SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY AS CHIVALRIC ROMANCE
Chapter 6
OTHELLO: COURTLY LOVE AND CHIVALRIC JUSTICE
I
Othello is romance from first to last. It contains most of what we associate with the
genre: a chivalric knight, a disdainful lady, a false steward, and an infidel foe; reports of
heroic adventures and dangerous travels in far-away places; hints of battles, sieges, and
single combat; and courtly love. It refers to magic and witchcraft; and exotic foods,
drugs, and poisons—all contributing to a pervasive, romantic atmosphere. In addition,
the protagonist is an exotic innovation, a black foreigner, a Moor; the locale of the action
moves toward the mysterious east; and the threat to Venice arises from the distant and
unseen Turks even farther to the east than Cyprus. So the love of Othello and
Desdemona is not the only reason for regarding the play as a romance.
None of the play’s romance features occurs in its source, a story in Giraldi Cinthio’s
Gli Hecatommithi (III, 7), an artifact of Italian renaissance fiction. A comparison of his
story and Shakespeare’s play throws these features of romance into high relief, but they
have not received their due. For example, not until some four decades ago had Othello
been identified, not generically as a soldier, but specifically as a chivalric knight, a figure
linking both war and love.1 Even so, that identification remains undeveloped with
regard to the dominant issues introduced in the first act and involved throughout the
rest of the play. As we shall see, the debate on the Turkish threat of war and the trial of
Othello’s courtship of Desdemona define the terms of later action in the play.
We have ignored the many and manifest features of chivalric romance in Othello, not
only for the reasons of cultural history since the seventeenth century given earlier, in
Chapter 1, but also out of concerns which impress us as more important and urgent in
our times. Most pressing may be those of gender and race; almost as pressing may be
our discontent with things—and people—military.2 Setting aside these reasons and
concerns, we still confront a host of difficult and puzzling issues. For Othello has long
been regarded as a problematic play, not least because it does not emphasize the great
public issues of rule, succession, or legitimacy which we associate with the histories and
the other three major tragedies, or with power—getting and spending it—in the classical
tragedies. Indeed, the Turkish threat of war seems to end almost before it begins. In
view of these differences, scholars have called Othello a domestic tragedy because it
focuses most of its energies on the relationship between Othello and Desdemona, or,
more precisely, on the jealousy with which Iago infuses Othello.
And it is problematic even here because, for hundreds of years, Othello’s jealousy has
seemed so implausible. Of course, we, as the audience, have the advantage of Othello;
we know that Iago’s insinuations and slanders are false. But we also see them work even
though we know that Desdemona is innocent of the slightest hint of infidelity or Cassio
1
I made this identification and explored its implications in “Shakespeare’s Use of Medieval Romance Elements
in His Major Tragedies,” Diss. University of Michigan, 1973 (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1974). The
identification appeared in general circulation in the 1980s, perhaps first in Mark Rose, “Othello’s Occupation:
Shakespeare and the Romance of Chivalry,” English Literary Renaissance, 15.3 (1985): 293-311, especially 294.
2
Almost all contemporary criticism of Othello focuses on the factors of gender, race, and the like. In the
service of such criticism is Vaughan, which provides background materials on these factors.
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of betrayal. So the challenge is to understand whether Othello’s sudden change from a
trusting and loving to a suspicious and jealous husband makes sense. Indeed, the
problem of explaining Othello’s sudden swing from exalted love to extreme jealousy—
that is, strictly speaking, what disposes Othello to believe Desdemona unfaithful to him—
is one of the cruxes, if not the major crux, of Othello criticism.
There are three basic approaches to this crux. The first approach, although it does
not regard characters as true-to-life persons with an off-stage life, regards them as trueto-life within the limits of their on-stage existence and assumes that dramatic characters
act according to ordinary principles of human character or motivation. It sees Othello’s
jealousy as an activation of his vulnerability to insinuation because of flaws in character,
deficiencies of breeding or background, or lack of suitable experience as—the list is
long—an alien to Venice; a black or not-so-black-but-still-quite-dark man; an African; a
Moor; a Mauritanian; a convert to Christianity; a senior; a rude, crude military man; a
social naïf; a sexual inept—and thus a man insecure in himself and unsure of his position
in unfamiliar surroundings who suddenly finds himself in an unexpected relationship
late in life with a young, white, beautiful, and much admired and desired woman. Earlier
critics stressed notions related to Othello’s psycho-social-occupational standing.3 Many
critics of recent vintage have emphasized similar matters of gender, race, and otherness.
But the proliferation of modern, nuanced interpretations of this sort suggests that they
fail to persuade. Everyone tries to explain the virtually instant and evidently implausible
onset of Othello’s jealousy, but no one succeeds where others have failed. No one has
suggested the possibility that the entire approach accounting for Othello’s jealousy in
terms of sociology, psychology, or occupation is misconceived.
Ironically, factors underlying this criticism, early or recent, parallel, if they do not
rely on, Othello’s inventory of inadequacies in his effort to rationalize his suspicion of
Desdemona’s adultery. He ruminates,
“Haply, for I am blacke,
And have not those soft parts of Conversation
That Chamberers have: Or for I am declin’d
Into the vale of yeares (yet that’s not much)
Shee’s gone” (III, iii, 263-267).
3
Bradley assumes a Victorian social standard to explain Othello’s jealousy: “any husband would have been
troubled” by “the warnings of so good a friend” (192). But he does not explain why Othello so easily distrusts
his even better friend Cassio. Leavis, moved by between-war disillusion with the military, explains Othello’s
jealousy as a result of a soldier’s lack of social sophistication; camp and campaign have not prepared him for
the challenges of courtship or marriage in the sophisticated social milieu of Venice or even Cyprus (136-159,
esp. 159.) But the play gives no hint that his life in the field unfits him for love in the big city.
Leavis expressly states the tacit assumption: “no development will be acceptable unless the behaviour it
imposes on him is reconcilable with our notions of ordinary psychological consistency” (157). Critics are silent
in embarrassment at Bradley’s chauvinism, but they remain vocal in agreement with Leavis’s anti-military
sentiments. For Othello’s career, see C. F. Burgess, “Othello’s Occupation,” Shakespeare Quarterly, XXVI.2
(1975): 208-13. Whether modern ideas of social or psychological behavior can help us understand characters
from their conduct in a play four centuries old is problematic. Bradley’s and Leavis’s ideas turn out, not to be
truths “for all time,” but the biases of each “age.” Generally, this approach, however pursued, patronizes
Shakespeare; it values him most when, as we read him, he conforms to, and so confirms, our views by seeming
to anticipate them. I hope my reliance on a literary tradition well-known to Shakespeare and his
contemporaries helps me avoid or at least mitigate some of these biases. But what I make of it and how I
interpret this play (as well as the other three plays) in its light may be more biased then I (can) realize.
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But Othello lacks conviction in any or all of these factors; he merely adduces them in an
effort to rationalize the infidelity which he imputes to Desdemona. Critics overlook the
import of “Or” and the parenthetical “(yet that’s not much).” The former demotes these
items to a grab-bag of possibilities, none of which carries much conviction with Othello,
and the latter signals the intrusion of reality into his fantasy rationalizing his deception.
Nevertheless, critics have stressed the factors to which a shocked and confused Othello
resorts, which he undermines, and which the play earlier raises and rejects or ignores.
The only evidence for any of these factors comes tainted as the poisoned fruits of
others’ prejudice and Othello’s after-the-fact rationalizing. The antidotes are evident in
the play. First, there is the earlier normative touchstone in the play on these matters.
Once the Duke pronounces Othello “farre more Faire then Blacke” (I, iii, 290), Venetian
higher society at its best—Brabantio excepted, of course—finds nothing incongruous or
unfitting about the love and marriage of a black general of proven ability to a white
daughter of a senator. Finally, there is that same judgment in the second half of the
play, when others express their incredulity at Othello’s conduct.4
The second approach invokes dramaturgic legerdemain, according to which
Shakespeare sought to achieve the powerful effects of a radical contrast between a loving
and a jealous husband, without regard for the plausibility of the sudden change from
one state of being to another. The diametric states are givens, and the link between
them relies on the convention of the slanderer believed.5 The problem is that the
convention is nowhere identified and does not address the fundamental issue: the
slanderer’s credibility. A convention involving belief implies something believed. The
slanderer cannot talk nonsense; he must say something appealing or plausible to the
hearer. So this appeal to this convention discourages closer scrutiny of the protagonist
and thus avoids issues of susceptibility or plausibility. The approach has long been
rightly discredited because its stick-figure, stage-trick interpretations substitute
sensationalism for significance. Still, the approach had value. It offered a corrective to
the tendency to interpret characters as if they were people, and it stressed a fact, until
then rarely admitted, that Shakespeare, in writing plays for the stage, owed a debt to the
literary and dramatic conventions of his time.
Both of these approaches occasionally assume or adopt some part of a third
approach, a formal analysis of Iago’s rhetorical craftiness.6
4
This approach has allowed silly or unseemly speculations about Othello’s sex life. Some critics seem to
assume that, by virtue of his life in the field or his first sex with a loved one, Othello is either a virgin or a naïf.
But his and Desdemona’s remarks about the sexual pleasures in marriage seem entirely sensible, healthy, and
robust. That his jealousy occurs shortly after a delayed consummation serves only a post hoc, propter hoc
argument. No evidence in the play justifies a suspicion that sexual inadequacy or incompatibility is an issue.
As a result, we know nothing—indeed, have no basis for knowing anything—of such matters, certainly less than
we know or can know about a child whom Lady Macbeth claims to have nursed. So I do not consider Othello
susceptible to Iago’s slanders because he has been disoriented by a first sexual encounter or disappointed by a
flawed or failed one with Desdemona; or because he has been overwhelmed, surprised, or threatened by her
sexually aggressive conduct, or unusual or insatiable sexual demands, on her part. W. Holmes, “Othello: Is’t
Possible?,” Midwest Modern Language Association (1970), is a notorious instance of such views on both Othello
and Desdemona.
5
E. E. Stoll, Art and Artifice in Shakespeare: A Study in Dramatic Contrast and Illusion (1933: New York: Barnes
and Noble, 1962), 6-55, first advanced this approach. Othello is his epitome.
6
For an extraordinary interpretation which makes Iago’s rhetorical skills all-powerful to induce Othello’s
jealousy, see Brian Vickers, Appropriating Shakespeare: Contemporary Critical Quarrels (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1993), 152-162.
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I take a middle way in dealing with Othello’s jealousy. I address the possibilities of
what I call the “literary psychology” inherent in the figure of the knight. This complex
of character, motivations, and more is available for artistic selection and emphasis from
the cumulative literary representations of knights involved in courtly love in chivalric
romances. I interpret Othello as a chivalric knight—a fighter for state and church, for
justice and faith; and a lover. To consider him as such is to address military, political,
and religious conflicts as well as amatory issues juxtaposing courtly and Christian love.
The way in which Shakespeare colors some of these conflicts and issues may be
startling and perhaps unsettling, for an element of anti-Semitism, not, so far as I know,
acknowledged by scholars, occurs in this play as one way of characterizing the state’s
and Othello’s enemy, and coloring the issue of justice. On a different scale, the antithesis
between Othello and Iago represents a conflict of contending world views. These
Weltanschauungs find expression in related literary types: the former, in the romance of
chivalry; the latter, in the romance of low-life. In this conflict between the idealistic and
the materialistic, Shakespeare uses the resources of romance to explore different
worldviews struggling for predominance at this point of balance between the late
medieval and the early modern periods.7
II
Cinthio’s story sketches the characters and plot in Shakespeare’s play.8 It offers few
details about any of his characters, whose names and spelling I use to distinguish them
from Shakespeare’s characters, and no details of the courtship between the Moor and
Disdemona.
There was once in Venice a Moor, a very gallant man, who, because he was personally valiant and
had given proof in warfare of great prudence and skilful energy, was very dear to the Signoria, who in
rewarding virtuous actions ever advance the interests of the Republic. It happened that a virtuous
Lady of wondrous beauty called Disdemona, impelled not by female appetite but by the Moor's good
qualities, fell in love with him, and he, vanquished by the Lady's beauty and noble mind, likewise was
enamoured of her. So propitious was their mutual love that, although the Lady's relatives did all they
could to make her take another husband, they were united in marriage and lived together in such
concord and tranquillity while they remained in Venice, that never a word passed between them that
was not loving.9
In sum, the Moor is black, brave, and successful in his military services to Venice. We
learn later that he dons armor for his trip to Cyprus, but we get no details to suggest
chivalric armor. Disdemona is beautiful and high-minded. The Moor and Disdemona
are virtuous, and the love between them is mutually satisfactory during their time in
Venice. The story neither describes nor characterizes the Corporal or the Ensign—Cassio
or Iago, respectively, in Shakespeare—in any, much less in rich, detail, as the play does.
