Othello

“Sir, you’re robbed. For shame, put on your gown! Your heart is burst. You have lost half your soul. Even now, now, very now, an old black ram is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise!”

In exposing Desdemona’s elopement with Othello, Iago is playing on Brabantio’s racial prejudice by supplying a graphic and demeaning image to represent their coupling. In this comparison, Iago reduces both characters to animals, with their colors meant to be an object of outrage and disgust. In Iago’s comparison, Desdemona is not only a passive “white ewe” (98) being mounted by “an old black ram” (97), but she is also the property of her father.

“O heaven! How got she out? O treason of the blood! Fathers, from hence trust not your daughters’ minds by what you see them act.—Is there not charms by which the property of youth and maidhood may be abused? Have you not read, Roderigo, of some such thing?”

After Iago and Roderigo alert Brabantio to Desdemona’s elopement with Othello, Brabantio exclaims that fathers should not trust that their daughters’ behavior reflects their thoughts. This idea of deceitful demeanor parallels Iago’s own plan to pretend that he is a loyal friend and servant to Othello so that he can exact his revenge upon him. However, Brabantio will not accept that his daughter has her own interior life and intelligence that is inaccessible to him. Instead, he concludes that she is being controlled by magic. Brabantio, and later, Othello, believe that Desdemona’s one-time deceit of her father is evidence of a deceitful (or manipulated) nature, rather than of free will and agency.

“If she in chains of magic were not bound, whether a maid so tender, fair, and happy, so opposite to marriage that she shunned

the wealthy curlèd darlings of our nation, would ever have, t’ incur a general mock, run from her guardage to the sooty bosom of such a thing as thou—to fear, not to delight! Judge me the world, if ’tis not gross in sense.”

Brabantio, confronting Othello at his residence, insists that Othello has enchanted his daughter because Desdemona had shunned marriage to her own countrymen. He tells Othello that Desdemona could not possibly care for a man of his race, that he is something to be feared and not loved. Although Othello does not directly rebut or appear wounded by any of Brabantio’s racist insults in-scene, they lay the foundation for his doubt of Desdemona’s love for him. Although a relatively minor character, Brabantio’s bigotry and incredulousness of Othello, Desdemona, and their relationship presents Iago with insecurities that he only has to capitalize on, not invent, in order to torment Othello.

“My noble father, I do perceive here a divided duty. To you I am bound for life and education. My life and education both do learn me how to respect you. You are the lord of duty. I am hitherto your daughter. But here’s my husband. And so much duty as my mother showed to you, preferring you before her father, so much I challenge that I may profess due to the Moor my lord.”

In her first dialogue in the play, Desdemona will not yield to her father, but nor will she disavow the respect she owes him for raising her. She frames her allegiance to Othello as the natural progression from girlhood to womanhood, the husband replacing the father as the most important male figure in her life. In this reply, Desdemona insists on nuance, as well as the validity of her thoughts, feelings, and choices as a woman. She refuses to see her elopement with Othello as a rebellion against her father, but as an expression of her adulthood that has nothing to do with her father. 

DESDEMONA: “‘So that, dear lords, if I be left behind, a moth of peace, and he go to the war, the rites for why I love him are bereft me and I a heavy interim shall support by his dear absence. Let me go with him.’

OTHELLO: ‘Let her have your voice. Vouch with me, heaven, I therefore beg it not to please the palate of my appetite, nor to comply with heat (the young affects in [me] defunct) and proper satisfaction, but to be free and bounteous to her mind.’”

Desdemona tells the senate that she fell in love with Othello for his character and bravery and that she does not want to separate from him in war, when he is most able to display those qualities. Othello likewise wants Desdemona to accompany him to Cyprus because he respects her wishes and thoughts, and he wants to gratify her mind. Shakespeare is casting Othello’s regard for Desdemona as a thinking, autonomous being in opposition to her father’s earlier insistence that she could not be making decisions for herself. Othello’s love for Desdemona is more spiritual and intellectual than carnal, and in ceding to her wishes, he appears to regard her as his equal.

“Let it be so. Good night to everyone. [To Brabantio.] And, noble signior, if virtue no delighted beauty lack, your son-in-law is far more fair than black.”

Characters throughout the play, like Duke in this scene, cast Othello’s noble and measured nature as a credit to him, in spite of his “blackness,” which refers to both the comparative color of his skin and within the play is also slang for “evil” or “ugly.”  The Venetian senate respects him for his long service record, but Othello’s ethnicity is a perpetual vulnerability.

BRABANTIO: “‘Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see. She has deceived her father, and may thee.’

