[In the following essay, King traces a pattern of musical metaphors and connotations in Othello that underscores the disintegration of the harmonious partnership between Othello and Desdemona. She contends that Iago's two songs, the military drums and trumpets, and Desdemona's “willow song” are integral to the play's narrative, characterization, and thematic development.]

                                                            O, you are well-tuned now,
But I'll set down the pegs that make this music,
As honest as I am.

(2.1.177-9)

Iago's commentary on the reunion of Othello and Desdemona on the island of Cyprus is more than just a fanciful statement of his intentions. Iago as a character deliberately sets out to destroy the harmony of love, but Shakespeare, the dramatist, presents his words and actions as part of an extensive pattern of musical images and effects. This pattern works integrally as a structural theme. It unites and expands the ideas of the play and provides the essential terms of reference for both aesthetic and moral judgement.

Othello probably makes more use of music than any other Shakespeare tragedy. Iago's two songs and Cassio's wind music are essential to the plot, while the ‘willow song’ expresses Desdemona's situation and her state of mind with accurate and agonizing economy.

Previous studies have demonstrated that Shakespeare knew and was using well-established musical theory.¹ They show that the play contains passages which spring from such commonplaces as the superiority of string over wind instruments, the existence of ‘music that cannot be heard’ (the music of the spheres), and the continuing debate as to whether the performance of music was a suitable occupation for anyone who claimed to be a gentleman.²

Renaissance ideas of musical harmony were inextricably bound up with order and structure. Following the ideas of Pythagoras and Plato, Renaissance scholars believed that the simple mathematical proportions 1:2, 2:3, 3:4, which result in the intervals of perfect harmony in ancient music—the octave, the perfect fifth, and the perfect fourth—were also responsible for the beauties and numerical structure of the universe, from the ‘dancing’ of the tuneful planets to the form and constitution of man. Discounting folk-song and ballads, audible music on earth was considered as falling into two categories—public, outdoor ceremonial music played on ‘loud’ instruments by professional musicians and bandsmen (military trumpeters, drummers, and the like) and private, indoor music played on ‘soft’ stringed instruments (virginals, lutes, viols etc.), sometimes by professional musicians but often by members of the upper classes for the amusement of themselves and their friends. The music in Othello exists in all these forms: actual and metaphorical, public and private, folk-song and art-song. It is an essential part of the way Shakespeare illustrates both the initial harmony of Othello's and Desdemona's love and the manner in which they combine their official public roles with their private lives.

As a military commander and general, Othello's life is punctuated by musical sounds—mostly played on trumpets and drums—designed to regulate life in the garrison and give orders on the battlefield. During the course of the play, the trumpets announce the arrival of first Othello and later the Venetian senator, Lodovico, before summoning all the characters to a state dinner. The trumpet is a reminder of state, ceremonial, and duty. A public instrument, it was used for broadcasting information to large numbers of people and in contemporary art and iconography it had understandably become the identifying symbol for personifications of Fame.³

The first reference to trumpets in the play, however, comes from Desdemona. She uses it with the connotations of both ‘fame’ and the ‘military life’ to express her love for her husband and to convince the Venetian Senate that it is fitting that she should accompany him to Cyprus:

That I did love the Moor to live with him,
My downright violence and storm of fortunes
May trumpet to the world.

(1.3.248-50)

The daughter ‘never bold’ that her father has described, demonstrates instead that she is the true partner of a man of action. She is no simple retiring maiden but a woman who is well aware of the consequences of her actions. She knows that Othello is a public figure and that by marrying him, particularly in such a ‘violent’ manner, she is likely to attract public attention to herself. She is not prepared to stay at home, a ‘moth of peace’, but is anxious to share her husband's life and to take an active role in it. Indeed, both lovers see their relationship as a reciprocal one, a partnership of mutual help and interest, and in these early scenes their descriptions of each other find similar and complementary expression:

She loved me for the dangers I had passed,
And I loved her that she did pity them.