7
Many critics “complain of its lack of supernatural reference or its limited metaphysical range” (Norman
Sanders, ed., Othello, The New Cambridge Shakespeare [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984], 30). I
take these issues to be represented on a human scale and plane, morally and socially, instead.
8
Bullough, VII: 193-238; and Muir, Sources, 182-196.
9
My text is Bullough, VII: 239-252, for this passage, 242. Horace Howard Furness, ed., Othello, New Variorum
Shakespeare (1886; New York: Dover, 1963), 376-389, is another source for this text and presents the story in
both Italian and English.
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Since Shakespeare follows Cinthio’s plot closely,10 only significant differences matter
here. First, Shakespeare adds almost everything about the Turks. Cinthio’s reason for
the Moor’s assignment to Cyprus is a rotation of forces facing the Turks; Shakespeare’s,
the threat of a reported Turkish invasion. Later references to the Turks as barbarians in
presumed contrast with civilized Venetians reinforce military, political, and religious
conflicts between Venice and the Ottoman Empire. Second, Shakespeare adds everything
about the courtship between Othello and Desdemona. Cinthio assigns no role in it to the
Corporal and relies entirely on the Ensign’s slanders and manipulations to arouse the
Moor’s jealousy; Shakespeare makes Cassio an intermediary and thus exploits the
ambiguity of the intermediary’s role in courtly romance to prompt Othello’s jealousy.
And third, Shakespeare departs from his source on the matter of motivation, or
susceptibility, to jealousy. In Cinthio, the motivation is racial more than ethnic.
Responding to the Moor’s first angry outburst against her pleas to restore the Corporal,
who, though “so dear a friend,” had been dismissed for a minor offense, Disdemona
comments that “you Moors are so hot by nature that any little thing moves you to anger
and revenge.”11 In Shakespeare, Othello’s jealousy has little or nothing to do with
anything inborn although it may seem otherwise because it happens so suddenly, so
easily, so apparently inexplicably.
In short, Cinthio’s story gives only a mention in hinting the Turkish threat and no
help in understanding Othello and Desdemona’s courtship. For both, we must look to
other works which Shakespeare might have considered in writing Othello.
III
Most of what Cinthio’s story from Gli Hecatommithi lacks Robert Greene’s Orlando
Furioso supplies; his play is almost certainly a source of Shakespeare’s.12 Greene’s
dramatized version of the Orlando story differs greatly from the narrative versions in his
sources—Ludovico Ariosto’s original, John Harington’s translation, or both. Shakespeare
likely knew Greene’s play. It was performed often, perhaps by both the Queen’s Men and
Strange’s Men, and it was published twice, in 1594 and 1599. If, as some believe,
Shakespeare was associated with the Queen’s Men, he may have known the play by
acting in it. The indebtedness of Shakespeare’s to Greene’s play appears in the
similarities of the protagonists, their speeches on love, and the contexts of those
speeches; the resemblance of characters and plots leading to jealousy; and the identity of
specific allusions or language in similar contexts—“savage Mores & Anthropagei” (119)
in Greene, “Antropophague” (I, iii, 144) in Shakespeare, for one especially arresting
instance. What matters about the identification of this source is that we can see that
Greene’s play provided a model to Shakespeare for using the features of courtly love to
induce jealousy in a knight who loves a truly faithful lady.
The link between characterization and motivation is one of the ways in which we can
see that Shakespeare preferred Greene’s play to Cinthio’s story. Cinthio stressed his
protagonist’s identity as a Moor, not, despite his valor and victories, as a soldier, much
less as a knight; and rendered the Moor’s jealousy plausible by using the folk psychology
of Moors. Greene’s sources provide different characterization and mixed motivation;
10
Bullough, VII: 215-316; and Muir, Sources, 196.
Bullough, VII: 245.
12
See the Endnote to this chapter for my detailed argument, summarized here, on this point.
11
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Orlando is a French chivalric knight. Like Cinthio, Greene used a bit of folk psychology
to make Orlando’s jealousy plausible, but the psychology was more one of national ethos
than racial nature. When Sacrepant plots to deceive Orlando about Angelica and Medor,
he remarks, “Now than the French no Nation under heaven/Is sooner tutcht with stings
of jealozie” (541-542). But Greene did not rely only on folk psychology; he also
exploited a chivalric knight’s familiarity with the devices of courtly love. To motivate
Orlando’s jealousy, he uses the appurtenances of courtly love to manipulate the chivalric
Orlando into believing in their love. The scene is clumsy and its machinations awkward,
but it shows a dramatist supplementing ethnic propensities with motives acquired in the
shaping of character and conduct.
In Greene’s and Shakespeare’s plays, a villain seeks revenge against a knight secure in
a lady’s love. In both, they pursue similar stratagems. In Orlando Furioso, Sacrepant
plots revenge on Angelica by “offring prejudice/Unto Orlando” (532-533); he executes it
by exploiting the familiarity between Angelica and Medor. Entering after they appear
together, Sacrepant states that their private walks and talks “well may breed suspition of
some love” (540). At once, Sacrepant, with ultimate success, arranges for some devices
of courtly love—love sonnets hung from trees and their names carved in them—to
deceive Orlando. Similarly, in Othello, after the trial in Venice, Iago hits on the same
general approach, “to abuse Othello’s eares,/That he [Cassio] is too familiar with his
wife” (I, iii, 395-396). Later, in like circumstances, Iago notes that the courtly manners
between Desdemona and Cassio may be the means of their undoing and Othello’s;
observing Cassio’s courtesies, he lowers, “I will give [gyve] thee in thine owne Courtship”
(II, i, 170). Iago does so, less by exploiting the circumstances of Cassio’s private
conversation with Desdemona and his stealthy departure from her than by exploiting
new information about his role in Othello’s courtship which arises immediately
thereafter and gives that role such great significance in retrospect.
With Greene as his model, Shakespeare delineated Othello as a chivalric knight and
represented his courtship of Desdemona according to the conventions of courtly love.
Shakespeare did not altogether dispense with the folk psychology and its associated
racial and ethnic prejudices which he found in Cinthio and Greene; instead, he put them
in the words of the morally or socially deficient or degenerate: Brabantio, Roderigo, Iago,
and, in his jealousy, Othello. In containing multitudes, Shakespeare has a little
something for everyone. But we err in taking their word for it and thinking that such
factors render Othello susceptible to jealousy.
IV
Most of the central characters in Othello are abundantly detailed as figures either of
chivalric romance or of social or literary types associated with them. We have Othello, a
knight-errant; Cassio, a knight, courtier, and intermediary; and Roderigo, a courtly
lover.13 We also have Desdemona, a fair lady, ardent in love, and alternately assertive
and submissive in marriage. This spectrum from the chivalric to the courtly captures the
range of moral and social nuances relevant to the themes of war and love. Although
13
Iago, a sort of false steward, fits in differently, as discussed below. A similar spectrum occurs in Hamlet: the
ghost of the father as a chivalric knight given to angry outbursts; Fortinbras, a chivalric knight disciplined by
his uncle’s advice and his adherence to law; Hamlet himself, a courtier studied in theology and skilled in
dueling; Osric, a courtier with a stylish lack of substance.
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many details about Othello and Desdemona show their affinity with knights and ladies of
chivalric romance, I adduce only those important to my reading of the play.14
Othello is a chivalric knight who “fetch[es his] life and being,/From Men of Royall
Seige” (I, ii, 21-22) and knows his “Services…done the Signorie” (18) but declines to
boast his birth or his merits. Instead, he reports the tales of far-flung, heroic actions
which impressed Brabantio and appealed to Desdemona. Roderigo identifies him as a
knight when he dismisses Othello as “an extravagant, and wheeling Stranger,/Of here,
and every where” (I, i, 136-137)—that is, a knight-errant. Othello’s autobiographical
account to the Venetian Senate supports this partial identification as a wandering knight:
Her Father…
Still question’d me the Storie of my life,
From yeare to yeare: the Battaile, Sieges, Fortune,
That I have past.
I ran it through, even from my boyish daies,
To th’ very moment that he bad me tell it.
Wherein I spoke of most disastrous chances:
Of moving Accidents by Flood and Field,
Of haire-breadth scapes i’ th’ imminent deadly breach;
Of being taken by the Insolent Foe,
And sold to slavery. Of my redemption thence,
And portance in my Travellours historie.
Wherein of Antars vast, and Desarts idle,
Rough Quarries, Rocks, Hills, whose head touch heaven,
It was my hint to speake. Such was my Processe,
And of the Canibals that each others eate,
The Antropophague, and men whose heads
Grew beneath their shoulders (I, iii, 128-145).
Thus, Othello summarizes the details given in response to Brabantio’s request for “the
Storie of my life.”
The briefly mentioned military adventures presumably allude to Othello’s deeds in
the service of the state which earned him the esteem of the Duke and the Venetian
Senate, and the attention of Brabantio. Known to them, Othello modestly refrains from
repeating or elaborating them. Instead, he emphasizes the other circumstances which
have won him the affection of Desdemona. Although he later acts on a different concept
of honor, he first and finally defines it in terms of service to Venice. On Iago’s report of
Roderigo’s “scurvy, and provoking termes/Against your Honor” (I, ii, 7-8), Othello
confidently asserts, “My Services…/Shall out-tongue his Complaints” (18-19). Indeed,
his faithful service has been so great that, despite Montano’s acknowledged ability, the
Venetian Senate insists on Othello’s assuming command in Cyprus.
Othello’s autobiography also indicates opposition to or combat against unusual foes.
His references to “Canibals that each others eate” and “Antropophague” point to foes
14
I offer one minor detail as an example of the number and variety of the details derived from chivalric
romances. Othello reports that “since these Armes of mine, had seven yeares pith,/Till now, some nine Moones
wasted, they have us’d/Their deerest action, in the Tented Field” (I, iii, 84-86). In life as well as chivalric
romance, seven is “the age at which the sons of knights were made squires” (Carl Stephenson, Mediaeval
Feudalism [l942; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956], 46.) In Guy of Warwick, his steward raises Reinbrun,
Guy’s son, from birth. The mention of his beauty and boldness at the age of seven (8413-8420) suggests his
readiness for chivalric training.
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like, but more credible than, the giants or monsters of chivalric romances.15 As a knight,
Othello regards whatever opposes him as monstrous, as his recurrent use of the terms
“monster” or “monstrous” later suggests, and takes action against it.
But to think of Othello as a chivalric warrior used only to personal combat is a
mistake. Shakespeare is at pains to indicate his considerable competence as governor
and administrator as well as knight and justicer (my neologism to mean enforcer of law
and order to ensure justice). The emphasis on administration may derive more from late
medieval and early renaissance books on governance than from chivalric romances
depicting the duties of stewards, but the audience would have viewed even these duties
in defense of the state as chivalric.16 Othello knows his duties. Seeking the Duke’s and
the senators’ permission for Desdemona to accompany him to Cyprus, he urges that they
not think that “I will your serious and great businesse scant/When she is with me” (I, iii,
267-268). He understands that their “great businesse” includes the administration of
the island of Cyprus. Thus, as a competent governor, he directs a Herald to proclaim the
triumph over the Turks and a public celebration of that victory and of his marriage,
takes appropriate judicial action after quelling a drunken disorder by his immediate
subordinate, makes reports to the Senate, and inspects the defenses of the island.
Shakespeare matches his emphasis on Othello’s administrative and judicial
competence with an emphasis on his diplomacy and self-control. Othello knows the
respect due both rank and age, and the time to fight and not to. Although Iago has
attempted to arouse his anger and urged him to flee a threatening mob, and offers to
fight Roderigo as it approaches, Othello stands firm, in control of himself and the
situation: “Keepe up your bright Swords, for the dew will rust them. Good Signior, you
shall more command with years, then with your Weapons” (I, ii, 59-61). But Shakespeare
also shows the undermining effects of jealousy in the contrast in Othello as a knight
before and after he becomes jealous. Addressing those involved in the street brawl on
Cyprus, Othello reproaches them: “To Manage private, and domesticke Quarrell” (II, iii,
215). But agreeing to a plan to spy on Desdemona, Othello assures Iago that he need
“Feare not my government” (III, iii, 256). The word “government” here means what
“Manage private, and domesticke Quarrell” means; Othello’s pursuit of a course of action
which he has reproved in others marks his decline as a knight. Later, when Lodovico
tells Desdemona that Venice has deputed “Cassio in his Government” (IV, i, 237), the
term conveys its significance of public good order and discipline, and thereby contrasts
with Othello’s misgovernment. Othello’s competence in these incidents corrects the view
that one reason for his change of character is his inexperience in non-military
circumstances.
In the extreme, this view holds that soldiership also unfits one for marriage. But
contemporary cultural traditions do not show that a military background unfits a
15
The generalized geographic descriptions probably derive from travel books widely current (Furness, 56-57n;
and M. R. Ridley, ed., Othello, 7th edn., Arden Shakespeare [London: Methuen, 1962], 29n.). However, for the
specific references to “Canibals that each others eate” and “Antropophague,” see the Endnote to this chapter.
