SOURCE: “Othello, Racism, and Despair,” in CLA Journal, Vol. XLI, No. 4, June, 1998, pp. 431-51.

[In the essay below, Hogan argues that race is a central issue in Othello, stating that Shakespeare opposed racism because it was not Christian.]

In the middle of this century, in the context of the anticolonial struggles being waged throughout Africa and the Caribbean, writers such as Frantz Fanon explored the effects of racism on the minds and hearts of those black men and women who came to internalize the inhuman attitudes of their oppressors, conceiving of themselves in the same brutish terms.¹ More recently, Derek Walcott has spoken of having black skin but looking at the world through blue eyes—seeing oneself and others through the distorting lenses of white racism. One result of this, Walcott tells us, is “racial despair,”² despondency over the possibilities for accomplishment, for change, fulfillment, a good life—what the Greeks called eudaimonia. Racial despair is a secular descendent of spiritual despair. The latter results from a sense that one's sin is too great even for all-merciful God to forgive, that this sin blots out one's soul. The former results from a sense that one's skin is too black for anyone to accept—to forget or to “forgive”—that one's skin blots out one's soul.

This, I wish to argue, is the tragedy of Othello, the reason that he murders both Desdemona and himself. Like many tragic heroes, Othello is greater than those around him. He is, in Aristotle's term, spoudaios:³ excellent in character, intense in thought, elevated in feeling. But the forces arrayed against him are immense—not superhuman forces, Greek gods or Satan in a usurped human form, but all of intimate society. Everywhere he turns, Othello confronts racism. Its different faces or masks—not only enmity, disdain, abuse, but friendship, admiration, love—serve to make it more insistent, compelling, inexorable. In the end, he succumbs to the racist vision of those around him. The consequent despair leads to murder and to suicide.

A number of critics have argued that Othello is, in effect, an antiracist play.⁴ Others have seen the play as racist or at least as partially acquiescing in racist views about miscegenation.⁵ Still others have argued that it is anachronistic to see the play in terms of racism at all. Thus Michael Neill maintains against Martin Orkin that it was not “possible for Shakespeare to ‘oppose racism’ in 1604 … the argument simply could not be constituted in those terms.”⁶

As to the third (“historicist”) position, it is a critical commonplace today that there is profound discontinuity and incommensurability between different historical periods, and between cultures. We cannot discuss this view at length here, but its status as dogma seems, at best, questionable. Orkin, Anthony Barthelemy,⁷ and others offer considerable evidence that many Europeans of Shakespeare's time categorized people according to skin color, analogized nonwhites to animals, judged nonwhites inferior to whites and, more specifically, lascivious, “hypersexualized,”⁸ etc., in keeping with standard stereotypes. Indeed, citing work done by Fanon only a few decades ago, Fintan O’Toole argues that in the seventeenth century blacks were demeaned in the very same terms as they are today.⁹ It seems odd to deny that this is racism. Moreover, Orkin argues convincingly that there were many people of the time (most famously, Montaigne¹⁰) who deplored, and thus opposed, this tendency to denigrate non-Europeans. It seems odd to insist that this is not antiracism.

But our use of the word “racism” is, in any case, not the point. We can, after all, substitute another term if “racism” seems too burdened by modern biological pseudoscience. What is important is just that Shakespeare recognized when people were not conceived of nor treated as human beings. He sensed the emotional violence of this; he could see its sources—including its sources in beliefs relating to skin color and national origin—and its devastating effects. In Othello, Shakespeare has illustrated this human recognition. And sharing that recognition is crucial to our experience of the play's tragedy.

Indeed, my purpose in writing this essay is perhaps not so much to defend a particular interpretive thesis, as to facilitate a particular tragic experience. In doing this, I follow the great Arabic theorists—al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd—in seeking the ethical and political value of a literary work not in its “message,” but in its takhyil, the imaginative experience which inspires and focusses our moral feelings.¹¹ In other words, following the views of these writers, my aim is not merely to analyze the play in a particular manner, but to foster a takhyil that is at once more fully tragic and more pointedly ethical.

