SOURCE: “Othello's Occupation: Shakespeare and the Romance of Chivalry,” in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 15, No. 3, Autumn, 1985, pp. 293-311.

[In the following essay, Rose discusses the role of chivalry in Othello.]

O now, for ever
Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troops, and the big wars
That makes ambition virtue! O, farewell!
Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, th’ ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!
And O you mortal engines, whose rude throats
Th’ immortal Jove's dread clamors counterfeit,
Farewell! Othello's occupation's gone.(1)

Othello's adieus to tranquility and content at the start of this speech evoke something more like the pastoral than the military ideal. Even when the imagery becomes explicitly military in the evocation of the “plumed troops” and the “big wars” there is a subtle continuity with the opening pastoralism. Here the lines suggest a transformation in which “ambition,” which is a vice in a world defined by pastoral content, becomes a “virtue” in a martial context—that is, both a positive good, and in the archaic sense of virtu, a source of strength. Moreover, the static quality of “plumed troops” and “big wars” is compatible with the feeling the lines convey that something like pastoral otium is being continued in a martial vein. Explicit activity enters the picture when Othello imagines the world he has lost as a parade of neighing horses and playing instruments—trumpet, drum, and fife—an ascending procession of sound that climaxes in the godlike roar of the cannon. “Farewell! Othello's occupation's gone.” Six times in eleven lines Othello says farewell. The repetition articulates the speech, contributing to the sense of a procession passing with Othello bidding adieu to each of the squadrons in the parade of his life. It also unifies the speech, turning it into a nostalgic lament for a paradoxically apprehended martial pastoral.

What has Othello lost? The contradictions in this speech, at once static and active, pastoral and martial, convey the emotional urgency with which an image of the perfected world of absolute being is here fashioned. It is a world in which everything, including the neighing of horses and the booming of cannon, takes on the aspect of music; a world without stress, one in which even ambitious striving for glory has been reconceived as a form of tranquility. To participate in the harmonious clamor of this grand march in which mortal engines counterfeit the huge sounds of immortal Jove is to live at the farthest verge of human possibility. It is to be nearly as absolute as a god. Plainly such a state of being, one in which there is no gap between desire and satisfaction, between, as Macbeth puts it, the firstlings of the heart and the firstlings of the hand, is a condition radically incompatible with self-reflection, thought, or uncertainty of any kind. To banish Othello from such an Eden, proof of Desdemona's infidelity is unnecessary; mere suspicion will do as well as certainty.

Why should suspicion of Desdemona's infidelity end Othello's occupation as a soldier? It helps to observe that Othello conceives himself in this speech as a type of the knight validated by the absolute worthiness of the mistress he serves. Call the mistress into question and not only the knight's activity but his very identity collapses. Of course in this case the mistress, the necessarily unattainable lady of romance, has become the wife: sexual availability—as opposed to the intensity of mere fantasizing—has entered the picture. Even without Iago's machinations, then, the romantic image of the absolute worthiness of the lady is at best unstable. Others have developed this aspect of Othello's vulnerability to Iago.² Here let us note simply that this speech is a clue to Othello's romanticizing imagination. It is of a piece with his address to the Senate in which he retells the story of his adventures among cannibals and monsters, his speech to Desdemona about the magic in the web of the handkerchief in which he invokes witches and charms as a way of explaining its overwhelming significance, or his final speech in which he recalls the exotic turbaned Turk in order to explain why he is about to slay himself. One might interpret Othello as a kind of tragic Don Quixote, a play in which Shakespeare explores the ways in which a romanticizing imagination can lead to devastating error. Yet despite the appeal of such an approach—and certainly it would be illuminating up to a point—we should note that Othello's romanticism is neither so explicit as Don Quixote's nor so firmly demarcated from the general world of the narrative.

There are no giants or dragons in Othello. The play's military world consists of generals, lieutenants, and ancients rather than knights, squires, evil magicians, and faithless Saracens. It is a world in which career advancement can be presented as a plausible motive for action; it is a comparatively workaday place of fleets, intelligence reports, and expeditionary forces. But the proximate realism should not blind us to the play's romantic aspects. There are Christian soldiers and threatening infidels here. Othello, a black warrior of royal lineage who turns out to be capable of astonishing violence, has something of a Savage Knight about him, and Desdemona may well in the constancy of her affection recall a Princess of Love and Chastity. Iago is no magician—indeed, he explicitly denies that he works by witchcraft—and yet his ensnarement of Othello's soul together with his manipulation of his perceptions may recall Spenser's Archimago, who similarly provides Redcross with ocular proof of his lady's infidelity. Moreover, all these elements reminiscent of chivalric romance—Othello's royal blood and adventurous past, the somewhat miraculous quality of Desdemona's innocence, the air of diabolical mystery that clings to Iago, the background of war with the infidel—are Shakespeare's additions to the Othello story as he found it in Cinthio's novella. Not just Othello's imagination but, I would suggest, Shakespeare's own is informed by the patterns of chivalric romance.

