All’s Well That Ends Well

Act Four

By Dennis Abrams

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Act Four:  The two plots move forward.  Disguised as enemy soldiers, the Dumaine brothers ambush Parolles and interrogate him. When he nonchalantly slanders his comrades, they remove his blindfold and unmask themselves. In the meantime, Diana has persuades Bertram to swap his ring for one of her own (which is, in fact, actually Helena’s), to seal the agreement that he will visit her chamber at midnight. All goes according to plan, and Helena – who by now has spread rumors of her own death – leaves for France in the company of the Widow Capulet and Diana, intending to tell the King everything.  However, believing Helena to be dead, Lafew has begun negotiating with the Countess to marry his daughter off to the now “widowed” Bertram.

Before the questions about Helena and Bertram can be answered (if they ever are), All’s Well moves away from its main subject to its minor (but still important) subplot, invented by Shakespeare, in which Parolles is shown to be as untrustworthy towards his apparent friends as we, the audience, have realized he is toward everyone else. His fellow soldiers conceive a ruse that, disguised as Russian troops, they will capture Parolles, blindfold him, threaten him with execution, and by doing so expose him as a lying coward. All goes according to plan (as does Helena’s): Parolles gives up all the military secrets he had sworn to keep without so much as pausing for breath, and is equally open with his opinions regarding his fellow soldiers – much to their private displeasure.  They then discover that he is carrying a letter addressed to Diana, warning her of Bertram’s intentions. Still fooled, Parolles freely explains it all:

My meaning in’t, I protest, was very honest in the behalf of the maid, for I knew the young Count to be a dangerous and lascivious boy, who is a whale to virginity, and devours up all the fry it finds.

The irony is, naturally, that the inveterate liar Parolles is nothing other than “honest” here, as Bertram well – and furiously knows. And though at first sight this scene seems to sit outside the main curve of the play, as the action develops it becomes evident how closely it informs and reflects on the central plot: in this topsy-turvy world a professional con-artist can as easily tell the truth as a woman can guarantee her husband’s virtue by arranging him an affair.

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From Bloom:

“Our uneasiness [with Helena and the bed trick] out to augment when we ponder Helena’s language as she anticipates her impending union with the gulled Bertram:

     But, O strange men!

That can such sweet use make of what they hate,

When saucy trusting of the cozen’d thoughts

Defiles the pitchy night; so lust doth play

With what it loathes for that which is away.

But more of this hereafter.

The superb rancidity of this resides in its pragmatism; does literature afford a cooler, more dispassionate female view of male lust? Helena’s pungent phrase, ‘saucy trusting,’ will reverberate in Measure for Measure [My Note:  Of “from” depending on how you date the plays] when the hypocrite Angelo equates murder with illicit procreation: ‘Their saucy sweetness that do coin heaven’s image/In stamps that are forbid.’ ‘Saucy’ in each case means both ‘insolent’ and ‘lascivious,’ and the strength of Helena’s insight turns, in part, upon her mingled sense that male lust is at once pungent, undifferentiated, and misogynistic. Though Helena promises us ‘more of this hereafter,’ we will not (alas) listen to her again upon this matter. As she tells us instead, the entire play must inform us, even as she cites its title:

    Yet, I pray you;

But with the word: ‘the time will bring on summer’ –

When briars shall have leaves as well as thorns

And be as sweet as sharp. We must away;

Our wagon is prepar’d; and time revives us.

All’s well that ends well; still the fine’s the crown.

Whate’er the course, the end is the renown.

This deliberate mishmash of proverbs is properly bittersweet, and is intended to justify Helena’s audacity, itself a sauciness we need not underestimate. The bed trick is one thing, and fair game if you want to play it, but is it not a very different matter to pretend death, so as to grieve the foster mother Countess, the King, and LaFew? Helena’s tactics here prelude those of the more-than-dubious Duke in Measure for Measure, when he cruelly deceives Isabella and everyone else as to Claudio’s death. Not that Helena, like the Duke, is a sadist, but rather that she is relentless in her drive to make all’s well for herself by ensnaring the inedible Bertram. This quest must strike the audience as singularly unwholesome, and Shakespeare gives every sign that he is well aware of our ambivalence, not toward Helena but toward her unrepentant mission.”

From Garber:

“In the Countess’s household there is a clown, Lavatch, whose jests and requests early on anticipate some of the play’s darker themes. In a part written for Robert Armin, who played the more complex fools of Shakespeare’s middle years (replacing the more broadly comic Will Kemp), Lavatch sings a song about Helen of Troy and recites another snatch of verse about marriage and cuckoldry, and thus encapsulates both Bertram’s story and Parolles.’ Lavatch’s desire to marry “Isbel the woman’ because he is ‘driven on by the flesh’ may remind audiences of the similarly cheerful and carnal fool Touchstone in As You Like It. (‘Isbel’ is a nicely down-market version of the far more formal, and far more virginal Isabella, immortalized in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure.)

How does the riddling love plot cohere with the much broader comedy of Lavatch and the downfall of the ‘jackanapes/With scarfs,’ the posturing Paroles? In a general sense Bertram’s adventures and Parolles’ are both concerned with honor and dishonor, and with the loss of the material embodiments of honor: a woman’s virginity (in the love plot) and the regimental drum (in the comic plot of Paroles and the soldiers). Whether or not the morphological analogy between drum and hymen (both are membranes stretched across cylindrical openings) would have been noted by an early modern audience, the symbolic role of each is fairly clear, and is emphasized by their juxtaposition in All’s Well. Both become issues in act 3, where we learn from the Widow that Bertram seeks to ‘[c]orrupt the tender honour of a maid,’ her daughter Diana, and only a few lines later that Parolles, returning from battle is melancholy and ‘shrewedly vexed’ because he has lost ‘our drum.’ Is the theft of virginity like the theft of a drum?

The plot against Paroles, hatched by two French lords to prove to Bertram that Paroles is, as one of them puts it, ‘a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise0maker, the owner of no one good quality worthy of your lordship’s entertainment’ is to ‘let him fetch off his drum, which you hear him so confidently undertake to do.’ They will pretend to be enemies, ‘bind and hoodwink’ him, and see whether they can persuade him to betray Bertram and ‘deliver all the intelligence in his power against you.’ The lords regard this as a joke: ‘O for the love of laughter hinder not the honour of his design; let him fetch off his drum.’ But the resonant word ‘honour’ attaches repeatedly to both the exploit and the drum itself, described by Bertram to Paroles, in deliberately inflated terms, as ‘this instrument of honour.’ Both before and after the drum scene the word ‘honour’ is used to describe Diana’s virginity, for which she will likewise hoodwink Bertram into bargaining in the episode of the ring trick and the bed trick:

Diana:

Give me that ring.

Bertram:

I’ll lend it thee, my dear, but have no power

To give it from me.

Diana:

Will you not, my lord?

Bertram:

It is an honour ‘long to our house,

Bequeathed down from many ancestors,

Which were the greatest obloquy I’ th’ world

In me to lose.

Diana:

My honour’s such a ring.

My chastity’s the jewel of our house,

Bequeathed down from many ancestors,

Which were the greatest obloquy i’ th’ world

In me to lose…

…………..

Bertram:

Here, take my ring.

My house, mine honour, yea my life be thine,

And I’ll be bid by thee.

Her detailed instructions to him – he is to remain with her only an hour in bed and not speak to her; she will put another ring on his finger and thus perform a ceremony of betrothal – are described by Bertram as promising ‘a heaven on earth, ‘but when she is left alone on the stage she makes clear her intentions to ‘cozen him that would unjustly win.’

In a conversation between the two French lords, the onstage audience, the planned seduction is again juxtaposed to the trick to be played upon Paroles, whom Bertram now describes as ‘a counterfeit model’ who ‘deceived me like a double-meaning prophesier.’ Bertram seems completely oblivious of the fact that words like ‘counterfeit,’ ‘deceived,’ and, indeed, ‘double-meaning prophesier’ might be applicable to himself in his dealings with Diana. But as we have noted, Diana is herself adept at double meanings, and her riddling language, which is to culminate in the final revelations scene, begins as soon as she has struck her bargain: ‘He had sworn to marry me/When his wife’s dead; therefore I’ll lie with him/When I am buried.’ Although these lines represent an early modern commonplace, they are uncannily reminiscent of that other young ‘Capulet’ woman, Juliet (‘If he be married/My grave is like to be my wedding bed.’)

The two hoodwinking scenes (Bertram in the dark with a woman he thinks is Diana; Paroles ‘muffled’ – that is, blindfolded – thinking he has been captured by the enemy) are thus set up to read of interpret each other. Paroles’ hoodwinking scene is rendered more comic, and also more pertinent, by the fact that this posturing captain, Bertram’s ‘devoted friend’ and a ‘manifold linguist’ whose name means ‘words,’ is immediately and completely at a loss for words, since his captors speak a made-up language, which is ‘translated’ by a soldier playing the role of ‘interpreter.’ ‘Porto tartarossa,’ says the Second Lord Dumaine, and the Interpreter translates, ‘He calls for the tortures.’ ‘Boblibindo chicurmurco’ is explained as a command to answer the ‘general’s’ questions. Paroles does so with alacrity, and sells out his friends, offering military information, slandering the two French lords, and revealing not only the story of the seduction, but his letter to Diana urging her to ask Bertram for money in exchange for her favors, and cautioning, ‘He ne’er pays after-debts, take it before.’ Shakespeare has used this comedy of interpretation before, notably in the masque of the ‘Muscovites’ in Love’s Labour’s Lost, where the joke is that the ‘translator’ is translating from English to English. Clearly, however, the anxiety – and pleasure – of multiple (and changing) languages and meanings was a matter of fascination for Renaissance humanists, diplomats, and writers. Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, one of the most celebrated of Elizabethan dramas, ends with a play in ‘sundry languages’ through which the revenge plot is fulfilled:

Hieronimo:

Each one of must act his part

In unknown languages;

That it may breed the more variety:

As you, my lord, in Latin, I in Greek,

You in Italian…

Balthazar:

But this will be a mere confusion,

And hardly shall we be understood…

As in the Spanish Tragedy, so in All’s Well, a surplus of words breeds ‘confusion’ as often as communication.

In the upshot, Parolles, despite his fine scarves and fine words, dwindles to the comic version of King Lear’s ‘thing itself,’ fundamental mankind:

Paroles:

     Simply the thing I am

Shall make me live.

We might compare this to the bawd Pompey’s ‘Truly sir, I am a poor fellow that would live’ in Measure for Measure, but Paroles’ affinity with Shakespeare’s other braggart soldiers is equally strong. His high-sounding apostrophe ‘Rust, sword; cool, blushes’ directly recalls the equally ludicrous sonnet-writing soldier Don Armado (‘Adieu, valor, rust, rapier; be still, drum: for your manager is in love’ [Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1.2 160-161]) And his determination to thrive at any coast – ‘Paroles live/Safest in shame; being fooled, by fool’ry thrive,/There’s place and means for every man alive’ – links him with Ancient Pistol, departing from the wars to find a dishonest livelihood at home:

     From my weary limbs

Honour is cudgeled. Well, bawd I’ll turn,

And something lean to cutpurse of quick hand.

To England will I steal, and there I’ll steal.

‘Simply the thing I am/Shall make me live’ is a bleak maxim, but one that we encounter not infrequently in Shakespeare’s plays, and we must admit, however grudgingly, that there is an admirable energy in these elemental characters, who – like their more glorious fellow – never die.”

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And finally, from Tanner:

“But Parolles really reveals himself in the episode of his supposed attempt to heroically recapture the lost drum.  He quickly realizes he has made a boast he cannot possibly carryout, and he turns on – his own tongue. ‘I find my tongue is too foolhardy…Tongue, I must put you into a butterwoman’s mouth, and buy myself another of Bajazet’s mule if you prattle me into these perils.’ Iago calculates every cutting, killing word – Parolles will simply say anything if he thinks it might please or impress on a particular occasion. We have the expression – his tongue ran away with him; Parolles is a cautionary example of the vagabond tongue which will stray, roam, run, rush anywhere – because his utterance is not rooted in, or motivated by, anything except an instinct to smooth, mollify, and get by. It duly ‘prattles him into perils.’ And when he thinks he has been captured by foreign enemies (it is apt that he is completely taken in by figures gabbling actual nonsensical gibberish – in a play in which quite a lot of the speech moves towards the edges of comprehensibility), Parolles reveals, as it were, his true colours: ‘Let me live, sir, in a dungeon, i, th, stocks, or anywhere, so I may live.’ It is the eternal cry of the picaro. It is not surprising that he adds, in an aside, ‘I’ll no more drumming. A plague of all drums!’

But he attains his zenith, or nadir – hard to say which – when, after his scream of betrayal and calumny of everything and everyone, his fellow officers ‘unmuffle’ him,  and he stands exposed in what you might think was the last degree of ignominy. His reaction? ‘Who cannot be crushed with a plot?’ There is no other line quite like this in the whole of Shakespeare. To be sure, Falstaff dusts himself off fairly breezily after he realizes he has been made ‘an ass’ in Merry Wives. But his attitude is more resigned – you win some, you lose some, and as you get older you lose more. But Parolles is another creature entirely. It is not that he is beyond shame. He has clearly never known what shame is – or guilt, or morality, or principle, or loyalty, or anything else by which society has tried to bind, and bond, and dignify itself. He is not, certainly not, evil. He is nothing at all. But there he breathtakingly is, demanding to live. His soliloquy, after his fellow officers leave him alone with his disgrace, is uttered, one feels, with a certain placidity and peace of mind, and is in some way definitive:

Yet am I thankful. If my heart were great

‘Twould burst at this. Captain I’ll be no more,

But I will eat and drink and sleep as soft

As Captain shall. Simply the thing I am

Shall make me live. Who knows himself a braggart,

Let him fear this; for it will come to pass

That every braggart shall be found an ass.

Rust, sword; cool, blushes; and Parolles live

Safest in shame! Being fooled, by fool’ry thrive!

There’s place and means for every man alive.

I’ll after them.

If my heart were great – but it isn’t, and that’s that. ‘Simply the thing I am shall make me live’ – it is a far cry from Richard’s ‘I am myself alone.’ It is the difference between heroic, overreaching Renaissance individualism, and an impoverished cluster of the most basic appetites. With Parolles, we could join the mean streets of the twentieth-century city. But he won’t die, and you won’t shake him off – ‘I’ll after them.’ This is the point of his final exchange with Lafew (who can’t resist teasing him – ‘How does your drum?’). Parolles is a supplicant: ‘It lies in you, my lord, to bring me in some grace, for you did  bring me out. (V, ii, 49-50). (Bertram will also, shortly, need someone to bring him in some grace.) Lafew at first responds chidingly: ‘Out upon thee, knave! Dost thou put upon me at once both the office of God and the devil? One brings thee in grace and the other brings thee out.’ (Again, a larger theme is glanced at – do, can, humans take on the office of God, and the devil?) But he concludes compassionately: ‘Sirrah, inquire further after me. I had talk of you last night; though you are a fool and a knave you shall eat. Go to, follow’ (V, ii, 51-7). This is part of the final muted mood of this curious ‘comedy’; not, certainly, festive – but nobody, not even the fools and knaves, will starve.

The must succinct comment on Parolles comes from a lord who overheard some of his shameless self-communings (if nothing else, paroles knows himself clearly and unself-deludingly enough) – ‘Is it possible he should know what he is, and be that he is?’. That is the wonder of the man. Not that he is a rogue (nothing new there); but that he seems oblivious to notions of roguery (no wallowing in villainy here, no determined embrace of evil) – he just doesn’t care. It is a little frightening – ethical discourse would be meaningless to him; he is completely unreachable on such matters. Yet there he stands like the rest of us – a hungry human being. But meanwhile, during the Florentine military scenes, Bertram is acquitting himself even more dishonourably. The timing is nice – his fellow captains have set the trap for Parolles and promise Bertram some ‘sport’: ‘When his disguise and he is parted, tell me what a sprat you shall find him.’ (III, vi, 107-8). (It will, of course, be only a matter of time before Bertram’s ‘disguise and he is parted’ as well.) But Bertram first wants to pursue some other sport, with a local lass (Diana).

Second Lord:

But you say she’s honest.

Bertram:

That’s all the fault.

Fault indeed, when a lass should be tiresomely ‘honest’: but whatever happened to the chivalric code, the courtier’s code, the gentleman’s code, all the codes? And the other captains see Bertram, what he is, as clearly as they see through Parolles.

Second Lord:

He hath perverted a young gentlewoman here in Florence of a most chaste renown, and this night he fleshes his will in the spoil of her honor; he hath given her his monumental ring, and thinks himself made in the unchaste composition.

First Lord:

Now, God delay our rebellion!  As we are ourselves, what things are we!

The [words in bold] express a powerful, vehement disgust. This man is a disgrace – he is sunk in spoilt honour. And there is a curious half-echo of the recent comment on Parolles – ‘Is it possible he should know what he is, and be that he is?’: ‘As we are ourselves, what things we are!’ There is a scent here of a sort of weary incredulousness at just how awful humans can be, which lingers in the louring air of the play.

Bertram thinks he is buying Diana’s body by giving her his ‘monumental ring.’ There is such a ring in the original tale; it is one of the wife’s ‘impossible’ tasks to get it off her husband’s finger.  Shakespeare adds a second ring, which, among other things, allows for further complications and attenuations in the last scene (and, not incidentally, allows Bertram to double his ignominy). Rings (female) and drums (male) should symbolize some kind of honour, and Shakespeare brings both into the foreground of his play; not just to point up the always possible struggle between the ring and the drum (and all they stand for), but also to show them both sullied, devalued, degraded. The drum is simply a farcical factor in Parolles’ disgrace. The ‘monumental ring’ should fare better: in Bertram’s own words to Diana when, following instructions, she requests it:

It is an houonr ‘longing to our hose,

Bequeathed down from many ancestors,

Which were the greatest obloquy I’ th’ world

In me to lose.

To which Diana has an unanswerable reply:

Mine honor’s such a ring;

My chastity’s the jewel of our house,

Bequeathed down from many ancestors,

Which were the greatest obloquy i’ th’ world

In me to lose.

So Bertram makes the ‘unchaste composition’ (bargain, arrangement): ‘Here, take my rings./My house, mine honor, yea, my life be thine.’ As Helena predicted he would:

     a ring the County wears,

That downward hath succeeded in his house

From son to son some four or five descents

Since the first father wore it. This ring he holds

In most rich choice; yet, in his idle fire,

To buy his will it would not seem too dear,

Howe’er repented after.

(III, vii, 22-8)

There is something rather awesomely biblical about ‘the first father’: cumulatively, it feels as if there were some ancient, even primal virtue, as well as dynastic honour and paternal potency, mystically lodged in the ring. The more profane and sacrilegious, then, Bertram’s easy surrendering it as part of a dirty deal – ‘to buy his will’ (lust). So much for the regimental drum; so much for the family ring. ‘Obloquy’ indeed (‘obloquy’ – to be everywhere spoken against: there is, indeed, nothing to be said for Bertram by the time Shakespeare has finished with him).

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So…how’s everybody doing?  What are your thoughts on All’s Well?  Is anybody enjoying it?

And as a fun weekend bonus…this Hamlet mashup:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mFZT4gOq8io

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Our next reading:  All’s Well That Ends Well, Act Five

My next post:  Sunday evening/Monday morning

Enjoy. And enjoy your weekend.

