complete, but he is much changed. Towards the close of the
Temptation-scene he becomes at times most terrible, but his grandeur
remains almost undiminished. Even in the following scene (III. iv.),
where he goes to test Desdemona in the matter of the handkerchief, and
receives a fatal confirmation of her guilt, our sympathy with him is
hardly touched by any feeling of humiliation. But in the Fourth Act
'Chaos has come.' A slight interval of time may be admitted here. It is
but slight; for it was necessary for Iago to hurry on, and terribly
dangerous to leave a chance for a meeting of Cassio with Othello; and
his insight into Othello's nature taught him that his plan was to
deliver blow on blow, and never to allow his victim to recover from the
confusion of the first shock. Still there is a slight interval; and when
Othello reappears we see at a glance that he is a changed man. He is
physically exhausted, and his mind is dazed.[100] He sees everything
blurred through a mist of blood and tears. He has actually forgotten the
incident of the handkerchief, and has to be reminded of it. When Iago,
perceiving that he can now risk almost any lie, tells him that Cassio
has confessed his guilt, Othello, the hero who has seemed to us only
second to Coriolanus in physical power, trembles all over; he mutters
disjointed words; a blackness suddenly intervenes between his eyes and
the world; he takes it for the shuddering testimony of nature to the
horror he has just heard,[101] and he falls senseless to the ground.
When he recovers it is to watch Cassio, as he imagines, laughing over
his shame. It is an imposition so gross, and should have been one so
perilous, that Iago would never have ventured it before. But he is safe
now. The sight only adds to the confusion of intellect the madness of
rage; and a ravenous thirst for revenge, contending with motions of
infinite longing and regret, conquers them. The delay till night-fall is
torture to him. His self-control has wholly deserted him, and he strikes
his wife in the presence of the Venetian envoy. He is so lost to all
sense of reality that he never asks himself what will follow the deaths
of Cassio and his wife. An ineradicable instinct of justice, rather than
any last quiver of hope, leads him to question Emilia; but nothing could
convince him now, and there follows the dreadful scene of accusation;
and then, to allow us the relief of burning hatred and burning tears,
the interview of Desdemona with Iago, and that last talk of hers with
Emilia, and her last song.
But before the end there is again a change. The supposed death of Cassio
(V. i.) satiates the thirst for vengeance. The Othello who enters the
bed-chamber with the words,
It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,
is not the man of the Fourth Act. The deed he is bound to do is no
murder, but a sacrifice. He is to save Desdemona from herself, not in
hate but in honour; in honour, and also in love. His anger has passed; a
boundless sorrow has taken its place; and
this sorrow's heavenly:
It strikes where it doth love.
Even when, at the sight of her apparent obduracy, and at the hearing of
words which by a crowning fatality can only reconvince him of her guilt,
these feelings give way to others, it is to righteous indignation they
give way, not to rage; and, terribly painful as this scene is, there is
almost nothing here to diminish the admiration and love which heighten
pity.[102] And pity itself vanishes, and love and admiration alone
remain, in the majestic dignity and sovereign ascendancy of the close.
Chaos has come and gone; and the Othello of the Council-chamber and the
quay of Cyprus has returned, or a greater and nobler Othello still. As
he speaks those final words in which all the glory and agony of his
life--long ago in India and Arabia and Aleppo, and afterwards in Venice,
and now in Cyprus--seem to pass before us, like the pictures that flash
before the eyes of a drowning man, a triumphant scorn for the fetters of
the flesh and the littleness of all the lives that must survive him
sweeps our grief away, and when he dies upon a kiss the most painful of
all tragedies leaves us for the moment free from pain, and exulting in
the power of 'love and man's unconquerable mind.'
3
The words just quoted come from Wordsworth's sonnet to Toussaint
l'Ouverture. Toussaint was a Negro; and there is a question, which,
though of little consequence, is not without dramatic interest, whether
Shakespeare imagined Othello as a Negro or as a Moor. Now I will not say
that Shakespeare imagined him as a Negro and not as a Moor, for that
might imply that he distinguished Negroes and Moors precisely as we do;
but what appears to me nearly certain is that he imagined Othello as a
black man, and not as a light-brown one.
