[In the essay below, Lucking explores Othello's attempts to assess and define his identity.]

One of the cardinal tenets underpinning contemporary theory in the fields of linguistics, semiotics and literary criticism is that enunciated in Saussure's famous assertion that the relation between signifier and signified is an arbitrary one. Although this intuition is by now indelibly associated with the author of its most celebrated formulation, very clear anticipations of the notion can be detected in the literature of preceding centuries.¹ While the statements to which I am referring are predominantly philosophical in character, in the case of certain works the arbitrary nature of signification does not constitute a theoretical problem only, but is conceived instead as entailing potentially far-reaching consequences for all human beings. We are constrained to use signs in order to compose experience and render it intelligible but, because the signs we employ are only contingently related to the world we seek to impose them on, a radical incongruity between the sign and its referent can make itself felt at any moment. And because as culturally constituted beings we inhabit a world of signification, within the framework of which we formulate our own selves as well as the reality that surrounds us, this means that not only the codes we employ, but in the final analysis our very identities as well, are perpetually in jeopardy.

In this paper I propose to discuss the manner in which Shakespeare explores these ideas in Othello, a work that is vitally concerned with the nature of signification and the problematics involved in the interpretation of signs. My argument will be that Othello might instructively be analyzed as a dramatization of the existential consequences ensuing from the disruption of a single paradigmatic system of semiotic contrapositions, a system which Shakespeare himself habitually manipulated in the form of puns and other varieties of verbal play. Reduced to essentials, this system consists in the image clusters light/white/fair on the one hand, and dark/black/foul on the other, a structure of binary oppositions which embraces the sphere of values as well as that of physical properties, and which therefore establishes a parallel between otherwise discrete areas of experience.² Although in exploiting such a pattern Shakespeare was drawing on a consolidated iconographical tradition, he did so in ways that were very much peculiar to himself, ways which are symptomatic of the critical and profoundly dialectical cast of his thought.

In the European cultural tradition at least, the clusters of words and images I am examining have been more or less consistently employed to refer to concepts which, although heterogeneous in character and even type, are nonetheless considered to be related by some degree of affinity. Light, or its associated colour white, might variously symbolize goodness, virtue, life, reason, order, truth, purity, or faith; while darkness, or the colour black, serves as the emblem of the contrary of all these things. These two image-families thus comprise categories which are mutually exclusive and yet formally related to one another if only in an antithetical sense—which is to say that a term in one cluster might be definable only in inverse relation to a corresponding term in the other. A considerable degree of semantic uncertainty inevitably arises therefore whenever any incompatibility emerges between different associations of the same term, when connotations are invoked which seem to contradict the more customary meanings of the words and hence challenge the stability of the system of polarities these encode. In extreme instances, as in that of the albino whale in Moby Dick for example, the physical attribute can become the node or point of intersection between conceptual and emotive complexes which, because they comprehend mutually exclusive properties, are not reconcilable even in principle.³ In such cases, the sign has become radically ambivalent, transforming itself from vehicle of meaning into mere cipher, designating little other than a semantic vacancy within which conflicting meanings collide.

Through the deft manipulation of the divergent meanings—or simply the denotative and connotative dimensions—of terms belonging to the same cluster, Shakespeare frequently generates an atmosphere of paradox analogous to that which occasions Melville's Ishmael such perplexity. This process can assume a relatively uncomplicated form in which figurative meaning is merely substituted for the literal, as when the Duchess of Gloucester, in the second part of Henry VI, responds to public disgrace and the prospect of exile with the lament that henceforth ‘dark shall be my light, and night my day’.⁴ A somewhat different order of semantic confusion is produced however when multiple connotation is exploited so as to invest words with qualities which are formally opposed to them, thereby making them appear self-contradictory at least on the strictly verbal level. An example of this occurs when Enobarbus in Antony and Cleopatra, speaking of the sumptuous banquets to which he has been witness while in Egypt, reports that ‘we did sleep day out of countenance, and made the night light with drinking’.⁵ In much the same way, the use of the word ‘fair’ in the sense of beautiful makes possible such elaborate transpositions of meaning as are to be found in Berowne's remark in Love's Labour's Lost that Roseline has been born ‘to make black fair’, which provokes in turn Dumain's sarcastic observation that ‘Dark needs no candles now, for dark is light’.⁶ These more or less frivolous quibbles on the various meanings of the words ‘fair’ and ‘black’, together with their respective cognates and synonyms, anticipate a number of very similar puns in Othello, where however they assume a rather less innocuous character. While it would certainly be a gross simplification to suggest that Othello is a single pun writ large, there is nonetheless a sense in which the manipulations to which the luminary imagery of the play is subjected enact on the verbal level the movement of the play as a whole, just as there is a sense in which the three witches are forecasting the entire course of events in Macbeth, and not merely indulging in idle wordplay, when they too announce that fair is foul and foul is fair.