All’s Well That Ends Well

Act Three

By Dennis Abrams

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Act Three:  The Countess’s delight on hearing the news of the marriage quickly turns sour when she receives a letter from Bertram declaring that he has fled. Helena announces that she has also received a letter from Bertram, in which he states that he will agree to be her husband only if she removes the ancestral ring from his finger and bears his child – both of which, he boasts, are impossible to accomplish.  Helena reflects that her only option is to disappear, and heads to Italy disguised as a pilgrim. She arrives to mixed news:  Bertram has proved himself to be a brilliant soldier, but he has also been trying to seduce Diana, daughter of the Widow Capulet. (Capulet!)  Revealing her identity to Diana’s mother, Helena suggests the old bed-trick: Diana will agree to sleep with Bertram but will be replaced at the last minute by Helena.  MEANWHILE…Parolles’ boastfulness has irritated the other soldiers so much that the Dumain brothers decide to humiliate him in public.

Back in Act One, Helena, wittily diverting Parolles’ obscene on the idea of virginity had asked him, “How might one do, sir, to lose it to her own liking!”  Her determination to do just that, to take responsibility for losing her own virginity is what drives the second phase of the play’s plot.  (Could this be one idea why historically critics, the vast majority of whom are men, feel uncomfortable with the play and with Helena?)  Like Rosalind in As You Like It, she puts on a disguise in order to get what she wants, but unlike Rosalind remains a woman throughout – her own “cover,” in a rather touching gesture to her “sanctifying” of Bertram at the play’s beginning, is in the cloak of a pilgrim.

But her stratagem requires that she wear that devout costume rather ironically. Once arrived in Italy, she quickly discovers that Bertram has been attempting to seduce the beautiful Diana – and though Diana has so far managed to resist his advances, she is clearly tempted to give in. Pointing out Bertram in the passing parade of soldiers, she sighs, “Tis a most gallant fellow,”

I would be loved his wife. If he were honester

He were much goodlier.

To which it might be replied that Bertram’s problem is too much honesty, not too little – far from pretending to be in love with a wife forced upon him, he takes the first opportunity to flee the country and look elsewhere.

“Honest,” a destructive and dangerous word in Othello (honest Iago indeed), resonates loudly at this point in Shakespeare’s career, and in All’s Well, it is put under unusual pressure. Helena, still in disguise, describes how Bertram’s “poor lady” has a “reserved honesty” (guarded chastity); the Widow speaks of Diana’s “honestest defence” against Bertram’s advances. But Helena’s solution to the problem that afflicts them  both will involve not honesty but cold-blooded, calculated betrayal. Suggesting that Diana agree to sleep with Bertram (but only after he gives in to her demands for his precious ring), Helena advises a covert assignation with him – for which she, not Diana, will turn up.  In the dark Bertram will be none the wiser, and before he knows it, he will have consummated his marriage, given his wife a child, AND surrendered the ring. His scoffing challenge to Helena will have been met, point by point. “Let us essay our plot,” Helena urges the Widow after paying her off,

    which if it speed

In wicked meaning in a lawful deed

And lawful meaning in a wicked act,

Where both not sin, and yet a sinful act.

As the Duke pronounces in Measure for Measure, “the doubleness of the benefit defends the deceit from reproof” (3.1.59-60); or, as Helena (and the play’s title) repeatedly expresses it, “All’s well that ends well; still the fine’s the crown./Whate’er the course, the end is the renown.” (4.4.35-6)

The paradoxes Helena describes – that a deed can be both “lawful” and “wicked,” both “sinful” and virtuous, that something so completely morally questionable can yet “wend well” – are brought into unpleasant proximity through the use of the bed-trick. All’s Well is the second and only other comedy in which Shakespeare uses the device, though numerous plays, including Much Ado, Othello, The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline, take a hard look at apparent sexual deceit by women. The difference here, of course, is that the deceit – though accomplished by Helena with what seems to her only the best of intentions – is completely real. And while commonplace in the tales that were Shakespeare’s sources for both Measure for Measure and All’s Well, on stage the bed-trick can seem like an unrealistic and uneasy technique, a somewhat unsettling combination of intimacy and distance. It implies that sex – even love – is dizzyingly unspecific, so much that Bertram will fail to even realize he has slept with the wrong woman.  (Of course, Shakespeare has often seemed to indicate that who one loves is utterly a matter of chance, and one’s objects of love can be completely interchangeable – see the lovers in Midsummer Night’s Dream as an example).  Some critics have defended it on the same grounds (more or less) as Helena:  it aligns her “liking” with his, and encourages Bertram back to the marital straight-and-narrow despite himself. But for most audiences, including most contemporary ones I’d guess, it remains an immensely troubling scene, maybe even an insurmountable stumbling block, the crowning problem in a play rich with them.  It is so not in the least because, I think, Helena’s love for Bertram seems to raise even more questions than it answers.  Is her contentedness to let her husband sleep with (what he thinks is) someone else a good thing or not? Is her unwavering devotion to such a lunkhead a sign of strength or weakness?  (I am suddenly reminded of Francois Truffaut’s great film, The Story of Adele H, again about the unwavering love and devotion of a woman to a man not at all worthy of it.)  Is she open-eyed to her husband’s many flaws, or is she willfully blind to them? Will her hoped-for triumph over Bertram alter Diana’s recognition that “Tis a hard bondage to become the wife/Of a detesting lord”

From Bloom:

“[Bertram’s] subsequent farewell letter to [Helena] completes both our contempt for him and our enforced complicity with her:

When thou can’st get the ring upon my finger, which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me husband, but in such a ‘then’ I write a ‘never.’

Pragmatically, this is Shakespeare’s invitation to the bed trick, the substitution of one woman for another in the dark, that helps bring about a rancid resolution, both here and in Measure for Measure. The sportive formula – in the dark they are all alike – is partly Shakespeare’s satire upon the male’s propensity scarcely to distinguish one woman from another, but it also carries a burden of bitterness with it. When Isabella accepts the bed trick, with Mariana substituting for her, in Measure for Measure, at the instigation of ‘the Duke of dark corners,’ we are not startled at her moral complicity because, like nearly every other character in the play, she is at least half crazy. But we necessarily are bothered when Helena proposes the bed trick, where she is to be the sexual performer under another person’s name.”

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And to continue from Tony Tanner:

“In the event, Bertram and the other young French blades decide to fight for Florence, but not, we understand, from any feelings of siding with an honourable (or even holy) cause. Boredom seems to be one motive (they ‘surfeit on their ease,’); while Bertram has his own determinants.

     This very day,

Great Mars, I put myself into thy file!

Make me but like my thoughts and I shall prove

A lover of thy drum, hater of love.

The word ‘drum’ does not appear in the translation of Boccaccio’s tale; it occurs more often in this play than in any other by Shakespeare. Such foregrounding of the ‘drum’ might seem to suggest that Shakespeare wants to invoke the martial and heroic values – perhaps to set up a tension between the masculine claims and appeal of Mars against the feminine enticements and allure of Venus. This could make for a perfectly good drama (there is something of it in Antony and Cleopatra), but it is not the case in this curiously skewed play. The next voiced concern about the drum comes from Parolles, as the Florentine army re-enters the city, presumably returning from battle. ‘Lose our drum! Well’. It is his only line in the scene. Now, it was well know that for a regiment to lose its drum (which bore the regimental colours) was some form of ultimate military disgrace. But here, it appears that only Parolles cares about the loss. The general attitude of the soldiers is expressed by the Second Lord, speaking, as it were, without velvet. ‘A pox on’t, let it go, ‘tis but a drum.’ As though only he feels the dishonour, Parolles grandiloquently vows to recover the lost drum. But if empty, say-anything-noisy, Parolles is the only voice speaking up for traditional notions of honour, then one has to feel that the old values are in a parlous state. In the event, his vainglorious boast that he will go and reclaim the drum is used by the other drum-indifferent officers to trick Parolles and catch him out in all his hypocrisies, mendacities, treacheries, betrayals, cowardices, and whatever else of abject baseness a man is capable of. Parolles is caught out all right; but whatever military dignity and honour may have been associated with the drum is entirely sullied and degraded by its being the central point in this farcical exposure of the least brave and heroic of men. But truly, no one here gives a damn about ‘the drum’ and whatever traditions of valour and honour it may symbolize.

Parolles, the manifestly pseudo courtier and soldier, a ‘counterfeit module’ (IV, iii, 104), a creature of ‘scarves’ (military sashes) and ‘bannerets’ is, variously and then comprehensively, seen though, ‘smoked,’ and ‘found’ out. This, it should be noted, is exactly what happens to the one man willing to believe in him and accept him as a companion, if not a guide – Bertram. Where Parolles is literally blindfolded and bamboozled and frightened into revealing the extent of his utter cowardice, Bertram is more subtly, and elaborately hoodwinked before his final, devastating, unmasking. Not for the first time in Shakespeare, the subplot parodies the main one, with worrying, undermining consequences. It becomes something of a question to what extent Parolles and Bertram (for all his true blue blood) might not be two of a kind. But where Bertram, for the most part, seems to alternate between sullen aphasia and a crude or cloddish manner of speaking (Helena is ‘my clog’ – II, v, 55), Parolles, as his name suggests, has any number of words at his disposal. And as we listen to his facile, improvising, opportunistic, unprincipled loquaciousness, we realize that this is a new voice in Shakespeare.

Nadia Fusini has suggested that Parolles is related to the picaro (= rogue, scoundrel) figure who was emerging in Spanish fiction (and probably in European cities) in the second half of the sixteenth century (the first ‘picaresque’ novel is usually taken to be the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes, 1554). The picaro is a deracinated, lower-class figure (an orphan, a discharged servant, some piece of social flotsam), with no family, belonging nowhere, owning nothing, who moves on, takes whatever is going, and lives by his wits. He has no aims, ambitions, or goals – or rather, he has one: survival. In the form of Parolles – I think Nadia Fusini is right – he has found his way onto the Shakespearian stage. Wise old Lafew sees him for what he is from the start – not deserving the title of ‘man.’ ‘Yet art thou good for nothing but taking up, and thou’rt scarce worth’ (II, iii, 208-9). For Lafew, Parolles is totally transparent: ‘thy casement I need not open, for I look through thee. Give me thy hand’ (II, iii, 215-16). (I would just note that this sort of quite unanticipated shirt of tone – you’re obviously a total fraud; shake hands – occurs quite often. Having promised to deny Florence any help, the King immediately says his men can fight for whom they like; similarly, in the last scene, when Bertram offers an incredibly contorted and implausible explanation of his conduct, the King says ‘Well excused’ and then goes on to describe the excuse as totally inadequate – V, ii, 55-72. That somewhat unnerving, unpredictable discontinuity of response is another characteristic of this strange play.)”

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And to expand on Shakespeare’s view of war as seen in All’s Well, this from the introduction to the Oxford edition, by Susan Snyder:

“Indeed, the whole presentation of the war prevents our taking it unproblematically as a stage for heroic achievement. Shakespeare takes over the conflict from his source. He may conceivably have known that Florence and France were allies in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and used that knowledge in inventing the letter from Florence requesting the French King’s assistance; but he does not appear to be referring to any particular hostilities between Florence and Sienna. The grounds of this war seem of now importance when the King offhandedly introduces it (‘The Florentines and Senois are by th’ ears,’ ); he takes no side himself and allows his young lords to use service in either army as an opportunity for the ‘breathing and exploit’ their restless youth makes desirable. In this situation, apparently the means justifies the end: any armed hostilities will do as the scene for martial bravery, and the political issues are irrelevant. Yet in Act 3, Scene 1, the Duke of Florence concludes an exposition of these issues for the French lords and presses them not only for approval of his cause but for an explanation of why France is not giving official support. When the First Lord assures the Duke, ‘Holy seems the quarrel/Upon your grace’s part, black and fearful/On the opposer’ (3.i.4-6), he is presumably being tactful rather than sincere; certainly his disclaimer of knowledge about the French king’s decision not to support Florence is a diplomatic lie, as he was on hand in Act I, Scene 2, when the King acceded to Austria’s request not to intervene. But to raise moral/political issues at all gives more substance to this war than it seems to require for its comic-opera function. Yet we hear no more about the holy cause, and in the next act the hostilities are abruptly ended by a casually mentioned ‘peace concluded’ (4.3.40). We never find out who wins, if anyone does. Even the French lords’ conversation with the Duke undercuts the just-cause notion almost as soon as it is enunciated, for the First Lord smoothes over his king’s lack of co-operation by saying that young Frenchmen will no doubt be quick to follow the colors, not because of the rightness of the cause but for ‘physic’ against to much ease. We are back to ‘breathing and exploit.’ But to bring up and then suppress the causes of the hostilities creates a different effect from just omitting them. The effect is to expose the fictional basis of the war, pointing not to the playwright’s plot device but beyond dramaturgy to the public relations fictions of actual Renaissance princes in justifying armed action, fictions which have to be advanced and ritually assented to but have no compelling reality. If this Florence-Siena war is to be seen as a typically tawdry bit of military adventurism, it is no wonder that the one battle action we hear about is a muddle in which the Florentine cavalry destroyed some of their own soldiers by mistake: friendly fire, in our modern oxymoron. Furthermore, the comment of the First Lord that the calvary’s mistake in charging its own army’s wing was not bad generalship but ‘a disaster of war that Caesar himself could not have prevented’ suggests that the lethal muddle is endemic to the enterprise. That’s war for you. In the army camp as in the court and the bedroom, All’s Well is poised uneasily between the high endeavors of honor, the world of miracle and chivalric romance, and the ‘modern and familiar’ world of Shakespeare’s own time when miracles were past (2.3.1-3) and human motives often less than idealistic.”

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Thoughts on the play so far?

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do6Ggvhx9gg

Our next reading:  All’s Well That Ends Well, Act Four

My next post:  Thursday evening/Friday morning

Enjoy.

All’s Well That Ends Well

Act Two

By Dennis Abrams

Act Two:  The King agrees to Helen’s treatment and to her request that if she succeeds, he will guarantee her the husband of her choosing.  He rapidly improves under her care, and summons all his lords so that she can make her choice. When she picks Bertram, however, he scornfully turns her down, refusing to touch a low-born doctor’s daughter.  And even though the King orders him to wed, Bertram decides to leave the marriage unconsummated and escapes to the Italian wars, accompanied by his disreputable companion, Parolles.

The King, obviously, is at first suspicious of Helena’s claims to be able to use her father’s wisdom to cure him, but when she offers to submit herself to death if her powers fail, he becomes convinced – or at the very least, convinced enough to give it a try.

And while his medical advisers have informed him that “labouring art” has little chance against the course of nature, Helena seems to offer him something different – the kind of “immortal” power that the Countess claims was invested in her father. There is something undeniably magical about this “Doctor She,” as Lafeu remarks to the King:

     I have seen a medicine

That’s able to breathe life into a stone,

Quicken a rock, and make you dance canary

With sprightly fire and motion…

(And a question for the group:  Note the scene when the King enters with Helena after she has cured him – there is this odd exchange between Parolles and Lafeu:

Parolles:  Mort du vinaigre! Is not this Helena?

Lafeu:  Fore God, I think so.

Lafeu’s response is just as puzzling as Parolles’ nonsensical oath.  How can he be learning for the first time that the King’s savior is the young women he had met earlier at Roussillon, when he himself introduced her into the royal presence in Act 2, Scene 1?  Some commentators have attributed it to irony, or a change in dress and mood after her success that transforms the Helena of old – others have suggested that the “Doctor She” who presents herself in court in Act 2 Scene 1 is in disguised and so is not recognized at that time by Lafeu.  So what do you think – disguise?  Or, is she just a “different” woman than the woman who enters in Act 2?)

There is one man, though, and only one, who refuses to give in to Helena’s powers.  When the King grants her “power to choose” a husband from among his lords as his reward for her “magic,” Bertram obstinately refuses to take part:

Bertram:

My wife, my liege? I shall beseech your highness,

In such a business give me leave to use

The help of mine own eyes.

King:

         Know’st thou not, Bertram,

What she has done for me?

Bertram:

        Yes, my good lord,

But never hope to know why I should marry her.

Bertram’s disgusted, snobbish explanation, that he will not “debase” his nobility by being forced to marry a “poor physician’s daughter,” is unappealing at best, and is part of what has earned him a consistently bad press; but, as always, Shakespeare muddies the moral water.  Looked at from Bertram’s perspective, it is the honest response of a man being forced to play along, to play a role in someone else’s bizarre fairy tale. Though Helena has brought life to the King, in Bertram’s eyes, what faces him is a life sentence of marriage to a woman he does not love.

But Bertram has little choice but to consent, although no sooner is he married than he announces his intention to leave France immediately and head off to the Tuscan wars. He leaves the marriage unconsummated, a state of affairs he has every intention to preserve, vowing in a letter to the Countess that ‘I have wedded her, not bedded her, and sworn to make the ‘not’ internal.’  (3.2.21-2)  His callous pun (“not eternal for “knot eternal”) does not impress his mother, but his boastful crowing message to his wife proves altogether more fateful:  ‘When thou can’st get the ring upon my finger, which shall never come off,” he writes, “and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father to, then call me husband.” (3.2.57-9). Helena’s quest to make those words come true will exercise all her drive, intelligence, and ingenuity, but she never swerves from her goal.

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From Bloom:

“Much admired by George Bernard Shaw as an aggressive, post-Ibsenite woman, Helena has little laughter in her; and so is not very Shavian. She is formidable indeed, well-nigh monomanical in her fixation upon the glittering emptiness of Bertram. Since her high-handedness in obtaining him is so outrageous, we can wonder why we are not moved to some sympathy for him, despite the usurpation of his choice by Helena’s alliance with the king, who simply threatens the young man into an arranged marriage. Humanly, Bertram has been wronged to an extreme, he is the prize set by Helena as her fairy-tale reward for curing the King of France. This ought to be abominable, but since Bertram is abominable, we are not distressed. Shakespeare’s art in handling Helena’s outrageousness is extraordinary; she carries off her weird project with verve and sprezzatura:

Bertram:

I cannot love her nor will strive to do’t.

King:

Thou wrong’st thyself if thou should’st strive to choose.

Helena:

That you are well restor’d, my lord, I’m glad.

Let the rest go.

‘Let the rest go’ is wonderful, in its admixture of despair and cunning, since Helena knows, as does the King, that the royal honor and power alike are at stake. Provoked, authority speaks out in tones that prophesy the admonishing God of Milton’s Paradise Lost:

Obey our will which travails in thy good;

Believe not thy disdain, but presently

Do thine own fortunes that obedient right

Which both thy duty owes and our power claims;

Or I will throw thee from my care for ever

Into the staggers and the careless lapse

Of youth and ignorance; both my revenge and hate

Loosing upon thee in the name of justice,

Without all terms of pity.

Bertram’s revenge, after he has capitulated, is properly childish: ‘I’ll to the Tuscan wars and never bed her.’ The play’s most poignant moment, at the close of Act II, juxtaposes Bertram’s petulance and Helena’s dignified despair:

Helena:

     Sir, I can nothing say

But that I am your most obedient servant.

Bertram:

Come, come; no more of that.

Helena:

     And ever shall

With true observance seek to eke out that

Wherein toward me my homely stars have fail’d

To equal my great fortune.

Bertram:

    Let that go.

My haste is very great. Farewell. Hie home.

Helena:

Pray sir, your pardon.

Bertram:

     Well, what would you say?

