SOURCE: Hopkins, Lisa. “Tragic Marriage.” In The Shakespearean Marriage: Merry Wives and Heavy Husbands, pp. 133-60. London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1998.

[In the following essay, Hopkins regards marriage as the source of tragedy in Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello.]

‘All comedies end with a marriage,’ said the maiden English teacher at my all girls' school, ‘and all tragedies begin with them.’ In the four great works of Shakespeare's central tragic period, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and King Lear, marriage functions as a site of stress, disruption and destruction of the individual identity. In three of the four plays, a marriage, or the arrangements for it, directly precipitate a disaster; as Joanna Montgomery Byles comments, ‘to some extent, it is the denial of Eros and the destructiveness of family attachments which largely contribute to the fate of Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear’.¹ Beginning where the comedies left off, these plays sharply develop the darker hints contained within the comic world.²

ROMEO AND JULIET

The tragedy of marriage is perhaps most immediately apparent in Romeo and Juliet. Though the lovers' attachment may seem to promise a comic outcome, the opposition of their families, sealed in the double death of Tybalt and Mercutio which follows almost immediately on the wedding ceremony, inextricably intertwines marriage and death within the structure of the play, just as Sampson verbally confounds the loss of virginity with the cutting off of heads.³ The very word ‘married’ sounds ominously in the text. Discussing the nubility of Juliet, Paris argues that ‘Younger than she are happy mothers made’ (I.2.12); Old Capulet immediately responds with ‘And too soon marred are those so early made’ (I.2.13), where ‘marred’ and ‘made’ quibble with ‘married’ and ‘maid’ in a way that posits a worrying equivalence between ‘married’ and ‘marred’. When ‘married’ itself is heard, it is in a similar context, as Lady Capulet exhorts her daughter to observe Paris well, and ‘Examine every married lineament’ (I.3.84); the next reference has Juliet, seeing Romeo, exclaim, in ironic prophecy, ‘If he be married, / My grave is like to be my wedding bed’ (I.5.134-5), just as the Friar will later rhyme ‘tomb’ and ‘womb’ (II.3.5-6). Though Juliet later associates marriage with honour, in her virtual proposal to Romeo (II.2.143-6), for Romeo it leads precisely to an imagined loss of honour: ‘O sweet Juliet, / Thy beauty hath made me effeminate / And in my temper softened valour's steel!’ (III.1.113-15).

With savage irony, it is precisely as a counter to the tragedy of Tybalt's death that Old Capulet proposes to cheer his family by hastening Juliet's wedding. Initially, Old Capulet has seemed a very proper father indeed, protecting his child on account of her youth, and exhorting her suitor, ‘But woo her, gentle Paris, get her heart. / My will to her consent is but a part’ (I.2.16-17). Soon, however, he becomes one of the most peremptory of all Shakespeare's fathers, transgressing social norms as well as disregarding Juliet's reluctance:

                                                  ‘A Thursday, tell her,
She shall be married to this noble earl.
Will you be ready? Do you like this haste?
We'll keep no great ado—a friend or two.

(III.4.20-3)

Naomi Conn Liebler argues that Romeo and Juliet, ‘by marrying in secret … prevent their families and their larger community from participating in the marriage rite’,⁴ but Capulet himself was equally proposing to restrict the element of communal celebration involved. There has been much debate about where the sympathies of Shakespeare's original audience would have lain in the disagreement between Juliet and her father: David Lindley, for instance, suggests that ‘there can be little doubt that many a father in the Globe Theatre would have identified with Capulet's feelings. Nor is it clear that the play as a whole endorses the position of Romeo and Juliet themselves.’⁵ Diane Elizabeth Dreher suggests that the absence of Capulet from the wedding makes it an unsatisfactory ceremony,⁶ and Jonathan Goldberg points out that in this play marriage definitively works against homosociality rather than facilitating it:⁷ only after the death of the couple themselves are the two fathers able to join in ‘a belated public solemnization of the marriage contract’.⁸

What is perhaps most striking, though, is the extent of the paralleling rather than the contrasting in the representation of attitudes to marriage. Thomas Moisan points, for instance, to ‘the Nurse's reiterated recollection of the “Ay” Juliet's three-year-old voice gave to but a cruder version of the very question put to her by her mother’,⁹ and Capulet quite literally speaks with Juliet's voice when he mimics her presumed answer that ‘I'll not wed, I cannot love; / I am too young, I pray you pardon me!’ (III.5.186-7); he also produces a paralleling of opposites as he recounts how he has worked towards Juliet's marriage ‘Day, night; hour, tide, time; work, play; / Alone, in company’ (III.5.177-8). There is a similar echoing in Juliet and her mother agreeing to poison Tybalt's assassin (III.5.96-9). Though Juliet is actually feigning here, the passage is a multiply suggestive one: it will again stress similarity rather than difference when Romeo in turn decides to buy poison, and it also evokes the story of Tristan and Iseult, where Iseult and her mother concoct a similar scheme against the killer of the mother's brother. The comparison is an interesting one, working both to elevate the lovers by association, and also to point up the fact that their own relationship is a legitimate one, not dependent on Tristan and Iseult's transgression of the marriage bond. It also works to reinforce an association between poison and women,¹⁰ which may further be hinted at in the suggestive phrasing of the Apothecary, ‘Mantua's law / Is death to any he that utters them’ (V.1.66-7). When Romeo takes poison and Juliet wields his dagger, we may thus indeed be tempted to feel that their unlicensed love has not only made him effeminate, but her—at least temporarily—mannish. Leading the living to lie in tombs, sons to die before their fathers, and Romeo to figure death as birth (V.1.62-5), their marriage consistently generates inversion (Lynda Boose argues that the whole of the latter half of the play ‘progresses as a series of inverted and disordered epithalamia’),¹¹ but it just as insistently leads to the revelation of parallels—both trends being contained in its final effect of healing the feud, as Capulet says ‘O brother Montague, give me thy hand’ (V.3.296).

One reason for the essentially homologising effect of the marriage lies in Romeo and Juliet's own basic similarity. Unlike, say, Othello and Desdemona, or even Hamlet and Ophelia, they are close in rank, years and status, and are members of the same community, which would indeed benefit from their marriage, if their parents would only sanction it. Despite their youth, they behave in a way that is, arguably, more mature than their own parents' conduct (a comparison which is actually suggested by the play's profusion of parallels). Romeo may kill Tybalt, but only because he was trying to prevent violence and make peace, and neither of the lovers thinks of consummating the relationship before they have had it blessed by the church (which, in the person of Friar Laurence, thoroughly supports their actions). With old heads on young shoulders, they in fact work only towards aims that are in tune with their society (in contrast, perhaps, to Mercutio, whom some readings see as punished by premature death for a homoerotic orientation unconducive to social rituals of bonding and reproduction). Moreover, the love of Romeo and Juliet will ultimately benefit their community by procuring the ending of the feud. This early tragedy has often been criticised for the apparently contingent nature of the tragic outcome—essentially, disaster strikes first because Romeo's arm accidentally got in Mercutio's way, and secondly because the letter goes astray—which does not spring from any hamartia on the part of the hero or any feeling that society as a whole has lost its way. This certainly seems to be true of the central relationship, for this was a marriage that need not have failed, a marriage that could have been equally at home in the comic world. In Shakespeare's more mature work, there will be a radical shift in conception, for there the seeds of tragedy will lie in the marital relationship itself.

HAMLET

In Hamlet, we enter the world of Denmark in the immediate aftermath of the marriage of Claudius and Gertrude—a ceremony which, in Hamlet's eyes at least, was ominously conflated with a funeral, and which has certainly sounded the death-knell of his own peace of mind—Janet Adelman points to ‘the logic of the play's alternative name for poison: “union”’,¹² while Terence Hawkes observes that the verb ‘to marry’ is ‘the one the play seems to turn on’.¹³ There can be no doubt at all that to the Renaissance mind, the marriage of Claudius and Gertrude was indeed both improper and, as Gertrude herself says, ‘o'er hasty’: Roland Mushat Frye points out that ‘in Tudor sermons and theological tracts, marriages such as that of Gertrude and Claudius are invariably classified as adultery, even if whitewashed by a marriage ceremony’, and that ‘the marriage followed the funeral almost at once, because it was impossible to bury a king or queen in Renaissance England in less than a month after the death, or at least it was never done more promptly’.¹⁴ Even so, however, the extent of the disorder which it precipitates is striking.

