Summary of "Othello" by Shakespeare

Introduction

Is Othello a play about race? Or maybe it is a play about religion and ethnicity? Or maybe it is a play about jealousy in general? Perhaps it is really a domestic tragedy framed within a military narrative? Or is it the exact opposite: a military tragedy framed in a domestic drama? Or possibly it is simply an experiment in transforming a comedy into a tragedy? Or maybe Othello is about the nature of evil? Or the nature of man? Or the nature of woman? Or the nature of the family? Or the changing nature of the family in an increasingly global world?

The idea that stories are crafted is another way to frame Othello: it is a play about storytellers, their tall-tales, and their effects on gullible listeners. After all, Othello won Desdemona’s heart by telling her “the story of my life”. His dying words are a request for the way his story should be framed in the future. Iago is also a master story crafter: he realizes that once a person is characterized or pigeonholed within a certain narrative structure, it can prove difficult to escape that plot or to recast oneself into alternative narrative structures. He who controls the storytelling controls the world in Othello.

Othello does not exist in one historical moment or one historical context alone. It is a play whose stagings, readings, and meanings have mutated and evolved over time. While these various Othellos are obviously discrete historical events reflecting and commenting upon the time in which they were produced, they are never entirely isolated or separate; they comment upon each other; they revise each other; and they invite readers and audience members to see both the connections and fissures between them. If we learn anything from Othello, it should be that there are benefits to accepting multiple stories, frames, and narratives.

In various historic moments, The Merchant of Venice and Othello have been employed to promote anti-Semitic and racist beliefs. Of course, the obverse is also true with both The Merchant of Venice and Othello employed in efforts to combat anti-Semitism and racism. When staging either play now, directors must decide which historical construction of the ‘Jew’ or the ‘Moor’ they will employ.

The play is not an inanimate object that never changes. Othello is a dynamic organism that is affected by every hand that touches it. Othello exists in history (multiple time periods) and through history (the stories and frames we use to recreate it).

What is Othello?: Genre

Usually referred to as a tragedy, Othello is also related to:

• The morality play, a medieval allegorical theatrical form in which moral lessons were taught through characters who personify moral qualities (15th – 16th century). The Vice is a character within the morality play, a temptation figure who performs the blithe spirit of worldly pleasures. The Vice is on intimate terms with the audience and cracks jokes with individual members of it and does not appear to be subject to the limitations of the other characters. But Shakespeare experiments with the genre. The Vice figure is not the racialized character in Othello; rather, the mankind figure is explicitly racialized (Othello) and the Vice figure is the native Venetian (Iago).
• The comedy: the comedic motifs of the plotline of the father who cannot control his wily daughter.
• The romance narrative: Othello’s personal narrative, the one that Desdemona would devour up with her greedy ears, borrows liberally from popular romances of the time, including John Mandeville’s travels.

The play is set up in a bifurcated fashion with a political tragedy bleeding into a domestic one, and vice versa. The movement of the play from Venice to Cyprus, after all, is governed by the political anxiety that the Turks will seize the important military base and trading island of Cyprus. The Duke and senators of Venice are willing to ignore the complaints of their fellow senator Brabantio precisely because they need the Moor to agree to battle the Turks. This is a political tragedy. But Shakespeare kills the Turks off in a storm so that the military narrative dies a natural death. The comic plot of the rebellious daughter marrying her true love against her father’s wishes then transforms into a domestic tragedy.

Where is Othello?: Early Modern Contexts

Sources

Scholars agree that Shakespeare must have read and been influenced by the Italian writer Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio (1504-73), author of Gli Hecatommithi. It is not clear if Shakespeare has read it in the original Italian, the French translation, or some lost English translation, but it is clear that he borrowed plots, themes, and characters from it. Othello is indebted to a story that addresses the infidelity of husbands and wives.

