Kiernan Ryan on 'Othello' — Julian Girdham

I recently attended a webinar organised by the English and Media Centre featuring Professor Kiernan Ryan, whose new overview Shakespearean Tragedy has recently been published by Arden. A particular pleasure was the Q and A session after his lecture, with Barbara Bleiman, in which his knowledge and passion for these plays were vigorously on show. The book is a magisterial lifetime’s reflection on these extraordinary works.

It starts in the ‘birth’ of the genre, Henry VI Parts 2 and 3, before moving on to a shortish section on Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet and Julius Caesar, ahead of the meat of the book on the four greatest tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, rounding off with Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus.

Since Othello is the play most in my teaching thoughts this year, here are some comments and notes on that chapter in Ryan’s book. Read a similar post on the Othello chapter in Emma Smith’s book This is Shakespeare (in his talk, Ryan wasn’t keen on the idea of ‘gappiness’ which features in her thinking).

The core idea for Ryan is that Othello is a play in which the characters’ actions cannot be separated from the societal milieu in which they exist, and that the values of that society seep into every part of their DNA. He sees the evidence for this within the texture of the play itself (in his talk he was particularly exercised at how he feels ‘historicism’ has taken over in English schools from close reading of scenes). Othello and Desdemona:

‘act, in other words, as if they were already free citizens of a truly civilized future, instead of prisoners of a time when racial prejudice and sexual inequality are so pervasive that even their heroic hearts are tainted by them.’

Of course, Othello is a text which has attracted a whole variety of responses on these issues: is the play itself (or Shakespeare?) racist, misogynist? Ryan is firmly on the other end of a spectrum on this: for him, it exposes racism and misogyny in Venetian culture (as does The Merchant for anti-Semitism), and in this sense Shakespeare is ahead of his time. He turned the ‘incidental significance’ of the blackness of ‘the Moor’ in the source by Cinthio into the centre of what the play is doing.

Some more notes of things I found interesting (I don’t at all agree with everything here, but Ryan argues fluently and comprehensively, and I urge you to read the thing itself):-

In the opening scene, the names of Iago, Roderigo and Brabantio are given a full airing, whereas Desdemona is only named in scene 2, and Othello in scene 3, in a kind of ‘trap’ for the audience: when we do see them, they are fully human and sympathetic in a way that is very far from their initial impression as anonymous, faceless cliches. Desdemona turns out to be a woman of formidable courage, intelligence, passion and resolve.
The first scene shows the racial and sexual prejudices of the society, but the third scene subverts this impression with something radically different and unforeseen: a marriage between a strong, spirited young white woman and a dignified, cultivated, older black man: a brazenly transgressive marriage. Ryan thinks this should be the starting point of our analysis, that such an ideal form of love could be envisaged by Shakespeare.
The taboo against such interracial liaisons appealed early on to the English stage’s upstart crow, because its irrational inhumanity fired his instinctive empathy with its victims.
Racism is most overtly seen in Brabantio (a member of the ruling élite) but tragically even Othello and Desdemona cannot help being infected by the attitudes of Venetian culture (be careful: Ryan is not suggesting racism in them).
A connection to the previous point: Desdemona is objectively innocent of what Othello has been led to accuse her of doing. But she has “been behaved” by internalized forces beyond her conscious control into speaking and feeling as if she were a wife guilty of the “greatest misuse.”
A section deals with the flimsy handkerchief, which Ryan sees as an apt symbol … of the fragility of marriage, and whose history shows it passing through the hands of three successive couples.
In a section looking at Emilia’s comments on women, he states that this is a patriarchal tragedy … the product of that kind of culture at that time rather than the timeless tragedy of the human condition it’s so often been reduced to.
Ryan has no time for Coleridge’s famous comment about Iago’s motive-hunting of motiveless Malignity since he feels that reduces the tragedy to the plotting of an unfathomably evil psychopath and essentially lets the society off the hook. Ryan says that Iago’s motive-hunting is confined to his first two soliloquies. Instead, we should attend to the traumatic affront to Iago’s self-regard as the key to comprehending the mainspring of his iniquity, that affront being Othello’s promotion of Cassio: The really galling thing about being denied the lieutenancy is that it reinforces the intolerable feeling of inferiority Iago would still have to fight against even if he had won promotion. That feeling, fostered by involuntary servitude in a rigidly stratified society, breeds in Iago its inextricable antithesis: the compulsion to proving himself secretly superior to those who make him feel inferior by debasing them.
An important and sensible point: Although Iago shares with Brabantio and Roderigo the routine racism of Venice, whose stuck slurs spring readily to his lips, he isn’t motivated by racist hatred. He simply exploits its prevalence. [And of course Iago hates everyone, - all but one being white].
And finally: Shakespeare builds into Othello the knowledge that to write this tragedy like that, with such a villain contriving that denouement, and to pay to be entertained by watching it, is to be implicated in what happens, not only in the play’s world but also in the world the play reflects, where such things have happened, and are still happening, for real.

That is just skimming the surface of Kiernan Ryan’s analysis (and then there are the other 240 pages of the book), which is full of interest and careful thinking.

END

(below: a 4-minute talk which encapsulates Professor Ryan’s central argument).