OTHELLO: ‘My life upon her faith!’”

Having lost his suit before the senate and in seeing that Desdemona is devoted to Othello in spite of his racial difference, Brabantio changes tactics and tries to injure Othello’s regard for Desdemona by planting the seeds of a masculine insecurity.  By putting Brabantio’s injunction to Othello in a rhyming couplet, Shakespeare gives it an ominous, incantatory, and memorable quality. Othello’s ready rejoinder that he would bet his life on her loyalty implies that he is not succumbing to the doubt Brabantio is trying to plant in him.

“Lay thy finger thus, and let thy soul be instructed. Mark me with what violence she first loved the Moor but for bragging and telling her fantasticallies. [And will she] love him still for prating? Let not thy discreet heart think it. Her eye must be fed. And what delight shall she have to look on the devil?”

Iago is manipulating Roderigo into believing Desdemona will take Cassio as a lover. To convince him of this possibility, Iago must also convert Roderigo to a misogynistic view of women that subordinates their minds to their bodies. Taking a cue from Brabantio, who initially disbelieves that his daughter could love a Moor, Iago suggests that a woman could not fall in love with a man’s mind. Instead, he says that women are ruled by sexual desire, which is in turn ruled by a man’s appearance. When he goes on to suggest that Roderigo could replace Cassio as the object of Desdemona’s lust, her further dehumanizes her. Desdemona’s affections, in Iago’s telling, are not vital and specific, but indiscriminate, their objects interchangeable.

CASSIO: “‘Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial. My reputation, Iago, my reputation!’

IAGO: ‘As I am an honest man, I thought you had received some bodily wound. There is more sense in that than in reputation. Reputation is an idle and most false imposition, oft got without merit and lost without deserving. You have lost no reputation at all, unless you repute yourself such a loser.’”

Cassio is distraught that he has engaged in a drunken fight and wounded Montano, which he believes has ruined his reputation. Cassio views his reputation as synonymous with his soul, and in losing it, he has also lost his human qualities. This perception dovetails with Iago’s tactic of debasing people by comparing them to animals. Here, Iago insists that Cassio is not debased (which was after all Iago’s intention) unless he himself believes he is. Iago’s claim that reputation is gained and lost without deserving echoes his own false reputation as being “honest” (2.3 7), as well as Desdemona’s soon-to-be (and unfairly) ruined reputation.

“Before Emilia here, I give thee warrant of thy place. Assure thee, if I do vow a friendship, I’ll perform it to the last article. My lord shall never rest: I’ll watch him tame and talk him out of patience; his bed shall seem a school, his board a shrift; I’ll intermingle everything he does with Cassio’s suit. Therefore be merry, Cassio, for thy solicitor shall rather die than give thy cause away.”

Desdemona, in her assurance of Cassio, shows that she is certain of Othello’s regard for her intellect and opinion. In speaking to Cassio as a friend, she also takes for granted that she is his peer and not an object of sexual or romantic interest. Iago will go on to exploit Desdemona’s innocence in this regard. While she does not regard herself as sexually motivated, or even as sexually influential over men, Iago reduces all of her behavior to the impulses and cover-ups of a temptress. In this passage, she furthermore demonstrates her loyal nature by vowing she would rather die than fail Cassio, thus proving false both her father’s and Iago’s insinuations that she has a disloyal nature. 

IAGO: “‘Men should be what they seem; or those that be not, would they might seem none!’

OTHELLO: ‘Certain, men should be what they seem.’

IAGO: ‘Why then, I think Cassio’s an honest man.’

OTHELLO: ‘Nay, yet there’s more in this. I prithee speak to me as to thy thinkings, as thou dost ruminate, and give thy worst of thoughts the worst of words.’”

One of Iago’s most cunning techniques throughout the play is to attribute his own negative qualities to other characters. At the start he announces: “I am not what I am” (1.1 71), signaling that his behavior will not betray his true feelings and goals. He then projects his own duplicity on to both Cassio and Desdemona, all the while claiming to despise his own malicious qualities.

“Nor from mine own weak merits will I draw the smallest fear or doubt of her revolt, for she had eyes, and chose me. No, Iago, I’ll see before I doubt; when I doubt, prove; and on the proof, there is no more but this: Away at once with love or jealousy.” 

Othello is attempting to resist the doubt that Iago is planting in his mind by insisting that Desdemona possesses intellect and free will and that she used them both to choose him over any other suitor. He claims that jealousy is pointless and harmful if there is no cause, and if there is a cause, pointless because you can’t be jealous if you are no longer in love. 