In Cinthio’s tale, an unnamed Moor who lives in Venice proves himself ‘valiant’ and ‘skillful’ to the Signoria, Venice’s governing authority. Disdemona, ‘a virtuous Lady of wondrous beauty’, whose name in Italian means unlucky or ill-omened, falls in love with the Moor ‘impelled not by female appetite but by the Moor’s good qualities’. Nonetheless, ‘the Lady’s relatives did all they could to make her take another husband’. While there is no Turkish threat to Cyprus in Gli Hecatommithi, the Signoria send the Moor ‘to maintain Cyprus’. The unnamed Ensign who accompanies the Moor to Cyprus, ‘fell ardently in love with Disdemona, and bent all his thoughts to see if he could manage to enjoy her’. Because Disdemona remains oblivious to the Ensign’s advances, ‘the love which he had felt for the Lady now changed to the bitterest hate’. As in Shakespeare’s Othello, the Ensign chips away at the Moor’s confidence by telling him that Disdemona is unfaithful, and yet in Cinthio’s version, his digs are more pointed racially: ‘The woman has come to dislike your blackness’. In the end, the Ensign and the Moor kill Disdemona together. The Moor is sentenced to exile and killed by Disdemona’s relatives. The Ensign continues enacting his wicked deeds until he dies under torture.

While Cinthio’s tale has a didactic purpose – to warn young girls not to marry ‘a man whom Nature, Heaven, and manner of life separate’ from them – Shakespeare’s Othello resists this simplistic moral thrust. Desdemona, unlike Disdemona, dies protecting Othello and continuing to pledge her love for him.

Shakespeare also seems to have used A Geographical History of Africa, whose author was an Andalusian Muslim captured by pirates in the Mediterranean, taken to Rome, and gifted to Pope Leo X. It was first published in Italian in 1550 and translated into English in 1600. The idea of a well-born, educated, and experienced African who works his way into the upper echelons of white, European power is clearly echoed in Othello. Shakespeare’s Othello, then, tells a tale that echoes the fascinating reality of Johannes Leo Africanus’s life.

Shakespeare also seems to have used bits and pieces from an English translation of Pliny the Elder’s The Historie of the Natural World. The fabulous parts of the narrative about the “Nature of Man” seem to be echoed in Othello (ex. the anthropophagi).

Othello’s narrative of self blends the personal and the fantastical: it echoes John Mandeville’s The Book of Marvels and Travels (1371). Written by an English Christian pilgrim who travels in Jerusalem, it’s a fabricated tale that blends travelogues, fantasy narratives, and fiction. Shakespeare also appears to have browsed books about the social and political structure of Venice.

Theatrically, Othello is indebted to dramas that featured “negro Moors”, especially George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar (1591), the first early modern English play to do so: it relates the true history of the Moroccan defeat of the Portuguese in 1578, and it features barbarous, ambitious, lusty, and manly Moors of various skin colours. The main character is Muly Mahamet, the offspring of the former king and his black bond slave, described as a barbarous Moor who is raven-coloured, a gifted rhetorician who is similar to Aaron, the Moor, from Shakespeare’s Livius Andronicus. While Iago embodies the devilish improvisational and rhetorical effectiveness of Muly Mahamet and Aaron, the Moor, Othello embodies the blackness of them.

Places

Othello has a split geography with the first act of the play taking place in Venice and the remaining acts taking place in Cyprus. In a comedic structure, this type of geographic split usually emphasizes the licensing freedom that is enabled outside of the city walls. Of course, tragic tales can contain a geographic split as well in order to mark a break from order into chaos. In Othello, the geographic split seems to signify the movement from Christian civilization to an unstable outpost. Venice, however, was not viewed as the same kind of city as London in early modern England. In fact, Venice was both lauded and reviled in the early modern English imagination. It was lauded for being a cosmopolitan and diverse city in which people from different races, ethnicities, and religions lived and worked together.

Yet Venice also became a symbol of hedonistic excess in the early modern English imagination. Associated with the goddess of love, Venus, Venice fascinated the early modern English because of the city’s more liberal treatment of sexual relations where prostitution was actually regulated by the state and involved thousands of women.

Cyprus looks as if it will represent the opposite of Venice: the margin instead of the centre. Cyprus is after all an island at the far east of the Mediterranean, marking it as closer to the religions and cultures of the East than to those of the West. Cyprus is the territory over which empires clash; it is the colony and not the empire itself.

