James VI of Scotland and I of England

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Othello, Lepanto, and the Cyprus Wars

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SOURCE: Jones, Emrys. “Othello, Lepanto, and the Cyprus Wars.” Shakespeare Survey 21 (1968): 47-52.

[In the following essay, Jones explores the link between Lepanto and Shakespeare's Othello.]

In 1604 the theatrical company for which Shakespeare wrote and acted was taken under the patronage of the new king; and it is becoming increasingly clear that at least two of the plays written by Shakespeare during the early years of the new reign were probably intended to reflect James I's opinions and tastes.1Othello, acted at court on 1 November 1604, seems never to have been considered in relation to Shakespeare's new patron. I want to suggest that, like Measure for Measure, Macbeth, and possibly other plays written during these years, Othello was also designed as a work appropriate to the chief dramatist of the King's Men.

James's various interests as a man, theological, political and scholarly, as well as his multiple roles as king—in particular his peculiar historical position as the first British king of modern times—provided panegyrists with a number of possible themes. He could be celebrated for his wisdom and learning, his piety, and his love of peace, as well as for the British unity which his accession to the English throne had achieved. Allusions could be made to his views on the theory of kingship and on witchcraft, and his own published works, Basilikon Doron and Daemonologie, could be searched for usable material. In poems, masques and processions he could be figured as David, Solomon, Augustus or Brute. There was also one other aspect of James's public personality which was eagerly taken up at the time of his accession: he could be acclaimed by poets as one of themselves. For while still a young man in Scotland James had not only written but published poems, so that along with his other roles he could be celebrated as a poet-king—and poets in particular were naturally anxious that no one should forget the fact. A sonnet by Drayton addressed to James opens, ‘Of Kings a Poet, and the Poets King’, and an epigram of Jonson's calls him ‘best of Poets’. Of course other English monarchs of recent date had also written poetry: Henry VIII and Elizabeth I had done so. But their poems had been no more than brief lyrics, while James's poetical works were more ambitious. Among the poems and translations which he had published the best known was his original heroic poem Lepanto. It is this poem, I suggest, which provides the link between Othello and the king.

Lepanto was first published in James's second volume of verse, His Maiesties Poeticall Exercises at Vacant Houres; the earliest known edition is dated 1591. It was written several years before, probably in 1585, when James was nineteen.2 The poem is hardly of much interest in its own right; yet whatever its poetic deficiencies it had at least the merit of a striking subject: an heroic action taken from recent history and of large political importance.3 James's poem celebrates the great naval victory over the Turks won by the confederate Catholic states. The battle of Lepanto was the culmination of a military episode which had begun in 1570 with the Turkish attack on Cyprus, at that time one of Venice's richest territorial possessions. Spain and Rome, who were in a confederation with Venice, came to her assistance, and in the autumn of 1571 the combined Christian fleet of Spain, Venice and the Papacy set sail from Messina under the command of Don John of Austria, the illegitimate half-brother of Philip II. Battle was joined with the Turkish fleet at the gulf of Lepanto (near Corinth) on Sunday 7 October 1571. There were heavy losses on both sides, but the greater part of the entire Turkish fleet was destroyed or captured. Lepanto was not only an overwhelming victory for the Christians: it was also the only great Christian victory over the Turks in the sixteenth century. It was usually interpreted as a victory for Christendom as a whole, Protestant as well as Catholic, and so, although the king of a fiercely Protestant nation, James could take it as a suitable theme for his Christian muse.

James's Lepanto quickly became famous. Poets and scholars in England paid it tribute; Du Bartas translated it into French. In his edition of James's poems James Craigie collects a number (27 in all; the collection is not exhaustive) of contemporary references to James as a poet; among the writers are Sidney, Gabriel Harvey, Francis Meres, Sir William Alexander, and Ben Jonson.4 Some of them refer explicitly to Lepanto: e.g. Gabriel Harvey, who in Pierces Supererogation (1593) declares of James that he

hath not only translated the two diuine Poems of Salustius du Bartas, his heavenly Vrany, and his hellish Furies, but hath readd a most valorous Martial Lecture unto himselfe in his own victorious Lepanto, a short, but heroicall, worke, in meeter, but royal meeter, fitt for a Dauids harpe—Lepanto, first the glory of Christendome against the Turke, and now the garland of a soueraine crowne.