“Haply, for I am black and have not those soft parts of conversation that chamberers have, or for I am declined into the vale of years—yet that’s not much—she’s gone, I am abused, and my relief must be to loathe her. O curse of marriage, that we can call these delicate creatures ours and not their appetites! I had rather be a toad and live upon the vapor of a dungeon than keep a corner in the thing I love for others’ uses. Yet ’tis the plague [of] great ones; prerogatived are they less than the base. ’Tis destiny unshunnable, like death. Even then this forkèd plague is fated to us when we do quicken. Look where she comes.”

Othello is showing in his speech that he has internalized the other social inferiority of “blackness” expressed by Brabantio, Iago, and the Duke, as well as insecurity over his age. In this moment, he believes Desdemona has been unfaithful and wonders if it’s his race that leads him to hate her, instead of expressing some more nuanced emotion. He is also beginning to participate in Iago’s objectification of Desdemona. Far from loving her “bounteous”(1.3 300) mind as he does in Act I, he refers to her as the thing he loves and frames marriage to a woman as a way to possess her. In viewing his ideal relationship to Desdemona as one of total ownership, the deviation from this ideal—that is, her infidelity—becomes more disturbing. In this formulation, an unfaithful Desdemona is not acting for her own intellectual, emotional, or physical satisfaction, or acting at all. Instead, she is something that exists “[f]or others’ uses” (314). He goes on to frame Desdemona’s infidelity as a symptom of his own greatness, further reducing them both to stereotypes.

“I will in Cassio’s lodging lose this napkin and let him find it. Trifles light as air are to the jealous confirmations strong as proofs of holy writ. This may do something.[The Moor already changes with my poison;]Dangerous conceits are in their natures poisons, which at the first are scarce found to distaste, but with a little act upon the blood burn like the mines of sulfur.”

Iago correctly predicts that, now primed to be suspicious, Othello will be looking for evidence to confirm his suspicions. Othello’s jealousy and sense of inferiority give more power to an object than to the behavior and speech of his wife. The handkerchief has more power to determine Desdemona’s fate than she herself does. 

“If thou dost slander her and torture me, never pray more. Abandon all remorse; on horror’s head horrors accumulate; do deeds to make heaven weep, all Earth amazed; for nothing canst thou to damnation add greater than that.” 

In a moment of either intuition or accident, Othello describes precisely what Iago is doing and characterizes it as a horrific, unforgivable act. Although Othello has guessed at the truth behind Iago’s manipulative behavior, he is unable to believe it is possible. Instead, he finds it easier to believe that Desdemona is betraying him, likely due to a combination of personal insecurities and latent misogynistic beliefs. 

EMILIA: “‘Is not this man jealous?’

DESDEMONA: ‘I ne’er saw this before. Sure, there’s some wonder in this handkerchief! I am most unhappy in the loss of it.’

EMILIA: ‘’Tis not a year or two shows us a man. They are all but stomachs, and we all but food; they eat us hungerly, and when they are full they belch us.’”

Emilia, with her grimmer and more pragmatic view of marriage and men, posits that Othello’s aggression towards Desdemona might be the first sign of his true character. She equates the desire and decorum of courtship to a man’s “hunger,” attainment of a woman to his being “full” (122), and her subsequent rejection and mistreatment to a “belch” (123). Emilia may only be trying to comfort and disillusion Desdemona, but her views of marriage also likely reflect Iago’s treatment of her in particular as well as his attitudes towards women in general. 

DESDEMONA: “‘Alas the day, I never gave him cause!’

EMILIA: ‘But jealous souls will not be answered so. They are not ever jealous for the cause, but jealous for they’re jealous. It is a monster Begot upon itself, born on itself.’

DESDEMONA: ‘Heaven keep [that] monster from Othello’s mind!’

EMILIA: ‘Lady, amen.’”

Emilia perceives that Othello, if driven by jealousy, is beyond the reach of reason. Both women understand that a man’s jealousy is a dangerous circumstance for women, and Desdemona, without power to stop it, instead asks “Heaven” (184) to keep him free of it. Emilia’s interpretation of jealousy as “a monster/Begot upon itself, born on itself” (182-183) also introduces the idea that Iago may not be responsible for creating Othello’s jealousy. He might instead have recognized that it existed within him already, and all of his manipulations have been in the service of feeding and directing it. 

“Lie with her? Lie on her? We say “lie on her” when they belie her. Lie with her—[Zounds,] that’s fulsome! Handkerchief—confessions—handkerchief. [To confess and be hanged for his labor. First to be hanged and then to confess—I trembleat it. Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion without some instruction. It is not words that shakes me thus. Pish! Noses, ears, and lips—is ’t possible? Confess—handkerchief—O, devil!]”

