Othello, nor Desdemona can endure.
Destructive violence is not Shakespeare's only version of these materials,
and even in Othello, Iago is not the playwright's only
representation of himself. Still, at the least we must grant Robert Greene
that it would have seemed fatal to be imitated by Shakespeare. He
possessed a limitless talent for entering into the consciousness of
another, perceiving its deepest structures as a manipulable fiction,
reinscribing it into his own narrative form. If in the late plays, he
experiments with controlled disruptions of narrative, moments of eddying
and ecstasy, these invariably give way to reaffirmations of
self‑fashioning through story.
Montaigne, who shares
many of Shakespeare's most radical perceptions, invents in effect a
brilliant mode of non‑narrative selffashioning: "I cannot keep my
subject still. It goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural
drunkenness. I take it in this condition, just as it is at the moment I
give my attention to it." Shakespeare by contrast remains throughout his
career the supreme purveyor of "empathy," the fashioner of narrative
selves, the master improviser. Where Montaigne withdrew to his study,
Shakespeare became the presiding genius of a popular, urban art form with
the capacity to foster psychic mobility in the service of Elizabethan
power; he became the principal maker of what we may see as the prototype
of the mass media Professor Lerner so admires.
Finally, we may ask,
is this service to power a function of the theater itself or of
Shakespeare's relation to his medium? The answer, predictably, is both.
The theater is widely perceived in the period as the concrete
manifestation of the histrionic quality of life, and, more specifically,
of power‑the power of the prince who stands as an actor upon a stage
before the eyes of the nation, the power of God who enacts His will in the
Theater of the World. The stage justifies itself against recurrent charges
of immorality by invoking this normative function: it is the expression of
those rules that govern a properly ordered society and displays visibly
the punishment, in laughter and violence, that is meted out upon those who
violate the rules. Most playwrights pay at least professional homage to
these values; they honor the institutions that enable them to earn their
keep and give voice to the ideology that holds together both their
"mystery" and the society at large.
In Marlowe, as we have
seen, we encounter a playwright at odds with this ideology. If the theater
normally reflects and flatters the royal sense of itself as national
performance, Marlowe struggles to expose the underlying motives of any
performance of power. If the theater normally affirms God's providence,
Marlowe explores the tragic needs and interests that are served by all
such affirmations. If the Elizabethan stage functions as one of the public
uses of spectacle to impose normative ethical patterns on the urban
masses, Marlowe enacts a relentless challenge to those patterns and
undermines employment of rhetoric and violence in their service.
Shakespeare approaches
his culture not, like Marlowe, as rebel and blasphemer, but rather as
dutiful servant, content to improvise a part of his own within its
orthodoxy. And if after centuries, that improvisation has been revealed
to us as embodying an almost boundless challenge to the culture's every
tenet, a devastation of every source, the author of Othello would
have understood that such a revelation scarcely matters. After all, the
heart of a successful improvisation lies in concealment, not exposure; and
besides, as we have seen, even a hostile improvisation reproduces the
relations of power that it hopes to displace and absorb. This is not to
dismiss the power of hatred or the sigrificance of distinctions—it matters
a great deal whether Othello or lago, the Lucayans or the Spaniards
prevail—only to suggest the boundaries that define the possibility of any
improvisational contact, even contact characterized by hidden malice.
I would not want to
argue, in any event, that Shakespeare's relation to his culture is defined
by hidden malice. Such a case can no doubt be made for many of the
plays—stranger things have been said—but it will sound forced and
unconvincing, just as the case for Shakespeare as an unwavering,
unquestioning apologist for Tudor ideology sounds forced and unconvincing.
The solution here is not, I suggest, that the truth lies somewhere in
between. Rather the truth itself is radically unstable and yet constantly
stabilized, as unstable as those male authorities that affirm themselves
only to be undermined by subversive women and then to be reconstituted in
a different guise. If any reductive generalization about Shakespeare's
relation to his culture seems dubious, it is because his plays offer no
single timeless affirmation or denial of legitimate authority and no
central, unwavering authorial presence. Shakespeare's language and themes
are caught up, like the medium itself, in unsettling repetitions,
committed to the shifting voices and audiences, with their shifting
aesthetic assumptions and historical imperatives, that govern a living
theater.
Criticism can
legitimately show—as I hope my discussion of Othello does—that
Shakespeare relentlessly explores the relations of power in a given
culture. That more than exploration is involved is much harder to
demonstrate convincingly. If there are intimations in Shakespeare of a
release from the complex narrative orders in which everyone is inscribed,
these intimations do not arise from bristling resistance or strident
denunciation—the mood of a Jaques or Timon. They arise paradoxically from
a peculiarly intense submission whose downright violence undermines
everything it was meant to shore up, the submission depicted not in
Othello or Iago but in Desdemona. As both the play and its culture
suggest, the arousal of intense, purposeless pleasure is only
superficially a confirmation of existing values, established selves. In
Shakespeare's narrative art, liberation from the massive power structures
that determine social and psychic reality is glimpsed in an excessive
aesthetic delight, an erotic embrace of those very structures‑the
embrace of a Desdemona whose love is more deeply unsettling than even a
Iago's empathy.
Epilogue
A few years ago, at
the start of a plane flight from Baltimore to Boston, I settled down next
to a middle‑aged man who was staring pensively out of the window. There
was no assigned seating, and I had chosen this neighbor as the least
likely to disturb me, since I wanted to finish rereading Geertz's
Interpretation of Cultures, which I was due to teach on my return to
Berkeley the following week. But no sooner had I fastened my seat belt and
turned my mind to Balinese cock‑fighting than the man suddenly began to
speak to me. He was traveling to Boston, he said, to visit his grown son
who was in the hospital. A disease had, among other consequences, impaired
the son's speech, so that he could only mouth words soundlessly; still
more seriously, as a result of the illness, he had lost his will to live.
The father was going, he told me, to try to restore that will, but he was
troubled by the thought that he would be incapable of understanding the
son's attempts at speech. He had therefore a favor to ask me: would I mime
a few sentences so that he could practice reading my lips? Would I say,
soundlessly, "I want to die. I want to die"?
Taken aback, I began
to form the words, with the man staring intently at my mouth: "I want to..
." But I was incapable of finishing the sentence. "Couldn't I say, 'I want
to live'?" Or better still (since the seat belt sign had by this time
flashed off), he might go into the bathroom, I suggested lamely, and
practice on himself in front of a mirror. "It's not the same," the man
replied in a shaky voice, then turned back to the window. "I'm sorry," I
said, and we sat in silence for the rest of the flight.
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