As might have been expected, there was a sharp revival of interest in James's poem—as there was in all his published works—at the time of his accession to the English throne. A separate edition of Lepanto was printed in London in 1603; the poem was called on the title-page His Maiesties Lepanto, or, Heroicall Song. Naupactiados, a Latin version of Lepanto by Thomas Moray, appeared in 1604. In Sorrows Joy (1603), a collection of elegies for Elizabeth I and panegyrics to James, a poem by ‘T. B.’ asks what poet is worthy to praise the King and answers, predictably enough:

Lo then the man which the Lepanto writ;
Or he, or els on earth is no man fitt.(5)

And in the same year, 1603, Richard Knolles dedicated his Generall Historie of the Turkes to James, and in his dedicatory epistle argued the aptness of the dedication: ‘and the rather, for that your Maiestie hath not disdained in your Lepanto, or Heroicall Song, with your learned Muse to adorne and set forth the greatest and most glorious victorie that ever was by anie the Christian confederate princes obtained against these the Othoman Kings or Emperors.’

There is further evidence that James was especially famed as a poet for Lepanto, and also that the poem was made to contribute to the coronation celebrations of 1604—possibly the year in which Othello was composed. In March 1604 the King made a coronation progress through the City of London. (The ceremony was described by Dekker in his tract, The Magnificent Entertainment given to King James.) The Italians Pageant, one of several before which the King and his party were required to pause, consisted of a great triumphal arch inset with illustrative panels.6 The main panel on the front side of the arch depicted James's main claim to the English throne by showing James receiving the sceptre from Henry VII. On the reverse side of the arch James's poetic achievements were the subject:

The middle great Square, that was aduanc'd over the Freeze of the Gate, held Apollo, with all his Ensignes and properties belonging vnto him, as a Sphere, Bookes, a Caducaeus, an Octoedron, with other Geometricall Bodies, and a Harpe in his left hand: his right hand with a golden Wand in it, poynting to the battel of Lepanto fought by the Turks, (of which his Maiestie hath written a Poem) and to doe him Honour, Apollo himselfe doth here seeme to take vpon himself to describe …

Othello was probably the first of Shakespeare's tragedies to be written for the King's Men, but it has apparently never been related to this setting of allusive compliment. That this is so may be largely due to the peculiarly private or even domestic nature of its action. Among Shakespeare's mature tragedies Othello is exceptional in taking its main plot not from history but fiction; and its apparent confinement to the private and domestic sphere sets it apart from Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and the Roman tragedies. Indeed its difference from them has seemed so marked that it has often been described as Shakespeare's closest approach to domestic tragedy, a genre concerned not with the crimes and misfortunes of heads of state but with the essentially private, and so unhistorical, lives of citizens. However, the opening scenes of the play present a world which could not be at all adequately described in private and domestic terms. These scenes evoke a world of public events: affairs of state, war, and military heroism. This is the world in which history is made; and it is accordingly in this part of the play—the Venetian part—that Othello comes closest to the public and historical concerns of the other tragedies.

The early Venetian scenes are usually regarded as a prelude to the main Cyprus action. The conflict of Othello and Brabantio can be seen as foreshadowing the much more difficult, because concealed and oblique, conflict of Othello and Iago, just as the trial scene in I, iii can be seen as anticipating the passing of judgement that takes place in the last scene of all. But otherwise the political events of which we hear in Act I are usually regarded as no more than dramatic machinery for effecting the move of the main characters from Venice to Cyprus (which from one point of view they are) and are seldom scrutinized for their own sakes. The modern playgoer probably never spares a thought for the ‘Cyprus wars’ mentioned early on by Iago or for the manoeuvres of the Turkish naval forces which so much exercise the Duke and Senators of Venice. The question arises whether Shakespeare had any further intentions in including this political material.

Shakespeare has so arranged it that the night of Othello's elopement with Desdemona is also the night when the news arrives in Venice of the movements of the warlike Turkish fleet. The Venetian Senate is alarmed for the safety of Cyprus, and accordingly Othello is sent to Cyprus to supervise its defences. Now although these events are in themselves fictitious (since Othello is a fictitious character), they could hardly have failed to arouse the memory of anyone in Shakespeare's audience who was at all aware of recent European history. For if we were to seek to give an approximate date to the action of Othello, we should be driven to the crucial years round about 1570, the year of the Turkish attack on Cyprus. The Turks had landed in Cyprus in 1570; one of the two chief Cypriot towns, Nicosia, soon fell; the other, Famagusta, underwent a long siege. It was these events which led to the Lepanto engagement. But the victory of Lepanto did not in fact restore Cyprus to Venice. Famagusta fell to the Turks on 1 August 1571, which left them in possession of the island. At the time of Othello's composition therefore (c. 1602-4), Cyprus had been in Turkish hands for over thirty years.

