Othello

Act One, Part Two

By Dennis Abrams

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First off – a few interesting points (or at least hopefully so):

1.  What prompted Shakespeare to write Othello?  One intriguing possibility is that the ambassador of the King of Barbary arrived in England in August 1600, for a ‘half year’s abode in London, and naturally, being Muslims and “strange in their ways” they caused quite a stir.  And since Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed at court during the Christmas season (1600-1601), it seems not at all unlikely that he might have encountered “the Barbarians” (as they were known).

One other point – this is a portrait of the Moorish ambassador.  Could it be a portrait of Othello?

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

2.  Venice in the 16^th century.  Keep in mind that it was a powerful city state, with roughly the population of London, and Europe’s most powerful trade link with north Africa and the East.

Perhaps even more important to keep in mind was this:  at the time the play was written, Venice was seen as the pleasure capital of Europe, especially in its sexual tolerance.  It courtesans were particularly renowned, so much so that Lord Byron, who was not the most shockable of men, wrote from Venice in 1817 that the state of morals,

“is much the same as in the Doges’ time; a woman is virtuous (according to the code) who limits herself to her husband and one lover; those who have two, three, or more, are a little wild; but…only those who are indiscriminately diffuse…are considered as overstepping the modesty of marriage.”

The history of costumes in Venice shows that courtesans and “ladies” dressed the same (again the idea of appearance in the play), and as Iago will point out to great effect, Venetian wives both look and behave like courtesans:

I know our country disposition well –

In Venice they do let God see the pranks

They dare not show their husbands…

(3.3.204-6)

Given that, why should Desdemona be any different?  It’s possible that one of the reasons Othello believes Iago is for the simple reason that his wife IS Venetian, and the city’s reputation for sexual licentiousness helps to convince him.

I took you for that cunning whore of Venice

That married with Othello.

(4.2.91-2)

3.  Is it possible that Othello has bad eyesight?  In his very first scene, Othello asks “But look, what lights come yond?” and Iago tells him, “Those are the raised father and his friends.”  And then, a moment later, he asks again, “Is it they”, and then twenty lines later, when Brabantio finally appears, Iago sees him first and reports, “It is Brabantio, general, be advised.”  Is Shakespeare suggesting that Othello sees less clearly than Iago, and that he depends on Iago to be his eyes?  And while it could be argued here that Iago might be working in the role of lookout, but what about later on, when Othello again asks Iago, “Was not that Cassio parted from my wife? (3.3.37) and, asked whether he had seen the very distinctive handkerchief “Spotted with strawberries,” he still needs confirmation, “Was that mine?” (3.3.438, 4.1.171).  And again, when Lodovico unexpectedly arrives, Iago jumps to Othello’s aid again, “’Tis Lodovico, this, comes from the duke.  See, your wife’s him.” (4.1.214).  Does this help to explain Othello’s trust (and dependence on Iago?  And does it add additional meaning to lines like Iago’s such as “Look to her, Moore, if thou hast eyes to see” and “Look to your wife, observe her well with Cassio.”?

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Now, to continue with Garber:

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Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.“The main accusation against Othello in the opening scenes is that he has used some kind of black magic to bewitch Desdemona and win her affections. Thus Brabantio lashes out at him: ‘O thou foul their, where hast thou stowed my daughter?/Damned as thou art, thou hast enchanted her.’  It must be witchcraft – what else could lead Desdemona to stray so far from parental and civic expectations to fall in love with a stranger and a black man?  As Brabantio insists in his complaint to the Duke,

A maiden never bold,

Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion

Blushed at herself – and she in spite of nature,

Of years, of country, credit, everything,

To fall in love with what she feared to look on!

To the father, witchcraft is the only plausible explanation. But Othello, with a quiet dignity, and the same soldier’s reticence he had shown in the previous scene, preempts the forthcoming accusation:

Rude am I in my speech,

And little blessed with the soft phrase of peace.

……….

And little of this great world can I speak

More than pertains to feats of broils and battle.

And therefore little shall I grace my cause

In speaking for myself. Yet, by your gracious patience,

I will a round unvarnished tale deliver

Of my whole course of love, what drugs, what charms,

What conjuration and what mighty magic –

For such proceeding I am charged withal –

I won his daughter.