In Othello, the symbolic pattern based on the opposition of light and darkness is of course invoked most vividly in the contrast between the Moor's notorious blackness and Desdemona's no less insistently proclaimed fairness. Initially at least, the clear suggestion is conveyed that the physical attributes of these personages might be emblematic of less manifest qualities of a moral or spiritual nature, that there is an essential continuity in other words between the denotative and connotative aspects of the terms involved. It has been argued indeed that Othello's colour would have assimilated him in the mind of the original spectator to what one critic refers to as the ‘exo-cultural stereotype’ of the Moor, and that the Elizabethan audience would have projected onto him certain stock expectations—of lustfulness, credulousness, jealousy, bravery, simplicity, etc.—in relation to which his dramatic identity would necessarily have to define itself.⁷ Whether we in fact agree that this strictly racial stereotype figures as a significant factor in our response to the play or not, there seems little doubt that the emphatic contrast of black and white is calculated to appeal to a predisposition, conceptually Manichean in tendency, to construe characters and events in terms of radical dichotomies or antithetical principles.

One of the profounder ironies of this drama resides in the fact that Othello himself, whose colour defines one term in the symbolic polarity around which much of the imagery of the play is articulated, is called upon to fathom the significance of precisely that polarity, upon the understanding of which his sense of self ultimately depends. Othello's fundamental problem is how to construe signs, a difficulty compounded in his case by the circumstance that as a foreigner, comparatively unconversant with the complex customs of his adopted country, he is uncertain what readings to place on signs, and even what qualifies as a sign in the first place. It is this perplexity which puts him at the mercy of Iago, to whom he too ingenuously defers as an authority on the category of signs in question, those having to do with the conduct of a ‘super-subtle Venetian’ such as Desdemona (I.iii.357).⁸ His faith in Iago's capacity to interpret such signs with frankness and accuracy is uncritical to the point of being almost culpably obtuse:

This fellow's of exceeding honesty,
And knows all qualities, with a learned spirit,
Of human dealing …

(III.iii.263-4)

As his own remarks indicate, however, Iago is not so much an exegete of signs as their accomplished manipulator, who recognizes that there is no inevitable correspondence between sign and referent, and who is therefore able to impose on events whatever constructions suit his evil fancy. It is symptomatic of the immense delight he takes in the ambiguity of signs that he should at one point lower his guard to the extent of swearing by Janus (I.ii.33), and symptomatic too of Othello's enormous naiveté that he should fail so egregiously to take the hint.

The essential character of Othello's dilemma announces itself in the opening scene of the play, when the Moor's trusted ‘ancient’ declares to Roderigo that

I must show out a flag, and sign of love,
Which is indeed but sign.

(I.i.156-7)

In this remarkably candid statement of intent, Iago is punning among other things on the etymology of his own official title, his military rank being that of ensign—or standard-bearer—a term of which the word ‘ancient’ is a corruption.⁹ In Shakespeare's time the term ‘ensign’ also meant ‘sign’ or’ token’, which suggests that Iago is not only a bearer of signs by nominal profession, but himself a ‘sign’ by titular designation as well.¹⁰ As his own private remarks to Roderigo imply, however, there is no connection whatsoever between the signs he parades before the world and the reality to which they purportedly refer. He commends the shrewdness of those who are only ‘trimm’d in forms, and visages of duty’ (I.i.50), avows that his ostentatious displays of regard for his general are no more than ‘shows of service’ (I.i.52), and protests ‘not I for love and duty, / But seeming so, for my peculiar end’ (I.i.59-60). He habitually defines himself and his conduct in terms of negatives, assuring Roderigo that ‘Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago’ (I.i.57), and delivering himself of the portentously cryptic announcement that ‘I am not what I am’ (I.i.65). Othello's ensign thus incarnates what G. Wilson Knight aptly described as the ‘spirit of denial’,¹¹ a fact which has induced various critics to compare his role to that of Mephistopheles.¹² Another way of characterizing Iago's dramatic function is to say that he insinuates himself into the world of established values as an infinitely mutable sign whose want of fixed referent calls into question the authority of all other signs.¹³ As he himself sardonically acknowledges at one point, ‘I am nothing, if not critical’ (II.i.119).