II

A few words about the Elizabethan chivalric revival are in order here. As Roy Strong says, “It is one of the great paradoxes of the Elizabethan world, one of its touchstones, that an age of social, political and religious revolution should cling to and deliberately erect a façade of the trappings of feudalism”³ Elizabethan culture was saturated with feudal idealism. In life and in art chivalric themes were pervasive. By the 1580s the spectacular Accession Day Tilts had reached their fully developed form. In this period, too, Robert Smythson was designing such fantasy castles as Wollaton Hall, Sidney was writing the Arcadia, Spenser was writing The Faerie Queene, and the London stages were populated by damsels in distress, knights in armor, and wicked enchanters in dozens of plays—most now lost—with names like Herpetulus the Blue Knight and Perobia, The History of the Solitary Knight, and Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes.⁴ Chivalric fantasies of service to the Virgin Queen shaped Elizabethan court style and also affected foreign policy. One product of the chivalric revival was Sidney's Arcadia, another was his death in 1586 in a campaign in which romantic notions continually obscured for Eliza's knights the complex facts of a situation in which Dutch burghers were attempting to throw off Spanish rule.⁵

Northrop Frye's conception of romance as “the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfillment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain that reality”⁶ might well be a gloss on the Elizabethan effort to turn reality into a romance. The late sixteenth century was a time of dramatic social changes and probably also a period of considerable social anxiety. London was burgeoning, commerce was developing rapidly, old bonds of service and obligation were yielding to new relationships based on the marketplace, and the religious unity of Europe was gone forever. Chivalric games and ceremonies helped to obscure the relative newness of so many of the noble families as well as the fact that, despite the continuing prestige of war, the aristocracy had ceased to be a warrior class and was becoming an administrative elite. By this period, as Lawrence Stone has shown, there was little that was particularly feudal about the English nobility, who from an early time had been deeply engaged in entrepreneurial activity.⁷ On the other hand, there was little that was clearly bourgeois—in the modern sense—about the sensibility of the Elizabethan middle class. Interestingly, the bourgeois hero tales of the 1590s and early 1600s—Deloney's Jack of Newbury, Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday and other stories and plays celebrating the virtues of the new men of commerce—show middle-class figures in feudal postures, fighting and feasting like knights.⁸ The usual aspiration of the successful businessman was not to oppose the interests of the landed aristocracy and gentry but to join them as soon as possible, one notable case in point being Shakespeare himself.

The chivalric revival assimilated the complexities of the present to a mythical world of the past, but at its center was the living Queen. In her own person Elizabeth held the contradictions of her culture together, and she did this in part by turning herself into a character, Gloriana, and her life and that of her country into a story. But the moment of magical balance was necessarily brief. By the late 1590s the fervor of the previous decade was gone. Corruption at court was more marked and commented on, and it had become increasingly more difficult for the Queen, who was now a full generation older than her principal courtiers, to play the role of the virginal beauty.⁹ Nor should the traumatic effect of the Earl of Essex's rebellion and execution be underestimated. Essex, who is one of the very few contemporary figures to whom Shakespeare directly alludes, was the inheritor of Philip Sidney's sword and of his position in the national imagination as the embodiment of chivalry. According to his biographer, his rise and sudden fall in 1601 probably affected the nation more deeply than any event since the defeat of the Spanish Armada.¹⁰ In any case, the time came when the Elizabethan romances—both the romance enacted by the Queen and those composed by her poets and dramatists—could no longer carry conviction. Despite a brief revival of some of its themes in 1610-1612 at the court of Prince Henry, nothing like the special quality of Elizabethan chivalry could occur again.

III

I know of no general study of Shakespeare's relation to the romance dramas of the 1570s and 1580s and to the Elizabethan chivalric revival.¹¹ Nevertheless, it is not hard to see how, for instance, 1 Henry VI with its opposition between the heroic knight Talbot and the wicked enchantress Joan represents a continuation and transformation of chivalric romance materials, or how similar materials influence the romantic comedies with their disguised and wandering heroines. Moreover, the theme of both historical tetralogies is the disintegration of an absolute world of chivalry, and in this theme the histories might be said to look forward to Othello's farewell to arms. Thus the first tetralogy begins with Henry V's funeral, a symbolic procession that suggests the death of chivalry itself, after which the Henry VI plays trace the collapse of the heroic society into faction and civil war. There follows the emergence of Richard the Third, a monstrous antitype of the chivalric hero, and finally the return of chivalry in the person of the Earl of Richmond. The pattern of the second tetralogy is similar. Here the interrupted combat at the start of Richard II establishes the lost world of perfected chivalric kingship, after which the plays trace a decline into strife and rebellion and finally the emergence of a new chivalric figure, Prince Hal as Henry V. But this time, we note, the chivalric return is not simply a return. Hal's chivalry is political and contingent rather than mystical and absolute in the vein of Richmond at the end of Richard III. Like Elizabeth holding the contradictions of her culture together in her person, Hal holds the contradictions of his history-play world together, and, like her, he does it through self-conscious role-playing.

