TIME--_After Lunch._
NORTH--TALBOYS--SEWARD--BULLER.
SEWARD.
On rising, sir, to----
NORTH.
Sit down--no gentleman speaks on his legs before, at, or after meals in
a private Party.
SEWARD.
Except in Scotland. On sitting down, sir, to state MY THEORY,
I trust that I shall not lay myself open to the im----
NORTH.
Speak with your natural tone as if you were sitting, Seward, and not
with that Parliamentary sing-song in which Statesmen, with their
coat-tails perked up behind, declaim on the State of Europe--
SEWARD.
I IMAGINE, SIR, THAT SHAKSPEARE ASSUMED THE MARRIAGE TO HAVE TAKEN
PLACE SOME TIME BEFORE THE COMMENCEMENT OF THE PLAY--SUFFICIENTLY
LONG TO ADMIT THE POSSIBILITY OF A COURSE OF GUILT BEFORE THE PLAY
OPENS. I imagine that, with this general idea in his mind, he
gave his full and unfettered attention to the working out of THE
PLOT, which has no reference to the time, circumstances, or
history of the Marriage, but relates exclusively to the Moor's
Jealousy. Therefore the indications of past time at Venice are vague,
and rarely scattered through the Dialogue.
TALBOYS.
A more astounding discovery indeed, Seward, than any yet announced by
that Stunner, Christopher North. Pardon me, sir.
NORTH.
We have said our say, Shirra; let the Lord-Lieutenant of his County say
his--
TALBOYS.
And the Chairman of the Quarter-Sessions, and President of the
Agricultural Society of the Land's End say his.
BULLER.
I can beat you at Chess.
TALBOYS.
YOU!!!
NORTH.
Gentlemen, let there be no bad blood.
SEWARD.
Supposing that this was Shakspeare's general idea of the Plot, I would
first beg your attention to the fact that the marriage has taken
place--none of us know how long--_before the beginning of the Play_.
TALBOYS.
The same night--the same night.
SEWARD.
I said--none of us know how long; and as you are a Lawyer, Mr Talboys--
TALBOYS.
For goodness' sake, my dear Seward, don't mister me--
SEWARD.
The only evidence, my dear Talboys, as to the history of the marriage
is that given by Roderigo in the First Scene. He, with the most
manifest anxiety to prove himself an honest witness, declares that
now, at midnight, Desdemona had eloped--NOT WITH _the Moor_,
but with no "worse nor better guard, but with a knave of common hire,
a gondolier, _to_," &c., &c. She has fled _alone_ from her father's
house; and Roderigo, being interrogated, "Are they married, think ye?"
answers, "Truly I think they are."
TALBOYS.
What do you say to Iago's saying to Cassio--
"Faith he _to-night_ has boarded a land Carrack:
If it prove lawful prize, he's made for ever.
_Cassio._ I do not understand.
_Iago._ He's married."
SEWARD.
It cannot be inferred, from these words, that this was the first
occasion on which Desdemona and Othello had come together as man and
wife. The words are quite consistent with the supposition that their
marriage had taken place some time before; also quite consistent with
Iago's knowledge of that event. It was not his cue or his humour to say
more than he did. Why should he?
TALBOYS.
It cannot be inferred! It can--I infer it. And pray, how do you account
for Othello saying to Desdemona, on the day of their arrival at Cyprus,
"The purchase made--the fruits are to ensue;
That profit's yet to come 'twixt me and you."
SEWARD.
"The purchase made"--refers to the price which Othello had paid for
connubial delight with Desdemona awaiting him at Cyprus. That price
was the peril which he had undergone during his stormy voyage. In his
exuberant satisfaction, simply expressing a self-evident truth, that
his happiness was _yet_ before him. Had Desdemona been then a virgin
bride, Othello would hardly have used such language. Iago speaks in his
usual characteristic coarse way--so no need to say a word more on the
subject.
TALBOYS.