To a very large degree this disjunction between outward conduct and underlying intention extends also to the relation between Iago's covert activities and the personal motives ostensibly prompting them, which means that even the audience—privy to his soliloquies and confidential asides though it may be—is denied a satisfactory understanding of the nexus. As Coleridge was remarking when he alluded in a famous phrase to ‘the motive-hunting of motiveless malignity’,¹⁴ although Iago perfunctorily cites several reasons for his animosity towards Othello, they are not really plausible and probably not meant even to appear so. It is to be noted that even at the end of the tragedy, after his villainy has been unmasked and he has nothing more either to gain or to lose, Iago obstinately persists in concealing his true motives: ‘what you know, you know, / From this time forth I never will speak word’ (V.ii.304-5). This elusiveness is essential to the function Iago performs within the play, for if Shakespeare had furnished him with a truly credible grievance he would have become less menacing at the same time that he became more human. There would have been a definable relation, though only an inverse one, between appearance and reality or, more specifically, sign and substance. As things stand, however, we are presented with signs in abundance, but nothing definite with which to correlate them. The trajectory of the play is essentially that of the process by which Othello himself, who is dependent to a more than average degree upon the stability of the semiotic order, inexorably falls victim to this indeterminateness.

It has already been remarked that the connotations of the colour images that Shakespeare makes use of in this play do not at first seem to deviate in any marked degree from those traditionally assigned to them. At least in appearance, in other words, the symbolic pattern based on the contrast of light and darkness is both coherent and stable, and consonant in all essential respects with the dictates of convention.¹⁵ An instance of this initial orthodoxy may be found in the commonplace equation of blackness with hell invoked by Iago in the opening scene, when by means of a volley of obscene innuendoes he tries to goad Desdemona's father into taking violent action against the Moor:

Even now, very now, an old black ram
Is tupping your white ewe: arise, arise,
Awake the snorting citizens with the bell,
Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you

(I.i.88-91)

Although nobody is expected to take the imputation of diabolism seriously, Brabantio is sufficiently influenced by the infernal associations of blackness as to leap to the conclusion that Othello has resorted to ‘practices of cunning hell’ to work his will on Desdemona (I.iii.102). ‘Damn’d as thou art, thou hast enchanted her’ (I.ii.63), he accuses him, several times linking the Moor's dark complexion with the ‘foulness’ of his alleged tactics (I.ii.62, 73).

At the hastily improvised inquiry subsequently held in the presence of the Duke, however, Othello is exonerated from all suspicion of impropriety in his courtship of Desdemona, the girl having according to her own testimony been won not by ‘foul’ means but by what one senator describes as ‘such fair question, / As soul to soul affordeth’ (I.iii.113-14). From what we learn of his past history and personal disposition, such ‘fairness’ seems to characterize all of Othello's proceedings. If Iago can accurately sum up his own paradoxical identity in the enigmatic statement ‘I am not what I am’, Othello is quite palpably everything he professes to be—‘all in all sufficient’ (IV.i.261), as one member of the Senate later puts it. He is, moreover, vividly conscious of this coherence in his personality, confidently asserting even when his conduct falls under temporary suspicion that ‘My parts, my title, and my perfect soul, / Shall manifest me rightly’ (I.ii.31-2). In terms of the moral and spiritual connotations with which colours are conventionally invested, however, this apparently seamless continuity between what Othello is and what he appears to be, his proud and triumphant integrity as a human being, might seem somewhat at variance with his physical aspect as a black man among whites. If white Iago is not what he is, black Othello is only too emphatically what he is, yet it is blackness, not whiteness, that is traditionally associated with the principle of negation. The tribute which the Moor's notable accomplishments elicit from the Duke contains an implicit recognition of such a reversal, an acknowledgement that the conventional values attaching to colour have, in Othello's case, no application:

If virtue no delighted beauty lack,
Your son-in-law is far more fair than black.