(1.3.167-8)

Just as Desdemona demands to share her husband's life, so Othello—perhaps even more remarkably—is willing for her to do so. Throughout the first half of the play in every speech of more than half-a-dozen lines, he manages to combine with perfect ease the most earnest consideration of state affairs with equally earnest and loving reference to his wife. He too is anxious that she should accompany him on his expedition to Cyprus, and adds his voice to her request:

And heaven defend your good souls that you think
I will your serious and great business scant
For she is with me.

(1.3.266-8)

Shakespeare twice adopts the point made in Cinthio's Introduction to Gli Hecatommithi,⁴ the major source of the play, that ‘he who wishes to form a true judgement of beauty must admire not only the body, but rather the minds and habits of those who present themselves to his view’. Thus, while Desdemona ‘saw Othello's visage in his mind’ (1.3.252), Othello wishes that the Senate be ‘free and bounteous to her mind’ (1.3.265) by allowing her to go with him to Cyprus. It is the similarity of thought and outlook, the bounty, the generosity, and the courage which each finds in the other that is important. This sharing of roles is further indicated when they meet after the storm on the island of Cyprus. He greets her as the soldier-hero and she him as the supporting lover: ‘My fair warrior … My dear Othello’ (2.1.180). The rarity of their thinking is emphasized by observations made by other characters on the same theme which are markedly rooted in sexual stereotypes. Cassio's description of Desdemona as ‘Our great Captain's Captain’ (2.1.74) is a recognition of Desdemona's powers in the terms of perfect woman-on-a-pedestal which in no way detracts from Othello's purely masculine authority, whereas Iago's very similar line, ‘Our General's wife is now the General’ (2.3.305), has exactly the opposite effect—and deliberately so. Instead of a unity in partnership, Iago depicts for his audience just another henpecked husband, harassed by an appalling wife.

From his observations about women to his thoughts on reputation, Iago consistently follows and exploits conventional beliefs about the way the world works. He thinks as Everyman thinks and Everyman is therefore bound to hold him in respect: ‘It would be every man's thought, and thou art a blessed fellow to think as every man thinks’ (2 Henry IV, 2.2.52). It is this that makes him so powerful. Audiences do not stop to disapprove of his scheming—they are too excited by it—and every character in the play (not just Othello and Desdemona) is taken in by it because in the context of normal social behaviour everything he says appears reasonable and credible even when it is most lying and pernicious.

And what's he, then, that says I play the villain?
When this advice is free I give and honest,
Probal to thinking.

(2.3.325-7)

In supporting Desdemona's request to accompany him to Cyprus, Othello quite clearly is not thinking like Everyman, and it is Iago's constant task throughout the long scenes of 3.3 and 3.4 to manipulate him into thinking that way. Even after vowing to kill her for the personal injury supposedly done to him, Othello is still able to appreciate not only Desdemona's charm but also her immense capability—although, because now obsessed with her body, he can only regard her as a concubine:

O, the world has not a sweeter creature; she might lie by an emperor's side and command him tasks.

(4.1.181)

It is evident from Iago's relationship with his own wife and from his views expressed in the rhyming game he plays with her and Desdemona that his ideas on what might be possible within marriage are very different from Othello's. In his own marriage, petty wrangling and jealousy are the norm and he is thus understandably determined to destroy the harmony and accord that his black commanding officer has found. His manner of doing this is evidenced by his behaviour in the landing-in-Cyprus scene, which in many respects is a paradigm of the entire play since it shows the acute strategy with which he responds to different but similar situations. The stage picture of an overly courteous Cassio taking Desdemona ‘by the palm’ and kissing his fingers (in a manner still practised by Italians wishing to impress and still regarded with suspicion and derision by Englishmen) is instantly replaced by that of Othello and Desdemona in each other's arms. Iago is the commentator on both. He perverts the former innocent though overdone courtesies to a gross anal sexuality:

Yet again your fingers to your lips? Would they were clyster-pipes for your sake.

(2.1.175)

However, when he likens the embrace between Othello and Desdemona to a well-tuned string instrument in the passage with which this article began, he is describing no more than the truth. He demonstrates that he is capable of appreciating the extent and quality of Othello's and Desdemona's love—an essential prerequisite to attempting to destroy it.