Very well. Be it so. But why should such a private marriage have been
resorted to; and if privacy was desirable at first, what change had
occurred to cause the public declaration of it?
SEWARD.
Othello had been nine months unemployed in war--the Venetian State was
at peace--and he had been in constant intercourse with the Brabantios.
"Her father lov'd me--oft invited me;"
and he "took _once_ a pliant hour" to ask Desdemona to
be his wife. That "once" cannot refer to the day on which the Play
commences; and that their marriage took place some time before, is
alike reconcileable with the character of the "gentle Lady," and with
that of the impetuous Hero.
TALBOYS.
Truly!
SEWARD.
Still, a private marriage is, under any circumstances, a questionable
proceeding; and our great Dramatist was desirous that as little of the
questionable as possible should either be or appear in the conduct of
the "Divine Desdemona;" and therefore he has left the private marriage
very much in the shade.
TALBOYS.
Very much in the shade indeed.
SEWARD.
Her duplicity must be admitted, and allowance must be made for it. It
was wrong, but not in the least unnatural, and perfectly excusable--
TALBOYS.
No.
SEWARD.
And grievously expiated.
TALBOYS.
It was indeed. Poor dear Desdemona!
SEWARD.
It is, you know, part of the proof of her capacity for guilt, that she
so ingeniously deceived her father.
TALBOYS.
But why reveal it now?
SEWARD.
Circumstances are changed. The Cyprus wars have broke out, and Othello
is about to be commissioned to take the command of the Venetian force.
"I do know, the State
Cannot with safety cast him, for he's embarked
With such loud reason to the Cyprus wars,
Which even now stand in act, that for their souls
Another of his fathom have they not
To lead this business."
It was therefore necessary that the marriage should be
declared, if Desdemona was to accompany her husband to Cyprus. And the
elopement from her father _to_ her husband did take place just in time.
TALBOYS.
Is that what people call plausible?
SEWARD.
All the difficulties of Time are thus removed in a moment. In a blaze
of light we see LONG TIME AT VENICE--SHORT TIME AT CYPRUS.
BULLER.
LONG TIME AT VENICE--SHORT TIME AT CYPRUS. That's the Ticket.
You Scotsmen are not wholly without Insight; but for seeing into the
heart of the bole--or of the stone--
TALBOYS.
Give me a Devonshire Cider-swiller or a Cornish Miner.
NORTH.
What! Can't we discuss a Great Question in the Drama without these
unseemly personal and national broils. For shame, Talboys.
TALBOYS.
You Scotsmen indeed!
"Nay, but he prated,
And spoke such scurvy and provoking terms
Against YOUR HONOUR."
NORTH.
My dear Seward, let's hear how you support your Theory.
SEWARD.
A great deal of weight, my dear Mr North, is to be attached to the calm
tone--the husbandlike and matronlike demeanour of Othello and Desdemona
when confronted with the Senate. That scene certainly impresses one
with the conviction that they had been man and wife for a considerable
period of time.
NORTH.
Very good, Seward--very good.
SEWARD.
I do indeed think, sir, that the bride and bridegroom show much
more composure throughout the whole of that Scene, than is very
reconcileable with the idea that this was their nuptial night.
Othello's "natural and prompt alacrity" in undertaking the wars was
scarcely complimentary to his virgin Spouse upon this supposition;
and Desdemona's cool distinguishings between the paternal and marital
claims on her duty seem also somewhat too matronly for the occasion.
NORTH.
