[In the following essay, Kirschbaum argues that many modern critics have misread Othello's character by viewing him as an essentially noble figure who is misled by others. Instead, Kirschbaum contends that Shakespeare intended Othello to be a tragically noble figure whose fate is attributable to his own character flaws.]

Is the Othello of modern critics Shakespeare's Othello?

Here are three representative opinions. To Sir Edmund Chambers, Othello is “the simple open-hearted soldier,” “a gracious and doomed creature” who is an “easy victim.”¹ For Kittredge, he is “an heroic and simple nature, putting full trust in two friends, both of whom betray him, the one in angry malice, the other by weakness and self-seeking.”² Stoll sees him as a very noble dramatic puppet who evinces no psychological consistency in his passage from love to sudden jealousy and who must fall because of the dramatic device that every one trusts the villain: Iago is Othello's nemesis.³

I do not think that this Othello is Shakespeare's Othello. I do not think that this is the Othello whom the judicious reader or spectator or actor sees. I do not think that this is the Othello whom an Elizabethan audience saw. Theodore Spencer is more cautious: “It is solely because Othello is the kind of man that he is that a man like Iago can destroy him.”⁴ Yet what kind of man is the Moor? I think that Shakespeare gives the answer partially by means of contrast within the play.

Consider the following speech of Iago to Roderigo in I, ii, when the latter says that it is not in his power to control his love for Desdemona:

… 'tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners; so that if we will plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many, either to have it sterile with idleness or manured with industry, why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills. If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most preposterous conclusions; but we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts, whereof I take this that you call love to be a sect or scion.

Shakespeare, says Kittredge, uses Iago “for the utterance of great truths.” “Of all these the most remarkable is his sublime assertion (to Roderigo) of the supremacy of will and reason in the cultivation of the moral faculties. … That is a saying of which Hamlet himself might be proud, and to which the noble Brutus would assent with enthusiasm.”⁵ Yet Iago's statement is simple Christian catechism. It is “the true doctrine” which is uttered by Jack Cade in the Mirror for Magistrates.⁶ If this doctrine be noble, then the Othello of modern critics is not noble, for they assert that he is not the maker of his own destiny: Iago is. But if we are going to insist on understanding Elizabethan dramatic artifice, let us also insist on examining Othello according to the traditional values which Shakespeare has injected implicitly and explicitly into the play. Actually by stressing Othello's innocence, modern critics have robbed the character of what the Elizabethans considered man's highest dignity—his own responsibility for his own life and character. Othello is less innocuous than modern critics conceive him because he ultimately is responsible for his terrible fate. On the other hand, precisely because of this responsibility, he possesses a stature as tragic protagonist which without this responsibility he could not possess.

Modern critics exonerate Othello. The noble hero is not responsible for the catastrophe. It is the devil-man, Iago, who is. But Othello is not the only noble character in the play who falls because of the wiles of Iago. Cassio does too. But Cassio does not excuse himself of culpability. He, too, follows the doctrine laid down by Iago above. Let us examine II, iii, 278-312. Knowing that he should not drink, Cassio has listened to the tempter, Iago, has become drunk in consequence, has created a scene, and has been dismissed from office:

CAS.
I will rather sue to be despis'd than to deceive so good a commander with so slight, so drunken, and so indiscreet an officer. Drunk? and speak parrot? and squabble? swagger? swear? and discourse fustian with one's own shadow? O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil! … I remember a mass of things, but nothing distinctly; a quarrel, but nothing wherefore. O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! That we should, with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!
IAGO.
Why, but you are now well enough. How come you thus recovered?
CAS.
It hath pleas'd the devil drunkenness to give place to the devil wrath. One unperfectness shows me another, to make me frankly depise myself.
IAGO.
Come, you are too severe a moraler. As the time, the place, and the condition of this country stands, I could heartily wish this had not befallen; but since it is as it is, mend it for your own good.
CAS.
I will ask him for my place again; he shall tell me I am a drunkard! Had I as many mouth as Hydra, such an answer would stop them all. 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.

