The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
William Shakespeare · a tragedy in five acts · fifteen scenes · written about 1603 to 1604 · scored on the Folio of 1623, with the Quarto of 1622 consulted for its variants; read from knowledge, no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Domestic tragedy in the grand style; intrigue play and tragedy of the outsider in one action
Mythos
The garden after the storm and the tempter who enters it; the morality Vice made tragic villain; the sacred object lost; the cloven hoof looked for and not found
Phase
One night in Venice, a storm at sea, then a short run on Cyprus from the landing to the murder, which the talk of the play stretches into weeks
Presentation
Drama; five acts and fifteen scenes, the first act in Venice and the other four on Cyprus, read in the Folio text with the Quarto’s variants beside it
Register
From Othello’s periodic verse and its exotic names to Iago’s prose and clipped verse, thick with beasts, and the plain speech of Emilia
Scale
A marriage, a garrison and an island; the Venetian state at the edge of the action
Governing Proposition
A Moor who commands the forces of Venice marries a senator’s daughter in secret, defends the marriage before the Senate at night, and sails with her to Cyprus, where his ensign, passed over for promotion, persuades him with a borrowed handkerchief and a few overheard words that she is false with his lieutenant; he kills her in her bed, learns the truth from the ensign’s wife, and kills himself. The wager of the play is that tragedy can be moved from the state into a marriage without loss of height, and that a jealousy which feeds on nothing can be shown from inside, at the speed at which it is lived.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The play opens at night in a Venetian street, in the middle of a quarrel. Iago has been passed over. Othello, the Moor who commands the forces of Venice, has made Michael Cassio his lieutenant, a “bookish theoric” who has never set a squadron in the field, and left Iago his ensign. Roderigo, a foolish gentleman who has been paying Iago to win him Desdemona, has just learned that she is gone. Iago tells him that he follows the Moor only to serve his own turn upon him, that preferment goes by letter and affection, “’tis the curse of service”, and he ends his account of himself in five words: “I am not what I am” (1.1).
Then the two men shout up at a senator’s window. Iago tells Brabantio that his daughter has been stolen, and tells it in the images of the farmyard: “an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe” (1.1). Brabantio goes from disbelief to certainty in minutes, calls up his household and goes out to find the Moor. It is street farce, two men shouting obscenities in the dark, and it is the play’s whole mechanism in small: a man worked on by picture and insinuation, with beasts for images, until he is sure of what he cannot have seen. Iago slips away before he can be seen standing against his general.
The play is in five acts and fifteen scenes. The first act is set in Venice; the other four are set on Cyprus. The source is a tale in Giraldi Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi (1565), the seventh of the third decade, a sordid and quick story in which an ensign and a Moor beat Disdemona to death and bring the ceiling down on her to feign an accident; only she has a name. Shakespeare kept the ensign, the handkerchief and the jealousy, named everyone, and set the story in the grand style. The King’s Men played it at Whitehall on 1 November 1604, and it was printed twice in the next two decades, in a Quarto of 1622 and in the Folio of 1623, the text read here.
Movement II
Warned that Brabantio is coming for him, Othello will not hide. He trusts himself to what he is: “My parts, my title and my perfect soul / Shall manifest me rightly” (1.2). When the senator’s men come with drawn swords, he tells them to put them up. The Senate is sitting at night, because a Turkish fleet is making for Cyprus, and it needs him. Brabantio comes before it and charges him with witchcraft: his daughter could not have chosen such a man unless she had been drugged or charmed.
Othello answers with the story of the wooing. He was a guest in Brabantio’s house and told his history, battles, sieges, captivity and escape, the deserts and the cannibals, the “anthropophagi” (1.3); Desdemona came back from her housework again and again to hear it, and wept. “She loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them” (1.3). Desdemona, sent for, says that her duty is divided now and that she owes it to her husband. The Senate sends Othello to Cyprus and lets her go with him. Brabantio leaves him a warning: “She has deceived her father, and may thee” (1.3).