For the often vaguely described giants and monsters of older chivalric romances, travel books provided the
unusual and mysterious people and creatures from the frontiers of exploration (or the imagination). Thus,
they poured new wines into old skins—a change toward greater credibility.
16
According to Ferguson, Chivalric Tradition, “The synthesis of chivalric idealism and civic humanism had in
fact significantly broadened the chivalric ideal of honor so as to encompass the ends of public service” (125),
by which he means other than military service like effective management on behalf of the Crown.
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warrior for marriage; on the contrary, only an occasional story shows a married love
distorted by uxoriousness and thereby enervating, rather than inspiring, a knight.17
Chivalric romance presupposes that a man’s performance in perilous adventures,
especially armed combat, establishes his suitability for love and marriage, and nothing in
Othello challenges this assumption. Moreover, Othello’s person itself suggests his fitness
for marriage. As Iago says,
The Moore …
Is of a constant, loving, Noble Nature,
And I dare thinke, he’le prove to Desdemona
A most deere husband (II, i, 288-291).
We may rely on Iago’s word here because it is occurs in a soliloquy and is contrary to
self-interest. Of course, here as so often elsewhere, Iago’s words have a double, darker
meaning: “deere” indeed, as in “costly.”
The challenge to Othello’s love for Desdemona comes not from any deficiency of
background, but from two other sources: conflicting kinds of honor, and a competing
love of God, as it is expressed in other Christian terms. Othello speaks of his escape from
captivity as a “redemption” and frequently appeals to “heaven.” Iago asserts the relative
strength or weakness of Othello’s Christian convictions by saying that his love for
Desdemona is greater; for her, Othello would
renownce his Baptisme,
All Seales, and Simbols of redeemed sin:
His Soule is so enfetter’d to her Love,
That she may make, unmake, do what the [she] list,
Even as her Appetite shall play the God” (II, iii, 343-347).
Iago exaggerates. We do not see Othello’s love for Desdemona as his god. We do see him
as a loving, not an uxorious, husband, as when he initially resists her requests for
Cassio’s prompt restoration to rank and place. But we also see that his jealousy, as great
as his love, manifests itself in acts contrary to the Christian mercy which she invokes and
he ignores. Acting like a chivalric knight doing justice more than following faith, he acts
in a manner akin to the renunciation of both. As I shall show, this renunciation is cast in
terms compatible with one, if not the only, widely understood alternative to Christian
love and mercy, namely, Jewish law and justice, as they were understood at the time.
Although in most respects Othello is part and parcel of the type of chivalric knight,
obviously, his blackness is atypical of chivalric knights. For the heroes of chivalric
romance are almost invariably white (and Christian), and the champions of opposing
forces are almost equally invariably black (and Mohammedan).18 The interplay of black
and white, as chromatic facts and moral indicators, especially in conjunction with
matters of faith, is varied, if not complex, when it arises in chivalric romance. For the
most part, color is a first and suggestive, not a final or determinative, indicator of moral
condition or status. In cases of conversion, color raises, at least latently, the question of
17
Paul A. Jorgensen, Shakespeare’s Military World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 259-264,
expresses some reservations about the idea that Othello was fitted for the camp, not the court, but in the end,
he accepts it. However, he says nothing on this point relevant to Othello’s jealousy.
18
Today’s pejorative term reflects yesterday’s terminology in chivalric romances; such a champion is a
“Mahound,” a follower of Mohammed.
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sincerity and stability. On the one hand, in Bevis of Hampton, Bevis defeats the
Mohammedan black giant Ascaparde, secures his conversion in faith but not a change of
color, and trusts him in battle and with his wife. Ascaparde betrays his master in both
instances, reverts to his original faith and, as it were, remains true to his color. On the
other hand, in the King of Tars, when a black heathen marries a white Christian princess,
his conversion transforms him into a white as well as a Christian.
Shakespeare probably did not know this romance, but he did know the conventional
aesthetic and moral significance of black and white. He seems not to regard blackness as
inherently ugly or base. Except for Roderigo, Iago, and Brabantio, other characters pay
little regard to Othello’s racial characteristics as aesthetically displeasing or morally
repugnant. Even those three pay no attention to them after Act I, after the Duke’s word
on the subject serves to dismiss their easy prejudices: “If Vertue no delighted Beautie
lacke,/Your Son-in-law is farre more Faire then Blacke” (I, iii, 289-290). Emilia identifies
Othello’s moral blackness after he tells her that he killed Desdemona; she exclaims, “Oh
the more Angell she, and you the blacker Divell” (V, ii, l30-131). Here Othello’s
blackness is entirely moral, it is earned, it is his. So a certain moral ambiguity abides in
Othello, and its origin may be partly attributable to the different ways in which chivalric
romances treat the baptism of black heathens. The complexity of this issue is most
evident at the end of the play, when Othello the hero slays himself as his own enemy.
Desdemona resembles ladies of chivalric romances in both her delineation and its
style. She is high-born, “Christian” (IV, ii, 82), beautiful, chaste, and educated in the
arts. Her social graces and talents (III, iii, 185) are the renaissance equivalents of
medieval accomplishments thought desirable in a woman. In matters of the heart, she
appears to her father to be all modesty, “a Maiden, never bold” (I, iii, 94), who has
“shun’d/The wealthy curled Deareling of our Nation” (I, ii, 67-68). To Othello, she
appears quite different; as he tells us, she takes the initiative in their courtship:
These things to heare,
Would Desdemona seriously incline:
But still the house Affaires would draw her hence:
Which ever as she could with haste dispatch,
She’ld come againe, and with a greedie eare
Devoure up my discourse. Which I observing,
Tooke once a pliant houre, and found good meanes
To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart,
That I would all my Pilgrimage dilate,
Whereof by parcels she had something heard,
But not instinctively: I did consent,
And often did beguile her of her teares,
When I did speake of some distressefull stroke
That my youth suffer’d: My Storie being done,
She gave me for my paines a world of kisses:
She swore in faith ‘twas strange: ’twas passing strange,
’Twas pittifull: ’twas wondrous pittifull.
She wish’d she had not heard it, yet she wish’d
That Heaven had made her such a man. She thank’d me,
And bad me, if I had a Friend that lov’d her,
I should but teach him how to tell my Story,
And that would wooe her. Upon this hint I spake,
She lov’d me for the dangers I had past,
And I lov’d her, that she did pitty them.
This onely is the witch-craft I have us’d.
Here comes the Ladie: Let her witnesse it (I, iii, 145-170).
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After Desdemona appears, but before she speaks, Brabantio admits the possibility of her
being “halfe the wooer” (I, iii, 176). As a witness, she affirms her assertiveness when she
admits her “downe-right violence, and storme of Fortunes” (249) in loving Othello and
eloping with him. Such assertiveness is not unusual in chivalric romances. We may be
surprised that she seems so forward in giving him a “world of kisses,” but she is no
bolder than some ladies in chivalric romances.19 In King Horn, Rymenild displays little
restraint. In the presence of one disguised as Horn, she immediately begins to “wexe
wild” (300). When Horn himself later visits her, she showers him with kisses. In “The
Book of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere” in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, the
fair maid of Astolat is nowhere behindhand in offering to be Launcelot’s wife or, as her
second choice, his paramour—this in her father’s presence. Desdemona’s part in
initiating the courtship may be more discreet than that of some ladies in chivalric
romances, but it is no less effective. Once Othello takes her “hint,” she acts the proud,
disdainful lady of chivalric romance when, so she tells Othello, she spoke “dispraisingly”
(III, iii, 72) of him to Cassio. But once married and subject to the abuses of Othello’s
jealousy, she reverts to yet another type of lady in romance, the Patient Griselda. All in
all, Desdemona has unmistakable affinities with the ladies of chivalric romances.
Cassio, has affinities with knights in chivalric romances. But our first impression of
him is misleadingly influenced by Iago’s sarcastic claim that he lacks military experience.
Iago scorns him as a “great Arithmatician,” a “Bookish Theoricke” who “never set a
Squadron in the Field” (I, i, 19, 24, 22); and sneers, “Meere pratle (without practice)/Is
all his Souldiership” (26-27). We learn that Iago has lied to Roderigo when Desdemona
reminds Othello that Cassio “Shar’d dangers” (III, iv, 95) with him. We can infer that
Cassio approximates Othello’s prowess as a comrade-in-arms. Cassio’s aggressiveness in
two fights in Cyprus does not suggest timidity in battle. And the choice of Cassio as
Othello’s replacement signifies that he is as sufficient as both Montano, who had
governed and has remained on Cyprus although Othello has replaced him, and Othello,
who has been recalled to Venice. Given the basis of Othello’s failure, we may believe that
Cassio’s assignment signals his ability to defend and govern well an island on the
contested frontier between Venice and the Turkish empire.
Although Othello, despite his rhetorical gestures or self-suasive rationalizing, is not
deficient in speaking or manners, Cassio is as much courtier as knight, and thus polished
in the social graces. He mentions his courtesy after he kisses Emilia on the lips; Iago
mentions it when Cassio kisses his hand in saluting Desdemona; Roderigo mentions it
when he dismisses Iago’s suggestion that Cassio’s manners are a prelude to adultery. His
military prowess, administrative competence, and social graces make Cassio an attractive
person loved by Othello and Desdemona, respected in Venice, and hated by Iago, who
underscores the point by saying of him that “He hath a dayly beauty in his life,/That
makes me ugly” (V, i, 19-20). He is the proper person to act, as he does, as a trusted
intermediary between Othello and Desdemona.
19
Editors who use the folio as their base text often change its “kisses” to the quarto’s “sighes,” usually without
explanation. Pope explains: “Sighs is evidently the true reading. The lady had been forward indeed, to give
him a world of kisses upon the bare recital of his story” (cited in Furness, 159n). The idea of maidenly
propriety continues to the present day. In defense of it, one editor hypothesizes without a hint of evidence
that “Perhaps the compositor had recently been setting a passage in which ‘world of kisses’ occurred, and it
stuck in his mind” (Ridley, 30). Another editor retains “kisses,” with the note that “its plausibility depends on
how forward one imagines Desdemona to be” (Walter Cohen, ed., Othello, The Norton Shakespeare: Based on
the Oxford Edition, eds. Stephen Greenblatt et al. [New York: Norton, 1997], 2110).
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But Cassio is not without the blemish of some moral weaknesses in submitting against
his judgment to Iago’s prompting to drink while on duty and in having a courtesan as a
mistress. His repentance for drunkenness, moving and genuine as it is, does not entirely
remove the taint. His willingness to continue with Bianca so long as he is not seen
“woman’d” (III, iv, 195) also counts against him, for courtly love condemns the love of
prostitutes as shameful and harmful to one’s reputation.20 Still, Iago is too severe a
moralist in suggesting that Cassio’s difficulties are “the fruits of whoring” (V, i, 116). His
failings suggest the inevitable and all-too-human discrepancy between the ideals in his
roles as soldier, courtier, and intermediary; and his actual conduct, which only slightly
taints him. His failings serve other purposes: to effect his demotion and to demonstrate
his devotion to Othello and his respect for Desdemona. His minor vices, consequential in
the action of the play, set off his greater virtues as soldier, courtier, and intermediary.
Roderigo is not a figure like any in chivalric romance but rather a foil to Othello and
Cassio. He is one of the “wealthy curled Deareling” spurned by Desdemona and found
unsuitable by Brabantio. Both before and after Desdemona’s marriage, he employs Iago
as an intermediary—Iago must be the worst of the lot of intermediaries in courtly love—
to prevail on Desdemona with gifts rather than deeds. Refusing to take no for an answer,
he shows himself less foolish than reprehensible in seeking an adulterous liaison with
her. For even he acknowledges that his efforts are “unlawfull solicitation” (IV, ii, 198199). Roderigo’s unchivalric conduct further discredits him. His presence in Cyprus is
attributable, not to the defense of the island from the Turks, but only to his attempt to
court Desdemona. Unlike Cassio, whose social graces complement his military prowess,
Roderigo is also inept with arms. To rouse Roderigo to an attempt on Cassio’s life, Iago
appeals to the conventional belief of courtly love that love inspires valor:
if thou be’st Valiant, (as they say base men being in Love, have then a Nobilitie in their Natures, more
then is native to them) list me” (II, i, 214-217).21
His two attempts on Cassio’s life, despite the advantage of surprise in assaulting
Cassio treacherously in dark streets, fail and show him less honorable than unsuccessful.