Very good--very good--my dear Seward, I like your observation much,
that the demeanour of the married pair before the Senate has a stamp of
composure. That is finely felt; but I venture to aver, my dear friend,
that we must otherwise understand it. The dignity of their spirits it
is that holds them both composed. Invincible self-collectedness is by
more than one person in the Play held up for a characteristic quality
of Othello. To a mind high and strong, which Desdemona's is, the
exigency of a grand crisis, which overthrows weaker and lower minds,
produces composure; from a sense of the necessity for self-possession;
and involuntarily from the tension of the powers--their sole direction
to the business that passes--which leaves no thought free to stray into
disorder, and the inquietude of personal regards. Add, on the part of
Othello, the gravity, and on that of Desdemona the awe of the Presence
in which they stand, speak, and act; and you have ennobling and
sufficing tragical, that is loftily and pathetically poetical, motives
for that elate presence of mind which both show. Now all the greatness
and grace vanish, if you suppose them calm simply because they have
been married these two months. That is a reason fit for Thalia, not for
Melpomene.
TALBOYS.
Let any one English among all the two of you answer that.
SEWARD.
The Duke says--
"You must hence to-night.
_Desdemona._ To-night, my Lord?
_Othello._ With all my heart."
This faint expression of Desdemona's slight surprise
and reluctance, and no more--is I allow--natural and delicate in
her--whether wife, bride, or Maid--but Othello's "with all my heart"
is--
TALBOYS.
Equally worthy of Othello. You know it is.
NORTH.
My dear Seward--do the Doge--Brabantio--the Senate understand and
believe what Othello has been telling them--and that he has now
disclosed to them the fact of a private marriage with Desdemona, of
some weeks' or months' standing? Is that their impression?
SEWARD.
I cannot say.
NORTH.
I can. Or has Othello been reserved--cautious--crafty in all
his apparent candour--and Desdemona equally so? Are they indeed
oldish-married folk?
TALBOYS.
Shocking--shocking. That Scene in the Council Chamber of itself deals
your "Theory!" its death-blow.
SEWARD.
I look on it in quite another light. I shall be glad to know what you
think is meant by Desdemona's to the Duke
"If I be left behind,
_The rites for which I love him are denied me_."
What are the _rites_ which are thus all comprehensive of
Desdemona's love for Othello? The phrase is, to the habit of our ears,
perhaps somewhat startling; yet five lines before she said truly "I saw
Othello's visage in his mind"--a love of spirit for spirit. And again--
"To his honour and his valiant parts
Did I my soul and fortunes consecrate."
I think they had been married some time.
TALBOYS.
The word _rites_ is the very word most fitting the Lady's lips--used
in a generous, free, capacious sense--as of the solace entire which
the wife of a soldier has, following him; as to dress his wounds, wind
his laurel, hear his counsels, cheer his darker mood, smile away the
lowering of the Elements--
SEWARD.
You won't understand me.
NORTH.
No--no--no. It won't go down. I have opened my mouth far and wide,
and, it won't go down. Our friend Isaac Widethroat himself could not
bolt it. The moral impossibility would choke him--that Othello would
marry Desdemona to leave her at her Father's House, for which most
perilous and entangling proceeding, quite out of his character, no
motive is offered, or imaginable. The love-making might go on long--and
I accept a good interval since he drew from her the prayer for his
history. The pressure of the war might give a decisive moment for
the final step, which must have been in agitation for some time--on
Desdemona's behalf and part, who would require some persuasion for
a step so desperate, and would not at once give up all hope of
her, father's consent, who "loved" Othello.
TALBOYS.
If they were married, how base and unmanly _to steal one's wedded Wife
out of one's Father-in-law's house_! The only course was to have gone
in the middle of the day to Brabantio and say, "this we have done"--or
"this I have done. Forgive us, if you can--we are Man and Wife." Men
less kingly than Othello have often done it. To steal in order to marry
was a temptation with a circumstantial necessity--a gallant adventure
in usual estimation.
NORTH.
The thing most preposterous to me in a long marriage at Venice,
is the continued lying position in which it places Othello and
Desdemona towards her father. Two months--say--or three or four--of
difficult deception! when the uppermost characteristic of both is
clear-souledness--the most magnanimous sincerity. By that, before
anything else, are they kindred and fit for one another. On that,
before anything else, is the Tragedy grounded--on his unsuspicious
openness which is drawn, against its own nature, to suspect her purity
that lies open as earth's bosom to the sun. And she is to be killed for
a dissembler! In either, immense contrast between the person and fate.
