changing places in 'othello' - Fairfield High School English Department

more vicious emotional level. When, for instance,
the mechanism of Iago's revenge first begins to
move in the drinking scene, his satisfaction at the
smoothness of its functioning finds play in a passage
of intensely private innuendo. He steers the
Lieutenant towards Desdemona in a speech whose
apparently innocent language is full of gloating
sexual suggestiveness:
Confess yourself freely to her; importune her help to
put you in your place again. She is so free, so kind, so apt,
so blessed a disposition, that she holds it a vice in her
goodness not to do more than she is requested.
(2.3.309-12)
* Place' here (though Cassio cannot hear it) has
begun to carry that obscene sense which Iago will
deploy to such deadly effect in the temptation scene:
Although 'tis fit that Cassio have his place,
For sure he Jills it up with great ability,
Yet, if you please to hold him off awhile,
You shall by that perceive him and his means;
Note if your lady strain his entertainment
With any strong or vehement importunity -
Much will be seen in that. (3.3.244-50)I5
Even the concluding appeal to ' hold her free' (1. 253)
seems to involve, beneath its frank concession of
Desdemona's probable innocence, a dark suggestion
of licentiousness. That these double entendres have
found their mark is suggested by Othello's tightlipped
response, 'Fear not my government' (1. 254),
tersely asserting his claim not merely to stoical
self-control, but to domestic and sexual rule.16
Othello, as we shall see, has always felt his political
* government' to be in some sense dependent on the
private office of his love; now he is being lured into
the demented conflation of the two which first
appeared in Iago's diseased imagination.
By its wanton insistence on arbitrary associations
the pun is a perfect instrument of emotions such as
jealousy and resentment which thrive on paranoid
connection. It is characteristic of jealousy, with its
obsessional reaching after certainties which it at once
needs yet cannot bear to face, that it should track the
paths of suspicion with the doubtful clews of pun
and equivoque; and it is no accident that word-play
SHAKESPEARE SURVEY
124
Shakespeare Survey Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007
should be of special significance both in Othello and
in Shakespeare's other drama of jealousy, The
Winter's Tale. In each case the action can be seen to
hang upon the fatal doubleness of certain words, the
ambiguity of certain signs. There is a kind of awful
decorum about this, that jealousy with its compulsive
dreams of adulterous substitution should discover a
self-lacerating pleasure in what is essentially a form
of semantic displacement, in which one meaning
surreptitiously, adulterously even, takes the place of
another. The pun is a kind of verbal bed-trick — as
essential to the process of inner displacement by
which an Othello or a Leontes collaborates in his
own destruction as to Iago's sleight-of-hand. The
very triviality of the device (which Shakespeare
seems reflexively to acknowledge in Leontes's murderous
teasing of meaning from the innocence of
'play'17) corresponds to that ultimate triviality of
motive so characteristic of jealousy; it is what carries
the drama of jealousy uncomfortably close to the
border of black comedy which The Winter's Tale
often crosses, and helps to make the action of Othello
the most meanly degrading - in some respects,
therefore, the cruellest — of all the tragedies.
It was this aspect o£Othello which excited Thomas
Rymer's notorious indignation. The focus of his
scorn was the handkerchief device: the handkerchief
provides Othello with the certainty he both craves
and fears, it is the pivot of the entire tragic design;
and yet, as Rymer saw, there is a kind of desperate
frivolity about it.18 The whole embroidery which
Iago weaves about this patch of cloth, culminating
in the carefully mounted ' ocular proof of act 4,
15 For the bawdy meanings of the italicized words in this and
the previous quotation, see the relevant entries in Eric
Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy (1969). Nelson and
Haines, 'Unconsummated Marriage', 15—16, also notice
the importance of bitter sexual punning as a sign of
Othello's gathering dementia.
16 For an equivalent use of'government', see, for instance,
Middleton's Women Beware Women, 1.3.45.
17 The Winter's Tale, 1.2.187—90. For a discussion of wordplay
in The Winter's Tale see Molly Mahood's brilliant
essay in Shakespeare's Wordplay (1957).
18 See Curt A. Zimansky (ed.), The Critical Works of Thomas
Rymer (New Haven, 1956), p. 163.