Helena:

I am not worthy of the wealth I owe,

Nor dare I say ‘tis mine – and yet it is,

But, like a timorous thief, most fain would steal

What law does vouch mine own.

Bertram:

     What would you have?

Helena:

Something, and scarce so much; nothing indeed.

I would not tell you what I would, my lord.

Faith, yes.

Strangers and foes do sunder and not kiss.

Bertram:

I pray you, stay not, but in haste to horse.

Helena:

I shall not break your bidding, good my lord.

He is the wealth she owes (owns), sexually speaking, but his rejection of her renders a ‘timorous thief,’ longing to steal what is only legally hers. The starts and stops of her voice here are immensely artful, and restore much of our fondness for her, if not her judgment.”

From Garber:

“The play is often compared to a fairy tale, and with good reason. It follows the general pattern of what is sometimes called the ‘Loathly Lady’ story, familiar from Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale.’ A woman despised by her haughty knight (in Chaucer, because she is old and ugly; in All’s Well because she is not a nobleman’s daughter) knows the answer to a crucial, lifesaving question. Once she has provided the answer, she gets to choose her husband. (In Chaucer, the young knight, known for his aggressive behavior toward women, must learn ‘what women most desire’ in order to save his own life; in All’s Well, the life-and-death issue is the illness of the King, for which Helena provides the cure.)  The husband first despises and rejects his wife, but soon learns that he is wrong to do so. Once he accepts her as she is, the lady is transformed, and she fulfills his fantasies as well as her desire. The Countess’s doubts about Helena’s chances of success in curing the King – ‘How shall they credit/A poor unlearned virgin…” (1.3.225-226) – are echoed by the King himself, but they are deftly refuted by Helena in terms that both revisit the theme of virginity and anticipate the bed trick:

King:

Upon thy certainty and confidence

What dar’st thou venture?

Helena:

     Tax of impudence,

A strumpet’s boldness, a divulged shame;

Traduced by odious ballads, my maiden’s name

Seared otherwise…

The King affects to hear a stronger voice within hers – ‘Methinks in thee some blessed spirit doth speak/His powerful sound within an organ weak’ – and whether this is the voice of her father (as Isabella in Measure for Measure claimed to hear her father’s voice in her brother’s) or that of heaven, it clearly does the trick. Shortly, in one of those reporting scenes that would become a Shakespearean specialty in the late romances, we hear Lafew, Parolles, and Bertram discussing the cure of the supposedly incurable king:

Lafew:

They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless. Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors, ensconsing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.

Parolles:

Why, ‘tis the rarest argument of wonder that hath shot out in our latter times.

Bertram:

And so ‘tis.

The same language of ‘wonder,’ that fundamental emotion of the mode of romance, had informed Lafew’s initial conversation with the King, introducing ‘Doctor She,’ the miracle-working Helena:

Lafew:

     I have spoke

With one that in her sex, her years, profession,

Wisdom and constancy, hath amazed me more

Than I dare blame my weakness…

………..

King:

Being in the admiration, that we with thee

May spend our wonder too, or take off thine

By wond’ring how thou took’st it.

But to Bertram and Parolles the identity of the wonder worker is itself astonishing (“[I]s not this Helen?’) and the ceremony of husband-choosing that follows her triumphal entry with the cured and newly powerful King a cause for consternation.

It is worth pausing for a moment on the stage management of the scene, bearing in mind that Bertram regards himself as too exalted in birth to marry a humble physician’s daughter, even if the knowledge at her command is life-bestowing. Shakespeare situates the loyal Lafew onstage as a spectator, where he can see but not hear. Helena addresses herself to four nameless ‘lords’ one by one, and each expresses an eager willingness to be her choice in marriage. But Helena, of course, has another lover in view. Helena turns each of them down, while Lafew mistakes what he is seeing for their rejection of her (‘Do all they deny her? An they were sons of mine I’d have them whipped.’), setting the stage for Bertram’s indignant refusal:

     I know her well:

She had her breeding at my father’s charge.

A poor physician’s daughter, my wife? Disdain

Rather corrupt me ever.

The King’s vigorous reply speaks directly to the questions of moral and ethical worth, rank, and social distinction:

‘Tis only title thou disdain’st in her, the which

I can build up. Strange it is that our bloods,

Of colour, weight, and heat, poured all together,

Would quite confound distinction, yet stands off

In differences so mighty…

He intends to supply both ‘title’ and a generous dowry: ‘Virtue and she/Is her own dower; honour and wealth from me’). But Bertram refuses point-blank: ‘I cannot love her, nor will strive to do’t.’

Critics have differed as to their assessment of Bertram’s response, some finding him churlish, others, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, expressing empathy:

‘I cannot agree with the solemn abuse which the critics have poured out upon Bertram in All’s Well That Ends Well. He was a young nobleman in feudal times, just bursting into manhood, with all the feelings of pride of birth and appetite for pleasure and liberty natural to such a character so circumstanced. Of course he had never regarded Helena otherwise than as a dependant in the family…Bertram had surely good reason to look upon the king’s forcing him to marry Helena as a very tyrannical act. Indeed, it must be confessed that her character is not very delicate, and it required all Shakespeare’s consummate skill to interest us for her.’ Coleridge, Table Talk

The heatedness of this response suggests that Coleridge is doing what teachers often warn their students against, and what, contrariwise, directors hope that audiences will do – that is to say, he is ‘identifying’ with a dramatic character. (His own unhappy marriage had been motivated by a utopian scheme invented – and later abandoned – by the poet Robert Southey; Coleridge married the sister of Southey’s fiancée.)”

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And finally, this from Tony Tanner:

“The play starts in an autumnal register, with two noble fathers lately dad, and a king seemingly sickening unto death – and it can hardly be said to move towards a springtime of regeneration.

The best, we feel, is past. The sick king remembers the words of one of his now-dead friends:

     ‘Let me not live,’ quoth he,

‘After my flame lacks oil, to be the snuff

Of younger spirits, whose apprehensive sense

All but new things disdain; whose judgments are

Mere fathers of their garments; whose constancies

Expire before their fashions.’

(I, ii, 58-63)

We have heard much of garments and fashions in the comedies, and of the besetting problems of changeableness and constancy. For this play, Shakespeare brings on a character who is, effectively, composed entirely of garments and inconstancies, with speech to match. I will come back to this extraordinary creation – Parolles; suffice it here to say that in his cavalier rejection of court values (of all values), he is not to be mistaken for a Falstaff or a Shylock. In their extremely corporeal presence, these two men embody and inhabit a world outside of, if adjacent to, the official citadels of the constituted authorities. Perhaps they have to be vanquished, marginalized, or extruded; but they have an undeniable, potentially damaging and threatening, reality. None of this applies to Parolles – he is something new in Shakespeare. There is a story by Edgar Allen Poe called ‘The Man Who Was Used Up,” concerning a flashy, fashionable socialite. The narrator goes to visit him at his private address, during the daytime. On being admitted to his room, all he can see is a little heap of clothes on the floor. The heap begins to assemble itself, with the aid of all sorts of artificial devices, into the recognizable fashionable figure who haunts the evening salons. But the narrator has seen what there really is to the man. There is something of this about Parolles; though it should be stressed that even when he seems most washed-up, he is never, ever ‘used up.’ There is nothing to him – but he is inextinguishable.

If Bertram is representative of the ‘younger spirits’ poised to take over, then we may well sympathize with the sick king’s wish to be ‘quickly…dissolved from my hive.’ This Bertram is not going to bring any honey home (syphilis is more likely). It is notable that Shakespeare makes Bertram plunge himself far deeper into ignominy and treachery in the perversely protracted fifth Act. Shakespeare certainly seems to want to make Bertram blacker than black, with no extenuations. (The proposition, sometime advanced, that the simple young lad is seduced and led astray by the demon, Parolles, won’t do. Even if accepted, it would only make Bertram even more stupid and corruptible than he already appears. But Bertram is his own man. It just happens that it is a particularly rotten sort of man to be.) Whether, by the same token, Shakespeare wants to make Helena appear whiter than white, is a more complex and interesting question, here deferred. We may, however, note that Shakespeare increases the social distance between Bertram and Helena – in the original, Helena is independently wealthy and much closer to being Bertram’s equal. Whether this goes anyway towards helping to explain her adoration and his revulsion, must be left to individual response (for me it doesn’t, but I can see that for some it might).

It will come as no surprise to anyone even slightly familiar with Shakespeare’s treatment of his sources to learn that he markedly compressed the more leisurely time-scheme of the original. But it worth drawing attention to one particular result of this contraction. In the original, Giletta (the Helena figure), having arranged the ‘bed trick’ with her husband, repeat it ‘manye other times so secretly, as it was never knowen.’ She not only conceives, but is delivered of, ‘two goodly soones’ which ‘were very like unto their father.’ When she produces the two sons at the final revelatory feast, Beltramo (Bertram) accepts the children as his – ‘they were so like hym’ – and ‘abjected his obstinate rigour.’ In Shakespeare’s play, the contrived illicit/licit bedding is a one-night-only affair; and when Helena finally confronts Bertram with ‘evidence’ of his paternity of her child in the final scene, she is – pregnant. Without pushing the matter too pointlessly far, there is surely a signal difference between confronting a man with two bouncing baby boys who are his spitting image, and standing, visibly pregnant, in front of him and asserting that you are carrying his child. Paternity is notoriously difficult to establish incontrovertibly, and this seemingly slight plot change is characteristic of the widespread introduction of uncertainty – or the draining or diffusing away of certainty – which marks this play. All you can feel at that is that it is, indeed, a conclusion ‘pregnant’ with possibilities. We cannot possibly see which way things will turn out – what, if you like, is waiting to be born.

I have mentioned that Shakespeare added a clown – given, deliberately one supposes, the rather unpleasant name of Lavatch. His is a sneering, bawdy, nihilistic voice; and as a figure he is closer to Thersites than to Touchstone and Feste. We are a long way from Arden and Illyria. The other figures to be added by Shakespeare are some French captains and Florentine soldiers. This is more interesting than it perhaps sounds, and pursuing the matter a little further may provide us with an oblique approach to the strangeness of this play. In  Boccaccio’s little story, the unwilling Beltramo, having been virtually forced into marrying Giletta, pretends to be returning home but immediately takes flight into Italy. This is what we are gold ‘And when he was on horseback hee went not thither but took his journey into Tuscane, where understanding that the Florentines and Senois were at warres, he determined to take the Florentines parte, and was willing received and honourablie entertained, and was made captaine of a certain nomber of men, continuing in their service a long time.’ And that is all we hear about the wars, and Beltramo’s soldiering. See how Shakespeare elaborates and complicates it.

King:

The Florentines and Senoys are by th’e ears,

Have fought with equal fortune, and continue

A braving war.

First Lord:

So ‘tis reported, sir.

King:

Nay, ‘tis most credible. We here receive it

A certainty, vouched  from our cousin Austria,

With caution, that the Florentine will move us

For speedy aid; wherein our dearest friend

Prejudicates the business, and would seem

To have us make denial.

First Lord:

     His love and wisdom,

Approved to your Majesty, may plead

For amplest credence.

King:

He hath armed our answer,

And Florentine is denied before he comes;

Yet, for our gentlemen that mean to see

The Tuscan service, freely have they leave

To stand on either part.

The Florentines are fighting the Sienese (Senoys) in Boccaccio, but what is Austria doing here, which was, anyway, in no sense France’s ‘dearest friend?’ Be that as it may – Austria prejudicates the business,’ a word Shakespeare uses nowhere else (this is not mere pedantry on my part – he forces a number of rather awkward and unusual words into service in All’s Well That Ends Well which he does not use elsewhere; this is part of the thick velvet side of the play). But ‘judicating’ all round seems rather precarious and insecure in this play: though Austria apparently deserves ‘amplest credence’ (another rather formal ‘silver’ word, used only in this play and in Troilus and Cressida), and though the King vows he will deny Florence help – he then says he will let his men take whichever side they like. So much for the ‘amplest credence’ of ‘our dearest friend.’ A quite unnecessary scene; unless Shakespeare wants to show that, despite the high-sounding sonorous language, loyalties and friendship are fading all round.

There is a comparably supererogatory-seeming scene somewhat later, in the Duke’s palace in Florence.

Duke:

So that from point to point now have you heard

The fundamental reasons of this war,

Whose great decision hath much blood let forth,

And more thirsts after.

First Lord:

     Holy seems the quarrel

Upon your Grace’s part; black and fearful

On the opposer.

Duke:

Therefore we marvel much our cousin France

Would in so just a business shut his bosom

Against our borrowing prayers.

Second Lord:

     Good my lord,

The reasons for our state I cannot yield,

But like a common and an outward man

That the great figure of a council frames

By self-unable motion; therefore date not

Say what I think of it, since I have found

Myself in my uncertain grounds to fail

As often as I had guessed

(III, i, 1-16 – my bold letters)

The quarrel between the holy and the black might certainly be said to be engaged by the confrontation of Helena and Bertram, but we are given no insight into the apparently elemental issues at stake in the war. In this, we are somewhat in the position of the Second Lord. It’s easy enough to get the hang of what he says – I can’t really tell you anything about our reasons of state because I am always outside the council chamber. I just have to make guesses and here I’m as wrong as often as I’m right.  But he ‘frames’ his guesses by ‘self-unable motion.’ Not only is this another word (or compound word) that Shakespeare never uses elsewhere; my guess is that this is its only appearance in the whole of English literature. Obviously it refers to some kind, or degree, of incompetence or disability or just inability. But it is an unusual mouthful for a second lord. However we can readily respond to his feeling that he is in ‘incertain grounds.’ In this play, so are we.”

Our next reading:  Act Three, All’s Well That Ends Well

My next post:  Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning

And as a quick look at coming attractions:  Our next play is Timon of Athens.  But then, perfect for a “Summer with Shakespeare” comes the big three:  Macbeth, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra.  I can hardly wait.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uxa07jOl0UQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQPDpUPcY4o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do6Ggvhx9gg

Enjoy.

All’s Well That Ends Well

Act One

By Dennis Abrams

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MAJOR CHARACTERS

Countess of Roussillon, a widow

Bertram, Count of Roussillon, the Countess’s son

Helena, a doctor’s daughter and the Countess’s servant

Lavatch, a clown in the Countess’s service

Reynaldo, the Countess’s steward

Parolles, a companion of Bertram

King of France

Lafeu, an old lord and friend of the Countess

First and Second Lords Dumaine, brothers

An Interpreter

Duke of Florence

Widow Capilet and Diana, her daughter

Mariana, a friend of the widow.

DATE

Though considered by some (although not by me) to be the lost Love’s Labour’s Won, most scholars believe that All’s Well dates from 1604-05 – that is, after Othello – making it the last of the “problem plays.”

How is that date arrived at?  There are a number of test of internal echoes, language, and metre – in the summary of Gary Taylor,

“In rare vocabulary, All’s Well is linked most closely (in descending order) to Measure, Troilus, Othello, and Coriolanus. The colloquialism-in-verse test puts it after Measure and Othello, and Oras’s pause tests locate it between Macbeth and Antony. Its metrical figure places it after Othello and before Lear; a more detailed analysis of the metrical characteristics of the text by Lowes puts the play in the period 1606-8. Brainerd’s statistical test (1980) would also place the play in that period. Fitch’s more reliable redaction of the ‘sense-pause- test puts All’s Well somewhere between Measure for Measure and Lear.”

(For those of you interested in reading more on the subject, click here.)

SOURCES

Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353), a collection of tales told by a group of Florentines, passes on the basic story, though Shakespeare would have taken it from William Painter’s translation Palace of Pleasure (1566). He adds several characters.

TEXTS

Though only the Folio text (1623) survives, it is unusually messy and filled with errors, meaning it was possibly set from the dramatist’s foul papers (working drafts).

Act One:  The King of France is dangerously ill and has summoned his ward Bertram (the son and heir of the late Count of Roussillon) to be with him during his last hours. As Bertram leaves his home in Roussillon, the Countess his mother notices that her gentlewoman Helena is upset, and realizes why – Helena is secretly in love with him. Giving Helena her blessing, the Countess encourages her to follow Bertram on the pretext of offering the medical skills that she has inherited from her father to the King.

Like Twelfth Night, All’s Well – though ostensibly a comedy – begins in mourning. The stage is filled with characters clad in black; bereavement hangs in the air. The King of France is near death and has command his young ward Bertram to attend him, while in the very first lines of the play Bertram’s own departure is likened by his widowed mother, the Countess of Roussillon, to ‘burying a second husband.’ Helena, too, is adjusting to the recent loss of her father – a man, moreover, whose medical expertise is now sorely missed at court.  The Countess reflects that if only he were here, the King’s prognosis would be vastly improved. Noting that Helena’s father’s “skill…would have made nature immortal,” she plays wistfully with the reality of his loss:

Would for the King’s sake he were living. I think it would be the death of the King’s disease.

But once Bertram is gone, the subject of Helena’s own “sorrows” proves more complicated than her companions think. “I think not on my father,” she weeps. “My imagination/Carries no favour in’t but Bertram’s.” Her description of him sounds strikingly (and oddly) like a remembrance:

     ‘Twas pretty, though a plague,

To see him every hour, to sit and draw

His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls,

In our heart’s table – heart too capable

Of every line and trick of his sweet favour.

But now he’s gone, and my idolatrous fancy

Must sanctify his relics.

Sounding somewhere between Hamlet and the anonymous maid in A Lover’s Complaint, Helena sighs that her heart is only too “capable of” (able to suck in) Bertram’s beauty. His departure for the social whirl of the French court might as well be from life itself; Helena is left behind, an “idolatrous” disciple, to “sanctify his relics.”

But as rich with religiosity as Helena’s words are, what happens next sounds as if it comes straight from a fairy tale. Under pressure, she “confesses” her love to Bertram’s mother, but instead of being appalled that her “gentlewoman” wants to marry her son, the Countess gives Helena her blessing and advises her to make haste for Paris.

A couple of things to keep in mind as we read the play:

1.  During the nineteenth century, the play was only performed seventeen times in the UK, in large part because of Victorian attitudes towards Helena’s sexual and  aggressiveness.

2.  Critic Karl Elze wrote that we should see All’s Well as a kind of companion piece to The Taming of the Shrew:  Bertram, like Kate is a wayward young animal being “tamed” to fit into his social role.  As she is likened to a falcon in training, he is compared to a colt being broken.

3.  No other heroine in Shakespearean comedy goes after the man she wants without some sort of attachment being first initiated by the man. Even Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, whose pursuit of the ever-so-unwilling Demetrius as well as her name links her with the Helena of All’s Well, is trying to win back the man who initially courted her.  It’s Helena alone who makes her beloved a sexual object.

From Marjorie Garber:

“All’s Well is generally regarded as an early Jacobean play, probably written in the period between Hamlet and Measure for Measure [MY NOTE:  Or not], with both of which it has obvious thematic and tonal affinities: the deaths of fathers and the circumstances of a court in mourning; meditations on virginity; clowns, fools, and knaves with downright views about human life, venality, and sex. As G.K. Hunter points out in the 1959 Arden edition of All’s Well, both Hamlet and All’s Well begin with plans for the education of a brash young courtier in Paris (Laertes, Bertram), and address the question of stepparents.  All’s Well and Measure for Measure are even more closely bound, by their use of the bed trick, their climatic scenes of ‘rebirth’ and restoration, and their inclusion of extensive discussions of virginity (Helena, Isabella) and a pregnant woman (Helena, Juliet) in the plot. The element of female disguise in these two plays is managed through the bed-trick substitution, rather than, as in the earlier ‘festive’ comedies of the Elizabethan period, through the cross-dressing of the heroine. Both Measure for Measure and All’s Well include as plot devices of Catholic religious practice (Isabella as a novice in the Order of Saint Clare; Helena as a pilgrim bound for the shrine of ‘Saint Jaques le Grand’).