The tone of Shakespeare's treatment of chivalric themes, like so much else, changes in the early seventeenth century. Troilus and Cressida, probably written the year after the Essex rebellion, is biting in its exposure of the putrefied core that seems to hide within the goodly armor of chivalric pretentions, and in King Lear not even the spectacular romancelike triumph of the unknown knight Edgar over his evil brother Edmund can prevent the ugly hanging of Cordelia and the play's tragic end. Particularly relevant to Othello, however, is the tragedy that immediately precedes it chronologically. It would be hard, I think, to overemphasize the importance of chivalry to Hamlet. The play takes its point of departure, and finds its image of the lost chivalric world, in Horatio's evocation of King Hamlet and King Fortinbras locked in a valiant single combat ratified by law and chivalry. It is this evocation of heroic combat in a past time when things were absolutely what they seemed to be that gives meaning to the great falling off that constitutes the play's present world. In creeping into the garden to poison his brother, Claudius has in effect poisoned chivalry. His secret duel with Hamlet, fought with such human weapons as Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and the actors, represents a travesty of chivalric ideals, and the play moves not toward the heroic restorations of the histories but toward a grotesque and deadly recapitulation of the original combat between the kings in Hamlet and Laertes' duel with the poisoned foils, overseen by Osric as chivalric judge-at-arms.

IV

“I’ll pour this pestilence into his ear” (2.3.356): the language with which Iago introduces his plan for undoing Othello strikingly recalls Claudius' poison poured into the porches of King Hamlet's ears. We can note, too, that Othello's farewell to arms figures in the play's structure in a manner analogous to the image of the kings in combat, providing in its martial pastoral a point of reference against which the present situation, Othello in the agonies of Iago's poison, is to be measured. But the fact that in Othello the nostalgic reference point comes in the middle rather than at the start of the tragedy is important; whereas in Hamlet chivalry is dead before the play begins, in Othello we observe the process of the poisonous transformation. In fact we do more than observe, we participate. In Hamlet the audience's representative, the figure who draws us into dramatic engagement with his purposes, is the prince, and Claudius, as his antagonist, becomes in consequence a relatively opaque figure. In Othello, as in Richard III and Macbeth, Shakespeare plays the dynamics of theatrical engagement against moral judgment, and this is one reason that Othello does not lapse into melodrama. From the opening in which Iago manipulates Roderigo and Brabantio the play is structured so that we enter the action from Iago's point of view, and his many strategically placed soliloquies and asides confirm our dramatic engagement with him through at least the first half of the play. Othello himself is magnificent, a commanding and dominating figure, but until the temptation scene and the start of his falling off he is also, like Claudius, apprehended at a certain distance, observed as one might observe a public figure and a stranger.

Othello, the exotic black man from Africa, is a stranger in another, more literal, sense as well. In Hamlet and in the history plays the representatives of chivalric perfection—King Hamlet, Henry V in the first tetralogy, Edward the Black Prince as he is evoked at the start of the second tetralogy—are generally ancestral figures. Even the Earl of Richmond and Henry V in the second tetralogy are ancestral figures to the audience if not to the characters in the plays. In Othello, however, the knightly defender of Christian civilization is projected as an alien. Othello's blackness is the index of a different orientation toward the chivalric figure. Moreover, as many critics since Bradley have remarked, Iago is a kind of playwright, an artist carefully maneuvering his characters into position to bring his tragedy to fulfillment.¹² Perhaps, then, we can think of Othello as a play in which Shakespeare is recapitulating his own earlier representations of an absolute world of chivalry, alienating them, and through Iago representing something like his own role in plotting the disintegration of the absolute world.

V

Put money in thy purse … I say put money in thy purse … put money in thy purse … put but money in thy purse … fill thy purse with money … put money in thy purse … Make all the money thou canst … therefore make money … go make money … go, provide thy money … put money enough in your purse.

(1.3.339-81)

It is more than a little tempting to think of Iago as an embodiment of the prodigious energies of the new commercialism of the Renaissance, and thus to turn Othello into an allegory in which bourgeois man destroys the representative of the older feudal values. Thus, whereas Othello speaks of the plumed troop and the royal banner in terms that evoke an activity of transcendent worth, Iago can talk casually of “the trade of war” (1.2.1). Iago's speech is shot through with the language of commerce. “I know my price,” he says when he describes being passed over for promotion, “I am worth no worse a place” (1.1.11), and, contrasting himself with Cassio, he dismisses the lieutenant as a mere accountant, a “debitor and creditor,” and a “counter-caster” (1.1.31). Yet even though he has money and purses on his mind, Iago's motive for bringing down Othello is certainly not profit. Moreover, Othello too can speak in commercial terms, as when he invites Desdemona to bed after their arrival in Cyprus: “Come, my dear love, / The purchase made, the fruits are to ensue; / The profit's yet to come ’tween me and you” (2.3.8-10).

To reduce Othello to historical allegory would plainly be to distort the play. Such a reduction would also be anachronistic. As Lawrence Stone and other social historians have taught us, we must beware of imagining anything like a clear-cut opposition in this period between a declining feudal class and a rising bourgeoisie.¹³ The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were a time of transition and contradiction, a period in which fundamentally incompatible social forms and structures of thought sat uneasily side by side in a manner that may make us think of those sixteenth-century account books kept partly in Arabic, partly in Roman numerals.¹⁴ An old world of traditional forms and values was largely gone, but a new one had not yet clearly taken shape.