What is Othello’s witchcraft?  Language – the source of ‘charm’ (from the Latin Carmen, ‘song’) and magic. A ‘round unvarnished tale.’ Despite his Antony-like protestation “Rude am in my speech’ (compare ‘I am no orator as Brutus was’ [Julius Caesar 3.2.208]), Othello has enchanted Desdemona with his story of himself.  In fact, Othello’s language throughout the play is so resoundingly beautiful that generations of critics, following G. Wilson Knight, have called it ‘the Othello music.’ The story of his courtship, as he relates it, is both charming and domestic, though it casts Desdemona in a conventional gender role, as admiring onlooker, that will incorporate its own dangers:

Her father loved me, oft invited me,

Still questioned me the story of my life

……..

Wherein I spoke of most disastrous chances,

Of moving accidents by flood and field,

Of hair-breadth scapes i’th’ imminent deadly breach,

Of being taken by the insolent foe

And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence,

And portance in my traveller’s history,

Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,

Rough qurries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven,

It was my hint to speak. Such was my process,

And of the cannibals that each other eat,

The Anthrophagi, and men whose heads

Do grow beneath their shoulders. These things to hear

Would Desdemona seriously incline,

But still the house affairs would draw her thence,

Which ever as she could with haste dispatch

She’d come again, and with a greedy ear

Devour up my discourse…

……

     My story being done,

She gave me for my pains a world of kisses.

She swore, in faith ‘twas strange, ‘twas passing strange,

‘Twas pitiful, ‘twas wondrous pitiful

She wished she had not heard it, yet she wished

That heaven had made her such a man. She thanked me,

And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her,

I should but teach him how to tell my story,

And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake.

She loved me for the dangers I had passed,

And I loved her that she did pity them.

This only is the witchcraft I have used.

Othello’s is a spellbinding story, out of the tradition of romance and epic, complete with monsters, deserts, caves, and cannibals, with the added appeal that it is ‘true.’ Indeed the magical language works upon the Duke as it worked upon Desdemona: ‘I think,’ he says, ‘this tale would win my daughter, too.’  As we will see, it is only when Othello loses language, loses this capacity to enchant through speech, that he loses the vestiges of ‘civilization,’ which his speech here clearly praises and exemplifies, and that his tragedy begins. Yet there is something very curious about this tale of courtship. ‘She loved me for the dangers I had passed,/And I loved her that she did pity them.’ This is a public, not a personal, perception. She loved me for what I did; I loved her because she admired me. As he will over and over again, Othello here confuses the personal with the public, the outer with the inner man. His own defensiveness, which coexists with his pride (‘Rude am I in my speech’; ‘Haply for I am black,/And have not those soft parts of conversation/That chamberers have’) causes him to misunderstand, radically and tragically, the nature of love in general and Desdemona’s love for him in particular. For when Desdemona appears, as she does in the very next moment, it becomes quite plain that this is not how she would describe their courtship.

Desdemona’s actions and language may remind us of all the other Shakespearean women who face what seems to them to be a choice between father and lover:  Juliet, Rosalind, Cressida, Isabella, Ophelia. Of them all, she is perhaps the most forthright and unambiguous:

Brabantio:

Come hither, gentle mistress.

Do you perceive in all this noble company

Where most you owe obedience?

Desdemona:

My noble father,

I do perceive here a divided duty.

To you I am bound for life and education.

My life and education both to 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.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.There is no hesitation here, no doubt or artificial coyness. Where Othello speaks of something like hero worship, Desdemona speaks of love, and of a love that is frankly sexual as well as romantic. They had been interrupted on their wedding night, and now the duke proposes to send Othello to Cyprus to quell the Turks, leaving Desdemona behind. Othello is willing to go: ‘The tyrant custom, most grave senators,/Hath made the flinty and steel couch of war/My thrice-driven bed of down.’ But Desdemona is resolute and determined to go with him, and her speech proclaims a love that will give the lie to any dependence upon mere appearances, upon ‘ocular proof’:

That I did love the Moor to live with him,

My downright violence and storm of fortunes

May trumpet to the world. My heart’s subdued

Even to the very quality of my lord.

