The Common Pursuit (22 page)

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. (p. 197.)

That again, no doubt, is how Othello (though as for satiated thirst, he says at line 74,

Had all his hairs been lives, my great revenge Had stomach for them all)

would like to see it. But Bradley, in the speech he quotes from, misses all the shifts of tone by which Shakespeare renders the shifting confusion of Othello's mind. For it is a speech one might have chosen with the express view of illustrating that subtle command of tone which marks Shakespeare's mature art, and which makes the poetry of Othello so different in kind from that of Romeo and Juliet, and the two dramas consequently incomparable.

It opens with the accent of a contained holy revulsion, the containing power appearing as inexorable, impersonal justice:

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul!

Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!

It is the cause.

Now comes a shrinking back from the deed:

Yet I'll not shed her blood, Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow And smooth as monumental alabaster.

Tenderness here quite clearly is that characteristic voluptuousness of Othello's which, since it is unassociated with any real interest in Desdemona as a person, slips so readily into possessive jealousy. Now the accent of impersonal justice is heard again—

Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men

—but the accent is so clearly unrelated to any effectual motive in Othello that the concern for justice, the self-bracing to noble sacrifice, appears as self-deception. Next come misgivings over the finality of the deed:

Put out the light, and then put out the light:

If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,

I can again thy former light restore,

Should I repent me: but once put out thy light,

Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature,

I know not where is that Promethean heat

That can thy light relume. When I have pluck'd the rose

I cannot give it vital growth again,

It must needs wither: I'll smell it on the tree.

Tenderness here is less specifically voluptuous sensuality than it was earlier, but we nevertheless remember:

Get me some poison, lago; this night. I'll not expostulate with her, lest her body and beauty unprovide my mind again: this night, lago.

[IV, i, 208]

And there is in Othello a curious and characteristic effect of self-preoccupation, of preoccupation with his emotions rather than with Desdemona in her own right:

0 balmy breath, that almost dost persuade Justice to break her sword! One more, one more: Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee, And love thee after: one more, and this the last. So sweet was ne'er so fatal. I must weep,

But they are cruel tears: this sorrow's heavenly; It strikes where it doth love. She wakes.

When she is awake and so is no longer a mere body, but a person, it is not sorrowful love or noble self-bracing to a sacrifice that she becomes aware of in Othello:

Alas, why gnaw you so your nether lip ? Some bloody passion shakes your very frame: These are portents.

Moreover, though Othello says

1 would not kill thy unprepared spirit,

actually he refuses her the time to say one prayer.

When he discovers his mistake, his reaction is an intolerably intensified form of the common 'I could kick myself :

Whip me, ye devils

From the possession of this heavenly sight! Blow me about in winds! roast me in sulphr! Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire! O Desdemona! Desdemona! dead! Oh! Oh! Oh!

But he remains the same Othello; he has discovered his mistake, but there is no tragic self-discovery. The speech closing with the lines just quoted is that beginning

Behold, I have a weapon,

one of the finest examples in the play of the self-dramatizing trick. The noble Othello is now seen as tragically pathetic, and he sees himself as pathetic too :

Man but a rush against Othello's breast, And he retires. Where shall Othello go ?

He is ruined, but he is the same Othello in whose essential make-up the tragedy lay: the tragedy doesn't involve the idea of the hero's learning through suffering. The fact that Othello tends to sentimentalize should be the reverse of a reason for our sentimentalizing too.

For even, or rather especially, in that magnificent last speech of his Othello does tend to sentimentalize, 1 though to say that and no more would convey a false impression, for the speech conveys something like the full complexity of Othello's simple nature, and in the total effect the simplicity is tragic and grand. The quiet beginning gives us the man of action with his habit of effortless authority:

Soft you; a word or two before you go.

I have done the State some service, and they know't.

No more of that. I pray you in your letters,

When you shall these unlucky deeds rekte,

Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,

Nor set down aught in malice . . .

Othello really is, we cannot doubt, the stoic-captain whose few words know their full sufficiency: up to this point we cannot say he dramatizes himself, he simply is. But then, in a marvellous way (if we consider Shakespeare's art), the emotion works itself up until in less than half-a-dozen lines die stoic of few words is eloquently weeping. With

Then must you speak Of one that loved not wisely but too well,

the epigrammatic terseness of the dispatch, the dictated dispatch, begins to quiver. Then, with a rising emotional swell, description

1 There is, I find, an admirable note on this speech in Mr T, S. Eliot's essay, Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca.

becomes unmistakably self-dramatization—self-dramatization as un-self-comprehending as before:

Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought,

Perplex'd 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,

Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees

Their medicinal gum.

Contemplating the spectacle of himself, Othello is overcome with the pathos of it. But this is not the part to die in: drawing himself proudly up, he speaks his last words as the stern soldier who recalls, and re-enacts, his supreme moment of deliberate courage:

Set you down this; And say besides, that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took by the throat the circumcised dog And smote him, thus. [Stabs himself.]

It is a superb coup de theatre.

As, with that double force, a coup de thlatre, it is a peculiarly right ending to the tragedy of Othello. The theme of the tragedy is concentrated in it—concentrated in tbe final speech and action as it could not have been had Othello 'learnt through suffering'. That he should die acting his ideal part is all in the part: the part is manifested here in its Tightness and solidity, and the actor as inseparably the man of action. The final blow is as real as the blow it re-enacts, and the histrionic intent symbolically affirms tbe reality: Othello dies belonging to the world of action in which his true part lay.

