[In the following essay, McNeely analyzes Othello as Shakespeare's allegory on the power of rhetoric to deceive. McNeely observes that just as Iago dupes Othello, Shakespeare dupes his audiences and critics, persuading us to believe in the plausibility of the story, rather than its essential absurdity.]

Criticism has been aware for almost three centuries, since Rymer first raised the question in 1693, of a striking contradiction in Othello and in the character of its hero. E.É. Stoll, writing in 1915, sketched something of the critical history of this contradiction, noting that while the contradiction has sometimes been acknowledged by the critics, it has invariably been ignored in interpretations of the play. The contradiction has to do, of course, primarily with the incredible facility of Othello's fall at Iago's hands, leading directly and precipitately to the murder of his wife. Whether in terms of time, of method, of motivation, or of character, the whole process of Othello's conversion is manifestly incredible and absurd, it is suggested. Many approaches to the problem are possible, but, most succinctly, I can perhaps demonstrate the supposed absurdity of this transformation in terms of a fundamental character trait in Othello that his fall necessarily predicates. The particular trait has various labels, whether considered a commendable or a censurable trait, but its essence is trust—a trusting or credulous nature is, one way or another, Othello's downfall, we are told. To Coleridge it is "unsuspiciousness";¹ to Bradley "his trust, where he trusts, is absolute",² to Wilson Knight Othello is "a symbol of faith in human values of love, of war, of romance".³

Now it is readily apparent in the case of all three of these descriptive expressions that something is wrong,—-wrong, that is, on the plain evidence of the play itself, in the murder of Desdemona. For each description involves the critic in what amounts (or at least very nearly) to a contradiction. Coleridge's unsuspiciousness can apply thus only in the case of Othello's relations with Iago—quite clearly its opposite obtains in his relations with Desdemona, of whom he is wildly, irrationally suspicious to the point of utter absurdity. And similarly with Bradley's criticism, if Othello's trust (of Iago) is "absolute", then plainly his lack of trust of Desdemona is equally absolute. Bradley further calls Othello Shakespeare's "greatest poet", a "character . . . so noble", whose "sufferings are so heart-rending, that he stirs . . . in most readers a. . . . mingled love and pity which they feel for no other hero in Shakespeare".⁴ Considering again the obvious contradictions in Othello's behaviour, such criticism cannot be better tagged than Shakespeare himself tags it in some lines taken from the very play in which this paragon appears:

It is a judgement maim'd and most imperfect
That will confess perfection so could err

Against all rules of nature, and must be driven
To find out practices of cunning hell
Why this should be.

(I, iii, 99-103)⁵

As these lines, I believe, deliberately hint, there is more to the conception of Othello than Bradley's criticism (or any other criticism that passes over the contradictions in the play) sees. Even in Stoll, who discusses at length both the contradictions themselves and criticism's failure to resolve them, no real attempt is made to deal with the problems they raise. Thus Stoll cites only the "ancient convention" of the "calumniator credited", as he calls it, as explanation, listing analogues in Shakespeare and other play-wrights of the fall of a "blameless hero", and concluding that "proof or probability is not required".⁶ I do not believe that this is a sufficient answer to the problem, and suggest that the evidence is overwhelming both that Shakespeare was fully conscious and fully in control of his pen in Othello—in other words, that he knew the contradictions were there and put them there for a purpose—and that whatever else Othello may be, it is primarily an implicit allegorical commentary on the functions and powers of rhetoric.

To enter Othello's rhetorical world, let me direct the reader first to an episode in the first scene of the play. Iago, unseen, is informing Brabantio, at the top of his voice and in coarse, blunt terms, of his daughter's elopement with the Moor, and in the course of his tirade he throws out a particularly vivid and characteristically "Iagesque" image for their liaison—the famous image of "the beast with two backs" (I, i, 119). The image is from Rabelais originally,⁷ and means of course fornication, but as well as its obvious meaning in Othello, it is an organic and carefully contrived poetic motive that has echoes throughout the play: indeed it might stand as an archetype of the really extraordinary linguistic care that Shakespeare has lavished on this play from beginning to end. Illustration: for a pattern of deliberately contrived imagery that this single motive evokes, consider first the name of the inn at which Desdemona and Othello lodge: the Sagittary—as it happens a literal "beast with two backs" in the figure of the centaur from classical mythology. The image of the centaur in turn then calls up further associations, of the mating of men with animals, for example—Iago's "you'll have your daughter cover'd with a Barbary horse", or his offer to "change [his] humanity with a baboon". And the "Barbary horse" image, finally, ties in directly with the "Barbary" name in Desdemona's willow song of Act IV. Patterns of imagery like this are only discovered by careful and repeated readings of Shakespeare in the study; they are never observed in performance, but their existence illustrates both the degree of control over his material Shakespeare clearly has, and also that a play like Othello was obviously composed in the study with great care, and not in haste prior to a performance. Such patterns of imagery are particularly significant in this, however, that they illustrate strikingly the fact that Othello in the study and Othello on the stage are really quite different animals—that the play is a "beast with two backs", in this respect as well, in yet another application of this profoundly suggestive motive which may well have occurred to Shakespeare.