In Othello there is the uncanny sense that Venice and Cyprus are related in their mythological associations with Venus: Cyprus is thought to be Venus’s birthplace (and another of Venus’s names is Cypris). Cyprus is the contested ground over which empires battle, but it also serves to highlight the problems inherent in those empires.

People

In the early modern period, moor was an elastic term that could encompass Muslims, Africans, blacks, atheists, and others. The only certainty is that the word does not refer to a white Christian. Thus, Othello: The Moor of Venice juxtaposes an unstable personal descriptor with a stable geographical location. Hearing the title of his play, Shakespeare’s audience members probably had various and potentially contradictory definitions and corresponding images in their minds.

It is widely assumed that diverse prosthetics were used to convey racial differences in early modern performances: herb-based dyes (usually woad), soot, coal, jet, oil-based ointments, dyed black cloth (masks, gloves, and stockings), exotic costuming, and wigs.

Othello is described as a black man and even Othello himself refers to his blackness, wondering if Desdemona has been unfaithful because he is black and saying that Desdemona’s virtue is as black as his face.

It was not until the early 19th century that Othello’s blackness was questioned by scholars and actors. In 1818, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote: Can we imagine him [Shakespeare] so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth, – at a time, too, when negroes were not known except as slaves? … Besides, if we could in good earnest believe Shakespeare ignorant of the distinction [between a Moor and a ‘negro’], still why should we adopt one disagreeable possibility instead of a ten times greater and more pleasing probability?

Coleridge acknowledges that Othello was performed as black in the past, but he also wants to argue that performances should now move to the more pleasing probability that Othello is not black but light-skinned. And he bluntly states that a good Venetian girl could never love a veritable negro. His arguments against Othello’s blackness are a clear reflection of his own time (in the early 19th century the transatlantic slave trade was fully established and there were anti-miscegenation laws).

Coleridge’s argument must seem racist and sexist by today’s standards, but it proved extremely influential in the 19th century and helped to initiate the great “Bronze Age of Othello”, the period in which Othello was portrayed as tanned, tawny, off-white, but definitely non-black. From the 1820s until the 1870s, it was standard practice to have Othello portrayed as light-skinned or bronzed. While the meaning of the term itself can be unclear, in the nineteenth century there was a tacit agreement that theatrical performances of Moors in early modern England were not: Othello was a black man.

The play also asks its audience to imagine another distinct group, the Turks. Although the term Turk seems somewhat more precise than Moor, it too was elastic in early modern English usage, encompassing the Turkish people, Muslims in general, and the Ottoman Empire. Stereotypes associated with Turks: barbarous, cruel, despotic, tyrannical, and sexually voracious.

The anxiety about not only the power, but also the lure of the Turk was expressed in the early modern English colloquial phrase ‘to turn Turk’. In early modern English, ‘to turn Turk’ was always used in a derogatory sense because, on the most basic level, this phrase signifies the threat of becoming barbaric or losing control. If the emphasis is placed on the noun, “to turn TURK” would imply becoming wholly separate, foreign to English Christianity. If the emphasis is placed on the verb, “to TURN Turk”, the implication is that identities are subject to change, self-constructions may be transient and impermanent.

The play ends with Othello committing suicide, narrating a story about his divided sense of self as both Christian and Turk. There is an implicit longing for some certainty about the differences between barbarians and the civilized, Turk and Venetian, Muslim and Christian.

Othello’s religion is left vague, inviting the audience to ponder precisely what it means for a character to be the Moor of Venice. When he relates the story of his life, Othello describes in equivocal terms how he was sold to slavery and his “redemption thence”. Does this use of “redemption” mean his salvation from slavery or his salvation through Christ?

In the temptation scene when Othello kneels vowing black vengeance, Iago kneels beside him and says “Do not rise yet”. Theatrically this scene can look like two men kneeling together in prayer, as Muslims do, without women present. This scene also looks like a bizarre inversion of a marriage rite. Iago pledges that he will obey Othello’s command, he gives up his hands and heart… he places himself in the role of a subordinate and perhaps of a wife, displacing Desdemona in Othello’s heart.