Clearly Cassio considers that his succumbing to the devil was his own fault. He does not exonerate himself of responsibility for his own ruin. An Elizabethan audience would not have understood a dramatist who implied that the Devil was man's nemesis. Man had free will.

But, says Stoll constantly, the question of free will does not enter into the matter of Othello's believing Iago. It is a dramatic convention that Iago's mask is impenetrable. All the characters believe him to be honest. Hence, Othello must believe Iago's slander against Desdemona.

It is true that Shakespeare has artfully maintained the fiction of Iago's honesty among the dramatis personae. But Shakespeare is more artful than Stoll notes. There are three clean-cut occasions in the play when the characters do not believe Iago. And each of these occasions occurs when he suggests that Desdemona is unchaste! Or let us put the matter a different way. Iago tells four of the characters that Desdemona is unchaste—and the only one who believes this accusation is Othello! It may be stated categorically that, contrary to Stoll, Shakespeare has underlined the premise that Othello need not have believed Iago's imputations.

In II, i, after the arrival scene in Cyprus, Iago asserts to Roderigo that Desdemona is in love with Cassio (220-1) “With him? Why, 'tis not possible.” Iago persists (223-53): Cassio is “a pestilent complete knave, and the woman hath found him already.” But Roderigo answers, “I cannot believe that in her. She's full of most bless'd condition.” And when Iago points to seeming proof, “Dids't thou not see her paddle with the palm of his hand? Dids't not mark that?”, Roderigo refuses to believe him: “Yes, that I did; but that was but courtesy.” The next scene but one (II, iii) is the scene of Cassio's downfall. But though Iago can tempt Cassio to drink, he cannot tempt him to disbelief in Desdemona's chastity:

CAS.
Welcome, Iago; we must to the watch.
IAGO.
Not this hour, Lieutenant; 'tis not yet ten o' th' clock. Our general cast us thus early for the love of his Desdemona; who let us not therefore blame. He hath not yet made wanton the night with her; and she is sport for Jove.
CAS.
She's a most exquisite lady.
IAGO.
And, I'll warrant her, full of game.
CAS.
Indeed, she's a most fresh and delicate creature.
IAGO.
What an eye she has! Methinks it sounds a parley to provocation.
CAS.
An inviting eye; and yet methinks right modest.
IAGO.
And when she speaks, is it not an alarum to love?
CAS.
She is indeed perfection.
IAGO.
Well, happiness to their sheets! Come, Lieutenant, I have a stoup of wine; and here without are a brace of Cyprus gallants that would fain have a measure to the health of black Othello.

And the very denouement of the play depends on one character's having more faith in Desdemona than in Iago. When Emilia first hears that her own husband has said that Desdemona was unfaithful, she cries, “He lies to the heart” (V, ii, 156). Thus, by having Iago always believed except in the matter of Desdemona's morality and believed in this matter only by Othello, Shakespeare is certainly using the dramatic device of contrast for a purpose. And what can this purpose be but to indicate that there is something in Othello's character which leads him to believe Iago's calumny concerning his wife?

But what is this something? T. S. Eliot has made an illuminating statement concerning Othello's final great speech, “Soft you; a word or two before you go, etc.” (V, ii, 338-56):

What Othello seems to me to be doing in making this speech is cheering himself up. He is endeavouring to escape reality, he has ceased to think about Desdemona, and is thinking about himself. Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of oneself. Othello succeeds in turning himself into a pathetic figure, by adopting an aesthetic rather than a moral attitude, dramatizing himself against his environment. He takes in the spectator, but the human motive is primarily to take in himself. I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this bovarysme, the human will to see things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare.⁷

But Eliot could have gone much further. In this last scene there is much evidence that Othello refuses to look squarely at his crime. Fate was responsible: “But, O vain boast! Who can control his fate? 'tis not so now” (264-5). Or it was the stars: “O ill-starr'd wench!” (272). Or his motive was of the best: He is “An honourable murderer. … For nought I did in hate, but all in honour!” (294-5). Contrast this self-exculpation with the attitude of Cassio toward his fall which we discussed earlier. There is little doubt, I believe, that the Othello of the last scene is not quite so strong a character as critics have made him out to be.⁸ He is understandably human—but he is not greatly noble.