The most outstanding image pattern in Othello is the pervasive black/white or light/dark opposition, to which the "beast with two backs" motive also relates. This image pattern in Othello is probably the most prominent such pattern in all of Shakespeare; and it is a pattern not only of images, but of character, plot, theme, and even of staging, that touches every facet of the play. As the world of the play divides both literally and metaphorically into elements of light and dark—of "good" and "evil", if one wishes—the "beast with two backs" becomes a subtly generalized device to suggest this opposition. Thus, if the "beast with two backs" means (among other things) the act of love, then in the coming together of Othello and Desdemona we have precisely such a union of black and white; but the emotion and the act of love itself divides further in Othello into "black" and "white" components: on the one side love is mere animal coupling, with lust and brutality the keynotes—this is Iago's version to Roderigo (I, iii, 329-31), and the source and motive of most of the animal imagery in the play; and on the other side love is antithetical to this—an idealizing sacrifice, angelic in its purity, of all that one has and is for another, the archetype of which sacrifice is made by Desdemona in her willing submission to and forgiveness of Othello, even to the point of condoning her own murder. There is almost no end of further ways in which the opposition of white and black can be seen as developed in the play. Othello's "occupation" (see III, iii, 361) as a soldier has a white/black connotation: as in war the "cause" (V, ii, 1) is always white and black—enemies and friends are clearly distinguishable—so in peace the clarity of this white/black opposition is obscured, and one cannot tell a "false, disloyal knave" indeed from one's own lieutenant without, as the joke has it, a program.

The primary black/white opposition in the play, however, from the point of view of this paper, (and I believe from Shakespeare's viewpoint as well), is in the writing. It is in rhetorical terms that the enigma of Othello is unlocked and the contradictions resolved, for Othello is before anything else a play about words—about rhetoric and poetry—about what they are and what they do. Essentially, the appearance of plausibility in the plot and the action of the play is sustained by the extraordinary richness, care and skill in the web of language ("There's magic in the web", remember) Shakespeare weaves; while behind this appearance, and perfectly well known to Shakespeare at the same time, lies the reality of an absurd and incredible imposture. Both "backs" of the beast, as it were, are in equal balance, which is to say that the "real" imposture is no more the final answer to Othello than the "apparent" plausibility; and this in turn also means, surprisingly but unquestionably, that all interpretations of Othello, no matter how extreme, are theoretically correct—whether Rymer's, who called it "a bloody farce", and said that "it had need be a supersubtle Venetian that this Plot will pass upon"; or Macaulay's, who said that Othello is "perhaps, the greatest work in the world".⁸

There are two levels on which rhetoric in Othello can be analyzed, and two basic avenues by which the play can be approached as a rhetorical allegory. Taking rhetoric in its classical definition as speech art used for purposes of persuasion,⁹ the two "levels" referred to are, first, rhetoric within the play—speech art used by the characters with the aim of persuading (in fact, duping) others; second, rhetoric used outside the play—speech art used by Shakespeare with the identical aim of duping his audience. The two avenues of approach, for convenience sake I will call at this time the linguistic and the structural. In "first-level" rhetorical terms, then, the key at every point to the plot of the play is found in rhetoric or speech art. For the character of Iago, first, enough has been said in past criticism of his acting and rhetorical skill, verging on the supernatural, to require no further embellishment here. One particular descriptive term is perhaps used more often than any other to describe his machinations—the word (and its cognates) "art". Johnson used the word, Coleridge and Swinburne as well, and Granville-Barker expanded the concept fully.¹⁰ It is a word that indeed says all as far as Iago's character is concerned: he is exactly the first-level counterpart of what Shakespeare knows himself to be in his own second-level rhetoric—the artist par excellence, putting across with compelling rhetorical force and invincible conviction that "transparent and unplausible imposture", to quote E.E. Stoll once again, that is Othello's downfall.

There have been fewer commentators who have seen the rhetorician in the character of Othello comparable to Iago, but this is a critical viewpoint that has some important adherents in recent years as well, notably T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis.¹¹ Iago's developing plot apart, it seems to me that the climactic moment of the first stage of the tragedy is in the confrontation of Othello with the Venetian council in I, iii, defending his marriage, and defending especially the manner of his courtship. It is his great opportunity to show his character as a man as well as to shine as an orator; and he triumphs on both counts, winning the hearts of his audience both on and off stage. His defence and his responses are shaped in such a manner, moreover, that the dramatic or oratorical basis of his character is unmistakable—indeed it is in the forefront of the audience's consciousness. There are two principal ways by which this emphasis is brought about. First, Brabantio's strident accusations of witchcraft against Othello, assumed by Brabantio as conclusive, and repeated several times early in the play, raise intriguing questions in the hearer's mind about the nature of this match, and prepare him to listen with special interest to whatever account of his actions Othello might give. The contrast, then, between Brabantio's near hysteria and Othello's masterful calm and self-control, exemplified in the unhurried eloquence and spontaneous grace of his every spoken word, is winning to Othello's cause and persuasive to the auditor in the highest degree. And the climax of the interlude is in Othello's recounting of the actual courtship itself, in which we learn that, quite frankly and unblushingly, he won Desdemona's heart by oratory. The last lines of the statement in particular epitomize the oratorical basis of his courtship, and set forth as well the strange conception of love as essentially nothing more than a romantic poem that Othello seems to hold:

