I have
spent the majority of the last year teaching Othello, so I thought I
should attempt to clarify some of my thoughts on the play, now that I’ve spent
so much time wrestling with the issues it raises. In the future I may separate
my blog posts about literature from blog posts about food or travel or
education, but at the moment I have so few blog posts of any kind that I figure
I might as well chuck this out into the void of the Internet without any fancy
adornment. Enjoy, and feel free to hit me up with questions or your own
theories about Shakespeare/literature/the nature of the universe. Don’t read
while operating heavy machinery!
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In Act I
of Othello, Iago instructs Roderigo to “plague [Brabantio] with flies. Though
that his joy be joy,/ throw some vexation on’t,/ As it may lose some colour.” This
is precisely my dilemma when reading Shakespeare’s Othello, because my
pleasure in reading the play is tempered by the fact that it still confuses the
heck out of me.
It is Iago,
usually considered the villain of the play, who throws the most ‘vexation’ on
my enjoyment of Othello. Is Iago a Machiavellian villain? Is he a
would-be mastermind ironically brought low by his own wife? How does his final
silence affect our understanding of the play’s ending, or the play as a whole?
These are only some of the questions I posed to my literature students during
the course of the past year, always painfully aware that I could not answer
them myself.
If I wish
to clarify what has long bothered me about the play, and more specifically
about the purpose Iago serves, I need to return to the basics: dramatic techniques.
For me, a central failure of many critical approaches to Othello lies in
their treatment of dramatic irony. Dramatic irony, as most of us who
have read Shakespeare in high school know, occurs when the audience knows more
about the play’s direction or a character’s intentions than one or more of the
actual characters – think Dr. Evil laying out his plans in great detail, or the
underwater camera capturing the shark in Jaws as it approaches the
dangling legs of its unwitting victim.
In Othello,
dramatic irony occurs very clearly whenever Iago speaks in asides or
soliloquies, revealing his intentions and providing commentary on his own
manipulations. “Thus do I ever make my fool my purse,” Iago tells us after
convincing the gullible Roderigo to continue pursuing Desdemona. In moments
like this, Iago offers the audience a blueprint for his self-serving
machinations. “Look at me; look at what I’m about to do,” is essentially the
message we receive. And once the deed is done: “See what I did there?”
Dramatic
irony is a simple technique with profound effects. One of my colleagues claims
that the force of tragedy, indeed its very essence, boils down to the profound
pull of dramatic irony on an audience’s emotions. We do not watch Oedipus
or Othello because we think their protagonists may escape their tragic fate;
on the contrary, we see their doom approaching, we edge forward in our seats as
the inevitable moment nears, and we derive a perplexing but undeniable pleasure
from witnessing the culmination of a dramatic arc we are powerless to change.
If a
student manages to identify an example of dramatic irony (one of Iago’s
soliloquies, say) and evaluate its effect on an audience, he is already
exceeding expectations; a few bright students, however, rightly pointed out to
me the fundamental weirdness of dramatic irony. “Why is he telling the
audience his plans?” they ask, and it is an excellent question. It leads
directly to a productive discussion about the purpose of dramatic irony in
theater, its intended effects and unintended consequences, and whether it is a
necessary weapon in a playwright’s arsenal.
Is dramatic
irony a theatrical crutch, meant to enable an uneducated audience to follow the
plot? Is it a necessary reminder that what happens on stage is a representation
of reality and not reality in itself (for in reality, talking to an audience we’re
not sure exists is a sign of either madness or religion), or is it a clunky but
pragmatic workaround that the innovations of modern theater have rendered
obsolete?
It seems
to me that, no matter what else it does, dramatic irony raises the important
question of audience privilege. In Shakespeare’s time, there were very few tragedies
that did not expose their inner workings to the audience’s eager eye. To watch
a play was to possess a form of privileged sight, perhaps of insight, into the
overarching dramatic structure that eluded the mere characters on stage.