It is this, the refusal to face reality, this, the trait of self-idealization, which makes of Shakespeare's Othello a psychologically consistent characterization and which explains why he falls so quickly into Iago's trap, why he alone on Iago's instigation believes Desdemona a strumpet.

Stoll maintains that Othello's belief in Iago is not grounded in Othello's psychology but is merely Shakespeare's dramatic device. “And it is only … by means of a specious and unreal psychology that he is made incapable of distrusting the testimony which his nature forbids him to accept, to the point of distrusting the testimony and character of those whom both his nature and their own forbid him to discredit.”⁹ Accordingly, Stoll belabors those critics who have attempted to see Othello as a psychologically consistent character.

It is interesting to see the way Stoll reasons. Again and again, when in discussing characters he says that Shakespeare substitutes artifice for authentic psychology, it is always Stoll's own concept of psychology which is the criterion. It may be, indeed, that the “psychology” of the critics whom Stoll attacks is entirely false. It does not follow that the “psychology” which Stoll employs to disprove them is correct. It is possible that Shakespeare's knowledge of how certain human beings operate in given situations is better than Stoll's. One is very much inclined to believe this merely on a priori grounds when he reads the following sentence in the midst of Stoll's rebuttal of those who have tried to read Othello's character: “Psychology, like law, is common sense, though art itself need not be.”¹⁰ No one who has any knowledge of the human heart and mind—whether he be a psychiatrist, or a psychologist, or a literary critic interested in determining to what extent art reflects life, or a spectator in the theater—will be inclined to agree with Stoll.

As a matter of fact, so irrational can human behavior be that in order to create probability the dramatist has to make his characters more consistent than people are in real life. It is a measure of Shakespeare's greatness that his probable characters are also possible characters.¹¹ When Shakespeare created Othello, he was merely imitating a life that produces a Rousseau or a William Blake, romantic idealists who swing from overtrust to unjust suspicion in a twinkling. Emotional polarity is one of the commonest traits of humanity. We all have a touch of paranoia in us. To the extent that we acclaim our own greatness (i. e., escape reality), to that extent do we suspect others. This is not common sense—but it is life. And Shakespeare imitates life. And the spectator reacts to this imitation not with technical knowledge but with awareness of human nature.

Othello from the beginning is too much of a romantic idealist—in regard to himself and others. He considers human nature superior to what it actually is. He overvalues Desdemona as much as he overvalues Iago—and himself.¹² In IV, iii, Emilia discusses sex in blunt unromantic terms. And her husband tells Othello in III, iii, 138-141:

                                                            Who has that breast so pure
But some uncleanly apprehensions
Keep leets and law-days and in sessions sit
With meditations lawful?

And even Desdemona in III, iv, 148, says: “Nay, we must think men are not gods.” But now listen to Othello when we see him and Desdemona together for the first time, when she has just pleaded to be allowed to go to Cyprus with him (I, iii, 261-79):¹³

OTH.
Your voyces Lords: beseech you let her will,
Haue a free way, I therefore beg it not
To please the pallat of my appetite,
Nor to comply with heate, the young affects
In [me] defunct, and proper satisfaction,
But to be free and bounteous of her mind,
And heauen defend your good soules that you thinke
I will your serious and good businesse scant,
For she is with me;—no, when light-wing'd toyes,
And feather'd Cupid foyles with wanton dulnesse,
My speculatiue and actiue instruments,
That my disports, corrupt and taint my businesse,
Let huswiues make a skellet of my Helme,
And all indigne and base aduersities,
Make head against my reputation.
DU.
Be it, as you shall priuately determine,
Either for stay or going, the affaires cry hast,
And speede must answer, you must hence to night,
DESD.
To night my Lord?
DU.
This night.
OTH.
With all my heart.