The idea is worth elaborating briefly. The major medieval Arabic theorists saw the prime function of literature as ethical. However, they did not conceive of this ethical function as a matter of a work expressing or inculcating some moral precept. Rather, they saw it as the fostering of an imaginative experience which serves to excite moral feelings, particularly the Islamic feelings of rahmah and taqwa¹²—the former signifying mercy or “tenderness requiring the exercise of beneficence”;¹³ the latter meaning piety or “observance of duty.”¹⁴ For these writers, the moral aim of literature is not the teaching of ideas, but rather what, many centuries later, European Romantic theorists came to call “the training of sensibility.”

Keeping in mind recent work on reception and response, we may further develop this view in a way that links it productively with practical literary criticism. Many modern European theorists have emphasized the incompleteness of the literary work, stressing the role of the readers in completing the story, “filling in” the character as they read. Roman Ingarden speaks of “concretizing” the literary work;¹⁵ Wolfgang Iser talks of filling gaps.¹⁶ If we combine this insight with the Arabic view, we see directly that a single literary work may produce a number of very different imaginative experiences depending upon how it is completed by a reader. These different imaginative experiences may, in turn, have quite different ethical functions. Some may stifle rahmah and taqwa; others may foster them. A critical practice concerned primarily with the takhyil of a work, would, then, aim to develop, from these possible readings, an interpretation conducive toward a literary experience that would foster such moral feelings, not stifle them.

In the following pages, I wish to make the interpretive argument that Othello is a play focussed on the devastating effects of racism. But at the same time, and more importantly, I wish to encourage a particular “concretization” of the play, and thus a particular imaginative experience of it. In other words, while the focus of my analysis is on meaning, my underlying concern is with takhyil. In this way, my project is continuous with that set out by Kiernan Ryan, “to activate the revolutionary imaginative vision which invites discovery in [Shakespeare's] plays today,” “to make his drama more disturbing in its impact on the institutions through which Shakespeare is reproduced, and more constructively alert to our most pressing problems and needs.”¹⁷ In short, the overarching goal, which I share with Ryan, is to integrate our imagination of Shakespeare with current concerns about political and social dilemmas—in this case, the persistent dilemmas of racism and racial despair. It is precisely this sort of integration that the Arabic theorists conceptualized many centuries ago as takhyil.

IS OTHELLO A FURIOUS MOOR?

In Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatommithi, from which Shakespeare drew the story of Othello, Desdemona tells her husband outright, “You Moors are of so hot a nature that every little trifle moves you to anger and revenge.”¹⁸ A common stereotype was the hot-blooded Turk, the vengeful Arab, the passionate and impulsive African.¹⁹ Shakespeare was, of course, free to create a character who fit this stereotype. And if he did, if Othello is indeed a furious Moor whose (more than human) passion overpowers his (less than human) reason, then there is nothing to be explained in the final murder and suicide. He kills Desdemona and himself because the divine faculty of reason is racially weak, and the animal impulses of passion are racially potent.

But it is easy to see that this is not the case. Shakespeare is at pains to portray Othello as more reasonable (more contemplative, calm, reflective, discerning) and less passionate (less impulsive, desirous, pugnacious) than any of the Venetians around him. Roderigo is a fool, his reason pathetically overwhelmed by lust for Desdemona. Cassio, deceived into inebriation, loses self-control and brawls on the slightest provocation. Brabantio storms into Othello's company crying havoc and flailing his sword hysterically. Most of all, Iago is crazed with the green-eyed monster, jealousy. It takes labor, and stage-craft, and practiced deceit to convince Othello that Desdemona has been unfaithful. It also takes moira, a tragic conspiracy of fate: Cassio bragging of his conquest, the compromising appearance of a handkerchief. But Iago requires no such evidence to accuse his wife of multiple adulteries. He speaks darkly of rumors: “[I]t is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets / H’as done my office” (I.iii.378-79).²⁰ Later, he delivers a mad speech on female “Lechery … lust and foul thoughts” (II.i.257-59), culminating with a fantastical accusation:

[T]he lusty Moor
Hath leaped into my seat; the thought whereof
Doth, like a poisonous mineral, gnaw my inwards;
And nothing can or shall content my soul
Till I am evened with him, wife for wife.