Some dilemmas that face the heroines of the ‘festive’ comedies also confront  Helena: her mourning for her dead father and her resourceful decision to act on her own by going to the King’s court to cure him may remind audiences of three other orphaned daughters:  the mourning Olivia and the resourceful Viola of Twelfth Night, or the empowered Portia of The Merchant of Venice (In Merchant Portia and Nerissa play a ring trick that allows them to pretend to have played a bed trick.)  The apparent death of Helena and her ‘miraculous’ appearance is a device used both in Measure for Measure (where it is a young man, Claudio, who is supposed dead and then reborn) and in Much Ado About Nothing (in which the slandered Hero is said to have died, and her repentant lover, another Claudio, agrees, as will Bertram in All’s Well, to marry a ‘new’ wife who will turn out to be the former one). But the denouements of these two mature and complicated ‘comedies’ also involve some elements that would become more familiar in the later romances, especially the question of the reunion of husband and wife, the wonder-working doctor, and again, the key themes of ‘rebirth’ and succession.

In All’s Well That Ends Well, Helena, the daughter of a celebrated physician, Gerard de Narbonne, has been living under the protection of the Countess of Roussillon since her father’s death. Helena is secretly in love with the Countess’s son, Bertram, who has just succeeded to the title at the death of his father. Bertram is about to take leave o f his mother and join the court of the King of France, accompanied by Lafew, an old and loyal lord and counselor. The King, who is by law Bertram’s ‘father’ (Bertram, still a minor, is his ward), is suffering from a life-threatening ailment, and has ‘abandoned his physicians.’ The play thus begins with many mentions of death and dying, and also with some hope for the future.

The Countess’s first words, the play’s opening line, set the tone: ‘In delivering my son from me I bury a second husband.’ From the first, childbirth and death are intermingled, as they will be at the denouement, when Bertram discovers that the wife he has rejected, and whose death has been announced, is not only alive but pregnant with his child: ‘Dead thou she be she feels her young one kick./So there’s my riddle; one that’s dead is quick.’ (5.3.299-300)

It is characteristic of other Shakespearean genres like history and tragedy to emphasize a discrepancy between the generations, whether by underscoring the impotence of the aging elders (Richard II, King Lear) or by stressing the natural rebelliousness of the young (Romeo and Juliet, Henry IV Part 1). But one of the things that makes All’s Well a curious kind of comedy is its insistence on this age gap. The play begins with a king whose infirmities are not only acknowledged but clinically described, and his female counterpart, the Countess, wields sway over her son, Bertram, in a way that deprives him of much agency. If he were more likeable, and she less elegant and majestic, it would be easy not only to see his side but also to take it.

Helena’s profound sadness, upon hearing of Bertram’s departure for the King’s court, motivates her to follow him. She determines to go to the court, cure the King with the help of the medical knowledge she has inherited from her father, and ask as her reward that she be married to Bertram. All unfolds as she intends, but the proud and callow Bertram spurns her as too lowborn for him, and even when motivated to go through with the marriage (since to reject it would lose him the care and regard of the King), he swears that he ‘will not bed her.’ (2.3.254)

Bertram’s concern with social status and his disdain for the idea of marriage with a doctor’s daughter seem more culpable in our time than it would have been in his. We are told that Helena’s father was a famous doctor, but doctors in general in early modern England were ‘middling,’ competing for social and professional status and for the patronage of the elite. And marriage, as we have seen in virtually every play by Shakespeare, was a social and cultural institution, biding family to family, house to house, country to country. Shakespeare’s lovers appeal to us as much as they do in part because they seem to have the energy of their own passions; they choose partners with eager single-mindedness, and pursue their loves until, with good fortune (and a smiling playwright), they end in the promise of marriage. From Romeo and Juliet to Rosalind and Orlando, these lovers commit themselves to the fulfillment of individual choice, often against the strong resistance of their families Although we should note that, without exception, these marriages, however emotionally transgressive in the short run (a Montague loves a Capulet; Portia seeks to outwit her father’s test of the caskets), wind up pairing social equals. [MY NOTE:  Although, as Bloom argues, despite being social equals, the women nearly always end up marrying beneath themselves, marrying men not quite worthy.] Even – or especially – in the late romances, when a prince falls in love with a shepherdess or with a young woman shipwrecked on an island, by the play’s end we are assured that the shepherdess is a princess in her own right, and that the shipwreck victim is a duke’s daughter, and that both are heirs of wealth as well as power. Poor Bertram, then, that we should judge him so harshly for not wanting to marry the clever girl from the ‘middling’ classes whom his mother has chosen for him. Yet the play does not go out of its way to make him a charmer.

In one of several letters that help to mobilize the plot, Bertram writes to Helena listing the impossible conditions upon which he would regard himself as really married to her:

‘When thou canst get the ring upon my finger, which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body that I am father too, then call me husband; but in such a ‘then’ I write a ‘never.’”

(3.2.55-58 emphasis added)

He then flees to Florence to fight in the wars. Helena leaves the French court and becomes a pilgrim, heading for the shrine of Saint Jaques (presumably in Santiago de Compostela, Spain), but passing through Florence on her way (somewhat in defiance of ordinary geography)…

Shakespeare’s main source here was a story told in Boccaccio’s Decameron (the ninth novel of the third day), probably as mediated through the English translation by William Painter in his Palace of Pleasure (1566, 1567, and 1575). Some details are altered, some added, as was the playwright’s usual practice with sources. The Helena-Bertram plot is augmented by the addition of the strong figure of the Countess, Bertram’s mother, who adores Helena and already treats her as a daughter; by the good old counselor Lafew, again a figure of virtue and steadfastness; and on the other side, by Paroles, described forthrightly by Helena before his first appearance as ‘a notorious liar,’ ‘a great way fool,’ and ‘solely a coward,’ and by Lafew as an idle dandy, a man whose ‘soul…is in his clothes.’ (2.5.40). In contrast to his ‘follower’ Paroles, even Bertram might be thought to have a few good points, although few critics have admired him unreservedly, despite his ‘arched brows, his hawking eye, [and] his curls’; the description is the love-struck Helena’s.  William Hazlitt, who found the play as a whole ‘one of the most pleasing of our author’s comedies,’ offered a balance assessment of Bertram’s ‘willful stubbornness and youthful petulance,’ in his Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays.”

And for your weekend bonus…Hazlitt on All’s Well That Ends Well:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do6Ggvhx9gg

Our next reading:  All’s Well That Ends Well, Act Two

My next post:  Sunday evening/Monday morning

Enjoy.  And enjoy your weekend.

Introduction to All’s Well That Ends Well

By Dennis Abrams

——————

On the surface, it’s a simple tale of a poor physician’s daughter who finds her prince and succeeds in marrying him, but exposed along the way is the realization that fairy tale endings rarely mesh with human needs.  Helen, the play’s questing daughter, needs only to convince the man of her dreams that she is, in fact worth marrying, but she ends up blackmailing him into it: a finale that the play’s deeply sardonic title renders profoundly disquieting and even upsetting.

Some have wondered whether All’s Well is an alternative title for the mysterious Love’s Labour’s Won, but although Helen does indeed “labour” to win her love, the play’s own deeply ambiguous “end” is worlds away from those of Shakespeare’s earlier, brighter, comedies.  (Bringing to mind Woody Allen’s “Stardust Memories” and the fans who preferred his “earlier, funnier” films.)  In fact, George Bernard Shaw compared the play to Ibsen’s A Doll’s House for the way that the “sovereign charm” of Helen is set against “a perfectly ordinary young man, whose unimaginative prejudices and selfish conventionality make him cut a very mean figure.”  Despite its more than considerable dramatic strength, All’s Well and its small cast are not often given the opportunity to win over audiences; nonetheless, a handful of productions from the mid-twentieth century on have demonstrated that this much neglected play has its own special intensity and charm.

From Marjorie Garber:

“’Who cannot be crushed with a plot?’ laments the braggart soldier Paroles in All’s Well That Ends Well, after a staged capture by his comrades results in his cowardly (and comical willingness to betray them, and then in his exposure and discomfiture. The scenario is reminiscent of Falstaff’s similar fiction-making in the tavern in Eastcheap in 1 Henry IV, although the wordy and well-named Paroles is a lesser figure (in all senses: less corpulent and less original and memorable). His combination of dismay and pique also closely resembles that of Malvolio, similarly gulled by unsympathetic peers and a clever plot (‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you.’)  But we might take Paroles’ complaint about being crushed with a plot as a key phrase for the whole of All’s Well, a play that is constructed like an elaborate mechanism and goes off with a bang in the powerful final scene. For the alternative to being ‘crushed’ is to have the plot work out to your advantage, despite all indications to the contrary – in effect, to have all end well. This is what happens to, and for, the play’s heroine, a young woman equipped with patience, ingenuity, and good sense, as well as a strong passion for an especially unlikable hero.

Classed for much of the twentieth century with the so-called problem plays or ‘dark comedies,’ All’s Wellhas not enjoyed, recently, the easy popularity with audiences of livelier and more romantic comedies, such as Twelfth Night and As You Like It. Yet it contains not one but two roles that would make an actress’s career (and have). Both Helena and the Countess are brilliant, complicated, strong women who, finding themselves in possible situations, emerge not only whole but triumphant. Helena is at least as ingenious as Rosalind, a much more crowd-pleasing heroine. And if Bertram seems like a cad compared to the smitten Orlando, he is not more so than Much Ado About Nothing’s Claudio. The real ‘problem’ here may be the other.  Although other comedies present single fathers with power over their children (Leonato in Much Ado, Duke Senior in As You Like It), All’s Well is, in a way, the comic counterpart of Coriolanus, a tragedy that has encountered a wide range of responses because of its powerful mother, Volumnia, and its curiously immature war-hero son, Coriolanus.

All’s Well That Ends Well has both an authoritative mother and a clever, strong-willed heroine. If it ‘ends well’ for them and less well for Bertram, perhaps it is simply because the play validates their wishes, not his.

It is striking how often the phrase ‘all’s well that ends well,’ or some variant of it, actually appears in the text. Many of Shakespeare’s plays have similar bromides for their titles, such as As You Like It, or Twelfth Night or What You Will, or the original title of the play – All is True – listed in the Folio as The Life of Henry the Eight.  This was a commonplace practice for plays in the period:  Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody is one example. But despite one great scene in As You Like It that turns on the multiple use of the words ‘as’ and ‘if,’ no other Shakespeare play dallies with its name in the insistent way that All’s Well does. In the fourth act Helena, the plucky heroine, cautions another young woman that she may ‘suffer’ briefly in order to assist her friend that but that things will improve:

All’s well that ends well; still the fine’s the crown.

What’er the course, the end is the renown.

(4.4.35-36)

Shortly thereafter, encountering a setback, Helena reiterates the point: ‘All’s well that ends well yet.’ After the many reversals and revelations in the play’s last scene, the King of France, inviting the usual offstage explanations of plot details (‘Of that…more leisure shall express’), uses the same phrase in his closing couplet,

All yet seems well; and if it end so meet,

The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.

Then, for good measure, he repeats the phrase one more time in the Epilogue that immediately follows, turning the notion of ‘ending well’ from the denouement of the plot to the audience’s applause for the play:

The King’s beggar now the play is done.

All is well ended if this suit be won;

That you express content…

…….

Ours be your patience then, and yours our parts:

Your gentle hands lend us, and take our hearts.

It is unusual for a play by Shakespeare to contain so many internal references to its own title, suggesting a certain self-consciousness about its identity as a fiction, and focusing attention upon the expectation both of interim suffering and of a happy outcome. Almost like Troilus and Cressida reciting their own future myths (‘[a]s true as Troilus,’ ‘[a]s false as Cressid,’) the repeated internal assurance that all’s well that ends well condition the audience to expect a satisfactory romance resolution, and permit the playwright to describe fairy-tale events, corrupt and even detestable characters, figures (like the Widow) who seem to emerge from the quite different genre of city comedy, and frank scenarios of sexual seduction, and to keep all of these comfortably under control until the disclosures of the last scene. They lighten the ‘problems’ of this ‘problem play.’”

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From Bloom:

“In proportion to its actual dramatic and literary merits, All’s Well That Ends Well remains Shakespeare’s most undervalued comedy, particularly when compared with such early works as The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew. I have seen only one production of All’s Well That Ends Well, and the play, alas, continues its long history of unpopularity, so I am unlikely to see many more. Fundamentally, we seem to misunderstand All’s Well That Ends Well, from Samuel Johnson, master of all Shakespeare critics, down to the present. Like Dr. Johnson, we cannot abide Bertram, the caddish young nobleman whom the evidently admirable Helena loves. This is hardly the only unequal relationship in Shakespeare; generally his women choose inadequate men. But this does seem the most aggravating object choice in the plays. Bertram has no saving qualities, to call him a spoiled brat is not anachronistic. Dr. Johnson particularly resented the happy ending, with Bertram settling into supposed domestic bliss:

I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram; a man noble without generosity, and young without truth, who married Helena as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate; when she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a second marriage, is accused by a woman whom he has wronged, defends himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to happiness.

Shakespeare might have admired Johnson’s bitter irony of ‘dismissed to happiness.’ All’s Well That Ends Well is quite as rancid, in its courtly way, as Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure; even as the play’s title carries a sophisticated bitterness. Since Bertram is an empty-headed snob and nothing more, the drama’s interest centers on Helena, and on Parolles, the fake soldier whose name aptly means ‘words,’ and who receives a demolition more in Ben Jonson’s moral code than in Shakespeare’s. Many critics have disliked Parolles, but I cannot imagine why; he is a splendid scoundrel, perfectly transparent to anyone of good sense, which of course does not include Bertram. Parolles’s and Helena’s are the roles that matter most in this play. About all that a director can do with Bertram is to make him look like a juvenile Clark Gable, Trevor Nunn’s solution in the production I recall seeing. Shakespeare’s unpleasant young men are numerous, Bertram, as a vacuity, is authentically noxious.

Yeats, lamenting that his beloved Maud Gonne should have chosen to marry the gunman MacBride when she might have had Yeats, set down Shakespeare’s own principle concerning all of his glorious women who select dreadful or empty men.

‘Tis certain that fine women eat

A crazy salad with their meat

Whereby the horn of plenty is undone.

[MY NOTE:  Nora Ephron had a collection of essays entitled “Crazy Salad”]

Since all of us know veritable instances of such Shakespearean mismatches, we should be delighted to turn to Shakespeare for insights into that ‘crazy salad.’  Portia happily settles for Bassanio, an amiable and perfectly useless fortune hunter, presumably because she thus implicitly gets back at her odd father, who imposed the casket ritual upon her, as she says:

O me the word ‘choose!’ I may neither choose who I would, nor refuse who I dislike, so is the will of a living daughter curb’d by the will of a dead father.

(The Merchant of Venice, I, ii, 22-25)

Julia, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, is foolishly in love with Proteus, but a Protean lover comes in so many guises that a much wiser woman might make the same blunder. Hero, in Much Ado About Nothing, marries the feckless Claudio, but she is just too young to know that there is nothing to him. By Twelfth Night, Shakespeare has gone beautifully wild: the charming but zany Viola is delighted by the absurd Orsino, while Olivia snaps up Sebastian simply because he is Viola’s twin; as another zany, he is pleased to be so devoured. Helena clearly is quite another matter, and her High Romantic passion for Bertram seems both an ironic culmination of Shakespeare’s comic pairings and something well-nigh Keatsian:

    my imagination

Carries no favour in’t but Bertram’s.

I am undone; there is no living, none,

If Bertram be away; ‘twere all one

That I should love a bright particular star

And think to wed it, he is so above me.

In his bright radiance and collateral light

Must I be comforted, not in his sphere.

Th’ambition in my love thus plagues itself;

The hind that would be mated by the lion

Must die for love. ‘Twas pretty, though it a plague,

To see him every hour; to sit and draw

His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls,

In our heart’s table – heart too capable

Of every line and trick of his sweet favour.

But now he’s gone, and my idolatrous fancy

Must sanctify his relics.

Keats’s great, final sonnet, ‘Bright star, would I were as steadfast as thou art,’ echoes Helena’s devotion to her ‘bright particular star,’ and the pathos of Keats’ poem can be said to catch Shakespeare’s irony. But Helena’s ironies here are directed only against her own ‘idolatrous fancy,’ her Petrarchan worship of the young nobleman with whom she has been raised. By ‘imagination’ and ‘fancy’ here both she and Shakespeare mean a negative facility, one that consciously self-deceives.

Shakespeare sees to it that we are moved (as Keats was) by Helena’s capacity for love, while still apprehending that this splendid woman has eaten a crazy salad with her meat. Bertram is ‘above’ her in social rank, and perhaps in good looks; otherwise she in fact is the ‘bright particular star’ and Bertram is only a touch better than Parolles, since Bertram’s only accomplishments are military, while Parolles is a mere braggart soldier, an impostor, a liar, a leech, considerably more interesting than the warring and whoring Bertram. The initial question of All’s Well That Ends Well thus is: How can Helena be so massively wrong? You can salvage her bad judgment only by arguing that Bertram is immature, and will change, but Shakespeare indicates otherwise: this spoiled cad will grow up to be even more of a monster, despite his mother, his wife, and his king; almost, indeed, to spite them. The stubborn Helena triumphs, but only at her own expense, as the audience surely is compelled to conclude. With his uncanny mastery at representing women at least as persuasively as men, Shakespeare transforms the question into the much more interesting: Who is Helena?

We are told a great deal about Helena’s late father, a distinguished physician and friend of the king’s, but nowhere in the play do I recall any reference to Helena’s actual mother. The Countess, Bertram’s mother, ahs raised Helena as her foster child, and the love between the wretch’s mother and Helena is the most admirable sentiment in the play. Shakespeare is very efficient at suppressing parents when they are, for his purposes, irrelevant. Of the mother of Goneril, Regan, and Cordelia, we are told nothing, almost as though Lear’s queen is as null as, say, Lady Macbeth’s first husband or Iago’s mother (even Iago presumably had one). I am not about to gratify formalists and materialists alike by speculating about Helena’s childhood, let alone Iago’s! But it is important to note Helena’s love for the dowager Countess of Roussillon, protector of the orphaned Helena. Freud, Shakespearean in this also, divided object choices into two types, narcissistic and propped-against, and Helena’s choice of Bertram participates strongly in both modes. Narcissistically Bertram, an earliest playfellow, is what Helena longed to be, the authentic child of her foster mother, while in the leaning-against mode, Bertram would have symbolized both lost fathers, his and hers. Helena’s love therefore is overdetermined to a degree unusual even in Shakespeare, where the contingency of sexual passion is almost always established for us. It does not matter who Bertram inwardly is, or what he does: Helena is locked into loving him.