Unlike the marriages of male characters in comedies, Claudius' alliance with Gertrude notably fails to facilitate his bonding with other men, proving particularly destructive in his relationship with Hamlet, whose goodwill is of particular importance to him since the Prince is not only his nephew but the heir presumptive to his throne. Claudius even seems to be himself uneasy about the marriage. Although no one has ever doubted that he loves Gertrude, the occasions on which he speaks of his relationship with her can all be seen as encoding ominous undertones. His initial description of her as ‘Th'imperial jointress to this warlike state’¹⁵ has given rise to much speculation about the precise political significance of their relationship, and whether, if Gertrude had some kind of purchase on government, Claudius perhaps stood to gain by the marriage as well as being motivated by affection. Claudius later cites his continued possession of his wife as a reason for his inability to repent, and speaks of Gertrude to Laertes in terms characterised by a radical ambivalence:

My virtue or my plague, be it either which—
She is so conjunctive to my life and soul
That, as the star moves not but in his sphere,
I could not but by her.

(IV.vii.13-16)

The person most adversely affected by the marriage, however, is Hamlet. Throughout the play, he experiences difficulty in reconciling his twin images of his mother as mother and as wife; he also reverses the traditional patterns of comedy by his increasing alienation from Ophelia, his own potential wife—Lisa Jardine underlines this teleology of separation when she points to Ophelia's return of Hamlet's gifts as ‘a sign of a betrothal broken off’.¹⁶ For him, the problematics of identification with the father cannot be mediated by women, and Ophelia, whose name so ironically signifies ‘help’ in Greek, can function as nothing more than a hindrance on his psychological quest, perpetually doubling both his language and his life-events but radically divorced from sharing them with him.

If Hamlet himself fails to connect with Ophelia, moreover, it often seems as if the play itself does not do so either. Hamlet, notoriously, is nothing without its prince, and it has often been remarked that not only does the prince himself habitually dislocate responsibility for his troubles onto women, but that the play relentlessly invites us to share his own perspective on the female characters, to such an extent that traditional critical response to both Ophelia and Gertrude has been radically conditioned by Hamlet's own response to them.¹⁷ Ophelia's soliloquy at the end of the nunnery scene briefly reverses this process by offering us her summing-up of his present condition, but it is rare to take the question of Gertrude's view of Hamlet very much further than A. C. Bradley's careless characterisation of her as like a sheep in the sun, wanting to be happy herself and vaguely desirous of seeing her fellow-sheep happy too. Nevertheless, since Gertrude is one of the very few examples in the Shakespearean canon of a woman who has survived one long marriage and has recently embarked on another, it might well be worth looking for a moment at ‘what says the married woman’.

Of Gertrude's attitude to her previous husband we know little or nothing, except, perhaps, what we could deduce from the portrayal of her represented by the Player Queen in The Murder of Gonzago. Of her attitude to her son we know a great deal, and it is very suggestive. The first exchange between them that we hear involves her publicly reproaching him for his dress and his behaviour; the last includes her comment that ‘He's fat and scant of breath’ (V.II.290). For all the apparent affection between them, and for all the warmth which led Ernest Jones to advance his famous suggestion that Hamlet was suffering from an unresolved Oedipus complex, there are other suggestions that a keynote of the relationship between them is denigration and rejection, considerably pre-dating the more obviously disruptive advent of Claudius. When the Player Queen concludes a speech with the line ‘None wed the second but who kill'd the first’ (III.II.175), Hamlet mutters aside, ‘That's wormwood’ (III.II.176). Wormwood, as Juliet's nurse reminds us, was the substance traditionally applied to the nipple to impart a bitter taste and deter the infant from further suckling; as such, it functions as the sign of the first and most shattering rejection by the mother of the child. That such an association is indeed present here is suggested by the Player Queen's almost immediately preceding assurance that ‘Such love must needs be treason in my breast’ (III.II.173); treason in the breast is what Hamlet seems to be remembering, a betrayal by his mother not only of his father but also of his infant self, but which he can now revenge by submitting her to this public exposure of her husband's guilt and her own. Suggestively, he also echoes here his father's description of the operations of the poison: ‘with a sudden vigour it doth posset / And curd, like eager droppings into milk, / The thin and wholesome blood’ (I.V.68-70). Both men envisage their fate as fundamentally informed by images of milk spoiled and milk denied, in a minor-image cluster reinforcing the play's larger narrative moves towards the disruption rather than the perpetuation and flourishing of family groups.

Imaging himself, perhaps with some justification, as rejected by his mother, Hamlet never seems likely to move towards forming a family of his own. If there is a sketched suggestion of malfunctioning lactation, there is a strongly sustained one of a general failure of fertility and of blight and waste. Claudius' view of nature is that its ‘common theme / Is death of fathers’ (I.ii.103-4); Horatio uses the language of fertility to suggest guilt when he wonders whether the Ghost has ‘uphoarded in thy life / Extorted treasure in the womb of earth’ (I.i.139-40). For Laertes, ‘birth’ is used to figure the constraints of Hamlet's rank (I.iii.18), and for Hamlet all breeding produces sinners, and so is best avoided (III.i.121-4); Naomi Conn Liebler points out that Hamlet's lament for the forgotten hobby-horse also encodes a failure of fertility, since the traditional hobby-horse ‘was specifically a man dressed in a horse mask and a hoop-like skirt under which he caught and then released village maids in an aggressively mimed fertility dance’.¹⁸ Hamlet wants ‘no mo marriage’ (III.i.149), and associates all marriage with curses, cuckoldry, error and the blighted growth of ‘a mildew'd ear’ (III.i.136-41, III.ii.245-6 and III.iv.64). In this, he resembles his counterparts in the comedies, but the difference is that he cannot mould his perspective into a basis for joking and for male camaraderie, since he shares it only with women—all his invectives on the subject are directed either to Gertrude or Ophelia. To Claudius, he can offer only a riddle—‘My mother. Father and mother is man and wife, man and wife is one flesh; so my mother’ (IV.iv.54-5)—which, because it takes dangerous obliterations of difference as its theme, cannot work to effect any such joining itself.

Other characters also figure marriage as being, at the best, problematic, both to achieve and in its operations. Both Laertes and Polonius doubt that Ophelia would be able to become Hamlet's bride; later, Ophelia herself sings of how women may be deceived by false promises of matrimony (IV.v.62-6), and she also hints at the dangers of hypergamy, or marriage with a person below one's own station, when she says in her madness ‘It is the false steward that stole his master's daughter’ (IV.v.170-1). Bridget Gellert Lyons comments that ‘deathly coldness or seclusion (“Be thou as chaste as ice …” “Get thee to a nunnery”) on the other, are presented to a young girl as the only sexual alternatives’.¹⁹ The floral imagery that clusters round the scenes of Ophelia's madness and death clearly evokes a parodic and subverted wedding rite, with the accompanying suggestion of sterility and waste. Moreover, images of illegitimacy and of unlicensed sexuality abound: Laertes exclaims, ‘That drop of blood that's calm proclaims me bastard, / Cries cuckold to my father’ (IV.v.117-18), and Hamlet tells Laertes, ‘I am afeard you make a wanton of me’ (V.ii.303). The Player Queen, representing Gertrude, protests, ‘In second husband let me be accurst; / None wed the second but who kill'd the first’ (III.ii.174-5), and Gertrude herself gives a brief clue to her own marital history when she cries, ‘O, this is counter, you false Danish dogs’ (IV.v.110). Clearly implying that she herself is not Danish, she reminds us of the political rather than the personal nature of the imperatives which would have structured her alliance with Old Hamlet. Swiftly though this is suggested, it is an important idea, since it refers to the importance of marriage as a crucial element of social and national substructure. Once marriages have been broken, illegitimately contracted, or become impossible, the failure and the repercussions are not merely private and personal: something is indeed rotten in the state of Denmark as a whole.