(II.i.295-99)

He concludes by elaborating the delusion further still: “I fear Cassio with my nightcap too” (II.i.307). In sum, the Venetians of the play fit Desdemona's description well: almost to a man, they are “of so hot a nature that every little trifle moves [them] to anger and revenge.”²¹

But Othello does not fit at all. When we first see Othello, Iago is trying to anger him. He gossips that a nobleman “spoke … scurvy and provoking terms” against Othello (I.ii.8). In the preceding scene, Iago's ploys had successfully inflamed Brabantio and duped Roderigo. But with Othello, he has no success: “Let him do his spite,” Othello responds, unmoved (I.ii.16). When Brabantio, Roderigo, and the officers enter, and both sides draw their swords, in preparation for bloody combat, Othello merely says: “Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them” (I.ii.58). Then, after Brabantio abuses him with gross racial invective, he continues, “Hold your hands, / Both you of my inclining and the rest” (I.ii.80-81). The scene and the phrase “Keep up your bright swords” are reminiscent of the garden at Gethsemane. When the armed men sent by the chief priests have come to arrest and imprison him, Jesus commands his followers not to fight, ordering Simon Peter (in the Geneva translation of 1560), “Put up thy sword”²²—a famous phrase alluded to in Othello's first command.²³ Later, in a similar manner, Othello is calm, though forceful, in ending the brawl between Cassio and Montano. Here he makes the religious significance of the act explicit, calling out, “For Christian shame put by this barbarous brawl!” (II.iii.171).

Othello is not committed to peace, however, due to some flaw; he is not pusillanimous or lacking in military skill. Despite the great racism of Venetian society (to which we shall turn presently), he has risen to command the Venetian troops. All acknowledge him valiant (see, for example, I.iii.48), and his status indicates his strategic abilities. In opposing battle, he is reasonable, not timorous. Moreover, his rational skills go beyond those of strategy. For example, he is a physican also, capable in the art of healing (see II.iii.253), where he comforts Montano, saying, “Sir, for your hurts, myself will be your surgeon”). Even Iago, despite his vicious hatred, must acknowledge that Othello is “constant, loving, noble” (II.i.289). In short, he, almost alone among the major characters in the play, is guided by reason, not passion. He is as far from the stereotype of the passionate Moor as he could possibly be, and as far superior to his white associates.

Why, then, does he kill?

THE UBIQUITY OF RACISM

In almost every way, the attitude of the Venetians toward Othello is racialist, even when it is not derogatory. Othello is a great general in the Venetian army, a friend and colleague of many Venetians. And yet, they refer to him far less frequently as “Othello,” as this particular man, than as “the Moor”—when counted up, the proportion is almost two to one in favor of the generic category over the name. In other words, they routinely discuss, and even address him, not as an individual person, but as an instance of his race.²⁴

Of course, much of the address and discussion is indeed derogatory as well—and in all the standard ways. Iago is particularly adept at racial slander. After Roderigo has referred to Othello as “the thick-lips” (I.i.63), Iago goes on to characterize Othello as a brute beast. He shouts that Othello is “an old black ram” (I.i.85). He taunts Brabantio with the dreadful possibility that Brabantio's grandchildren will be of mixed race, saying, “[Y]our daughter [is] covered with a Barbary horse, [hence] you’ll have nephews neigh to you, you’ll have coursers for cousins, and gennets for germans” (I.i.108-11). Worse still, at times he sees Othello as demonic: “[T]he devil will make a grandsire of you” (I.i.88). Though, later, Shakespeare has Iago admit that it is he himself, not Othello, who is of Satan's party. Speaking of his plot against Othello, Iago says: “When devils will the blackest sins put on, / They do suggest at first with heavenly shows, / As I do now” (II.iii.351-53). And at the end of the play, Othello repeats the characterization, asking Cassio to inquire of “the demi-devil” Iago “Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body?” (V.ii.297-98).

Despite his own degradation, however, Iago finds Desdemona degraded in loving Othello. It is a violation of nature—akin almost to the bestiality of Pasiphaë—for this woman who is so “fair” (both so beautiful and so white) to choose “the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor” (I.i.119,123). It is beyond reason: “[W]hat delight shall she have to look on the devil?” he asks Roderigo (II.i.224-25).

