[In the following excerpt, Keyishian centers on Othello's interpretation of love and revenge.]

THE SOUL OF OTHELLO

Othello is in many ways an extended meditation on revenge. As we will see, Shakespeare gives us a full-scale portrait of vindictiveness in the figure of Iago; but he also shows us, in Othello himself, the emergence of vindictive trends in a character constitutionally devoted to affirmative goals. Once separated from those goals, however, and convinced Desdemona has betrayed him, Othello feels sullied by her very existence. He kills her both to avenge himself and to redeem the world.

Although the revenges practiced by Iago and Othello are both corrupt and destructive, they differ in their foundations, aims, and moral flavor. For Iago, to whom love represents an irrational, enervating surrender of self-interest, revenge seems a pleasurable means of serving oneself and validating a philosophy of opportunism. For Othello, to whom love is an act of voluntary, creative submission, revenge is a painful duty, requiring strict personal discipline, performed in the service of selfless ideals and in the name of justice.

In Iago we perceive a sharp distinction between what he pretends to be and what he is; using various poses of blunt cynicism and excessive skepticism to gain credibility, he presents himself as a man fundamentally, even compulsively, honest. In Othello the telling distinction is between what he understands himself to be and what he is. He thinks he is a man of inviolable integrity, master of his emotions, whereas he is, in fact, easily overwhelmed by his passions and most strongly under Iago's control when he thinks he is under his own.

Rhetorically, there are parallels between Iago's manner of seducing Othello and Antony's transformation of the crowd during the funeral oration in Julius Caesar. In both cases, a revenger is fashioned before an audience's eyes through manipulations that manufacture a sense of injury where there was none before. The manipulator does not inscribe the doctrine of revenge upon a blank slate but, rather, appeals to a particular personality's anxieties and vulnerabilities. The key to his success is to locate the basic psychological investments of the character being seduced, then make it seem they are being violated and abused by the target of revenge. We have seen how Antony did that with the Roman crowd. Iago uses some obviously similar strategies: he convinces Othello he is full of "love and honesty" (3.3.119), qualities Othello admires; he pretends to speak of Othello's wrongs only reluctantly ("It were not for your quiet nor your good / … To let you know my thoughts" [152-54]); he gets Othello to command him to say what he already intends to say ("If thou dost love me, / Show me thy thought" [115-16]); he gives Othello evidence both visual (mental images of adultery) and aural (Cassio's partially heard conversation); he plays on Othello's fears of seeming irresolute ("If you are so fond over her iniquity, give her patent to offend, for if it touch not you, it comes near nobody" [4.1.197-98]); he appeals to Othello's blunt sense of justice ("Strangle her in her bed, even the bed she hath contaminated" [207-8]). Othello's soul is composed of these investments, and it is Shakespeare's point that Iago, knowing his prey, can use them against him.

CATCHING OTHELLO'S SOUL

Soul is the word Othello uses when he wants to speak of the irreducible and inviolable center of his being, his essential identity. It is not only his "parts" and his "title" but also his "perfect soul" that put him beyond Brabantio's reproaches; and that soul is perfect because it is self-validating and autonomous. "Were it my cue to fight, I should have known it, / Without a prompter" (1.2.83-84), he tells his followers; he assures the Senators of Venice that no "light-wing'd toys / Of feather'd Cupid" (1.3.268-69) will keep him from his duty. He recognizes, and warns others, that should he lose self-control, he would become a menace to them all:

                    Now by heaven,
My blood begins my safer guides to rule,
And passion, having my best judgment
 collied,
Assays to lead the way. 'Zounds, if I stir,
Or do but lift this arm, the best of you
Shall sink in my rebuke.
                                    (2.3.204-9)

Therefore, it is necessary not only for his own peace but for the world's that Othello's soul remain inviolable.

Othello serves only two masters: his reason and the Senators of Venice. To neither does he feel he has surrendered his independence: indeed, the faithfulness with which he serves them is his personal measure of value. But what Othello has done at the start of the play is, for the first time in his life, to share that intimate space, his soul, with another. For Desdemona he has his "unhoused free condition / Put into circumscription and confine" (1.2.26-27). She has become his "soul's joy" (2.1.184); being with her, he declares,

My soul hath her content so absolute
That not another comfort like to this
Succeeds in unknown fate.
                                    (191-93)

What she signifies to him, what she supplies in that secret inner space that defines him, is peace and harmony, conditions that apparently represent his chief happiness. As he says on his arrival in Cyprus after a stormy journey,

If after every tempest comes such calm,
May the winds blow, till they have waken'd
 death!
                                    (2.1.185)

It almost seems that the point of enduring the storm is to enjoy such rest.