God's hand tuning the string of the universe is a fairly common Renaissance and Shakespearian emblem. In Troilus and Cressida (1.3.109) Ulysses uses the image of an untuned string to express political anarchy, and in Richard II the deposed king languishing in prison, considering the ‘music of men's lives’ (5.5.44ff), mentions the discord which results from a ‘disordered string’—one that is plucked out of time with the others. Iago does not mention a specific instrument, but the lute, a solo instrument with courses of strings tuned in consonant pairs so that two strings are plucked together and sound as one, lends itself admirably to an image of union in marriage. Such an instrument also forms the central image in Sonnet 8—one of the initial sequence urging love, marriage, and procreation—because the sound produced when both identically pitched strings are plucked together is far fuller and more resonant than either would produce singly:

Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering;
Resembling sire and child and happy mother,
Who, all in one, one pleasing note do sing.

The difficulty of tuning a lute and the horrible sound that can result even when only one string in one of those pairs is out of tune had become commonplace by the time Webster was writing The Duchess of Malfi:

                                                            'twas just like one
That hath a little fingering on the lute
Yet cannot tune it.

(2.4.34-6)

One of the ways in which Iago cultivates his appearance of honesty is by pretending to the practice of harmony, and it is through music that he effects the vital first stage of his plot, the undoing of Cassio. Despite Iago's disparaging remarks, Othello has undoubtedly made the right decision in appointing Cassio to the lieutenantship. As an ‘arithmetician’ (1.1.19) he should know something about recent revolutionary developments in the art of fortification.⁵ The defence of Mediterranean islands at this time centred on their fortified ports, thus, rather than requiring a soldier who can ‘set a squadron in the field’ (1.1.22), Othello needs someone to design and build the new star-shaped defences and to calculate the track of tunnels for the laying of mines. Cassio is not, however, completely ‘bookish’, for during the course of the play he proves himself to be an accomplished swordsman. Both Othello and the Venetian Senate have the greatest confidence in him, and at the end of the play the governorship of the island falls to him quite naturally. Unfortunately, he has two weaknesses—a bad head for drink and a basic insecurity regarding his position in society. He presents himself as a gentleman from Florence but is slightly uneasy in the role. In his description of Desdemona to Montano (2.1.61-87), and in his manner of greeting her when she lands in Cyprus, he is seen striving just a little too hard to be courtly, and it is this excess which gives Iago his chance: ‘Ay, smile upon her, do. I will gyve thee in thine own courtship’ (2.1.170). This social unease is further emphasized by his ambivalent attitude to Iago's songs on the Court of Guard. He is beguiled by the music but he is also wary of it. He is not sufficiently sure of himself and his own social standing to risk behaving in what some might consider to be an improper manner.

CASSIO.
Fore God, this is a more exquisite song than the other.
IAGO.
Will you hear't again?
CASSIO.
No; for I hold him to be unworthy of his place that does those things.

(2.3.91ff)

Roderigo has already drunk ‘potations pottle deep’, and Iago has ‘flustered with flowing cups’ the three remaining guards (2.3.47ff). By persuading Cassio to accept a drink, staging a rowdy drinking song and organizing a fight, Iago has corrupted the entire ‘Court and Guard of safety’. A single drunken man might be overlooked but not a noisy brawl involving all members of the watch. Othello has decreed that the island should be free to celebrate both the sinking of the Turkish fleet and his own marriage—again a perfectly balanced combination of the public and private life—but the islanders can only do this in safety if those on watch are keeping to their duty. The decree is made in the form of a direct address by Othello's herald to the audience—not a stage rabble as in most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editions⁶—thus bringing that audience into some measure of active involvement in the situation.