We therefore should begin apprehending All’s Well That Ends Well by seeing that Helena’s judgment is neither unsound nor sound, it is not a question of judgment at all. Helena, so long as she lives, will be in love with Bertram, because that is her selfsame identity, what she has been always. Shakespeare, who most certainly was unhappily married, shows us that marriage hardly is a matter of choice. I delight always in telling my students that the happiest marriage in all of Shakespeare is that of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, who suit one another so admirably! Why do Othello and Desdemona marry, in a mismatch that gives Iago his terrible opportunity? We no more can answer that definitely than we can choose among Iago’s many motives for his malignity. Something seems to be missing in both Othello’s and Desdemona’s accounts of their love, but that something is fundamental to the nature of marriage, the most peculiar of human institutions, both in and out of Shakespeare. Marriage, Shakespeare always implies, is where we are written, and not where we write.”

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So…excited about this play?  I am – it’s not a play I know well, and I’m anxious to see how it reads now that I (and we) have spent more than a year and a half immersed in Shakespeare.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSNSSZS0VeE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzncfFNOxGI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ae60Q0sr28I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi9sh62P8WA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLBY9-ygf6w&list=PL2alQNZWKx8PRMgL5ueYi2LsMPRbDabhX

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXL1yYPzOOg

Our next reading:  All’s Well That Ends Well, Act One

My next post:  Thursday evening/Friday morning

Enjoy.

SONNET 135

Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy ‘Will,’
And ‘Will’ to boot, and ‘Will’ in overplus;
More than enough am I that vex thee still,
To thy sweet will making addition thus.                            4

Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious,
Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?
Shall will in others seem right gracious,
And in my will no fair acceptance shine?                          8

The sea all water, yet receives rain still
And in abundance addeth to his store;
So thou, being rich in ‘Will,’ add to thy ‘Will’
One will of mine, to make thy large ‘Will’ more.                12

Let no unkind, no fair beseechers kill;
Think all but one, and me in that one ‘Will.’                     14

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIuW3RUKZLc

From David West:

You have a strong will, and have me, Will, more than enough of me.

Will you not accommodate me as generously as you do others?

The sea is all water and accepts rain. You are all willing desire,

    why not accept me?

Let no unkind of handsome [lovers] defeat my plea.

    Think of all your lovers as one, and me as part of that one.

This sonnet is bewildering because it contains the word ‘will’ 14 times in different senses. The first ‘will’ refers primarily to decision, determination (abbreviated below as D). In line 2 ‘Will’ is mainly William, the speaker, ‘Will is overplus –/More than enough am I’ (abbreviated as W). In line 4 the salient reference is to the Black Lady’s sexual charm and sexual desires, lust, libido (abbreviated as L). In line 5 the auxiliary verb (A) ‘wilt thou vouchsafe’ is drawn into the game, and ‘will’ is among other things the Black Lady’s sexual appetite (L above). But line 6 forces a revision. The ‘will’ is now the penis (P), and therefore, in retrospect, it is the penis in 2 and the vagina in 4 and 5 (V).

The poem would be difficult to interpret if ‘will’ meant one thing in each of its occurrences, but line 6 has just shown that the game is not so simple. In any passage the word may carry several different meanings. Certainty is not possible. Shakespeare himself would be hard put to it to define his own puns, or even to paraphrase the poem, but it may help new readers through the jungle to have some soft of chart, and it may also be useful to compare the text to the Quarto of 1609, as pri9nted below. Capital letters in the margin point to the salient senses of each occurrence of the word ‘will.’ Lower case suggests some lurking sub-senses.

Who euer hath her wish, thou hast thy Will,                   Dl

And Will too boote, and Will in ouer-plus,                      W, Wp

More than enough am I that vexe thee still,

To thy sweet will making addition thus.                         LV

Wilt thou, whose will is large and spatious                    A, DLV

Not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine,                 PV (thine)

Shall will in others seeme right gracious                       LP

And in my will no faire acceptance shine:                     LP

The sea all water, yet receiues raine still,

And in aboundance addeth to his store,

So thou beeing rich in Will adde to thy Will,                Lp, LV

One will of mine to make thy large Will more.           Pd, LV

   Let no vnkinde, no faire beseechers kill,

   Thinke all but one, and me in that one Will.           LPW

This Quarto text distributes italics and initial capitals for no discernible reason. ‘Will’ is unhelpfully given italics and an initial capital seven times, in lines 1-2, 11-12 and 14. It also puts commas at the end of lines except at the end of quatrains, 4, 8 and 12, apparently as a matter of habit rather than sense. My own printing above offers a capital initial only when the personal name seems to be salient, in lines 2 and 14.

1-4:  In the first line ‘will’ must be different from ‘wish,’ but something like it. Women have wishes but the Black Lady is an unusually determined character. The rest of the poem suggests that she also has a keen sexual appetite, as marked above by L and V. ‘Will to boot’ could hint at that. Will is also a cameo appearance for William Shakespeare in the plot, as discussed at the end of the note on Sonnet 136.  [MY NOTE:  To come after our next play!]  ‘Will in overplus’ then suggests a lusty Will, a Will who still vexes her even after she has had too much of him (2 and 6), in both places offering a glimpse of the penis, as suggested above.

        In line 3, S keep son vexing her with his demands, thus making an addition to her sweet will. This cannot imply that he is making love to her, because lines 6-8 make it clear that she is refusing him. Line 4 perhaps suggests that his advances are adding to her sexual life the burden of refusing him, a burden which taxes the sweetness of her nature. Into this concentration of obscene puns he has squeezed a droplet of praise.

5-8:  The auxiliary verb ‘wilt’ in play with ‘will’ is a polyptoton. When her ‘will is large and spacious’ it must mean that her libido is generous as well as large, and ‘spacious’ implies that her vagina is accommodating. The lady is promiscuous, as is hinted in 134.10, and made brutally explicit in 137.6 and 10. When S wants to hide his will in hers, he clearly wants to hide his penis in her vagina, and he is not allowed to, ‘in [the case of] his will no fair acceptance shines,’ appears. ‘Spacious’ and ‘gracious’ are trisyllabic, with the second syllable touched very lightly, more like ‘spac-ci-ous’ than our ‘spash-ous.’

9-12  Lines 9-12 are a simile. The heavy hints of her promiscuity in lines 5-8 are strengthened by comparing her store of libido and its replenishment to sea and rain ‘[Just as] the sea, all water, receives rain and adds abundantly to its store, so you, being rich in will, add one other will to your vast will.’ When the sea ‘addeth to its store,’ ‘his’ almost personifies him as a hoarder. After line 6, the second ‘will’ in 11 must refer to her vagina, and the first in 12 to his penis. Lines 11, 12, and 14 of the sonnet are all entirely monosyllabic.

13-14  The sense of line 13 as punctuated above could be ‘Let no unkind [suppliants], no fair suppliants kill [this request.]’ This seems to be the last unlikely interpretation of the line. Its advantages are that the contrast between ‘unkind’ and ‘fair’ is characteristic, and that it preserves the Quarto’s comma after ‘unkinde.’ Its disadvantages are that words have to be supplied before that meaning can be divined, and that even so the verb ‘kill’ is strange on this interpretation. On the other hand ‘kill’ is sometimes used with impersonal objects (‘all pure effects,’ ‘this blessed league, ‘thine honour, ‘his quality, in The Rape of Lucrece 250, 383, 516, 875). Most scholars solve the problem by printing ‘no’ in inverted commas to make it the subject of ‘kill’ and beseechers its object, ‘Let ‘no’ unkind no fair beseechers kill,’ which could be explained as ‘Let a churlish negative not kill any handsome suitors.’ But S would probably not object if it did. A third possibility is to take ‘unkind’ as a noun, and so ‘Let no unkindness kill lovely suitors,’ but ‘unkind’ is never used as a noun.

        The last line as punctuated in this edition is lewd and insulting. ‘Think all but one, and me, in that, one Will, ‘where ‘one Will’ suggests one lover, one penis, one William. All he is asking is to be one of many, as at 136.6. It could also be printed, ‘Think all but one, and me in that one, Will.’ But that weakens the insult, and isolates Will, making him mask to be special when the most he dare hope is to be one of the crowd. Duncan-Jones’s solution keeps the punctuation of the quarto, ‘Think all but one, and me in that one Will,’ and comments, ‘Regard all your…lovers as a single one, and treat me as your only object of desire/man called William/occupant of your sexual space.’ (Duncan-Jones 1977). This dilutes the insult, and also makes him ask for what he knows is not an offer. He has long given up hope of being her only lover (5-8). But perhaps the quarto here preserves Shakespeare’s punctuation, leaving readers free to juggle possibilities. After all, the poem is a maze of puzzles. This plodding exposition is offered as one guide through it.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmhnXf1AUgw

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And to conclude, a couple of weeks ago I mentioned the remarkable essay “Kafka and His Precursors” by Jorge Luis Borges.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVCAjzn4BEI

Here it is, in its entirety:

“At one time I considered writing a study of Kafka’s precursors. I had thought, at first, that he was as unique as the phoenix of rhetorical praise; after spending a little time with hi, I felt I could recognize his voice, or his habits, in the texts of various literatures and various ages. I will note of a few of them here, in chronological order.

The first is Zeno’s paradox against motion. A moving body at point A (Aristotle states) will not be able to reach point B, because it must first cover half the distance between the two, and before that, half of the half, and before that, half of the half of the half, and so on to infinity; the form of this famous problem is precisely that of The Castle, and the moving body and the arrow and Achilles are the first Kafkaesque characters in literature. In the second text that bibliographic chance has brought my way, the affinity is not in the form but in the tone. It is a fable by Han Yu, a prose writer of the ninth century, and it is found in the admirable Anthologie raisonee de la literature chinoise (1948) by Margoulies. This is the mysterious and tranquil paragraph I marked:

It is universally admitted that the unicorn is a supernatural being and one of good omen; thus it is declared in the Odes, in the Annals, in the biographies of illustrious men, and in other texts of unquestioned authority. Even the women and children of the common people know that the unicorn is a favorable portent. But this animal does not figure among the domestic animals, it is not easy to find, it does not lend itself to any classification. It is not like the horse or the bull, the wolf or the deer. Under such conditions, we could be in the presence of a unicorn and not know with certainty that it is one. We know that a given animal with a mane is a horse, and that one with horns is a bull. We do not know what a unicorn is like.

The third text comes from a more predictable source: the writings of Kierkegaard. The mental affinity of both writers is known to everyone; what has not yet been emphasized, as far as I know, is that Kierkegaard, like Kafka abounded in religious parables on contemporary and bourgeois themes. Lowrie, in his Kierkegaard (Oxford University Press, 1938), mentions two. One is the story of a counterfeiter who, under constant surveillance, examines Bank of England notes; in the same way, God could be suspicious of Kierkegaard and yet entrust him with a mission precisely because He knew he was accustomed to evil. Expeditions to the North Pole are the subject of the other. Danish clergymen had declared from their pulpits that to participate in such expeditions would serve the eternal health of the soul. They had to admit, however, that reaching the Pole was difficult and perhaps impossible, and that not everyone could undertake the adventure. In the end, they announced that any journey – from Denmark to London, say, in a steamship, or a Sunday outing in a hackney coach – could be seen as a veritable expedition to the North Pole. The fourth prefiguration I found in Browning’s poem ‘Fears and Scruples,’ published in 1876. A man has, or thinks he has, a famous friend. He has never seen this friend, and the fact is that this friend has never been able to help him, but he knows that the friend has some very noble qualities, and he shows others the letters his friend has written. Some have doubts about his nobility, and handwriting experts declare the letters to be fake. In the last line, the man asks: ‘What if this friend happened to be – God?’

My notes also include two short stories. One is from Histoires desobligeantes by Leon Bloy, and refers to the case of some people who amass globes, atlases, train schedules, and trunks, and who die without ever having left the town where they were born. The other is entitled ‘Carcassonne’ and is by Lord Dunsany. An invincible army of warriors departs from an infinite castle, subjugates kingdoms and sees monsters and crosses desserts and mountains, but never reaches Carcassonne, although they once catch a glimpse of it. (This story is, as it is easily noticed, the exact opposite of the previous one: in the first, they  never leave the city; in the second, they never reach it.)

If I am not mistaken, the heterogenous pieces I have listed resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. This last fact is what is most significant. Kafka’s idiosyncrasy is present in each of these writings, to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had not written, we would not perceive it, that is to say, it would not exist. The poem “Fears and Scruples” by Robert Browning prophesies the work of Kafka, but our reading of Kafka noticeably refines and diverts our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do now. The word ‘precursor’ is indispensable to the vocabulary of criticism, but one must try to purify it from any connotation of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. In this correlation, the identity or plurality of men doesn’t matter. The first Kafka of “Betrachtung” is less a precursor of the Kafka of the gloomy myths and terrifying institutions than is Browning or Lord Dunsany.”

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My next post:  Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning:  My introduction to our next play, All’s Well That Ends Well.

Enjoy.

Othello

Act Five, Part Two

By Dennis Abrams

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Let’s start by finishing up with Jan Kott:

“They talk about her even before she has appeared. They shout that she has run away with a Negro. Her image is already being shown in the sphere of animal eroticism:

…..an old black ram

Is tupping your white ewe.

The prologue of Othello is a brutal one. Iago and Roderigo want to anger Brabantio. This, however, does not explain the obstinacy with which animal comparisons are used. They are there by design. The union of Othello and Desdemona is presented from the very first moment as mating of animals.

…you’ll have your daughter cover’d with a Barbary horse; you’ll have your nephews neigh to you; you’ll have coursers for cousins, and gennets for germans.

Othello is black, Desdemona is white. Victor Hugo, in the fragment quoted [in my last post], wrote about the symbolism of black and white, of day and night. But Shakespeare had been more specific than the Romantics; more material and carnal. Bodies in Othello are not only tormented; they also attract each other.

…your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs.

The image of the animal with two backs, one white, the other black, is one of the most brutal and, at the same time, most fascinating representations of the sexual act. But there is in it also the atmosphere of modern eroticism, with its longing for pure animality, its fascination with ‘being different,’ its breaking of sexual taboo. That is why its area is so often black and white. Othello is fascinated by Desdemona, but Desdemona is much more strongly fascinated by Othello.

…and she, in spite of nature,

Of years, of country, credit, everything,

To fall in love with what she fear’d to look on?

She has given up everything. She is in a hurry. She does not want a simple empty night any more. She will follow Othello to Cyprus.

That I did love the Moor to live with him,

My downright violence, and storm of fortunes,

May trumpet to the world.

In days of Kean, Desdemona use to go to bed in a nightcap. Modern Desdemonas not infrequently still wear that Victorian nightcap. Heine felt uneasy about Desdemona having moist hands. He wrote that sometimes he felt sad at the thought that, perhaps, Iago was partially right. Heine interpreted Shakespeare with far greater pungency than Schlegel, Tick, and all the other sentimental Germans. He compared Othello to Titus Andronicus, ‘In both the passion of a beautiful woman for an ugly Negro is represented with particular relish,’ he wrote.

Desdemona is two to four years older than Juliet; she could be Ophelia’s age. But she is much more of a woman than either one of them. Heine was right. Desdemona is obedient and stubborn at the same time. She is obedient to the point where passion begins. Of all Shakespeare’s female characters she is the most sensuous. More silent than Juliet or Ophelia, she seems absorbed in herself, and wakes only to the night,

…Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion without some instruction.

She does not even know that she disturbs and – promises by her very presence. Othello will only later learn about it, but Iago knows this from the onset. Desdemona is faithful, but must have something of a slut in her. Not in actu but in potential. Otherwise the drama could not work, because Othello would be ridiculous. Othello must not be ridiculous. Desdemona is sexually obsessed with Othello, but all men – Iago, Cassio, Roderigo – are obsessed with Desdemona. They remain in her erotic climate.

…The wine she drinks is made of rapes. If she had been blessed, she would never have lov’d the Moor…Didst thou not see her paddle with the palm of his hand?…They met so near with their lips that their breaths embrac’d together.

In Othello’s relation to Desdemona a violent change will occur; a change that cannot be explained fully by Iago’s intrigues. It is as if Othello were suddenly horrified by Desdemona. Robert Speaight in his reflections on Othello wonders where their marriage was consummated – in Venice, or only in Cyprus, the night when Iago made Cassio drunk. Such a question may sound absurd, applied to a Shakespearean tragedy, with its double time of invents and synthetic motivations. But, perhaps because Shakespeare leaves out no motivation, this question touches on a dark sphere in Othello’s relations with Desdemona. Othello behaves as if he found a different Desdemona from the one he expected. As Iago says, ‘She that, so young, could give out such a seeming…’ (III, 3). It is as if the outburst of sensuality in a girl who not long ago listened to his tales with her eyes lowered, amazed and horrified Othello.

His bed shall seem a school, his board a shrift…

From the very first night Desdemona felt herself a lover and a wife. Eroticism was her vocation and joy; eroticism and love, eroticism and Othello are one in the same. Her Eros is a substance of light. But for Othello Eros is a trap. It is as if, after the first night, he got lost in darkness, where love and jealousy, lust and disgust were inextricably bound together.

The more violently Desdemona becomes engrossed by love, the more of a slut she seems to Othello; a past, present, or future slut. The more she desires, the better she loves, the more readily Othello believes that she can, or has, betrayed him.

Turnip Top Acting Troupe
British Western Front
WWI

Iago sets all the world’s evil in motion and falls victim to it in the end. Desdemona is the victim of her own passion. Her love testifies against her, not for her. Love proves her undoing. This is the second paradox.

In no other great Shakespearean drama, with the possible exception of King Lear, is the word ‘nature’ uttered so frequently as in Othello.

It is a judgment maim’d and most imperfect

That will confess perfection so could err

Against all rules of nature…

The idea is repeated several times, almost in the same words:

And yet, how nature erring from itself –

What is nature? What is against nature? Desdemona deceived her father. In King Lear we look at daughters with the eyes of the exiled old man. We hear his curses. In Othello, the viewpoint is different. Othello and Desdemona stand in the foreground. Brabantio does not rouse our compassion. But only for the time being: his words will later be repeated by Othello:

Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see.

She has deceiv’d her father, and may thee.

Respect her father, husband, family, class, and estate is consistent with nature. Social order is natural. Everything that destroys it is against nature. Eroticism is nature too. But nature can be good or evil. Eroticism is nature depraved. The theme of Othello, like that of Macbeth and King Lear, is the fall. The Renaissance tale of the cunning villain and the jealous husband has been changed into a medieval morality.

Othello:

Why, what art thou?

Desdemona:

Your wife, my lord; your true

And loyal wife.

Othello:

Come swear it, damn thyself;

Lest, being like one of heaven, the devils themselves

Should fear to seize thee. therefore be double-damn’d—

Swear thou art honest.

Desdemona:

Heaven doth truly know it.

Othello:

Heaven truly knows that thou art false as hell.

Angel turns into devil. After animal symbolism, in which eroticism has been enclosed, this is, in frequency, the second semantic sphere of the tragedy. Othello’s landscape consisted of the earth without moon and stars, then of the world of reptiles and insects. Now the setting, as in medieval theatre, consists of two gates: of heaven and hell. Even the sober and down-to-earth Emilia turns into a hellish gate-keeper:

….You, mistress,

That have the office opposite to Saint Peter

And keep the gate of hell!

In front of the two gates Othello utters his great closing speeches before he kills himself:

….When we shall meet at compt,

This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven,

And fiends will snatch at it.

But in fact Othello is no more a morality, or a mystery, than it is an opera or a melodrama. Nature is depraved and cannot be trusted. Eros is nature and cannot be trusted either. There is no appeal to nature, or her laws. Nature is evil, not only to Othello, but also to Shakespeare.  It is just as insane and cruel as history. Nature is depraved but in live, unlike a medieval morality play, it is not redeemed. There is no redemption. Angels turn into devils. All of them.

