THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

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If throughout Hamlet suicide is seen either as forbidden by a canon of the Everlasting or as an untidy quietus for
the unhinged Ophelia, in Othello and the Roman plays it is raised again to its pre-Christian, classical dignity. For
many members of Shakespeare’s first audiences, however, suicide remained a damnable act, a rash end to present
woes or accumulated sins on earth (as in the case of Kyd’s Isabella and Hieronimo), or a dark act of despair (as in the
grave temptation of Spenser’s Redcrosse). In Romeo and Juliet (c. 1594-5) the defeated lovers rush into death as
precipitously, as incomprehendingly, and as clumsily (if not as fulfillingly) as they had earlier embraced a passionate
life. By contrast, in Shakespeare’s two great mature love tragedies, Othello (1604) and Antony and Cleopatra (c.
1606-7), suicide figures as a noble culmination rather than as an ignoble or despairing escape. For Antony, death by
his own hand (albeit bungled) is seen as the proper response of a Roman general to military failure and as the only
alternative to public disgrace. For Cleopatra, finally glorious in her robes of state, ‘immortal longings’ suggest the
possibility of a final reunion with a transfigured and heroic husband. The asp’s bite seems to her both ‘a lover’s pinch,
| Which hurts and is desired’ and a baby at her breast ‘who sucks the nurse asleep’. Like Antony, Othello dies as a
soldier intent on preserving what is left of his honour and his integrity. He may despair as a man who has been cruelly
manipulated and as one whose soul has been caught by perdition, but he too knows what is required of him as a
soldier who must follow through the consequences of his earlier ill-considered resolution. If Antony and Cleopatra
revel in the chance of an immortal freedom from an empire regulated by the zealous Octavius, Othello, by contrast,
dies claiming his part in an ordered Christian society where there are chains of command, records, and distinctions
between the baptised and the heathen:
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I pray you in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well,
Of one not easily jealous but, being wrought,
Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinable gum. Set you down this,
And say besides that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog
And smote him thus.
He stabs himself
In a sense Othello both dictates his own epitaph and acts out the drama of his inevitable and violent end. Here the
‘high Roman fashion’ of death, of which his fellow-African Cleopatra speaks, is reasserted for modern times.
High Roman fashions and chivalric military codes are alike absent from the most disturbing, and most obviously
revised of Shakespeare’s major tragedies, King Lear (c. 1605, printed 1608 with a substantially different text
published in the 1623 Folio). King Lear, set in pre-Christian Britain, presents us with both a despairing suicide (that
of the defeated lover and poisoner, Goneril) and an attempt at suicide (Gloucester’s). The main tragic drive of the play
derives, however, not from any consistent and inevitable movement towards the death of its main characters but from
a series of expectations which Shakespeare systematically confounds or reverses. It is a pattern which would be
essentially comic elsewhere in his work. The subversive comments of Lear’s Fool, the adoption by Edgar of the role of
a crazed beggar, and the fairy-tale-like improbability of the play’s opening scenes all suggest how precipitously King
Lear teeters on the edge of absurdist comedy. When the blinded Gloucester attempts to destroy himself by throwing
himself over a cliff at Dover he merely ends up flat on his face (thanks to his son’s contrivance). When the painfully
chastened Lear seems about to be restored to his rights at the end of the play, Shakespeare, in a calculated reversal of
the story provided by his sources, deprives him of Cordelia, of full control of his reasoning faculty, and, above all, of a
conventional tragic dignity. In Act III the King madly rages against human ingratitude, exposed to the ravages of the
weather like the ‘poor naked wretches’ who are the meanest of his former subjects. He enters in Act IV ‘crowned with