My story being done,
She gave me for my pains a world of sighs;

She swore, in faith, 'twas strange, 'twas passing strange;
'Twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful.
She wish'd she had not heard it; yet she wish'd
That heaven had made her such a man. She thank'd me
And bade me, if I had a friend that lov'd her,
I should but teach him how to tell my story,
And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake;
She lov'd me for the dangers I had pass'd;
And I lov'd her that she did pity them.
This only is the witchcraft I have us'd.

(I, iii, 158-69)

There are several significant inferences that can be taken from these lines. First we may note that it was his story (at least in Othello's view) that won Desdemona's heart, and not the person of Othello himself, since "a friend", apparently, who could tell such a story could have won her too—Desdemona, or indeed, in the Duke's awe-struck and admiring words (1. 171), any other girl: as he says, "I think this tale would win my daughter too". Second, and perhaps more significant in the light of later events, it appears almost to have been the same "story" again, that won Othello's heart to Desdemona, rather than the girl herself being his object. Loving Othello "for the dangers [he] had pass'd", Desdemona is loved in turn because of this, that "she did pity them". His love of Desdemona is thus really a love not of her, but of the romance of his own life seen reflected in her eyes. The third and most significant inference in the speech, however, has to do with Brabantio's witchcraft motif again. Oratory, as Othello says, is the "only" witchcraft he has used, but to say this is very pointedly not to deny that oratory is a form of witchcraft—a witchcraft that can turn "a thing" like Othello—a middle-aged Ethiopian mercenary and outsider—into a desirable mate for a Desdemona, and that can turn disaster, flood, slaughter, cannibalism, appalling freaks of nature, and other "bragging and fantastical lies", into romance. It is crucially important also to note that Iago alone among the characters sees through the rhetorician to the hollow man that Othello really is. That Othello is a liar indeed we ourselves know, or we should, for we heard him not five minutes before this very passage say, "Rude am I in my speech";¹² and likewise only in a poem, as we also know if we reflect, is slavery or the "occupation" of war ever the glorious adventure that Othello pictures it as being. And it is finally particularly interesting that in spite of Iago's straightforward and wholly accurate estimate of Othello, not to mention the plain evidence of the character and the speeches of the man himself, criticism until recently has not seen his hollow side, being taken in by the same mesmerizing spell of magnificent poetry that took in Desdemona and the Duke, and missing Shakespeare's message—the message that to fall under the spell of rhetoric is to lay oneself open to the most flagrant and absurd abuses of reason; a message that is brought home with the ultimate of compelling force in the preposterous and impossible plot that snares Othello—that becomes, indeed, "the net / That shall enmesh them all" (II, iii, 350-51).

These are some of the first-level rhetorical implications in the character of Othello, but there are additional second-level, Shakespeare-to-the audience implications that further support the picture of Othello as a poseur and of his play as a farce on the theme of rhetoric. I have suggested that the "linguistic approach" to the question of allegory and the problem of meaning in Shakespeare is a fruitful one. By this term I mean the critical study of words, their contexts and special meanings in individual plays, as indices to possible deeper revelations of Shakespeare's thought in those plays. Such analyses are matter exclusively for the study, of course; and their primary and indispensable tool accordingly is the pedant's delight, the Concordance.¹³ The reservation is always there, moreover in advancing conclusions from linguistics, that these can never be more than merely suggestions, "ocular proof in such matters being in the nature of things impossible. Linguistic hints and leads can be fascinating for their own sake notwithstanding, however, and at times they can be highly suggestive and strongly inferential.

There are, then, for example, several generically rhetorical words that have either their most frequent or very nearly their most frequent use in Othello of all the plays, a fact which suggests a special and conscious rhetorical purpose in this play. The word speech, for instance, has more uses in Othello than in any other play except Hamlet; and similarly with the words speak, say, and act.¹⁴ Frequency of use of such words, of course, while perhaps suggestive, is not conclusive in itself without support from a special manner in their use as well, such that deliberate hints of double (first and second level) meanings may be conveyed. With eye and ear cocked for nuances, however, we can indeed spot such hints in various of these words as they are used in the play, and especially as they are associated with other words of similar theatrical and rhetorical purport. A classic instance of precisely this kind of doubleness occurs early in the play in one of Othello's speeches. This particular line, as it happens, does not use any of the words listed above, but as a response to an accusation of being "a practiser / Of arts inhibited and out of warrant", it has a closely associated meaning: "Were it my cue to fight", says Othello, "I should have known it / Without a prompter" (I, ii, 83-84). Such an allusion passes unnoticed in performance, but it has the effect of subtly putting Othello's whole performance into the context purely of theatre, which is exactly what it is intended to do. This is, incidentally, one of only two uses of the word prompter in the whole Shakespeare canon. Similar implications are with equal subtlety insinuated into the other words as well, as they are frequently used in Othello (italics mine on key words):

Bra. Fathers, from hence trust not your daughters' minds
By what you see them act.