The original audience cannot have been ignorant of the spectacular advances of the Turks in the Mediterranean, as they were a matter for public concern and well documented.⁷ Cyprus had in fact fallen to the Turks in 1571 and Hakluyt's Voyages includes an eyewitness account written by a Venetian nobleman.⁸ He tells how the Venetian garrison of Famagusta eventually surrendered after a siege lasting nearly six months on promise of a safe conduct to Candy (Crete), but that the promise was not kept. Almost the entire garrison was murdered or taken as slaves and one of its commanding officers skinned alive.

Appended to The Mahumetane or Turkish History published in 1600 are two short tracts, ‘The Narration of the Wars of Cyprus’⁹ and ‘The Causes of the Greatness of the Turkish Empire’. This last attempts an analysis of the reasons for Turkish success and concludes that, in contrast with the Turkish forces, the Christians at all levels of command were badly disciplined and too preoccupied with their own differences and jealousies:

we are desperately diseased, even to the death, our soldiers being mutinous, factious, disobedient, who fashioned by no rules of discipline, contained in duty by no regard of punishment … which is as common to the captains and commanders as the private soldiers, a number of whom studying their particular revenge, their private ambition or (than which with men of war there is naught more odious) their servile gain, betray their country, neglect their princes' command and without executing aught worthy their trust and employment cause often impediments through malicious envy of another's glory, to whatsoever might be worthily executed.

In this context, it becomes clear that Shakespeare's play is very much more than the ‘most famous story of sexual jealousy ever written’.¹⁰ Othello's and Desdemona's love is presented as quite inseparable from their management of state affairs, while Iago's jealousy of both Cassio and Othello, and the factious quarrel which he engineers on the Court of Guard, is part of an examination of the ways in which personal rivalries can affect and be affected by wider political issues. This marks a departure from Cinthio's story, in which the geographical change of scene from Venice to Cyprus is incidental and bears no stated military or political significance, and where no mention is made of the Moor's ability in his public life. Shakespeare presents a man who has been entrusted with a large measure of the safety and commercial interest of the Venetian state, and who, for the first half of the play, seems capable of fulfilling that trust. Iago's plan demands a reversal of Othello's values of love and loyalty, and the first stage of this plan is effected by the drinking song directed against Cassio.

The song instructs the drinkers to forget their public duty to the wider issues and longer time-scheme of the state and to concentrate instead on the personal pleasure that one man can snatch during a single lifetime:

A soldier's a man;
O, man's life's but a span;
Why, then, let a soldier drink.

(2.3.66-8)

Cassio makes one last attempt to refer back to the public situation by proposing ‘the health of our General’, which Montano is quick to second; but Iago prevents the drinking of the toast by launching into a second song, ‘King Stephen’.

This song is a single stanza from the middle of a traditional ballad entitled ‘Bell, my wife’ or ‘The old cloak’ and survives in Bishop Percy's manuscript. The nineteenth-century editors of the manuscript, Furnivall and Hales, describe ‘a controversy between the spirits of Social Revolution and Social Conservatism. The man is anxious to better himself, no longer content to tend cows and drive the plough; his neighbours are rising and advancing around him; the clown is not now distinguishable from the gentleman.’¹¹ The song takes the form of a conversation between the shepherd and Bell, his wife. She wants him to get up and tend the cow, taking his old cloak about him; he wants to improve his attire—and his social standing—and go to court. Eventually, to save an argument, he gives in.

It is one of Bell's stanzas stressing the need for order and degree that Iago is singing, but in the ballad the king in question is King Harry.¹² Iago's change to King Stephen is interesting. Holinshed stresses that Stephen was a generous king but that he was directly responsible for the terrible civil wars that raged throughout his reign, ‘having usurped another man's rightful inheritance’. He had sworn an oath of allegiance to King Henry I's queen, the Empress Maud, but broke this oath because of an ‘ambitious desire to reign’. His arrival in England had been marked by a terrible thunderstorm which ‘seemed against nature and therefore it was the more noted as a foreshowing of some trouble and calamity to come’. Holinshed also explains Stephen's unusual generosity and his decisions not to collect taxes as a deliberate policy of buying support in preparation for the inevitable wars with Maud.¹³ Stephen's reign was, and still is, notorious as a time of civil strife and anarchy, yet Stephen himself has been placed within Bell's format of modesty and worthiness. Iago has turned Bell's words into a praise of anarchy and dubious virtue, while as always retaining his appearance of honesty. Thus Iago uses apparent harmony in order to start the process of setting down the pegs that make the music between Desdemona and Othello. By this time almost half the play has passed, and as yet Iago has not even started to work on Othello himself.