This precious commodity, integrity of soul, is important to his existence both as a soldier and as a man. Should he let his sensual pleasures interfere with his duties, he will deserve to "Let housewives make a skillet of [his] helm" (1.3.272); and should he "make a life of jealousy" and turn the business of his soul to such "exsufficate and blown surmises" as a jealous mind conceives, it would be appropriate to "exchange [him] for a goat" (3.3.177-80). That he had actually lived according to his principles is attested to by Lodovico, who, seeing Othello's violence against Desdemona, cannot believe it can be the same man he knew:

Is this the noble Moor whom our full Senate
Call all in all sufficient? Is this the nature
Whom passion could not shake? whose solid
 virtue
The shot of accident nor dart of chance
Could neither graze nor pierce?
                                  (4.1.264-68)

But independence of soul is just what Othello has given up for Desdemona. Love involves some degree of submission to its object: Desdemona commented that her heart was "subdu'd / Even to the very quality of her lord" (1.3.250-51). And for Othello, too, love is experienced as surrender: his mother, he said, had managed to "subdue his father / Entirely to her love" (3.4.59-60). By sharing his soul with Desdemona, Othello has made his integrity contingent on hers.

Iago thoroughly unsettles Othello by making him believe that Desdemona has betrayed that act of surrender and sharing. For Othello the situation is untenable and unbearable; as he says, he would rather

             be a toad
And live upon the vapor of a dungeon

Than keep a corner in the thing I love
For others' uses.
                                     (3.3.270-73)

His confident faith in his "perfect" soul gives way to doubts about his color, his lack of social graces, his age, and his judgment: "If she be false, O then heaven mocks itself (278). His security in being the sort of person for whom "to be once in doubt / Is once to be resolv'd" (179-80) gives way to his realization that he really thinks "'tis better to be much abus'd / Than but to know't a little" (336-37). Each source of his pride and confidence seems contingent on the other; when one gives way, they all go:

                     O now, for ever
Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troops and the big wars
That make ambition virtue!

Farewell! Othello's occupation's gone.
                                      (347-57)

Desdemona's betrayal not only makes forever unavailable to him his previous sources of pleasure and glory ("The spirit-stirring drum, th' ear-piercing fife" [352]); it also infects his inner identity (in F1):

              My name, that was as fresh
As Dian's visage, is now begrim'd and black
As mine own face.
                                       (386-88)⁵

As with revengers generally, the integrity-altering injury seems in Othello to require an act of counter-aggression that will declare his potency and control over his own identity:

If there be cords, or knives,
Poison, or fire, or suffocating streams,
I'll not endure it!
                                       (388-90)

These are the stakes, then; these the elements of integrity and self-esteem that trusting another has cost him. When Othello turns against Desdemona, he ousts her from her privileged place and now fills his soul with violent hatred:

Arise, black vengeance, from the hollow hell!
Yield up, O love, thy crown, and hearted
 throne
To tyrannous hate! Swell, bosom, with thy
 fraught,
For 'tis of aspics' tongues!
                                 (3.3.446-49)

He recognizes the terrible consequences of what he is doing, but it is beyond him to resist what seems, and is experienced as, a violent current outside and around him. His love of Desdemona was a powerful substance; when it vanishes, the vacuum it leaves must be filled by an equally powerful force, a violent propulsion toward revenge:

  Like to the Pontic Sea,
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Nev'r feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellespont.
                                      (453-56)

Surrender to it gives him comfort and confidence. In order to achieve what he thinks will assuage his pain and restore his sense of autonomous selfhood—"a capable and wide revenge" against Desdemona and Cassio that will "swallow them up"—he needs above all to be sure his "bloody thoughts" will "nev'r ebb to humble love" (457-60).

However, if we want to get to the heart of Othello's motive for revenge, to understand what is at stake for him, we must look beyond such melodramatic rant to a much sadder and more intimate moment. In act 4, scene 2, Othello, having humiliated Desdemona—and himself—by striking her before the Venetian ambassadors, directly accuses her of adultery. He has sworn revenge against her; he has demanded and received what he deems "proof" of her guilt—the handkerchief and Cassio's bragging; he has declared his heart turned to stone against her. And yet when it comes to making his most heartbroken declaration of what all that means to him, it is to Desdemona that he expresses himself: she remains the intimate of his soul, and it is to her that he explains what her seeming treachery means and what his pain is like:

                    Had it pleas'd heaven
To try me with affliction, had they rain'd
All kind of sores and shames on my bare
 head,
Steep's me in poverty to the very lips,
Given to captivity me and my utmost hopes,
I should have found in some place of my soul
A drop of patience; but, alas, to make me
The fixed figure for the time of scorn
To point his slow unmoving finger at!
Yet could I bear that too, well, very well;
But there, where I have garner'd up my heart,
Where either I must live or bear no life;
The fountain from the which my current runs
Or else dries up: to be discarded thence!
Or keep it as a cestern for foul toads
To knot and gender in!
                                     (4.2.47-62)

That is intolerable, the end of Othello's being—not just the "big wars" and military pomp he had earlier declared he had to surrender, but his absolute and deeply cherished integrity. When this moment of devastating pathos is over, Othello's mind turns quickly and completely to vituperation and bitter hatred; but in the meanwhile he has revealed the source of his agony.

