F.R. Leavis on Othello
Othello, it will be very
generally granted, is of all Shakespeare’s great tragedies the simplest:
the theme is limited and sharply defined, and the play, everyone agrees,
is a brilliantly successful piece of workmanship.
The effect is one of a noble, “classical” clarity—of firm, clear
outlines, unblurred and undistracted by cloudy recessions, metaphysical aura, or
richly symbolic ambiguities . . . And yet it is of Othello
that one can say bluntly, as of no other of the great tragedies, that it suffers
in current appreciation an essential and denaturing falsification . . .
According to the version of Othello
elaborated by Bradley [A.C. Bradley, the great Victorian critic], the tragedy is
the undoing of the noble Moor by the devilish cunning of Iago.
Othello we are to see as a nearly faultless hero whose strength and
virtue are turned against him. Othello
and Desdemona, so far as their fate depended on their characters and
un-tampered-with mutual relations, had every ground for expecting the happiness
that romantic courtship had promised. It
was external evil, the malice of the demi-devil, that turned a happy story of
romantic love—of romantic lovers who were qualified to live happily ever
after, so to speak—into a tragedy. This—it is the traditional version of Othello and has, moreover, the support of Coleridge—is to
sentimentalize Shakespeare’s tragedy and to displace its centre . . .
The plain fact that has to be asserted in the face of this sustained and sanctioned perversity is that in Shakespeare’s tragedy of Othello Othello is the chief personage—the chief personage in such a sense that the tragedy may fairly be said to be Othello’s character in action. Iago is subordinate and merely ancillary. He is not much more than a necessary piece of dramatic mechanism—that at any rate is a fit reply to the view of Othello as necessary material and provocation for a display of Iago’s fiendish intellectual superiority .
It is plain that what we should see in Iago’s prompt success is not so
much Iago’s diabolic intellect as Othello’s readiness to respond.
Iago’s power, in fact, in the temptation-scene is that he represents
something that is in Othello—in Othello the husband of Desdemona; the
essential traitor is within the gates. For
if Shakespeare’s Othello too is simple-minded, he is nevertheless more complex
than Bradley’s. Bradley’s
Othello is, rather, Othello’s; it being an essential datum regarding the
Shakespearean Othello that he has an ideal conception of himself . . .
Othello, in his magnanimous way, is egotistical. He really is, beyond any question, the nobly massive man of action, the captain of men, he sees himself as being, but he does very much see himself: “Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.” In short, a habit of self-approving self-dramatization is an essential element on Othello’s make-up, and remains so at the very end.
It is, at the best, the impressive manifestation of a noble egotism.
But, in the new marital situation, this egotism isn’t going to be the
less dangerous for its nobility. This
self-centeredness doesn’t mean self-knowledge:
that is a virtue which Othello, as soldier of fortune, hasn’t had much
need of. He has been well provided
by nature to meet all the trials a life of action has exposed him to.
The trials facing him now that he has married this Venetian girl with
whom he’s “in love” so imaginatively (we’re told) as to outdo Romeo and
who is so many years younger than himself (his color, whether or not
“color-feeling” existed among the Elizabethans, we are certainly to take as
emphasizing the disparity of the match)—the trials facing him now are of a
different order . . .
Iago, like Bradley, points out that Othello didn’t really know
Desdemona, and Othello acquiesces in considering her as a type—a type outside
his experience—the Venetian wife. It
is plain, then, that his love is composed very largely of ignorance of self as
well as ignorance of her . . . It may be love, but it can be only in an oddly
qualified sense love of her: it
must be much more a matter of self-centered and self-regarding
satisfactions—pride, sensual possessiveness, appetite, love of loving—than
he suspects.
This comes out unmistakably when he begins to let himself go; for
instance, in the soliloquy that follows Iago’s exit:
“She’s gone; I am abused, and my relief
Must be to loathe her . . . 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 . . .”
kneels to take a formal vow of revenge, he does so in the heroic strain .
. . he reassumes formally his heroic self-dramatization—reassumes formally his
heroic self-dramatization—reassumes the Othello of “the big wars that make
ambition virtue” . . . Othello’s self-idealization, his promptness to
jealousy and his blindness are shown in their essential relation.
The self-idealization is shown as blindness and the nobility as here no
longer something real, but the disguise of an obtuse and brutal egotism.
Self-pride becomes stupidity, ferocious stupidity, an insane and
self-deceiving passion. The habitual “nobility”
is seen to make self-deception invincible, the egotism it expresses being
the drive to catastrophe. Othello’s
noble lack of self-knowledge is shown as humiliating and disastrous . . . When
he discovers his mistake, his reaction is an intolerably intensified form of the
common “I could kick myself”:
“Whip me, ye devils,
From the possession of this heavenly sight!
Blow me about in winds! roast
me in sulphur!
Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire!
O Desdemona . . .
But he remains the same Othello, he has discovered his mistake, but there
is no tragic self-discovery . . . He is ruined, but he is the same Othello in
whose essential make-up the tragedy lay: the
tragedy doesn’t involve the idea of the hero’s learning through suffering.
The fact that Othello tends to sentimentalize should be the reverse of a
reason for our sentimentalizing too . . .