The connexion of the action of Othello with these events, at least in approximate date, is allowed by the Variorum editor. He quotes Isaac Reed's note on the play:

Selymus the Second formed his design against Cyprus in 1569, and took it in 1571. This was the only attempt the Turks ever made upon that island after it came into the hands of the Venetians (which was in the year 1473), wherefore the time of the play must fall in with some part of that interval.7

In the story by Cinthio, which is Shakespeare's only known source of Othello, there is no mention of a Turkish threat to Cyprus. Cinthio's story was after all written before the Turkish attack; the novelle were first published in 1565. So the story of Cinthio's Moor takes place in time of peace. If Cinthio was in fact his only narrative source, then Shakespeare has deliberately brought the action closer to the events of 1570-1. In Act I everything seems—or perhaps would have seemed to Shakespeare's first audience—to be moving towards the naval action which culminated in Lepanto and which was fought over the same issue as that presented in the play: the possession of Cyprus. Thus Iago says of Othello in the opening scene:

                                                  … he's embark'd,
With such loud reason to the Cyprus wars,
Which even now stand in act …

—a remark which seems, among other things, to be a direct pointer (‘Which even now stand in act’) to the approximate date of the action. And in the senate scene the Duke tells Othello:

The Turk with a most mighty preparation makes for Cyprus.

Given the fame of the battle of Lepanto, Shakespeare's audience could not have been blamed if they had expected the play to run along lines much more true to history than the play they were actually given. But what happens is that as soon as the main characters are arrived in Cyprus, the action moves into an entirely fictive realm, and the military background involving Venice and Cyprus, Christian and Turk, is allowed to recede from the attention. The military and naval clash which we seem led to expect never takes place. For instead of a battle between Christians and Turks Shakespeare substitutes a storm which disperses the Turkish fleet. An anonymous Gentleman announces:

                                                            News, lads! Our wars are done.
The desperate tempest hath so bang'd the Turk
That their designment halts …

A little later, on his entry, Othello dismisses all thought of the Turks in a single line:

News, friends: our wars are done; the Turks are drown'd.

And finally the war theme is allowed to die with the Herald's proclamation:

It is Othello's pleasure, our noble and valiant general, that, upon certain tidings now arriv'd, importing the mere perdition of the Turkish fleet, every man put himself into triumph …

The fate of the Turks is left purposely vague, and apart from one or two phrases which help sustain the atmosphere of an exposed garrison town (‘this warlike isle’, ‘what! in a town of war, / Yet wild, the people's hearts brimful of fear’), the Turkish threat to Cyprus is allowed to be forgotten.

The connexion of Othello with the ‘Cyprus wars’ is not only of a general kind; there are one or two precise details which suggest that Shakespeare had the events of 1570-1 in mind. At the beginning of I, iii the Duke and Senators are comparing the different reports of the numbers of the Turkish galleys and their movements:

1 SENATOR:
My letters say a hundred and seven galleys.
DUKE:
And mine a hundred and forty.
2 SENATOR:
                                                                                                                        And mine two hundred …

In his Generall Historie of the Turkes Knolles says of the Turks at the time of their first landing in Cyprus: ‘The whole fleet at that time consisted of two hundred gallies.’ And later, after Lepanto, he notes: ‘Of the enemies gallies were taken an hundred threescore and one, fortie sunk or burnt.’8 The Turks had two hundred galleys; and this is the number which Shakespeare keeps last, in a position of emphasis or climax, for his Second Senator. This may be a coincidence, but at any rate the size of the Turkish fleet in Othello and at Lepanto was roughly the same. A little later in the same scene a messenger reports news of the Turkish movements:

The Ottomites, reverend and gracious,
Steering with due course toward the isle of Rhodes,
Have there injointed them with an after fleet.
1 SENATOR:
Ay, so I thought. How many, as you guess?
MESSENGER:
Of thirty sail; and now do they restem
Their backward course, bearing with frank appearance
Their purposes toward Cyprus.