In the first place, we must remember that the brown or bronze to which
we are now accustomed in the Othellos of our theatres is a recent
innovation. Down to Edmund Kean's time, so far as is known, Othello was
always quite black. This stage-tradition goes back to the Restoration,
and it almost settles our question. For it is impossible that the colour
of the original Othello should have been forgotten so soon after
Shakespeare's time, and most improbable that it should have been changed
from brown to black.
If we turn to the play itself, we find many references to Othello's
colour and appearance. Most of these are indecisive; for the word
'black' was of course used then where we should speak of a 'dark'
complexion now; and even the nickname 'thick-lips,' appealed to as proof
that Othello was a Negro, might have been applied by an enemy to what we
call a Moor. On the other hand, it is hard to believe that, if Othello
had been light-brown, Brabantio would have taunted him with having a
'sooty bosom,' or that (as Mr. Furness observes) he himself would have
used the words,
her name, that was as fresh
As Dian's visage, is now begrimed and black
As mine own face.
These arguments cannot be met by pointing out that Othello was of royal
blood, is not called an Ethiopian, is called a Barbary horse, and is
said to be going to Mauritania. All this would be of importance if we
had reason to believe that Shakespeare shared our ideas, knowledge and
terms. Otherwise it proves nothing. And we know that sixteenth-century
writers called any dark North-African a Moor, or a black Moor, or a
blackamoor. Sir Thomas Elyot, according to Hunter,[103] calls Ethiopians
Moors; and the following are the first two illustrations of 'Blackamoor'
in the Oxford _English Dictionary_: 1547, 'I am a blake More borne in
Barbary'; 1548, '_Ethiopo_, a blake More, or a man of Ethiope.' Thus
geographical names can tell us nothing about the question how
Shakespeare imagined Othello. He may have known that a Mauritanian is
not a Negro nor black, but we cannot assume that he did. He may have
known, again, that the Prince of Morocco, who is described in the
_Merchant of Venice_ as having, like Othello, the complexion of a devil,
was no Negro. But we cannot tell: nor is there any reason why he should
not have imagined the Prince as a brown Moor and Othello as a
Blackamoor.
_Titus Andronicus_ appeared in the Folio among Shakespeare's works. It
is believed by some good critics to be his: hardly anyone doubts that he
had a hand in it: it is certain that he knew it, for reminiscences of it
are scattered through his plays. Now no one who reads _Titus Andronicus_
with an open mind can doubt that Aaron was, in our sense, black; and he
appears to have been a Negro. To mention nothing else, he is twice
called 'coal-black'; his colour is compared with that of a raven and a
swan's legs; his child is coal-black and thick-lipped; he himself has a
'fleece of woolly hair.' Yet he is 'Aaron the Moor,' just as Othello is
'Othello the Moor.' In the _Battle of Alcazar_ (Dyce's _Peele_, p. 421)
Muly the Moor is called 'the negro'; and Shakespeare himself in a single
line uses 'negro' and 'Moor' of the same person (_Merchant of Venice_,
III. v. 42).
The horror of most American critics (Mr. Furness is a bright exception)
at the idea of a black Othello is very amusing, and their arguments are
highly instructive. But they were anticipated, I regret to say, by
Coleridge, and we will hear him. 'No doubt Desdemona saw Othello's
visage in his mind; yet, as we are constituted, and most surely as an
English audience was disposed in the beginning of the seventeenth
century, it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful
Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro. It would argue a
disproportionateness, a want of balance, in Desdemona, which Shakespeare
does not appear to have in the least contemplated.'[104] Could any
argument be more self-destructive? It actually _did_ appear to Brabantio
'something monstrous to conceive' his daughter falling in love with
Othello,--so monstrous that he could account for her love only by drugs
and foul charms. And the suggestion that such love would argue
'disproportionateness' is precisely the suggestion that Iago _did_ make
in Desdemona's case:
Foh! one may smell in such a will most rank,
Foul _disproportion_, thoughts unnatural.
In fact he spoke of the marriage exactly as a filthy-minded cynic now
might speak of the marriage of an English lady to a negro like
Toussaint. Thus the argument of Coleridge and others points straight to
the conclusion against which they argue.