(I, i, 171-72)

Duke. [To Othello]
What, in your own part, can you say to this?

(I, iii, 74)

Cass Drunk! And speak parrot! And squabble, swagger, swear! And discourse fustian with one's own shadow!

(II, iii, 270-71)

Iago You shall observe him;
And his own courses will denote him so
That I may save my speech.

(IV, i, 275-77)

Des Upon my knees, what doth your speech import?

(IV, ii, 31)

Oth I know this act shows horrible and grim.

(V, ii , 206)

The final example of rhetorical doubleness in a speech in this play that I will draw the reader's attention to, is to Othello's garbled speech just before his collapse in IV, i. It has been noted that this speech is a "travesty", probably an intentional parody, of the elevated language and "rounded harmonies"¹⁵ of the earlier Othello style, symbolizing his reversion at this point to total bestiality, from the lofty pinnacle of civilized humanitarianism that was his distinction and his greatness when we met him first. The speech is also often called "incoherent", and is usually passed over without comment—an easy enough omission, given the more facile and intense images and actions that surround it in the rest of the scene, and indeed what Shakespeare (in performance again, of course) would have us do, it seems clear. To take the easy way out with this speech, however, is to fall into the old Shakespearean trap of inobservancy that is set for us on every page of this play. Though logically disconnected, the speech is not incoherent; quite the reverse in fact, it is an intelligible and extraordinarily carefully constructed recapitulation of Iago's whole plot against Othello. This becomes a rather involved question of interpretation almost immediately when we get into it, but concentrating for the moment just on the speech itself, we note very clearly first that its primary subject is words and their ambiguities. It is worth quoting the last couple of lines that lead up to the speech as well:

Oth. What hath he said?

Iago. Faith, that he did—I know not what he did.

Oth. What? What?

Iago. Lie—

Oth. With her?

Iago. With her, on her; what you will.

Oth. Lie with her—lie on her? We say lie on her when they belie her. Lie with her. Zounds, that's fulsome. Handkerchief—confessions—handkerchief! To confess, and be hang'd for his labour—first, to be hang'd and then to confess. I tremble at it. Nature would not invest herself with such shadowing passion without some instruction. It is not words that shakes me thus—pish!—noses, ears, and lips. It's possible? Confess! Handkerchief! O devil!

(IV, i,31-44)

There is considerably more, then, of penetrating meaning in this statement than at first glance appears. Considering that up to this point in the play Iago's plot is constructed wholly of words—in actual fact, of course, it never does have much more than words for backing, but up to IV, i not even the scintilla of ocular proof that the handkerchief constitutes has yet been produced: there is simply nothing—it is perhaps surprising that Othello is obsessed, here, with precisely the question of the ambiguities and the imaginative effects of words, the very means by which he is being duped! Shakespeare, I suggest, is daring us to see what is going on. Can Othello, we must ask, come this close to his answer and still not see what is being done to him? The falsity, thus, the tissue of words, that is Iago's whole plot is explicitly laid out in the speech; it is clear, it is exposed, and it is Othello its victim who speaks it. He uses the word lie not once in this exchange but five times, noting its ambiguities: "We say lie on her when they belie her"—this statement asking, in effect, is someone belying her?—and this in turn raising the natural next question, who could such a someone be? One can really do little more with such absurd incongruities as these are seen on reflection to be than to throw back at them Desdemona's rhetorical question to the Clown in III, iv: "Can anything be made of this?" It is no accident either, I submit, that the subject of that earlier conversation as well happens to be the question of the ambiguous meanings of the word lie. And as if to bolster and confirm even further our awareness of his game, Shakespeare does not let the "words" question go at this point, but returns to and expands it in 11. 39-41: "Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion without some instruction. It is not words that shakes me thus". These lines too are far from nonsense when carefully considered; though somewhat obscurely worded, their meaning is crystal clear, to wit: that Nature does not put on a passionate act like this without cause; there must be more to this than words! There is not, of course—not to Iago's plot (first-level rhetoric), and not to the play as a whole (second-level rhetoric); and at this point we can finally see Shakespeare's game, I believe, without illusions. The implications of this conclusion are complex, and I must back off the question briefly and approach it again in a somewhat more roundabout manner to present them fully. "'Tis here", as Iago says, "but yet confus'd".