These movements correspond exactly to Knolles's account of the Turkish invasion plans:9 ‘For Mustapha, author of that expedition … had before appointed Piall Bassa at a time prefixed, to meet him at the Rhodes, and that he that came first should tarrie for the other, that so they might together sayle into Cyprus.’ Knolles goes on to say that Mustapha Bassa ‘together with Haly Bassa and the rest of the fleet, departed from Constantinople the six and twentieth of May, and at the Rhodes met with Piall as he had before appointed. The whole fleet at that time consisted of two hundred gallies …’10

Shakespeare could of course have taken for granted a general interest in the Ottoman empire which is very remote from what a modern audience brings to Othello. The Turkish menace to Christendom was a fact of Shakespeare's entire lifetime; it remained of pressing concern to the West until late in the seventeenth century. This fact may of itself have given Othello's Cypriot setting an ominous character which is lost on us. As Knolles put it: ‘The Venetians had ever had great care of the island of Cyprus, as lying far from them, in the middest of the sworne enemies of the Christian religion, and had therefore oftentimes determined to have fortified the same.’11 So Cyprus could be seen as an outpost of Christendom, rich, vulnerable, and perilously situated: a highly suitable setting for a play showing Christian behaviour under stress. After Cassio's drunken brawl has been put down, Othello is to say:

Are we turn'd Turks, and to ourselves do that
Which Heaven hath forbid the Ottomites?
For Christian shame, put by this barbarous brawl.

His words, skilfully placed in the scene, are emphatic and ironic. For if Shakespeare's fictitious action can be said to belong to the years 1570-1, those were historically the very years when Cyprus underwent a violent conversion from Christian to Turkish rule—the years when it literally ‘turned Turk’.

However, over thirty years had elapsed between Lepanto and the writing of Othello. The battle in itself was no longer a matter of topical interest as it had been (for example) to Gascoigne when, in his Mountacute Masque of 1572, he had incorporated a dramatic eyewitness account of the sea-fight. But in the interval between 1571 and 1604 an event had taken place which had had the effect of reviving interest in the battle, at least indirectly. The event was, as I have argued, the accession of James, whose heroic poem was promptly reprinted in 1603.

It has to be admitted that Shakespeare seems to have no direct indebtedness to James. What is relevant here is Lepanto as an historical event rather than any specific reminiscences of the poem.12 Even so the general affinities between Othello and Lepanto are sufficiently striking. Both are concerned, Lepanto centrally, Othello peripherally, with the ‘Cyprus wars’, which for Shakespeare's contemporaries could only have pointed to the events of 1570-1. And a major topic of the poem—the conflict of Christian and Turk—is present in Othello as it is in no other of Shakespeare's plays. Knolles's dedication of his Generall Historie of the Turkes has already been quoted; it can surely be assumed that Shakespeare and his fellow actors would have been quite as adroit in publicly saluting their new patron.

Notes

  1. See Henry N. Paul, The Royal Play ofMacbeth’ (New York, 1950); David L. Stevenson, ‘The Role of James I in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure’, E.L.H. XXVI (1959), 188-208; Josephine Waters Bennett, ‘Measure for Measureas Royal Entertainment (New York and London, 1966); I have argued the case for Cymbeline in E.C. XI (1961), 84-99.

  2. The Poems of James VI of Scotland (vol. 1), ed. James Craigie (Edinburgh and London, 1955), p. xlviii.

  3. The subject inspired several Venetian painters. Paolo Veronese's Battle of Lepanto is reproduced in Samuel C. Chew's The Crescent and the Rose. Islam and England during the Renaissance (New York, 1937). Chew quotes (p. 126) Jonson's Cynthia's Revels, IV, i, 48 (‘He looks like a Venetian trumpeter in the battle of Lepanto in the gallery yonder’) as evidence for the existence of paintings on the subject in England.

  4. Craigie, op. cit. Appendix A.

  5. Quoted by Craigie, op. cit. p. 276.

  6. The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge, 1955), II, 262-5.

  7. Othello, ed. H. H. Furness (Philadelphia, 1886), 357. The editor wrongly attributes the comment to Henry Reed, author of Lectures on English History and Tragic Poetry (1856). It should be attributed to Isaac Reed; it occurs in his prefatory note to Othello in his edition of Shakespeare (1799-1802).

  8. Knolles (2nd edn. 1610), pp. 846, 863.

  9. This was noted by Isaac Reed.

  10. Knolles, op. cit. p. 846.

  11. Knolles, op. cit. p. 847.

  12. In ‘Othelloas the Tragedy of Italy (1924), an attempt at a cryptic reading of the play, Lilian Winstanley wrongly states (p. 21) that the battle of Lepanto is directly referred to. In this context of the Christian and Turkish conflict in Othello, see F. N. Lees's article, ‘Othello's Name’ (N.Q., n.s., VIII (1961), 139-41), for the suggestion that Shakespeare adapted Othello's name from that of Othoman, the founder of the Ottoman (or Othoman) empire. Shakespeare could have found an account of Othoman in Knolles.

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