I saw Othello’s visage in his mind,

And to his honours and his valiant parts

Did I my soul and fortunes consecrate;

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.

Her eloquent certainty may remind us of Juliet’s speech of love-longing for Romeo (‘Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,/Toward Phoebus’ lodging’ [Romeo and Juliet 3.2.1-2]). Desdemona is from the first open, generous, sure of herself [MY NOTE:  She knows what she wants.] – unlike Othello.  There is no self-doubt here.

In the council chamber scene, and at several key points thereafter, Desdemona will present herself as a social actor in the context of an otherwise man-to-man negotiation: here, and again when she tried to intervene on the side of Cassio, and indeed in the original offstage scene of wooing, when she paused in her housework to overhear and ultimately to participate in the conversation between Othello and her father. Othello’s notions of woman hood are, it appears, more conventional than Desdemona’s. He prefers a posture of obedience and admiration (‘She loved me for the dangers I had passed’), a woman who ‘knows her place’ and does not overstep it; yet as Iago will be quick to observe on the first opportune occasion: ‘She did deceive her father, marrying you’ (3.3.210). Desdemona’s outspokenness in the council chamber scene is welcome to her husband, but it is a harbinger of trouble ahead. She had told him she wished that ‘heaven had made her such a man,’ but he does not want her to act like a man in the political sphere.

Furthermore, her erotic frankness poses its own dangers. Othello is quick to declare that his own motives for wishing her companionship at Cyprus are not carnal: ‘I therefor beg it not/To please the palate of my appetite,/Not to comply with heat – the young affects/In me defunct.’ Once again we hear from Othello a denial of appetite and personal desire, a denial of the private man. Whether he is protesting too much against a perceived stereotype of the sexually appetitive black man, or merely declaring his own imperviousness to overweening passion, his assertion here draws a line: I am too old and too controlled to be driven by ‘young affects.’ Here it is a boast, but how soon the coin will flip the other way, and he will be convinced that Desdemona could indeed be unfaithful to him, ‘for I am declined/Into the vale of years.’ A failure to reconcile public and private feelings leaves him with no space for self-knowledge. The clearest danger signal here is his willingness to deny and postpone sexual love; it is as if, in proving himself a civilized man, worthy of the title of Venetian, he has to prove he is more than a man, that he must compensate for his own ordinary humanity. Othello seems to project a need to be seen as a superhuman, and is driven as a consequence, into a situation of uncontrollable and destructive passion. With his mythical exploits against cannibals and monsters, his heroic status as the only man who can defend Venice in a time of crisis, Othello never takes the time to see himself as a man.

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Clik here to view.Significantly, at the end of the first act, the act that centers on Othello’s marriage, the only pregnancy is that of Iago’s plot against him: ‘I ha’t. It is ingendered. Hell and night/Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light.’  These are the last lines of the act, and again they come out of the darkness, as in scene after scene Iago remains onstage and speaks to the audience in soliloquy, plotting his devices, gulling Roderigo and playing on his lusts. For Roderigo is Othello’s opposite in terms of sexual passion – incontinently lustful, willing to do anything and spend any sum in order to enjoy Desdemona’s body. The first act, then, opens in darkness and closes in darkness, its brief glimpse of Venetian order and reason a prelude to tragedy.”

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From Bloom:

“Since the world is Iago’s, I am scarcely done expounding him, and will examine him again in an overview of the play, but only after brooding upon the many enigmas of Othello. Where Shakespeare granted Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth an almost continuous and preternatural eloquence, he chose instead to give Othello a curiously mixed power of expression, distinct yet divided, and deliberately flawed. Iago’s theatricialism is superb, but Othello’s is troublesome, brilliantly so. The Moor tells us that he has been a warrior since he was seven, presumably a hyperbole but indicative that he is all too aware his greatness has been hard won. His professional self-awareness is extraordinarily intense; partly this is inevitable, since he is technically a mercenary, a black soldier of fortune who honorably serves the Venetian state. And yet his acute sense of his reputation betrays what may well be an uneasiness, sometimes manifested in the baroque elaborations of his language, satirized by Iago as ‘a bombast circumstance,/Horribly stuffed with epithets of war.’