Brabantio takes up this theme most vehemently, accusing Othello of witchcraft. Only magic, “foul charms” and “drugs” could drive Desdemona “from her guardage to the sooty bosom / Of such a thing as thou—to fear, not to delight” (I.ii.72, 73, 69-70). Because he is black, he is hideous (another common stereotype of the period; see, for example, Barthelmy 27). His natural color is soot, filth—a physical degradation paralleling a spiritual degradation. No fair woman could love “such a thing.” Later, he questions again how she could “fall in love with what she feared to look on” (I.iii.99). In the brief period of the play, Brabantio pines away and dies. He too is struck down by despair. What point is there to living, once his daughter has espoused the kin of Lucifer?

When I teach this play, I ask my students to imagine themselves in Othello's position, to make a self-conscious effort at developing a particular takhyil. It is, I think, a worthwhile exercise. To the society around Othello, it makes no sense that Desdemona would love him. His father-in-law vilifies him and demands that he be tried, for it is unimaginable that a white woman could genuinely love a black demonic thing. And this father-in-law's racial hatred is so immense and implacable that it drives him to his grave. It is important to try to imagine this: you are in a society which is almost entirely racially different. Everyone of your race is repulsive to the eye, socially and spiritually subhuman. The father of the person you love drags you to the law courts screeching these obscenities.

Now imagine that even this man or woman you love has not entirely escaped the racist view. Sometimes he/she refers to you by name, but sometimes simply invokes your racial category—your wife or husband calling you not “John” or “Jane,” but “the caucasian,” or “the oriental,” or “the hispanic.” And he/she implicitly agrees that you, and everyone like you, is repugnant to the eye. This is how Othello lives. Of the men in the play, the Duke is certainly the most enlightened. He can see the value in Othello's work, his skill, the character of his mind. Yet he too acknowledges the outer man blackly repulsive: “If virtue no delighted beauty lack, / Your son-in-law is far more fair than black” (I.ii.284-85). In complimenting Othello's virtue, he simultaneously characterizes all beauty—primarily physical beauty, but also spiritual beauty—as white, as “fair.” Even for the Duke, Othello's appearance is grotesque. Indeed, in this, the most enlightened view of the play, Othello has achieved his inner virtue only insofar as he has become “fair” inside, insofar as he is not black within.

Desdemona is worse. In her first speech, discussing her recent marriage, she does not refer to her new husband as “Othello,” but as “the Moor” (I.iii.187). In her next reference to him, she expresses deep affection, but still does not give him a name, and thus a personal identity. “I love the Moor,” she says (I.iii.243). She then goes on to account for this love—for she too implicitly acknowledges that it is queer to love “such a thing” as Othello, that it requires an explanation. Indeed, she too implicitly acknowledges that he is unsightly. “My heart's subdued / Even to the very quality of my lord” (I.iii.245-46), she says. The phrase is ambiguous. It may mean, as it is sometimes glossed, that she has accepted his warlike profession. But this does not fit the general context. As Othello has already explained (I.iii.166), she fell in love with him because of his martial and other exploits. Thus it makes no sense to say that she accepts even these. It seems likely, then, that “quality” here refers to the nature or origin of Othello, or to a salient attribute of his person, thus to his being African and black. Desdemona's heart has, it seems, been subdued even to the dark foreignness—the frightful sooty bosom—of what Roderigo called “an extravagant and wheeling stranger” (I.i.133). This meaning is made fully clear in the following line, where Desdemona explains her intent to the curious auditors, who still baffle at this strange marriage of fair and foul. What does she mean when she says that her heart's subdued to the very quality of Othello? She means, “I saw Othello's visage in his mind” (I.iii.247). In the presence of her husband, on her first day of marriage, she announces publicly that, because of his valor, she could love him despite his color. Her comment is akin to that of the Duke: I see him as fair, because I see his virtue, not the dreadful blackness of his face. And, again like the Duke, in affirming Othello's transcendence of his race, she simultaneously affirms that, in Venice, or among Venetians, he will never be considered anything other than an instance of that race.

OTHELLO'S CRIME

The apparent ease with which Othello is convinced by Iago's deceptions already becomes more comprehensible in this context: the almost universal judgment of Venetians is that Othello is a racial eyesore. Few of us would feel secure if our spouses casually acknowledged that they had to become reconciled to our disagreeable appearance. Moreover, Desdemona might seem to have manifest an impetuous character by eloping with Othello. And, then, she speaks gaily with other men, the fair men, pink-skinned and comely. She even pleads the case of Michael Cassio, a “curled darling of our nation,” as Brabantio might put it (see I.ii.67). Certainly, these are no faults, yet to a husband whom she has publicly portrayed as unalluring, they might appear significant.