When the others have gone, Iago and Roderigo are left. Roderigo talks of drowning himself, and Iago tells him that love is “a lust of the blood and a permission of the will” (1.3) and that money will buy him the woman yet. Alone, he plans aloud to the audience. He hates the Moor; it is said that the Moor has lain with his wife, and he will act on the suspicion as if it were certain; Cassio is handsome, and Othello is of a free and open nature that thinks men honest who only seem so. The play has made its audience the villain’s confidant, and it will keep them in his confidence to the end.
Movement III
A storm wrecks the Turkish fleet and the war ends before it begins. On Cyprus the only enemy left is inside the garrison. Desdemona lands before her husband, and Iago passes the time of waiting on the quay with rhymes about women. Then Othello comes in from the sea and finds her there: “If it were now to die, / ’Twere now to be most happy” (2.1). Iago, watching, says in an aside that he will untune the music they make.
He begins with Cassio, who has a weak head for drink. Iago makes him drunk on the night of the celebration and sets Roderigo on him; the brawl spreads, the bell rings, and Othello, woken, takes Cassio’s office from him. Iago advises Cassio to ask Desdemona to plead for him, and she promises that she will. In the long third scene of the third act, Iago works on Othello. He echoes, hesitates, will not say what he thinks, warns his general against jealousy, “the green-eyed monster” (3.3), and reminds him that Desdemona has deceived once before: “She did deceive her father, marrying you” (3.3). Alone, Othello looks for the reason in himself: “Haply, for I am black” (3.3).
Desdemona offers her handkerchief to bind his aching head; he pushes it away and it falls. Emilia picks it up: her husband, she says, has “woo’d me to steal it” (3.3) a hundred times. Iago will leave it in Cassio’s lodging. “Trifles light as air / Are to the jealous confirmations strong / As proofs of holy writ” (3.3). Othello comes back already changed and takes leave of his trade, the plumed troops and the big wars, until “Othello’s occupation’s gone” (3.3). He demands proof; Iago tells of a dream Cassio spoke in his sleep, and says he has seen Cassio wipe his beard with the handkerchief. Othello swears by the Pontic sea that his bloody thoughts will not ebb, and the two men kneel together and vow the murder.
Movement IV
Othello asks Desdemona for the handkerchief, and tells her what it is. An Egyptian charmer gave it to his mother, and while she kept it his father would love her; a sibyl sewed it in her prophetic fury, the silk came from hallowed worms, and it was dyed in mummy: there is “magic in the web of it” (3.4). Desdemona says that it is not lost, and goes back to pleading for Cassio. Othello leaves, and the handkerchief has passed from Cassio’s floor into the hands of Bianca, whom he asks to copy its work.
Iago returns to the attack with single words, and Othello’s speech breaks. He moves from verse into prose, from prose into broken phrases, and falls in a fit at Iago’s feet. When he wakes, Iago hides him to watch Cassio laughing, and draws Cassio on to talk of Bianca while Othello takes it to be talk of Desdemona; Bianca arrives and throws the handkerchief back. Then Lodovico comes from Venice with letters calling Othello home and leaving Cassio in his place, and before the envoy Othello strikes his wife. Left alone, he cries “Goats and monkeys!” (4.1), the beasts of Iago’s speech now in his mouth.
He questions Emilia and treats her as a bawd, and calls his wife a whore to her face. That night Desdemona prepares for bed. She remembers her mother’s maid, Barbary, whose lover went mad and forsook her, and who died singing a song of willow, and she sings it while Emilia undresses her. The Folio gives the song and what follows it, which the Quarto lacks: Emilia’s speech on husbands, that wives have senses as husbands do, can see and smell and taste and have their own affections, and that the ills wives do are taught them by the men. In the street Iago sets Roderigo on to kill Cassio.