He is so inconsequential that Iago only momentarily mentions him as a means of
cuckolding Othello, and the suggestion is mere flattery to the discouraged Roderigo. His
courtship of Desdemona and his incompetence with arms make him, not a character
from chivalric romance, but a representation of a courtly lover debased by attempts to
substitute the giving of gifts for the performance of deeds. He is also a caricature of the
foppish, landed aristocrat. As such, he bears a marked but ignoble resemblance to Sir
Andrew Aguecheek. Like him, Roderigo reforms, but he is late in doing so; his pleasant
vices are fatal to him.
Othello, Cassio, and Roderigo range themselves on a spectrum from the chivalric
knight known for his military and administrative achievements who wins his lady by
courtly wooing; to the knight/courtier who combines military, administrative, and social
graces; to the courtier who lacks any such competencies and substitutes presents for
performance. Whatever their differences, strengths, and weaknesses, all three adhere to
20
Capellanus, 150.
“They say” indicates the axiomatic nature of the proposition; “base men” perhaps unwittingly discloses
Iago’s estimation of Roderigo. Iago perverts by mangling the principle, as we should expect him to do, since he
separates valor from virtue, or “Nobilitie.”
21
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a belief in military honor or courtly love or both; they accept those ideals although they
do not, to differing degrees, live up to them.
V
The courtship between hero and heroine—absent in any detail in Cinthio, present in
a rhetorical contest in Greene—Shakespeare elaborates and exploits in prompting
Othello’s jealousy. I reconstruct this courtship in its narrative, not its presentational,
order. We know that the courtship followed Brabantio’s invitations to Othello to tell the
story of his life. Desdemona, overhearing “parcels” of it, requests that he repeat the
whole of it to her. Othello reiterates his past of strange adventures and heroic deeds.
Her response is openly sympathetic and amorous. To a man not imagining courtship,
she gives a “hint” that he should court her. She “bad” him to proceed and how to do so:
“if I had a Friend that lov’d her,/I should but teach him how to tell my Story,/And that
would wooe her.” Thus, Desdemona not only confesses her love, but also decides on a
manner of courtship before marriage. Taking her “hint,” Othello selects Cassio as their
intermediary, who, Desdemona tells us, many times came “a woing” (III, iii, 71) with
Othello and by himself on Othello’s behalf, for she reports that Cassio defended Othello
when she spoke of him “dispraisingly.” Othello gives Desdemona a handkerchief, “her
first remembrance” (291), as a token of their love. And they maintain the secrecy
required in courtly love. Brabantio is not alone in his ignorance, as Roderigo’s reproach
and Iago’s response at the start of the play make clear. Like Othello and Desdemona’s
courtship, their elopement is a secret until success makes secrecy unnecessary. The
pattern of their courtship is that of courtly love in its premarital rather than its
extramarital form: Othello, the chivalric warrior, who wins his lady on the basis of
proven merit of his military prowess; Desdemona, the high-born and beautiful maiden
who speaks disdainfully of her lover but relents; Cassio, the agreed-upon intermediary; a
token of love; and the secrecy of the entire proceeding. As Othello says, when he aptly
summarizes their courtship, “She loved me for the dangers I had past,/And I lov’d her,
that she did pitty them.” There is probably no more succinct statement of the reciprocal
motives underlying courtly love, a generative prompt of many chivalric romances. As a
result of this courtship, Othello and Desdemona elope and marry in Venice, and
consummate their marriage in Cyprus. All is love between them through the delayed
first night together.
The morning after commences Othello’s jealousy. Once made jealous by Iago’s
insinuations and machinations, Othello attempts to reconcile the disparities between the
woman he has regarded as a loving lady and now regards as an unfaithful wife,
rationalizes her loss of affection for him by reciting the prejudices which Iago has
indicated as causes, and, thus persuaded, then self-persuaded, pursues a course of
revenge until he kills Desdemona. He tries to explain to himself what the audience
knows needs no explanation, for no infidelity has occurred or apparently had a chance
of occurring. He cites his color, manners, and age. These factors do not explain
Othello’s jealousy to us; they explain it to Othello.
Between the love and the jealousy are the change and its proximate cause: Cassio’s
role as intermediary and its meaning to Shakespeare and his audience in light of the
English chivalric romance tradition, especially courtly love and its stage adaptations. In
romance after romance, an intermediary’s purpose is to promote the love between a
knight and lady, and his role is to serve as a trusted emissary between them. But his
practice is often to woo for himself, sometimes at her urging, usually with success.
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So the intermediary is an ambiguous figure, taken as trustworthy but prone to
suspicion because a knight and a lady know his purpose and his practice.22 A knight
begins by trusting a friend as an intermediary but ends, when he comes to suspect
otherwise, by being less surprised by what has occurred than outraged by what should
not have. Whatever suggests an intermediary’s untrustworthiness readily arouses a
knight’s latent fear of betrayal, suspicion of infidelity, loss of honor, and insane jealousy,
which often leads to revenge on the intermediary or the lady or both. These responses
reflect his perception of what to the audience is a literary convention; to him, a possible
reality—the faithless intermediary. And, it is important to note, the dynamics of sudden
jealousy reflect the easy shift in a knight’s self-perception of himself in relation to his
lady and his intermediary. The change from love to jealousy can occur, and quickly, not
necessarily because the facts change, but invariably because the perceptions do.
If we now look at the turning point between Othello’s love and his jealousy in Act III,
scene iii, we find the fact of Cassio’s role in the courtship revealed for the first time and
that fact exploited for all which it is worth. Until this moment, Iago has plotted to
ensnare them all—Othello, Desdemona, Cassio—in the trammels of Cassio’s courtship.
Speaking of Cassio, Iago mutters threateningly “to abuse Othello’s eares,/That he is too
familiar with his wife” and to “give thee in thine owne Courtship.” These threats
articulate a strategic intent, not a tactical plan, because Iago does not know about
Cassio’s role in the courtship. Although he registers disapproval when Cassio stealthily
departs from Desdemona—“Hah? I like not that” (III, iii, 35)—nothing comes of it. Iago
is as much in the dark about Cassio’s role as we are. But Iago is alert to any possibility;
he adjusts and refines his plot at every opportunity and is ready to act when it presents
itself to achieve his revenge.
After Desdemona and Othello establish that Cassio has just departed, she belabors
him on Cassio’s behalf; indeed, she nags him to meet, dine, and reconcile with Cassio. At
first, he off-handedly grants her request, and she makes his manner of doing so an issue.
Dissatisfied with the matter or manner of his response, she expresses dismay that he
would delay his prompt dispatch of her urgent request. Disbelieving, she argues
expeditious action because of Cassio’s special relationship with them both:
What? Michael Cassio,
That came a woing with you? and so many a time
(When I have spoke of you dispraisingly)
Hath tane your part (III, iii, 70-73).
To this remonstrance, Othello surrenders: “Let him come when he will:/I will deny thee
nothing” (75-76). Now dissatisfied with his capitulation or the manner of it, and still
thinking herself the lady-to-be-won, she persists:
when I have a suite
Wherein I meane to touch your Love indeed,
It shall be full of poize, and difficult waight,
And fearefull to be granted (III, iii, 80-83).
Othello repeats: “I will deny thee nothing” (83). When she leaves, he declaims his
22
I discuss the literary tradition of the intermediary in Chapter 3.
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admiration and love for her: “Excellent wretch: Perdition catch my Soule/But I do love
thee: and when I love thee not,/Chaos is come againe (III, iii, 90-92). Thus far, there is
no jealousy or even a hint of jealousy.
We see the powerful irony of these lines in retrospect, but our position of retrospect
is not scenes later, as Othello’s jealousy develops, but lines later, as it starts. For in the
next three lines, the first of which interrupts the rapt Othello, Iago initiates his assault
with the insinuation which renders him jealous: “My Noble Lord …/Did Michael
Cassio/When he [F; Q: you] woo’d my Lady, know of your love?” (III, iii, 93,94-95).23 The
question harkens back to the fact new to Iago as well as to us just a few lines earlier.
Whether Iago utters his question with incredulity, suspicion, or both, it relies on and
23
To see the world in a grain of sand is, in editing and interpreting Shakespeare, to inspect the implications of
different pronouns at this point in the play, in the two earliest texts of Othello: “Did Michael Cassio / When
[someone] woo’d my Lady, know of your love?” The 1622 quarto reads “you”; the 1623 folio reads “he.” What
is unusual about this difference is its treatment by recent editors of the play. All select F as their copy text, all
emend F to Q, but none explains this emendation.
So this emendation is both strange and revealing—strange because unanimous, and revealing because
silent. By contrast, recent editors consider or contest other pairs of substantive differences between F and Q. In
some notable cases, decisions to emend F to Q involve aesthetic—F’s “kisses” (I, iii, 159) versus Q’s “sighes”—or
ethical—F’s “Judean” (V, ii, 347) versus Q’s “Indian”—not textual, considerations. In any event, these
emendations, although they affect meaning, do so locally, not globally, and so have limited effects on an
understanding of the play as a whole. The F: he; Q: you crux is far more substantive and far more significant
than these much-discussed cruxes because it suggests greatly different relationships among the characters. Yet
even Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor have nothing to say in justification of this emendation.
In a play in which the protagonist becomes homicidally jealous, this crux should count for something, but
recent editors apparently think not. Their unanimous, silent decision to emend F to Q speaks volumes about
editorial principles, practices, and professions thereof. For the usual reasons for the emendation are null and
void. Textual corruption is not an issue, and assumed nonsense implies that the nonsense was undetected by
Shakespeare, his company, and his audience over years of rehearsal and production. Their familiarity with the
literary tradition of the intermediary in courtly romance made sense of Othello’s jealousy.
Both texts make sense, but the difference in sense is considerable. Q implies nothing and insinuates
everything about Cassio as an intermediary. Q is vague, indirect, non-committal. Contemporary readers or
audiences supplied the traditional suspicion of intermediaries. Modern readers or audiences must rely on
irrelevant considerations or latent biases, or Iago’s wink-and-nod machinations in action or language and,
given the continuing critical puzzle about Othello’s jealousy, still not understand its sudden onset, as discussed
earlier. By contrast, F asserts that Cassio was courting Desdemona before Cassio agreed to act as Othello’s
intermediary. F is specific, direct, and shocking. It means—that is, it requires—that Iago, who is quick and has
the time, considers the fact which Desdemona has disclosed and contorts it into an imputed fact of enormously
slanderous insinuation. Indeed, he achieves a trifecta of slanders intensely focused by imputed fact. F means
that Cassio wooed Desdemona, that Othello wooed her, and the both wooed her at the same time. It means that
Cassio accepted Othello’s request to serve as intermediary while he was wooing for himself and that Othello
believed that he served honorably. It means that Desdemona consented to concurrent solicitations by two
men. It means that Othello’s play-directing of Desdemona as the “whore” whom Othello later declares her to
be and of Emilia as a procuress is intelligible as a working imagination, not deranged or diseased, but acting
out the implications of either text. Both Q and F make good sense, but whereas Q is insipid in its insinuation, F
is inspired in its slanders.
To an audience familiar with the figure of the intermediary in courtly love, F would have been far richer
and more powerful than Q. I believe, but cannot prove, that Shakespeare realized what this change would mean
and what enormous effect it would have. For all of these reasons, editorial and critical, I believe that F’s “he”
makes better and more impressive sense that Q’s “you.” At the very least, editors of Othello who use F as their
copy text lack warrant to emend it in light of Q. If retaining F requires that they indicate lost cultural
knowledge, so be it.
I make the same argument in greater detail (and length) in “Emending Othello; Explaining Othello: A
Critique of Contemporary Principles of and Practices in Editing Shakespeare and a Historical-Literary
Interpretation of Othello’s Jealousy” (handout), 33rd Shakespeare Association of America (2005); and “Othello's
Jealousy: From Textual Crux to Critical Conundrum,” Discoveries in Renaissance Culture, Online Publications of
the South-Central Renaissance Conference, 29.1 (Spring 2012)—both available at URL whiteknightpubs.org.
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repeats that fact. The repetition leaves little doubt that the fact is critical to Iago’s longintended strategy to trap Othello, Desdemona, and Cassio in Cassio’s courtship; and that
Iago immediately apprehends its criticality.
The fact which Iago did not know is the fact of Cassio’s role as intermediary in the
courtship of Othello and Desdemona. It is this fact upon which Iago immediately
pounces. When he insinuates Cassio’s betrayal, Othello insists on his fidelity and tries to
affirm his intended purposes. Thus, Othello asks Iago “What didd’st not like?/…when I
told thee, he was of my Counsaile,/Of my whole course of wooing” (III, iii, 110-112).
Iago presses on honesty, here the correspondence between word and deed, and pursues
its implications for Othello’s honor. Othello, for whom honor, his honor, is all, assumes
Iago’s concern for it as well; within fifty lines or so from this fact, Iago introduces the
matter of jealousy, which possesses Othello thereafter. As a result, Othello comes to
see—Iago leads him to see—honor in a new way. Before he becomes jealous, Othello
understands his honor to be a knight’s honor based on his deeds; after, a husband’s
honor based on his wife’s fidelity. The change in Othello’s sense of honor parallels the
change in his perception of his place in relationships defined by courtly love. Before
Othello becomes jealous, he believes himself a knight courting a lady with the aid of a
trusted intermediary. The pattern is that of pre-marital, non-adulterous courtly love.