But Othello does not succumb this easily. Again, it takes ill-fortune and the evil genius of Iago. Despite her belief that black is ugly, despite her references to him as “the Moor,” Desdemona is the one Venetian, the one white person by whom Othello feels—at least at times—acknowledged as a subject. She, almost alone, gives him love and respect. She alone will defy convention and self-interest for him. (Even the Duke's respect may be strategic, motivated by Othello's usefulness—for he has done the state some service.) That her heart and mind too should be warped by racism is, almost necessarily, Othello's deepest fear. If this were so, the one link connecting him with the Venetian community would be severed. He would in effect no longer have a place in human society.

And yet, she has already called him “the Moor,” already affirmed that black is ugly. Her words have already sown uncertainty in Othello's mind. He tries to suppress the doubts and questions. But Iago will not let him. At first, Othello is unconvinced, affirming Desdemona's honesty (III.iii.225). He recognizes that even good natures can err (III.iii.227), but this is brief, Christian doubt, expressed in Christian terms. Iago intentionally twists Othello's point, perverting it into a statement about race—that Desdemona has erred from “nature” in not marrying a European: “Not to affect many proposed matches / Of her own clime, complexion, and degree, / Whereto we see in all things nature tends” (III.iii.229-31). Iago's point is that the mating of white and black is unnatural—all nature moves to unite like with like, thus not Desdemona and Othello, but (perhaps) Desdemona and Cassio. He continues, “I may fear / Her will, recoiling to her better judgment, / May fall to match you with her country forms, / And happily repent” (III.iii.235-38). He cautions Othello: Beware. If she is reasonable, and follows nature, she will at last compare you with the fair-complexioned men of Venice and repent her wedding vows—just as she might repent a sin, a temporary alliance with the devil.

This persuasion works deeply on Othello, and in his next long speech, he pathetically concludes that Iago is correct: “She’s gone” (II.iii.266). He gives two possible reasons for her betrayal. One is age, that he is “declined / Into the vale of years,” but this he dismisses, “yet that’s not much” (III.iii.264-65). The remaining reason, then, is the reason he accepts, the compelling reason. It is very simple: “I am black” (III.iii.263).

From this point on, the language in which Othello speaks of Desdemona's infidelity is saturated with images of blackness and whiteness, and the beginnings of racial despair. In considering his reputation, he says, “My name, that was as fresh / As Dian's visage, is now begrimed and black / As mine own face” (III.iii.383-85). It does not take a psychoanalyst to see the incipient self-hate below the shallow surface of anger. The contrast between Diana's whiteness and Othello's blackness displaces only slightly his sense that Desdemona has betrayed him because of his black face. When he contemplates revenge, it is “black vengeance, from the hollow hell!” (III.iii.444), vengeance by a black man betrayed due to his blackness, but also vengeance by a man who is perhaps beginning to sink into despondency, believing that he is indeed not human, that he is instead some ill-formed demon, a wretched and diminished image of black Lucifer. (Later, accusing Desdemona of infidelity, he similarly contrasts the “complexion” of Desdemona with his own appearance, “grim as hell” [IV.ii.61-63].)

The misplaced handkerchief is, of course, the final datum edging Othello over the brink to complete despair, and murder. In part, it is an ordinary love token, similar to the love tokens in so many comedies of forbidden love. But it has further resonance as well, resonance amplified by Othello's sense that he has been betrayed due to his race. It was his mother's handkerchief, from Egypt (III.iv.56). She gave it to Othello for his wife. When he gave it to Desdemona, it was a token not only of his love, but of his family, his heritage, his home—Africa, from which he was “taken by the insolent foe / And sold to slavery” (I.iii.136-37). For Desdemona to give away this handkerchief to the curled darling Cassio, that he might pass it casually to a prostitute—this not only denigrates Othello's love, but dishonors his family, his past, his origins, his race. Again, the deepest hurt is not that he has lost sexual possession of his wife, but that he has lost the one point of contact with human community, that even Desdemona's love conceals mockery and disdain.