It is these ideas of rottenness, of decay and of failure to flourish which permeate the imagery of the play. The green world is present in Hamlet only in ghastly parody, in the ‘unweeded garden’ (I.II.135) of the hero's imagination, in the barren plot imaged as serving Fortinbras' followers as a grave and in the literal graveyard itself, and in the pastoral landscape of Ophelia's death; the ‘country’ to Hamlet is always hideously conflated with the pun on ‘cuntry’.²⁰ None of these affords growth and renewal; even resurrection is invoked only to be deflated in the disinterment of Yorick's skull. A society which, in Hamlet's terms, celebrates a marriage with cold meat (left over from a funeral), and where the central relationship involves a woman presumably well past child-bearing age, kills its children, but begets no new ones. Instead, it anatomises its central marriage from a perspective never previously available in the plays—that of the child, radically excluded—and it shifts attention from social and ideological function to psychological cost. It shows us a Claudius who perceives his own uxoriousness as dangerous weakness (and who will later keep silent and let his wife die, rather than betray his own guilt by warning her against the poisoned cup); a Gertrude who, at any rate according to her son and her first husband, has been coarsened and diminished by her second marriage, and a child whose bitter disappointment in his mother and fraught imaginings of his father leave him paralysed, misogynist and sterile. Even when the state passes to the new rule of Fortinbras, the crisis in the state of marriage is not resolved, for Fortinbras, like Hal before him and Malcolm and Edgar after him, is a saviour conspicuously free from any contact with women. Marriage, though it carries within it the seeds of its own renewal, does not prove easy to restore in the tragic world when it has been once disrupted.

KING LEAR

If Hamlet treats marriage predominantly from the point of view of the child, King Lear deals with the perspectives and experiences of the father—in this case a father for whom the marriage of his youngest and favourite child seems to be proving a source of great stress.²¹ Although the opening scene of the play is ostensibly concerned primarily with the major political issues of abdication and succession, both these are mediated through questions of marriage—are, indeed, staged to some extent as a wedding ceremony,²² onto which Lear attempts to map his own meanings. Even before the subject of Cordelia's betrothal has been mentioned, we hear of marriage vows made—and broken, as Gloucester introduces his bastard son to Kent:

KENT.
I cannot conceive you.
GLOU.
Sir, this young fellow's mother could; whereupon she grew round-womb'd, and had, indeed, Sir, a son for her cradle ere she had a husband for her bed. Do you smell a fault?
KENT.
I cannot wish the fault undone, the issue of it being so proper.
GLOU.
But I have a son, Sir, by order of law, some year elder than this, who yet is no dearer in my account: though this knave came something saucily to the world before he was sent for, yet was his mother fair; there was good sport at his making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged.(23)

The reference to Edgar's age makes it quite clear that Gloucester's relationship was an adulterous one, and this will later be seen by Edgar as the direct and operative clause for all Gloucester's suffering:

The Gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us;
The dark and vicious place where thee he got
Cost him his eyes.

(V.III.169-72)

Less noticeable than the fact of the transgression, but equally troubling, is Gloucester's reference to his sons' respective places in his ‘account’, a word which in turn causes ‘dearer’ to resonate not only with the language of love but with the language of cost. In a low-key way, he uses exactly the same discourse of quantity rather than quality which will later characterise Lear's approach to his children, so that encoded in this passage is not only a cheapening of the marriage relationship but an approach to the parent-child one patterned as a transaction rather than as an emotional response.

Both these elements are even more strongly marked in Lear's dealings with his daughters. From the outset, the scene is riddled with tensions between the rehearsed and the spontaneous, the genuine and the expedient. Lear inaugurates the proceedings with the ominous line ‘Meantime, we shall express our darker purpose’ (I.i.35). The idea connoted by ‘express’ seems to make it quite clear that what is to be unfolded is something already decided, but ‘darker’ suggests not only something previously concealed but something inherently sinister, a meaning, indeed, which may have been unsuspected even by Lear himself until he discovers that it has found expression; certainly there seems to be a deep-seated unease about the prospect of Cordelia's marriage which will later lead him, quite irrationally, to condemn France as ‘hot-blooded’ and to refuse absolutely to ‘knee his throne’ (II.iv.210, 212).²⁴ On the surface, the ‘purpose’ seems a straightforward and sensible one:

We have this hour a constant will to publish
Our daughters' several dowers, that future strife
May be prevented now.

(I.i.41-3)

Nevertheless, there is again a darker note sounded in Lear's unquestioned assumption that ‘future strife’ would follow if dowry business were left unsettled. In his mind, marriage already figures as a focus for stress and disruption.

It becomes even more of a threat to him when his youngest daughter unequivocally tells him that her imminent marriage is going to diminish the amount of affection she feels for him:

                                                                                Good my Lord,
You have begot me, bred me, lov'd me: I
Return those duties back as are right fit,
Obey you, love you, and most honour you.
Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty:
Sure I shall never marry like my sisters,
To love my father all.

(I.i.94-103)

Though Cordelia's caution here is intended as a corrective to the extravagance and exaggerations of Goneril and Regan, it also partakes of the same discourse of reckoning as characterised Gloucester's approach to affection (and which is so scorned by Antony in his first exchange with Cleopatra): Cordelia conceives of love not as boundless, but as demarcated and rationed. She may implicitly reject her sisters' language of cost and price, but she also, to some extent, shares it, and she is indeed to find herself virtually echoed in Goneril's final advice to her:

Let your study
Be to content your lord, who hath receiv'd you
At Fortune's alms; you have obedience scanted,
And well are worth the want that you have wanted.

(I.i.275-8)

On the terms to which both Goneril and Cordelia have subscribed, it is indeed Goneril who sounds the more dutiful here, and seems to have the more generous and compliant conception of the marriage relationship.

Any such view of the sisters is of course soon challenged, as the behaviour of Goneril and Regan sharply deteriorates. It is notable that their disobedience to the (literally) patriarchal structures of behaviour enjoined by their father is repeatedly figured as an attack not primarily on the relationship between father and child, but on that between husband and wife. In the first scene, there is no hint that there is anything amiss between either couple, but trouble soon begins to surface: Goneril declares, ‘I must change arms at home, and give the distaff / Into my husband's hands’ (IV.ii.17-18), and even Regan, though her relationship with Cornwall seems far more secure, shows occasional signs of impatience with him—the Arden editor suggests that on their arrival at Gloucester's castle, ‘Regan takes the words out of her husband's mouth, and thereby shows that he is subordinate’ (II.i.118 note). More strikingly, the daughters' disobedience is actually interpreted as a retrospective assault on the sanctity of their parents' marriage: Lear terms Goneril a ‘Degenerate bastard’ (I.iv.251), and tells Regan that if her behaviour were to resemble her sister's, ‘I would divorce me from thy mother's tomb, / Sepulchring an adult'ress’ (II.iv.128-9) (the Arden note comments that the source-play of Leir starts with the funeral of the queen). Bastardy is again invoked as the ultimate social evil when Albany uses it to forbid Regan's marriage to Edmund: when Edmund declares that Albany has no jurisdiction over them, Albany retorts ‘Half-blooded fellow, yes’ (V.iii.81). In a play that questions many things, the absolute distinction between marriage and adultery remains sacrosanct, and marriage is invoked as a fundamental guarantor of the continuation of civilised society; nevertheless, marking as it does the progression to maturity of a new generation, it is a rite of passage fraught with a peculiar melancholy for those whose lives are waning. It is, as much as anything, the marriage of his youngest child which disempowers Lear.