…turn thy complexion there

Patience, thou young and rose-lipp’d cherubin!

Ay, there look grim as hell!

It is the mad Lear who continues the argument:

Behold yond simp’ring dame,

Whose face between her forks presageth snow,

That minces virtue, and does shake the had

To hear of pleasure’s name.

The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to’t

With a more riotous appetite.

Down from the waist they are Centaurs,

Though women all above.

But to the girdle do the gods inherit,

Beneath is all the fiend’s.

There’s hell, there’s darkness, there’s the sulphurous pit; burning, scalding, stench, consumption.

(King Lear, IV, 6)

Othello and Lear stay in the same sphere of madness. Nature has been put on trial. Once again Shakespeare’s hatred of nature forecasts that of Swift. Nature is depraved, above all in its reproductive function. Love tales, stories of lovers and married couples, are just as ruthless and cruel as the histories of kings, princes, and usurpers. In both, dead bodies are carried away from the empty stage.

All the landscapes of Othello, the gestures, the rhetoric – the last also in its gradual destruction – belong to the poetics of the Baroque. I visualize Othello, Desdemona, and Iago in black and gold, dipped in Rembrandtan darkness. Light falls on their faces. The first crowd scene, when Brabantio with his retinue sets out in search of Othello, always reminds me of the Night-watch.

Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.

Othello is a tragedy of gestures. This, too, is part of Baroque. But the gestures are stayed, held up in the air, as it were. Everyone is motionless for a moment. I would have Othello’s final gestures held up in the same way. Let him approach Desdemona lying on her bed. And let him draw back. He knows now that Iago has won the final argument. The world is sufficiently vile, if she could have betrayed him, if he has come to believe in her infidelity, if he could believe in it even.

…To be once in doubt

Is once to be resolv’d.

Othello does not have to kill Desdemona. The play would be more cruel, if, in that final and decisive moment, he just left her. Cressida does not die after her act of betrayal, nor does Troilus kill himself. Their play ends in a mocking tone.

Othello kills Desdemona to save the moral order, to restore love and faith. He kills Desdemona to be able to forgive her; so that the accounts be settled and the world returned to its equilibrium. Othello does not mumble any more. He desperately wants to save the meaning of live, of his life, perhaps even the meaning of the world.

And say besides that in Aleppo once,

Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk

Beat a Venetian and traduc’d the state,

I took by th’throat the circumcised dog

And smote him – thus.

Othello’s death can save nothing. Desdemona is dead, and so is the world of feudal loyalty. The condottieri are anachronistic; together with their enchanting poetry, with their rhetoric, their pathos and their gestures. One such gesture is Othello’s suicide.

Desdemona is dead, so are the stupid fool Roderigo and the prudent Emilia. In a while Othello will die. All of them die: the noble ones and the villains; the level-headed ones and the madmen; the empiricists and the absolutists. All choices are bad.

Desdemona:

Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?

Emilia:

Why, would not you?

Desdemona:

No, by this heavenly light!

Emilia:

Nor I neither, by this heavenly light,

I might do’t as well I’ th’ dark.

Desdemona:

Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?

Emilia:

The world’s a huge thing. It is a great price for a small vice.

Iago keeps silent. Probably even on the rack he will not utter a word. He has won all the arguments; but only the intellectual ones. In all great Shakespearean dramas, from Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida onwards, the moral order and the intellectual order are in conflict with one another. They will remain so up to The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. The world is as Iago sees it. But Iago is a villain. Like our world, Shakespeare’s world did not regain its balance after the earthquake. Like our world, it remained incoherent. In Shakespeare’s Othello everybody loses in the end.”

And with that, we come to the end of Othello.  For me, this has been a fascinating experience.  For years, it had been my “least favorite” (relatively speaking) of the tragedies:  I tended to agree with Bradley and the like that it lacks the “cosmic’ depth of the others, that it’s too “specific” a tragedy and, quite honestly, I tended to find Othello’s quick plunge into jealousy and rage not quite believable.

But  this time all that changed.  Reading the play along with Garber and (especially) Kott, changed my perception of the play.  Kott, in particular, I thought, brought the play into a completely new light for me:  his view of the play makes sense for me, and elevated the play from a seemingly domestic tragedy into one that’s larger than I’d imagined.

And one more observation of a more general variety…is everyone else noticing how much “easier” it is to read Shakespeare now?  My guess is, it’s in part because of his progression as a writer, but even more because we know how to read him.

So now I’d like to throw it over to all of you.  What did you think about Othello?  If you’ve never read it, what were your initial impressions?  And if you’re read it before, how did your interpretation/experience change?  Please…share with the group!

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K7xjPyMl-w&list=PL48F22AF61832B590

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZb7G4vse6w&list=PL48F22AF61832B590

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSQK_mjqmcE&list=PL48F22AF61832B590

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFsOiaYTB0E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DF7YQrC7HM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IynoOLAk3bM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgGTkaovWzw

My next post will be Sunday evening/Monday morning, Sonnet #135, with another post Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning introducing our next play:  All’s Well That Ends Well.  (Heads-up – the title is seriously ironic.  And yes, it’s a comedy.)

Enjoy.  And enjoy your weekend.

Othello

Act Five, Part One

By Dennis Abrams

Act Five:  At Iago’s bidding, Roderigo attacks Cassio but only managed to wound him, and in the confusion that follows Iago stabs Roderigo to death. Othello, meanwhile, is about to kill the sleeping Desdemona when she wakes up, and despite her anguished denials, he smothers her in her own bed. Discovering them both, Emilia insists on her mistresses’ innocence, and when Othello mentions the fatal strawberry handkerchief, the full extent of Iago’s villainy is revealed. Iago has since arrived, but when Othello attacks him, he flees after killing Emilia. Returning under arrest, he refuses to give any reason for his actions. Othello finally realizes the truth and, after asking Cassio’s forgiveness, stabs himself.  He dies, clutching Desdemona’s body.

Even though we know how it’s going to end, there is still something infinitely moving about Othello’s torment.  Of course, he’s not its main victim – instructing Desdemona to prepare herself for bed, he is readying himself for her cold-blooded execution. Even so, the testimony of her sleeping body almost (I said almost) persuades him not to go through with it. “It is the cause, it is the cause,’ he murmurs, stepping silently into her bedroom,

Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars,

It is the cause. Yet I’ll not shed her blood,

Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow.

Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men.

(5.2.1-6)

He will not (and probably cannot or could not) “scar” her alabaster skin, but he will kill her before the scene has ended. This is probably the most chilling of Iago’s many purely malicious victories: as well as robbing Othello of his sanity, he turns him into a villain created by a racist’s worst fantasy – a black murderer entering into a white girl’s bedchamber.  Worse still, Othello seems all too aware of the fact, drawing attention to her “whiter” complexion rather than his “foul,” “filthy” murder. Emilia informs Othello what many seventeenth audiences would have suspected all along: “O, the more angel she, and you the blacker devil.”

And with that, the play is almost over…but not quite.  Though it is too late for either Desdemona or Othello, the truth does come out. Following Emilia’s furious testimony (like her namesake in The Winter’s Tale she is a fierce guardian of the truth), the real story emerges. “O thou dull Moor,” she yells, “that handkerchief thou speak’st of/I found by fortune and did give my husband…(5.2.232-3). Realizing that his lies are collapsing around him, Iago makes a last attempt to rewrite the conclusion and lunges brutally at Emilia, wounding her. Othello, meanwhile, begins his slow and tragic journey back to himself, to realization. He, too, is desperate to be understood. ‘When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,” he tells the assembled crowd, as it gathers around the corpses on the stage,

Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate,

Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak

Of one that loved not wisely but too well,

Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,

Perplexed in the extreme, of one whose hand,

Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away

Richer than all his tribe…

(5.2.350-7)

But for Iago, the storytelling has come to an abrupt end.  “Demand me nothing,” he says sneeringly, “What you know you know.”  (5.2.309-10).  There will be no more answers.

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From Harold Bloom:

“Desdemona dies so piteously that Shakespeare risks alienating us forever from Othello:

Desdemona:

O, banish me, my lord, but kill me not.

Othello:

Down, strumpet!

Desdemona:

Kill me tomorrow, let me live tonight!

Othello:

Nay – if you strive –

Desdemona:

But half an hour!

Othello:

       Being done, there is no pause –

Desdemona:

But while I say one prayer!

Othello:

It is too late.

Rather operatically, Shakespeare gives Desdemona a dying breath that attempts to exonerate Othello, which would strain credulity if she were not, as Alvin Kernan put it, ‘Shakespeare’s word for love.’ We are made to believe that this was at once the most natural of young women, and also so loyal to her murderer that her exemplary last words sound almost ironic, given Othello’s degradation: ‘Commend me to my kind lord – O, farewell!’ It seems to much more for us to bear that Othello should refuse her final act of love: ‘She’s like a liar gone to burning hell:/Twas I that killed her.’ The influential modern assaults upon Othello by T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis take their plausibility (such as it is) from Shakespeare’s heaping up of Othello’s brutality, stupidity, and unmitigated guilt. But Shakespeare allows Othello a great if partial recovery, in an astonishing last speech:

Soft you, a word or two before you go.

I have done the state some service, and they know’t:

No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate,

Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak

Of one that loved not wisely, but too well;

Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,

Perplexed in the extreme, of one whose hand,

Like the base Judean, threw a pearl away

Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,

Albeit unused to the melting mood,

Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees

Their medicinable gum. Set you down this,

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! He stabs himself.

This famous and problematic outburst rarely provokes any critic to agree with any other, yet the Eliot-Leavis interpretation, which holds that Othello essentially is ‘cheering himself up,’ cannot be right. The Moor remains as divided a character as Shakespeare ever created; we need give no credence to the absurd blindness of ‘loved not wisely, but too well,’ or the outrageous self-deception of ‘one not easily jealous.’ Yet we are moved by the truth of ‘perplexed in the extreme,’ and by the invocation of Herod, ‘the base Judean’ who murdered his Maccabean wife, Mariamme, whom he loved. The association of Othello with Herod the Great is the more shocking for being Othello’s own adjustment upon himself, and is followed by the Moor’s tears, and by his fine image of weeping trees. Nor should a fair critic fail to be impressed by Othello’s verdict upon himself: that he has become an enemy of Venice, and as such must be slain. His suicide has nothing Roman in it: Othello passes sentence upon himself, and performs the execution. We need to ask what Venice would have done with Othello, had he allowed himself to survive. I venture that he seeks to forestall what might have been their politic decision: to preserve him until he might be of high use again. Cassio is no Othello, the state has no replacement for the Moor, and might well have used him again, doubtless under some control. All of the rifts in Othello that Iago sensed and exploited are present in this final speech, but so is a final vision of judgment, one in which Othello abandons his nostalgias for glorious war, and pitifully seeks to expiate what cannot be expiated – not, at least, by a farewell to arms.”

Bloom had me until we got to his “venture” of what Venice would have done with Othello?  Really?  Your thoughts?

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And from Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare For All:

“The death scene itself is framed in legalisms. Othello has sought ‘proof’ (‘Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore’). When he comes to her bedside he speaks of ‘the cause,’ as if submitting his case to a heavenly – or infernal – judge:

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul.

Let me not name it to you, you chase stars.

It is the cause. Yet I’ll not shed her blood,

Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,

And smooth as monumental alabaster.

Yet she must dies, else she’ll betray more men.

Put out the light, and then put out the light.

If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,

I can again thy former light restore

Should I repent me; but once put out thy light,

Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature,

I know not where is that Promethean heat

That can thy light relume. When I have plucked the rose

I cannot give it vital growth again.

It needs must wither. I’ll smell thee on the tree.

In dramatic action as well as in language the play has been seeking light all this time, from the moment in the first scene when Brabantio called for light, and in scene after scene, shrouded in darkness, when the call went up for ‘lights, lights.’  Here Othello compares Desdemona’s life to the candle he holds in his hand, prefiguring later moments in other tragedies (Macbeth’s ‘brief candle’ speech; Lady Macbeth’s desperate command to have light by her continually). Yet even here, shrouded in the mocking whiteness of her wedding sheets, Desdemona’s purity and generosity make themselves manifest. Othello smothers her, and yet she speaks. He has closed the bed-curtains, making of the marriage bed and death bed another inner stage, and from behind the curtains, as if from death itself, Desdemona speaks: ‘O, falsely, falsely murdered!…A guiltless death I did.’ When Emilia asks ‘who hath done this deed,’ Desdemona’s answer is exculpatory and enigmatic: ‘Nobody, I myself. Farewell./Commend me to my kind lord.’ Her recovery to speech, which has been so insistently equated with humanity, it itself brief, but essential. She speaks from the brink of the grave, as Iago refuses speech. He is dead, even as he lives; she alive, even as she dies.

As for Othello, at the close of the play surrounded by horrified spectators who represent the return of Venetian law, he speaks to them, and through them to the audience in the theater. Like Hamlet at the close of his tragedy, he speaks finally to us, his first words like the restraining arm of Coleridge’s Ancient mariner, enforcing attention even on the unwilling:

Soft you, a word or two before you go.

I have done the state some service, and they know’t:

No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate,

Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak

Of one that loved not wisely, but too well;

Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,

Perplexed in the extreme, of one whose hand,

Like the base Judean, threw a pearl away

Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,

Albeit unused to the melting mood,

Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees

Their medicinable gum. Set you down this,

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.

Othello kills Othello. He is both Turk and Venetian, as he has been all along, and he dies in the act of describing a noble public gesture, the killing of a public enemy, in front of Venetian ambassadors who are public men themselves. The famous textual crux, ‘base Indian (the Quarto reading) or ‘base Judean’ (the Folio reading), is produced by the fact that the capital letters for modern I and J were the same, and the letter n could look like the letter u (the piece of type – u or n – could also be inserted upside down within the frame). Like many textual ambiguities in Shakespeare, this one, however accidental, is salutary, for it has produced competing readings of great power. If the image is that of the ‘base Indian,’ the context is New World exploration and discovery, the ‘savage’ man who does not know the value of the jewel he finds. If the phrase is read as ‘base Judean,’ the figure invoked is that of Judas Iscariot. The ‘pearl of great price’ (Matthew 13: 44-52) he throws away, ‘richer than all his tribe,’ is the Kingdom of Heaven. [MY NOTE:  Compare this reading with that of Bloom, above.]

Othello wants to be remembered for his private sins and for his public virtue. His appeal is finally to the civilizing power of language: ‘a word or two before you go; ‘[w]hen you shall these unlucky deeds relate’; ‘[s]peak of me as I am’; [t]hen must you speak.’ As at the end of Hamlet and indeed throughout Shakespearean tragedy, retelling becomes the tragic hero’s only path to redemption. The request to retell is an injunction to replay the play, to speak of Othello again and again, to learn from tragic drama as we learn from history, by taking its example seriously as a model of conduct.

Samuel Johnson, the great eighteenth century lexicographer, biographer, essayist, and editor of Shakespeare, wrote at the conclusion of his edition of Othello: “I am glad that I have ended my revisal of this dreadful scene; it is not to be endured.’ As was the case in Romeo and Juliet, womb becomes tomb, wedding becomes funeral, marriage bed becomes deathbed. But Johnson’s response is a sign of the scene’s power. It is to be endured – that is its purpose. ‘Look on the tragic loading of this bed,’ says Lodovico, the Duke’s emissary, to Iago. ‘This is thy work.’ In the final scene the audience in the theater is offered its chance to measure the tragic work of two competing dramatists, Iago and Shakespeare. Throughout the play Iago had made us his unwitting and unwilling co-conspirators, presuming on our silence. Now, through Othello’s plea, ‘Speak of me as I am,’ the audience can be said to find its own role in the drama. Language, refused by Iago, regained by Desdemona, becomes at last the joint instrument of actor, playwright, and spectators. By gazing upon the final tableau, the tragic loading of the bed, and by replaying, remembering, and even editing the play, the silent audience can find its voice.”

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28LDq-BI4Es

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q0H-V5Qvp0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THTR1IzFWS0

And so, too can silent readers.  Follow Othello’s words, and share with the group your thoughts…Speak of him…

My last post on Othello:  Thursday evening/Friday morning.

Othello

Act Four, Part Two

By Dennis Abrams

For today’s post, we’re going to be looking at Othello from two very different angles – contemporary and old school.  First, from Polish avant-garde activist, critic, and theoretician, from his book Shakespeare Our Contemporary (I’ll be using this a lot when we get to King Lear – his reading of the play was extraordinarily influential)  As the New York Times said in their obituary when he died at the age of 87 in 2002,

“Mr. Kott was one of a handful of theater critics who have changed the perception of masterpieces. His main strong point as a critic lay in his skill at showing ”the way in which the history is part of the drama and the drama is part of the history,” as he put it in a 1985 interview.

In his influential book ”Shakespeare Our Contemporary” (1964, Doubleday), ”Kott sees Shakespeare in the light of our world, or, more pointedly and poignantly, in the light of his world,” Harold Clurman, a director, drama critic and author on theater, wrote in a review of the work in The New York Times Book Review. ”Being a Pole whose country suffered more than any other the holocaust of Nazism and later the oppression of Stalinism, Kott’s vision of our era is infernal.””

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From Kott:

“In what setting does Othello’s tragedy unfold? The question sounds absurd. The first act takes place in Venice, the remaining four in Cyprus. Venice and Cyprus had already been depicted by means of an open change; later it seemed that the revolving stage would solve all difficulties. Each scene could now have a new set. In English theaters of the early nineteenth century, Othello was usually set in contemporary middle-class interior. Only later did Othello gradually become an historical costume play. The naturalistic theatre even managed to reproduce St. Mark’s Square on the stage in its entirety. Othello has been identified with nineteenth-century stage design to such an extent that all of Shakespeare’s plays it is the most difficult to visualize on a bare stage. However, Venice and Cyprus in Othello are no more real than the cities and countries in all Shakespeare’s other tragedies and comedies. Cyprus and Venice are no less and no more real than Elsinore, Bohemia, Illyria, the forest of Dunsinane in Macbeth, or the cliffs of Dover from which blind Gloucester wanted to hurl himself into the abyss.

Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul

But I do love thee! and when I love thee not,

Chaos is come again.

(III, 3)

The action of Othello, like that of all Shakespeare’s other great tragedies, really takes place on the Elizabethan stage which is also the Theatrum Mundi. On that stage, as in Hamlet and King Lear, the world is unhinged, chaos returns, and the very order of nature is threatened.

If she be false, O, then heaven mocks itself!

I’ll not belive’t.

(III, 3)

On horror’s head horrors accumulate;

Do deeds to make heaven weep, all earth amaz’d.

(III, 3)

Even the firmament is shaken, the balance of heavenly spheres disturbed, as if madness descended on people from the stars:

It is the very error of the moon.

She comes more near the earth than she was wont

And makes men mad.

(V, 2)

And then, Desdemona having been murdered, apocalyptic night falls down on Othello’s world:

Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse

Of sun and moon, and that th’affrighted globe

Should yawn at alteration.

(V, 2)

A simultaneous eclipse of the sun and the moon is a vision of the end of the world found in Baroque painting. Night falls down on Othello. Not only a night without sun and moon; as in King Lear and Macbeth, the sky is empty.

Are there no stones in heaven

But what serves for the thunder?

