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

counter-movement of redemption. The ' foul and
violent tempest' which parts the ships of Cassio and
the Moor (2.1.34) clearly anticipates the storm of
passion which will part their friendship for ever; the
voyage itself parts Desdemona and Othello before
their marriage can be consummated, and here too
the tempest symbolically announces a division
which will be resolved only in the perverted
consummation of act 5.1 As so often in Shakespeare,
the sea-voyage amounts to a rite of passage: it is as
though some fatal boundary had been crossed - from
this bourn no traveller returns.
Venice is the city of the play, its metropolitan
centre; but the civilization it represents proves, on
closer inspection, to be no more ideal than that of its
counterpart in The Merchant of Venice. Iago's racial
slurs and Brabantio's answering outrage make it
plain from the beginning that, beneath its
ceremonious courtesies, Shakespeare's Venice is a
society capable of treating any stranger, any ethnic
outsider with the same calculating cruelty it meted
out to Shylock. 'There's many a beast then in a
populous city, / And many a civil monster', Iago
tells Othello in a characteristically veiled sarcasm
(4.1.63—4): the remark is doubly Janus-faced, for
beyond its glance at the supposed horning of Othello
by the urbane monsters Cassio and Desdemona, it
means to point at the Venetian Moor himself as a
kind of tamed Caliban, a civilized barbarian; while
by a further reach of irony Iago identifies himself
as the true beast of his populous city, the ' Spartan
dog' of Lodovico's final denunciation (5.2.357), a
barbarous monster beneath his civil guise of honesty.
The fetches of Iago's policy are designed to expose
the essential savagery of his ' stranger' general; but
what they produce is an Othello remade in Iago's
own monstrous image.
Like the Venice of The Merchant too, this is a city
whose most humane values can seem compromised
by its mercantile ethics: its language of love, typically,
is tainted by metaphors of trade, purchase, and
possession. Here women are to men rather as Cyprus
is to Venice and Turkey - objects of competition,
possession, and ' occupation': indeed Brabantio's
reply to the Duke's sententious consolation on the
loss of his daughter - 'The robbed that smiles steals
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something from the thief - makes precisely that
equation:
So let the Turk of Cyprus us beguile,
We lose it not so long as we can smile.
(1.3.206, 208-9)
It is natural in this world that Iago and Brabantio
should concur in seeing Desdemona's abduction as,
like Jessica's, the theft of a father's rightful property;
it is perhaps more disturbing to notice that even
Othello's language, for all its rhetorical magnificence,
finally pictures love as a fabulous treasure, an object
of erotic commerce:
The purchase made, the fruits are to ensue:
The profit's yet to come 'tween me and you.
(2.3.9-10)
However gracefully bantering its expression, the
metaphor here is close to that crass possessiveness
which lies at the root of all jealousy - as we may
quickly feel in the more obviously corrupted language
of the temptation scene:
Othello.
What sense had I of her stolen hours of lust ?...
He that is robbed, not wanting what is stolen,
Let him not know't, and he's not robbed at all.
(3-3-335, 339-40)
Cruelly enough, the attitude persists even through
Othello's finest agonies of remorse, where his
imagination seems tormented by the sense of the
1
For a highly persuasive argument that the marriage is
never properly consummated, see T. G. A. Nelson and
Charles Haines, 'Othello's Unconsummated Marriage',
Essays in Criticism, 23 (1983), 1—18. To the mass of
circumstantial detail on which they rest their case, I
would add the suggestive simile with which Iago describes
the falling out of Cassio and Montano:
Friends all but now, even now,
In quarter and in terms like bride and groom
Devesting them for bed: and then but now -
As if some planet had unwitted men -
Swords out, and tilting one at other's breasts
In opposition bloody. (2.3.173-8)
All citations from Othello are to the edition by Kenneth
Muir (Harmondsworth, 1968).