Particularly apparent were the tensions between the traditional feudal values of honor, loyalty, and service, and the less absolute imperatives of the marketplace. On the one hand honor might be regarded as a kind of religion, something worth dying for, as for instance when Cassio equates his good name with his soul: “Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial” (2.3.262-64). On the other, it was often treated as merchandise. “I would to God thou and I knew where a commodity of good names were to be bought,” Falstaff says mockingly to Hal (1 Henry IV, 1.2.82-83), and a few years later in the Jacobean debasement of honors, good names were openly traded like stocks and bonds. Thus Stone reports that in 1606 Lionel Cranfield bought the making of six knights from his friend Arthur Ingram for £373.1s.8d.¹⁵ In this transitional moment, no simple antithesis between the values of the marketplace and those of the field of honor is possible. Despite his skepticism about honor, Sir John Falstaff is not a bourgeois figure. Likewise, Antonio, the paragon of lordly generosity who is contrasted with Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, is not, as we might suppose given the values that he embodies, a feudal figure.¹⁶ Perhaps, then, we should imagine the tension between feudal and commercial codes at this time as less like a modern class struggle than like a medieval psychomachia—that is, as a still internalized struggle in which members of the same group, or even at times a single individual, can be found operating inconsistently, now according to one set of values, now according to another.

The mediation of contradiction can be understood as one of the functions of drama or even of narrative generally. With this in mind let us briefly note that Shakespeare often plays romantic and absolute attitudes against contingent and commercial ones, building drama out of the tension. The Merchant of Venice is an obvious case in point, as is As You Like It where the absoluteness of Orlando's professions of love is measured against the more mundane view evoked in Rosalind's mockery of dying for love and her advice to Phoebe, “Sell when you can, you are not for all markets” (3.5.60). And yet for all her mockery, Rosalind is, we know, a very romantic young lady, many fathoms deep in love. Just so 1 Henry IV, in which the romanticism is expressed in chivalric rather than erotic terms, measures Hotspur against Falstaff. Like Rosalind, Hal is able to play both mocker and romantic, or, to make the point at the level of diction where it may be easiest to observe, he is able to blend the language of commerce with that of chivalry, as when he predicts his triumph over Hotspur:

Percy is but my factor, good my lord,
To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf;
And I will call him to so strict account
That he shall render every glory up,
Yea, even the slightest worship of his time,
Or I will tear the reckoning from his heart.

(3.2.147-52)

In this way the flexibility of language allows contrary systems of value to be expressed. At the same time, the conventions of narrative achieve forward thrust. No practical resolution of the cultural contradiction may be possible but at least there can be the satisfactions of the achievement of narrative closure. In any case, Othello, too, incorporates the tension between romantic absolutism and the antithetical values of the marketplace, but here instead of being held in triumphant balance in the style of the 1590s, the brutal power latent in the contradiction is used to drive a tragedy.

VI

Let us begin by observing a major change that Shakespeare makes in the structure of Cinthio's narrative. In the novella the wicked ensign's revenge is not directed at the Moor so much as at the lady. Cinthio's ensign is a rebuffed suitor whose passion for Desdemona turns to hate. Shakespeare, however, pits Iago directly against Othello. One effect of this change is to obscure the villain's motive. Another is to alter the lady's position in the narrative structure, demoting her from one of the two ultimate figures in the story to an intermediary. Like the handkerchief with which she is associated, Desdemona becomes a kind of object, an instrument of Iago's revenge against Othello. Passed first from Brabantio's hands into the Moor's and then ignorantly thrown away, Shakespeare's Desdemona figures in the narrative as property. Iago's revenge looks forward to the bourgeois style of a later age; he achieves satisfaction by depriving his enemy of his most valued possession.

At the same time that Shakespeare's narrative demotes Desdemona from a person to property, it also elevates her to an angel. Cinthio's lady is a rather matter of fact heroine, but Shakespeare's is a transcendent figure who refracts the long series of divine ladies that reaches back through the sonnet and romance heroines of the sixteenth century to, among others, Petrarch's Laura and Dante's Beatrice. Her conversation with Emilia about women who betray their husbands evokes the realm of the marketplace precisely in order to separate her from it absolutely. “Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?” she asks Emilia, who replies less romantically that while she would not do it for anything trivial such as a ring or a dress, she certainly would do it for the world: “The world's a huge thing; it is a great price / For a small vice” (4.3.67-69). Later, guiltlessly dying, Desdemona refuses to blame Othello for anything: “Commend me to my kind lord. O, farewell!” (5.2.125). At once property and an angel of selflessness, Desdemona, too, looks forward to the bourgeois age and to its conception of woman.