After he becomes jealous, he imagines himself betrayed by that intermediary and, by his
marriage, to have become a husband of a woman once intimate—and, as Iago seeks to
persuade him, still intimate—with that trusted friend. The pattern is that of postmarital, adulterous courtly love. The change in self-perception is instantaneous, factfree, and requires only the knowledge that an intermediary may and often does court for
himself. Othello’s after-the-fact rationalizations merely confirm the fiction which Iago
has recalled to him as a commonplace. The events which ensue as Othello’s jealousy
unfolds need no elaboration here. All accord with the action of the Patient Griselda type
of romance, with its stark contrast between the knight’s unchristian persecution and
abusiveness, and the lady’s Christian patience and wifely submissiveness.
The plausibility of Othello’s jealousy and all else relevant to it hinges on the fact of
Cassio’s role as intermediary in the courtship. We may be sure that this fact is important
because Shakespeare makes it important. He presents it in the central scene of the play,
not once, but twice, where Iago uses it to induce Othello’s jealousy. In doing so,
Shakespeare expected his audience to know its import and appreciate its impact.
Otherwise, if it were not only instrumental, but necessary, here, he could have used it
and Cassio’s corroboration in Act I to exonerate Othello of Brabantio’s charge of using
witchcraft in wooing Desdemona. But Shakespeare did not use the fact in the trial, and,
if he did not need the fact in the trial, he did not need it in the central scene unless it
enables Iago to prompt Othello’s jealousy. Although Shakespeare did not use the fact in
the trial, he hinted that the courtship used an intermediary. Othello reports that
Desdemona advised him that “if I had a Friend that lov’d her,/I should but teach him
how to tell my Story,/And that would wooe her.” To those knowing about intermediaries
in romances, her hint not only directed Othello to engage his friend Cassio as an
intermediary, but also created an expectation which Shakespeare later fulfilled.24
24
This interpretation of Othello’s jealousy undermines the theory of the long-time, short-time scheme
attributed to the play. The evidence for this theory, aside from minor discrepancies like those in many
Shakespearean plays, is the major discrepancy between the short time of the action in Cyprus against the long
time required for Cassio to have copulated with Desdemona a thousand times. Of course, this number is
hyperbolic, but it still implies many copulations over a considerable period of time. However, if Cassio had
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VI
Iago, that most interesting of characters in Othello, has no place in chivalric romance,
but he does have a place in relation to it. I delineate this complex, fascinating character,
not by building a prior biography of him, but by identifying and interpreting those
features which help us understand his signifying place in the play. The challenge is to
distinguish between what is true about Iago and what is not, for his words should not be,
although they often are, taken at face value. Given that Iago is a successful dissimulator
for most of the play, even the words of other characters about him cannot be accepted
uncritically. So I accept his statements in soliloquies or against interest as reliable unless
reason for doubt exists; suspect and scrutinize all other statements and accept them only
on positive grounds; and interpret his language as it reveals character or value.25
For starters, Iago is not the soldier of proven military prowess which he claims to be
in discussion with Roderigo, a gentleman with no military experience or knowledge. The
language of Iago’s accusation that Othello evaded Iago’s solicitors “with a bumbast
Circumstance,/Horribly stufft with Epithites of warre” (I, i, 13-14) suggests that Othello
applied standards of soldiership to Iago and found him wanting. In the context of the
wit combat between Desdemona and Iago, Cassio’s remark that she may “rellish him
more in the Souldier, then in the Scholler” (II, i, 165-166) suggests the blunter talk of the
camp than of the court, nothing about deeds of valor. More revealing is Iago’s response
to Montano’s request for information about the street brawl in Cyprus. When Montano
insists on Iago’s telling the truth about the brawl and says that if he fails to do so, he is
“no Souldier,” Iago quickly replies, “Touch me not so neere” (II, iii, 220). His only
official duty with a military color is escort duty, to accompany Desdemona to Cyprus. In
his plots and their execution, he suggests nothing brave or competent about himself;
when he plots to ambush Cassio, he relies on Roderigo, and, when he relies on himself,
he botches the job. So we can believe neither his comment to Othello that “in the trade
of Warre” he has “slain men” nor his appeal to a code of honor that he holds “it very
stuffe o’ th’ conscience/To do no contriv’d Murder” (I, ii, 1-3) were he to stab Roderigo
under the ribs for slanderous remarks. If Othello had been witness to Iago’s military
deeds, he would need no reminders, and Iago’s remarks would not be necessary; as they
seem to be, so they also seem to testify to what Othello has not witnessed. Unless we
accept this misrepresentation, even hypocrisy, we cannot credit him with doing in open
combat what he cannot do in “contriv’d Murder.”26
been courting for himself, not Othello, and doing so over some part of their nine most recent months in Venice,
then the hyperbole would well serve the truth. In short, the narrative time provides enough time to make
Iago’s insinuations possible and Othello’s jealousy plausible, eliminates the double-time problem, and makes
Othello’s intense jealousy reflect, not mental delusion, but moral outrage.
Ned. B. Allen, “The Two Parts of ‘Othello’,” Shakespeare Survey, 21 (1968): 13-29, uses the theory to argue
that Shakespeare wrote Othello in two stages, the last three acts following Cinthio before the first two following
his own imagination. His theory aims to explain the apparent discrepancies between the two parts. In the
absence of external evidence for dating, the effort to determine compositional order from discrepancies is
circular; it is also strange, for it seems to assume that what Shakespeare wrote first he did not read again, and
that neither he nor anyone else in his company ever noticed or corrected these slips. More to the point, these
discrepancies depend on interpretations which make Iago’s rhetorical skills all-powerful to induce Othello’s
jealousy. My interpretation attempts to explain the substantive plausibility of Iago’s slanders to Othello.
25
We normally accept soliloquies and asides at face value as true. But Iago’s remark that he, too, loves
Desdemona (II, i, 291) is puzzling and impenetrable—or so I find it.
26
Jorgensen, 81, notes an irony between “ensignship … a rank which above all others called for courage and
honor” and its application “to the most wretched of Shakespeare’s cowards.” Yet later he regards Iago as
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Still, it is odd that Iago uses terms less associated with combat than with commerce or
accounting to describe his military experience. He speaks of action in war, not as a way
of life or an “Occupation” (III, iii, 357), as Othello regards it, but as a “trade,” with its
suggestion of commercial transaction. At the very beginning of the play, he equates
knowing his worth with knowing his “price” (I, i, 11). He uses the language of
accounting in derogating Cassio as “a great Arithmatician” and a “Counter-caster” (31),
an accountant. He continues in this vein when he indicates that the effect of Othello’s
assessment of Cassio and him has left them in the same positions or roles in accounting
transactions as before, “By Debitor, and Creditor” (31). We see nothing in Cassio to
suggest such a position or role. Instead, Iago’s use of such language in his first
appearance makes it seem projective, thus self-descriptive. He wants to be, not one of
those who serve long years and, in old age, are “Casheer’d” (48), but one of those who
“have lin’d their Coates” (53). So Iago’s language suggests a profession as a paymaster
or finance administrator and thus associates him with military service in the rear
echelons quite far from the field. An adjunct to his implied graft in military service is
his bilking Roderigo of money purportedly to advance his courtship of Desdemona. In
speaking constantly of money and in seeking it from military coffers and Roderigo’s
purse, Iago indicates that money is a preoccupation and a measure of value—both
reflecting his essentially materialistic outlook.
Odder still is Iago’s language suggesting his affinities with the military, political, and
religious enemies of Venice and Christianity. First is his language rich in associations
with the sea and the enemy. In boasting of his military prowess to Roderigo, Iago claims
that Othello had first-hand knowledge “At Rhodes, at Ciprus, and on other grounds” (I, i,
29)—presciently naming the very islands under discussion in the Venetian Senate’s war
council. His metaphor for his condition of professional stasis is a ship “be-lee’d, and
calm’d” (30). He metaphorizes Desdemona mounted to consummate the marriage after
elopement and wedding as a “Land Carract” (I, ii, 50), a trading ship often attacked and
boarded by pirates for gold and other riches. Later, when his plans for a street brawl
promise success, Iago says, “My Boate sailes freely, both with winde and Streame” (II, iii,
64). The contrast with the Turkish fleet drowned in a storm, like the Spanish Armada, is
notable, and, omitting the reference to Desdemona, talk of the sea means talk of the
Turk. Finally, the logic of his assertion that his slanders against women are “true: or else
I am a Turke” (II, i, 114) implies, since they are false, that Iago is a Turk.
Those “other grounds” are “Christen’d [Christian], and heathen” (I, i, 30).27 Since
Othello is Christian, and Othello and Iago are in conflict, we might ask about Iago’s
religious affiliation. His affinities with the Turk, including his implied self-identification,
associate him with either Mohammedanism or heathenism, but these affinities remain
latent and undeveloped. Iago’s religious coloring comes, not from these religious
associations, but from others which exploit the better-known rival of Christianity,
namely, Judaism—not the faith per se, but features popularly associated with it.
“appropriately described as ‘the bold Iago’ … ‘brave Iago’ … ‘a very valiant fellow’” (108.) The inconsistency
arises in Jorgensen’s analysis in terms taken at face value and not tested against their use in context in Othello.
27
The 1622 quarto reading is “Christian.” The quarto reading is unremarkable; indeed, virtually the same
phrase occurs in describing the foreign lands of the knight’s campaigns, in the “Prologue” to Chaucer’s The
Canterbury Tales. However, the change to the folio reading “Christen’d” may be a deliberate one to suggest
lands once heathen but since conquered and converted. If so, the change is in the direction of a sense of an
inadequately secured faith, like Othello’s.
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As his language links Iago with Turks, so it links him with Jews. Iago qualifies his
promise to Roderigo that he shall enjoy Desdemona with a condition contrary to
expectation: “If Sanctimonie, and a fraile vow, betwixt an erring Barbarian, and a supersubtle Venetian be not too hard for my wits, and all the Tribe of hell” (I, iii, 355-357).
The “Tribe of hell” may mean devils dwelling there—but, according to Christian lore,
they would include Jews—or it may refer to the tribe of the people of Israel, a people
damned by persistent refusal to accept the New Law. Although presumably deprecating
the value of riches, Iago nevertheless associates himself with concerns about money and
thinks of himself as a member of a “Tribe”:
Poore, and Content, is rich, and rich enough,
But Riches finelesse, is as poore as Winter,
To him that ever feares he shall be poore:
Good Heaven, the Soules of all my Tribe defend
From Jealousie (III, iii, 172-176).
These lines, following on those about the stealing of a purse and the stealing of
reputation, reinforce the link between Iago and a “Tribe” fearing the loss of its material
wealth. We have already seen Iago’s interest in finance and money; here, we cannot
escape the traditional association of Jews and money.
Of Iago’s many motives, primary is “Revenge” (II, i, 294), with a sense and texture
which suggest the Old Law. Persuading himself that Othello has cuckolded him, Iago
declares that “nothing can, or shall content my Soule/Till I am eeven’d with him, wife,
for wift [wife]” (298-299). In the context of revenge, this amphimacer suggests the
Jewish law “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth” (Matthew 5:38), which was then
understood (and continues to be misunderstood) by many Christians as a law, not of
fair, or proportionate, compensation, but of revenge.28
Finally, we note that Iago lives by his “wits,” and his soliloquies repeatedly invite us
to see him doing so. He plans his revenge, revises his plans, exploits opportunities as
they present themselves, and comments to us on his progress in executing them and
achieving his ends. More, some part of Iago’s asides almost seem a show-off’s appeal for
appreciation, admiration, even approval, of his cleverness. When Iago offers Roderigo
his reasons for appearing loyal to Othello, he implies a life of living by his wits and doing
so by changing his masters; the juxtaposition links them.
I follow him, to serve my turne upon him.
We cannot all be Masters, nor all Masters
Cannot be truely follow’d (I, i, 42-44).
This remarkable statement about deceptive ambition and the exploitation of masters is
only partly consonant with the figure of the false steward of chivalric romance. In
supplanting Cassio and assuming his role as lieutenant, Iago becomes Othello’s trusted
companion and advisor. When Othello kneels to vow revenge—“Now by yond Marble
Heaven,/In the due reverence of a Sacred vow,/I heere engage my words” (III, iii, 460462)—Iago kneels to swear allegiance to Othello.
28
Such canards linking Jews with money, and revenge are the very stuff of The Merchant of Venice.
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Witnesse you ever-burning Lights above,
You Elements, that clip us round about,
Witnesse that heere Iago doth give up
The execution of his wit, hands, heart,
To wrong’d Othello’s service. Let him command,
And to obey shall be in me remorse,
What bloody businesse ever (III, iii, 463-469).
