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

upon the jewel of his love, Desdemona. The temptation
is also a wooing, an act of erotic possession,
punctuated by protestations of love:
My lord, you know I love you.
SHAKESPEARE SURVEY
(3.3.116)
now I shall have reason
To show the love and duty that I bear you
With franker spirit. (11. 191-3)
But I am much to blame,
I humbly do beseech you of your pardon
For too much loving you. (11. 209-11)
I hope you will consider what is spoke
Comes from my love. (11. 214—5)
God bu'y you: take mine office. O wretched fool,
That lov'st to make thine honesty a vice!...
I thank you for this profit, and from hence
I'll love no friend, sith love breeds such offence.
(ii. 372-7)
I do not like the office.
But sith I am entered in this cause so far -
Pricked to't by foolish honesty and love -
I will go on. (11. 407-10)
The attitude struck, with Iago's gift of vicious
mimicry, is a surreptitious burlesque of Desdemona's
own long-suffering devotion; and by the destructive
logic of comparison it is precisely this show of love
which most inflames Othello's jealousy - Iago's
fidelity rendering doubly intolerable Desdemona's
apparent infidelity and Cassio's betrayal of trust. The
scene reaches its climax with the Moor's formal
repudiation of the bonds of matrimony:
All my fond love thus do I blow to heaven:
'Tis gone.
Arise, black vengeance, from thy hollow cell!
Yield up, O love, thy crown and hearted throne
To tyrannous hate! (3-3 -442-6)
The spirit of revenge is here imagined as the usurper
of love's royal seat; and the metaphor exactly
corresponds to the displacement of the loving
Desdemona by the vindictive Iago realized in the
stage action which follows. The kneeling exchange
of vows is presented as a blasphemous trothplighting:
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Shakespeare Survey Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007
Othello Now, by yond marble heaven,
In the due reverence of a sacred vow
I here engage my words.
He kneels
Iago. Do not rise yet.
He kneels
Witness you ever-burning lights above,
You elements, that clip us round about,
Witness that here Iago doth give up
The execution of his wit, hands, heart,
To wronged Othello's service. Let him
command,
And to obey shall be in me remorse,
What bloody business ever.
They rise
Othello. I greet thy love,
Not with vain thanks, but with acceptance
bounteous;...
... Now art thou my Lieutenant.
Iago.
I am your own for ever. (3-3-457-76)
If there is any act of adultery in the play, this surely
is it. 'Lieutenant' encompasses not merely Cassio's
office, but the role of domestic deputy which
patriarchal theory gave to every wife. In Iago's lurid
fantasy of sharing Cassio's bed he actually cast
himself, in a black-comic version of the bed-trick,
as Desdemona's substitute. The intense emotional
identification of tempter and tempted reached by
that point in the scene (' I am bound to thee for ever',
1. 211) ensured that Othello and Iago were virtually
interchangeable figures in this fantasy; thus for
Othello merely to listen to the speech was to put
himself imaginatively in Iago's place and, in effect,
to experience Cassio's adultery with Desdemona (as
Brabantio was made to experience her seduction by
Othello) as a sexual assault upon his own person. The
ending of the scene merely confirms in literal terms
the psychological lieutenancy appropriated by
means of Iago's ugly fiction. Iago has successfully
usurped both Cassio's and Desdemona's places, and
in that dank corner of the emotional prison which
the two men share, Othello and he are bound to one
another for ever: they have become in an appalling
sense, one flesh — this is hell, nor are they out of it.25
25 One might add that this is a consummation which leads
to its own obscene kind of pregnancy: the ' monstrous