Movement V
In the dark Roderigo strikes at Cassio and is wounded; Iago wounds Cassio from behind, and in the confusion that follows kills Roderigo, who could have told what he knew. Then Othello enters the bedroom with a light. Desdemona is asleep. “It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul” (5.2). He will not shed her blood. “Put out the light, and then put out the light” (5.2): the lamp can be lit again, and she cannot. He kisses her and she wakes, and he tells her to pray. She asks for one night, then for half an hour, then for one prayer, and he smothers her.
Emilia is at the door with news of the night’s killing. Desdemona speaks once more, and asked who has done this, she answers: “Nobody; I myself” (5.2). Othello tells Emilia that he killed her, and that Iago knew she was false. Emilia, who has kept the secret of the handkerchief, now will not keep silent, though her husband orders her to, and she tells how she found it and gave it to him; Iago kills her. Othello looks down at Iago’s feet for the cloven hoof, says it is a fable, wounds him, and asks why “that demi-devil” (5.2) has ensnared his soul and body. Iago answers: “Demand me nothing. What you know, you know” (5.2). He says nothing more.
Othello asks the Venetians to speak of him as he is: of “one that loved not wisely but too well” (5.2), who like the base Indian of the Quarto, or the base Iudean of the Folio, threw a pearl away richer than all his tribe. He tells them of a turbaned Turk he once killed in Aleppo for beating a Venetian, and as he tells it he stabs himself, and dies on a kiss. Lodovico gives Cassio the island and the torture of Iago, has the loaded bed hidden from sight, and goes to tell the state. The state, absent since the storm, comes back for the last lines; the play has been in a bedroom.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds almost nothing idle. There is no subplot: Roderigo is Iago’s purse and his knife, Bianca carries the handkerchief to its last use in 4.1, and Emilia, who picks it up, is the one who unmakes the plot in 5.2. The case for cutting is the first act, and Boito and Verdi made it, beginning their opera in the Cypriot storm. What that cut loses shows the act is required. Brabantio’s parting warning, “She has deceived her father, and may thee” (1.3), is the seed Iago plants in 3.3 as “She did deceive her father, marrying you”; the Senate’s trust is the height Othello falls from; the wooing is the love the play destroys. What can go is small: the Clown’s two appearances, the musicians, and some of Iago’s rhymes on the quay.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The disclosure is that jealousy does not grow from evidence. It seizes on a void and feeds on what it is given: “Trifles light as air / Are to the jealous confirmations strong / As proofs of holy writ” (3.3). The play shows a self built on the estimate of others, “My parts, my title and my perfect soul / Shall manifest me rightly” (1.2), and how little it takes to unbuild it in a man who has half taken in his society’s view of him: “Haply, for I am black” (3.3). Iago discloses the reducing intellect, for which love is “a lust of the blood and a permission of the will” (1.3). Emilia, in the Folio’s 4.3, says what the marriages hide: that wives have senses as husbands have. These hold as stated truths. Held below King Lear because the condition disclosed is that of a marriage and a self, not of the human estate.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The elevation is frequent and of two kinds. The first is Othello’s own music: the wooing told to the Senate, “She loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them” (1.3); the reunion after the storm, “If it were now to die, / ’Twere now to be most happy” (2.1); the farewell to his trade that ends “Othello’s occupation’s gone” (3.3); the Pontic sea of the Folio; “It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul” (5.2) over the sleeping Desdemona. The second is terror: the trance in 4.1, the blow struck before the Venetian envoy, the Willow Song sung as she prepares for bed. The last scene rises twice more, at “Nobody; I myself” and in the final speech. Held a step down because the middle is meant to sink, and because the play sets its own sublime in question: the grand style is the hero’s, and the hero is deceived.