There is nothing chivalric or Christian about Iago’s vows. “What bloody businesse ever”
is not justice, but revenge; and so it is neither chivalric nor Christian. Iago’s pledge of
fealty to “Othello’s service” is not chivalric, but mock chivalric, for Iago is no knight and
intends not to follow—serve—Othello, but to betray him. What matters is that Iago uses
his wits to deceive his master and to promote his interests. Iago’s trick is to insinuate
himself, not only into Cassio’s position and role, but also into Othello’s soul. His success
manifests itself in Othello’s use of the idioms, images, and ideas which reveal Iago to the
audience. Thus, for Othello, the firmament is “Marble”; for Iago, it is the stars; for both,
it is the secular realm of the skies, not the divine abode of God.
The final feature about Iago—sometimes noted; seldom explained; never, so far as I
know, integrated into an interpretation of his character or role—is his name, which is
Spanish and equates to James in English. The well-known Spaniard of that name is, of
course, Santiago (or Saint James) de Compostela, whose shrine was an important goal of
Catholic pilgrimage in the medieval and early renaissance periods. So his name suggests
that Iago is both Spanish and Catholic.29 James was known for his militant opposition to
the Moors of Spain; he is almost the patron saint of their later expulsion. In the selection
of Iago’s name, Shakespeare establishes an opposition between him and the Moor of
Venice, an opposition which plays out in actions reflecting antithetical ideals or values.
Thus, all of Iago’s associations with finance and money, hate and revenge, Turks and
Jews (and Catholics) are antithetical to Othello’s associations with war and service, love
and justice, Venetians and Christians (or Protestants).30
Iago differs from Othello, Cassio, and even Roderigo precisely in his rejection of their
ideals. Considerations of love do not affect his conduct toward Desdemona—it is
impossible to believe that he, too, loves her—or Emilia, his wife. Considerations of
justice do not dissuade him from revenge. Considerations of honor arise in a merely
passing comment about his baseless suspicion that Othello has cuckolded him; otherwise,
they have no part in his plots or their execution against Othello and Cassio, much less in
his exploitation of Roderigo. The considerations which matter to him—all forms of selfaggrandizement and all means to it—are evident from the start and are evinced
throughout the play. Othello changes, Cassio changes, even Roderigo changes; Iago does
not change. He stands against them—he often criticizes them and Desdemona, too—in
29
Richmond, 156. Her thesis that Shakespeare’s work adumbrates, if it does not subtlely advocate, Catholic
sympathies receives no endorsement from the association of Santiago with a figure of such unremitting evil.
30
James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 18, 86, 138, and 179,
indicates the various linkages between Catholics, Jews, Spaniards, and Turks at this time. His first chapter
considers English anxieties about Jewish conversions to Christianity. I assume similar anxieties about pagan or
Islamic conversions, without the more elaborate discussions of that longer-standing problem (from a Christian
point of view). The threats posed by Jews to an understanding of what it meant to be Christian or English may
be seen in the issues raised by Othello, whose status as an alien, a Moor, and a black Brabantio, Roderigo, and
Iago make prominent; and whose allegiance to the faith into which he has been baptized Iago calls into
question.
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caustic, but never cynical, opposition to their chivalric, courtly, and Christian values.
Against their ideals and their idealism are his materialism, egoism, and evil.
So, although Iago has no place in chivalric romance, he has one in the romance of low
life. For the major features which we have identified and associated with Iago—desiring
money, living by his wits, and deceiving his master—are the major distinguishing
characteristics of the picaro.31 In the context of literary history, an antithesis of
chivalric and picaresque should not be surprising. In some part, chivalric romances
adumbrated the contrast because of those knights who depart from the norm. One
example is Sir Dinaden, in Le Morte D’Arthur, who regards many of the deeds of derringdo to be dangerous and unnecessary. Native burlesques of chivalric romances, like The
Tournament at Tottenham (early fifteenth century) provided a low-life view of the lofty
vision of chivalry. About a century and half later, Lazarillo de Tormes (1553), the first
Spanish picaresque novel, appeared in England shortly before 1570 and was published at
least twice before Shakespeare wrote Othello.32 It influenced the English novels of low
life, which began with Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594). In retrospect,
the development of the novel of low life looks like an inevitable means to express the
economic, social, and cultural changes and values long gestating and now birthing in the
late medieval and early renaissance periods. Othello registers this conflict between the
chivalric and courtly, and the picaresque, in the conflict between the knight Othello and
the picaro Iago. At the level of character, Othello and Iago thus signify the conflict
between the opposed Weltanschauungs of idealism and materialism which infuse and
influence the entire play.
VII
At the level of theme, these opposed world views manifest themselves in the changes
in Othello’s role as a knight. We have seen that change in the alteration in his concept of
honor, from its basis in his deeds in state service to its basis in the continued fidelity of
his wife. We have seen it in the concomitant alteration of his feelings for Desdemona,
from love expressed in ethereal terms to loathing expressed in earthly terms. Both
changes reflect his debasement as a knight.
These changes occur in the private sphere of the knight as courtly lover, not in the
public sphere of the knight as chivalric justicer. Even so, in the public sphere, justice
properly addresses both public and private matters. The Duke sets the standard, though
not the ideal, of justice, first in deciding the point of attack of the Turkish fleet, then in
deciding Brabantio’s charges that Othello has “abus’d, stolne from me, and corrupted/By
Spels, and Medicines” (I, iii, 60-61) Desdemona.
In ascertaining the Turks’ intentions, the Duke considers all available evidence,
consults with advisors, and considers their views. After he makes his decision, a
31
The picaro serves many masters, the plot is episodic, and the satire focuses on the master-of-the-moment.
But Iago has only one master; his plan, which is systematic in conception, is sometimes opportunistic in its
execution; and his deprecations focus, not on many masters, but on different types of characters. I believe that
the number of masters, their sequence, and the satire of each matter less than disloyalty to one master in one
story which satirizes society across a range of social types. So the differences between picaresque novel and
Shakespearean play are modest, incidental, not essential.
32
Colwell entered Lazarillo de Tormes in 1568-1569, a marginal note to that entry indicates its transfer to
Bynneman on 19 June 1573 (SR, I, 378), and Jeffres published it in 1586 (STC 15336) and 1596 (STC 15337).
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messenger arrives with news ratifying it and, in effect, vindicating its process. We see
much the same process working in the inquiry into Brabantio’s charges that Othello has
seduced, abducted, and ravished Desdemona by means of “witch-craft” (I, iii, 64), a less
threatening but more inflammatory matter. The Duke allows Othello to respond and to
summon a witness to substantiate his testimony. Despite the force of Brabantio’s angry
allegations, the Duke distinguishes between assertions and evidence:
To vouch this, is no proofe,
Without more wider, and more overt Test
Then these thin habits, and poore likely-hoods
Of moderne seeming, do prefer against him (I, iii, l06-109).
At the same time, the Duke assures Brabantio that
the bloodie Booke of Law,
You shall your selfe read, in the bitter letter,
After your owne sense: yea, though our proper Son
Stood in your Action (I, iii, 67-70).
But the Duke does not permit Brabantio to judge the “foule proceeding” (65). Justice in
Venice follows a reasonable judicial procedure which vindicates both Othello’s innocence
and his love.
So in Venice, justice and love are not incompatible or antagonistic. Indeed, in
chivalric romance, the conventional nexus between public justice and private love is the
court of love. In light of this tradition, Shakespeare’s audience would deem a judicial
hearing of charges about a knight’s conduct in his courtship of a lady as entirely
appropriate. If the Duke’s regard for Othello, unlike Brabantio’s anger, implies anything,
it implies that love is the basis of justice.33
The Duke’s conduct sets a standard to measure Othello’s performance as a knight in
ensuring justice in Cyprus, in dealing first with Cassio’s misconduct, then with his
suspicions of Desdemona’s infidelity. Othello is a knight in the position of command
which the Duke occupied in Venice, and would be expected to do justice in a similar
manner. This expectation is initially fulfilled when Othello administers justice fairly in
the streets of Cyprus. Despite his anger at the event and its major participants, Cassio
and Montano, he calls on both to explain their conduct. Both elect to remain silent, and
Iago tells no more than everyone knows. Othello metes out punishment to his friend and
second-in-command Cassio, the more responsible party in the quarrel; none to Montano,
33
Winifred M. T. Nowottny’s “Justice and Love in Othello,” Essays in Shakespearean Criticism, eds. James L.
Calderwood and Harold E. Toliver (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1970), 459-472, argues to the contrary. But
her article errs in important respects. She interprets the entire play on the basis of parts of it, and muddles the
evidence which muddies her thesis. On the first point, she substitutes the part for the whole in two ways. She
deals only with the jealous Othello, not with the loving Othello as we see him throughout the play; thus, “in the
jealousy of Othello, the value of justice and the value of love become openly contestant and reveal their
essential incompatibility” (460). And she takes injustice in the last act as indicative of injustice in the entire
play; thus, “that Othello perpetrates injustice in no way weakens the significance of Act V, for the play turns
upon the conflict between justice and love, not upon the nature of justice itself” (469). On the second point,
she dismisses the possibility that “the contention of love and justice begins … with Brabantio’s attempt to bring
love under law, from which attempt it follows that the quality of Othello’s and Desdemona’s love is declared in
a kind of trial scene” (460). Instead, she sees the episode as mainly expository. But Othello everywhere shows
love as the basis of justice; animosity, loathing, or jealousy as the basis of injustice. Her views pay no attention
to the conjunction of justice and love in courts of love.
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the less responsible. Despite his “passion” which “Assaies to leade the way” (II, iii 206,
207), Othello shows himself in his first test doing justice according to a fair process.
But Othello betrays his function as justicer when he presumes to act as plaintiff as
well as judge and executioner in proceeding against Desdemona. She invokes the
standard of the knight as justicer, when, calling herself an “unhandsome Warrior,” she
berates herself for “Arraigning his unkindnesse with my soule:/But now I finde, I had
suborn’d the Witnesse,/And he’s Indited falsely” (III, iv, 151-154). Othello’s perversion
of judicial procedure is painful in his progressive self-degradation and his inexorable,
fatal abuse of Desdemona.
When Othello discloses his evidence, the love token which he claims Desdemona gave
Cassio, she directly contradicts him. Further, she implores Othello to “Send, for him
hither:/Let him confesse a truth” (V, ii, 67-68). But Othello believes him to be no longer
able to do so; worse than suborning perjury, he has approved Iago’s intent to murder the
witness. And whereas even Brabantio in his anger would have committed Othello “To
Prison, till fit time/Of Law, and course of direct Session/Call thee to answer” (I, ii, 85-87),
Othello in his jealousy does not postpone execution “But halfe an houre” (V, ii, 82).
The two occasions on which Othello acts as justicer show him acting appropriately
when he is judge only, abysmally when both plaintiff and judge. The difference shows
his perversion of the judicial process and marks his degradation as a knight in the role of
justicer. His change from a chivalric knight to a cuckolded husband armed only with the
power of his position corresponds to the change in his regard for Desdemona, with the
implication—the converse of the example set in Venice—that hate implements injustice.
The Duke is no knight but the ruler of a well-ordered society; Othello is a knight and
governor of an island recently disturbed by threats of invasion. The Duke administers
justice appropriately; Othello shows his ability to do so until Iago exploits the sinister
aspects of courtly love to overwhelm the standards of chivalric justice.
VIII
Love leads to justice in Venice and jealousy to revenge in Cyprus—the move from one
to the other locales reflecting a change from one to the other opposed concepts of legal
conduct. This opposition parallels the larger conflict between Venetians and Turks,
obviously national and military at the start of the play, personal and religious thereafter,
as jealousy and revenge supplant love and justice; and is resolved only with Othello’s
suicide. As in chivalric romance, the conflict repeats the clash of cultures and values,
between the European and Christian, and the Levantine and Mohammedan. When
Othello reproaches the brawlers in the streets of Cyprus, he touches upon the personal
and religious dimensions of the recent conflict: “Are we turn’d Turkes? and to our selves
do that/Which Heaven hath forbid the Ottamittes./For Christian shame, put by this
barbarous Brawle” (II, iii, 170-172).
The thematic treatment of contrasting concepts of legal conduct invites Shakespeare
to make them intelligible to his contemporaries, to represent them in familiar terms. So
he contrasts, not Christian and Mohammedan, but Christian and Jewish, concepts of
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justice, as then prejudicially understood.34 He thus aligns the conflicting concepts of law
between the New Law of Christianity and the Old Law of Judaism. The equation would
make emphatic sense to that part of his audience who knew that Sephardic Jews expelled
from Spain had fled to Turkey and prospered there.
