'Othello: Language and Writing' by Laurie Maguire
Othello: Language and Writing by Laurie Maguire, Professor of English at Oxford University, is in the Student Skills series from Arden Shakespeare, but is also an excellent refresher for teachers.
As suggested by the sub-title, there is a high level of attention here to the language of the play, right down to the ‘small words’ like ‘and’ and modal verbs. Laurie Maguire points out that this play of all the tragedies is particularly concerned with language itself. The plot centres on how language is (mis)used and (mis)interpreted. And
As a play in which the hero misinterprets language, and in which the villain deliberately engineers situations that make this misunderstanding possible, ‘Othello’ is of particular interest and relevance to us - not just as students of English but as human beings who engage in the making and interpretation of meaning in all aspects of our linguistic life.” xiii
She refers to the profoundly unstable linguistic world of the play. For her, it is a play about uncoupling: the separating of Othello and Desdemona parallels the uncoupling of word and meaning (signifier and signified) that is Iago’s terrible masterpiece.
She divides the book into three sections (of course, all overlap): Language and Narrative, Language and Genre, Language and Boundaries. The first of these concentrates on how stories (inset narratives) weave through the play, right from Iago’s version at the start of how he was denied promotion, on to Othello’s version of the story of his and Desdemona’s wooing (which itself was prompted by the story of Othello’s past), and then to the horrific culmination, when Othello justifies the murder of his wife with another self-presentation (an attempt to reassert control over narrative, 69). Famously, the handkerchief is the subject of contradictory narratives, and that flimsy object prompts the catastrophe:
This is a world in which story-telling matters: you can win (or lose) a professional position (Iago, Cassio,) a bride (Othello) or your life (Desdemona), depending on how you command an audience or to whom you give an audience. (62)
The Genre section looks at how Shakespeare (generically trilingual) plays with expectations of comedy and tragedy in a way he does not in any other tragedy. It is a commonplace now that the play seems to start as a comedy (tyrannical father, daughter eloping with older man, cuckold, the focus on a prop) but moves surprisingly into tragedy. As Maguire writes:
It is an essay in Beyond Comedy, an exploration of what happens to the world of comedy (with which Othello opens) if its pledge of psychic immunity is betrayed” (81)
since
comedy is generally a world without pain - or a world in which pain has no long-term effects or consequences. (81)
The third main section looks at the many boundaries in the story:
‘Othello’ is a play that is unusually conscious of differences, doubleness, binaries, borders, overlaps, duplications and separations at all levels: plot, metaphor, vocabulary. (129)
Of course these cohere in the central character (another ‘doubleness’ - by contrast there is no doubt who the central characters of the plays Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth are):
Iago is able to manipulate meaning because he is manipulatively aware of the polysemous quality of language. He is not just a double-dealer, but one who linguistically deals in doubles: the pun, paradox, repetition, echoes. (130)
A man who swears by Janus, the double-faced Roman god of gates and doorways, is himself appointed the doorkeeper of truth by Othello. Puns symbolise this doubleness (particularly that brilliant use of ‘lie’ in Act 3 scene iii):
Two in a bed; the wrong two in a bed. Two in a word; the wrong two in a word. No wonder that Iago, the architect of the false wife story, uses as his agent misleading words … (he is the human embodiment of the pun - a sign (ensign) who ‘hints at another order of knowledge’ (143-3)
Later, Maguire calls ‘Iago’ ‘bilingual’ in his equal facility with prose and verse.
Some other notes:
On Iago claiming in Act 4 scene i that Bianca is supposedly a ‘sex worker’: ‘By this time in the play, however, I am not inclined to trust anything Iago says; and, as we shall see, one of the play’s projects is to ask us to question the basis on which we know, or think we know, self-evident truths.’ (8).
“Othello is promised the satisfaction of knowledge and certainty when he sees or imagines the couple receiving sexual satisfaction (the word ‘satisfied’ occurs three times in III.iii, 393-7). But given the voyeuristic implication of Othello’s peeping at the threshold is it cognitive or sexual satisfaction that Iago promises?” (34)
On Roderigo, a character sometimes portrayed as an idiot: he “is the play’s most persistent interrogator, holding Iago to account linguistically and logically, questioning both his vocabulary and his reasoning.” (40)
On Cassio: “‘I am a drunkard’: what he has done has quickly become what he is. Reputation is not what you are, but what others say about you.” (71).
In Othello’s final speech “he locates himself in a series of correspondences with Others: a base Indian (or, in the Folio reading, Judean), an Arabian tree, a malignant Turk, a Venetian, and a circumcised dog. This … confirms what we suspected all along, that there ‘is’ no stable Othello identity.” (144).
“The human instinct is to disambiguate… Throughout the play Iago thwarts this basic cognitive ability in Othello - he opens up meaning. Or rather: he controls disambiguation so that Othello activates the wrong meaning.” (148).
For anyone unfamiliar with the Cinthio source, there is helpful material here as well, later on, analyses of variants of the story in modern culture (like the films O and Stage Beauty), and many references to performance history.
Laurie Maguire’s book is recommended as an excellent prompt to thinking about the play.