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

MOORE: “GOATS AND MONKEYS!”: SHAKESPEARE, HOBBES, AND THE STATE
OF NATURE
border between the state of natural law and the state of nature. And so for both the
playwright and the philosopher, what we can call ‘natural’ human conduct depends
largely on context.
Conclusion
The term “slave” recurs a number of times in Othello. 57 Othello, of course,
recounts to the Venetian senators how he was “sold to slavery” (1.3.138), but the term
“slave” appears most often as an insult. Once Iago has convinced the Moor that Cassio is
sleeping with his wife, Othello wishes “that the slave had forty thousand lives” so that he
could murder him over and over (3.3.443). Emilia speculates that “Some cogging,
cozening slave” has slandered Desdemona, and Iago calls Roderigo a “murd’rous slave,”
just before murdering him (5.1.61).
Most of these references to slavery happen in close proximity to Iago, and in the
play’s final scene Iago is called a slave multiple times. Montano calls him a “damnéd
slave” after he has killed Emilia (5.2.242); Lodovico calls him the same thing – “damnéd
slave” – as he laments Othello’s downfall (5.2.290). As Othello mourns for his wife and
cries out “O curséd, curséd slave!” (5.2.275), he might be talking about Iago or about
himself. There is no ambiguity, however, about the play’s final invocation of the term as
Iago is taken away to be tortured: “For this slave, / If there be any cunning cruelty / That
can torment him much and hold him long, / It shall be his” (5.2.331-4).
In early modern England slavery had specific connotations. It “bore little or no
relation to discourses of ‘racial’ difference in early modern thought,” instead it was used
57 Wells Slights, “Slaves and Subjects in Othello,” 382-3.
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