In this moment, the image of Desdemona and Cassio having sex (which Iago supplied) is overwhelming Othello’s ability to evaluate the evidence against them and choose a course of action that is proportionate to Iago’s circumstantial evidence. Instead, his jealousy causes him to issue the sentence before having proof of a crime. He is so overtaken with emotion that he falls into an epileptic fit that could also signify the death of all that is temperate and cautious in his character. 

EMILIA: “‘I will be hanged if some eternal villain, some busy and insinuating rogue, some cogging, cozening slave, to get some office, Have not devised this slander. I will be hanged else.’

IAGO: ‘Fie, there is no such man. It is impossible.’

DESDEMONA: ‘If any such there be, heaven pardon him.’

EMILIA: ‘A halter pardon him, and hell gnaw his bones!’”

Emilia likens the unknown instigator of Othello’s rage to some evil supernatural force, “eternal villain” (153), and Iago, tongue-in-cheek, seems to play into this implication that he is some form of demon by saying “there is no such man” (157). By rejecting Desdemona’s wish that heaven would pardon such a man, Emilia unwittingly reveals her allegiance to Desdemona to her husband. Her reaction confirms that if she were to know about Iago’s plot, she would likely expose and condemn him, rather than subordinate her opinions to those of her husband. 

“O, fie upon them! Some such squire he was that turned your wit the seamy side without and made you to suspect me with the Moor.”

Emilia, for the first time, reveals that she was aware that Iago suspected her of having an affair with Othello, and she indicates that this rumor is as baseless as the one now plaguing Desdemona. She is perhaps more right than she knows when she guesses that the same man was stirring up trouble in both cases—the subtext here signifies that Iago was likely his own tormentor before he was Othello’s. 

“[But I do think it is their husbands’ faults if wives do fall. Say that they slack their duties, and pour our treasures into foreign laps; or else break out in peevish jealousies, throwing restraint upon us. Or say they strike us, or scant our former having in despite. Why, we have galls, and though we have some grace, yet have we some revenge. Let husbands know their wives have sense like them. They see, and smell, and have their palates both for sweet and sour, as husbands have. What is it that they do when they change us for others? Is it sport? I think it is. And doth affection breed it? I think it doth. Is ’t frailty that thus errs? It is so too. And have not we affections, desires for sport, and frailty, as men have? Then let them use us well. Else let them know, the ills we do, their ills instruct us so.]”

Emilia, seeming to reveal the dynamics in her marriage and her own thoughts on infidelity, says that likely a husband is at fault if his wife cheats on him. She says that infidelity is a form of revenge for mistreatment that also shows men that their wives are just as much human beings as they are. Since Shakespeare establishes Iago’s contempt and suspicion for his wife early in the play, it’s likely that Emilia, too, is suffering in her marriage, and stating as much indirectly. Her view of equality within marriage is ultimately what allows her to betray Iago as he has betrayed her by fooling her and arranging Desdemona’s murder. 

EMILIA: “‘O fie upon thee, strumpet!’

BIANCA: ‘I am no strumpet, but of life as honest as you that thus abuse me.’ 

EMILIA: ‘As I? [Faugh!] Fie upon thee!’”

Bianca’s claim that she is equal in integrity to Emilia presents the possibility that she is elevating her love for, and loyalty to, Cassio, to the status of a married woman. Alternatively, she could be calling in to question Emilia’s principles and behaviors, which are pragmatic and based in equality and reciprocity, rather than subservience. Neither Bianca nor Emilia are as high-minded as Desdemona, who even on her deathbed refuses to betray the husband who has murdered her. 

“Thou hast not half that power to do me harm as I have to be hurt. O gull! O dolt, as ignorant as dirt! Thou hast done a deed—I care not for thy sword. I’ll make thee known, though I lost twenty lives. Help! Help, ho! Help! The Moor hath killed my mistress! Murder, murder!”

Emilia is powerful in her grief, frustration, and rage at Othello, as well as in her certainty in Desdemona’s innocence. In this moment, she is invulnerable, having lost the person she cares about most and having no interest in the danger Othello poses to her physically. At the start of the play several of the male characters (including Iago and Brabantio) described Othello using racial slurs as well as race-based backhanded compliments, and now, in the final act, Emilia insults his intelligence. In doing so, Emilia underscores that in murdering Desdemona, Othello has destroyed all of his previously-acknowledged merits—intelligence, temperance, and loyalty.