But this is not all. The question whether to Shakespeare Othello was
black or brown is not a mere question of isolated fact or historical
curiosity; it concerns the character of Desdemona. Coleridge, and still
more the American writers, regard her love, in effect, as Brabantio
regarded it, and not as Shakespeare conceived it. They are simply
blurring this glorious conception when they try to lessen the distance
between her and Othello, and to smooth away the obstacle which his
'visage' offered to her romantic passion for a hero. Desdemona, the
'eternal womanly' in its most lovely and adorable form, simple and
innocent as a child, ardent with the courage and idealism of a saint,
radiant with that heavenly purity of heart which men worship the more
because nature so rarely permits it to themselves, had no theories about
universal brotherhood, and no phrases about 'one blood in all the
nations of the earth' or 'barbarian, Scythian, bond and free'; but when
her soul came in sight of the noblest soul on earth, she made nothing of
the shrinking of her senses, but followed her soul until her senses took
part with it, and 'loved him with the love which was her doom.' It was
not prudent. It even turned out tragically. She met in life with the
reward of those who rise too far above our common level; and we continue
to allot her the same reward when we consent to forgive her for loving a
brown man, but find it monstrous that she should love a black one.[105]
There is perhaps a certain excuse for our failure to rise to
Shakespeare's meaning, and to realise how extraordinary and splendid a
thing it was in a gentle Venetian girl to love Othello, and to assail
fortune with such a 'downright violence and storm' as is expected only
in a hero. It is that when first we hear of her marriage we have not yet
seen the Desdemona of the later Acts; and therefore we do not perceive
how astonishing this love and boldness must have been in a maiden so
quiet and submissive. And when we watch her in her suffering and death
we are so penetrated by the sense of her heavenly sweetness and
self-surrender that we almost forget that she had shown herself quite as
exceptional in the active assertion of her own soul and will. She tends
to become to us predominantly pathetic, the sweetest and most pathetic
of Shakespeare's women, as innocent as Miranda and as loving as Viola,
yet suffering more deeply than Cordelia or Imogen. And she seems to lack
that independence and strength of spirit which Cordelia and Imogen
possess, and which in a manner raises them above suffering. She appears
passive and defenceless, and can oppose to wrong nothing but the
infinite endurance and forgiveness of a love that knows not how to
resist or resent. She thus becomes at once the most beautiful example of
this love, and the most pathetic heroine in Shakespeare's world. If her
part were acted by an artist equal to Salvini, and with a Salvini for
Othello, I doubt if the spectacle of the last two Acts would not be
pronounced intolerable.
Of course this later impression of Desdemona is perfectly right, but it
must be carried back and united with the earlier before we can see what
Shakespeare imagined. Evidently, we are to understand, innocence,
gentleness, sweetness, lovingness were the salient and, in a sense, the
principal traits in Desdemona's character. She was, as her father
supposed her to be,
a maiden never bold,
Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion
Blushed at herself.
But suddenly there appeared something quite different--something which
could never have appeared, for example, in Ophelia--a love not only full
of romance but showing a strange freedom and energy of spirit, and
leading to a most unusual boldness of action; and this action was
carried through with a confidence and decision worthy of Juliet or
Cordelia. Desdemona does not shrink before the Senate; and her language
to her father, though deeply respectful, is firm enough to stir in us
some sympathy with the old man who could not survive his daughter's
loss. This then, we must understand, was the emergence in Desdemona, as
she passed from girlhood to womanhood, of an individuality and strength
which, if she had lived, would have been gradually fused with her more
obvious qualities and have issued in a thousand actions, sweet and good,
but surprising to her conventional or timid neighbours. And, indeed, we
have already a slight example in her overflowing kindness, her boldness
and her ill-fated persistence in pleading Cassio's cause. But the full
ripening of her lovely and noble nature was not to be. In her brief
wedded life she appeared again chiefly as the sweet and submissive being
of her girlhood; and the strength of her soul, first evoked by love,
found scope to show itself only in a love which, when harshly repulsed,
blamed only its own pain; when bruised, only gave forth a more exquisite
fragrance; and, when rewarded with death, summoned its last labouring
breath to save its murderer.
Many traits in Desdemona's character have been described with
sympathetic insight by Mrs. Jameson, and I will pass them by and add but
a few words on the connection between this character and the catastrophe
of _Othello_. Desdemona, as Mrs. Jameson remarks, shows less quickness
of intellect and less tendency to reflection than most of Shakespeare's
heroines; but I question whether the critic is right in adding that she
shows much of the 'unconscious address common in women.' She seems to me
deficient in this address, having in its place a frank childlike
boldness and persistency, which are full of charm but are unhappily
united with a certain want of perception. And these graces and this
deficiency appear to be inextricably intertwined, and in the
circumstances conspire tragically against her. They, with her innocence,
hinder her from understanding Othello's state of mind, and lead her to
the most unlucky acts and words; and unkindness or anger subdues her so
completely that she becomes passive and seems to drift helplessly
towards the cataract in front.