MACBETH

In Othello and Macbeth, the focus switches from the generations not personally involved in marriage to those which are, and Macbeth in particular presents perhaps the Shakespearean canon's most sustained and probing portrait of an individual marriage—and one which, for all the brevity of the play, is particularly attentive to changes in the relationship over time. The institution of marriage radically fashions not only the individual life of Macbeth, but also the whole mindset of the society in which he lives. Violent and unsettled as it may be, it nevertheless adheres strictly to the rituals which surround kinship and the home. Notably, the Captain initially figures Macdonwald's rebellion precisely in terms of unlicensed sexuality: ‘fortune on his damned quarrel smiling / Showed like a rebel's whore’,²⁵ whereas Macbeth, fighting for the rightful king, is ‘That Bellona's bridegroom’ (I.2.56). Even if loyalty has been forfeited and rebellion broached, legitimate marriage, it seems, remains available as an absolute demarcator. Even heaven is figured as structured by it in Banquo's homely image, ‘There's husbandry in heaven, / Their candles are all out’ (II.1.4-5).

Marriage—and the legitimacy of offspring which, at least in theory, it ensures—also lies at the heart of the play in a different way. It is a critical commonplace that Shakespeare's choice of subject in Macbeth surely represents a response to the accession of James VI of Scotland to the throne of England, and the resultant heightened awareness of all things Scottish. James's claim to the throne derived entirely from the principles of primogeniture and hereditary succession of legitimate offspring; and these are precisely the considerations which are set aside when Macbeth is crowned king in preference to either of the sons of Duncan. However, under the Scottish custom of tanistry, whereby the throne passed not to the son of the previous ruler but to a suitable adult male relative, Macbeth's succession is perfectly legal; it could indeed be said to be Duncan who outrages convention by unilaterally designating Malcolm as Prince of Cumberland, and thus as his probable successor, apparently without prior consultation with his magnates. If blood-relationship alone is sufficient, marriage becomes relatively unimportant, but if, as in the case of James VI and I, it is legitimate descent which is prioritised, then marriage becomes the cornerstone of the royal succession. It is notable that during the course of Macbeth Scottish society seems to undergo a clear shift from the first model to the second. There is no initial challenge to Macbeth's claim to the throne, but by the end of the play it seems to be tacitly assumed that the right of Malcolm, as the eldest son of Duncan, is unquestionable. Moreover, Malcolm himself prominently foregrounds the ritual force of marriage in his discussion of his suitability for the kingship. The first sin that he claims is voluptuousness (IV.3.60ff), and he warns Macduff that ‘Your wives, your daughters, / Your matrons, and your maids, could not fill up / The cistern of my lust’ (IV.3.61-3). Macduff's growing horror draws precisely on the idea of legitimate succession and continuity of good citizenship which marriage should ensure, but which Malcolm, it seems, is monstrously transgressing:

                                                                                                                        Thy royal father
Was a most sainted king; the queen that bore thee,
Oftener upon her knees than on her feet,
Died every day she lived.

(IV.3.108-11)

In the end, of course, such a marriage of a virtuous king and a virtuous queen is indeed vindicated as having produced desirable offspring; but immediately after Malcolm's self-revelation we hear of the savage destruction of Macduff's own marriage, and all its progeny. As the grief sinks in, it is Malcolm's turn to give counsel, as he exhorts Macduff, ‘Dispute it like a man’ (IV.3.219)—an echo, perhaps, of the latent fear that all association with women, even within the legalised context of marriage, carries the threat of effeminisation.

Though Malcolm's unsatisfactoriness as an offspring of his parents' apparently perfect marriage proves eventually to be only illusory, it does nevertheless accord with a strongly marked pattern, in the play as a whole, of sterility and of blighted progeny. Initially, the world of the play does indeed seem to promise fertility and growth, as Duncan says to Macbeth, ‘Welcome hither. / I have begun to plant thee, and will labour / To make thee full of growing’ (I.4.28-30). But soon such images of the cycle of the natural world are perverted as Lady Macbeth advises her husband, ‘look like the innocent flower, / But be the serpent under't’ (I.5.63-4). For her, reminders of the green world occur only in abuse:

                                                                                Was the hope drunk
Wherein you dressed yourself? Hath it slept since?
And wakes it now to look so green and pale
At what it did so freely?

(I.7.35-8)

Her use of ‘green’ connotes nausea, not viridescence. Macbeth too will come to revel in the obliteration of the potential for growth, his determination intact ‘though the treasure of nature's germens tumble all together / Even till destruction sicken’ (IV.1.57-9). In his kingdom, Macduff's ‘chickens’ will fall victim to a ‘kite’, and babies will be cooked in the witches' stew.

In contrast, Macbeth's enemies come increasingly to be identified as figures of regeneration and the renewal of fertility. Lennox announces that they come ‘To dew the sovereign flower and drown the weeds’ (V.2.29-30). While Macbeth laments that ‘my way of life / Is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf’ (V.3.22-3), and threatens to make a hideous parody of the normal processes of fruit-bearing by hanging the messenger on a tree ‘Till famine cling thee’ (V.5.40), Malcolm's army advances with its boughs like the green world come to life to take its revenge on the figure who has threatened it.²⁶ In a final confirmation of his increasing identification with the anti-natural, Macbeth responds to the approach of Birnam wood with an invocation of the apocalypse:

I ‘gin to be aweary of the sun,
And wish the estate o'the world were now undone.—
Ring the alarum bell!—Blow wind, come wrack …

(V.5.49-51)

Most noticeably, of course, Macbeth is identified from the outset as an emblem of his sterility by his own childlessness. The apparent contradiction between this and his wife's memories of giving suck has aroused the spilling of much critical ink (the simplest explanation is in fact Shakespeare's awareness that Gruouch, the historical Lady Macbeth, had a son, Lulach the Fool, from an earlier marriage); but its dramatic and thematic functions are clear enough. It allows not only for a stress on the eventual passing of the Scottish throne to the Stuart line, but also for the presentation of Macbeth (and pointedly him, rather than the couple as a whole) as an incarnation of barrenness²⁷—a point often made in production.²⁸

Despite their childlessness, however, there can be no doubt that the Macbeths' relationship is—initially at least—a happy one. Barbara Everett calls them ‘probably Shakespeare's most thoroughly married couple’,²⁹ and as a couple, they function in striking contrast to the Macduffs' marriage, in which the husband inexplicably abandons wife and children in his flight to England, and the wife responds with bitter recrimination and open criticism of him in front of the children. Even when she is most grossly provoked, by Macbeth's extraordinary behaviour in the banquet scene, Lady Macbeth never does this, desperately trying instead to find excuses for him; indeed A. C. Bradley famously remarked that ‘strange and almost ludicrous as the statement may sound, she is, up to her light, a perfect wife’.³⁰ In the theatre, it is customary to present their relationship as an explosively erotic one—indeed, in Philip Franks' production at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield, in November 1995, Lady Macbeth's backless purple gown was so striking that the actress appeared in it, in character, in the Celebrity Wardrobe column of the Sheffield Star, explaining that it was her ‘seduction outfit’. It is, however, perhaps precisely this sexual charge which proves the undoing of the relationship as well as its distinctive strength, for Lady Macbeth's view of marriage, while in some ways companionate, is also relentlessly premised on sharply drawn sexual distinctions. For her, men are men—exhortations to be a ‘man’, and accusations of failure of manhood, punctuate her exhortations to her husband—and women are Other,³¹ creatures whose best hope of full achievement lies in being unsexed. Known only by the name of her husband, affectionately remembering her father, Lady Macbeth is fully interpellated into patriarchal ideology. Never seen outside her own house, she even dies within it, and the most horrific of her actions are nevertheless clearly inserted within a framework, however transgressive and paradoxical, which clearly asserts her femininity: even the laying out of the grooms' daggers parodies her ‘proper’ duty of table-setting, and her invocation of darkness is couched in the language of breastfeeding.³² Thus by driving her husband to definitive, ‘manly’ action she has inevitably set in motion the processes which will confine them to radically demarcated separate spheres. Anny Crunelle-Vanrigh notes the extent to which ‘womanhood becomes significantly prominent in Shakespeare's character development of [Lady Macbeth]: she is seen walking in her sleep in her night gown and her talk is all of the perfumes of Arabia’;³³ conversely, Coppélia Kahn points to the extent of Macbeth's eventual separation from the world of women when she suggests that when Macduff ‘cows’ his opponent's better part of man ‘it is Macduff's bond with the feminine which triumphs over Macbeth's manly valour’.³⁴ What the Macbeths' relationship shows us, then, is perhaps that when the genders are kept so firmly apart, and when what lies at the heart of marriage is a sexual relationship so clearly predicated on sexual difference, it can work to break down the companionship and union altogether.