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Clik here to view.A military commander who can compare the movement of his mind to the ‘icy current and compulsive course’ of the Pontic (Black) Sea, Othello seems incapable of seeing himself except in grandiose terms. He presents himself as a living legend or walking myth, nobler than any antique Roman. The poet Anthony Hecht thinks we are meant to recognize ‘a ludicrous and nervous vanity’ in Othello, but Shakespeare’s adroit perspectivism evades so single a recognition. Othello has a touch of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in him; there is an ambiguity in both figures that makes it very difficult to trace the demarcations between their vainglory and their grandeur. If you believe in the war god Caesar (as Antony does) or in the war god Othello (as Iago once did), then you lack the leisure to contemplate the god’s failings. But if you are Cassius, or the postlapsarian Iago, then you are at pains to behold the weaknesses that mask as divinity. Othello, like Caesar, is prone to refer himself in the third person, a somewhat unnerving habit, whether in literature or in life. And yet, again like Julius Caesar, Othello believes his own myth, and to some extent we must also, because there is authentic nobility in the language of his soul. That there is opacity also, we cannot doubt; Othello’s tragedy is precisely that Iago should know him better than the Moor knows himself.

Othello is a great commander, w ho knows war and the limits of war but who knows little else, and cannot know that he does not know.  His sense of himself is very large, in that its scale is vast, but he sees himself from afar as it were; up close, he hardly confronts the void at his center. Iago’s apprehension of that abyss is sometimes compared to Montaigne’s; I sooner would compare it to Hamlet’s, because like one element in the infinitely varied prince of Denmark, Iago is well beyond skepticism and has crossed into nihilism. Iago’s most brilliant insight is that if he was reduced to nothingness by Cassio’s preferment, then how much more vulnerable Othello must be, lacking Iago’s intellect and game-playing will. Anyone can be pulverized, in Iago’s view, and in this drama he is right. There is one in the play with the irony and wit that alone could hold off Iago. Othello is consciously theatrical but quite humorless, and Desdemona is a miracle of sincerity. The terrible painfulness of Othello is that Shakespeare shrewdly omits any counterforce to Iago. In King Lear, Edmund also confronts no one with the intellect to withstand him, until he is annihilated by the exquisite irony of having created the nameless avenger who was once his gull, Edgar. First and last, Othello is powerless against Iago, that helplessness is the most harrowing element in the play, except perhaps for Desdemona’s double powerlessness, in regard both to Iago and to her husband.

It is important to emphasize the greatness of Othello, despite all his inadequacies of language and of spirit. Shakespeare implicitly celebrates Othello as a giant of mere being, an ontological splendor, and so a natural man self-raised to an authentic if precarious eminence. Even if we doubt the possibility of the purity of arms, Othello plausibly represents that lost ideal. At every point, he is the antithesis of Iago’s ‘I am not what I am,’ until he begins to come apart under Iago’s influence. Manifestly, Desdemona has made a wrong choice in a husband, and yet that choice testifies to Othello’s hard-won splendor. These days, when so many academic critics are converted to the French fashion of denying the self, some of them happily seize upon Othello as a fit instance. They undervalue how subtle Shakespeare’s art can be; Othello indeed may seem to prompt James Calderwood’s Lancanian observation:

‘Instead of a self-core discoverable at the center of his being, Othello’s ‘I am’ seems a kind of internal repertory company, a ‘we are.’’

If Othello, at the play’s start, or at its close, is only the sum of his self-descriptions, then indeed he could be judged a veritable picnic of souls. But his third-person relation to his own images of self testifies not to a ‘we are’ but to a perpetual romanticism at seeing and describing himself. To some degree, he is a self-enchanter, as well as the enchanter of Desdemona. Othello desperately wants and needs to be the protagonist of a Shakespearean romance, but alas he is the hero-victim of this most painful Shakespearean domestic tragedy of blood. John Jones makes the fine observation that Lear in the Quarto version is a romance figure, but then is revised by Shakespeare into the tragic being of the Folio text. As Iago’s destined gull, Othello presented Shakespeare with enormous problems in representation. How are we to believe in the essential heroism, largeness, and loving nature of so catastrophic a protagonist? Since Desdemona is the most admirable image of love in all Shakespeare, how are we to sympathize with her increasingly incoherent destroyer, who renders her the unluckiest of all wives? Romance, literary and human, depends on partial or imperfect knowledge. Perhaps Othello never gets beyond that, even in his final speech, but Shakespeare shrewdly frames the romance of Othello within the tragedy of Othello, and thus solves the problem of sympathetic representation.