Note how carefully Shakespeare distinguishes between Desdemona's cry (This is their wedding night!) and Othello's almost inhuman, “With all my heart.”

Just as Othello flees from facing what he is in the last act, so too does he flee from what he is in the above speech in the first act.¹⁴ That which makes him psychologically consistent is his refusal to see himself as ordinarily human.¹⁵ The importance of I, iii, 261-75, in which Othello disclaims sexual feelings, is that it furnishes the spectator with the first clear indication that Othello considers himself above human passions. From that time on the spectator will watch for repetition of this dangerous self-delusion and evidence that indicates it is a delusion. The spectator will contrast the Platonic exhilaration of the “O my fair warrior!” passage (II, i, 185 ff.) with the sexuality of “Come, my dear love, etc.” (II, iii, 3-10). The spectator will be prepared for the outbreak of passion dissolving judgment in III, iii, by Othello's outburst toward the drunken Cassio in II, iii, 204-7:

                                                                                Now, by heaven,
My blood begins my safer guides to rule;
And passion, having my best judgment collied,
Assays to lead the way.

Here, for the first time, the god pose clearly dissolves. The spectator will observe self-delusion permeating the temptation scene (III, iii) in which Othello disclaims attitudes and emotions which he immediately exhibits. The spectator will see Othello holding on to his high opinion of himself in IV, i, 39-40: “Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion without some instruction. It is not words that shakes me thus.” When Iago tells Othello that he must have patience or the former will consider him “all in all in spleen,” the spectator will hear Othello say, “I will be found most cunning in my patience” (IV, i, 88-91) though word and act deny him. The spectator will see grating sensuality and the god pose held concomittantly in V, ii, 13-22. The conjunction of “I'll smell it on the tree” and self-justification is pretty ghastly. I quote Kittredge's note in his individual edition on lines 21-22: “This sorrow's heavenly … love”: “My sorrow is like that which God feels when he punishes the guilty: he loves the sinner, yet punishes the sin. Cf. Hebrews, xii, 6: ‘Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.’ Here again we see that Othello regards himself as the agent of divine justice. He strives to maintain this attitude of mind throughout the scene, but in vain.” In short the spectator will not, like Stoll, accept Othello's description of himself as “one not easily jealous” in V, ii, 345, as a trustworthy remark, for it comes from one who from the first has believed himself to be what actually he is not.

Othello's romantic idealism has made him overidealize himself and Desdemona from the first. And like other romantic idealists, his overtrust speedily shifts to undertrust on the first provocation. Careful readers of the temptation scene (III, iii) will observe how Othello cooperates with Iago, how Iago seems rather to make Othello see what corruption is within himself than to put something there which has not been there.

There is terrible truth in the reflection that if a man is wedded to his fantasy of woman as the steadfast hiding-place of his heart, the fountain whence his current flows, so that he grows frantic and blind with passion at the thought of the actual woman he has married as a creature of natural varying impulse—then he lies at the mercy of life's chances, and of his own secret fears and suspicions.¹⁶

Paradoxically, Othello loves Desdemona so much that it is questionable whether in human terms he loves her at all. He loves not Desdemona but his image of her. (Shelley was such another.) To Othello, his wife is not a woman but the matrix of his universe.¹⁷ And to Othello he himself is not a man but a super-being without ordinary human emotions. I never read the Othello speech above without recalling Juliet's passionate hymeneal, “Gallop apace, etc.” (III, ii, 1-31). Why does Iago say of Othello in relation to Desdemona (II, iii, 345-54)?

                                                                                And then for her
To win the Moor, were't to renounce his baptism,
All seals and symbols of redeemed sin,
His soul is so enfettr'd to her love,
That she may make, unmake, do what she list,
Even as her appetite shall play the god
With his weak function.

Othello, Iago is indicating here, keeps no proportion in his love. And there is no proportion in his fall. What makes of him a consistent character is a species of romantic idealism which soars, shatters, and partially recovers—which at no time, Shakespeare indicates by contrast, is ever to be taken on its own terms as modern critics tend to take it—which at no time, one can say, is completely equivalent with a nobility based on what the world is and not on what it is not.