Behind the contradictions implicit in Shakespeare's Desdemona may be glimpsed the tensions of a moment of cultural transformation. In a penetrating observation, Kenneth Burke suggests that Othello incorporates an analogue in the realm of human affinity to the enclosure acts whereby common lands were made private. Shakespeare's play inscribes an act of spiritual enclosure, love transformed into private property. Whatever is owned may be seized. The fear of loss is integral to the principle of property and thus the threat that Iago represents comes as much from within Othello as from without; Shakespeare externalizes the already implicit fear in the figure of Iago, making the villain, in Burke's phrase, into a voice at Othello's ear. Othello and Iago, possessor and the threat of loss, are dialectically related parts of the one “fascination.” Add Desdemona to the integral, Burke says, “and you have a tragic trinity of ownership in the profoundest sense of ownership, the property in human affections, as fetishistically localized in the object of possession.”¹⁷

Property implies theft: therein lies the play's premise. Opening in Venice, the city of fabled commercial wealth, Othello is structured as a series of thefts. The first is a variant of the stock comic action of the stolen daughter that Shakespeare uses also in his other play set in Venice when Jessica escapes from Shylock's house laden with ducats and jewels. Here, in an episode that foreshadows his later and more subtle arousing of Othello, Iago wakes Brabantio: “Awake! what ho, Brabantio! thieves, thieves! / Look to your house, your daughter, and your bags! / Thieves, thieves!” (1.1.79-81). And a moment after: “Zounds, sir, y’are robb’d! For shame, put on your gown; / Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul” (1.1.86-87).

Let us note the fusion of spiritual and proprietary ideas: Desdemona is both half her father's soul and a possession equivalent to his money. Let us note, too, that so far as the play is concerned Desdemona might have no mother. She is represented as wholly her father's possession, and the principal question concerning her at the opening is whether the transfer from father to husband has been rightfully made, whether she has in fact been stolen from Brabantio or properly won. Again, the play fuses spiritual and proprietary themes when in the Senate scene the Duke decides the case on romantic principles. “I think this tale would win my daughter too” (1.3.171), he comments on Othello's speech, and when Desdemona acknowledges that she freely loves the Moor, Brabantio must yield.

The play's first movement is “The Abduction of Desdemona”; the second is “The Theft of Cassio's Name.” Cassio supposes that he is wholly responsible for the loss of his reputation, but we know that Iago, plying his victim with wine, has robbed him. The presentation of Cassio as a decent man changed into a drunken madman foreshadows the action with Othello to come, specifically, the theme of diabolic possession: “O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil! … To be now a sensible man, by and by a fool, and presently a beast! O strange! Every inordinate cup is unbless’d, and the ingredient is a devil” (2.3.281-308). To which Iago replies in language that plays upon the theme: “Come, come; good wine is a good familiar creature, if it be well us’d” (2.3.309-10).

In the transitional culture of the early modern period the concept of the soul is also affected by the hegemonic principle of property. Now a soul is something a person has as well as something a person is. We think, of course, of Marlowe's Faustus selling his soul by contract like an aristocrat turning his land into cash; and it may be, too, that the interest in cases of possession and exorcism at the end of the sixteenth century reveals the influence of proprietary modes of thought.¹⁸ In Othello, at any rate, the theme of diabolic possession is related to the play's concern with property. Here the ideas of soul, property, and honor join together in a complex dance of equivalences and ironies, as when Iago tells Brabantio that he has been robbed of half his soul or when Cassio speaks of his reputation as his immortal part.

The play's main action, which begins in the temptation scene when Iago at last turns to work directly upon Othello, depends upon this system of unstable equivalences. Speaking to Cassio, Iago has dismissed the loss of reputation as insignificant, but now he echoes Cassio when he proclaims the opposite to Othello:

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls.
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.

(3.3.155-61)

With the idea of theft thus implanted in his thoughts, Othello himself is soon speaking of robbery—“What sense had I in her stol’n hours of lust?” (3.3.338)—accusing Desdemona of filching her honor, which as her husband belongs ultimately to him, and thus of stealing also his own good name.

“I am your own for ever” (3.3.480). When at the end of the temptation scene Iago says that he belongs to Othello forever we understand that he means the opposite of what he speaks: Othello is now his. Othello believes that Desdemona has been stolen from him but the truth is that he has been stolen from himself. The demi-devil Iago has taken possession of his soul. Soon, like a classic case of demonic possession, Othello will be thrashing on the ground, foaming and raving in a fit. Soon, too, diabolic powers will in effect speak through Othello's mouth as the smooth and authoritative cadences of what Wilson Knight calls the “Othello music” yield to the staccato fragments and ugly images associated with Iago. In this way the unitary world of absolute self-possession that is recapitulated in “Farewell the tranquil mind” is split open and Othello becomes estranged not only from Desdemona but from himself. Like Spenser's Redcross knight, who is also launched into a world of doubleness, Othello is propelled into a nightmare of duplicity in which his love and his doubt are at war with each other. This process of self-alienation climaxes in Othello's suicide, the one half of his divided self executing justice upon the other as once he administered justice to the Turk in Aleppo. Thus the narrative—although not of course the contradictions that drive the narrative—is resolved.