(I.iii.289-90)

This is all very well, but the logical inference is that a sign can, through the multiplicity of its potential meanings, effectively contradict itself. It is precisely this possibility, subversive of the conventions which give codes their meanings, which invest experience itself with its shape and significance, that Iago contrives to exploit. If black Othello can, by identifying him exclusively with the ‘delighted beauty’ of his virtue,¹⁶ be represented as essentially fair, then fair Desdemona can through an inversion of this process be made to look black. ‘So will I turn her virtue into pitch’ (II.iii.351), Iago proclaims as he prepares to transform fairness itself into its diametrical opposite. This radical transmutation of light into darkness has a precedent in Iago's earlier and less ambitious scheme, represented in this case as well as an attack on colour, to mar the tranquillity of Othello's wedding night, ‘poison his delight’, by inciting Brabantio against him:

… though that his joy be joy,
Yet throw such changes of vexation on ’t,
As it may lose some colour.

(I.i.71-3)

Iago's project, consisting in the systematic inversion of a code, is implicitly an attack upon the possibility of signification at large, and to the degree that signs actually constitute the reality in which human beings live, may be seen as tending toward the destruction of the ordered universe itself.

Iago's sinister power derives from the circumstance that, consisting himself solely of empty signs, he is uniquely aware that there is no inevitability in signs or in their relation to what they purport to represent. Signs can be cast adrift from their conventional meanings, to the infinite confusion of those who inhabit—as all men do—a universe of signs. Such a process of semiotic dissociation is to be seen operating in the symbolic metamorphosis undergone by the handkerchief which Othello has bestowed upon his wife as a love-token, a ‘flag, and sign of love’ par excellence, but once again patently arbitrary in its character as signifier,¹⁷ and ironically susceptible of being transformed into what seems to be an incontrovertible sign of Desdemona's infidelity. Iago's distinctive rhetoric frequently makes use of the discrepancies that can arise between a sign and its referent, or between the various possible meanings of the same sign. He relishes paradoxes that depend on multiple connotation: Cassio, he remarks for instance at the beginning of the play, is a man ‘almost damn’d in a fair wife’ (I.i.21). The sequence of mildly ribald epigrams with which he entertains Desdemona and Emilia as they are awaiting Othello's arrival in Cyprus reveals how adept he is at juggling with the various meanings of this crucial word ‘fair’ and its two possible antonyms ‘black’ and ‘foul’:

If she be fair and wise, fairness and wit;
The one's for use, the other using it.
If she be black, and thereto have a wit,
She’ll find a white, that shall her blackness hit.
She never yet was foolish, that was fair,
For even her folly help’d her, to an heir.
There’s none so foul, and foolish therunto,
But does foul pranks, which fair and wise ones do.

(II.i.129-42)

Part of the significance of this humorous interlude lies in the fact that while Iago is exercising his talent for verbal prestidigitation Desdemona is dissembling her anxiety for Othello's safety beneath a false display of levity: ‘I am not merry, but I do beguile / The thing I am, by seeming otherwise’ (II.i.122-3). However irreproachable her solicitude for her husband may be in itself, in other words, she reveals herself capable of exploiting precisely that distinction between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’ that Iago's machinations pivot on. For a brief interval she too, like Iago himself, is ‘not what she is’, for she is simulating signs that bear no relation to her actual state of mind, using them to project a persona at variance with her true self. When Othello greets his wife with the words ‘fair warrior’ while Iago's set of variations on the theme of fairness is still vibrating in the air, therefore, the spectator might well register the epithet with a certain diffidence (II.i.182).