Othello is not a ‘poem unlimited,’ beyond genre, like Hamlet, but the romance elements in its three principal figures do make it a very uncommon tragedy. Iago is a triumph because he is in exactly the right play for an ontotheological villain, while the charitable Desdemona is superbly suited to this drama as well. Othello cannot quite fit in, but then that it his socio-political dilemma, the heroic Moor commanding the armed forces of Venice, sophisticated in its decadence then as now. Shakespeare mingles commercial realism and visionary romance in his portrait of Othello, and the mix necessarily is unsteady, even for this greatest of all makers. Yet we do Othello wrong to offer him the show of violence, whether by unselfing him or by devaluing his goodness. Iago, nothing if not critical, has a keener sense of Othello than most of us now tend to achieve:

The Moor is of a free and open nature

That thinks men honest that but seem to be so.

There are not many in Shakespeare, or in life, that are ‘of a free and open nature’: to suppose that we are to find Othello ludicrous or paltry is to mistake the play badly. He is admirable, a tower among men, but soon enough he becomes a broken tower. Shakespeare’s own Hector, Ulysses, and Achilles, in his Troilus and Cressida, were all complex travesties of their Homeric originals (in George Chapman’s version), but Othello is precisely Homeric, as close as Shakespeare desired to come to Chapman’s heroes. Within his clear limitations, Othello indeed is ‘noble’: his consciousness, prior to his fall, is firmly controlled, just, and massively dignified, and has its own kind of perfection. Reuben Brower admirably said of Othello that ‘his heroic simplicity was also heroic blindness. That too is part of the ‘ideal’ hero, part of Shakespeare’s metaphor.’ The metaphor, no longer quite Homeric, had to extend to the professionalism of a great mercenary soldier and a heroic black in the service of a highly decadent white society. Othello’s superb professionalism is at once his extraordinary strength and his tragic freedom to fall. The love between Desdemona and Othello is authentic, yet might have proved catastrophic even in the absence of the daemonic genius of Iago. Nothing in Othello is marriageable: his military career fulfills him completely. Desdemona, persuasively innocent in the highest of senses, falls in love with the pure warrior in Othello, and he falls in love with her love for him, her mirroring of his legendary career. Their romance is his own pre-existent romance, the marriage does not and cannot change him, though its changes his relationship to Venice, in the highly ironic sense of making him more than ever an outsider.

Othello’s character has suffered the assaults of T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis and their various followers, but fashions in Shakespeare criticism always vanish, and the noble Moor has survived his denigrators. Yet Shakespeare has endowed Othello with the authentic mystery of being a radically flawed hero, an Adam too free to fall. In some respects, Othello is Shakespeare’s most wounding representation of male vanity and fear of female sexuality, and so of the male equation that makes the fear of cuckoldry and the fear of mortality into a single dread. Leontes, in The Winter’s Tale, is partly a study in repressed homosexuality, and thus his virulent jealousy is of another order than Othello’s. We wince when Othello, in his closing apologia, speaks of himself as one not easily jealous, and we wonder at his blindness. Still we never doubt his valor, and this makes it even stranger that he at least matches Leontes in jealous madness.  Shakespeare’s greatest insight into male sexual jealousy is that it is a mask for the fear of being castrated by death. Men imagine that there never can be enough time and space for themselves, and they find in cuckoldry, real or imaginary, the image of their own vanishing, the realization that the world will go on without them.

Othello sees the world as a theater for his professional reputation, this most valiant of soldiers has no fear of literal death in battle, which only would enhance his glory. But to be cuckolded by his own wife, and with his subordinate Cassio as the other offender, would be a greater, metaphorical death in life, for his reputation would not survive it, particularly in his own view of his mythic renown. Shakespeare is sublimely daemonic, in a mode transcending even Iago’s genius, in making Othello’s vulnerability exactly consonant with the wound rendered to Iago’s self-regard by being passed over for promotion. Iago says, “I am not what I am;’ Othello’s loss of ontological dignity would be even great had Desdemona ‘betrayed him’ (I place the word between quotation marks, because the implicit metaphor involved is a triumph of male vanity). Othello all too self-consciously has risked his hard-won sense of his own being in marrying Desdemona, and he has an accurate foreboding of chaotic engulfment should that risk prove a disaster:

Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul

But I do love thee! and when I love thee not

Chaos is come again.

