Shakespeares Othello - Research Paper Example

Topic: Shakespeare’s Othello Shakespeare in his play, Othello depicts about social unacceptability of a moor in Venetian society and draws the attention of his readers towards the cultural values of the society in terms of color and complexion of Othello. Othello’s being an alien in Venice and the gulf of the culture, race and complexion—that exists between him and the Venetians—is an important factor in his tragedy. Othello presents, in his extreme form, the situation of the alien in a hierarchal, predatory and therefore not yet fully human society (Braxton 12). Othello’s color is thus representative of a much wider human protest that concerns race alone and Paul Robeson was right in maintaining that: “Shakespeare meant Othello to be a ‘black moor’ from Africa……But the colour is essentially secondary—except as it emphasizes the difference in culture. This is the most important thing……..Shakespeare’s Othello has learned to live in a strange society, but he is not of it—as an easterner today might pick up western manners and not be western.” (Hodgdon 27) In another way, however, the color is of crucial importance in focusing the irrational feelings associated with that difference. Shakespeare forced his audience to see Othello first with the ‘bodily eye’ of Iago. This hero is a great human being who, differing physically as well as culturally from the community he has entered, recognizes (within the limits of his social role) only universal human values of love and loyalty; but when in his equalitarian innocence he assumes full human rights in a society where other values are dominant, he makes himself and his personal relationships vulnerable to irrational , inhuman forces, embodied in Iago, that try to reduce him to a level as irrational as themselves and almost—but not quite—succeed (Cowhig 23). Although color prejudice and discrimination, in our sense of these terms—were unknown to the Elizabethan, it may be noted that the imagery of the play among other things emphasizes the contrast between light and dark. Othello is far more fair than black, because his visage is in his mind’ Iago will make the blonde Desdemona begrimed and black by turning her virtue into pitch: Iago’s business is thus to confuse the opposites. ‘The first and last acts are set in darkness, broken in one case by torches and in the other by Othello’s fatal candle as he speaks the soliloquy ‘Put out the light, and then put out the light’ (Braxton 13). While Iago is trying to bring darkness into the happy light of Othello’s life, there is an opposing force that tries to bring light into the surrounding darkness. The bearing of this symbolism on the moral opposition between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is obvious but Shakespeare does not start with symbols and then attach complexions to them, and the inevitable effect of this opposition is to stress the racial contrast between Othello and his associates. Color prejudice could not possibly have been a current problem in Shakespeare’s day in the modern sense of economical, political and sexual rivalry within a competitive society, conditioned by the hangover from slavery and by movements of African independence. Elizabethan would, however, have first hand contact with Moors. Trade with North Africa had long flourished; and on two occasions when there was an expulsion of Moors from Spain, in 1958 and 1609, they were carried back to Africa in English ships, apparently with much sympathy from the crews (Cowhig 24). As England backed the Moors against a common enemy, Spain, it is perhaps significant that the form of Iago’s name is Spanish. In 1600, only four years before the first recorded performance of Othello, many theatergoers would have seen ‘noble Moors’ lodging in London, members of an embassy from the Barbary Coast to Queen Elizabeth (Braxton 16). There is little doubt that Moors were generally credited with savagery as well as splendor. Elizabethan processions might be lent magnificence by a ‘King of the Moors’, but many of the words associated with ‘Barbary’ (1596) were also Elizabethan; for instance barbarity, barbarism, barbarous. Shakespeare’s earlier Moor, Aaron in Titus Androncius, had been an atheist and an ‘inhuman dog’. Aliens were held in suspicion even where they satisfied the criteria of order and degree. Although the Prince of Morocco in The Merchant of Venice is eligible to marry Portia, she is glad to get rid of him and ‘all of his complexion’; and the King of Naples in The Tempest is bitterly reproached for marrying his daughter to the King of Tunis after the whole court had begged him not to ‘loose her to an African’. Again the force of Hamlet’s pun when he is making his mother compare her first husband with the second. “Could you on this faire mountaine leave to feede, And batten on this Moore; ha, have you eyes?” (Cowhig 16) Depends on the double antithesis not only between mountain and Moor, but between fair and Moor. All these are reasonable tests of audience response. The unfamiliarity of the color problem would even tend to increase its impact; marriage between Othello and Desdemona must have been very startling to an audience who had never even seen a colored boy walking out with a white girl (Cowhig 16). Dover Wilson goes further and says: “If anyone imagines that England at that date was unconscious of the “colour-bar” they cannot have read Othello with any care”. (Cowhig 17) Tension, it is clear, could quickly be