Concerning this view, however, critics may say that I avoid the crucial descriptions of Othello by Iago:

The Moor is of a free and open nature,
That thinks men honest that but seem to be so,
And will as tenderly be led by th' nose
As asses are.

(I, iii, 405-8)

The Moor, howbeit that I endure him not,
Is of a constant, loving, noble nature,
And I dare think he'll prove to Desdemona
A most dear husband.

(II, i, 297-300)

Of course both these statements are choral. The first supports my analysis. It is a cynically realistic judgment of Othello's particular kind of nobility. What better definition of a romantic idealist can we find than that he is one “That thinks men honest that but seem to be so”—including himself? And the second statement is followed by lines which indicate that Othello can be made jealous “Even to madness.” There is no difficulty here in reconciling how Iago sees Othello and how the spectator sees him. The trouble is that critics tend to see him as he sees himself. Do we take other self-deluded characters on their own terms—Angelo, Romeo, Lear, Timon, Hotspur?

For Othello is not the only self-deluded character in Shakespeare's plays who thinks himself more ideal than actuality permits. Consider Romeo in his relationship with Rosaline.¹⁸ Remember what happens to Angelo in Measure for Measure. Of him, at the opening of the play, the Duke says (I, iii, 50-4):

                                                                                          Lord Angelo is precise,
Stands at guard with envy, scarce confesses
That his blood flows, or that his appetite
Is more to bread than stone; hence shall we see,
If power change purpose, what our seemers be.

There is probably more likeness between Othello and Angelo than critics care to find.¹⁹ Doesn't Othello fail in the test too? And there is one other Shakespeare character who suddenly swings from the high pinnacle of an idealism which is not based on reality to a ghastly misanthropy which, also, is not based on reality. Of Timon of Athens, Apemantus says, “The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends” (IV, iii, 300-1). How apt these words are for Othello too! That an outwardly noble character could fall because of an inner flaw, Shakespeare had indicated by means of Proteus even in the early The Two Gentlemen of Verona. And what of the thrice-noble Macbeth?

In short, it seems to me that by means of Iago's soliloquies; by means of character contrast with the brutally clear-eyed Iago, the earthy Emilia, the self-honest Cassio (who, also, be it remembered, openly admits his relationship to Bianca); by means of action contrast in the rejoinders of Roderigo, Cassio, and Emilia to the proposal that Desdemona is unchaste; by means of Othello's own words in the first and second acts; by means of a carefully drawn Othello in the temptation scene who considers himself much stronger than he actually is; by means of sundry touches throughout which show Othello refusing to recognize his own passionate nature; by means of a broken Othello in the last act, who tries to hang on to his nobility by refusing to face the fact of his murder—by means of all this Shakespeare has shown us that his hero is not as strong or as good a man as he thinks he is, that the hero's flaw is his refusal to face the reality of his own nature. This Othello, who (I think) is the Othello Shakespeare intended to convey, is rather different from the modern Othello, who is always thoroughly noble—before, during, and after his downfall. The truly noble aspects of Othello I have not stressed. They are obvious. The blots on the scutcheon I have stressed, for critics have obscured them.

The Othello that Shakespeare presents is nobly tragic in the same sense in which Macbeth and Antony and Coriolanus and Lear are nobly tragic. Shakespeare's tragic protagonist is noble, but he is not altogether noble. He represents Aristotle's dictum:

A man not preeminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice or depravity but by some error of judgment, he being one of those who enjoy great reputation and prosperity. … The change in the hero's fortunes must be … from happiness to misery; and the cause of it must lie not in any depravity, but in some great error on his part; the man himself being either such as we have described, or better, not worse, than that.

