Since I pretty much agree for the moment with Daniel Larison about the top news of the day, here is a post about Shakespeare instead, and the conclusions I came to when I re-read Othello for a class.
Othello begins with Iago plotting the interruption that sets the play in motion. Iago’s first attempt at an interruption, getting Brabantio to accuse Othello of stealing Desdemona, seems to fail, but this failure only spurs Iago to “double knavery.” The play reveals what Othello sees as a long series of minor interruptions—Cassio’s drunkenness, the handkerchief mischief, Iago’s carefully suggestive wordings—as the work of a single Machiavellian interrupter. The audience understands completely the relationship of seems and is in the play, but Othello has them exactly backwards. For Othello, the first really troubling interruption, the beginning of his crisis, is Iago’s sly suggestion in the third scene of the third act that there is more to Desdemona and Cassio’s relationship than meets the eye. So the play gives us a long view of the manufacture of the primary interruption, and some insight into what makes it tragic.
Consider for the moment what it would have meant if Iago’s first interruption had succeeded. If the Venetians had not needed Othello’s military services, and if Othello were not so eloquent an expositor of his own side of the story, one could imagine the city’s rulers deciding the case in Brabantio’s favor and sending Desdemona back to her father. This would have been sad, perhaps even unjust, but one would hardly call it tragic. It would have represented the defeat of the protagonist, but not the downfall. Othello and Desdemona would have known the truth of their situation, and they would have understood the forces that separated them. Such adversity might have brought out the best in Othello; the play might have been a broad romance, or a lesson in the nobility of perseverance. But Othello does escape Iago’s first plan, Iago resolves to interrupt Othello on a much deeper level, and so begins the tragedy.
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2 comments:
Surely the most wonderful (and terrifying) aspect of Iago's character is his ability to improvise the plot of the play; this seems to be the meaning of observation about his obscuring the difference between "seems" and "is."
My edition of the play includes an interpretive essay by Harold Bloom (so break out the salt), who argues that Milton may have in some sense sublimated the "fall" of Iago from grace (occurring, of course, before the action of the play itself) into the character of Satan. It's his way of insisting that Shakespeare (the "inventor of the human," remember) originated even our diabology.
Brendan,
I had a little bit more on Iago as interrupter when I wrote this up for a class, but not much. You mention “improvisation,” which makes me wonder: have you read Stephen Greenblatt on Othello? He was quite convincing on Iago's role in the play: the improvisation that makes Iago successful is the same kind of improvisation that makes imperialism successful. (But we see how Iago ended...)
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