I will start by observing that the tragedy of Othello, as any reader of even average alertness must note, hinges to an extraordinary extent on coincidence. Apart from considerations of character and psychology, whereby Othello is interpreted (and quite legitimately) as prone to this type of delusion and manipulation, the simple fact remains that if one small question had been asked by anyone, indeed if a single word were out of place from the beginning of III, iii to the death of Desdemona, Iago's spell would be broken and his plot come to ground. The necessary question is never asked, of course, and the tragedy proceeds as inexorably as fate to its predestined end; and it is convincing and moving in the highest degree in accomplishing that end. It is only when one steps back a pace from the spell of the play's music and its passions, however, that these coincidences begin to be seen. And "stepping back", one quickly discovers, is itself a matter of degree: for the further one steps back—the more rationally and critically one looks at the play—the more incredible, absurd, and contradictory it becomes. Viewed rationally, in fact, these contradictions and absurdities cannot be accidental. The speech of Othello before his collapse is a classic case in point. Realistically considered it is impossibly contradictory: on the one hand Othello "knows" (because he says it) that words are ambiguous, that "lie on" can mean "belie", and that it could be "words" that "shake" him; on the other hand he not only fails to act on that knowledge, he fails seemingly even to grasp it. One could say of this contradiction, of course, that it is just another example of Shakespeare's preternatural tragic sense—to bring his Othello thus within the veriest whisker of the truth, to tantalize him to the ultimate degree, and yet to deny him. One could say this and in fact be right, in a dramatic sense again, but one cannot say it and be logical. That is to say, no real Othello could be so blind; a play Othello on the other hand, whose very being is poetry, can be anything his creator wants him to be; and this is exactly Shakespeare's point. The play, as I have said, is a beast with two backs—in rhetorical or poetic terms a tragedy, in rational terms a farce. As soon as rational criteria are applied to the play it falls apart; but the magic of the play and the witchcraft of its words are such that rational criteria are not applied without the greatest difficulty. In performance they are being impossible to apply, and even in the study the illusion of logic and sense is so strong that only a conscious and continuing effort on the part of the reader to stay alert can withstand it. Without the effort, however—and this is virtually the history of Othello criticism for over two hundred years—reason is led literally "tenderly by the nose as asses are", and we ourselves are the victims and the dupes of Shakespeare's rhetoric, in exact parallel to Othello being the dupe of Iago's rhetoric.

We have looked at a few of the ways in which his language betrays Shakespeare's allegorical purpose in Othello, but as I indicated earlier the structure of the play betrays it too, and perhaps even more blatantly. I will consider this structural problem first briefly in the context of time in the play. This is an area of difficulty that has been noticed frequently by critics in the last century. Essentially the problem that has been pointed out is that the action of the play is so constructed that there is literally no time when the supposed adultery between Cassio and Desdemona could have taken place.¹⁶ This fact, of course, is probably the fundamental absurdity of the whole play, sufficient in itself, without qualification or comment, to elevate Othello and his whole crew to the realm of farce. To counter this possibility, however, and to salvage the tragic reading of Othello, there is the additional device of "long" time in the play, whereby numerous references are made in the later scenes to longer periods of time than the 36 hours that the actual clock on Cyprus records. The discrepancies between the two "times" are not noticed in performance, all the critics concur in this; and they almost all concur likewise in the necessity for the two times. Kenneth Muir's explanation is typical:

From Iago's point of view, every hour increases the danger of his exposure. Shakespeare was faced with an acute problem. The action has to be exceedingly swift or it becomes incredible; and yet considerable time has to elapse or the action becomes incredible in another way.¹⁷

I reiterate that these words present, in a very succinct form, the traditional justification for the double time in Othello: they are identical in principle to what Furness, Granville-Barker or Ridley say at greater length about it. My emphasis on this point has a purpose; because the statement, when read carefully, contains a logical absurdity. Put into approximate syllogistic form, it says in effect that the action of the play is incredible if it does not move swiftly, and on the other hand that the action is incredible if it does move swiftly. The conclusion is that the action is incredible. This straightfaced affirmation of absurdity by Muir is a perfect illustration of the "nameless, mysterious power" (to quote Furness) in Othello to warp the mind, such that even as one states clearly the logical absurdity of the play, like Othello in his speech before his collapse one does not see what one has stated. Furness, paraphrasing Prof. Wilson, suggests that even the "'Artificer of Fraud'" was not totally conscious of his trickery in Othello,¹⁸ but to imagine such a thing is simply to fall victim again to Shakespeare's rhetorical wiles.