(Poetics, Chapter 13)

It is not the hero's nobility in Shakespeare's tragedies but the flaw, the sin or error that all flesh is heir to, that destroys him. It is the close interweaving of great man, mere man, and base man that makes of Othello the peculiarly powerful and mysterious figure he is. In him Shakespeare shows the possible greatness, the possible baseness not only closely allied in what is after all mere man but also so causally connected that one must perforce wonder and weep.²⁰

Notes

1. Shakespeare: A Survey (London, 1935), pp. 219, 225.

2. Shakespeare (Harvard University Press, 1930), p. 35.

3. Art and Artifice in Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 1933), pp. 6-55, 173-4, passim; Shakespeare and Other Masters (Harvard University Press, 1940), pp. 59-84, passim; “Source and Motive in Macbeth and Othello,” RES [Review of English Studies] 19 (1943). 25-32. The opinions of Stoll, Chambers, and Kittredge have been arbitrarily selected. Further examples of the same view can easily be found. For example, Dover Wilson says that “Iago's victim is blameless”; The Essential Shakespeare (New York and Cambridge, 1932), p. 120. For a most interesting consideration of Othello, far different from most, one which takes the Moor as a not totally assimilated black barbarian, see Mark Van Doren's Shakespeare (New York, 1939), pp. 225-37. To Van Doren, Othello “deserves his tragedy.”

4. Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (New York, 1942), p. 124.

5. Op. cit., pp. 45-6.

6. E. M. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London, 1943), pp. 53-4.

7. “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca,” in Selected Essays: 1917-1932 (London, 1932), pp. 130-1. Though this viewpoint can be supported much more than Eliot supports it, as I indicate above, Stoll takes issue with it in Art and Artifice, pp. 173-4. “As I have shown elsewhere this is a self-descriptive method … : if taken as a bit of self-consciousness, it much troubles the noble and heroic impression.” The answer to this is, simply, that apparently Shakespeare did want this impression to be troubled. One cannot possibly take Othello on his own terms. Every single thing that he says about himself in III, iii, 177 ff., “Think'st thou I'ld make a life of jealousy, etc.” is immediately disproved by the way he acts in the lines immediately succeeding.

   Although Stoll constantly rebukes other critics for their “psychology,” in answering Eliot he does not hesitate to invent his own “psychology”: “And even as dramatic psychology—that is, such as does not press and peer behind drama and poetry—the speech is finely appropriate. After such an experience and such depths of despair Othello must, in sheer reaction and relapse, think a little well of himself. It is one of the glories of Shakespeare that … he recognizes the limits of human nature. …”

   Then does Stoll agree with Eliot? The issue seems to be that the former sees the hero as thoroughly noble, the latter as imperfectly noble. However, Eliot also indicates the tension between these two viewpoints going on at one and the same time in the spectator, for Eliot himself is a spectator.

8. The final Othello is not a pretty sight to watch. Consider his whimpering (243-5 and 270-1), his refusal to be by himself (257-8), his uncontrolled screaming (277-82). I cannot see how Schücking can write of Othello that “Shakespeare's intention … was to create a hero who, for all his weakness in the matter of jealousy, never falls so low as to lose his dignity”; “The Baroque Character of the Elizabethan Tragic Hero,” Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy (1938), p. 27. Critics state—but do no more than state—that Othello at the end is a better man than he has been before; see A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London and New York, 1906), p. 198; R. W. Chambers, Man's Unconquerable Mind (London and Toronto, 1939), pp. 261, 303; E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Last Plays (London, 1938), pp. 17, 21. G. Wilson Knight, “The Othello Music,” in The Wheel of Fire (Oxford University Press, 1930), p. 130, does not claim growth but does claim that during the last scene “Othello is a nobly tragic figure.”

9. Othello (University of Minnesota Press, 1915), p. 33; quoted with a few changes in Art and Artifice, p. 16.

10. Art and Artifice in Shakespeare, p. 17.

11. The underlying premise of the present paper is that expressed by W. W. Lawrence, “Artifice must always be sustained by a due proportion of nature, of psychological consistency.” “Hamlet's Sea Voyage,” PMLA 59 (1944). 69.