VII

Iago's diabolism is of course only metaphorical. Shakespeare is exploring a secular equivalent to demonic possession, showing how a terrible misapprehension can take control of a normally rational mind. Othello, in which there are neither ghosts, soothsayers, witches, nor supernatural prodigies, is one of the most secular of Shakespeare's tragedies. Nevertheless, it is significant that the world “devil” occurs in its various forms more often here than in any other Shakespeare play. The word “faith,” too, is prominent whether it is used casually as in Iago and Cassio's discussion of Bianca where it occurs repeatedly as a mild expletive (4.1) or whether it is used portentously as in Othello's tremendous oath, “My life upon her faith” (1.3.294). What Shakespeare is doing in this play is appropriating spiritual conceptions, turning them into metaphors for secular experiences. But metaphors work two ways. If Othello incorporates a process of demystification, the assimilation of the supernatural to the natural world, it also incorporates the antithetical movement. The story may not literally be the temptation and fall of man from faith, but the play is not purely domestic tragedy either. An interpretation may legitimately stress either the process of naturalization or the way the domestic drama suggests events of cosmic significance. Like all of Shakespeare's work, Othello is implicated in the Renaissance system of analogical thought in which the realms of matter and spirit are not yet wholly divided and distinguished. Thus the play can be at once domestic and cosmic, secular and supernatural.

Othello is fascinating as a historical document because of the way it inscribes a transitional moment in Western culture. In it we can almost see the supernatural realm receding. The feudal world of honor, fidelity, and service is becoming the bourgeois world of property and contractual relations. Heroic tragedy is turning into domestic tragedy. It was Shakespeare's fortune to partake of two worlds without belonging completely to either. Shakespeare's myriad-mindedness—the quality that Norman Rabkin speaks of as complementarity—has much to do with this particular historical situation, as does his endless self-consciousness, the metadramatic aspect of his plays that has been emphasized by Sigurd Burckhardt and James Calderwood.

We can locate Shakespeare's historical situation with some precision by observing that his friend and colleague Ben Jonson, a man less than ten years younger than Shakespeare, belongs much more to the new era. Whereas Shakespeare fuses and blends the spiritual and the secular, the realms of honor and commerce, Jonson uses comic irony to create distinctions. The spectacularly blasphemous opening of Volpone—a play like Othello set in the commercial city of Venice—makes the point.

Good morning to the day; and next, my gold!
Open the shrine that I may see my saint.
Hail the world's soul, and mine! More glad than is
The teeming earth to see the longed-for sun
Peep through the horns of the celestial Ram,
Am I, to view thy splendor darkening his;
That lying here, amongst my other hoards,
Show'st like a flame by night, or like the day
Struck out of chaos, when all darkness fled
Unto the center.(19)

Here the Renaissance system of correspondence between matter and spirit, microcosm and macrocosm, is used against itself to expose the gap between traditional values and the realities of the marketplace and to suggest the emptying out of spiritual significance from the world.

Jonson typically pokes fun at magicians, monsters, and fairy queens Concerned with verisimilitude and poetic justice, his plays look forward in a way that Shakespeare's, with their marvels, anachronisms, and freedoms of time and place, do not. His attitude toward chivalric romanticism is also different from Shakespeare's. In Prince Henry's Barriers, the masque that Jonson wrote in connection with the Prince of Wales's first bearing arms in January 1610, Henry is cast as the reviver of chivalry. The masque begins with the Lady of the Lake praising James's court as greater than Arthur's but lamenting the decay of chivalry which is represented by the scene, the ruined House of Chivalry. Arthur appears and prophesies the advent of a knight who will restore chivalry, whereupon Merlin rises from his tomb to reveal Prince Henry, discovered with his companions in arms in a new scene representing St. George's Portico, where knighthood now lives. In a long speech Merlin lectures the Prince on English history, emphasizing industriousness, peaceability, and other values that are distinctly not chivalric.²⁰ Most interesting, Merlin says that Henry will not seek to emulate the deeds of “antique knights” by thinking to rescue ladies from giants or to do battle with a score of men at once.

These were bold stories of our Arthur's age;
But here are other acts; another stage
And scene appears; it is not since as then:
No giants, dwarfs or monsters here, but men.(21)

The arts of the modern hero must be to govern and give laws and to preserve the peace whenever possible.

The matter-of-factness incorporated in the apparently romantic and chivalric pageant of Prince Henry's Barriers may remind us of the similar quality in Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle, probably performed three years earlier in 1607. Here too we are in a world of men, a world drained of the supernatural and marvelous. Like Jonson in the comedies, Beaumont uses comedy to make distinctions between realms that Shakespeare characteristically blends. Shakespeare's Hal fuses the language of the marketplace and that of the field of honor, speaking of Hotspur as his factor to purchase glorious deeds for him wholesale. Beaumont disjoins the two realms, gaining comic mileage by placing Hotspur's “bright honor” speech in Rafe the grocer's man's mouth and then by placing Rafe and his chivalric posturings in a world in which innkeepers expect to be paid and servants to be tipped. In this unromantic place things are simply what they are, and the comedy ridicules Rafe's attempt to transvalue them by renaming forests and heaths “deserts,” horses “palfreys,” and by referring to females as either “fair lady” or “distressed damsel” depending upon whether they have their desires or not.²²

