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

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harbour (2.1.128—32), this is a world whose whispering can transform the marriage-bed itself to the centre-piece of some luxurious Venetian brothel, and make the ' fair Desdemona' seem indistinguishable from the prostituted Bianca (whose own name, ironically enough, means 'white' or 'fair'). It is a place where no one is truly at home, and where the only native Cypriot we meet is, significantly, the jealous camp-follower, Bianca. 'Jealousy in itself, Northrop Frye remarks,' tends to create an enclosed prison-world' ;4 and this Cyprus is its perfect physical correlative. Far from providing a refuge from urban corruption, it is a colonial outpost of civilization where the worst Venetian values can flourish unchecked by any normative social order. Desdemona above all is a stranger to it; cut off from her family, effectually removed from those ' O£ her own clime, complexion and degree', a woman almost alone in a conspicuously masculine realm, she is as isolated and potentially vulnerable as Othello in the subtle world of Venice. To the extent that the Cyprus wars have returned the martial Othello to the military environment he knows best, husband and wife may seem at first to have changed places. But the activity of the civil monster Iago ensures that this impression is short-lived, Desdemona has merely come to share the Moor's continuing isolation; each is a stranger whose only ' place' is in the other's heart. In the first act Othello spoke of his marriage to Desdemona in terms of a willing exchange of freedom: But that I love the gentle Desdemona, I would not my unhoused free condition Put into circumscription and confine For the seas' worth. (1.2.25-8) The vicious psychological circumscription of Cyprus will give an ugly new meaning to that careless metaphor, as the action of the play moves from the relative freedom of the city to the cramping confines of a besieged citadel. The siege which seems to be lifted at the opening of act 2 has, in reality, only just begun: Desdemona's virtue is its imagined object, Othello's consciousness its true battleground - for that is the fortified ' place' which Iago will methodically reduce and occupy. Indeed SHAKESPEARE SURVEY n8 Shakespeare Survey Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 the whole action of the play might be read in terms of sinister distortions and displacements of the old metaphor of erotic siege. But' place' has another, even more potent significance in Othello — one which provides the key to Iago's consuming passion of resentment. The importance of Venice as the metropolitan centre of the play world is that it supplies, or offers to supply, each individual with a clearly defined and secure position within an established social order: indeed it is precisely the city's idea of 'place' (a term which includes' office' and ' rank' as well as' status') which distinguishes it from the barbarous world beyond, that vaguely imagined wilderness to which Iago consigns his 'stranger' General. The displaced Venetians of the Cypriot garrison are solidly located solely by virtue of the ' place' they bring with them, above all their rank in the state's military hierarchy. In such circumstances' place' is liable to become an object of unusually ferocious competition; but of course it was already an issue before the departure from Venice. The magnifico, Brabantio, woken by the 'malicious bravery' of Iago and Roderigo, instinctively rebukes them with an appeal to 'My spirit and my place' (1.1.104) - the same lofty ' place' upon whose potency he relies in arraigning Othello before his fellow senators (1.3.53). To be thus confident of one's place is to feel at home in a very important sense: it is to have a particularly firm idea of the rights and dignities attaching to one's function in this society. Neither Iago nor Othello is at home in quite this way: that is the ground of their fatally shared insecurity. Iago's notion of himself is as a man whose expectations are properly governed not merely by his personal worth, but also by his being native to the place called Venice. This, in his estimate, properly raises him above such outsiders as Othello and Cassio. From Iago's point of view (as to Brabantio's prejudiced eyes) Othello is a man without any true place, ' an extravagant and wheeling stranger / O£ here and everywhere' (1.1.137-8), a man whose 4 Northrop Frye, Fools of Time (Toronto and London, 1967), p. 102.