Shakespeare's indubitable exact knowledge of Othello's necessary absurdity, in terms of time, can be demonstrated in both simple and complex ways. Logically, of course, disregarding the issue of credibility, it scarcely needs pointing out that the play can function on only one time scheme. It can be either "short" or "long" time but not both. If the two time schemes could in some supernatural manner be kept separate in the play, then possibly it could work, but, as Iago says, "thou know'st we work by wit, and not by witchcraft"; the only witchcraft¹⁹ Shakespeare has is in his words. It does not require much perception, then, to note that in terms of "short" time logic Iago's "I lay with Cassio lately . . . ", (III, iii, 418-36—going on with the recitation of Cassio's "dream") contains a calculated absurdity that we are taunted by Shakespeare to catch: "lay with Cassio?" logic answers, "Impossible! you only arrived on Cyprus yesterday, and you were up all night with that brawl! And you couldn't have slept with Cassio on shipboard because you came on different ships!" The point of such tauntings, in both first and second-level rhetorical terms, is to demonstrate that, however logically untenable a claim may be, under the spell of a powerful rhetoric it can be made to seem plausible. This particular example is perhaps absurd in its obviousness, but there are many other instances in the play where the deliberate sleight-of-hand maneuverings with time are paradoxically so simultaneously blatant and deft that one can only shake one's head in wonder at their wizardry, when awareness finally dawns. "Do but encave yourself, urges Iago, telling Othello to mark Cassio's gesture as he tells "the tale anew" of

Where, how, how oft, how long ago, and when,
He hath, and is again to cope your wife.

(IV, i, 85-86. My italics)

Or equally absurd the confrontation of Desdemona and Othello in the boudoir (IV, ii), as she replies, with irrefutable "short" time logic, to his accusation of her being "false": "To whom, my Lord? With whom? How am I false?" (IV, ii, 41)—which is reinforced later by Emilia's "who keeps her company? / What place, what time, what form, what likelihood?" (1. 138-39).

And these are far from the most complex levels on which Shakespeare's manipulations of time are operating in Othello. "Double" time should not be the designation for his trickery, but rather triple time. It has been noticed before of Shakespeare that there is considerable foreshortening or telescoping of time in many of the plays. By this term is meant the phenomenon of accelerating time during the course of a single scene so that much more "time" elapses dramatically than the auditor's watch has recorded. In a recent essay on the subject, Irwin Smith²⁰ points out that it is common in Shakespeare to accelerate time as much as forty times and more over the actual—that is, where in terms of lines spoken (calculating an average of twenty lines to the minute) ten minutes can consume up to six "hours" and more of dramatic time. In Othello Smith instances only the accelerations of II, i, where in the space of 180 lines (nine minutes) three ships appear on the horizon, dock, and discharge their passengers, all of this taking place during a raging storm. This particular instance is one of the easiest seen of Othello's telescopings of time; in fact one has almost the impression in this scene, with its repetition of the sightings and dockings, that one is being invited to actually observe and be aware of the manipulations that are taking place. There are numerous other scenes in the play, however, where more outrageous yet harder to detect accelerations are worked in, which, if seen, are absurd, but unseen are quite unexceptionable. Such is II, iii, the scene which begins at "not yet ten a clock" and ends 375 lines later (approximately 19 minutes playing time) with "By the mass, 'tis morning"; and includes the cashiering of Cassio as well as the supposed consummation of the marriage of Othello and Desdemona. I say "supposed" by design in this case, because with the accelerated consumption of time in the scene there is every possibility that the consummation does not take place because there was no time for it! We have a reminder of this at 1. 171:

Friends all but now, even now,
In quarter, and in terms, like bride and groom
Divesting them for bed; and then, but now,
As if some planet had outwitted men,
Swords out, and tilting one at other's breast.

(II, iii, 171-75. My italics)

—a reminder that in the approximately nine minutes since Othello and Desdemona left the stage they can hardly more than have "divested them" for bed, let alone have had a moment for "love's quick pants" before the brawl disturbs them. The special emphasis on the word now in this speech, moreover, is a clear reminder that Shakespeare's stealing of time in this scene is a hoax, for plainly now cannot refer to any time except "real" time—that is, the audience's—since it was "but now" in real terms that the brawl in fact took place. It was Othello's last opportunity for sleep this night, as well, it seems, since he concludes his disciplinary measures with an offer to be Montano's "surgeon" himself for the binding of his wounds.²¹ It is speculation, of course, but it is my opinion that Shakespeare has deliberately arranged this scene as an oblique tip-off to the alert reader that no consummation of the wedding could have taken place; and therefore when Othello strangles Desdemona the following night—on her bed with its wedding sheets still in place, it is (irony of ironies) with her virginity still untried. This possibility is at least consistent with the mad logic that leads to her murder, since even Othello could hardly have forgotten in the space of 18 hours or so the "lust stained" (?) bed of his wedding night, if indeed it had "with lust's blood [been] spotted".