OTHELLO

The marital relationship in Othello, on the other hand, is, notoriously, by no means so clearly identified as sexual. Nicholas Brooke comments that ‘Macbeth is unique among Shakespeare's tragedies in centring on an intimate marriage (Othello's was never that)’,³⁵ and there has even been extensive critical debate about whether the marriage of Othello and Desdemona ever actually achieves consummation,³⁶ while Stephen Greenblatt has commented perceptively on ‘the syntactic ambiguity’ in Iago's lines ‘to abuse Othello's ear / That he is too familiar with his wife’, where it could as well be Othello himself as much as Cassio who is figured as over-intimate with Desdemona.³⁷ Michael Hattaway, too, notes that even when he is killing Desdemona, Othello can still refer to himself as being yet to ‘pluck her rose’, which, he argues, clearly connotes her virginity.³⁸

It is certainly quite clear that Othello does not unequivocally embrace the married state. He tells Iago:

I fetch my life and being
From men of royal siege, and my demerits
May speak unbonneted to as proud a fortune
As this that I have reach'd; for know, Iago,
But that I love the gentle Desdemona,
I would not my unhoused free condition
Put into circumscription and confine
For the sea's worth.(39)

In Othello's account, marriage has offered him nothing:⁴⁰ already Desdemona's social superior because of his royal ancestry, he has merely succeeded in forfeiting his freedom, an action which he figures by reference to the sea, which, throughout the play, will recur as an image of unpredictability, insatiability and instability. The only redeeming feature, it seems, is his ‘love’ for the ‘gentle Desdemona’, and love, in Shakespeare, rarely proves enough to sustain a marriage. Moreover, even Othello's description of his feelings may sound an ominous note; even if ‘gentle’ does not suggest a noticeable rank difference from his own ‘royal’ condition, in this marriage of dissimilarities, it certainly suggests a conditionality in Othello's love, which will endure only as long as he finds her ‘gentle’ (and Desdemona, even more than Shakespeare's other heroines, is a woman whom men are continually finding suspect).⁴¹ This is clearly not the language of an eager bridegroom, and even the act of warning his wife of his departure is characterised in terms suggestive of effort and cost: ‘I will but spend a word here in the house’ (I.ii.48).

Interestingly, Desdemona, too, is described by her father as initially averse to marriage:

                    a maid so tender, fair, and happy,
So opposite to marriage, that she shunn'd
The wealthy curled darlings of our nation

(I.ii.66-9)

There is a forceful implicit logic to Brabantio's paratactic structure here, for the syntax draws no distinction between the various elements of his list, presenting ‘opposite to marriage’ as precisely the same kind of quality as ‘tender’, ‘fair’ and ‘happy’; the effect is that it, too, becomes an item in his praise of her, implicitly aligning Brabantio himself with his daughter's alleged repugnance to marriage. Iago, also, registers such a dislike, dismissing Cassio as ‘A fellow almost damn'd in a fair wife’ (I.i.21), a passage that has aroused much critical debate since the suggestion that Cassio is either married or about to be so never occurs again. Suggestively, the ‘almost’ of Iago's indictment of Cassio is echoed by his assumption that Othello's own marriage may be merely provisional, shown when he questions his general:

                                                                                but I pray, sir,
Are you fast married? For be sure of this,
That the magnificio is much belov'd,
And hath in his effect a voice potential
As double as the duke's; he will divorce you,
Or put upon what restraint, and grievance,
That law (with all his might to enforce it on)
Will give him cable.

(I.ii.10-17)

The triple alliteration of ‘double’, ‘duke’ and ‘divorce’ may perhaps serve to underline the potential ambiguity of ‘double’, which, in Renaissance English, connotes ‘duplicitous’ as often as ‘duplication’. Moreover, here again syntax and imagery work to disturbing effect. For Iago, ‘divorce’ is envisioned as an alternative to ‘restraint’ and ‘grievance’ which would operate within marriage; and marriage itself is best ‘fast’, although that very ‘fastness’ associates it with precisely the same kind of tethering idea as is present in the ‘enforce'd ‘cable’ of the law which Brabantio might invoke as punishment. Iago's terms are ominous indeed, suggestive of nothing but trouble whatever the outcome may be.

Similar danger signals continue to gather round the couple's unfolding story, to the extent, indeed, that Michael Bristol has brilliantly compared the whole play to the performance of a charivari, a popular ritual performed to deprecate a marriage not to the satisfaction of the community.⁴² What we hear of their courtship resonates heavily with the language of manipulation: Othello recalls that he ‘Took once a pliant hour, and found good means to draw from her …’ (I.iii.151-2), that he ‘did beguile her of her tears’ (I.iii.156), and, finally, that ‘Upon this hint I spake’ (I.iii.165; my italics in all cases). Brabantio is appalled by what he hears:

If she confess that she was half the wooer,
Destruction light on me, if my bad blame
Light on the man!

(I.iii.176-8)

The focus of his anger is telling. The hints and counter-hints which characterised the couple's courtship may seem to us to be informed with a mutuality which is profoundly appealing; but Brabantio's point is precisely that there should be no such mutuality in male-female relationships, and while modern sensibilities may disagree, we should be aware that, from one point of view, he is right: in a misogynistic society, what Desdemona has done is dangerous. Her behaviour may have arisen from pleasing motives, but it will lay her open to exactly the kind of misconstruction which will, in fact, dog her whole career. Additionally, she will soon find out that the ‘division’ which she experiences between father and husband is in fact a spurious distinction, since both will operate within the same actantial role of patriarch: as Brabantio warns Othello, demonstrating a degree of same-sex identification which ironically transcends their individual conflict, ‘Look to her, Moor, have a quick eye to see: / She has deceiv'd her father, may do thee’ (I.iii.292-3).

Desdemona responds to her father's accusations in terms strongly reminiscent of Cordelia: ‘My noble father, / I do perceive here a divided duty’ (I.iii.175-6). To some extent, her argument fails just as Cordelia's had done, since the angry father is not appeased, but it also functions in a different way, for whereas Cordelia did retain a considerable emotional investment in her father, Desdemona's commitment will in practice, be entirely to her husband, and will indeed go further than simple ‘duty’ might prescribe:

So that, dear lords, if I be left behind,
A moth of peace, and he go to the war,
The rites for which I love him are bereft me

(I.iii.255-7)

Not only does she press to accompany him; she, as Othello had done earlier, assigns a reason for her love—the performance of love's ‘rites’.⁴³ Where Othello seeks gentleness, Desdemona desires performance; unfortunately, there seems to be a radical mismatch between the couple's expectations of each other and what each offers. Ironically, they might in fact do better to reverse the polarities and value the ‘gentleness’ of Othello and Desdemona's dedication to ‘rites’, in which case they might hope for the kind of eclectic but fulfulling mutual exchanges which characterised the relationship of Antony and Cleopatra—except that they too would find, like Antony and Cleopatra, that theirs is a society which does not easily countenance such failure to adhere to traditional gender roles.