That so many readers—Coleridge, Swinburne, Bradley, for instance—not belonging to that world should have found Othello's part irresistibly attractive, in the sense that they have preferred to see the pky through Othello's eyes rather than Shakespeare's, is perhaps not after all surprising. It maybe suggested that the cult of T. E. Lawrence has some relevance here. And Othello

is not merely a glamorous man of action who dominates all companies, he is (as we have all been) cruelly and tragically wronged —a victim of relentless intrigue, and, while remaining noble and heroic, is allowed to appreciate the pathos of his own fate. He has, in fact, all the advantages of that last speech, where the invitation to identify oneself with him is indeed hardly resistible. Who does not (in some moments) readily see himself as the hero of such a coup de theatre ?

The exaltation of lago, it has already been suggested, is a corollary of this response to Othello. What but supremely subtle villainy could have brought to this kind of ruin the hero whose perfect nobility we admire and love ? Bradley concludes that

to compare lago with the Satan of Paradise Lost seems almost absurd, so immensely does Shakespeare's man exceed Milton's fiend in evil, (p. 206.)

However, to be fair to Bradley, we must add that he also finds lago decidedly less great than Napoleon. 1 Nevertheless, even if lago hasn't 'intellectual supremacy', we are to credit him with vast 'intellectual superiority*: 'in intellect . . . and in will. . . lago is great' (p. 219). If we ask the believers in lago's intellect where they find it, they can hardly point to anything immediately present in the text, though it is true that he makes some acute and cynical observations at times. The evidence of his intellect is the success of his plot: if he hadn't had an extraordinary intellect, how could he have succeeded ? That is the essential argument. It is an odd kind of literary criticism. 'The skill of lago was extraordinary/ says Bradley, 'but', he adds, with characteristic scrupulousness, 'so was his good fortune'.

Yes, so was his good fortune—until Shakespeare gave him bad. That it should be possible to argue so solemnly and pertinaciously on the assumption that lago, his intellect and his good fortune belong, like Napoleon and his, to history, may be taken as showing that Shakespeare succeeded in making him plausible enough for the purposes of the drama. And yet even Bradley betrays certain

1 ' But compare him with one who may perhaps be roughly called a bad man of supreme intellectual power, Napoleon, and you see how mean and negative lago's mind is, incapable of his military achievements, much more incapable of his political constructions/ (p. 236.)

misgivings. Noting the astonishing (when one thinks of it) contrast between the devilish reality of lago and the impression he makes on everyone (including his wife) 1 except Roderigo, Bradley comments (p. 217):

What further conclusions can be drawn from it ? Obviously, to begin with, the inference, which is accompanied by a thrill of admiration, that lago's powers of dissimulation and of self-control must have been prodigious . . .

There we have the process by which the prodigious lago is created. But the scrupulous Bradley nevertheless records the passing doubt:

In fact so prodigious does his self-control appear that a reader might be excused for feeling a doubt of its possibility.

Of course, it is recorded only to be overcome:

But there are certain observations and further inferences which, apart from a confidence in Shakespeare, would remove this doubt.

Actually, if we are to be saved from these doubts (those of us who are not strengthened by this confidence in Shakespeare), we must refrain from careful observations, comparative notes and scrupulous inferences. Shakespeare's genius carries with it a large facility in imposing conviction locally, and before we ask for more than this we should make sure we know just what is being offered us in the whole. The tide tells us where, in this play (it is not, of course, so in all the plays), we are to focus. As for lago, we know from the beginning that he is a villain; the business of Roderigo tells us that. In the other scenes we have no difficulty in taking him as we are meant to take him; and we don't (at any rate in die reading, and otherwise it's the actor's problem) ask how it is that appearance and reality can have been so successfully divorced. Considered as a comprehensibly villainous person, he represents a not uncommon kind of grudging, cynical malice (and he's given, at least in suggestion, enough in the way of grievance and motive). But in order to perform his function as dramatic machinery he has to put on such an appearance of invincibly

1 'And it is a fact too litde noticed that lie presented an appearance not very different to his wife. There is no sign either that Emilia's marriage was downright unhappy, or that she suspected the true nature of her husband.'

cunning devilry as to provide Coleridge and the rest with some excuse for their awe, and to leave others wondering, in critical reflection, whether he isn't a rather clumsy mechanism. Perhaps the most serious point to be pondered is that, if Othello is to retain our sympathy sufficiently, lago must, as devil, claim for himself an implicit weight of emotional regard that critical reflection finds him unfit to carry.

'Clumsy', however, is not the right word for anything in Othello. It is a marvellously sure and adroit piece of workmanship ; though closely related to that judgment is the further one that, with all its brilliance and poignancy, it comes below Shakespeare's supreme—his very greatest—works.

I refrained, of set purpose, from reading Professor Stoll on Othello and its critics till I had written, as Bradley precipitated it, my own account of die play. Professor Stoll is of course known as, in academic Shakespeare criticism, the adversary of the Bradley approach, and now that I have read what he has to say 1 about Othello he seems to me to confirm where the critical centre lies by deviating as badly on his side as Bradley does on the other.

Professor Stoll, having first justified with a weight of scholarship my unscholarly assumption that the view of Othello represented by Bradley has, since Coleridge's time, been the generally accepted one, exposes unanswerably and at length the absurdity of that view. His own positive account of the play, however, is no less, indefensible than Bradley's. He argues that Othello's lapse into jealousy is to be explained in terms, not of Othello's psychology, but of convention. Profiting by the convention of * die slanderer believed* (for the use of which Professor Stoll gives a long string of instances) Shakespeare simply imposes jealousy on Othello from the outside: that is Professor StolTs position.