Shakespeare: A Life (53 page)

who (in
Othello's
quarto text) sings her Willow Song in Act IV. Observing that
Desdemona does not 'sing' in the play's Folio text, one critic takes
this as a sign that
Othello
followed
Hamlet
quickly to take advantage of a musical boy before his voice cracked.
²⁵

Perhaps so. But that is not sufficient evidence to date the play, and
many boy actors sang and played the lute. Shakespeare wisely trusted
his own 'little eyases'. A boy could shatter an audience even in his
silence. Indeed when
Othello
was later taken to Oxford in
1610, a scholar noted in Latin that Desdemona 'in her death moved us
even more greatly, when lying in bed she implored the pity of the
spectators with her face alone'.
²⁶

The year 1604 had been busy for the King's players. In the summer
they were called to Somerset House to attend the Constable of Castile
and his 234 gentlemen who had come over to sign the Spanish Peace.
Shakespeare and eleven of his fellows, as low-ranking Grooms of the
Chamber, were then made to wait on the party for eighteen days, from 9
to 27 August, and were paid just £21. 12
s.
o
d.
for their pains. Each actor received 2
s. per diem,
or just what the King paid to his ordinary yeomen of the guard. It was only after this unrewarding time that
Othello
was played at court on 1 November 1604. The work may lightly
compliment King James in noticing his interest in Venice's war against
the Muslim Turks. Shakespeare had been under few illusions about the
court's munificence, and he had planned a sharply affecting drama
which would last in repertory. He apparently viewed his main source --
again a tale by Cinthio -- with extreme patience and a lack of
self-assertiveness. One suspects that he bided his time so as to put
many things to use; but after modifying a given story, drawing amply
from his past work and visualizing new scenes, he wrote with that
quickness which Ben Jonson, Heminges, and Condell recall. He probably
revised his text, but even in the mature tragedies he leaves confused
time-schemes, blatant contradictions, changed names, 'ghost'
characters who loom up to be forgotten by the author, and other minor
faults.

Though based on Cinthio's tale of jealousy,
Othello
is a drama about morality plays, about reputation and male seduction,
and, in a subtle way, about an acting troupe. Out of such threads as
these its

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love story, with Iago's defeat of the hero and heroine, is tightly
woven. Faults in the weave are not noticeable to an audience, and the
play -written with immense assurance and skill-- is the most poignant of
his tragedies. Critics often forget its action's ugly sordidness,
since the whole effect is one of unusual beauty and the story is
simple. (One might tell it in two sentences: when Cassio in Venice is
promoted to a lieutenancy over an ensign's head, the ensign, Iago,
vows an opportunistic revenge against the newly married Othello and the
rival. At Cyprus, tricked by Iago into believing that Desdemona and
Cassio are lovers, Othello kills first his wife and then himself, but
the trickery comes to light so that Cassio is promoted and Iago is
left to face trial and torture.)

The simplicity of that action, without a sub-plot, allows Shakespeare to
develop the psychological interest of a few main figures. He works up
a soldier's milieu, with its interactions, motives, and emotional
intensities, even as he dramatizes love's betrayal. Often he draws on
older plays, such as Marlowe
Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus
,
and
The Jew of Malta
. Behind the verbal music of the Moor's talk one is aware of
Tambulaine's
music, and behind Iago's candour with the audience are comic addresses of the villain in
Jew of Malta
.
Even behind the intent, homoerotic exchanges of
Othello
and Iago, one senses the eerie league between victim and tempter in
Doctor Faustus
.

There are other echoes of more recent dramas. Iago resembles a
satirist in a Jonson play, with the difference that he uses his
percipience not to mock but to destroy.
Othello
also is
made up of rich overlays from the author's own experience in comedy.
An officer who woos a lady under her father's nose, weds her in
secret, and impresses a Senate before sailing off to be governor of
Cyprus might be a romance hero. Even the seas favour Othello by
drowning the Muslim Turks. He prospers in all ways until Cassio is
cashiered (in Act II, scene iii), and he is then in the dilemma of the
cocu imaginaire.
The cuckold of comedy is a topic of mirth,
but here and elsewhere the poet evades this. With care he develops the
theme of a villain plotting against a marriage, already used lightly,
of course, in Don John's efforts to cross Claudio and Hero in
Much Ado
.

Iago may be like a 'Vice' in a morality play, but what Coleridge

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called his 'motiveless malignancy' has a realistic beginning. Jacobeans
had no difficulty in understanding a grievance over patronage denied.
'Three great ones of the city', Iago tells Roderigo in scene i,

In personal suit to make me his lieutenant,

Off-capped to him. . .
I know my price, I am worth no worse a place.
But he, as loving his own pride and purposes,
Evades them

for 'Certes,' says he,
'I have already chose my officer.'
And what was he?