undeserved office can be tossed aside with that dismissive mock-honorific, * his Moorship' (i. i. 3 3). He discovers a special bitterness, therefore, in the fact that it should be this contemptible alien who has conspired to keep him from his own rightful place - and that in favour of yet another stranger, 'One Michael Cassio, a Florentine' (1.1.20). The heavy metrical stress on the first syllable of' Florentine ' exactly catches the force of Iago's scorn, the curl of his lip. In his own estimate he is a man doubly displaced; and this is the theme of his tirades in the opening scene: Three great ones of the city, In personal suit to make me his Lieutenant, Off-capped to him: and by the faith of man, I know my price, I am worth no worse a place. CHANGING PLACES IN 'OTHELLO' (1.1.8-11) Iago's sense of self, as this speech already suggests, is founded upon the treacherous relativities of comparison. For such a man to be bilked of the place which answers to his conviction of his own market price is to be cheated of identity, since the very centre of his being is to be found in that obsessive concern for what is 'wholesome to my place' (1.1.146). Iago is possessed by comparison: it is hardly too much to say that he has become comparison. For him nothing (and no one) has a value in and of itself, but only as a measure or object of comparison — hence his overriding faith in money, that ultimate agent of comparison which offers to place everything within a comprehensive taxonomy of price. Such a construction of the world does, however, invoke its own nemesis, for it commits one to a devouring torment of self-comparison that has, in principle, no end. In act 1 Iago presents himself to Roderigo as a model of rational self-love (1.3.311), one of those who know how to 'Do themselves homage' (1.1.54); he is thus a free man, liberated from those bonds of service, affection and duty which, by putting a man comprehensively in his place, serve as constant provocations of unwelcome comparison, stinging reminders of the price that others put upon one. Yet ironically enough the very speeches in which this claim is most fiercely advanced are full of nagging 119 Shakespeare Survey Online © Cambridge University Press, 2007 self-comparison — both with those whose servitude he despises and those whose superior authority he resents: We cannot all be masters, nor all masters Cannot be truly followed. You shall mark Many a duteous and knee-crooking knave That, doting on his own obsequious bondage, Wears out his time, much like his master's ass, For naught but provender, and when he's old - cashiered! Whip me such honest knaves. Others there are Who, trimmed in forms and visages of duty, Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves... It is as sure as you are Roderigo, Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago: In following him, I follow but myself. (1.1.43-59) Iago dreams of a world without comparison, a bureaucratic Utopia in which place is determined by the ' old gradation, where each second / Stood heir to th'first' (1.1.3 7-8); yet this ideal of egalitarian succession is contradicted by his wounded sense of superiority to both the braggart Moor, with his 'bombast circumstance / Horribly stuffed with epithets of war', and to the desk-soldier, Cassio, that 'counter-caster' with his 'bookish theoric' (11. I3"~31)- The true accountant, endlessly poring over his ledger of'debitor and creditor', is, needless to say, Iago himself. For Iago is a kind of moral mercantilist: there is only a certain stock of virtue in the world, and by that rule one man's credit must necessarily be another's debit: If Cassio do remain He hath a daily beauty in his life That makes me ugly. (5.1.18—20) Cassio's charm, Desdemona's goodness, Othello's nobility — none of these can be granted an intrinsic worth or independent significance; each is comprehensible only as an implicit criticism of Iago's life. Intolerable objects of comparison whose very existence challenges his place in the order of things, they must be eliminated. The villain's preoccupation with displacement is, interestingly enough, one of Shakespeare's principal additions to the story. In Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatom-
Page 1 and 2: CHANGING PLACES IN 'OTHELLO' But wh
Page 3: prize he has lost to the virtual ex
Page 7 and 8: When Othello enters to check the en
Page 9 and 10: moral accounting ('evened with him,
Page 11 and 12: scene i and Cassio's contemptuous a
Page 13 and 14: Desdemona's wonder, pity, and love;
Page 15 and 16: symbiosis in the Moor's earlier ' I
Page 17 and 18: The Othello of the last two acts is

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

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