“goats and monkeys!”: shakespeare, hobbes, and the state of nature

MOORE: “GOATS AND MONKEYS!”: SHAKESPEARE, HOBBES, AND THE STATE
OF NATURE
Desdemona understands her relationship to her father as something deliberate, not
something inevitable. Interestingly, like Lear, Brabantio views his daughter’s
disobedience as a deviation from nature; only what Lear calls ‘unnatural’, Brabantio calls
‘supernatural’, claiming his daughter has been seduced “By spells and medicines bought
of mountebanks” (1.3.62).
In this way Othello, like King Lear, begins its examination of “the parameters of
the human.” 50 Both plays begin with a father asserting that naturalness of the Christian
humanist paradigm. Here Brabantio insists on patriarchal authority and racial hierarchies,
but his arguments come off as impotent bluster. As Hobbes says, “Ignorance of the
causes and original constitution of right, equity, law, and justice disposeth a man to make
custom and example the rule of his actions[.]” 51 And as in King Lear a traditional account
of human nature is challenged by an atheistic, animalistic account of our nature. In
Othello it is Iago who consistently claims that humans (especially women and Moors) are
no different from animals driven primarily by instinct. Trying to incense Brabantio
against the Moor, Iago memorably cries out, “Even now, now, very now, an old black
ram / Is tupping your white ewe” (1.1.88-9). Iago consistently refers to Desdemona’s
feminine ‘nature’ as the thing that will lead her to stray from her husband. He tantalizes
Roderigo with fantasies of Desdemona’s sexual liberality: “She must change for youth:
when she is sated with his body she will find the errors of her choice. She must have
change, she must” (1.3.343-5). One of the most memorable images in the play comes in
the seduction scene when Othello demands Iago show him proof that his wife is a whore,
and Iago responds, “It is impossible you should see this, / Were they as prime as goats, as
50 Brown, “Defining Nature through Monstrosity in Othello and Macbeth,” 60.
51 Hobbes, Leviathan, 79.
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