Graham Bradshaw on 'Othello'
The Connell Guides to literature are attractively-produced small guides to great works, with some impressive names on the author-list. This is certainly the case with the volume on Othello, written by Professor Graham Bradshaw, author also of Shakespeare’s Scepticism.
The guide is built around a series of provocative questions, which are interspersed with separate insert sections (on the theory of double time, ‘Blacking up’ and the changes of the source material, for instance). Here are some of these questions, and some points Bradshaw makes:
‘Why does Iago hate Othello so much?’
The key question of the play, which so many have puzzled over:
He sees himself as a kind of truthteller, who knows and sees more than all the alleged superiors who outrank him. The truths that Iago thinks he knows are always reductive. 34
Bradshaw usefully quotes the Nobel Prize-winning J.M. Coetzee in referring to the foundational fictions by which we all live. In Act One
we see how the idealistic, self-committing Othello lives for these ideas, or foundational fictions. He has committed himself not only to his love for Desdemona, but to Christianity, and to serving the republican state of Venice which ‘makes ambition virtue. When the play begins the idealistic Othello has triumphed on all three fronts: as Iago says to Cassio in the second scene he’s ‘made for ever.’ The contrast between the two men is clear: the reductive truthtelling on which Iago’s self-regard is based has brought him nowhere, whereas Othello’s idealism, and idealistic view of himself, has brought him everything. This is agony to the Iago who later observes that Cassio ‘hath a beauty in his daily life that makes me ugly.’ 37-9
‘What view of character emerges from Othello?
From a modern perspective, one of the most extraordinary aspects of this play is the way in which it persistently exposes and opposes its own characters, and their own alarmingly confident use of metaphors that imply some static, rather than dynamic, concept of the Self. 63-8
A good example of this is Lodovico’s reaction when he sees the ‘new’ Othello:
Is this the noble Moor, whom our full Senate / Call all in all sufficient?’
Why is Othello’s ‘Had it pleas’d Heaven speech’ so important?
Bradshaw provides a helpful close reading of this speech, showing how liquid metaphors give way to images of storing/garnering, and how the logic and syntax break down in the later part of the speech.
How important is Othello’s colour and Can Othello be seen as a racist play?
Bradshaw looks at how the relationship between ethnicity and subordination was by no means clear, in Michael Neill’s words, until the full development of the slave trade and expansion of Empire, both after Shakespeare’s time. This is an old debate of course: is the play itself racist or does it portray racism? Hugh Quarshie’s podcast in the Shakespeare Sessions, ‘Looking for the Moor’, is good on this. Iago’s brooding inferiority and habitual suspiciousness … identify him with the naturally jealous temperament that the English were as likely to attribute to Italians as to Moors. 101
What does Othello tell us about human happiness?
The cognitive approach to this tragedy is more helpful than any other because it entails that we must recognise ourselves in Othello, and his foundational fictions, or illusions, about who or what he is. 113
Other questions Bradshaw asks, and explores, include:
How is Iago so successful?
How important is it the age difference between Othello and Desdemona?
Is Othello’s marriage ever consummated?
In what light does the play show us male attitudes to women?