One Michael Cassio

That never set a squadron in the field
Nor the division of a battle knows

Mere prattle without practice

(1. i. 8-25)

This is pellucid and telling, but a good reason for disliking is buried
as Iago thinks of other reasons, and his gnawing hatred is epitomized
in racial slurs. The Moor's blackness becomes a frame of reference
for nearly all that is said of him. Othello is explicitly referred to
as 'thicklips', or as a 'barbary horse', or has a 'sooty bosom', or is
'the lascivious Moor'. Prejudice leaps like an infection to old
Brabanzio, the Senator, when Iago shouts that 'an old black ram I Is
tupping your white ewe'. Racism even infects a shamed Othello, who
declares that his name is 'black As mine own face.' (1. i, 111. iii.
392-3).

In contrast with its vague role in
The Merchant of Venice
,
racist feeling here is treated with a moral lucidity. That allows for
indirection and aesthetic effect, and one crucial difference between
the Merchant and Othello is that plays such as
As You Like It
and
Hamlet
,
which seem to draw on memories of a domestic past, have come in
between. In any case, Shakespeare is better able to use a biblical
symbolism which had begun to impress him in youth. What is stunning in
Othello

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is that there is no gap, no dividing line of any kind between his
aesthetic and moral interests or pressures. Othello is a black Everyman,
victimized by light's betrayer, Judas, and there are other biblical
strands in the design. A central irony is that low racist slurs,
springing from Iago, take for their object a Moor who is dignified,
unselfish, and troubled by sensuality in marriage. Prizing what he
confusedly calls Desdemona's 'chastity', Othello declares that she
saves him from chaos. 'Excellent wretch!' he tells her,

Perdition catch my soul
But I do love thee, and when I love thee not,
Chaos is come again.

(111. iii. 91-3)

Othello's 'Chaos' is a region of lawless passion and anarchy. It is a
frame of mind, but it is also a place, even such a city as engulfs
Elizabeth and Joice of Stratford and their sisterhood. It is the
Shoreditch and Bankside brothels. It has a relation to the city actor
and the soldier. The army and the stage after all had much in common.
Shakespcare in
Othello
shows us the code-heavy
relationships of soldiers on Cyprus who, like actors, have their own
rituals, taboos, and male bonding. The army and the stage were both
glamorous by 1602, and indeed Burbage had a popular following that
might have done credit to Sidney or Essex. In their all-male groups at
a slight remove from society, the soldier and young actor were about
equally ready to view women as hazards.

Knitting the male troop together is a latent homoerotic feeling, so
strong that Iago can allude to it usefully. 'I lay with Cassio lately',
says the ensign to confirm the Moor's suspicion of Desclemona's
adultery. At night Cassio, supposedly, kissed Iago's lips hard, as if
plucking up kisses by the roots, and 'lay his leg o'er my thigh', and
sighed, and kissed, and then cried ' "Cursèd fate, I That gave thee to
the Moor!"' (111. iii. 418-30). Enacting a parody of the marriage
rite, the hero and villain exchange words fit for a bride and groom.

The Moor's feeling for the tempter is in part disturbingly homoerotic,
and at Cyprus, in Iago's presence, the general is implicitly hostile
not simply to Desdemona but to the female sex. And yet

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Othello's talk is natural for the careerist who raises his vocation as a
prime standard of value. No dialogue by Shakespeare thus far is more
subtle than that between Iago and Othello in Act III, and in the midst
of their collusive intimacy the hero degrades his wife. The aural
grandeur of his phrases, or the '
Othello
music' as Wilson
Knight called it, overrides one's sense of Othello's sick ease in
wishing that Desdemona's sweet body had been tasted by the entire camp,
pioneers and all, 'so I had nothing known'. What is achingly intense
is his need for self-definition. 'O, now for ever', he cries with the
air of an actor, extolling painted scenery,

Farewell the tranquil mind, farewell content,
Farewell the plumed troops, and the big wars
That makes ambition virtue! O, farewell,
Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, th'ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!

(111. iii. 352-9)

That glorification of war might have been felt excessive at any time, but especially in the reign of
rex pacificus.
The Moor's display of his soul need not qualify one's sense of his
dignity, nor cause one to admire him less. Shakespeare keeps both hero
and heroine at a slight remove, so that an audience does not identify
with them but observes and sympathizes. Iago is always closer to us
than Othello, and yet the villain despite his banality has a mythical
aspect.