12. See Maud Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1934), pp. 217-24, 245, 332-4. This is probably the best psychological discussion of Othello to be found. But Miss Bodkin is interested in much broader matters than I am.

13. I quote from the first quarto because folio omits Desdemona's question and the Duke's reply in 279. Modern texts differ, some following Q, some F.

14. Of this speech, Theodore Spencer (op. cit., pp. 127-8) writes: “His love for Desdemona is in keeping with such a character; entirely unlike the love of Troilus for Cressida, it has no sensuality in it. When he asks to be allowed to take Desdemona to Cyprus with him, he explicitly describes—in the terms of Elizabethan psychology—the exalted quality of his devotion: [Spencer quotes the speech.] Like Horatio, Othello appears to all the world as a man who is not passion's slave. His higher faculties, his ‘speculative and offic'd instruments,’ are apparently in complete control.”

    Is Othello, then, displaying sensuality when in Cyprus, in II, iii, 8-10, he says to Desdemona:

                                                                Come, my dear love.
    The purchase made, the fruits are to ensue;
    That profit's yet to come 'tween me and you.

    Is Desdemona displaying “sensuality” when she cries, “Tonight, my lord?” Othello may play the noble stoic concerning marriage in I, iii. But he talks like a normal man concerning marriage in II, iii. And unless Shakespeare was extraordinarily careless, the two speeches were meant to contrast. In the first Othello indicates that he is above men; in the second, that he is a man. He is a good man in the second, an extraordinary man (if honest) in the first. But since the second contradicts the first, Othello is neither extraordinary nor honest. Certainly an audience feels if it does not see something wrong in the first. One function of Iago's filth in I, i, is certainly to indicate to the audience the sexual aspect of marriage.

15. Compare Othello's opinion of himself with Henry the Fifth's (HV, IV, i, 104-12):

    For, though I speak it to you, I think the King is but a man, as I am. The violet smells to him as it does to me; the element shows to him as it doth to me; all his senses have but human conditions. His ceremonies laid by, in his nakedness he appears but a man; and though his affections are higher mounted than ours, yet, when they stoop, they stoop with the like wing.

16. Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns, p. 222.

17. “My life upon her faith” (I, iii, 295). Iago's opinion (II, iii, 348-54), quoted above. “Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul, etc.” (III, iii, 90-2). “If she be false, O, then heaven mocks itself!” (III, iii, 278). “O, now for ever Farewell the tranquil mind! etc.” (III, iii, 347-57). The most notable expression of the total dependence of Othello on his image of Desdemona is in IV, ii, 47-64, “Had it pleas'd heaven, etc.” But these are explicit statements. His whole bearing toward Desdemona, especially in II, i, the arrival in Cyprus scene, implies this view of her.

18. Objective analysis of this relationship is supplied by Friar Laurence in II, iii, 64-82.

19. With Othello's denial and Iago's admission of human frailty cited above, cf. Isabella to Angelo (II, ii, 136-41):

                                                                                                                            Go to your bosom;
    Knock there, and ask you heart what it doth know
    That's like my brother's fault. If it confess
    A natural guiltiness such as is his,
    Let it not sound a thought upon your tongue
    Against my brother's life.

20. Since writing the above, I have read an important little book, Allardyce Nicoll's Studies in Shakespeare (Hogarth Lectures No. 3, London, 1931). Since students of Shakespeare tend to distrust—and rightly—any character interpretation that differs sharply from the traditional view, I am happy to record that Professor Nicoll (though he uses a different approach, less inductive and comparative than impressionistic) has come to the same conclusion as this paper presents—that Othello is a self-deceiving romantic idealist. Though he merely outlines rather than fills in in detail (as this paper attempts), yet our interpretations even to the use sometimes of the same passages coincide remarkably. But I do not think that Professor Nicoll sees Othello as in tension between conflicting inward forces: he tends to strip him bluntly of all nobility. I suppose I should say that when it comes to Desdemona and Iago, I accept the traditional interpretations rather than Nicoll's.