Before succumbing to Iago's malevolent influence Othello himself appears to be, as I have remarked, incapable of the least duplicity in his personal conduct. His outward action is always an unambiguous sign for what he ‘really’ is, and Iago is obviously mocking his general's own unexamined assumption when he sanctimoniously declares that ‘men should be that they seem’ (III.iii.130). The world inhabited by the Moor is essentially one of face values and, when he is confronted even by the mere possibility that Desdemona might be capable of being something other than what she seems, he is driven into a state of mental turmoil which threatens at every moment to erupt into outright insanity. The sensation induced in him as his certitudes begin to crumble is that ‘Chaos is come again’ (III.iii.93), and the inevitable consequence of this impression of general dissolution is that the stability even of his own identity is menaced. He resorts to forms of behaviour that would previously have been totally repugnant to him, presenting a false front to the world, concealing himself according to Iago's instructions, spying, eavesdropping, brooding obsessively over trivial or sordid details, echoing the cheap wordplay of the clown who is his own servant.¹⁸ He absorbs not only Iago's repulsive conception of mankind, but also his distinctive idiom, his predilection for couching his observations in bestial and infernal imagery. It is clear that there is something more in this than sexual jealousy or the sense of outraged personal honour or the anxiety experienced by an unwitting representative of a threatened patriarchal order.¹⁹ More profoundly disorientating than any of these is the intolerable cognitive challenge to which Othello's mental faculties are being subjected, and to which in his simplicity he does not know how to respond. Perceived now solely in the light of Iago's dark insinuations, Desdemona has become for him an incarnate paradox, a fair woman whose whiteness, once the manifest emblem of an immaculate virtue, is now the perverse symbol of its own opposite. ‘O thou black weed, why art so lovely fair’ (IV.ii.69), is the anguished question he addresses to his wife at one point, and his subsequent remarks continue to advert to the same apparent disparity: ‘Was this fair paper, this most goodly book, / Made to write “whore” on?’ (IV.ii.73-4). Desdemona's conspicuous fairness has thus been transformed into a radically ambiguous sign. She is now ‘the fair devil’ (III.iii.485), a living contradiction for Othello's semiotically unsophisticated mind, an affront to the conventions that make experience intelligible.

Since it is in terms of these very conventions that Othello has defined his own identity, this subversion of meaning has fatal implications for his personal self-conception as well, compromising the integrity of the sign which is his name. Othello's own remarks make the association between his name—or the public self of which that name is the verbal token—and the polarity of light and darkness perfectly explicit:

… my name, that was as fresh
As Dian's visage, is now begrim’d, and black
As mine own face …

(III.iii.392-4)

Iago is diabolically aware of the critical role played by cultural codes in the constitution of selfhood, and his attack on meaning—in particular on the meaning of personal names—is an attack on identity as well.²⁰ ‘He that filches from me my good name’, he slyly remarks at one point, ‘ … makes me poor indeed’ (III.iii.163-5). Cassio is the first major character to be deprived of his good name through Iago's scheming, and when he expresses his humiliation in the exclamation ‘Reputation, reputation, I ha’ lost my reputation! I ha’ lost the immortal part, sir, of myself, and what remains is bestial’ (II.iii.254-6), he is anticipating Othello's still more critical loss of self. Even Desdemona, accused of harlotry by her husband, is finally driven to the extreme of asking ‘Am I that name, Iago?’—to which the ensign replies with only barely concealed irony: ‘What name, fair lady?’ (IV.ii.120).

Almost for relief Othello, confronted with this growing uncertainty as to the real significance of names and signs, allows himself to be swallowed up in the oblivion of mindless passion, seeking certitudes of a different order in the absolute and uncomplicated darkness of revenge: ‘Arise, black vengeance, from thy hollow cell’ (III.iii.454). Interestingly enough, it is precisely at this juncture of the play, when triumphant darkness seems on the point of overwhelming everything, that a new personage is introduced—in time as it happens to be woven into Iago's ever more intricate web. This is Cassio's mistress, hitherto unmentioned, whose name Bianca might seem to collocate her instantly within a universe of self-contradicting signs. While fair Desdemona is represented as the blackest of harlots, the real harlot is dignified with a name that means white. It is perhaps arguable, however—though this is not the place to pursue the point—that Bianca's appearance, rather than complicating matters still further, in fact heralds the beginning of a restorative movement back towards the clarification of signs and their meanings. Despite her manifest defects she is not an unsympathetic character, and her unrequited devotion to Cassio seems unfeigned; she protests that her life is as honest as Emilia's, and perhaps, according to her ‘lights’ at least, she is right (V.i.121-2).