What are the author's
affinities with his characters? Desdemona is warmly humanized through
her minor, calamitous indiscretions, her defiance of Brabanzio, and
loving zeal for the Moor, but she remains opaque. One knows her less
well than Gertrude or Lady Macbeth, Goneril and Regan, or even
Cleopatra. The author might have found hints in his own temperament
for his calculating, rational, improvising, and half-comic Iago, as well
as for the self-dramatizing Moor, but he sees both objectively. The
play has a flawless structure of feeling and yet Othello and Iago, as
modern theatre history shows, can be played in many different ways.
Othello
renews itself in productions

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especially when the blame for the heroine's death is left as ambiguous
as it is. The hero's touching integrity appeals to the author at least
partly because Othello is undone by the narrow profession he serves.
The soldier's vocation is sketched here with a terrible, evocative
precision in parallel with the actor's own, and in a tragedy of the
highest art. Shakespeare does not condemn actors, but he subjects his
calling to an implicitly sharp scrutiny. So he abets his objectivity
-- he appears to insist on his own inner distance from the theatre,
before he turns to the minds of Macbeth or King Lear in the great
sequence that he already has under way.

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All blest secrets,
All you unpublished virtues of the earth,
Spring with my tears
( Cordelia,
King Lear
)

Ein alter Mann ist stets ein König Lear
(An aged man is always a King Lear)
(Goethe)
I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do.
(First Witch,
Macbeth
)

I
n
King James's reign, Shakespeare was acquainted with a plucky,
intelligent, and reputedly beautiful woman known to her family as
'Jennet', who was four years younger than himself. Since the seventeenth
century she has been seen in a haze of gossip, but there is no need
to romanticize her.

Jennet was
baptized at St Margaret's Westminster, on 1 November 1568, as Jane
Sheppard. Three Sheppard brothers served the late Tudor Queen before
being employed by the Stuart monarch. Her brothers Thomas and Richard
were skilled court embroiderers, glovers, and perfumers who served
Queen Anna even as the milliner Marie Mountjoy -- in whose house
Shakespeare lived -- pleased Anna by supplying her with hats and
headdresses. A third brother, William Sheppard, held an office in the
Catery, which procured foodstuffs in bulk for the royal household.

Jennet had married John Davenant who, as a worldly, practical,

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cultivated man, had been to Merchant Taylors' school before joining
his father as a merchant broker and wine-importer. From her house near
the church of St James Garlickhithe on Maiden Lane, she could see
ships carrying her husband's wine. These often came in from Bordeaux
and, with unfurled sails, berthed pale wooden casks which were then
ferried upstream by broad-decked lighters to the Three Cranes wharf.
Everyone knew of the wine ships. 'There's a whole merchant's venture
of Bordeaux stuff in him', as Doll Tearsheet says of Falstaff in
2 Henry IV
,
'you have not seen a hulk better stuffed in the hold.' Moreover, the
Davenants were nearly opposite the Globe across the river and within
earshot of the actors' brash trumpets. It is not surprising that the
playwright was attracted to a wine-importer with a charming wife; and
Davenant -- as Anthony à Wood wrote of him in that century -- was 'an
admirer and lover of plays and play-makers, especially Shakespeare'.
¹

Any friend of this couple, though, would have known of their
misfortune. Up to 1600, Jennet had given birth to infants who were
stillborn or who quickly died. She had buried five children when in her
thirtieth year she gave birth to a sixth, a 'John', who must have died
as well, since yet another infant was to have his name. In distress
she turned any way she could for help or consolation, perhaps to
Shakespeare, and certainly to the eccentric, fashionable astrologer and
physician Simon Forman. Nothing compensated her husband for his
human losses, and at last to escape the plague-ridden city he threw
over his prosperous London life. Around 1601, Davenant took Jennet up
to Oxford to run a wine-tavern.

On
the cast side of Cornmarket on the main street leading up to
Stratford, this tavern was then owned by New College. It was not a
'two-storey' edifice as is stated in a documentary life of the poet, but
a four-storey building of twenty or more rooms and running back about
120 feet from the Cornmarket. Though reduced and with a modernized
front, No. 3 Cornmarket Street still exists near an old inn at No. 5
-- now the Golden Cross -- which has served 'without a break', as Mary
Edmond notes, 'for some eight hundred years'.
²
Here up at Oxford Jennet's luck changed, as she was to give birth to
seven children, most of whom lived to old age. Her first robust son,
Robert, later

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