Having been undone in music, Cassio ironically reinforces his fall from favour in an attempt to create harmony. He takes it upon himself to provide the traditional musical awakening for the bride and groom on the morning after the wedding night and has hired musicians to perform this aubade. These musicians are playing wind instruments or ‘pipes’. This is a neat visual and aural pun on the ‘clyster pipes’ that Iago has already said should be at Cassio's lips, and the bawdy jokes made by the Clown on the nature of anal wind music in this scene indicate that the connection is deliberate:

CLOWN.
O, thereby hangs a tail.
MUSICIAN.
Whereby hangs a tale, sir?
CLOWN.
Marry, sir, by many a wind instrument that I know.

(3.1.8-11)

Whatever the exact identity of these musical pipes—and this of course would depend on the particular resources of the company—the instruments must have double reeds (like modern oboe reeds) which produce a nasal sound: ‘Why, masters, ha' your instruments been in Naples, that they speak i' th' nose thus?’ (3.1.3). Instruments of this kind might be blown directly, or attached to a bag (i.e. a bagpipe). The latter might be implied by the Clown's line ‘put up your pipes in your bag’ (3.1.19), while the phallic imagery could be emphasized visually by means of the distinctive upturned shape of the crumhorn.

Cassio behaves correctly in considering that music is necessary for the occasion, but he displays an inordinate lack of taste in his choice of such music. The Clown's comments indicate that it is coarse and crude and not suitable as an aubade for the newly married pair, and reports that the General would only be happy if the musicians could play music that cannot be heard. Of course neither the Clown nor the musicians take this to mean any more than that they should pack up and go away, but the line refers back to Othello and his wishes. He enjoys music. Even at the height of his rage he can be moved by the recollection that his wife ‘sings, plays and dances well’ (3.3.189). In desiring music that cannot be heard he is demanding the music of the spheres which is inaudible to the ears of fallen man but which alone would be a suitable accompaniment to his love for his wife.¹⁴

As the audible music in the play gets noticeably falser, so both Othello and Desdemona find it progressively more difficult to effect the harmony of true partnership. As her husband becomes unaccountably difficult and distant, she admits to Cassio that her ‘advocation is not now in tune’ (3.4.124). Similarly, as Iago drives in the wedge that alienates him from his wife, Othello finds that without her the very sounds intrinsic to his life no longer have any meaning for him:

                                                            O, now for ever
Farewell the tranquil mind, farewell content,
Farewell the plumed troops and the big wars
That makes ambition virtue. O, farewell.
Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, th' ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance, of glorious war.
And O ye mortal engines whose rude throats
Th' immortal Jove's dread clamours counterfeit,
Farewell. Othello's occupation's gone.

(3.3.351-61)

The farewell to the type of music which, according to classical theory,¹⁵ had been thought capable of raising men to noble acts, the ‘spirit-stirring drum, th' ear-piercing fife’ emphasizes Othello's rejection of his public duty and demonstrates that just as with Cassio on the Court of Guard, the attack on the private man is resulting in the destruction of the public one. The terror of his situation lies in the fact that he and Desdemona had been so close that they had become indeed the ‘beast with two backs’, the hermaphrodite image of perfect love of which Aristophanes speaks in Plato's Symposium (189ff) and which Iago parodies in sexual terms in the first scene of the play (1.1.118). Thus casting off Desdemona is like trying to cut himself in half—it inevitably leads to his own destruction. Everything that he had ever lived for, including his public life established before he met Desdemona, is gone. He feels that he no longer exists, and refers to himself in the third person as ‘Othello’. The long ‘temptation’ scene in which this speech occurs is preceded by a deceptively short and seemingly insignificant scene (3.2) in which Othello enters with his aides, dispatches a letter to the Senate, and then departs to inspect the fortifications. This is his last act of official business in the play, and it now becomes apparent that this six-line scene has marked the climax of Othello's career and that its position as the central scene of the play is a fitting one.

