Emma Smith on 'Othello'
One of the very best books on Shakespeare in recent years is This is Shakespeare, by the Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford, Emma Smith. She ranges brilliantly across 20 of the plays, examining
The artistic and ideological and artistic implications of Shakespeare’s silences, inconsistencies and, above all, the sheer and permissive gappiness of his drama.
This ‘gappiness’ is central to Emma Smith’s analyses of the plays:
Shakespeare’s construction of his plays tends to imply rather than state; he often shows, rather than tells; most characters and encounters are susceptible to multiple interpretations. It’s because we have to fill in the gaps that Shakespeare is so vital.
Since in Ireland many Leaving Certificate candidates are now studying Othello for examination in 2022, here are some notes on Emma Smith’s chapter on the play with my observations. At the bottom of this post you can listen to her University lecture in 2010, which provides the basis for her chapter.
Some notes:
The central thesis is that Othello is protean: it has ‘always been able to transform itself’, its ‘gappiness’ allowing ‘a particular space for us’. This remains the case for our age, since we continue to be concerned about ‘race, difference and belonging.’ [Check out Red Bull Theater’s Othello 2020 project, which is currently examining these ideas]. Emma Smith asks:
Is this a racist play in which a black man is driven to homicidal rage, revealing that his civilization is only skin-deep? Or a plea for a more tolerant society in which Othello and Desdemona’s marriage might flourish?
Othello is ‘denigrated’ by others. The etymology is a giveaway, coming from the Latin for ‘black’, and so ‘to blacken’.
The preoccupation with sex is ‘a voyeuristic preoccupation’, all the way from the terms Iago uses (the ‘black ram’) to the final scene in the bedchamber, where the play ‘homes in on the ultimate object of its erotic obsession’, the bed.
Othello is regarded in two ways at the start of the play: he has eloped with Desdemona without her father’s knowledge or permission, but he is also a potential saviour of Venice in his professional military role. That doubleness (a form of ‘gappiness’ - what exactly is he?) will permeate the play, and our reactions to him.
‘The Moor of Venice’: Emma Smith interrogates that ‘of’ (listen to the podcast below in which she talks about the phrase). There can indeed be a ‘Merchant of Venice’ but not a Jew of Venice, let alone a Moor of the great city. Othello is in an
estranged position as both a Moor and ‘of Venice’, the commander of Venetian forces and the unacceptable son-in-law, the Christian citizen’s defender against a malignant Turk, and that turbaned and circumcised Turk himself.
There is a long critical tradition which looks at two possible interpretations of ‘Moor’, ‘a word with dense historical associations’ including the geographical link with Mauretania, the more general religious meaning of ‘Muslim’, and then the racist stereotyping of sub-Saharan Africa, and so even the word ‘Moor’ is slippery, another ‘gappy’ word. Is Othello a Christian convert? If so, is the suggestion that he merely has a patina of ‘self-control, social, integration, lucidity, rationality’ a loaded version of ‘Christian’ values?
The question of which kind of ‘Moor’ Othello should represent was crucial to the sympathy we were to feel for him, and thus to the whole notion of tragedy in the play.
Another doubleness in our sympathies: with Othello as a man abused and destroyed by a racist society, or with Desdemona, ‘dead at the hands of a man she loved and trusted’? Desdemona started with her own voice (heard in Act 1 in her riposte to her father’s pleas), but eventually is literally silenced by her husband, who murders her:
Thus the play, and its main character, ends on a fissure, an incompatible religious and ethnic split played out on the impossible identity of its central protagonist, who is destroyed by its unbearable cognitive dissonance.
Othello’s identity might be impossible because he is a living ‘cognitive dissonance’: a successful black man in a white society, a man who marries into that society and yet is never ‘of’ it, a Christian who may have been a Muslim, a man of immense self-control (‘Keep up your bright swords’) who loses all control, professionally a brilliant soldier and leader (he must be, to reach that position) and yet utterly clueless and gullible in the domestic sphere. A debate over the years: is the play itself racist, or does it explore racism?
Outsiders: it is not just the obvious outsider that the play examines: in fact, all three central characters are “different outsiders struggling with their own disempowered status in the majority society.” and “Othello, Iago and Desdemona all struggle to be autonomous selves within the confines of what is expected and assumed about them by others.”
She sees Othello as close to comedy at times. It starts (like A Midsummer Night’s Dream) with a classic comedy trope: the father who tries to forbid his daughter making a romantic choice of which he disapproves. Other moments are close to comedy or farce (such as the scene when Iago prompts Cassio into laughter about Bianca, and Othello thinks they are discussing Desdemona; the handkerchief is ‘a comic prop’). “Act 1 of Othello is a miniature comedy of lovers overcoming differences or circumstances to be together in spite of the blocking figures”:
Elsewhere in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, the figure of the jealous husband, paranoid about cuckoldry and over-interpreting the most innocent of details to corroborate his desperate fantasies of his wife’s infidelity, is firmly comic.
Again, as a tragedy which veers very close so regularly to the comic, the comic resolution is almost within grasp as Emilia forces her way into the bedroom and raises the alarm. But (as in the story of Romeo and Juliet) she is just too late. Iago was so close to being exposed in time, but by the time he is, this is irrelevant.