In Desdemona's incapacity to resist there is also, in addition to her
perfect love, something which is very characteristic. She is, in a
sense, a child of nature. That deep inward division which leads to clear
and conscious oppositions of right and wrong, duty and inclination,
justice and injustice, is alien to her beautiful soul. She is not good,
kind and true in spite of a temptation to be otherwise, any more than
she is charming in spite of a temptation to be otherwise. She seems to
know evil only by name, and, her inclinations being good, she acts on
inclination. This trait, with its results, may be seen if we compare
her, at the crises of the story, with Cordelia. In Desdemona's place,
Cordelia, however frightened at Othello's anger about the lost
handkerchief, would not have denied its loss. Painful experience had
produced in her a conscious principle of rectitude and a proud hatred of
falseness, which would have made a lie, even one wholly innocent in
spirit, impossible to her; and the clear sense of justice and right
would have led her, instead, to require an explanation of Othello's
agitation which would have broken Iago's plot to pieces. In the same
way, at the final crisis, no instinctive terror of death would have
compelled Cordelia suddenly to relinquish her demand for justice and to
plead for life. But these moments are fatal to Desdemona, who acts
precisely as if she were guilty; and they are fatal because they ask for
something which, it seems to us, could hardly be united with the
peculiar beauty of her nature.
This beauty is all her own. Something as beautiful may be found in
Cordelia, but not the same beauty. Desdemona, confronted with Lear's
foolish but pathetic demand for a profession of love, could have done, I
think, what Cordelia could not do--could have refused to compete with
her sisters, and yet have made her father feel that she loved him well.
And I doubt if Cordelia, 'falsely murdered,' would have been capable of
those last words of Desdemona--her answer to Emilia's 'O, who hath done
this deed?'
Nobody: I myself. Farewell.
Commend me to my kind lord. O, farewell!
Were we intended to remember, as we hear this last 'falsehood,' that
other falsehood, 'It is not lost,' and to feel that, alike in the
momentary child's fear and the deathless woman's love, Desdemona is
herself and herself alone?[106]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 85: One instance is worth pointing out, because the passage in
_Othello_ has, oddly enough, given trouble. Desdemona says of the maid
Barbara: 'She was in love, and he she loved proved mad And did forsake
her.' Theobald changed 'mad' to 'bad.' Warburton read 'and he she loved
forsook her, And she proved mad'! Johnson said 'mad' meant only 'wild,
frantic, uncertain.' But what Desdemona says of Barbara is just what
Ophelia might have said of herself.]
[Footnote 86: The whole force of the passages referred to can be felt
only by a reader. The Othello of our stage can never be Shakespeare's
Othello, any more than the Cleopatra of our stage can be his Cleopatra.]
[Footnote 87: See p. 9.]
[Footnote 88: Even here, however, there is a great difference; for
although the idea of such a power is not suggested by _King Lear_ as it
is by _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_, it is repeatedly expressed by persons _in_
the drama. Of such references there are very few in _Othello_. But for
somewhat frequent allusions to hell and the devil the view of the
characters is almost strictly secular. Desdemona's sweetness and
forgivingness are not based on religion, and her only way of accounting
for her undeserved suffering is by an appeal to Fortune: 'It is my
wretched fortune' (IV. ii. 128). In like manner Othello can only appeal
to Fate (V. ii. 264):
but, oh vain boast!
Who can control his fate?]
[Footnote 89: Ulrici has good remarks, though he exaggerates, on this
point and the element of intrigue.]
[Footnote 90: And neither she nor Othello observes what handkerchief it
is. Else she would have remembered how she came to lose it, and would
have told Othello; and Othello, too, would at once have detected Iago's
lie (III. iii. 438) that he had seen Cassio wipe his beard with the
handkerchief 'to-day.' For in fact the handkerchief had been lost _not
an hour_ before Iago told that lie (line 288 of the _same scene_), and
it was at that moment in his pocket. He lied therefore most rashly, but
with his usual luck.]