That there is indeed a marked difference in their attitude to love's ‘rites’ is clearly indicated by Othello's response to Desdemona's speech:

Your voices, Lords: beseech you, let her will
Have a free way; I therefore beg it not
To please the palate of my appetite,
Nor to comply with heat, the young affects
In my defunct, and proper satisfation,
But to be free and bounteous of her mind;
And heaven defend your good souls that you think
I will your serious and great business scant,
For she is with me.

(I.iii.260-8)

There is certainly at least a tolerance of Desdemona's evident sexuality here, and it is easy to hear a standard Renaissance pun on both male and female sexual organs in Othello's plea ‘let her will / Have a free way’. Nevertheless, Othello goes out of his way to discount the influence of his own ‘appetite’ and ‘heat’, which seem (the passage is a notoriously difficult one to construe) to be ‘defunct’ now that he is no longer young. Moreover, when the Duke orders that their departure should take place immediately, Desdemona queries it—‘Tonight, my Lord?’ (I.iii.277), but Othello positively embraces the haste which will, in effect, defer his embracements of Desdemona: ‘With all my heart’ (I.iii.277).

Even when the couple are safely reunited in Cyprus, Othello is still noticeably willing to postpone the moment of consummation:

                                                  If it were now to die,
'Twere now to be most happy, for I fear
My soul hath her content so absolute,
That not another comfort, like to this
Succeeds in unknown fate.

(II.i.189-93)

Though the standard pun on ‘die’ certainly enforces a suggestion here that it is the moment of orgasm that he is so impatient for, Othello's persistent efforts to divorce mind and soul from body equally inform ‘die’ with an idea that it is real death, in a classical instance of the Freudian death-wish, that he craves. Desdemona's attitude, though, is once again visibly differentiated from his when she responds, ‘The heavens forbid / But that our love and comforts should increase, / Even as our days do grow’ (II.i.193-5). Here, she takes on the eschatological overtones of Othello's concern with death, fates and souls, but recasts them into the image of the ‘heavens’ which, as well as being the abode of God, are also responsible for the regulation of the cycles of time and weather, so that the image-pattern shifts towards the temporal promise implied by ‘increase’ and ‘grow’.

Desdemona's figures of fertility are, however, doomed even before they are spoken, for in direct opposition to her own vision of beneficent heavens, the audience have already heard of the only kind of fruition that will take place in the play in Iago's triumphant declaration ‘I ha't, it is engender'd; Hell and night / Must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light’ (I.iii.401-2). Iago's ‘engendering’ and ‘birth’ will be the play's only examples of parturition, and they, like Frankenstein's monster, will be born of a radical misogyny that seeks persistently to exclude and demonise women. Condemning the whole sex as ‘Players in your housewifery; and housewives in your beds’ (II.i.112), Iago sees sexual misconduct, gender role reversal and sexual failure everywhere he looks: ‘For that I do suspect the lustful Moor / Hath leap'd into my seat’ (I.ii.290-1); ‘Our general's wife is now the general’ (II.iii.305-6); ‘her appetite shall play the god / With his weak function’ (II.iii.37-8). Even his account of Bianca is subtly skewed, when he calls her ‘A housewife that by selling her desires / Buys herself bread and clothes’ (IV.i.94-5); what Bianca actually obtains from the economic transaction may be bread and clothes, but for Iago, what she wants is, perversely, not what she buys but what she sells, and he reads her as motivated not by need but by desire. This is consistent with his usual pattern of imagining an aggressive sexuality for all around him—indeed the vigour with which he describes Cassio's supposed dream-advances to himself (III.iii.424-32) has led many critics to suspect that what is at work is indeed, as Emilia terms it, his ‘fantasy’ (III.iii.303), and that what really motivates him is a repressed homosexual desire for either Othello or Cassio. If such were indeed the case, then his failure to achieve such a liaison would be another instance of the fact that, as the perversion and sterility of his own imagery of birth implies, Iago can only create from what is there already. He can feed desires, but he cannot implant them; he may reap the harvest of Desdemona and Othello's mismatched relationship, but the seeds were sown already.

Throughout the scenes dramatising Iago's manipulation of events, there is in fact a carefully controlled balance between the damage done by his provocation and the damage which the couple bring upon themselves. Iago may prompt Cassio's appeal to Desdemona, but he could hardly have hoped for such a disastrously self-destructive response as Desdemona spontaneously makes to the suggestion:

                                                            my lord shall never rest,
I'll watch him tame, and talk him out of patience;
His bed shall seem a school, his board a shrift,
I'll intermingle everything he does
With Cassio's suit.

(III.iii.22-6)

However briefly, Desdemona here is unmistakably proposing to exhibit the stereotypical behaviour of the shrew, and laying herself open, in Renaissance ideologies, to appropriate punishment: unlike Emilia, who obeys her husband even when (as in the case of the handkerchief) his commands are morally dubious, Desdemona is, at least in some sense, wilful.⁴⁴ She will combine immoderate talking, a standard attribute of both shrew and loose woman, with inappropriate sexual behaviour, for she will talk her husband ‘tame’—i.e. reduce him to impotence. The appearance of such a word in such a context must surely remind us that it might well be Desdemona herself who would be seen, like Kate, as in need of ‘taming’ here. Once again, a gesture of unguarded generosity on Desdemona's part exposes her to serious charges of deviancy and tempts patriarchal wrath.

Desdemona's campaign continues along these unpromising lines when she mounts her attack on Othello. Not satisfied with some signs of softening on his part, she warns him:

                                                  nay, when I have a suit
Wherein I mean to touch your love indeed,
It shall be full of poise and difficulty,
And fearful to be granted.

(III.iii.81-4)

What is notable here is Desdemona's insistent use of indicative and future tenses, rather than conditionals: she confidently anticipates a time when she will make such a demand of Othello, and she puts it to him as a test of his love. It is perhaps unsurprising that Othello's own use of the future tense in a rather similar situation suggests that he is already mentally prepared to fail that test:

Excellent wretch, perdition catch my soul,
But I do love thee, and when I love thee not,
Chaos is come again.

(III.iii.92-4)

The Arden editor's note says that it would be wrong to read any suggestion of futurity into ‘when’, but the language clearly invites it, as it does again when Othello tells Iago ‘I'll see before I doubt, when I doubt, prove’ (III.iii.194). Certainly he listens to Iago, but his own psychic processes are at work as well. When Iago reminds him, ‘She did deceive her father, marrying you’ (III.iii.210), he immediately assents, ‘And so she did’ (III.iii.212), and he is soon exclaiming, ‘Even then this forked plague is fated to us, / When we do quicken’ (III.iii.280-1). Othello here mentally links conception and cuckoldry, just as when he later tells Desdemona:

This argues fruitfulness, and liberal heart;
Hot, hot, and moist, this hand of yours requires
A sequester from liberty; fasting and praying

(III.iv.34-6)

He has, moreover, given his wife a handkerchief which, in one version of its origins, was deliberately designed to secure the marital chastity of his own parents, which he clearly imagines as threatened (though in that relationship it was the husband who was thought likely to stray). For Othello, it seems, the love of fathers and mothers is likely to deteriorate, and yet sex is always likely to turn husbands and wives into fathers and mothers. Perhaps this is why this play which includes three childless women figures its births as monstrous and hellish, so that even Emilia hopes that Othello's distraction is caused merely by state-matters, ‘And no conception, nor no jealous toy / Concerning you’ (III.iv.154-5).

Emilia in general functions in sustained counterpoint to her husband, defending female sexuality in contrast to his attacks on it, and asserting stoutly, ‘But I do think it is their husbands' faults / If wives do fall’ (I.viii.86-7), a clear and sane articulation of a perspective that does not always seek to make women a focus of blame. Her words will take on a bitter ring, however, in the play's final demonstration of how even Desdemona's best intentions are always vulnerable to indictment: after his wife has sought to exculpate him of her murder, Othello cries savagely, ‘She's like a liar gone to burning hell, / ‘'Twas I that killed her’ (V.ii.130-1). While Emilia dies echoing another ‘lie’ of Desdemona's that was nevertheless profoundly expressive of truth, the Willow Song, Othello reverts to a scale of values that marriage with Desdemona had perhaps barely disrupted. He exclaims:

                              Behold, I have a weapon,
A better never did itself sustain
Upon a soldier's thigh

(V.ii.260-2)

‘Weapon’, the idea of ‘itself sustain’ and ‘thigh’ might all suggest, in another context, the penis; but for Othello, the sword has perhaps always been better. His brief marital career disastrously concluded, he reclaims his preferred identification as a soldier. Even when he joins Desdemona on the bed, the presence of Emilia robs the scene of intimacy.