Such positive notes are sounded only later in the play, however, and in the meantime the momentum of the drama continues in the direction of ever greater perplexity. As I have suggested, perhaps the most ironic aspect of Othello's deterioration is that, plunged without warning into an alien world in which signs have become divorced from their meanings, he too has been severed from his own identity. He has been incorporated into a deeply problematic universe in which things do not even represent themselves, in which the Iago-principle prevails and nothing is what it is. ‘My lord is not my lord’ (III.iv.121), says Desdemona in explanation for her husband's aberrant behaviour, and Iago archly excites Lodovico's apprehensions regarding the Moor's psychological state with the characteristically circuitous observation:

He’s that he is; I may not breathe my censure,
What he might be; if, as he might, he is not,
I would to heaven he were!

(IV.1.266-8)

The terrible resolution to exact vengeance seems to act as a stabilizing factor, however, presumably because it affords a precise, if only momentary, focus around which Othello's disintegrating personality can realign itself. In view of the confounding of colour values that has been taking place throughout the play, it is perhaps entirely to be expected that the invocation of ‘black vengeance’ should be paradoxically associated with light, Othello swearing ‘by yond marble heaven’ (III.iii.467) to punish the supposed malefactors, and Iago calling to witness ‘you ever-burning lights above’ (III.iii.470) when he pledges himself to the same dark purpose.

By the time the Moor actually addresses himself to what he has come to look upon as the ‘sacrifice’ of his wife, he has recovered a measure of self-control and achieved a genuine, though desperate, equilibrium. Among other things, this manifests itself in the restored stateliness of his diction, and in the elevated soliloquy commencing with the phrase ‘It is the cause’ we perceive the more traditional associations of light and darkness beginning to reaffirm themselves despite the symbolic confusion generated by the preceding scenes. Ironically, however, this rehabilitation of colour values is rendered possible only through what amounts to the annihilation of the positive term in that symbolic contraposition which has by now become hopelessly corrupt. If light and darkness can exchange places with one another with such facility that they lose their separate characters, then the readiest and most definitive remedy that an absolutist such as Othello can resort to is simply to eliminate the problematic element in the contrast, by both literally and figuratively ‘putting out the light’:

… yet I’ll not shed her blood,
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,
And smooth, as monumental alabaster;
Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men.
Put out the light, and then put out the light:
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me; but once put out thine,
Thou cunning pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume …

(V.ii.3-13)

In thus extinguishing light in the person of Desdemona—who has continued to invoke ‘this light of heaven’ (IV.ii.152) and ‘this heavenly light’ (IV.iii.64) in the final hours of her life—Othello does seem, in his own terms at least, to accomplish his purpose. A semiotic order in continual flux, that for the Moor has been a source only of perpetual confusion, has been stabilized through the simple expedient of giving the world over to a complete and absolute darkness that does not admit of potentially dangerous discriminations:

O heavy hour!
Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse
Of sun and moon …

(V.ii.99-101)

The irony latent in Othello's effort to impose perfect coherence upon what seems to be the incessantly mutating world of signs lies of course in the circumstance that the dilemma, or at least the assumption precipitating the dilemma, has been a false one, that there has been in fact no discrepancy between Desdemona's colour and her conduct. The process by which Othello is disabused of his enormous error implicates the final reconstitution of a cognitively familiar, though no less terrible world, a world in which the Moor has ironically justified the infernal associations evoked by his colour at the beginning of the play. Emilia refuses to admit that Desdemona's dying effort to exculpate Othello perjures her soul: on the contrary ‘the more angel she, / And you the blacker devil!’ (V.ii.131-2). Words like ‘filth’ and ‘slime’, denoting substances that make white things black, abound in the dialogue between the Moor and Emilia. Until Iago is unmasked by his wife Othello rather desperately persists in believing that Desdemona was ‘foul’ (V.ii.201), but in the end he sees the light, in every sense of the expression. Desdemona is once again unambiguously white (‘Pale as thy smock’), even if her pallor is ironically now only that of death (V.ii.274), Iago is at last identified as the real fiend in the piece (V.ii.287-8), and Othello is restored to a world in which the distinction between light and darkness makes some sort of sense.

