Some Thoughts on Shakespeare's Othello

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.