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The myth is built, not evoked. The marriage after the storm is a garden; the storm drowns the Turks so that the only enemy is inside; Iago enters it as tempter, and when the fall comes Othello names it beforehand: “Chaos is come again” (3.3). At the end he looks down at Iago’s feet for the cloven hoof and calls him “that demi-devil” (5.2). The handkerchief is the play’s sacred object, sewn by a sibyl and dyed in mummy, with “magic in the web of it” (3.4), and the plot turns on its loss. Iago carries the Vice of the morality play into tragedy: he talks to us, plans aloud and laughs. The particular stays particular: a garrison, a promotion, a borrowed handkerchief. Held where it is because the archetype lives in the characters’ language more than in the world’s structure: Lear’s heath is the myth, and Cyprus is where the myth is spoken.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Cinthio’s tale is sordid and quick: the Ensign and the Moor beat Disdemona to death with a stocking filled with sand and bring the ceiling down on her. Shakespeare made it heroic tragedy, and two turns carried risk. He made a Moor the noble hero, on a stage whose Moors had been villains: Aaron in his own Titus Andronicus, the Moor of Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar. And he lifted domestic tragedy, a form then at the level of Arden of Faversham and Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), into the grand style with a handkerchief at its centre. The cost was paid in reception: Thomas Rymer in 1693 called it a “bloody farce” and mocked the handkerchief as unworthy of tragedy. Held below the rest of the gated five because the machinery, the soliloquising villain and the intrigue, was inherited from the Vice and from Shakespeare’s own Richard III: the swerve is in where tragedy was placed, more than in a new form.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The form is the instrument. The double time is the clearest case. On Cyprus the action runs so short from the landing to the murder that there is no time for the adultery to have happened, while the talk implies weeks: Bianca complains of Cassio’s week away, and Emilia reports that Iago “woo’d me to steal it” (3.3) a hundred times. On the stage the short clock is the one felt, and the speed of the passion is the speed of the play. The soliloquies make the audience Iago’s confidant: we know and cannot tell, which is the jealous man’s position inverted. The island confines everyone to one house and one garrison. Set the matter in Cinthio’s form, the novella, and it says only that a Moor was deceived; the drama shows how deception feels from inside.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The evidence of yield is four centuries of argument that has not closed. Iago’s motive is the open wound: Coleridge’s “motive-hunting of motiveless malignity”, A. C. Bradley’s study of him (1904), and the reversal by T. S. Eliot (1927) and F. R. Leavis (“Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero”, 1937), who read Othello’s grandeur as self-regard. William Empson worked the play through one word, “honest” (1951). Stanley Cavell read it as a tragedy of scepticism; Stephen Greenblatt (1980) read Iago as the improviser who enters another’s narrative. Readings of race, from the years of Paul Robeson onward, and readings of Desdemona and Emilia have each found another play in the same text. The double time and the crux of the last speech remain live. Held a step below the inexhaustibility of Hamlet, which is the standard for this axis in drama.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The field is English drama of the 1600s. The force: tragedy moved from the court and the state into a marriage and a bedroom without loss of height, and the villain made the play’s author, who stages the action to an audience he has made complicit. It is held below Hamlet and King Lear, which redirected tragedy itself; this play redirected where tragedy could be set. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the intelligent, confiding villain who stages the action runs on through the tragedy after it; Rossini (1816) and Verdi and Boito (1887) made it opera; Orson Welles filmed it (1951); Ira Aldridge in the nineteenth century and Paul Robeson in the twentieth made the role a site of contest; Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966) answers it; and “the green-eyed monster” is in the language.