At this point Don Quixote, which may have influenced both Beaumont and Jonson, virtually demands to be mentioned. I referred to Cervantes earlier in order to distinguish between his novelistic exploration of the romanticizing imagination and Shakespeare's play in which the protagonist's romanticism is not perfectly demarcated from the general world of the narrative. Published in 1605, a year after Othello was performed, Don Quixote marks a cultural watershed, the emergence of what Michel Foucault calls the classical epistemé. In the Renaissance, Foucault suggests, the principle of resemblance plays a constitutive role in knowledge. The Renaissance conceives a universe of magical correspondences. From this point of view the cosmos is a single vast text and knowledge is a form of interpretation, a matter of reading the mystic signatures written in things. There is finally no difference between language and nature, authority and observation. In Don Quixote, however, the bond between words and things has been severed. The Don seeks to reestablish a world of magical resemblances; his entire journey is a quest for similitudes. But the world he inhabits is one in which things are simply what they are, one in which flocks and serving girls are not subject to the transmutation of language. The Renaissance cosmos has dissolved. In its place the empire of fact is emerging and language is retreating into a special domain, literature, with only an indirect relationship to the world in the neo-classical doctrines of representation and verisimilitude.²³

It is indicative of the importance of chivalry as a locus for the contradictions of Renaissance culture that such a crucial text as Don Quixote should take the form of a negation of chivalric romance. While the chivalric revival of the sixteenth century helped to obscure some of the social and intellectual contradictions of the period, it also contributed to them, raising, as it were, the level of tension by a notch. We can note that in its nostalgia the chivalric revival was a way of possessing the past, of turning chivalry into property. To turn honor literally into property, as the sale of honors did, or to portray merchants and tradesmen in heroic postures, as the bourgeois hero tales did, was to approach the breaking point. In Jonson, Beaumont, and above all in Cervantes, the contradictions of the late Renaissance snap into laughter. Don Quixote in particular prefigures the bourgeois civilization of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in which the romance becomes the novel and the emblematic theater of the world, Shakespeare's theater, becomes the illusionistic theater of scenes and stage properties, the theater of things.

VIII

But what of Shakespeare, whose sensibility is perhaps as close to that of Spenser as to Jonson? Shakespeare, who came to maturity in the 1580s at the height of the Elizabethan revival of chivalry, was not ready to write anti-romances like Don Quixote or The Knight of the Burning Pestle. He was, I think, still too deeply possessed by the absolute world of fidelity. He could write about the death of chivalry or the corruption of chivalry but he could not distance himself sufficiently from its imaginative claims to burlesque it. As a principal shareholder in London's most successful theatrical company and an energetic accumulator of wealth in Stratford and London, Shakespeare evidently participated in the new ethos of the marketplace. But he was also still something of a romantic, even if an unillusioned one.

I suggested earlier that we might think of Othello as a play in which Shakespeare recapitulates his own earlier representations of the absolute world of chivalry and that we might regard Iago, the cunning artist of tragedy, as at least in part a representation of Shakespeare himself. Iago is not bourgeois man—that creature had not, so to speak, been thought in 1604. Nevertheless, he is a figure in which the age could find something like the bourgeois cast of mind, together with the multitude of fears and desires that it aroused, made manifest. But Iago is not simply the pragmatist and materialist that he seems to take himself to be. Why should he want to destroy Othello? Iago and Othello are reciprocal figures, part of the same—to use Burke's word—fascination. Just as Othello is possessed by Iago, so Iago is from the beginning of the play possessed by Othello. But though Iago succeeds in destroying the Moor and Desdemona as well, he does not, we might say, succeed in exorcising the spirit they embody. Desdemona remains a miracle of fidelity to the end, and Othello, released from the demi-devil's snares, dies reasserting his allegiance to his heroic self.

True enough; yet to conclude our discussion on this romantic note of sustained fidelity and reasserted heroism misrepresents the tenor of Shakespeare's play. Othello may be an honorable murderer but he is a murderer nonetheless, and at the story's end both Desdemona and the Moor are dead. The world of Othello is not that of the novel, the characteristic genre of bourgeois civilization, but neither is it that of Elizabethan romance. Othello represents an intermediate moment in cultural development and an intermediate form, tragedy. Romance incorporates certainties, absolute opposites of good and evil. Tragedy subverts, deconstructs, certainties and absolutes, or, as Fredric Jameson puts it, tragedy rebukes romance.²⁴ What Shakespeare has done in Othello is to convert the material of Elizabethan romance into tragedy.

Tragedy involves katharsis: purging, cleansing, exorcising. The scapegoats of this particular tragic sacrifice are Desdemona and Othello, figures of an exquisite and dangerous romantic beauty. The high priest is Iago, who draws us as audience into dynamic engagement with his purposes, mobilizing destructive emotions that we may not wish to acknowledge. We participate with Iago in splitting open the absolutes of Othello's martial pastoral. We assist in his project of driving the romance hero and his lady out of the world, of torturing Othello and Desdemona to death. Like Othello, we too are in a sense possessed. But because this is theater we are simultaneously dispossessed. Iago engages our rapaciousness, jealousy, and fear, but he also allows us to alienate ourselves from those ungentle emotions, projecting them onto him. Thus he too becomes a scapegoat. Protagonist and antagonist cancel each other out.²⁵ We are left at the end with neither a reassertion of an old world nor a prefiguration of a new one, but a mere vacancy, or, rather, a tableau of corpses and a disconcerting promise that Iago too will be tortured.