But when the time comes for Othello to kill Desdemona, he cannot do it on the basis of his subjective pain. Because justice is so important to him, he must convince himself that he has transcended personal considerations. He becomes in his own mind the agent of justice, a benign sort of justice that aims to recreate the object of his adoration in her original purity by destroying her. Separating her vice from her beauty, Othello can say of the sleeping Desdemona, "Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee / And love thee after" (5.2.18-19). (His dismissal of Cassio earlier had expressed his capacity to separate his feeling for someone from his objective sense of that person's fitness: "Cassio, I love thee, / But never more be officer of mine" [2.3.248-49].)

Throughout the play, Othello displays an appreciation, sometimes witty, of what is fair and appropriate in his reciprocal dealings with others. To the enraged Brabantio he not only points out the folly of his attempt to intimidate a soldier by force of arms, but with kindness he suggests the values that should control relations between them: "Good signior, you shall more command with years / Than with your weapons" (1.2.60-61). Reciprocity of feeling had drawn him and Desdemona together: "She gave me for my pains a world of sighs" (1.3.159), he says, and concludes:

She lov'd me for the dangers I had pass'd,
And I lov'd her that she did pity them.
                                     (167-68)

Thus, Othello's sense of self is invested not only in his feelings of personal inviolability, but also in the sense of decorum, appropriateness, and justice that governs his manner of falling in love. When his love turns to hate, he of course retains that habit of thought. "How shall I murther him, Iago?" he says of Cassio; "I would have him nine years a-killing" (4.1.170, 178). When Iago suggests he strangle Desdemona "in her bed, even the bed she hath contaminated" (4.1.207-8), he is delighted: "Good, good; the justice of it pleases; very good" (209-10).

In the soliloquy "It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul" (5.2.1-22), Othello takes up the question of justice. Consider Desdemona's outward beauty alone, he observes, and it would certainly be wrong to "scar that whiter skin of hers than snow" (4); but consider her character, and she must die, because if he lets her live, "she'll betray more men" (6). He must struggle against his senses—of sight, of smell; but justice in the end wins out, and he finds a point of personal harmony in the holding of oxymorons in suspension:

So sweet was ne'er so fatal. I must weep,
But they are cruel tears. This sorrow's
 heavenly,
It strikes where it doth love.
                                  (5.1.20-22)

I that am cruel am yet merciful,
I would not have thee linger in thy pain.
                                      (87-88)

Othello is reading his actions as issuing from a sense of justice and fairness: he is striving, while walking into strange and foreign moral territory, to keep the familiar guideposts of his personality in view.

And of course when it comes time to judge himself, he applies the same criteria. He thinks it appropriate that his weapon should be taken from him by Montano: "why should honor outlive honesty?" (5.2.245). He sees himself as deserving torment for his deed—being whipped from the sight of Desdemona, blown about in winds, roasted in sulphur, and washed in gulfs of liquid fire (277-80). And finally, of course, after having "read" himself, with a sense of balance and measure, as one "that lov'd not wisely but too well; / … not easily jealious, but being wrought, / Perplexed in the extreme" (344-47), he judges himself to deserve the same fate as the "malignant … Turk" who "Beat a Venetian and traduc'd the state" (353-54). When justice demands that he be punished, he, using the only means left him to act out his self-sufficiency, imposes his punishment upon himself. He does it with a characteristic sense of symmetry in his last flourish:

I kiss'd thee ere I kill'd thee. No way but
  this,
Killing myself, to die upon a kiss.
                                     (358-59)

And in that self-imposed justice he seeks to restore his integrity by avenging Desdemona.

Antony, the Roman populace, and Othello seem to me to stand at the borders of vindictiveness. What holds them back, in my view, is the presence in them of a potential capacity—or at least a wish—to live for affirmative goals. In making this judgment in the case of Antony, I may be reading backward from Antony and Cleopatra and ascribing his skillful Machiavellianism too fully to his chagrin at failing Caesar; and in the case of the Roman populace, I may too easily exculpate them for their malleability in the hands of a master rhetorician. But … vindictiveness was seen as a more deep-seated evil, as a full-blown psychic disorder and the product of profound moral flaws. At his very worst moments—planning to poison Desdemona, cheering on the assassination of Cassio—Othello briefly occupies that mental territory, but he is finally as much a stranger there as he had ever been in Venice.

Note

⁵ I here depart from The Riverside Shakespeare, which rejects the Folio text's "my name" (3.3.386) in favor of Q2's "her name." The emendation has a certain logic: Othello has just been speaking of Desdemona, whose reputation, here conflated with her beauty, seems sullied by her actions. However, I prefer (and my view of the play is better served by) the view of the Arden editor, M. R. Ridley: "I see little justification for accepting Q2's 'her name' as most edd. have done. Othello is maddened by the befoulment of his own honour; it is that which he will not endure, and which only revenge will clear." See M. R. Ridley, ed., Othello (London: Methuen, 1962), 117.