There is reason to suspect that, in consequence of the delirium of despair provoked in him by the discovery of his error, Othello briefly undergoes a final phase of dissociation from self, and that it is for this reason that he momentarily refers to himself not in the first but in the third person: ‘Man but a rush against Othello's breast, / And he retires. Where should Othello go?’ (V.ii.271-2). Even if this is so, however, it would appear that the Moor's belated recognition of the truth ultimately makes possible, if not the complete restoration of his lost identity, then at least the capacity to perceive himself in relation to that identity. When Lodovico demands to see ‘this rash and most unfortunate man’ the Moor recognizes himself instantly in the sombre epithet, replying ‘That’s he that was Othello; here I am’ (V.ii.284-5). Instead of being ‘not what he is’ (‘My lord is not my lord’), he now perceives himself to be not what he was, and this opens up the possibility at least of forging some kind of link between what he is now and what he has been previously. I would suggest that it is precisely this that Othello is attempting to accomplish in his final speech, which culminates in a suicide that he explicitly assimilates to one of the many colourful exploits in his past. Readers of the play have not always been entirely convinced by Othello's grandiloquent and enormously self-conscious eulogy for himself, which seems to betray, as T. S. Eliot and others have pointed out in disparagement of the Moor, an ‘aesthetic rather than a moral attitude’ towards himself and what he has done, and thus raises doubts concerning his sincerity.²¹ But since Othello seems always to have identified his personality with his public performances, to the extent that even his courtship of Desdemona has assumed the form of a detailed recitation of his autobiography, it is perhaps only to be expected that under the present circumstances he will try to recapture a sense of the continuity of that personality through the identical means.²² The Moor is not, in other words, attempting to deliver judgement or render an account of himself in his concluding speech, and still less is he seeking to elicit anyone's compassion. What he is really trying to do is discover, in the final moments of his life, an adequate signification for that complex and fatally compromised sign which is the name Othello. While the question of whether he has fully succeeded in this endeavour doubtless remains an open one, the terse encomium pronounced by Cassio over the body of his dead commander that ‘he was great of heart’ (V.ii.362) perhaps suggests that his final effort at self-definition has not met with total defeat.

Notes

1. Cf. for instance Locke's account of the process by which ‘a word is made arbitrarily the mark of … an idea’, Berkeley's comparison of names with the abstract letters employed in algebra, and Coleridge's reference to ‘words used as the arbitrary marks of thought, our smooth market-coin of intercourse’. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited by John W. Yolton (London, reprinted 1990), p. 207; George Berkeley, Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Introduction XIX, in A New Theory of Vision and Other Writings (London, reprinted 1969), p. 107; S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Chap. XXII, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selected Poetry and Prose, edited by Elisabeth Schneider (New York, reprinted 1966), pp. 340-1. Original emphasis deleted.

2. These oppositions have been examined in rhetorical terms by Doris Adler in her article ‘The Rhetoric of Black and White in Othello’, Shakespeare Quarterly 25 (1974), 248-57. Though very different in viewpoint and emphasis, my own argument coincides with Adler's analysis at a number of points.

3. Melville's Ishmael makes this explicit. He refers to the ‘elusive quality’ which ‘causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds’. And specifically adducing the whiteness of the polar bear, he advances a hypothesis according to which ‘that heightened hideousness … only arises from the circumstance, that the irresponsible ferociousness of the creature stands invested in the fleece of celestial innocence and love; and hence, by bringing together two such opposite emotions in our minds, the Polar bear frightens us with so unnatural a contrast’. Herman Melville, Moby Dick (London, reprinted 1975), pp. 164-5.

4. Henry VI, Part 2, II.iv.40. The edition cited here is W. J. Craig, Shakespeare: Complete Works (Oxford, reprinted 1965). All subsequent references to Shakespeare's plays other than Othello will be in this edition.

5. Antony and Cleopatra, II.ii.184-5.

6. Love's Labour's Lost, IV.iii.261, 269.

7. Michael Echeruo, The Conditioned Imagination from Shakespeare to Conrad (London, 1978), p. 57.

8. This and all subsequent references to Othello are in the New Arden Edition of the play, edited by M. R. Ridley (London, reprinted 1979), and conform to the lineation of that text.