The fact that we, the audience, have already witnessed Iago's skilful manipulation of Cassio and Roderigo enables us to accept that his successful transformation of Othello is possible. The internal construction of act 3, scene 3 as a whole dramatizes the difficulty of Iago's task and shows the tightrope of expediency and luck on which he is walking. This scene is the longest in the play, and consists of constantly varying groups of characters: Desdemona, Cassio, and Emilia, with Othello and Iago entering later; Othello and Desdemona with Iago looking on; Othello and Iago; Othello; Othello and Desdemona with Emilia; Emilia with the handkerchief; Emilia and Iago; Iago; Iago and Othello. Throughout the scene, Othello keeps reiterating his belief in his wife's fidelity, a belief which is always first welcomed and then deftly punctured by Iago. By the end of the scene, the man who had been seen combining his domestic and public life with such ease—receiving and giving orders with Desdemona by his side, controlling his men and inspecting defences with a quiet because absolute authority—can now think of nothing except his wife's body and her supposed faithlessness, which eventually he comes to ‘see’ as clearly as if he had indeed the ‘ocular proof’ which he demands from Iago. He is tortured as much by the true picture of her virtues as by the false picture of her adultery, for, as Iago implies, those very qualities which attracted him must now be being used to attract others.

OTHELLO.
Hang her. I do but say what she is: so delicate with her needle, an admirable musician—O, she will sing the savageness out of a bear—of so high and plenteous wit and invention.
IAGO.
She's the worse for all this.

(4.1.183-7)

Iago's disparagement and suspicion of Desdemona's musical and other qualities is almost immediately challenged by the sound of a Venetian trumpet. Desdemona enters, fulfilling both her official duties and her family ones by having received Lodovico who has brought a letter from the Venetian Senate and who is also her kinsman. The entire incident and her precedence is a threat to Iago's plan, and he abruptly interrupts their conversation, thus demonstrating that he now has Cassio's place and rank. The situation then turns back to Iago's advantage, for Desdemona seizes the opportunity to talk about Cassio, and Othello, whose language even while accepting the letter consisted of words with normally sexual connotations—‘I kiss the instrument of their pleasures’ (4.1.213)—now uses this ‘instrument’ merely as a prop to cover his eavesdropping on Desdemona's and Lodovico's conversation. Finally, private passion conquers duty altogether as Othello strikes his wife in public.

Desdemona is now naturally distraught. Their next meeting, the so-called ‘brothel scene’ (4.2), ends with an agonizing promise of reconcilation in which for a few moments it seems that Othello was about to accept Desdemona's protestations of innocence. His simple insult, ‘Impudent strumpet’ (l. 82), gives way to a progression of questions—‘Are not you a strumpet?’, ‘What, not a whore?’, ‘Is 't possible?’—which seems to display an increasing uncertainty concerning her guilt. This then prompts Desdemona's plea to heaven to forgive them both, which is probably best delivered as a renewed attempt to stress the equality of their relationship and the truth of their mutual love. For a brief moment he seems to concur in this image of forgiveness—‘I cry you mercy, then’—but this is an illusion. The admission of his mistake is merely ironical and the phrase which follows is a rejection of her and everything that she has just said: ‘I took you for that cunning whore of Venice / That married with Othello’ (4.2.90-1). For a second time he casts her away, and for a second time he calls himself by his name ‘Othello’. After he has gone, she summons Iago and asks him to mediate for her. The trumpets sound for an official dinner and he prompts her back to her public role with the promise ‘all things shall be well’ (4.2.172). The biblical echoes in this phrase are ironic. She has just been kneeling to him as Othello had knelt earlier,¹⁶ and Iago enjoys the role of father confessor.