Notes

1. 3.3.347-57. All citations of Shakespeare refer to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, Mass., 1974).

2. See in particular Stephen Greenblatt's exciting discussion in Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago, Ill., 1980), pp. 222-57.

3. The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London, 1977), pp. 161-62. See also Frances A. Yates, “Elizabethan Chivalry: The Romance of the Accession Day Tilts,” in Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1975), pp. 88-111.

4. On chivalric themes in architecture see Mark Girouard, Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan Country House (New Haven, Conn., 1983), esp. pp. 205-32. Betty J. Littleton discusses the romance dramas of the 1570s and 1580s and provides a list of titles in her critical edition of Clyomon and Clamydes (The Hague, 1968).

5. See Jan Albert Dop, Eliza's Knights: Soldiers, Poets, and Puritans in the Netherlands (Leiden, 1981).

6. The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ., 1957), p. 193.

7. See The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641 (Oxford, 1965), esp. pp. 335-84. Diane Bornstein, Mirrors of Courtesy (Hamden, Conn., 1975), studies English chivalric manuals and makes a number of suggestive comments on the social functions of Renaissance chivalry.

8. See Laura Stevenson O’Connell's important “The Elizabethan Bourgeois Hero-Tale: Aspects of an Adolescent Social Consciousness,” in After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter, ed. Barbara C. Malament (Philadephia, Pa., 1980), pp. 267-90.

9. See J. E. Neale, “The Elizabethan Political Scene,” in Essays in Elizabethan History (London, 1958), pp. 59-84, on the tenor of late Elizabethan court life. Stephen Orgel, “Making Greatness Familiar,” Genre, 15 (1982), 41-48, has suggestive comments about late Elizabethan chivalry.

10. G. B. Harrison, The Life and Death of Robert Devereux Earl of Essex (London, 1937), pp. 274-75.

11. There have been a number of interesting particular studies, among them Paul N. Siegel's “Shakespeare and the Neo-Chivalric Cult of Honor,” The Centennial Review of Arts and Sciences, 8 (1964), 39-70, which focuses on the code of the duello; Sheldon Zitner's “Hamlet, Duellist,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 34 (1969), 1-18, which discusses Hamlet and the duello; and Frances A. Yates' controversial Shakespeare's Last Plays (London, 1978), which discusses the late plays in the context of the chivalric revival at the court of Prince Henry.

12. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London, 1904), pp. 230-31.

13. The literature on this subject is vast, but besides Stone's Crisis of the Aristocracy see J. H. Hexter's seminal essays printed in revised versions in Reappraisals in History (London, 1961), esp. “The Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England,” pp. 71-116, and “Storm Over the Gentry,” pp. 117-62.

14. I owe this apt image to O’Connell, “The Bourgeois Hero-Tale,” p. 272.

15. Crisis of the Aristocracy, p. 77.

16. Giorgio Melchiori makes this point in his suggestive “Shakespeare and the New Economics of His Time,” Review of National Literatures, 3 (1972), 123-37. Melchiori's general argument is that Shakespeare's ambiguity reveals his full awareness of the social changes taking place in his time, but his discussion is grounded in a misleading conception of clear class distinctions in the period.

17. “Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method,” The Hudson Review, 4 (1951), 165-203. In a few brilliant pages (pp. 165-69) Burke anticipates many of the points made here in a different context.

18. On possession and dispossession in Elizabethan England see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971), pp. 477-92, and D. P. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1981). On Othello see David Kaula's excellent “Othello Possessed: Notes on Shakespeare's Use of Magic and Witchcraft,” Shakespeare Studies, 2 (1966), 112-32. See also Stephen Greenblatt's extremely suggestive “King Lear and Harsnett's ‘Devil-Fiction,’” Genre, 15 (1982), 239-42.

19. Volpone, ed. Alvin B. Kernan (New Haven, Conn., 1962), p. 38.

20. See Norman Council, “Ben Jonson, Inigo Jones, and the Transformation of Tudor Chivalry,” ELH, 47 (1980), 259-75.

21. Ben Jonson: The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (New Haven, Conn., 1969), p. 149.

22. The Knight of the Burning Pestle, 1.1.271-77; ed. John Doebler, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (London, 1967), p. 24. Doebler suggests 1607 as a likely date for the play.

23. See The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London, 1970), esp. pp. 17-50.

24. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Art (Ithaca, N.Y., 1981), pp. 115-16.

25. Cf. Franco Moretti: Shakespeare “may announce the dawn of bourgeois civilization, but not by prefiguring it. On the contrary, he demonstrates inexorably how, obeying the old rules, which are the only ones he knows, the world can only fall apart,” Signs Taken For Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms (London, 1983), p. 68. Moretti's exciting discussion of Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy also appears in abridged form as “‘A Huge Eclipse’: Tragic Form and the Deconsecration of Sovereignty,” Genre, 15 (1982), 7-40.