Obviously, events have been precipitated by Iago's lies and manipulations. Nevertheless, the seeds of trouble have been clearly there from the beginning, and they may well be thought to lie primarily in the conflicting sets of expectations which characterise Othello's and Desdemona's approach to their relationship. It is notable that, when Othello comes to believe in Desdemona's infidelity, he finds that he has a positive superfluity of causes to which to attribute her apparent change of heart: he imagines that his colour, his age, his cultural difference and his military background all separate him from her, and indeed in terms of the cultural norms espoused by Shakespeare's own society and in many of his other plays, he has a point. Othello does seem to be old to marry—older than any of the Shakespearean characters who make a successful marriage, with the highly dubious exception of Claudius in Hamlet, and perhaps Paulina and Camillo in The Winter's Tale. He has, notably, not renounced his military career, which Bertram in All's Well needed to do before he could commit himself to his wife; he does indeed find that his differing cultural expectations cause him problems in understanding the probable causes of his wife's behaviour, though he himself does not really understand this until it is too late. And having married as it were in a cultural vacuum, without the support of either her family or his, they find that they have no one to turn to when difficulties begin—there is only Emilia, whose advice is well meant but ill-informed, and Iago, who is out to destroy them.

Shakespeare need not have been a racist to suggest that a marriage between an older black soldier and a young white Venetian woman was unlikely to survive in such circumstances and in such a setting—he need only have been a realist.⁴⁵ He presents Othello as, in many respects, a dignified, noble figure, and Desdemona as loving and lively; he lets us see what attracted each to the other. But marriage in Shakespeare is above all a social relationship as well as a personal one, and where the social infrastructure is lacking the personal interaction is simply not enough to sustain the bond. If Othello at the outset seems to think that marriage has surprisingly little to offer to him personally, what is abundantly clear throughout the play is that his relationship with Desdemona has nothing at all to offer to the society around it—indeed its first effect was to kill her father, a potent emblem of its failure to feed the community and the needs of the patriarchy.

The patriarchy, however, is amply revenged, for in one sense the failure of the relationship could be said to be little to do with purely personal traits, but to be radically conditioned by the very success with which both Othello and Desdemona had previously inhabited their socially allotted roles. So complete is their interpellation within these that they, as characters, seem completely unaware of the extent to which they conform to such sets of expectations; but on the metatheatrical level the audience is repeatedly reminded of the extent to which both Othello and Desdemona have, as it were, their parts already scripted for them. When Othello speaks of the supposedly authentic, personal experiences of his journeys, the audience will actually hear echoes of the fictional accounts of Sir John Mandeville; when Desdemona talks of ‘taming’, she as a character is oblivious to any intertextual echoes of the earlier play, but we as audience are acutely alive to them. Indeed every act of close reading depends on the belief that the hearer can perceive resonances and themes in the speech of which the fictional speaker himself must be supposed to be unaware. In the cases of Othello and Desdemona, what I think I have heard is unconscious adherence to a psychological pattern which is not purely personal, but social, for it seems to me that each has internalised, in different ways, a set of ideas about female behaviour which read it as always already likely to be deviant.

In Othello's case, this has manifested itself as a fear of commitment—with, arguably, a concomitant fear of consummation and perhaps of conception—and, despite his protestations of not being easily jealous, an underlying readiness to believe in the slanders that a man, and a comrade, tells him about his wife. In Desdemona, the effects seem to me to be both more subtle and more pernicious. Quite unintentionally, Desdemona throughout the play consistently behaves in ways that allow of a hostile construction: openly called ‘whore’, she is also vulnerable to charges of deceit, of being a bad daughter, of being sexually voracious, and of being a shrew; even after her death, when the audience, who are fully convinced of her innocence of adultery, have seen her nobly attempt to shield her husband from blame, we must still hear that husband call her a liar—and indeed we have to agree with the accusation, in a technical sense at least. What Desdemona does, then, is repeatedly find herself inhabiting, as if to the manner born, all the most reductively misogynistic stereotypes that her culture has to offer.⁴⁶ Whenever she attempts to speak, she is, unwittingly, ‘spoken by’ a socially authorised counter-discourse which labels her and demonises her. If it is true to say that the marriage between Othello and Desdemona is doomed partly by a culture clash, then her culture is, ultimately, at least as deeply implicated as his in the destruction of love and hope. Indeed what one sees in all these four tragedies, where discourses of misogyny and of extreme gender differentiation can be so rapidly and so effectively mobilised, is the self-destructiveness of a cultural reflex that, by demonising feminity, disables men too, dooming both individuals and the mutuality of marriage, along with the green world of fertility and renewal which it represents. Nevertheless, marriage does not function in this tragic world as an ideal to be unequivocally defended: as the greed of the Macbeths, the incest of Claudius and Gertrude, and the elements of disparity between Othello and Desdemona so clearly show, marriage, if it is to be worth anything at all, must always function as a social unit, rather than as a purely personal relationship.

Notes

1. Joanna Montgomery Byles, ‘Tragic Alternatives: Eros and Superego Revenge in Hamlet’, in New Essays on Hamlet, ed. Mark Thornton Burnett and John Manning (New York: AMS Press, 1994), pp. 117-34, p. 122.

2. Carol Thomas Neely also comments on how ‘In the tragedies, maidens become wives’ (Broken Nuptials, p. 22) and on the extent to which ‘disrupted marriages are prominent in many of the tragedies’ (p. 1). Marilyn French similarly remarks that ‘Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies have similar events’ (Shakespeare's Division of Experience [London: Jonathan Cape, 1982], p. 35), while Lawrence Danson comments that ‘in comedy the catastrophe is a nuptial; in tragedy and romance, the nuptial is prologue’ (‘“The Catastrophe is a Nuptial”: The Space of Masculine Desire in Othello, Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale’, Shakespeare Survey 46 (1994), pp. 69-79, p. 74.

3. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. T. J. B. Spencer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), I.1.20-2. All further quotations from the play will be taken from this edition and reference will be given in the text.

4. Naomi Conn Liebler, Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 150. Another interesting instance of reading the play in terms of ritual is to be found in Barbara Everett, Young Hamlet: Essays on Shakespeare's Tragedies (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1989), discussing the importance of Lammas (p. 115).

5. David Lindley, The Trials of Frances Howard (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 40.

6. Diane Elizabeth Dreher, Domination and Defiance: Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), p. 60. Christopher Brooke further notes that ‘Shakespeare unrolls at length the betrothal and prepares elaborately for the consummation; but makes shift with the ceremony off-stage’ (The Medieval Idea of Marriage [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991], p. 246).

7. Jonathan Goldberg, ‘Romeo and Juliet's Open Rs’, in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 218-35, p. 219.

8. Dympna Callaghan, ‘The Ideology of Romantic Love: The Case of Romeo and Juliet’, in The Weyward Sisters: Shakespeare and Feminist Politics, ed. Dympna Callaghan, Lorraine Helms and Jyotsna Singh (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994), pp. 59-101, p. 78. This essay offers a particularly interesting discussion of the play's representation of marriage.

9. Thomas Moisan, ‘“O Any Thing, of Nothing First Create!”: Gender and Patriarchy and the Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet’, in In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama, ed. Dorothea Kehler and Susan Baker (Metuchen, NJ and London: The Scarecrow Press, 1991), pp. 113-36, p. 120.

10. See David Lindley, The Trials of Frances Howard (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 166, for contemporary assumptions about this link.