(V, 2)

Othello, like King Lear and Macbeth is the tragedy of man under empty heaven. At the close of the play Iago is exposed to tortures. But it is really Othello who, from Act II onwards, is put on the rack. He steps downwards, like Lear, Macbeth, or Gloucester, and like them is brought to the ultimate point. He exhausts fully one of human experiences. As in King Lear and Macbeth, in Othello the plummet has been thrown down to the bottom, darkness has been sounded fully. Fundamental questions about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of the world can be answered only at the end of the road, at the lowest depths.

G. Wilson Knight was the first to reveal the music of Othello. But he denied Othello universality. In comparison with King Lear and Macbeth, Othello is to him a play that does not achieve the power of symbol and remains enclosed in its literality. For Mr. Knight, Othello is not a cosmic tragedy.  [MY NOTE:  I see his point.]  I prefer Victor Hugo’s view, in spite of his unbearable romantic rhetoric:

Now what is Othello? He is night. An immense fatal figure. Night is amorous of day. Darkness loves the dawn. The African adores the white woman. Desdemona is Othello’s brightness and frenzy! And then how easy to him is jealousy? He is great, he is dignified, he is majestic, he soars above all heads, he has an escort bravery, battle, the braying of trumpets, the banner of war, renown, glory; he is radiant with twenty victories, he is studded with stars, this Othello: but he is black. And thus how soon, when jealous, the hero becomes monster, the black becomes the Negro! How speedily has night beckoned to death!

The above fragment is not devoid of a genuine theatrical vision; it almost seems to fit Sir Laurence Olivier’s latest interpretation of the part of Othello.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDo-GHN_Kk

Iago near Othello is the precipice near the landslip. ‘This way!’ he ways in a low voice. The snare advises blindness. The being of darkness guides the black. Deceit takes upon itself to give what light may be required by night. Jealousy uses falsehood as the blind man his dog. Iago the traitor, opposed to whiteness and candour, Othello the Negro, what can be more terrible! These ferocities of the darkness act in unison. These two incarnations of the eclipse comprise together, the one roaring, the other sneering, the tragic suffocation of light. Sound this profound thing. Othello is the night, and being night, wishes to kill, what does he take to slay with? Poison? The club? The axe? The knife? No, the pillow. To kill is to lull to sleep. Shakespeare himself perhaps did not take this into account. The creator sometimes, almost unknown to himself, yields to his type, so much is that type a power. And it is thus that Desdemona, spouse of the man Night, dies stifled by the pillow, which has had the first kiss, and which has the last sigh.

Olivier’s Othello enters the stage with the step of a dancer, holding a rose in his mouth. Olivier’s Othello stifles Desdemona among kisses.

Iago always caused the most difficulties for commentators. For the Romantics he was simply the genius of evil. But even Mephistopheles must have his own reasons for acting. Iago hates Othello, just as he hates everybody. Commentators observed long ago that there is something disinterested in his hate. Iago hates first, and only then seems to invent reasons for his hate. Coleridge’s description hits the nail on the head: ‘motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity.’ Thwarted ambition, jealousy of his wife, of Desdemona, of all women and all men: his hate constantly looks for nourishment to feed itself on and is never satisfied. But if hate looks for reasons to justify itself, what are the arguments it uses?

There are two other excellent descriptions of Iago. Carlyle called him ‘an inarticulate poet’; Hazlitt, ‘an amateur of tragedy in real life.’ Iago is not satisfied with devising the tragedy; he wants to play it through distribute all the parts and act in it himself.

Iago is a diabolic stage manager, or, rather – a Machiavellian stage manager. His motives for acting are ambiguous and hidden, his intellectual reasons clear and precise. He formulates them in the early scenes when, for instance, he soliloquizes loudly: ‘Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners.’ (I, 3)

The demonic Iago was an invention of the Romantics. Iago is no demon. Like Richard III, he is a careerist, but on a different scale. He, too, wants to set in motion a real mechanism, make use of genuine passions. He does not want to be cheated. ‘We cannot all be masters, nor all masters/Cannot be truly follow’d.’ (I,1)  This is not a demonic statement, but rather one obvious to the point of vulgarity. ‘Preferment goes by letter and affection.’ This is not a demonic statement either. Iago is an empiricist, does not believe in ideologies, and has no illusions: ‘Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit and lost without deserving.’ (II, 3)

Of course, Iago is a Machiavellian, but Machiavellianism for him merely means a generalized personal experience. Fools believe in honour and love. In reality there are only egoism and lust. The strong are able to subordinate their passions to ambition. One’s own body can also be an instrument. Hence Iago’s contempt for everything that benumbs a man, from moral precepts to love.

Iago believes in will power. One can make everything of oneself, and of other people. Others, too, are only an instrument. They can be molded like clay. Iago, like Richard III, despises people even more than he hates them.

Says Iago: The world consists of villains and fools; of those who devour and those who are devoured. People are like animals; they copulate and eat each other. The weak do not deserve pity, they are just as abominable, only more stupid than the strong. The world is vile.

Says Othello: The world is beautiful and people are noble. Love and loyalty exist in it.

If we strip Othello of romantic varnish, of everything that is opera and melodrama, the tragedy of jealousy and the tragedy of betrayed confidence become a dispute between Othello and Iago: the dispute on the nature of the world. Is this world good or bad? What are the limits of suffering; what is the ultimate purpose of the few brief moments that pass between birth and death?

Like Richard III, Iago sets in motion the mechanism of vileness, envy, and stupidity, and, like Richard, he will be destroyed. The world, in which Othello can believe in Desdemona’s infidelity, in which treachery is possible, in which Othello murders Desdemona, in which there is no friendship, loyalty, or faith, in which Othello – by agreeing to the murder of Cassio – gives consent to secret assassination, such a world is bad. Iago is an accomplished stage manager.

…..Thou hast set me on the rack.

(III, 3)

He has proved that the world consists of fools and villains. He has destroyed all around him, and himself. He goes to torture, in a tragedy devised by himself. He has proved that neither the world nor himself deserves any pity. Richard’s defeat confirms the working of the Grand Mechanism; just as Iago’s failure does. The world is vile. He was right. And the very fact that he was right proved his undoing. This is the first paradox. [MY NOTE: The name of Kott’s essay is “The Two Paradoxes of Othello.”]

In the last scene Iago is silent. Why should he talk? Everything has become clear. The world has fallen; but for Othello; not for him. They will crush his bones, but he can triumph. The torture and death of Iago do not restore justice; they do not serve any purpose, and they happen outside the play, even in the literal sense. But Iago wins not only on the intellectual plane of the tragedy; he wins in its very fabric and texture, in its language.

In Act III Othello crawls at Iago’s feet, foaming at the mouth in a fit. Shakespeare is never afraid of cruelty. Gloucester shall have his eyes torn out, Lear shall go mad. The magnificent, proud, beautiful Othello has to degrade himself physically. Othello’s world, he himself, everything will be dissolved, as if eaten away by acid. (This is how G. Wilson Knight has described it.)

…..O, now for ever

Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!

Farwell the plumed troop, and the big wars

That make 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 great clamours counterfeit

Farewell! Othello’s occupation gone!

(III, 3)

Othello is endowed by Shakespeare with all the attributes of feudal heroics found in knightly epic and romance. There is enchanting poetry here, but at the same time a decaying set of values. To start with, there is royal blood:

….I fetch my life, and being

From men of royal siege.

(I, 2)

Next, there are the heroic stereotypes, inherited from Roman rhetoric:

The tyrant custom, most grave senators,

Hath made the flinty and steel couch of war

My thrice-driven bed of down.

(I, 3)

And then, there are the elements of fairy tale, dream, legend. Iago is all reality, everyday life, pure matter. Othello belongs to a different world, the world of the exotic that ranges from the adventures of Ulysses to the expeditions of Renaissance sailors. He talks to Desdemona:

…of the cannibals that each other eat,

The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads

Do grow beneath their shoulders…

(I, 3)

With Othello, the bare Elizabethan stage has been filled with the seascape of all oceans.

…..Like to the Pontic sea,

Whose icy current and compulsive course

Ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on

To the Propontic and the Hellespont;

Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace,

Shall ne’er look back, ne’er ebb to humble love,

Till that a capable and wide revenge

Swallow them up.

(III, 3)

The system of values in Othello disintegrates together with the play’s poetry and language. But there is another language, another rhetoric in this tragedy. Iago uses it. In Iago’s semantic sphere there stand out, as word-slogans, word-clues, evocative words – names of things and animals, arousing abhorrence, fear, disgust. Iago talks about glues, baits, nets, poisons, drugs, enemas, pitch and sulphur, plague and pestilence.

So will I turn her virtue into pitch,

And out of her own goodness make the net

That shall enmesh them all.

(II, 3)

Even more characteristic is the bestiary invoked by Iago. It contains helpless and powerless animals (‘Drown theyself? Drown cats and blind puppies!’ I,3), symbols and allegories of stupidity and ugliness (guinea-hens, baboons), lust and lewdness (‘…as primes goats, as hot as monkeys,/As salt as wolves in pride.’ III, 3)

Othello’s speech is gradually reduced to mumbling. The pathos and poetry of feudal heroics are destroyed in language and in imagery. Mr. Knight has already observed this. Not only shall Othello crawl at Iago’s feet; he shall talk his language. These broken sentences are at the same time one of the earliest inner monologues – in the modern sense of the word – that we find in drama.

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

Othello will now rave incessantly about whoring and breeding, fire and sulphur, cords, knives, and poison. He will invoke the same bestiary. Iago spoke of jackdaws looking for prey; Othello will now be haunted by the image of “…the raven o’er the infected house’ (IV, 1). He will take over from Iago all his obsessions, as if he were unable to break away from the images of monkeys and goats, mongrels and lewd bitches.’ “…Exchange me for a goat,’ he says (III, 3). Even while he is ceremoniously receiving Lodovico, he cannot contain himself: ‘You are welcome, sir, to Cyprus. Goats and monkeys!’ (IV, 1)

Caroline Spurgeon in her catalogue of Shakespearean images compared the bestiaries of Othello and King Lear. In both tragedies animals appear in the semantic sphere of suffering and cruelty; suffering that has to be endured, torments that have to be inflicted.  In King Lear there are magnificent and fierce beasts of prey:  tiger, vulture, boar; in Othello – reptiles and insects. The action of the tragedy takes place in the course of two long nights, at least according to the clock of passions. The internal landscape of Othello, in which the leading characters of the tragedy are more and more deeply submerged, the landscape of their dreams, erotic obsessions, and fears, is the landscape of darkness; of the earth without sun, stars, or moon; a dungeon full of spiders, blindworms, and frogs.

     I had rather be a toad

And live upon the vapour of a dungeon

(III, 3)

And again:

The fountain from the which my current runs

Or else dries up – to be discarded thence,

Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads

To knot and gender in.

(IV, 2)

The difference between the animal sphere of Othello and King Lear is not only one of degree. The animal symbolism of Othello serves to degrade the human world. Man is an animal. But what sort of animal?

Man – the description of man, in which are contained the kinds almost alike, such as baboon, ape and others which are many.

This is s note by Leonardo, very similar in intention and in choice of comparisons. Man can be described as animal. A bloodthirsty and cowardly, deceitful, and cruel animal. Man, considered as animal, inevitably rouses revulsion.

With as little a web as this will I ensnare as great a fly as Cassio.

(II, 1)

This is the most significant image in the tragedy. Flies and spiders, spiders and flies. Cassio, Roderigo, Othello – are all flies for Iago. Small flies and big flies. The white Desdemona, too, will turn into a black fly. Othello will take over all Iago’s obsessions.

Desdemona:

I hope my noble lord esteems me honest.

Othello:

O, ay! as summer flies are in the shambles,

That quicken even with blowing.

(IV, 2)

The image of flies will return in King Lear, in a sentence that contains one of man’s ultimate experiences:

As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods.

They kill us for their sport.

(Lear, IV, 1)

To whom can a fly appeal? What can justify the suffering of a fly? Does a fly deserve pity? Can a fly ask men for compassion? Can men asks the gods for compassion?

Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law

My services are bound.

(Lear, I, 2)

Those words are spoken by Edmund in King Lear. In the great Shakespearean tragedies we are witness to an earthquake. Both human orders have fallen; the feudal hierarchy of loyalty, as well as the naturalism of Renaissance. The world’s history is just that of spiders and flies.

Iago (Spider):

…’Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus.

(I, 3)

Iago (Spider):

Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,

But seeming so, for my peculiar end.

(I, 1)

Iago (Spider):

I follow him to serve my turn upon him.

(I,1)

Othello (Fly):

My parts, my title, and my perfect soul

Shall manifest me rightly.

(I,2)

Desdemona (Fly):

Good night, good night. Heaven me such uses send,

Not to pick bad from bad, but by bad mend!

(IV, 3)

Othello came to find himself not only in Iago’s semantic sphere, but in ‘a close-shut murderous room’ (Bradley). Othello, like King Lear, is put to the torture and driven to madness.

Ay, let her rot, and perish, and be damn’d to-night; for she shall not live. No, my heart is turn’d to stone. I strike it, and it hurts my hand. O, the world hath not a sweeter creature! She might lie by an emperor’s side and command him tasks…Hang her! I do not but say what she is. So delicate with her needle! an admirable musician!…I will chop her into messes!

(IV, 1)

Othello talks the language of the mad Lear. All kinds of rhetoric have been smashed to pieces. And so have people. Othello, like King Lear, like Macbeth in his last scene, has found himself in the area of the absurd.”

Stanislavski as Othello

I found this remarkably persuasive.  For me, the key passage:

“Says Iago: The world consists of villains and fools; of those who devour and those who are devoured. People are like animals; they copulate and eat each other. The weak do not deserve pity, they are just as abominable, only more stupid than the strong. The world is vile.

Says Othello: The world is beautiful and people are noble. Love and loyalty exist in it.”

What do you all think?  Is Kott’s reading supported by the play itself (I tend to think it is), or is he reading into it something that isn’t there based on his own life in cold war Poland?

And to finish today’s post, I’d like to continue from A.C. Bradley:

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But before the end there is again a change. The supposed death of Cassio (V. i.) satiates the thirst for vengeance. The Othello who enters the bed-chamber with the words,

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,

is not the man of the Fourth Act. The deed he is bound to do is no murder, but a sacrifice. He is to save Desdemona from herself, not in hate but in honour; in honour, and also in love. His anger has passed; a boundless sorrow has taken its place; and

this sorrow’s heavenly:
It strikes where it doth love.

Even when, at the sight of her apparent obduracy, and at the hearing of words which by a crowning fatality can only reconvince him of her guilt, these feelings give way to others, it is to righteous indignation they give way, not to rage; and, terribly painful as this scene is, there is almost nothing here to diminish the admiration and love which heighten pity. And pity itself vanishes, and love and admiration alone remain, in the majestic dignity and sovereign ascendancy of the close. Chaos has come and gone; and the Othello of the Council-chamber and the quay of Cyprus has returned, or a greater and nobler Othello still. As he speaks those final words in which all the glory and agony of his life — long ago in India and Arabia and Aleppo, and afterwards in Venice, and now in Cyprus — seem to pass before us, like the pictures that flash before the eyes of a drowning man, a triumphant scorn for the fetters of the flesh and the littleness of all the lives that must survive him sweeps our grief away, and when he dies upon a kiss the most painful of all tragedies leaves us for the moment free from pain, and exulting in the power of “love and man’s unconquerable mind.”

3

32. The words just quoted come from Wordsworth’s sonnet to Toussaint l’Ouverture. Toussaint was a Negro; and there is a question, which, though of little consequence, is not without dramatic interest, whether Shakespeare imagined Othello as a Negro or as a Moor. Now I will not say that Shakespeare imagined him as a Negro and not as a Moor, for that might imply that he distinguished Negroes and Moors precisely as we do; but what appears to me nearly certain is that he imagined Othello as a black man, and not as a light-brown one.

33. In the first place, we must remember that the brown or bronze, to which we are now accustomed in the Othellos of our theatres is a recent innovation. Down to Edmund Kean’s time, so far as is known, Othello was always quite black. This stage-tradition goes back to the Restoration, and it almost settles our question. For it is impossible that the colour of the original Othello should have been forgotten so soon after Shakespeare’s time, and most improbable that it should have been changed from brown to black.

34. If we turn to the play itself, we find many references to Othello’s colour and appearance. Most of these are indecisive; for the word “black” was of course used then where we should speak of a “dark” complexion now; and even the nickname “thick-lips,” appealed to as proof that Othello was a Negro, might have been applied by an enemy to what we call a Moor. On the other hand, it is hard to believe that, if Othello had been light-brown, Brabantio would have taunted him with having a “sooty bosom,” or that (as Mr. Furness observes) he himself would have used the words,

her name, that was as fresh
As Dian’s visage, is now begrimed and black
As mine own face.

35. These arguments cannot be met by pointing out that Othello was of royal blood, is not called an Ethiopian, is called a Barbary horse, and is said to be going to Mauritania. All this would be of importance if we had reason to believe that Shakespeare shared our ideas, knowledge and terms. Otherwise it proves nothing. And we know that sixteenth-century writers called any dark North-African a Moor, or a black Moor, or a blackamoor. Sir Thomas Elyot, according to Hunter, calls Ethiopians Moors; and the following are the first two illustrations of “Blackamoor” in the Oxford English Dictionary: 1547, “I am a blake More borne in Barbary”; 1548, “Ethiopo, a blake More, or a man of Ethiope.” Thus geographical names can tell us nothing about the question how Shakespeare imagined Othello. He may have known that a Mauritanian is not a Negro nor black, but we cannot assume that he did. He may have known, again, that the Prince of Morocco, who is described in the Merchant of Venice as having, like Othello, the complexion of a devil, was no Negro. But we cannot tell: nor is there any reason why he should not have imagined the Prince as a brown Moor and Othello as a Blackamoor.

36. Titus Andronicus appeared in the Folio among Shakespeare’s works. It is believed by some good critics to be his: hardly anyone doubts that he had a hand in it: it is certain that he knew it, for reminiscences of it are scattered through his plays. Now no one who reads Titus Andronicus with an open mind can doubt that Aaron was, in our sense, black; and he appears to have been a Negro. To mention nothing else, he is twice called “coal-black”; his colour is compared with that of a raven and a swan’s legs; his child is coal-black and thick-lipped; he himself has a “fleece of woolly hair.” Yet he is “Aaron the Moor,” just as Othello is “Othello the Moor.” In the Battle of Alcazar (Dyce’s Peele, p. 421) Muly the Moor is called “the negro”; and Shakespeare himself in a single line uses “negro” and “Moor” of the same person (Merchant of Venice, III. V. 42).

37. The horror of most American critics (Mr. Furness is a bright exception) at the idea of a black Othello is very amusing, and their arguments are highly instructive. But they were anticipated, I regret to say, by Coleridge, and we will hear him. “No doubt Desdemona saw Othello’s visage in his mind; yet, as we are constituted, and most surely as an English audience was disposed in the beginning of the seventeenth century, it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro. It would argue a disproportionateness, a want of balance, in Desdemona, which Shakespeare does not appear to have in the least contemplated.” Could any argument be more self-destructive? It actually did appear to Brabantio “something monstrous to conceive” his daughter falling in love with Othello, — so monstrous that he could account for her love only by drugs and foul charms. And the suggestion that such love would argue “disproportionateness” is precisely the suggestion that Iago did make in Desdemona’s case:

Foh! one may smell in such a will most rank,
Foul disproportion, thoughts unnatural.

In fact he spoke of the marriage exactly as a filthy-minded cynic might now speak of the marriage of an English lady to a negro like Toussaint. Thus the argument of Coleridge and others points straight to the conclusion against which they argue.