That These Two should truckle to a domestic lie!
TALBOYS.
No. The Abduction and Marriage were of one stroke--one effort--one
plot. When Othello says, "That I have ta'en away--that I have married
her"--he tells literally and simply that which has happened as it
happened, in the order of events.
SEWARD.
Why should not Othello marry Desdemona, and keep her at her father's,
as theorised?
NORTH.
It is out of his character. He has the spirit of command, of lordship,
of dominion--an _animus imperiosus_. This element must be granted to
fit him for his place; and it is intimated, and is consistent with and
essential to his whole fabric of mind. Then, he would not put that
which belonged to him out of his power, in hostile keeping--his wife
and not his wife. It is contrary to his great love, which desires and
would feed upon her continual presence. And against his discretion,
prudence, or common sense, to risk that Brabantio, discovering, might
in fury take sudden violent measures--shut her up in a convent, or turn
her into the streets, or who knows what--kill her.
TALBOYS.
Then the insupportable consideration and question, how do they come
together as man and wife? Does she come to his bedroom at his private
Lodgings, or his quarters at the Sagittary? Or does he go to hers at
her father's, climbing a garden wall every night like Romeo, bribing
the porter, or trusting Ancilla? You cannot figure it out any way
without _degradation_, and something ludicrous; and a sense of being
entangled in the impracticable.
NORTH.
The least that can be said is, that it invests the sanctimony of
marriage with the air of an illicit amour.
TALBOYS.
Then the high-minded Othello running the perpetual and
imminent risk of being caught thieving--slipping through
loop-holes--mouse-holes--key-holes. What in Romeo and Juliet is
romance, between Othello and Desdemona is almost pollution.
NORTH.
What a desolating of the MANNERS of the Play! Will you then,
in order to evade a difficulty of the mechanical construction, clog and
whelm the poetry, and moral greatness of the Play, with a preliminary
debasement? Introduce your Hero and Heroine under a cloud?
TALBOYS.
And how can you show that Othello could not at any moment have taken
her away, as at last you suppose him to do, having a motive? Mind--he
knows that the wars are on--he does not know he shall be sent for that
night. He does not know that he may not have to keep her a week at his
quarters.
NORTH.
My dear Seward--pray, meditate but for a moment on these words of
Desdemona in the Council Chamber--
"My noble Father,
I do perceive here A DIVIDED DUTY:
My life and education both do learn me
How to respect you; you are the LORD OF DUTY,
I am hitherto your Daughter: BUT HERE'S MY HUSBAND;
And so _much duty as my mother showed
To you_, preferring you before her Father,
So much I challenge that I may profess
Due to the Moor, my Lord."
These are weighty words--of grave and solemn import--and the time has
come when Desdemona the Daughter is to be Desdemona the Wife. She
tells simply and sedately--affectionately and gratefully--the great
primal Truth of this our human and social life. Hitherto her Father
has been to her the Lord of Duty--the Lord of Duty henceforth is to
be her Husband. Othello, up to that night, had been but her Lover;
and up to that night--for the hidden wooing was nothing to be ashamed
of or repented--there had been to her no "divided Duty"--to her
Father's happiness had been devoted her whole filial heart. But had she
been a married woman for weeks or months before, how insincere--how
hypocritical had that appeal been felt by herself to be, as it issued
from her lips! The Duty had, in that case, been "divided" before--and
in a way not pleasant for us to think of--to her Father violated or
extinct.
TALBOYS.
I engage, Seward, over and above what our Master has made manifest, to
show that though this Theory of yours would remove some difficulties
attending the time in Cyprus, it would leave others just where they
are--and create many more.
NORTH.
Grant that Othello and Desdemona must be married for two months
before he murders her--that our hearts and imaginations require it.
