Othello Read Online Free
Book: Othello Read Online Free
Author: William Shakespeare
the cultural associations now attached to the image of a powerful and athletic black man killing his white wife out of sexual resentment.
Shakespeare’s Venetian world is suffused with sexual as well as racial prejudice. Each of the three women in the play is viewed at some point—in Bianca’s case, at all points—as a sexual commodity. And yet the female characters are never passive. They express themselves with vigor and take action into their own hands. Desdemona only becomes a victim when she lies vulnerably asleep. The play does not necessarily replicate the prejudices of its male characters. In a remarkable passage in the Folio text, * Emilia lucidly articulates an argument that skewers the double standard of her society:
… Let husbands know
Their wives have sense like them: they see and smell
And have their palates both for sweet and sour,
As husbands have. What is it that they do
When they change us for others? Is it sport?
I think it is. And doth affection breed it?
I think it doth. Is’t frailty that thus errs?
It is so too. And have not we affections?
Desires for sport? And frailty, as men have?
Then let them use us well: else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.
In Gregory Doran’s 2004 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Emilia appeared to have lived by what she preached. Desdemona describes Lodovico as a “proper” man. The adjective simultaneously suggests handsome, accomplished, and decent; Emilia responds by emphasizing the “handsome” and then says “I know a lady in Venice would have walked barefoot to Palestine for a touch of his nether lip.” In rehearsal for Doran’s production, the actors explored the possibility that the lady is Emilia herself. Could her words here and some part of Iago’s behavior in the play be explained by the hypothesis that she has had an affair with Lodovico?
It is a matter of debate as to how seriously we should take Iago’s claims that both Cassio and Othello have cuckolded him. For Samuel Taylor Coleridge, this was “the motive-hunting of motiveless malignity.” But it was the convention in Shakespeare’s theater that characters addressing the audience in soliloquy speak the truth. Iago is no respecter of convention, yet a sense of his own sexual insecurity may well be one of his driving motives. He says of Cassio, “He hath a daily beauty in his life / That makes me ugly.” This is one of the keys to Iago’s character: Cassio’s good nature tortures him because it exposes his own moral and social deficiencies, just as the very beauty of Othello and Desdemona’s love for each other is something that he cannot bear to witness and that he accordingly feels compelled to destroy.
His method of doing so is revealed in the linguistic echo chamber of the gripping temptation scene in the third act. “Alas,” says Othello, “thou echo’st me, / As if there were some monster in thy thought / Too hideous to be shown”: in the course of the dialogue, with its pattern of suggestion and repetition, the monster of envy that resides within Iago is transferred into the jealous fit that brings down Othello. It is an extraordinary performance on Iago’s part, in which—A. C. Bradley’s phrase again—“absolute evil [is] united with supreme intellectual power.” Where Othello’s poetry is one of the great embodiments of Shakespeare’s lyrical art, Iago’s prose and his plotting take us straight to his inventor’s supreme intellectual power.
ABOUT THE TEXT
Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling,
Shakespeare’s Venetian world is suffused with sexual as well as racial prejudice. Each of the three women in the play is viewed at some point—in Bianca’s case, at all points—as a sexual commodity. And yet the female characters are never passive. They express themselves with vigor and take action into their own hands. Desdemona only becomes a victim when she lies vulnerably asleep. The play does not necessarily replicate the prejudices of its male characters. In a remarkable passage in the Folio text, * Emilia lucidly articulates an argument that skewers the double standard of her society:
… Let husbands know
Their wives have sense like them: they see and smell
And have their palates both for sweet and sour,
As husbands have. What is it that they do
When they change us for others? Is it sport?
I think it is. And doth affection breed it?
I think it doth. Is’t frailty that thus errs?
It is so too. And have not we affections?
Desires for sport? And frailty, as men have?
Then let them use us well: else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.
In Gregory Doran’s 2004 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Emilia appeared to have lived by what she preached. Desdemona describes Lodovico as a “proper” man. The adjective simultaneously suggests handsome, accomplished, and decent; Emilia responds by emphasizing the “handsome” and then says “I know a lady in Venice would have walked barefoot to Palestine for a touch of his nether lip.” In rehearsal for Doran’s production, the actors explored the possibility that the lady is Emilia herself. Could her words here and some part of Iago’s behavior in the play be explained by the hypothesis that she has had an affair with Lodovico?
It is a matter of debate as to how seriously we should take Iago’s claims that both Cassio and Othello have cuckolded him. For Samuel Taylor Coleridge, this was “the motive-hunting of motiveless malignity.” But it was the convention in Shakespeare’s theater that characters addressing the audience in soliloquy speak the truth. Iago is no respecter of convention, yet a sense of his own sexual insecurity may well be one of his driving motives. He says of Cassio, “He hath a daily beauty in his life / That makes me ugly.” This is one of the keys to Iago’s character: Cassio’s good nature tortures him because it exposes his own moral and social deficiencies, just as the very beauty of Othello and Desdemona’s love for each other is something that he cannot bear to witness and that he accordingly feels compelled to destroy.
His method of doing so is revealed in the linguistic echo chamber of the gripping temptation scene in the third act. “Alas,” says Othello, “thou echo’st me, / As if there were some monster in thy thought / Too hideous to be shown”: in the course of the dialogue, with its pattern of suggestion and repetition, the monster of envy that resides within Iago is transferred into the jealous fit that brings down Othello. It is an extraordinary performance on Iago’s part, in which—A. C. Bradley’s phrase again—“absolute evil [is] united with supreme intellectual power.” Where Othello’s poetry is one of the great embodiments of Shakespeare’s lyrical art, Iago’s prose and his plotting take us straight to his inventor’s supreme intellectual power.
ABOUT THE TEXT
Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling,
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