The contrast is not dichotomous, for the Duke’s speech on sentencing suggests Old
Testament law in its mention of the “bloodie Booke of Law” and its “bitter letter”—a hint
of legal literalism consonant with contemporary Puritan strictness. But justice in Venice
is still a far cry from the injustice of revenge in Cyprus, as abusive in process as harsh in
punishment. The contrast is clear in Othello’s arrogation to himself of disparate roles in
a judicial process precipitated by and pursued in anger. The suggestion is obvious:
Jewish justice at the hands of an angry god. Desdemona’s “Balmy breath…dost almost
perswade/Justice to breake her Sword!” (V, ii, 16-17)—here Othello still thinks himself a
chivalric justicer—but Desdemona cannot assuage the “bloody passion” which rules him
(44). Moved by revenge, he replies to her, who has denied giving Cassio the
handkerchief, that she “makes me call, what I intend to do,/A Murther, which I thought a
Sacrifice” (64-65). Othello’s anger, like that imputed to the God of the Jews, accepts
“sacrifice” as satisfaction for a wrong committed against him. The contrast is clearest in
the failure of Desdemona’s pleas for mercy to win a mere postponement of execution.
As love mutates into jealousy and justice into revenge, we see that Othello becomes
by linguistic associations what Iago already is, Turk and Jew. Othello identifies himself
as a Turk and a Jew when, in committing suicide, he dramatizes how he once slew a
“Turbond-Turke” and “circumcised Dogge,” who had “traduc’d the State” (V, ii, 353,
355, 354).35 One of the ironies of Othello is that the Christian chivalric warrior who
achieves his greatness by opposing the Turkish foe becomes his own enemy by turning
Turk. And, as lover and husband, Othello recognizes that his personal mistake was
primarily moral and religious. For he compares himself to the “base Judean [who] threw
a Pearle away/Richer then all his Tribe” (347-348).36 That Othello as well as Iago is
doubly associated with both Turks and Jews reinforces the thematic contrast with
Venetian political and religious ideals.
34
Medieval tradition concerning the ten lost tribes of Israel often linked Jews and Turks against Christians
(The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia: An Authoritative and Popular Presentation of Jews and Judaism Since the
Earliest Times, 10 vols. with index, gen. ed. Isaac Landman [New York: Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, 1943], X:
305). The belief that the ten lost tribes settled in southern Arabia gave rise to the belief in “the Jewish origin
of Islam” (The Jewish Encyclopedia: A Descriptive Record of the History, Religion, Literature, and Customs of
the Jewish People from the Earliest Times, 12 vols., gen. ed. Isidore Singer [New York: Ktav Publishing House,
n.d. (l901?)], XII: 249). The view was revived during the political ascendancy of David Reubeni in the sixteenth
century.
35
The folk etymology by associations would be: Turk to Mohammedan to Mahound to hound to dog. A
“circumcised Dogge” would readily double by association as a Jew.
36
Although modern editors of Othello use the First Folio as their base text, they invariably change its “base
Iudean” (V, ii, 347) to the “base Indian” of the 1622 quarto. In doing so, they replace one meaning with
another. They reject Biblical allusions to a “base Iudean” (Herod or Judas) who throws away a pearl (Mariamne
or Jesus) as remote; they propose equally remote proverbs about, or usually “lost” allusions to, a “base Indian.”
They may assert, as the Riverside editor does, that “base” means “low in the scale of civilization.” But the
contemporary meaning of “base” was morally unworthy or vile, not ignorant. The context also controls
meaning. Othello’s speech indicates the general area of the Levant by references to Turks, Arabia, Aleppo,
turbans, tribes, and circumcision. These lexical and literary considerations work against “base Indian” and for
“base Iudean”; Othello means a reprehensible Jew. Whatever the arguments for the quarto reading, I suspect
that post-Holocaustal squeamishness about Shakespeare’s anti-Semitism, or, to speak truly, anti-Judaism, tacitly
motivates today’s consensus against the folio reading. If so, let us get over it. If all other forms of this
prejudice were no different from, or worse than, his, we might all give some thanks.
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Othello’s last words and deeds attempt to recover his initial sense of himself as a
chivalric knight. But ambiguities of which Othello seems unaware remain and do not
restore him, at least not fully, in the audience’s eyes. For a more unchivalrous act than
threatening a woman with a sword is hard to conceive. Emilia indicates such an act
when she responds to his gesture, following Iago’s similar attempt, to silence her: “I care
not for thy Sword” (V, ii, 165).37 When Othello unchivalrously wounds Iago and is
disarmed, he remarks,
I am not valiant neither:
But every Punie whipster gets my Sword.
But why should Honor out-live Honesty?
Let it go all (V, ii, 243-246).
But valor and honor—neither has anything to do with such threats and conduct. So
when Othello, like a defeated or disgraced knight, gives up his sword, his sense of
diminished valor and honor follows.38 His claim that “nought I did in hate, but all in
Honour” (V, ii, 295) shows no awareness of the different concepts of “Honour” as they
apply to the conduct of a chivalric warrior and a cuckolded husband. When he recalls
his former “service” to the state (339), he sees his murder of Desdemona as a departure
from it in admitting that he loved, “not wisely, but too well” (344). Othello’s tragic
failure results from his transvalued obligations to serve lord or lady—the central conflict
of Le Morte D’Arthur. The conflict in these valuations is the stuff of chivalric romance;
the knight’s choice determines whether his life comes to a tragic close or not.
A final ambiguity inheres in Othello’s suicide. As a matter of Christian faith, suicide
is a mortal sin. His act fulfills Iago’s belief, but in a quite different sense, that Othello
would renounce his baptism because of his love of Desdemona; in fact, it accords with
the Roman custom of restoring personal honor. But, as a matter of chivalric justice, it is
a final act of service to the state, for he slays that part of him allied with the Turkish and
Jewish foe. It also marks a final fulfillment of justice according to the standard of justice
in Venice. Roderigo introduces the standard when he invites Brabantio to “Let loose on
me the Justice of the State” (I, i, 139) if he has erred in rousing him with the news of
Desdemona’s elopement. Othello acknowledges the same standard, when, responding to
Brabantio’s charges, he requests Desdemona’s testimony, adding:
If you do finde me foule, in her report,
The Trust, the Office, I do hold of you,
Not onely take away, but let your Sentence
Even fall upon my life (I, iii, 117-120).
As an ambiguous act, Othello’s suicide both takes action against the enemy of the state
which he has become and self-administers the justice of the state for failing his chivalric
obligations to serve justice according to its standard.
37
In King Horn, Fikenhild, a companion who betrays the hero, shows his unchivalrous and villainous nature
when he strikes Rymenild, whom he abducts, with his sword (ll. 1427-1428, in Sands, 52).
38
Sidney Painter, French Chivalry: Chivalric Ideas and Practices in Mediaeval France (l940; Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1957), 73. The surrender of the sword was an international gesture of this import and
remained so until at least the end of the Second World War.
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IX
The changes in Othello’s perceptions of himself as chivalric knight and cuckolded
husband—contrasting perceptions which parallel the thematic conflicts of love, honor,
and justice—suggest a self-consciousness and thus a self-fashioning which realize a
potential inherent in chivalric romance. After all, knights report their adventures. They
control their narratives and thereby may place themselves in them either truthfully or
not, modestly or not. For only occasionally do others, only rarely do their ladies, witness
their deeds of derring-do. Thus, story-telling in romance is one way by which characters
can define identity, theirs and others’, and the relationships which thereby result.
Othello’s story, less the modest elisions of his services to the state, is the
abstracted “tale” about his adventures, which the Duke remarks would likely win his
daughter, too. It is not his account of his courtship with Desdemona, which by itself
would not win anyone and which is really her story. Othello knows battle, Desdemona
knows books, and she gives him instructions on how to woo her after he has won her.
“Upon this hint,” he speaks, acts, and uses an intermediary between them, with the
consequences already described and explained. Some kiss the book, others kiss by the
book, Desdemona lived by it—and made Othello do so, too.
Othello tells or credits other stories, about his mother’s handkerchief or from the
Bible. So, by the way, does everyone else; no one accepts Iago’s view of romances as
“bragging, and telling her fantasticall lies…[and] prating” (II, i, 223-224). When Othello
looks down to Iago’s feet and remarks, “but that’s a Fable” (V, ii, 286), he expects to find
them cloven as they would be in stories about devils. Although he is disappointed, he is
right. Such stories do not sort with reality, yet somehow they sort with truth. For even
as Othello fails to slay Iago, as devils cannot be slain, so the metaphor becomes incarnate
in the character before him.
Nevertheless, there remains something possibly pernicious about such stories. Only
after Desdemona hinted broadly at her love for Othello did she insist upon a method of
courtship. The use of an intermediary served a ritualistic, not a real, purpose, but the
needlessness is not immediately apparent. Likewise, her talk about a “Boone” (III, iii, 76)
and “a suite/…to touch your Love indeed,/…full of poize, and difficult waight,/And
fearefull to be granted”—this prattle of a courtly lady teasing her chivalric lover—seems
innocent enough. Both of them come to think of love and to act it out, not as it was
before their charade, but, in the words of Yeats, as “a casual/Improvisation, or a settled
game/That followed if I let the kerchief fall.” But love is more than a set of conventions
with defined roles. Assuming roles and acting them out entail risks, for they both
overcome some limitations of the human condition and deny something of humanity in
its variety and complexity. In Othello, we may see the conventions of chivalry and of
courtly love as proxies for any conventions of human society; they require some sacrifice
of self, demand some reliance on others, and make society possible. But forgetting who
one is, depending entirely on oneself or on others, or defining stories for one’s sense of
identity—these are foibles. In comedy, they are funny; in tragedy, fatal. Of our pleasant
vices, the gods make instruments to plague us. But the fitness of their punishment is
romance.
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Endnote: Greene’s Orlando Furioso and Shakespeare’s Othello
1
Robert Greene’s Orlando Furioso is almost certainly a source of Othello. The
similarities of the protagonists, their speeches on love, and the contexts of those
speeches; the resemblance of characters and plots leading to jealousy; and the identity of
specific allusions and similar language in similar contexts point to no other conclusion.
All show that Shakespeare used a work known to him and his audience in order to
supplement the characterization, the plotting, and the thematic material of his primary
source, a story in Giraldi Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi.
My comparison depends on two facts: that Shakespeare knew Greene’s play and that
his version of the Orlando story can be distinguished from other available versions. As
we have already seen in Chapter 2, Greene’s play seems to have been performed
frequently, perhaps by both the Queen’s Men and Strange’s Men; and it was published
twice, in 1594 and 1599. If, as some believe, Shakespeare was associated with the
Queen’s Men, he may have known the play by acting in it.39
Greene’s version of the story of a mad Orlando is quite different from Ludovico
Ariosto’s verse epic and John Harington’s translation of it. Greene’s play derives from
Ariosto’s or, perhaps, Harington’s version—for our purposes, one version. Greene’s
adaptation is no slavish imitation of their version, from which it differs in three major
ways. First, in the play, the love between Angelica and Orlando leads to marriage; in the
verse epics, their relationship is not reciprocal, and after their paths cross, they part.
Second, the loving and virtuous heroine of the play contrasts sharply with the aloof,
cunning, and somewhat tawdry heroine of the epics. Greene’s Angelica is sexually
chaste, whereas Ariosto’s and Harington’s Angelica engages in illicit, pre-marital sex. The
name “Angelica” is literal in the former, ironic in the latter. Third, in the play, Sacrepant
is an ambitious, deceitful schemer, and instrumental to Orlando’s jealousy; in the epics,
he is a lover as noble as her other lovers, and is incidental to Orlando’s jealousy. There
are not only differences between Greene’s, and Ariosto’s and Harington’s, versions of the
mad Orlando story, but also similarities between Greene’s play and Shakespeare’s.
The question which we should ask in such cases but must be careful in answering is
what Shakespeare would have found of value in Greene’s play. If we can assume that
Shakespeare’s practice was to read or recollect related stories as he prepared to write or
wrote a play,40 we can speculate on the links between related works, at some risk of
seeming or presuming to read his mind. So, in reading Cinthio’s story, he would have
considered other stories with similar characters or plots, and would have found them in
Greene’s play. Both have a foreign suitor who is known for his military attainments, who
seeks a much-sought-after lady of great beauty and high birth, and who becomes
insanely jealous when confronted with evidence of her affection for another. If, on the
basis of these general similarities, Shakespeare recalled the story of a mad Orlando, he
would have recalled Greene’s version of it. Had he done so, he would also have
39
Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 160-166. “The conjecture that best answers … is that Shakespeare belonged to the Queen’s Men
early in his career, perhaps in some other capacity than as a writer” (165).
40
Hunter, 59, 60.
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considered the differences between the two versions. He would have noted that the
Angelica of Greene’s play, not the Angelica of Ariosto’s or Harington’s verse epics,
resembled Cinthio’s heroine; both are faithful to their betrothed or espoused, whose
jealousies are unfounded. He would then have looked to see how Cinthio’s story and
Greene’s play managed to make otherwise attractive and faithful women the object of
their loving husbands’ insane jealousy—my point of departure in interpreting Othello’s
jealousy.