38. But this is not all. The question whether to Shakespeare Othello was black or brown is not a mere question of isolated fact or historical curiosity; it concerns the character of Desdemona. Coleridge, and still more the American writers, regard her love, in effect, as Brabantio regarded it, and not as Shakespeare conceived it. They are simply blurring this glorious conception when they try to lessen the distance between her and Othello, and to smooth away the obstacle which his “visage” offered to her romantic passion for a hero. Desdemona, the “eternal womanly” in its most lovely and adorable form, simple and innocent as a child, ardent with the courage and idealism of a saint, radiant with that heavenly purity of heart which men worship the more because nature so rarely permits it to themselves, had no theories about universal brotherhood, and no phrases about “one blood in all the nations of the earth” or “barbarian, Scythian, bond and free”; but when her soul came in sight of the noblest soul on earth, she made nothing of the shrinking of her senses, but followed her soul until her senses took part with it, and “loved him with the love which was her doom.” It was not prudent. It even turned out tragically. She met in life with the reward of those who rise too far above our common level; and we continue to allot her the same reward when we consent to forgive her for loving a brown man, but find it monstrous that she should love a black one.

39. There is perhaps a certain excuse for our failure to rise to Shakespeare’s meaning, and to realise how extraordinary and splendid a thing it was in a gentle Venetian girl to love Othello, and to assail fortune with such a “downright violence and storm” as is expected only in a hero. It is that when first we hear of her marriage we have not yet seen the Desdemona of the later Acts; and therefore we do not perceive how astonishing this love and boldness must have been in a maiden so quiet and submissive. And when we watch her in her suffering and death we are so penetrated by the sense of her heavenly sweetness and self-surrender that we almost forget that she had shown herself quite as exceptional in the active assertion of her own soul and will. She tends to become to us predominantly pathetic, the sweetest and most pathetic of Shakespeare’s women, as innocent as Miranda and as loving as Viola, yet suffering more deeply than Cordelia or Imogen. And she seems to lack that independence and strength of spirit which Cordelia and Imogen possess, and which in a manner raises them above suffering. She appears passive and defenceless, and can oppose to wrong nothing but the infinite endurance and forgiveness of a love that knows not how to resist or resent. She thus becomes at once the most beautiful example of this love, and the most pathetic heroine in Shakespeare’s world. If her part were acted by an artist equal to Salvini, and with a Salvini for Othello, I doubt if the spectacle of the last two Acts would not be pronounced intolerable.

40. Of course this later impression of Desdemona is perfectly right, but it must be carried back and united with the earlier before we can see what Shakespeare imagined. Evidently, we are to understand, innocence, gentleness, sweetness, lovingness were the salient and, in a sense, the principal traits in Desdemona’s character. She was, as her father supposed her to be,

a maiden never bold,
Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion
Blushed at herself.

But suddenly there appeared something quite different — something which could never have appeared, for example, in Ophelia — a love not only full of romance but showing a strange freedom and energy of spirit, and leading to a most unusual boldness of action; and this action was carried through with a confidence and decision worthy of Juliet or Cordelia. Desdemona does not shrink before the Senate; and her language to her father, though deeply respectful, is firm enough to stir in us some sympathy with the old man who could not survive his daughter’s loss. This then, we must understand, was the emergence in Desdemona, as she passed from girlhood to womanhood, of an individuality and strength which, if she had lived would have been gradually fused with her more obvious qualities and have issued in a thousand actions, sweet and good, but surprising to her conventional or timid neighbours. And, indeed, we have already a slight example in her overflowing kindness, her boldness and her ill-fated persistence in pleading Cassio’s cause. But the full ripening of her lovely and noble nature was not to be. In her brief wedded life she appeared again chiefly as the sweet and submissive being of her girlhood; and the strength of her soul, first evoked by love, found scope to show itself only in a love which, when harshly repulsed, blamed only its own pain; when bruised, only gave forth a more exquisite fragrance; and when rewarded with death, summoned its last labouring breath to save its murderer.

41. Many traits in Desdemona’s character have been described with sympathetic insight by Mrs. Jameson, and I will pass them by and add but a few words on the connection between this character and the catastrophe of Othello. Desdemona, as Mrs. Jameson remarks, shows less quickness of intellect and less tendency to reflection than most of Shakespeare’s heroines; but I question whether the critic is right in adding that she shows much of the “unconscious address common in women.” She seems to me deficient in this address, having in its place a frank childlike boldness and persistency, which are full of charm but are unhappily united with a certain want of perception. And these graces and this deficiency appear to be inextricably intertwined, and in the circumstances conspire tragically against her. They, with her innocence, hinder her from understanding Othello’s state of mind, and lead her to the most unlucky acts and words; and unkindness or anger subdues her so completely that she becomes passive and seems to drift helplessly towards the cataract in front.

42. In Desdemona’s incapacity to resist there is also, in addition to her perfect love, something which is very characteristic. She is, in a sense, a child of nature. That deep inward division which leads to clear and conscious oppositions of right and wrong, duty and inclination, justice and injustice, is alien to her beautiful soul. She is not good, kind and true in spite of a temptation to be otherwise, any more than she is charming in spite of a temptation to be otherwise. She seems to know evil only by name, and, her inclinations being good, she acts on inclination. This trait, with its results, may be seen if we compare her, at the crises of the story, with Cordelia. In Desdemona’s place, Cordelia, however frightened at Othello’s anger about the lost handkerchief, would not have denied its loss. Painful experience had produced in her a conscious principle of rectitude and a proud hatred of falseness, which would have made a lie, even one wholly innocent in spirit, impossible to her; and the clear sense of justice and right would have led her, instead, to require an explanation of Othello’s agitation which would have broken Iago’s plot to pieces. In the same way, at the final crisis, no instinctive terror of death would have compelled Cordelia suddenly to relinquish her demand for justice and to plead for life. But these moments are fatal to Desdemona, who acts precisely as if she were guilty; and they are fatal because they ask for something which, it seems to us, could hardly be united with the peculiar beauty of her nature.

43. This beauty is all her own. Something as beautiful may be found in Cordelia, but not the same beauty. Desdemona, confronted with Lear’s foolish but pathetic demand for a profession of love, could have done, I think, what Cordelia could not do — could have refused to compete with her sisters, and yet have made her father feel that she loved him well. And I doubt if Cordelia, “falsely murdered,” would have been capable of those last words of Desdemona — her answer to Emilia’s “O, who hath done this deed?

Nobody: I myself. Farewell.
Commend me to my kind lord. O, farewell!

Were we intended to remember, as we hear this last “falsehood,” that other falsehood, “It is not lost,” and to feel that, alike in the momentary child’s fear and the deathless woman’s love, Desdemona is herself and herself alone?

Our next reading:  Othello, Act Five

My next post:  Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning

Enjoy

Othello

Act Four, Part One

By Dennis Abrams

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Act Four:  Iago continues to fuel Othello’s growing jealousy, to the point where he collapses in a fit.  When he recovers, Iago “arranges” for him to overhear a meeting with Cassio, during which Othello becomes even more certain that Desdemona is unfaithful. He resolves to kill her, while Iago takes on the mission of killing Cassio. When a deputation arrives from Venice recalling Othello, he publicly abuses Desdemona (to everyone’s horror) and later, in private, accuses her of being a whore.

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In Othello, Shakespeare gives us little opportunity to catch our breath.  (Just wait until we get to Macbeth – a miracle of compression).  Moments after beginning to suspect Desdemona, Othello is racked by doubt; just a few minutes after that, he is swearing “capable and wide revenge” with Iago’s more than gleeful help, convinced by the “evidence” and resolved not to go back.  After the handkerchief makes its appearance and Cassio is effectively framed, the effect on our hero is devastating: “Lie with her? Lie on her?”  Othello desperately cries:

We say ‘like on her’ when they belie her.  Lie with her? ‘Swounds, that’s fulsome! Handkerchief – confessions – handkerchief. To confess and be hanged for his labour. First to be hanged and then to confess! I tremble at it. Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion without some instruction. It is not words that shakes me thus. Pish! Noses, ears, and lips! Is’t possible? Confess? Handkerchief? O devil!

(He falls down in a trance)

And although Othello will quickly recover from his fit, the mental turmoil that it represents (as does the collapse in his use of language) will stay with him until the end of Act Five.

But first, Desdemona must die.  Although it was Iago who planted the idea of her infidelity into Othello’s mind, the idea of killing her in revenge is all her husbands. “O blood, blood, blood!” he rages, just moments before Desdemona appears, as innocent of the knowledge as she is in character.  She assumes that state business has distracted and frustrated Othello, making him unwell, but as we have seen, her ministrations do nothing but further infuriate him. The terrible cycle of jealousy does its work all to well.  After that horrific (is there any other word to describe it?) public shaming during which Othello actually hit her in front of guests from Venice, the couple have a final tearful argument. Othello taunts her with his own certainties and refuses to listen to her denials. “What, not a whore?” he cried incredulously?

Desdemona:

No, as I shall be saved.

Othello:

Is’t possible?

Desdemona:

O heaven forgive us!

Othello:

I cry you mercy then.

I took you for that cunning whore of Venice

That married with Othello.

There is something infinitely moving about Othello’s lingering torment, but of course, he is not its main victim.  That role will fall to Desdemona in Act Five.

From Garber:

“And what are Iago’s proofs? Two pieces of evidence: a handkerchief, and a conversation overheard. First, the handkerchief. A white handkerchief, spotted with strawberries. Othello tells the story of the handkerchief more than once, and the details differ in each telling. In one version it is a gift from his mother, woven by an Egyptian charmer, and said to have the power of guaranteeing love: ‘There’s magic in the web of it.’ In another version it has been given by Othello’s father to his mother. (These variations suggest that Othello’s story-telling abilities are even more sophisticated – and dangerous – than previously thought.) Othello, characteristically, takes the thing, the sign, for the intangible fact of Desdemona’s love, and when he fears she has lost the handkerchief, he is certain that he has lost her love. The handkerchief, properly a private love token, now becomes, again characteristically, a public spectacle. The white handkerchief marked with red becomes – because Othello makes it so – another version of the white wedding sheets that are so often mentioned in the play. The red embroidery now becomes the emblem of the blood of her virginity, and Othello is now convinced that Cassio has had them both. In a most serious and tragic sense he hangs out his dirty linen in public. For him the handkerchief is the wedding sheets, and the wedding sheets therefore become a shroud. Deferred sexual consummation, and again deferred sexual consummation – Othello the hero, the patient, public man, wedded to his ‘occupation’ as general and governor, willing to leave the marriage bed at the city’s command to instill order in the populace – and now he finds, or thinks he finds, his wedding sheets are already stained by someone else’s love. A short step leads to the second piece of ocular proof, the play-within-the-play so artfully staged by Iago, in which Iago and Cassio joke about Bianca, the courtesan, and Othello, again placed so that he can see but cannot hear, thinks they are joking about his wife. He misinterprets this dumb show, as Iago means him to do – for what he sees, after all, is the telltale handkerchief, given by Cassio to Bianca to ‘take the work out,’ to copy the design.

From the very beginning, Othello, whose tale would have won the Duke’s daughter, has denied his own eloquence: ‘Rude am I in my speech,/And little blessed with the soft phrase of peace’; ‘Haply for I am black,/And have not those soft parts of conversation/That chamberers have.’ Generations of audience and critics have responded to his stirring language, but the breakdown of Othello’s speech follows the loss of his faith in Desdemona, Iago’s manipulation of language through subtraction – insinuation, artful echo, pause, and silence – ultimately outlasts and outwits the grand speeches and resounding periods. Once again it is Iago who lures Othello into this state, and the turning point, fittingly, is the utterance of the ambiguous word ‘lie.’:

Othello:

What hath he said?

Iago:

Faith, that he did – I know not what he did.

Othello:

What, what?

Iago:

              Lie –

Othello:

                       With her?

Iago:

                                With her, on her, what you will.

Othello:

Lie with her? Lie on her? We say ‘lie on her’ when they belie her. Lie with her? ‘Swounds, that’s fulsome! Handkerchief – confessions – handkerchief. To confess and be hanged for his labour.  First to be hanged, and then to confess!…It is not words that shake me thus. Pish! Noses, ears, and lips! Is’t possible? Confess? Handkerchief? O devil!

Othello says, ‘It is not words that shakes me thus’ – yet is only words that do, Iago’s words.

Loss of language here, as elsewhere in Shakespeare, is emblematic of loss of humanity. Othello’s decline into incoherence, fragments of sentences about fragments of bodies, is a sign of his temporary abandonment of human codes and qualities. The ‘fit’ into which he falls, sometimes called ‘an epilepsy,’ and associated not only with linguistic loss of control but also with sexual orgasm, the ‘little death,’ marks the disintegration of the iron discipline he tried to enforce upon his own desire, his own sense of himself as a soldier, general, diplomatic, Venetian hero, and husband. The magic web of language has become for him a snare. Yet his magnificent language will return, at full throttle, in the final scenes of the play, during and especially after the murder. It is Iago who chooses the path of silence, and the ultimate, willed, dehumanization that accompanies it. ‘From this time forth,’ he will declare at the end of the play, ‘I never will speak word’ (5.2.310).  He will retreat into the archetype from which he grew, a ‘demi-devil,’ a Vice. We saw in a play like Measure for Measure that silence onstage is an emblem of death, as the muffled and unspeaking Claudio is dead – until he recovers to speech. Iago chooses this living death; he chooses against humanity. And yet he cannot be killed.

Iago is the ‘bad angel,’ and Desdemona the ‘good.’ The power of Desdemona’s extraordinary character is such that she, too, bursts through archetype. She is ripped from the play’s apparently ‘comic’ beginnings in courtship and marriage. A ‘maiden never bold,’ according to her father, she becomes bold, like Juliet, when she sees her husband and reaches out to him. She is ‘one entire and perfect chrysolite,’ and yet she is no Isabella – she articulates passion and desire, and she speaks out, finally to her own cost – she is an articulate and ardent woman who intervenes in the world of politics and policy conventionally reserved for me. Othello, even in his jealous agony, praises her skills as a seamstress and a musician, skills possessed by some of the most noteworthy Shakespearean women. And as if for emphasis, the play presents her framed by two women who reflect the very things she is not: Bianca, the courtesan; Emilia, the obedient and pragmatic wife. Bianca is the whore Desdemona is accused of being, yet she is in love with Cassio, who treats her lightly. Emilia, Iago’s wife, is a realist and a literalist, like Hamlet’s gravedigger, or Macbeth’s Porter. Like them, she sees things not for what they could be, but for what they are. Desdemona asks her, in tones of incredulity, whether she could imagine that a woman might be unfaithful to her husband, and Emilia’s reply has the frank, down-to-earth tone of Pompey the bawd in Measure for Measure:

Desdemona:

Wouldn’t thou do such a deed for all the world?

Emilia:

The world’s a huge thing. It is a great price for a small vice.

In this exchange lies a huge conflict of cultures. Emilia in Desdemona’s place would see no difficulties.  But Desdemona’s goodness, and belief in the goodness of others, is her death warrant.”

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From Bloom:

“Shakespeare creates a terrible pathos for us by not showing Desdemona in her full nature and splendor until we know that she is doomed. Dr. Johnson found the death of Cordelia intolerable; the death of Desdemona, in my experience as a reader and theatergoer, is even more unendurable. Shakespeare stages the scene as a sacrifice, as grimly countertheological as are Iago’s passed-over nihilism and Othello’s ‘godlike’ jealousy. Though Desdemona in her anguish declares she is a Christian, she does not die a martyr to that faith but becomes another victim of what could be called the religion of Moloch, since she is a sacrifice to the war god whom Iago once worshiped, the Othello he has reduced to incoherence. ‘Othello’s occupation’s gone’; the shattered relic of Othello murders in the name of that occupation, for he knows no other, and is the walking ghost of what he was.

Millicent Bell recently has argued that Othello’s is an epistemological tragedy; but only Iago has intellect enough to sustain such a notion, and Iago is not much interested in how he knows what he thinks he knows. Othello, as much as King Lear and Macbeth, is a vision of radical evil; Hamlet is Shakespeare’s tragedy of an intellectual. Though Shakespeare never would commit himself to specifically Christian terms, he approached a kind of Gnostic or heretic tragedy in Macbeth, as I will attempt to show. Othello has no transcendental aspect, perhaps because the religion of war does not allow for any. Iago, who makes a new covenant with Othello when they kneel together, had lived and fought in what he took to be an old covenant with his general, until Cassio was preferred to him. A devout adherent to the fire of battle, his sense of merit injured by his god, has degraded that god into ‘an honourable murderer,’ Othello’s oxymoronic, final vision of his role. Can such degradation allow the dignity required for a tragic protagonist?

A.C. Bradley rated Othello below Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth [MY NOTE:  Until this reading, I had as well, now I’m not so sure.] primarily because it gives us no sense of universal powers impinging upon the limits of human power. I think those powers hover in Othello, but they manifest themselves only in the gap that divides the earlier, foregrounded relationship between Iago and Othello from the process of ruination that we observe between them. Iago is so formidable a figure because he has uncanny abilities, endowments only available to a true believer whose trust has transmuted into nihilism. Cain, rejected by Yahweh in favor of Abel, is as much the father of Iago [MY NOTE:  Good point!] as Iago is the precursor of Milton’s Satan.  [On this topic, there’s an interesting essay by Borges called “Kafka and his Precursors” –anyone interested in having me post it?]  Iago murders Roderigo and maims Cassio, it is as inconceivable to Iago as to u s that Iago seeks to knife Othello. If you have been rejected by your god, then you attack him spiritually or metaphysically, not merely physically. Iago’s greatest triumph is that the lapsed Othello sacrifices Desdemona in the name of the war god Othello, the solitary warrior with whom unwisely she has fallen in love. That may be why Desdemona offers no resistance, and makes so relatively unspirited a defense, first of her virtue, and then of her life. Her victimization is all the more complete, and our own horror at is thereby augmented.

Though criticism frequently has blinded itself to this, Shakespeare has no affection for war, or for violence organized or unorganized. His great killing machines come to sorrowful ends: Othello, Macbeth, Antony, Coriolanus. His favorite warrior is Sir John Falstaff, whose motto is: ‘Give me life!’ Othello’s motto could be ‘Give me honor,’ which sanctions slaughtering a wife he hasn’t known, supposedly not ‘in hate, but all in honour.’ Dreadfully flawed, even vacuous at the center as Othello is, he still is meant to be the best instance available of a professional mercenary. What Iago once worshiped was real enough, but more vulnerable even than Iago suspected. Shakespeare subtly intimates that Othello’s prior nobility and his later incoherent brutality are two faces of the war god, but it remains the same god. Othello’s occupation’s gone partly because he married at all. Pent-up resentment, and not repressed lust, animates Othello as he avenges his lost autonomy in the name of his honor. Iago’s truest triumph comes when Othello loses his sense of war’s limits, and joins Iago’s incessant campaign against being. ‘I am not what I am,’ Iago’s credo, becomes Othello’s implicit cry. The rapidity and totality of Othello’s descent seems at once the play’s one weakness and its most persuasive strength, as persuasive as Iago.”

And finally, as a special bonus for the weekend, William Hazlitt’s remarkable analysis of the play and its characters:

OTHELLO.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPpugaVJABs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nV4GZCGM1o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28LDq-BI4Es

My next post:  Sunday evening/Monday morning.

Enjoy.  And enjoy your weekend.