The murder too follows this pattern. But here the self-hatred, the racial despair, has progressed even further. The imagery of her death is all imagery of white and black: putting out the light (V.ii.7), or, more suggestively, “a huge eclipse / Of sun and moon” (V.ii.98-99). There are more literal connections as well. Indeed, putting out the light is an image of suffocation, and Othello chooses to suffocate Desdemona for a racial reason, for a reason which indicates that he has, at least in part, internalized the racism of Venetian society: “I’ll not shed her blood, / Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow” (V.ii.3-4). Her whiteness has become sacred, just as his blackness has become demonic. Emilia makes this explicit when she summarizes the murder: “the more angel she, / And you the blacker devil!” (V.ii.129-30). Of course, Othello does at moments reverse this, asserting that Desdemona is a “fair devil” (III.iv.475), that her soul has “gone to burning hell” (V.ii.128). But, then, racial despair does not exclude ambivalence. Indeed, one despairs precisely because one has moments when one feels and sees oneself as human, and recognizes with horror the inhumanity of the oppressor.

TURKS, VENETIANS, CHRISTIANS

Shakespeare, it seems, was not only aware but deeply critical of racial hatred and related forms of exclusion and oppression. He was pained by the brutality of majority toward minority groups. But his empathy was not our multicultural empathy. It was, rather, thoroughly Christian. His plays indicate that he believed in the unity and equality of humankind, but that he believed in this unity and equality as meaningful only in and through Christian belief and practice. Indeed, that unity and equality would appear to have been, for Shakespeare, a doctrine of Christianity. The racism of the Venetians against Othello is thoroughly unchristian, as is their racism against Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. In both plays, Shakespeare sets out to represent a putatively Christian society violating the precepts of Christianity and, in consequence, driving men to acts of barbarism. In short, he shows “Christian” society turning people away from God, when it is their Christian duty to lead people towards God.

A unfortunate aspect of Shakespeare's Christian antiracism is his apparent willingness to condemn all religions other than Christianity. On the other hand, these condemnations were not directed against people but against beliefs and practices. Moreover, they were aimed not at extending colonial oppression but at achieving conversion, and they were paired with equally strong condemnations of hypocritical Christianity.

Put differently, there are two ways in which one may conceive of the opposition between Turk and Venetian. One is religious, the other racial. One identifies Othello with the Venetians as a Christian. The other identifies Othello with the Turks as a Moor. Shakespeare stacks the deck strongly in favor of the former opposition. Othello is the general in charge of defeating the Turks. A violent tempest destroys the Turkish fleet, giving victory to the Venetians before military engagement, thus without loss or suffering. The storm is not, however, a mere natural occurrence. It is too discerning to be random: destroying the Turkish fleet alone, sparing the Venetians, it is a classic literary act of divine providence. For a few moments, it is unclear whether God has chosen to spare Othello or to drown him with the Ottomites, whether God has identified Othello with the Venetians as a Christian or has identified him with the Turks as a Moor. Of course, Othello is spared. God has judged on religious, not racial grounds.

Later, Othello makes this opposition clear, referring to the providential nature of the storm. When restraining the inebriated Cassio, he asks, “Are we turned Turks, and to ourselves do that / Which heaven hath forbid the Ottomites? / For Christian shame put by this barbarous brawl!” (II.iii.169-71). In saying that heaven has forbidden the Ottomites to kill the Venetian soldiers, Othello is referring to the storm and explicitly characterizing it as a manifestation of divine will. In addition, he implicitly explains this providential intervention of God in religious terms. For Othello, “turning Turk” is opposed not to being Venetian, being white, but to being “Christian.” Indeed, Othello refers to the entire group as “we,” rightly including himself in the body opposed to the Turks—more rightly than those around him, for he alone remembers “Christian shame.”