9. Under the entry ‘Ancient’ the Oxford English Dictionary cites 2 Henry IV (II.iv.120 [II.iv.118 in Craig]) and Henry V (III.vi.20 [III.vi.19 in Craig]) as early instances of this usage.

10. Cf. Romeo's lines: ‘beauty's ensign yet / Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks, / And death's pale flag is not advanced there.’ Romeo and Juliet, V.iii.94-6.

11. G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire (London, reprinted 1968). p. 116.

12. See for instance Knight, op. cit., pp. 114-16, and Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (Oxford, reprinted 1971), pp. 217-24.

13. For a more technical semiological analysis of this play, see Alessandro Serpieri, ‘Reading the Signs: Towards a Semiotics of Shakespearean Drama’, translated by Keir Elam, in Alternative Shakespeares, edited by John Drakakis (London, reprinted 1986), pp. 119-43.

14. Coleridge, Note on Othello, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Shakespearean Criticism, edited by Thomas Middleton Raysor (London, reprinted 1961), vol. I, p. 44.

15. The word ‘light’ recurs in a variety of senses throughout Othello, sustaining the verbal momentum if not always reinforcing the symbolic implications of the play. See for instance Brabantio's ‘Destruction light on me, if my bad blame / Light on the man!’ (I.iii.177-8); Othello's reference to ‘light-wing’d toys' (I.iii.268); his warning to his quarrelling officers that whoever commits any further act of aggression ‘Holds his soul light’ (II.iii.165); Cassio's disparagement of himself as ‘so light, so drunken, and indiscreet an officer’ (II.iii.270-1); Iago's observation that ‘trifles light as air / Are to the jealous, confirmations strong’ (III.iii.327-8); Iago's reference to ‘Poor Cassio's smiles, gestures, and light behaviour’(IV.i.102); and Lodovico's inquiry with regard to Othello: ‘is he not light of brain?’ (IV.1.265).

16. Although there is no etymological connection between the words ‘delight’ and ‘light’, it appears quite evident that in Othello Shakespeare is associating the two words in an imaginative sense at least. The reader might note for instance the contraposition of colours implicit in Brabantio's question to Othello as to whether it is credible that his daughter would have ‘Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom / Of such a thing as thou? to fear, not to delight’ (I.ii.70-71). In a similar vein, Iago later remarks of Desdemona that ‘Her eye must be fed, and what delight shall she have to look on the devil?’ (II.i.224-5).

17. The seeming inevitability of the symbolic associations with which the handkerchief is invested does not make its status as a sign any less arbitrary. Lynda E. Boose's ingenious analysis of the emblematic significance of this object, for instance, is not an effort to tease out intrinsic meanings but to recuperate the codes (embodied chiefly in European folk practices surrounding nuptials and in the Book of Deuteronomy) that might have enabled meaning in the minds of Shakespeare's audience. See Boose, ‘Othello's Handerkerchief: “The Recognizance and Pledge of Love”’, English Literary Renaissance 5 (1975), 360-74.

18. ‘We say lie on her, when they belie her’ (IV.i.35-6). Cf. the clown's quip: ‘I know not where he [Cassio] lodges, and for me to devise a lodging, and say he lies here, or he lies there, were to lie in mine own throat’ (III.iv.9-11).

19. A thorough analysis of this latter aspect of Othello's plight is to be found in Edward A. Snow, ‘Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Things in Othello’, English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980), 384-412. To the degree that the patriarchal view of the world itself represents a codification of reality in which the individual's identity is vested, of course, the potential challenge posed to that order by the empowering of the woman as an active sexual being in her own right might be seen as correlative to the subversion of the luminary code that I am discussing here.

20. For a stimulating recent discussion of the more specifically ‘linguistic’ determinants of Othello's dilemma, see Kenneth Gross, ‘Slander and Skepticism in Othello’, ELH 56 (1989), 819-52.

21. T.S. Eliot, ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ in Selected Essays (London, reprinted 1986), p. 131. Emphasis in the original.

22. For an acute analysis of the interdependency of identity and narrative in Othello see Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago, 1980), pp. 232-52.