11. Lynda E. Boose, ‘The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 97 (1982), pp. 325-47, p. 329.

12. Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 10.

13. Terence Hawkes, Meaning by Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 1.

14. Roland Mushat Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 79 and 82-3. Sharon Ouditt discusses critical approaches to Gertrude which focus on the inappropriateness of her remarriage in ‘Explaining Woman's Frailty: Feminist Readings of Gertrude’, in Theory in Practice: Hamlet, ed. Peter J. Smith and Nigel Wood (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996), pp. 83-107, p. 102. See also Lisa Jardine, Reading Shakespeare Historically (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 45, on the play's representation of second marriage.

15. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), I.ii.9. All further quotations from the play will be taken from this edition and references will be given in the text..

16. Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters, p. 72. Diane Elizabeth Dreher (Domination and Defiance: Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare [Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986], p. 61), sees the nunnery scene as a ‘distorted marriage ceremony … an exchange of vows at this point would constitute a legal marriage’.

17. For interesting comment on Gertrude, see for instance Kay Stanton, ‘Hamlet's Whores’, in New Essays on Hamlet, pp. 167-88, esp. p. 167.

18. Naomi Conn Liebler, Shakespeare's Festive Tragedy (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 178. See also Liebler's discussion of tainted marriage rites and the dissolution of distinction, pp. 186-7; Boose (‘The Father and the Bride’, p. 329), points out the extent to which the nunnery scene constitutes a parody of a marriage.

19. Bridget Gellert Lyons, ‘The Iconography of Ophelia’, English Literary History 44 (1977), pp. 60-74, p. 72.

20. See Stanton, ‘Hamlet's Whores’, p. 176.

21. Diane Elizabeth Dreher sees Lear as feeling an ‘emotional need [which] has long been recognized in Christian marriage ceremonies’ (Domination and Defiance, p. 72); see also Boose, ‘The Father and the Bride’, p. 333. Everett (Young Hamlet, p. 79) comments interestingly on Lear's later characterisation of himself as ‘like a smugge Bridegroome’, a term that may perhaps be prompted in part by resentment of the play's actual bridegroom.

22. For this idea, see Coppélia Kahn, ‘The Absent Mother in King Lear’, in Rewriting the Renaissance, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 33-49, p. 39; Kahn rightly credits the insight to Lynda Boose, who in turn has also commented elsewhere on the absence of mothers from the Lear and Gloucester families (‘“The Getting of a Lawful Race”: Racial Discourse in Early Modern England and the Unrepresentable Black Woman’, in Women, ‘Race’ and Writing in the Early Modern Period, ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 35-54, p. 45. On absent mothers, see also Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, p. 104.

23. William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen, 1972), I.i.11-23. All further quotations from the play will be taken from this edition and references will be given in the text.

24. See, for instance, Kathleen McLuskie, ‘The Patriarchal Bard: Feminist Criticism and Shakespeare: King Lear and Measure for Measure’, in Political Shakespeare, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 88-108, p. 99. Dreher (Domination and Defiance, p. 71) thinks that Lear prefers Burgundy as a candidate, because he sees him as less of a rival).

25. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. G. K. Hunter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), I.2.14-15. All further quotations from the play will be taken from this edition and references will be given in the text.

26. As John Wain asks in his introduction to Macbeth: A Casebook (Macmillan: Basingstoke, 1968, p. 12), ‘Are the green boughs held by the soldiers … related to the May-day dances?’ Malcolm Evans similarly points to the relationship between Macbeth and the forms of popular ritual (Signifying Nothing, 2nd edition [London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989], p. 136).

27. At III.4.141-3, Macbeth uses a series of phrases which may, perhaps, be suggestive in this connection, saying to his wife, ‘Come, we'll to sleep. My strange and self-abuse / Is the initiate fear that wants hard use. / We are yet but young in deed’. Though OED does not record ‘self-abuse’ as signalling ‘masturbation’ until 1728, its close proximity to ‘hard use’ and ‘deed’, which often has a sexual connotation, might perhaps be thought to work towards an implication of a sterile sex act here. It is at any rate noticeable that Macbeth invites his wife to bed specifically to ‘sleep’.

28. See, for instance, Carol Rutter, Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare's Women Today (London: The Women's Press, 1988), p. 56. Philip Franks' autumn 1995 production at the Sheffield Crucible had an empty pram by the stage throughout.

29. Young Hamlet, p. 103.

30. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy [1904] (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1974), p. 316.

31. For the otherness of women in this play, see also Jonathan Goldberg, ‘Speculations: Macbeth and Source’, in Howard and O'Connor, eds, Shakespeare Reproduced, pp. 242-64, p. 258.

32. For a suggestive discussion of this see Adelman, Suffocating Mothers p. 135. Adelman suggests that Lady Macbeth may in fact be offering to feed the spirits, if they take her milk as their gall.

33. Anny Crunelle-Vanrigh, ‘Macbeth: Oedipus Transposed’, Cahiers Elisabéthains, 43 (April 1993), pp. 21-33, p. 28.

34. Coppélia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 191.

35. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Nicholas Brooke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 19.

36. See, for instance, Pierre Janton, ‘Othello's Weak Function’, Cahiers Elisabéthains 7 (April 1975), pp. 43-50; T. G. A. Nelson and Charles Haines, ‘Othello's Unconsummated Marriage’, Essays in Criticism 33 (1983), pp. 1-18; Norman Nathan, ‘Othello's Marriage is Consummated’, Cahiers Elisabéthains 34 (1988), pp. 79-82; Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, p. 66; and Arthur Kirsch, Shakespeare and the Experience of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 23.

37. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 247. For comments along similar lines, though dealing with other parts of the play, see, for instance, Danson, ‘“The Catastrophe is a Nuptial”’, p. 74, and Marianne Novy, Love's Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare (Chapel Hill, NC and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), p. 131.

38. Michael Hattaway, ‘Fleshing his Will in the Spoil of her Honour: Desire, Misogyny, and the Perils of Chivalry’, Shakespeare Survey 46 (1994), pp. 121-35, p. 132.

39. William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. M. R. Ridley (London: Methuen, 1958; reprinted Routledge, 1989), I.ii.21-8. All further quotations from the play will be from this edition and reference will be given in the text.

40. Mark Thornton Burnett comments that ‘Marriage is envisaged by Othello as an unexciting responsibility and an unattractive inevitability’ (‘“When you shall these unlucky deeds relate”: Othello and Story-telling’, in Longman Critical Essays: Othello, ed. Linda Cookson and Bryan Loughrey [Harlow, Essex: Longman, n.d.], pp. 61-71, p. 69).

41. Some critics share this tendency: see, for instance, Margaret Loftus Ranald, Shakespeare and His Social Context (New York: AMS Press, 1987), pp. 135-52, on Desdemona as failing to adhere to Renaissance ideals of wifely conduct.

42. Michael D. Bristol, ‘Charivari and the Comedy of Abjection in Othello’, in True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and His Age, ed. Linda Woodbridge and Edward Berry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), pp. 75-97.

43. Juliet Dusinberre, in Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1975), argues that Desdemona's general outspokenness would be regarded as justifiable within Puritan views on marriage (p. 84); Mary Beth Rose, in The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), argues that ‘Desdemona presents herself to the Senate as a hero of marriage’ (p. 138).

44. I am indebted here to a lively debate on the electronic discussion group SHAKSPER, initiated by Jacob Goldberg and with subsequent contributions from David Evett, Daniel Lowenstein, Linda Vecchi, Richard Bovard and Sydney Kasten.

45. Virginia Mason Vaughan comments on the extent to which Desdemona's elopement deviated from the normal marriage practices of the Venetian aristocracy, which were highly formalised and endogamic (Othello: A Contextual History [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], p. 28).

46. Virginia Mason Vaughan comments ‘Desdemona is a true Venetian; true, that is, to the city's whore image by being unchaste, deceitful, and given to vice’ (Othello, p. 32).