Othello: the opening scene (Knowing and Satisfaction)
The openings of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies brilliantly pre-figure their central concerns. This revision reflection looks at Act I scene i of Othello, and in particular how it sets up ideas of how we can know, and how we can be ‘satisfied’. For the first scene of Hamlet, go here; of King Lear here.
Again we open in media res, and, typically of the openings of these plays, in some confusion. Two men huddle together in a Venetian street at night-time: one is spitting with indignation, the other trying to reassure him (it seems). It seems also one has been taking the other’s money for some sort of favour, and that he can’t stand his boss. Often they open with exclamations, denials, expletives, imperatives: Tush / ‘Sblood / Despise me / By heaven / Why / O sir / What a full fortune / O sir, content you / Call up her father / Do / What, ho / Awake! What ho!
We will come to understand that Iago’s words can never be trusted, even his ones to himself (unlike Hamlet and Macbeth in their soliloquies). But for the moment, in the theatre, we know as much as Roderigo, who says right at the start that he doesn’t know enough and complains. He is not satisfied:
Never tell me? I take it much unkindly
That thou, Iago, who hast had thy purse
As if the strings were thine, should know of this.
‘Knowledge’ will be central to the play (the word know and its other forms appear over 65 times in the text). Brabantio thought he ‘knew’ his daughter. Othello thought he knew Cassio. Everyone thought they knew Iago. Everyone thinks they know themselves. We live, in J.M. Coetzee’s phrase, by foundational fictions which we come to think are true, but the play frighteningly shows us how such ‘knowledge’ can in fact be built on sand. We feel secure in knowledge if we have evidence to back it up, but the flimsy ‘evidence’ here often floats free of reality (a handkerchief, a man talking about his girlfriend).
Then Iago complains to Roderigo that he has been passed over for preferment, despite Othello seeing the evidence, the proof, of Iago’s abilities:
And I - of whom his eyes had seen the proof
At Rhodes, at Cyprus and others’ grounds …
Must be beleed and calmed.
As in Macbeth, King Lear and Hamlet the central character does not yet appear on stage straight away. Instead, the first time we hear his words they are spoken by someone else:
For ‘Certes’, says he, / I have already chose my officer.’
We have no proof this is what Othello said, and the apparent dismissiveness of the statement certainly suits Iago’s narrative. Later in the play Othello’s very speech patterns will disintegrate, his normal voice taken away from him. The voices of the three women in the play will also be denied, two of them by murder. And finally the ventriloquist Iago will close down his own voice at the end, denying explanation and satisfaction to everyone and leaving them with their very partial ‘knowledge’:
Demand me nothing: what you know, you know:
From this time forth I never will speak word. (V ii)
Back to the start: Iago goes on to say I know my price whereas Cassio, undeserving of his appointment, is ‘a fellow’ who knows little:
Never set a squadron in the field
Nor the division of a battle knows
More than a spinster.
Iago’s default mode of contempt is evident throughout this speech: Cassio is an arithmetician, a man of mere bookish theoric, a counter-caster, and (appealing further to Roderigo’s prejudices) an outsider, a Florentine. Othello is dismissed as being bombastic, horribly stuffed with epithets of war and repeatedly reduced to a race label, The Moor and its viciously sarcastic version His Moorship.
On our second viewing/reading, Iago’s speech from line 38 (O sir, content you) will take on a far greater charge. Then we are able to see just how arrogant and self-delighting his language is. He describes himself:
Other there are
Who, trimmed in forms and visages of duty
Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves,
And, throwing but shows of service on their lords
Do well thrive by them, and when they have lined their coats,
Do themselves homage.
And he goes on to say I follow but myself and I am not what I am.
He has actually just told Roderigo not to trust him. Part of his own pleasure is that he hides in plain sight, revealing himself to the clueless.
Brabantio is roused. Iago says relatively little in this section, lurking in the shadows behind Roderigo, who takes the lead. What Iago does say is crude, mostly racist animal images (black ram, Barbary horse, beast with two backs). Roderigo is slightly more respectful talking to Brabantio, but he too hits the same buttons of ‘grossness’: Desdemona has gone to the cross clasps of a lascivious Moor and hath made gross revolt, / Tying her duty, beauty, wit and fortunes / In an extravagant and wheeling stranger / Of here and everywhere. ‘Extravagant’ comes from the Latin verb vagare, to wander. Othello is someone who crosses borders (a foreigner, a ‘Moor’, a soldier for hire) and Brabantio is oppressed by his xenophobic fear of the stranger, the Other, though ironically the real threat is from an insider, from right inside the heart of this society.
Roderigo addresses Brabantio’s fears by telling him to look for proof that Desdemona is gone, and that Roderigo has been speaking the truth:
Straight satisfy yourself.
‘Satisfaction’, a form of proof, is a tricky concept in this play. More Latin: satis means enough. Think of the pivotal Act III scene iii when Iago addresses Othello after he says Would I were satisfied:
I see, sir, you are eaten up with passion.
I do repent me that I put it to you.
You would be satisfied?
OTHELLO: Would? Nay, and I will.
IAGO: And may, but how? How satisfied, my lord?
Would you, the supervisor, grossly gape on,
Behold her topped?
And he adds
Where’s satisfaction?
It is impossible you should see this [thus actually making him ‘see’ it],
Were they as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys,
As salt as wolves in pride, and fools as gross
As ignorance made drunk. But yet, I say,
If imputation and strong circumstances
Which lead directly to the door of truth
Will give you satisfaction, you may have ’t.
So the only thing that will provide satisfaction for Othello is seeing his wife in bed with another man. Then he will indeed be satisfied that he knows: the torturous uncertainty, the imagining, will be over.
In a pattern we will come to see is central to the play, Brabantio judges badly, on little to no evidence (there will be more quasi-judicial scenes later). When he returns from looking for Desdemona he assumes she can only have left due to charms, an un-evidenced idea which he holds on to until the explicit denial by his daughter in I iii, proven by her profession of love for her new husband. In a mirroring of Othello at the end of the play when he thinks Desdemona has ‘gone’ from him, Brabantio’s reaction to discovering her disappearance is:
too true an evil. Gone she is;
And what’s to come of my despised time
Is naught but bitterness.
The scene ends with Brabantio pathetically begging Roderigo for more information (Do you know / Where we may apprehend her and the Moor?), just like Othello later begs Iago for knowledge, for satisfaction, for knowing.
Iago says nothing. He has set the train in motion. He melts away into the darkness.