Score: 9.0 / 10
About four hundred and twenty years. The text survives in two substantive early printings, the Quarto of 1622 and the Folio of 1623, which differ in their oaths and in a run of lines but agree on the play: the form survives whole. Presence has been continuous: played at Whitehall in 1604, among the first plays revived after 1660, never long out of the repertory since, taught wherever English is taught, translated into most written languages, and remade in opera, ballet and film. The surface most fixed to its moment is the language of race, “an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe” (1.1), with the practice of blacked-up performance; both charge the presence rather than end it, and the argument they raise has kept the play on the stage. Held below the survivals of millennia, and below the presence of Hamlet, the widest of Shakespeare’s plays.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Judged on the Folio as the fuller text, with the Quarto’s oaths noted as the better reading where they occur. Three idioms are commanded and set against one another: Othello’s periodic verse, with its exotic names and its “anthropophagi” (1.3); Iago’s prose and clipped verse, thick with beasts; and the plain speech of Emilia. The making is load-bearing, because the contagion of idioms is the plot. In 4.1 Othello speaks Iago’s language, breaks into prose and falls in a fit, and later cries “Goats and monkeys!” In 3.3, in one continuous movement, a man goes from love to a vow of murder, kneeling with his tempter. The handkerchief passes through four hands in two scenes without strain. Charged: the Clown, and Iago’s luck, which brings Cassio and Bianca on when they are needed.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the street farce of 1.1, two men shouting obscenities under a senator’s window at night, and the bed of 5.2. One law governs both. In the first scene Iago works on Brabantio exactly as he will work on Othello, by picture and insinuation, with beasts for images, and Brabantio, like Othello, goes from disbelief to certainty in minutes. The gulling of Roderigo is the comedy of the same mechanism at a lower price. The Turkish war and the marriage obey it too: the storm removes the outward enemy so the inward one can work. The breaches are two. The double time cannot be reconciled on the page, though it cannot be seen in the theatre, and the Clown’s quibbles belong to another play. The range is wide, from farce to the death of a wife, and it is held.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The orders held: the state, in the night sitting of the Senate and the threat to Cyprus; war and military rank, the preferment of Cassio, a “bookish theoric” (1.1), over Iago’s years of service; race and the outsider; marriage, sex and the place of wives; class and service, “’tis the curse of service” (1.1); the sacred, in soul, damnation and the oath; consciousness, in Othello’s ruin and Iago’s self-possession. They are integrated, since each bears on the marriage. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the concentration that makes the play’s force. The state withdraws once the Turks drown and returns only as Lodovico’s embassy; history is a ground; the natural order lives in the storm and the Pontic sea. King Lear and the great novels hold more.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Made and The Imperishable at 9.4, then The Living Form at 9.3. A making in which three idioms are set against one another and the contagion of one by another is the plot; a text whole in two early printings and on the stage for four centuries, its dated surface charging its presence without ending it; and a form whose short clock is the speed of the passion, with an audience made the villain’s confidant.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 8.4, held by the concentration that makes the play’s force: the state withdraws once the Turks drown, history is a ground, and the natural order lives in the storm alone. Next above it, The Swerve at 8.9: the turn was in where tragedy was placed, a Moor made the noble hero and a domestic matter lifted into the grand style, while the soliloquising villain and the intrigue were inherited.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.3, The Made at 9.4, The Inner Law at 9.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.4, The Unconcealment at 9.2, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0 and The Swerve at 8.9 clear the bar of 8.5, The Swerve by four tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.9, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, written about 1603 to 1604 and first recorded in performance by the King’s Men at Whitehall on 1 November 1604, entered in the Revels Accounts as the “Moor of Venis”. It is scored as one play in five acts and fifteen scenes. Two early printings carry it: the Quarto of 1622, printed for Thomas Walkley, and the Folio of 1623. The Folio is the text read, because it carries passages the play needs that the Quarto lacks, among them the Pontic sea in 3.3 and the Willow Song and Emilia’s speech on husbands in 4.3, and because its softened oaths cost less than those absences. The Quarto is consulted for its variants, and where it reads better, in its oaths and a handful of its own lines, that is said; neither printing’s shortfall is charged to the play. The best-known crux, in Othello’s last speech, where the Quarto has “Indian” and the Folio “Iudean”, is left open. The English is Shakespeare’s, with no translation between. No text was in hand: nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. English is quoted only where its words are certain, in modern spelling, and cited by act and scene; everything else is paraphrased. The source, Giraldi Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi (1565), the seventh tale of the third decade, is not part of the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the line count, the number of lines in which the two printings differ, the reason the Folio softened the oaths, the relative length of the two principal parts, the count of “honest” and its cognates, the length of the action on Cyprus, the length of the scenes and the performances after 1604 and before 1660, are not given.