In the next scene, as Lodovico takes his leave, Othello ‘looks gentler than he did’, but Desdemona, still with no clear conception of what is wrong, is haunted by the old song her mother's maid Barbary sang when her lover ‘proved mad, / And did forsake her’—the ‘willow song’.

The major significance of this scene is not so much that the song is sung as that it is broken off. The story of the song is too close to Desdemona's own situation to be borne, and she first muddles the order of the stanzas before finally stopping altogether, unable to go on. By this stage in the play, Desdemona is the only character who is still ‘in tune’. It is vital therefore that her song should be well performed. She is an accomplished musician and must be seen to be so, otherwise the double collapse of her song is meaningless or merely embarrassing.

One of the two possible settings of the song identified by Sternfeld¹⁷—and the one which bears the closest resemblance to the words as given in the Folio—contains some striking harmonic modulations in the lute accompaniment which greatly increase the impact of the tune, while cadences in the lute part sound through rests in the vocal line to give the effect of sighs. The music therefore performs the task of expressing Desdemona's misery. The boy actor is not required to contribute his own emotions. All he is asked to do is to sing and play—the music will do the rest.

The song has two important dramatic functions. It displays Desdemona's emotional state and manipulates the audience's response to her. In her previous conversation with Emilia she has reiterated her beliefs concerning her marriage to Othello, but the audience, who alone have the benefit of knowing exactly what is happening, may well be feeling that Emilia's worldly view is more sensible and pragmatic. The song has the effect of stripping away the accidentals in the current situation and reminding us not only of what love might be but also of the nature of Othello's and Desdemona's love before Iago set to work. It speaks directly to the hearts and minds of the audience, and has the effect of making us appreciate the absolute truth of what Desdemona represents as opposed to the worldly truth of Emilia's observations. This reaction to her is exactly the same as that which Othello has always experienced. He recognizes that she can ‘sing the savageness out of a bear’ and is afraid of the power of her words. He refuses to allow the rational force of words to interfere with his irrational passion. He is afraid that she will render him incapable of performing the task that he has set himself—the necessary, rightful killing of a woman who has wronged him: ‘I'll not expostulate with her lest her body and beauty unprovide my mind again’ (4.1.200). But it is not her body and beauty which weaken his resolve, for he comes to her while she is asleep and kisses her, exulting in her beauty but still quite firm in his intentions. The act of expostulation of course necessitates talking to her, and this he is not prepared to risk. When she wakes, he stops her expression of pity and tenderness for his overwrought state and prevents her explaining her motivations and actions. She realizes her danger, and her line ‘Kill me tomorrow, let me live tonight’ (5.2.84) is a last attempt to restore sanity to the situation. She knows that if only she could talk to him, all things would indeed be well; a brief moment is all that is needed, ‘But half an hour … But while I say one prayer’ (ll.86-8). But the entire play is organized so that there is not one scene which presents the two of them talking privately together, and part of the horrific quality of the ‘brothel’ scene arises from the fact that he has set up the interview in order to prove her guilt and is not talking to her but at her.

Othello takes his revenge, only to learn immediately that it is not after all complete and that Cassio is not dead: ‘Not Cassio killed? Then murder's out of tune / And sweet revenge grows harsh’ (5.2.118-19). For Othello at this instant, imbued with Iago's false music, harmony could only be achieved if both adulterous lovers had died.

It is left to Emilia, whose part is greatly strengthened in the Folio, to take over the feminine strength of the play after Desdemona's death¹⁸ to bring Othello to a recognition of the truth. With the dawning of understanding, Othello's language reverts to normal. For the first time since he came to suspect his wife he considers himself as a soldier rather than simply an aggrieved husband. Now, again, he is able to talk with some ease about the two things which were dearest to him—his profession and his love—but this time his rejection of Desdemona has been absolute and irreversible and for a third time he refers to himself in the third person: ‘Man but a rush against Othello's breast, / And he retires. Where should Othello go?’ (5.2.273-4), and then again some ten lines later: ‘That's he that was Othello; here I am.’