Not all
tragedy hinges on dramatic irony, of course, and more modern innovations in
drama and prose often require the audience to discover the “truth” right
alongside the characters (Megan Whalen Turner’s excellent young adult novel The
Thief, for example, manages to hoodwink the reader until the finale). But
to the extent that audiences expect soliloquies, asides, and other
vehicles of dramatic irony in the theater, we take for granted the privilege to
see beyond the surface of things to the underlying truth. We think that
elevated perception is our privilege, even to the extent of “seeing” the future
in the form of the tragedy’s inevitable conclusion.
From our
perch of privileged perception, critics are all too comfortable pointing out
Othello’s blindness. “He mistakes evidence for proof,” we say, citing the unfortunate
incident with the handkerchief. “His perception is flawed.” This may be true,
but it creates a false distinction between Othello’s tragic flaw and the audience’s
imagined clarity. “Poor Othello,” we say, shaking our heads with condescending
sympathy, “if only he hadn’t taken Iago at his word.” Even critics who treat Othello
with more sympathy often believe that with a little close reading, a little
inference, they can “figure Iago out” – get to the truth behind the lies.
The
audience wishes to divide the world between those whom Iago has deceived and
those who “see through him” – not surprisingly, the audience is the only group
to profit by the comparison. Only the audience is aware of Iago’s plan for the
entire play, thanks to the revelatory power of dramatic irony... or so the
theory goes. But in the end the joke is on us.
In spite
of Iago’s declaration “I am not what I am,” critics have persisted in their
attempts to see past Iago’s misdirection in order to find the ‘truth’ of him,
what Iago calls the “native act and figure of my heart.” These attempts have
provided a number of fascinating theories ranging from
Iago-as-motiveless-psychopath to Iago-in-love-with-Othello. But none of these
theories address the climactic moment in the final scene, when Iago shuts out
the audience as surely as his captors: “Demand me nothing. What you know, you
know./ From this time forth I never will speak word” (V.ii.300-301).
From the opening
scene Iago has reserved his most candid moments for the audience, whether
offering insight into the formation of his plans (“I have’t! It is engendered!”)
or commenting on the status of those plans (“The Moor changes already with my
poison”). Following this pattern, we might expect some measure of closure from Iago,
either gloating or lamenting. What we get instead is… silence.
Iago
effectively shuts us out, and for an audience accustomed to hearing Iago’s
words when no one else does, the effect ought to be similar to a bucket of ice
water to the face. Our privilege is abruptly stripped away, leaving us no
closer to the truth than the bumbling Venetians.
Dramatic
irony fails us, indeed it actively tricks us, as Iago reveals that his
illusion of transparency was, in the words of a Venetian Senator, a “pageant to
keep us in false gaze.” At the very moment Iago refuses to speak, the audience realizes
that we are no better off than Roderigo, the poor sap who believes for most of
the play that Iago is lying to everyone else but him.
Iago
freely concedes that “I am not what I am”, yet his audience (whether it is
Roderigo, Othello, or the audience in the theater) persists in the belief that
Iago’s much-vaunted “honesty” is reserved for them alone. Iago’s rhetoric consistently
relies on the message, “I am lying to everyone else but you”; however, the
message underlying this refrain is clearly, “I am lying to you.” This
declaration, like the phrase “I am not what I am,” moves beyond mere deception
into the realm of logical paradox. Each phrase contradicts itself, and this
impossible duality creates an endless circulation of meaning that defies
efforts to constrain it within an intelligible system.
Iago’s
silence strips us of our pretensions and shatters our belief that we see
clearly where Othello does not. In so doing, that silence also represents
Shakespeare’s self-aware treatment of the effects of dramatic irony on an
audience. It is astonishing to me how many critics experience Iago’s resounding
silence – the abrupt termination of dramatic irony – and persist in believing
that an audience is free from Othello’s blindness and vulnerability to
deception. We are aligned more closely with the Moor of Venice than most of us
are willing to acknowledge.
There are
many questions left to answer about the play itself, many tensions that remain
unresolved. In order to grapple with them, however, we must first acknowledge the
flawed nature of our vision, and consequently the limits placed on our
knowledge. Iago’s final words include the parting jab, “What you know, you know”
– if we fail to examine what we actually “know,” to question how we came
to “know” it, then we leave the theater as deluded as Othello himself.