But not everyone sees the division in these terms. Early in the play, Brabantio draws an analogy between Othello's marriage to Desdemona and the Turks' conquest of Cyprus, at that point not yet prevented by the tempest (I.iii.207-08). For him, it is clear that the difference between Turks and Venetians is racial, not religious. The final and perhaps most devastating tragedy of Othello is that, in the end, Othello himself comes to believe Brabantio. He comes to accept that he is not an individual with a name and all the attributes of humanity, that he is not, even more importantly, a soul whose worth is defined by devotion to God rather than outward color. He comes to see himself as nothing but an instance of blackness. Through this distorting lens, he sees the horror of his crime, but he fails to see its nature. He has killed Desdemona because he fell prey to “Christian” inhumanity and became himself as “unchristian” as those around him. But this is not what he sees. When he looks at his crime, and when he looks into the heart of darkness deep in European society, he does not recognize the brutal racism of that society. Instead, he accepts it. Falling headlong into racial despair, he sees his crime as confirmation that he is a dog, a demon, a Turk, that he is all and only blackness, in body and in spirit. Indeed, this racial despair is not only similar to spiritual despair; it is, for Shakespeare, an instance of spiritual despair. Othello cannot dream of forgiveness, for his sin is his very being. It cannot be washed away from his soul by divine grace any more than the “soot” of his bosom or the “grime” of his face can be washed away. The only way to end the sin is to destroy the life which sustains it—and so he murders himself, perversely driven to spiritual despair by the “Christian” community which should have functioned precisely to prevent such feelings, to inspire faith in divine mercy.

There are hints of this self-hatred earlier, as we have already seen. But it is only in his final speech, leading to self-murder, that they are fully developed and fully articulated. Spoudaios even in disgrace, he asks his captors to “extenuate” nothing. His full acceptance of his crime, and the racial despair which follows from this, is, again, an aspect of his “constant, loving, noble” character. He will not blame others, only himself. But he blames himself racially, seeing himself through the blue eyes of a racist society. (O’Toole: “Racism isn’t just the context in which Othello lives. It has entered his mind and his soul.”²⁵) In the final lines leading to the suicide, he stops speaking of himself in the first person, as a subject, and begins to speak of himself in the third person, as “one,” as an object. He draws three comparisons. First, he is like a “Judean” (V.ii.343); second, he is like an “Arabian tree”; and, finally, he is a “Turk.” All are variations on his racial difference from those around him. His final conception of himself is of a Moor only, a dark stranger, no longer this singular man, Othello.

In the first comparison, he is a Jew who “threw a pearl away / Richer than all his tribe” (V.ii.343-44). The pearl was, of course, Desdemona. She was a pearl because she was white, and in being white worth more than an entire Semitic “tribe,” her fairness giving her greater value than all the dark men and women in combination. In the second analogy, he is like a tree from Arabia, his sorrow producing a curative balm. The balm is his tears of repentance—the cure, one must assume, is death.

The final comparison is the most painful. Othello has already announced that he will not speak of service he has done the state. But he ends with a story of this service:

[I]n Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog
And smote him—thus.

(V.ii.348-52)

In speaking the final words, he stabs himself, as if he were that very Turk.²⁶ Othello is no longer capable of seeing either Desdemona or himself as individual people, even as husband and wife. She and he have become merely Venetian and Turk, white and black. Othello is now a “malignant” Turk who beat a Venetian, and who must, in consequence, be killed. Looking at himself, he sees an inhuman beast, a “circumcised dog.” He has come around to the view of Iago and of Brabantio. He must be punished not because he, Othello, took the life of his beloved Desdemona, but because this black, subhuman Turk took the life of a fair Venetian. When Othello plunges the dagger into his chest, he is not killing himself, for he no longer recognizes himself as a self, a subject, a human body with a divine soul. He is, rather, slaying a dark beast.

This is what makes the ending of the play so devastating, especially for a Christian such as Shakespeare. Othello was a greater Christian than all the Christians of Venice, but he was driven to these final acts of desperation because of the evil of the “Christians” around him, and because of his own “constant, loving, noble nature” (II.i.289). Thus, by Christian doctrine, he is condemned to eternal torment, the death of the soul which he, in Christian conscience, did not wish to inflict on anyone, even Desdemona, even at the extremity of loathing and despair: “If you bethink yourself of any crime / Unreconciled as yet to heaven and grace, / Solicit for it straight. … I would not kill thy unprepared spirit. / No, heavens forfend! I would not kill thy soul” (V.ii.26-27, 31-32). It is worth contrasting this attitude with that of Hamlet, who once refrains from killing Claudius for fear that Claudius is at prayer and thus would rise to heaven. To kill someone at prayer, he reflects, “is hire and salary, not revenge!” (III.iii.82). For Shakespeare, the difference between this and the attitude of Othello is not trivial. And both remind a Christian reader of the eternal tragedy that follows inexorably from Othello's unsanctified death. Unlike Hamlet, who piled up corpses on the stage and would even have killed a man's soul—all based on evidence as flimsy as an apparition—unlike Hamlet, Othello will never have “flights of angels sing [him] to [his] rest” (Hamlet V.ii.386).