The very construction of Othello's final speech serves to underline all that is lost in the tragedy. His reminder that he has done the state some service gives way to personal thoughts both of Desdemona, the ‘pearl’ he has thrown away, and of his own nature. These are then combined as he repeats the service to the state which he had once performed in Aleppo by killing a foreigner who had harmed a Venetian.

And say besides that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by th' throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him—thus.

(5.2.355)

On one level this is a vengeful triumph for Iago's white racism: the ‘old black ram’ has been justly punished for tupping the white ewe (1.1.90). On another, Iago as devil has achieved his ends, for according to conventional Christian belief both of his victims are damned—she for perjuring herself in laying claim to the sin of suicide (5.1.127) and he for the double sin of murder and self-murder. But neither of these possible views can be uppermost in the audience's mind. Emilia's swan-song, the ‘willow, willow’ refrain, reminds the audience of Desdemona's song and the dramatic reality which it created. The fact that love is unrequited is also proof that love exists. The protagonists of the play may be dead, but for those left alive—including those members of the audience who did not hang up their brains along with their hats on entering the theatre—the possibility of love remains. The tune that Iago was calling—the declaration that love is ‘merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will’ (1.3.333)—is broken not with the torture that Lodovico has ordered but by the results of what he himself has engineered. The ‘tragic loading of the bed’ is a positive reminder not only of what might have been, but of what might be.

Notes

1. F. W. Sternfeld, Music in Shakespearian Tragedy (London, 1963); Lawrence Ross, ‘Shakespeare's “Dull Clown” and Symbolic Music’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 17 (1966).

2. Much of the confusion stems directly from Aristotle, The Politics, e.g. ‘We think it not manly to perform music, except when drunk or for fun’ (Book 8.4.7). ‘it is plain that music has the power of producing a certain effect on the moral character of the soul, and if it has the power to do this, it is clear that the young must be directed to music and must be educated in it’ (Book 8.5.9): trans. H. Rackham (London, 1932).

3. Cf. Geoffrey Chaucer, The House of Fame Book 3; ll.1237ff, ed. F. N. Robinson (London, 1957).

4. Ed. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. vii (1973), p. 240.

5. E.g. the bastioned trace developed by Italian engineers at the beginning of the sixteenth century—extremely thick walls with projecting bastions able to withstand artillery bombardment.

6. Cf. Capell, ‘A street. People moving in it. Trumpets. Enter a Herald attended.’ Malone, ‘Enter a Herald with a proclamation; People following.’

7. Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages and Discoveries of the English Nation (London, 1589, enlarged 1598-1600); The Mahumetane or Turkish History, trans. R. Carr et al. (London, 1600); Richard Knolles, The General History of the Turks (London, 1603; subsequent editions 1610, 1621, 1631, 1638).

8. Hakluyt, vol. 2.1.121ff (1599).

9. The Mahumetane or Turkish History, Hh 4^v.

10. Publicity for RSC production of Othello, 1985.

11. Ed. J. W. Hales and F. J. Furnivall, Bishop Percy's Folio Manuscript (London, 1867-8), vol. 2, p. 320.

12. Another version of the ballad, printed in Allan Ramsay's Tea Table Miscellany (London, 1740), pp. 105-7, gives ‘King Robert’.

13. Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles, 2 vols (1577), pp. 365-94.

14. Ross, Shakespeare Quarterly, 17, pp. 117-18. I am grateful to Mr Andrew Pinnock for drawing my attention to the fact that the Musician's reply ‘We have none such’ is also a contemporary musical joke, since ‘Nonesuch’ was the name of a popular tune.

15. Modes, rhythms and instruments were all considered to be capable of affecting the human spirit either for good or bad; cf. Aristotle, Politics, 8.5.8-9.

16. 3.3.464.

17. The London Book, British Library Add. MS 15117, f. 18.

18. E. A. J. Honigmann, ‘Shakespeare's revised plays: King Lear and Othello’, The Library Series 6, vol. 4 (London, 1982), p. 159.

All Shakespearian references are taken from the Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander (Glasgow, 1951).