2
My identification of Orlando Furioso as a source of Othello focuses on the opening
representations of success in winning a lady’s love, cursorily reported in Shakespeare’s
primary source, and the instigation of jealousy, adventitiously arranged in Cinthio’s plot.
Accordingly, my comparison focuses on the opening scene of Greene’s play and the trial
scene of Shakespeare’s, mainly Orlando’s and Othello’s longer speeches; and on the
means by which Greene and Shakespeare effect Orlando’s and Othello’s jealousy,
respectively.
The context, nature, and details of Orlando’s speech before Marsillus and the other
four noble suitors seeking his daughter Angelica in marriage resemble those of Othello’s
speech in defense of his courtship of Desdemona. Both speeches occur in formal
situations requiring a vindication of the speaker’s love. In Orlando Furioso, Marsillus has
summoned five suitors to his court to profess their loves for Angelica. As in a court of
love, the lady chooses her husband, here a right granted by her father. After four
similar speeches, each ending with the identical line—“I love, my lord, let that suffice for
me”—Orlando, the lowest born, delivers his speech, ending with an appeal for
vindication by Angelica herself: “Angelica her selfe shall speak for mee.” In Othello, the
Duke, who has summoned Othello to the Venetian Senate, is obliged to conduct a hearing
on Brabantio’s charges that he used illicit means to woo and win Desdemona. We
already know that Desdemona has “shun’d/The wealthy curled Deareling” (I, ii, 67-68)
of Venice, a fact implying her right to refuse suitors not to her liking. Brabantio never
asserts any right to veto her choice, much less to choose a husband, despite his evident
dissatisfaction with Othello as a son-in-law. Indeed, in the absence of such a right, he
requires a charge of witchcraft in his effort to annul the marriage. So Desdemona, like
Angelica, seems to have the right to elect as husband whomever she prefers.41 This trial
resembles trials before courts of love convened to hear cases of improper conduct, such
as those in Capellanus’s The Art of Courtly Love or that in Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s
Tale.” Othello must explain his courtship of Desdemona in order to exonerate himself.42
Concluding his speech, he urges the Senate to allow Desdemona to verify his testimony:
“let her witness it.” Both the opening proceeding in Orlando Furioso and the trial
initiated by Brabantio in Othello are different kinds of courts of love.
In these similar contexts, Orlando and Othello deliver speeches which describe the
development of their respective loves. I quote both speeches in full, at the end of this
41
William G. Meader, Courtship in Shakespeare: Its Relation to the Tradition of Courtly Love (1952; New York:
Octagon Books, 1971), 169-171, gives a simplified account of this issue.
42
As I noted above, Shakespeare could have had Othello seek Cassio’s testimony, but he did not, to make his
role the instigating factor of Othello’s jealousy.
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discussion, for Orlando’s speech, unlike Othello’s, is generally unfamiliar, and both
establish the contexts of the parallels between them.43
The histories recounted in both speeches and the circumstances attending their
delivery are much alike. Orlando’s various dangers have impeded his progress to
Marsillus’s court for Angelica’s love; Othello’s difficulties have not been occasioned by a
quest for Desdemona’s love, but he has experienced obstacles like Orlando’s. Both have
confronted dangerous seas and inhospitable lands. “The Seas by Neptune hoysed to the
heavens” and “lands” which “might well have kept me backe” confronted Orlando;
Othello confronted “moving Accidents by Flood and Field.” Both faced hostile creatures;
most noticeable is our first distinctive parallel, shared allusions—in Orlando Furioso, to
“Cannibals” and “Anthropagei”; in Othello, to “Canibals” and “Antropophague.” The
proximity of these two allusions in similar contexts establishes a co-occurrence which is
far more than coincidence and much stronger than any affinity previously cited.44 We
note, too, an allusion to “Mores” in the one, allusions by a Moor in the other. Both
overcome these comparable obstacles to win their loves. Orlando’s speech wins Angelica
and persuades Marsillus to accept her choice; Othello’s “Storie” to Desdemona has won
her, and his account to the Senate persuades it of his innocence. Indeed, the Duke
declares, as Marsillus might have done, that Othello’s “tale would win my Daughter too”
(I, iii, 171).
In addition to a shared history of past dangers and present difficulties overcome,
Orlando and Othello have other features in common. But all of these features trace to
the common features of chivalric knights: noble birth, special swords, valiant deeds, and
becoming modesty about them. More important still, the value each assigns to his
devotion to country and to his previous deeds when love is the argument is also similar.
Orlando professes that his love of his native land and its nobility, though “deerer than
pearle,” is surpassed by his love for Angelica. He mentions his “acts of chivalrie” to
commit them to her, with appropriate modesty. Othello shares similar views.
Recognizing his fatal error, he acknowledges Desdemona “a Pearle.../Richer then all his
Tribe” (V, ii, 347-348). When Othello declares his “Occupation’s gone” (III, iii, 357), he
conceives his heroic exploits as meritorious only so far as a virtuous and loving woman
(or, from his point of view, a woman believed to be so) deems them worthy. Which is to
say that Othello, like Orlando, is delineated as a chivalric knight; not surprisingly,
Desdemona and Angelica share features associated with ladies in romance: high birth,
beauty, and many lovers from whom they choose.
43
My text is Robert Greene, The History of Orlando Furioso (1595), ed. W.W. Greg, Malone Society Reprints
(1907; Oxford: The Malone Society, 1963), which I have silently emended to accord with modern typography.
44
Given the co-occurrence of these allusions in similar contexts, we have no need to trace their sources to
Holland’s translation of Pliny’s Natural History or, less often, Mandeville’s Travels or Raleigh’s Voyage to
Guinea. Indeed, since such references were commonplaces of contemporary travel books, it appears pointless
to urge a particular natural history or travel book as a source. See Thomas B. Stroup, “Shakespeare’s Use of a
Travel-Book Commonplace,” Philological Quarterly, 17 (1938): 351-358, mainly 351-352. Perhaps
Shakespeare’s additional reference to men with heads growing beneath their shoulders derives from one or
more travel books, as “travel’s history” suggests. Shakespeare’s choice of image is a thematically appropriate
one: head is to chest as reason is to passion.
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3
Among the other similarities between these plays, the most important are the
resemblances between Sacrepant and Iago, their motives, and their plots. Both are
proud, ambitious, self-serving soldiers, each with a none-too-clever associate. Both begin
plotting revenge after the formal court, or court-of-love, scenes conclude. Sacrepant
plots revenge on Angelica because her choice of Orlando to be her husband denies him
the possibility of succeeding to the throne; Iago plots revenge upon Othello for, so he
tells Roderigo, refusing him a promotion. As Sacrepant admits a love for Angelica which
is inspired by his desire to inherit by marriage her father’s throne, so Iago asserts a love
for Desdemona that regards her no less as a means to advance his revenge.
A verbal parallel associated with Sacrepant and Iago in advancing their interests by
soliciting others is worth noting here. When Angelica rebuffs Orlando’s four rivals in
Sacrepant’s presence, she “nonsutes all your Princely evidence” (167). When she later
rebuffs his professions of love, she rejects him—“nonsutes…[his] evidence”—as well.
When Iago sues to Othello for promotion by means of “Three Great-ones” (I, i, 8), Othello
“Non-suites” (16) them as well. Given this sole occurrence of the word in Shakespeare
and in circumstances like those in which it occurs in Greene’s play,45 we have another
distinctive linguistic similarity suggesting that Orlando Furioso is a source of Othello.
Far more importantly, Sacrepant and Iago pursue similar stratagems. Sacrepant plots
revenge on Angelica by “offring prejudice/Unto Orlando” (532-533) by exploiting the
familiarity between Angelica and Medor. Entering after they appear together, Sacrepant
states that their private walks and conversations “well may breed suspition of some love”
(540). At this point, Sacrepant, with ultimate success, arranges for some of the devices
of courtly love—love sonnets hung from trees and the lovers’ names carved in them—to
deceive Orlando. After the trial in Venice, Iago hits on the same general approach, “to
abuse Othello’s eares,/That he [Cassio] is too familiar with his wife” (I, iii, 395-396).
Later, in like circumstances, Iago specifically notes that the courtly manners between
Desdemona and Cassio may be the means of Othello’s undoing and theirs. Observing
Cassio’s courtesies, he lowers, “I will give [read: gyve] thee in thine owne Courtship” (II, i,
170). Iago does so, less by exploiting the circumstances of Cassio’s private conversation
with Desdemona and his stealthy departure from her, than by exploiting new
information about his role in Othello’s courtship which arises immediately thereafter
and gives these circumstances greater significance in retrospect.
The inevitable differences between the two plays do not overwhelm the notable
similarities of character and plot between them. On these points, the similarities are, I
think, unmistakable and unprecedented. In both, truly innocent conduct—between
Angelica and Medor, and between Desdemona and Cassio—prompts an ambitious
schemer bent on revenge to exploit different but no less effective appurtenances of
courtly love to arouse the jealousy of the fiancé or the husband. On the basis of these
multiple similarities, both general and specific, I find that Orlando Furioso is an
important source of Othello.
45
This legal term in Greene’s play sorts well with “evidence”; in Shakespeare’s, with Iago’s legal terminology
seriatim through the first forty lines of the play. I do not claim that Shakespeare learned the word from
Greene, only that he had Greene’s play in mind as he wrote his own.
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Orlando’s Speech
Othello’s Speech
Lords of the South, & Princes of esteeme,
Viceroyes unto the State of Affrica:
I am no King, yet am I princely borne,
Descended from the royall house of France,
And nephew to the mightie Charlemaine,
Surnamde Orlando the Countie Palatine.
Swift Fame that sounded to our Westerne seas
The matchless beautie of Angelica,
Fairer than was the Nimph of Mercurie,
Who when bright Phoebus mounteth up his coach
And tracts Aurora in her silver steps,
And sprinkles from the folding of her lap,
White lillies, roses and sweete violets.
Yet thus beleeve me, Princes of the South,
Although my Countries love deerer than pearle,
Or mynes of gold might well have kept me backe;
The sweet conversing with my King and frends,
(Left all for love) might well have kept mee backe;
The Seas by Neptune hoysed to the heavens,
Whose dangerous flawes might well have kept me
backe;
The savage Mores & Anthropagei
Whose lands I past might well have kept me
backe;
The doubt of entertainment in the Court
When I arrivde might well have kept me backe:
But so the fame of faire Angelica,
Stampt in my thoughts the figure of her love,
As neither Country, King, or Seas, or Cannibals,
Could by dispairing keep Orlando backe.
I list not boast in acts of chivalrie,
(An humor never fitting with my minde)
But come there forth the proudest champion
That hath suspition in the Palatine,
And with my trustie sword Durandell
Single, Ile register upon his helme,
What I dare doo for faire Angelica.
But leaving these, such glories as they bee;
I love my Lord.
Angelica her selfe shall speake for me (99-136).
Her Father lov’d me; oft invited me:
Still question’d me the Storie of my life,
From yeare to yeare: the Battaile, Sieges, Fortune,
That I have past.
I ran it through, even from my boyish daies,
To th’ very moment that he bad me tell it.
Wherein I spoke of most disastrous chances:
Of moving Accidents by Flood and Field,
Of haire-breadth scapes i’ th’ imminent deadly breach;
Of being taken by the Insolent Foe,
And sold to slavery. Of my redemption thence,
And portance in my Travellours historie.
Wherein of Antars vast, and Desarts idle,
Rough Quarries, Rocks, Hills, whose head touch heaven,
It was my hint to speake. Such was my Processe,
And of the Canibals that each others eate,
The Antropophague, and men whose heads
Grew beneath their shoulders. These things to heare,
Would Desdemona seriously incline:
But still the house Affaires would draw her hence:
Which ever as she could with haste dispatch,
She’ld come againe, and with a greedie eare
Devoure up my discourse. Which I observing,
Tooke once a pliant houre, and found good meanes
To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart,
That I would all my Pilgrimage dilate,
Whereof by parcels she had something heard,
But not instinctively: I did consent,
And often did beguile her of her teares,
When I did speake of some distressefull stroke
That my youth suffer’d: My Storie being done,
She gave me for my paines a world of kisses:
She swore, in faith ’twas strange: ’twas passing strange,
’Twas pittifull: ’twas wondrous pittifull.
She wish’d she had not heard it, yet she wish’d
That Heaven had made her such a man. She thank’d me,
And bad me, if I had a Friend that lov’d her,
I should but teach him how to tell my Story,
And that would wooe her. Upon this hint I spake,
She lov’d me for the dangers I had past,
And I lov’d her, that she did pitty them.
This onely is the witch-craft I have us’d.
Here comes the Ladie: Let her witnesse it (I, iii, 128-170
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