Perhaps the most glaring incongruity, and for this reason the most controversial instance of time acceleration in the play, is the great scene of the temptation and fall of Othello in III, iii; considered in the context especially of the famous last utterance of Othello that he is one "not easily jealous". Act III scene iii is 483 lines in length, and in the course of its approximately 24 minutes playing time Othello is transformed from a doting newly-wed husband to a raving maniac whose one aim and obsession is the immediate murder of his wife. Speaking of a later scene in the play F.R. Leavis used the expression "superb coup de théâtre" to describe Shakespeare's handling of it. It is a phrase that must be applied to this scene as well, for there is nothing comparable in Shakespeare or any other dramatist to the concentration of rhetorical persuasiveness that is achieved in this scene. Every word is in place, everything is plausible, indeed overwhelmingly so, and yet by every rational canon or consideration the absurdity of the whole transaction is "gross in sense" to the highest possible degree. And notwithstanding the fact that as late as line 186 we have Othello confidently asserting that he will never become jealous over "exsufflicate and blown surmises", and that Iago as late as line 436 admits that "yet we see nothing done", the inevitability of Othello's fall is never once doubted. Perhaps most significant, and I suggest by deliberate design on Shakespeare's part, there are no direct chronological references to suggest telescoping of time, so there is no way of assuming that more than the approximately half an hour's stage time is elapsed. The one "timing" event that the scene contains is Desdemona's reference to "your dinner, and the generous islanders / By you invited" (1. 284-85), which locates the scene in the course of the day but gives no certainty as to duration.

The "handkerchief trick" in Othello, as the key by which "probation . . . without hinge nor loop / To hang a doubt on" is achieved, is as flagrant a bit of sleight of hand as the annals of literature afford. As the vaunted "ocular proo f of infidelity the sighting of the handkerchief is the culminating event in a series of "vision" references in the play that form as prominent a pattern as the "time" references.²² From Iago's "I, of whom his eyes had seen the proo f in scene i; through the Duke's "I did not see you" (1. 50) and Brabantio's "look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see" (1. 292) of scene iii; and ending with "the object poisons sight" (1. 367) of V, ii, the "vision" motif is present everywhere in the play; and its clear implication is that vision is never absolute—what you think you see, whether you are Othello or Othello's audience, and what is actually before your eyes may be two different things. The handkerchief trick is the quintessential visual manipulation in the play. The first appearance of the handkerchief on stage is in Desdemona's hand in III, iii, when she uses it to bind Othello's aching forehead, placing it directly in front of his eyes (see 1. 288-91) to do so, of course. It is but a few moments from this (1. 437) that Iago drives Othello to the final degree of murderous rage ("Now do I see 'tis true") in his story about having seen the handkerchief in Cassio's hand, introducing the story (absurdity to end absurdities) with the words "Have you not sometimes seen a handkerchief / Spotted with strawberries in your wife's hand?" This handkerchief—the last legacy of his dying mother and Othello's first gift to his adored wife, unseen in her hand though placed in front of his eyes, constitutes then, ocular proof of her infidelity when seen at a distance in another's hand but minutes (?) later, in the next scene. That such a preposterous display is not laughed off the stage at every performance is a permanent tribute to the spellbinding, almost supernatural power, that this tour de force of poetical persuasion puts forth.

There is much more indirect evidence than this of Shakespeare's allegorical intentions in Othello. In second-level rhetorical terms, the theme of the power of rhetoric and its potential for deception is returned to over and over. Especially in the early scenes of the play, as it were in anticipation of the great catastrophe to come, do these implications receive emphasis. Brabantio, for example, whom Iago characterizes with uncanny (yet obviously conscious on Shakespeare's part) allegorical appropriateness as having "in his effect a voice potential / As double as the Duke's" (I, ii, 13-14), pays unconscious tribute to Othello's rhetorical skill in his words

For nature so preposterously to err,
Being not deficient, blind, or lame of sense,
Sans witchcraft could not.

(I, iii, 62-64)

And as well as reflecting on Othello's winning of Desdemona by words, these lines also reflect both Iago's and Shakespeare's greater skill at taking in their respective dupes in an even more preposterous way. The Duke's reply to Brabantio's accusations of witchcraft constitutes another instance of the same—saying in Othello's hearing, words which are directly prophetic of his own fall and the absurd folly of Iago's "proof of infidelity:

To vouch this is no proof—
Without more wider and more overt test
That these thin habits and poor likelihoods
Of modern seeming do prefer against him.

(I, iii, 106-109)

Perhaps the most glaring "double-voiced" reference of the whole play is the Duke's earlier

This cannot be,
By no assay of reason. 'Tis a pageant
To keep us in false gaze.

(I, iii, 17-19)

Spoken of the Turkish ruse against Rhodes, the words reflect with stark allegorical clarity on the "pageant" that is Othello. They significance similar and comparable to that of the final allegorical motif in Othello that I will give example of in this paper—the phrase "Is't possible?", which is repeated five times in the play,²³ with gathering emphasis, and crying out more loudly with every repetition for the answer No!

It is perhaps fitting that the last words here should be from Shakespeare, rather than from me, but I leave them with the reader that he may decide for himself the extent to which they may or may not apply to the thesis (and the author) of this paper.

I conjure thee, as thou believ'st
There is another comfort than this world,
That thou neglect me not with that opinion
That I am touch'd with madness. Make not impossible
That which but seems unlike

(Measure for Measure, V, i, 48-52)

Notes

¹ T. Ashe, ed., Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare and Other English Poets, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, London, 1908, p. 394. In the original note the word unsuspiciousness is, strictly speaking, applied only to Desdemona, but the implication is that it applies to Othello as well. In the report on lecture IV, at Bristol (1813), the word is applied to Othello. See Ibid., p. 477.