Indeed, even for those of us who do not accept the Christian attitudes behind the work, the dual culmination of events is devastating. In any moral system—religious or secular—it is all too brutally unnecessary and unjust. Othello is one of the most impassioned and moving studies of racism in English literature, one of the most powerful in takhyil. For Shakespeare makes painfully clear the quiet, pervasive cruelty of racism, and its terrible human consequences.

Notes

1. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967).

2. Derek Walcott, “What the Twilight Says: An Overture,” Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (New York: Noonday, 1970) 21.

3. Aristotle, Peri Poietikes, in Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, ed. and trans S. H. Butcher (New York: Dover, 1951) 10.

4. See especially Martin Orkin, Shakespeare Against Apartheid (Craighall: Ad. Donker, 1987) and citations; see also Emily C. Bartels, “Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashionings of Race,” Shakespeare Quarterly 41.4 (Winter 1990): 433-54.

5. See, for example, John Gillies, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (New York: Cambridge UP, 1994) 25-27.

6. Michael Neill, “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideouts in Othello,” Shakespeare Quarterly 40.4 (Winter 1989): 393.

7. Anthony Gerard Barthelemy, Black Face Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1987).

8. See Jonathan Crewe, “Outside the Matrix: Shakespeare and Race-Writing,” Yale Journal of Criticism 8.2 (Fall 1995): 28n25.

9. Fintan O’Toole, No More Heroes: A Radical Guide to Shakespeare (Dublin: Raven Arts, 1990) 63-64.

10. Michel de Montaigne, “Of the Cannibals,” Shakespeare's World: Background Readings in the English Renaissance, ed. Gerald M. Pinciss and Roger Lockyer (New York: Continuum, 1989).

11. Al-Farabi, “Canons of the Art of Poetry,” Arabic Poetics in the Golden Age: Selection of Texts Accompanied by a Preliminary Study, ed. and trans. Vicente Cantarino (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975); Ibn Sina, Avicenna's Commentary on the Poetics of Aristotle, ed. and trans. Ismail Dahiyat (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974); Ibn Rushd, Averroes' Middle Commentary on Aristotle's Poetics, ed. and trans., Charles Butterworth (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1986).

12. Dahiyat 89n4.

13. Maulana Muhammad Ali, ed. and trans., The Holy Qur’an: Arabic Text, English Translation and Commentary (Columbus, Ohio: Ahmadiyyah Anjuman Isha’at Islam Lahore, 1995) 3n2.

14. Ali 1180n2745.

15. Roman Ingarden, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, trans. Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth R. Olson (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1973).

16. Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, ed. Jane Tompkins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980).

17. Kiernan Ryan, Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (London: Harvester, Wheatsheaf, 1995) 1, 5.

18. Giraldi Cinthio, “Selection from Giraldi Cinthio Hecatommithi,” The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, ed. Alvan Kernan (New York: Signet, 1986) 175.

19. Cf. Peter Davison, Othello (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1988) 63. The contrast between Shakespeare's treatment of blacks and that of the source has been noted by several critics; see, for example, Edward Berry, “Othello's Alienation,” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 30.3 (Spring 1990) 316. For an historical overview of racist stereotyping in the Renaissance, see Barthelmy, note 7 above.

20. This and subsequent citations refer to William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, ed. Alvin Kernan, rev. ed. (New York: New American Library, 1986).

21. Cinthio 175.

22. Matthew 26.52 and John 18.11, in Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison: U. of Wisconsin P, 1969).

23. This parallel seems to have gone unnoticed; indeed, despite the obviously Judas-like character of Iago and the occasional links between Othello and Jesus, critics have tended to associate Othello with Judas—bizarrely, in my view; for an overview, see Roy Battenhouse, ed., Shakespeare's Christian Dimension: An Anthology of Commentary (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994).

24. This point has been noted by several critics; see, for example, Derek Cohen, “Othello's Suicide,” University of Toronto Quarterly 62.3 (Spring 1993): 324.

25. O’Toole 64.

26. Cf. Leslie A. Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (New York: Stein and Day, 1972) 195.