Othello
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Othello is, in one sense of the word, by far the most romantic figure among Shakespeares heroes; and he is so partly from the strange life of war and adventure which he has lived from childhood. He does not belong to our world, and he seems to enter it we know not whence — almost as if from wonderland. There is something mysterious in his descent from men of royal
siege; in his wanderings in vast deserts and among marvelous peoples; in his tales of magic handkerchiefs and prophetic Sibyls; in the sudden vague glimpses we get of numberless battles and sieges in which he has played the hero and has borne a charmed life; even in chance references to his baptism, his being sold to slavery, his sojourn in Aleppo. And he is not a merely romantic figure; his own nature is romantic. He has not, indeed, the meditative or speculative imagination of Hamlet; but in the strictest sense of the word he is more poetic than Hamlet. Indeed, if one recalls Othellos most famous speeches
— those that begin, “Her father loved me”, “O now for ever”, “Never, Iago”, “Had it pleased Heaven”, “It is the cause”, “Behold, I have a weapon”, “Soft you, a word or two before you go”
– and if one places side by side with these speeches an equal number by any other hero, one will not doubt that Othello is the greatest poet of them all. There is the same poetry in his casual phrases — like “These nine moons wasted”, “Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust
them”, “You chaste stars”, “It is a sword of Spain, the ice-brooks temper”, “It is the very error of the moon” — and in those brief expressions of intense feeling which ever since have been taken as the absolute expression, like
If it were now to die,
Twere now to be most happy; for, I fear,
My soul hath her content so absolute
That not another comfort like to this
Succeeds in unknown fate,
If she be false, O then Heaven mocks itself,
Ill not believe it;
No, my heart is turned to stone; I strike it, and it hurts my hand,
But yet the pity of it, Iago! O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!
O thou weed,
Who are so lovely fair and smellst so sweet
That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst neer been born.
And this imagination, we feel, has accompanied his whole life. He has watched with a poets eye the Arabian trees dropping their medcinable gum, and the Indian throwing away his chance-found pearl; and has gazed in a fascinated dream at the Pontic sea rushing, never to return, to the Propontic and the Hellespont; and has felt as no other man ever felt (for he speaks of it as none other ever did) the poetry of the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war. So he comes before us, dark and grand, with a light upon him from the sun where he was born; but no longer young, and now grave, self-controlled, steeled by the experience of countless perils, hardships and vicissitudes, at once simple and stately in bearing and in speech, a great man naturally modest but fully conscious of his worth, proud of his services to the state, unawed by dignitaries and unelated by honours, secure, it would seem, against all dangers from without and all rebellion from within. And he comes to have his life crowned with the final glory of love, a love as strange, adventurous and romantic as any passage of his eventful history, filling his heart with tenderness and his imagination with ecstasy. For there is no love, not that of Romeo in his youth, more steeped in imagination than Othellos. The sources of danger in this character are revealed but too clearly by the story. In the first place, Othellos mind, for all its poetry, is very simple. He is not observant. His nature tends outward. He is quite free from introspection, and is not given to reflection. Emotion excites his imagination, but it confuses and dulls his intellect. On this side he is the very opposite of Hamlet, with whom, however, he shares a great openness and trustfulness of nature. In addition, he has little experience of the corrupt products of civilised life, and is ignorant of European women.
In the second place, for all his dignity and massive calm (and he has greater dignity than any other of Shakespeares men), he is by nature full of the most vehement passion. Shakespeare emphasises his self-control, not only by the wonderful pictures of the Fist Act, but by references to the past. Lodovico, amazed at his violence, exclaims:
Is this the noble Moor whom our full Senate
Call all in all sufficient? Is this the nature
Whom passion could not shake? whose solid virtue
The shot of accident nor dart of chance
Could neither graze nor pierce?
Iago, who has no motive for lying, asks:
Can he be angry? I have seen the cannon
When it hath blown his ranks into the air,
And, like the devil, from his very arm
Puffed his own brother — and can he be angry?
This, and other aspects of his character, are best exhibited by a single line — one of Shakespeares miracles — the words by which Othello silences in a moment the night-brawl between his attendants and those of Brabantio:
Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.
And the same self-control is strikingly shown where Othello endeavours to elicit some explanation of the fight between Cassio and Montano. Here, however, there occur ominous words, which make us feel how necessary was this self-control, and make us admire it the more:
Now, by heaven,
My blood begins my safer guides to