² A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, London, 1949, p. 191.

³ G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire, London, 1964, p. 107.

⁴ Bradley, op. cit., p. 188, 191.

⁵The Tudor Edition of William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. by Peter Alexander, Collins, 1951. All quotations from Shakespeare, unless otherwise specified, will be from this edition.

⁶ E.E. Stoll, Othello: An Historical and Comparative Study, repr. New York, 1964, pp. 6 and 7.

⁷ See Bk. I, Chap. iii.

⁸ Macauley in his "Essay on Dante", Knight's Quarterly Magazine, Jan. 1824. Quoted here from Horace Howard Furness, A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: Othello, Eleventh Edition, Philadelphia, 1886, p. 412.

⁹ Cf. Aristotle, Rhetoric, I, 1354^a par. 2: "The modes of persuasion . . . are the only true constituents of the art [of rhetoric]: everything else is merely accessory" (The Works of Aristotle. Translated into English under the Editorship of W.D. Ross, Vol. XI, "Rhetorica", Oxford, 1959).

¹⁰ See Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, vol. II, Princeton, 1947, pp. 104-112.

¹¹ See e.g. Eliot's famous remarks on Othello in his "Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca" (1927); and see F.R. Leavis, "Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero", in The Common Pursuit, London, 1958, pp. 136-159. A recent essay, Stephen Rogers' "Othello: Comedy in Reverse" (Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. XXIV, 2, Spring, 1973, 210-20), takes a stronger line yet on Othello's duplicity, e.g., "The false music of his supposed eloquence is nothing but empty rhetoric, and takes us all in" (211).

¹² An example of meiosis, "the Disabler or figure of Extenuation", as Puttenham calls it (Puttenham, The Art of English Poesie, ed. by G.D. Willcock and A. Walker, Cambridge, 1970 [1589], p. 219), a favoured rhetorical device with Shakespeare, in which the speaker deliberately deprecates himself, affecting modesty or lack of ability, for purposes of gaining credibility for the cause he advocates. Meiosis may well be the most devious of all rhetorical tricks, having the effect simultaneously of disarming the hearer and of subtly flattering the speaker; and as Shakespeare uses it particularly, here and elsewhere, it has an effect of special challenge and uniqueness, for his favourite ploy is to have the character affect modesty in verbal skill itself—an affectation which is of course blatantly contradicted by the words and the skills the speaker displays in its very utterance!

¹³ And the only Concordance for really careful linguis-tic studies today is Marvin Spevak's computer-generated A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare, Hildesheim, 1968-1970, in six volumes.

¹⁴Speech: in Hamlet 16 uses, in Othello 12, in Lear 9; speak: in Hamlet 63, in Coriolanus 54, in Othello 51, in Lear 49; say: in The Winter's Tale 73, in Coriolanus 72, in Othello 67, in Shrew 63; act: in Hamlet 14, in Othello 11, in King John 8.

¹⁵ See M.M. Mahood, Shakespeare's Wordplay, Lon-don, 1957, p. 48.

¹⁶ Not to crowd the text with a long explanation of what is essentially a technical matter, I would direct the reader to Furness (op. cit. pp. 358-72) for background to this question. Furness gives a comprehensive history of the controversy up to the date of publication of his text in 1886, and modern editors have frequently rehearsed the arguments again since that time. Among those who discuss it are Granville-Barker (op. cit. pp. 24-30), M.R. Ridley in the Arden Othello, London, 1959, pp. Ixvii-lxx, and Kenneth Muir in the New Penguin Othello, Penguin, 1968, pp. 26-28.

¹⁷ Muir, op. cit. p. 26.

¹⁸ Furness,op. cit. p. 369.

¹⁹ "And wit depends on dilatory (i.e. capable of being expanded and contracted] time". (II, iii, 360-61).

²⁰ Irwin Smith, "Dramatic Time versus Clock Time in Shakespeare", Shakespeare Quarterly, XX, 1, Winter, 1969, 65-69.

²¹ Desdemona's "Faith, that's with watching", of III, iii, as she binds Othello's head with her handkerchief, would then be a direct reference to the fact that Othello had spent a sleepless night the previous night. Obviously "watching" in the sense of being alert does not apply in this case.

²² Maurianne S. Adams, in "Ocular Proof in Othello and its Sources", (PMLA, LXXIX. 3, June, 1964, 234-241) discusses the "vision" motif in Othello, pointing out that the expression "ocular proof (the only occurrence of the word ocular in all Shakespeare, incidentally) comes almost direct from Cinthio, Shakespeare's source, and that Shakespeare has embroidered the one idea into the rich tapestry of vision metaphors that extend throughout the play.

²³ II, iii, 278; III, iii, 362; III, iv, 68; IV, i, 42; IV, ii, 88. Also there are additional near repetitions at I, iii, 9 and II, i, 217.