The resemblance to the ordinary course of human affairs asks it. We
cannot bear that he shall extinguish her and himself--both having
sipped only, and not quaffed from the cup of hymeneal felicity. Your
soul is outraged by so harsh and malignant a procedure of the Three
Sisters. Besides, in proper poetical equilibration, he should have
enjoyed to the full, with soul and with body, the happiness which his
soul annihilates. And men do not kill their wives the first week.
It would be too exceptional a case. Extended time is required for
the probability--the steps of change in the heart of Othello require
it--the construction and accumulation of proofs require it--the wheel
of events usually rolls with something of leisure and measure. So is
it in the real World--so must it seem to be on the Stage--else no
verisimilitude--no "veluti in speculum." "Two mouths shall elapse
between marriage and murder," says Shakspeare--going to write. They
must pass at Venice, or they must pass at Cyprus. Place Shakspeare
in this position, and which will he choose? If at Venice, a main
requiring condition is not satisfied. For in the fits and snatches
of the clandestine marriage, Othello has never possessed with full
embrace, and heart overflowing, the happiness which he destroys. If an
earthquake is to ruin a palace, it must be built up to the battlements
and pinnacles; furnished, occupied, made the seat of Pleasure, Pomp,
and Power; and then shaken into heaps--or you have but half a story.
Only at Cyprus Othello _possesses_ Desdemona. There where he is Lord
of his Office, Lord over the Allegiance of soldier and civilian--of a
whole population--Lord of the Island, which, sea-surrounded, is as a
world of itself--Lord of his will--Lord of his Wife.
TALBOYS.
I feel, sir, in this view much poetical demonstration--although
mathematical none--and in such a case Poetry is your only Principia.
NORTH.
Your hand. But if, my dear Seward, Shakspeare elects time at Venice,
he wilfully clouds his two excellent Persons with many shadows
of indecorum, and clogs his Action with a procedure and a state
of affairs, which your Imagination loses itself in attempting
to define--with improbabilities--with impracticabilities--with
impossibilities. If he was resolute to have a well-sustained logic of
Time, I say it was better for him to have his Two Months distinct at
Cyprus. I say that, with his creative powers, if he was determined to
have Two Calendar Months, from the First of May to the First of July,
and then in One Day distinctly the first suspicion sown and the murder
done, nothing could have been easier to him than to have imagined, and
indicated, and hurried over the required gap of time; and that he would
have been bound to prefer this course to that inexplicable marriage and
no marriage at Venice.
BULLER.
How he clears his way!
NORTH.
But Shakspeare, my dear Boys, had a better escape. Wittingly or
unwittingly, he exempted himself from the obligation of walking by the
Calendar. He knew--or he felt that the fair proportionate structure
of the Action required liberal time at Cyprus. He took it; for there
it is, recognised in the consciousness of every sitting or standing
spectator. He knew, or he felt, that the passionate expectation to be
sustained in the bosoms of his audience required a rapidity of movement
in his Murder-Plot, and it moves on feet of fire.
SEWARD.
Venice is beginning to fade from my ken.
NORTH.
The first of all necessities towards the Criticism of the Play, Seward,
is to convince yourself that there was not--could not be a time of
concealed marriage at Venice--that it is not hinted, and is not
inferable.
BULLER.
Shall we give in, Seward?
SEWARD.
Yes.
NORTH.
You must go to the TREMENDOUS DOUBLE TIME AT CYPRUS, knowing
that the solution is to be had there, or nowhere. If you cast back a
longing lingering look towards Venice, you are lost. Put mountains and
waves between you and the Queen of the Sea. Help yourself through at
Cyprus, or perish in the adventure.
TALBOYS.
Through that Mystery, you alone, sir, are the Man to help us
through--and you must.
NORTH.
Not now--to-morrow. Till then be revolving the subject occasionally in
your minds.
TALBOYS.
Let's off to the Pike-ground at Kilchurn.
_Printed by William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh._
[Transcriber's Note:
Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation are as in the original.]