generated by confronting white with black under certain conditions, although Othello cannot be a product of existing tension in the Elizabethan society. The personal qualities of Othello make his social position seem much higher that what he really is. He is employed by the Venetian Republic as a professional soldier, a mercenary, and has become its most reliable and popular general. In his own country, he was descended ‘from men of social siege’ and he can say without boasting that he merits the position he has reached. Yet in Roderigo’s words, he is an ‘extravagant and wheeling stranger’ (where extravagant means ‘straying outside his proper place’), who has lived in Venice, as distinct from the camp, for less than a year (Braxton 9). The precarious anomaly of Othello’s status is vividly dramatized in the opening scenes. In the second scene, two parties of men are searching for him independently through the streets of Venice: one from the Duke’s senate to require his urgent service against the enemy Ottoman, the other to imprison him for marrying a senator’s daughter. Ironically, one party is at first mistaken for the other in the darkness. Othello himself, not without irony, comments on the paradox: ‘If I obey the prison party, he says, ‘How may the Duke be therewith satisfied?’ (Shakespeare, Othello). Othello’s prestige rests on his indispensability, but being indispensible does not make him socially acceptable in governing circles. Brabantio invited him home and ‘loved' him while he recounted his past adventures, but as a future son-in-law he is decidedly undesirable, a thing that no Venetian girl could possibly look at with affection except by some preposterous error of nature. Brabantio never reconcile himself to the match, the grief of which kills him. Both Desdemona and Iago completely ignore these considerations of native and alien, and base their relationship on a purely human basis (Braxton 11). Their secret union, in contempt of the ‘many noble matches’ available to Desdemona, is to make it quite clear that no material interests were involved in what was a free love-match. Othello gets nothing from it, while as Desdemona says: “That I did love the Moor to live with him My downright violence and storm of fortunes May trumpet to the world.” (Shakespeare, Othello) Desdemona affirms her choice in public and with devastating simplicity. She makes no distinction whatever, that is, between her parents’ marriage and her own. Brabantio retorts in effect that in that case he is no longer related to her: “I had rather to adopt a child than get it.” And Desdemona finds, without dismay, that her act has isolated her with Othello, for her father will not admit her into his house, even alone. Desdemona’s childlike simplicity, dramatically so effective at the end of the play in heightening the pathos of her helpless isolation, has the effect in this scene of positing the spontaneous, instinctive naturalness of her love for Othello (Cowhig 9). Unlike her father, Desdemona entertains no consideration of years, of country, and of credit, only of direct human relationships such as with parents, lover, husband and friend. These sentiments are fully reciprocated by Othello. This is the first relationship he has experienced since childhood (Casio’s friendship apart) that was not based on military or political expediency but purely on human feeling. Yet in staking his emotional life on Desdemona, he has put his free condition into a circumscription and confinement, which makes him vulnerable and that is why the supposed loss of her love exhausts his capacity for suffering. There is nothing egotistical in this attitude; on the contrary, disease, poverty, slavery, even public disgrace—the loss of all ha has valued up to now—he could bear ‘well, very well’, “But there, where I garner’d up my heart, Where either I must live or bear no life, The fountain from the which my current runs, Or else dries up—to be discarded thence!” (Shakespeare, Othello) Thus both lovers assert human values against the conventions that debase them; but humaneness, so isolated, is itself an abstraction and reliance on it leaves them fatally vulnerable. The emotional innocence of the hero and heroine reflects both their protest against the social environment and their ultimate helplessness before it. Othello’s being vastly different from Desdemona and others in race and compexsion also seems to have something to do with the tragic outcome. Brabantio thinks that his daughter much have been bewitched to make her want to do anything as unnatural as marrying a black man, and throughout the play the characters who dislike Othello tend to make it an additional point against him that he is a negro. Those who like him tend to make no fuss about his color one way or other; while there is nobody, however pro-Othello, who says that he is all the more admirable because of his race and Shakespeare explains this perception in Elizabethan social context. Works Cited Braxton, Phyllis Natalie. Othello: The Moor and the Metaphor. South Atlantic Review 55 (4) (1990): 1-17. Cowhig, Ruth. “Blacks in English Renaissance Drama and the role of Shakespeare’s Othello”. The Black Presence in English Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985: 1-25. Hodgdon, Barbara. “Race-ing Othello and Re-engendering White Out”. Shakespeare, the movie: popularizing the plays on film, TV, and video. London: Routledge, 1997: 23-45. Shakespeare, William. Othello. New York: Bantam Books, 1988. Read More