[Footnote 91: For those who know the end of the story there is a
terrible irony in the enthusiasm with which Cassio greets the arrival of
Desdemona in Cyprus. Her ship (which is also Iago's) sets out from
Venice a week later than the others, but reaches Cyprus on the same day
with them:
Tempests themselves, high seas and howling winds,
The gutter'd rocks and congregated sands--
Traitors ensteep'd to clog the guiltless keel--
As having sense of beauty, do omit
Their mortal natures, letting go safely by
The divine Desdemona.
So swiftly does Fate conduct her to her doom.]
[Footnote 92: The dead bodies are not carried out at the end, as they
must have been if the bed had been on the main stage (for this had no
front curtain). The curtains within which the bed stood were drawn
together at the words, 'Let it be hid' (V. ii. 365).]
[Footnote 93: Against which may be set the scene of the blinding of
Gloster in _King Lear_.]
[Footnote 94: The reader who is tempted by it should, however, first ask
himself whether Othello does act like a barbarian, or like a man who,
though wrought almost to madness, does 'all in honour.']
[Footnote 95: For the actor, then, to represent him as violently angry
when he cashiers Cassio is an utter mistake.]
[Footnote 96: I cannot deal fully with this point in the lecture. See
Note L.]
[Footnote 97: It is important to observe that, in his attempt to arrive
at the facts about Cassio's drunken misdemeanour, Othello had just had
an example of Iago's unwillingness to tell the whole truth where it must
injure a friend. No wonder he feels in the Temptation-scene that 'this
honest creature doubtless Sees and knows more, much more, than he
unfolds.']
[Footnote 98: To represent that Venetian women do not regard adultery so
seriously as Othello does, and again that Othello would be wise to
accept the situation like an Italian husband, is one of Iago's most
artful and most maddening devices.]
[Footnote 99: If the reader has ever chanced to see an African violently
excited, he may have been startled to observe how completely at a loss
he was to interpret those bodily expressions of passion which in a
fellow-countryman he understands at once, and in a European foreigner
with somewhat less certainty. The effect of difference in blood in
increasing Othello's bewilderment regarding his wife is not sufficiently
realised. The same effect has to be remembered in regard to Desdemona's
mistakes in dealing with Othello in his anger.]
[Footnote 100: See Note M.]
[Footnote 101: Cf. _Winter's Tale_, I. ii. 137 ff.:
Can thy dam?--may't be?--
Affection! thy intention stabs the centre:
Thou dost make possible things not so held,
Communicatest with dreams;--how can this be?
With what's unreal thou coactive art,
And fellow'st nothing: then 'tis very credent
Thou may'st cojoin with something; and thou dost,
And that beyond commission, and I find it,
And that to the infection of my brains
And hardening of my brows.]
[Footnote 102: See Note O.]
[Footnote 103: New Illustrations, ii. 281.]
[Footnote 104: _Lectures on Shakespeare_, ed. Ashe, p. 386.]
[Footnote 105: I will not discuss the further question whether, granted
that to Shakespeare Othello was a black, he should be represented as a
black in our theatres now. I dare say not. We do not like the real
Shakespeare. We like to have his language pruned and his conceptions
flattened into something that suits our mouths and minds. And even if we
were prepared to make an effort, still, as Lamb observes, to imagine is
one thing and to see is another. Perhaps if we saw Othello coal-black
with the bodily eye, the aversion of our blood, an aversion which comes
as near to being merely physical as anything human can, would overpower
our imagination and sink us below not Shakespeare only but the audiences
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
As I have mentioned Lamb, I may observe that he differed from Coleridge
as to Othello's colour, but, I am sorry to add, thought Desdemona to
stand in need of excuse. 'This noble lady, with a singularity rather to
be wondered at than imitated, had chosen for the object of her
affections a Moor, a black.... Neither is Desdemona to be altogether
condemned for the unsuitableness of the person whom she selected for her
lover' (_Tales from Shakespeare_). Others, of course, have gone much
further and have treated all the calamities of the tragedy as a sort of
judgment on Desdemona's rashness, wilfulness and undutifulness. There is
no arguing with opinions like this; but I cannot believe that even Lamb
is true to Shakespeare in implying that Desdemona is in some degree to
be condemned. What is there in the play to show that Shakespeare
regarded her marriage differently from Imogen's?]
[Footnote 106: When Desdemona spoke her last words, perhaps that line of
the ballad which she sang an hour before her death was still busy in her
brain,
Let nobody blame him: his scorn I approve.