(III, iii.90-92)

An earlier intimation of Othello’s uneasiness is one of the play’s subtlest touches:

For know, Iago,

But that I love the gentle Desdemona

I would not my unhoused free condition

Put into circumscription and confine

For the sea’s worth

(I.ii.24-289)

Othello’s psychological complexity has to be reconstructed by the audience from his ruins, as it were, because Shakespeare does not supply us with the full foreground. We are given the hint that but for Desdemona, he never would have married, and indeed he himself describes a courtship on which he was essentially passive:

This to hear
Would Desdemona seriously incline:
But still the house-affairs would draw her thence:
Which ever as she could with haste dispatch,
She’ld come again, and with a greedy ear
Devour up my discourse: which I observing,
Took once a pliant hour, and found good means
To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart
That I would all my pilgrimage dilate,
Whereof by parcels she had something heard,
But not intentively: I did consent,
And often did beguile her of her tears,
When I did speak of some distressful stroke
That my youth suffer’d. My story being done,
She gave me for my pains a world of sighs:
She swore, in faith, twas strange, ’twas passing strange,
‘Twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful:
She wish’d she had not heard it, yet she wish’d
That heaven had made her such a man: she thank’d me,
And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her,
I should but teach him how to tell my story.
And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake:
She loved me for the dangers I had pass’d,
And I loved her that she did pity them.

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Peggy Ashcroft and Paul Robeson

That is rather more than a ‘hint,’ and nearly constitutes a boldly direct proposal, on Desdemona’s part. With the Venetian competition evidently confined to the likes of Roderigo, Desdemona is willingly seduced by Othello’s naïve but powerful romance of the self, provocative of that ‘world of kisses.’ The Moor is not only noble; his saga brings ‘a maiden never bold’ (her father’s testimony) ‘to fall in love with what she feared to look on.’ Desdemona, a High Romantic centuries ahead of her time, yields to the fascination of quest, if yields can be an accurate word for so active a surrender.  No other match in Shakespeare is so fabulously unlikely, or so tragically inevitable.”

More to come…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uihbX1ho2_k

Our next reading:  Othello, Act Two

My next post:  Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning

Enjoy.

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Othello

Act Two, Part One

By Dennis Abrams

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Act Two:  Though battered by storms, the Venetians, led by Othello, arrive safely in Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Cyprus to the news that the Turkish threat has been eliminated. Roderigo is also on Cyprus, and Iago is quick to exploit his jealousy:  Persuading him that Desdemona is now in love with Cassio, he encourages him to pick a fight with him later that evening.  To make this more likely, Iago gets Cassio drunk and in the ensuing brawl Cassio hits a fellow officer. Dragged from his bed (yet again), Othello demands an explanation, which Iago gives in such a way that – without directly casting blame – Cassio is dismissed.  Iago then advises Cassio to get back into Othello’s favor by using Desdemona’s influence; but this secret plan is Iago’s way of convincing Othello that Cassio is having an affair with her.

Othello, it seems, has not the slightest clue that there are forces at work against him.  But Iago’s racist insults, delivered while Iago is successfully pretending to be Othello’s closest and most trustworthy companion, take on a more frightening aspect when the action relocates to the island of Cyprus.  Posted there in order to confront the encroaching Turks, the party of Venetians – Othello, Desdemona, Cassio, plus soldiers – arrive to the news that the Turkish fleet has been broken up by the storm. But though the military threat has vanished, the threat posed by Iago has not.  Trapped as he is in this seemingly suffocating outpost, his plot to devastate the colony and Othello, the man at its center, develops and builds in strength completely uninterrupted.

I’m sure a big question for all of you is this:  why is Iago so desperate to destroy Othello?  Is being passed over for promotion enough to explain it?  The play itself has no real answers – or, instead, provides us with too many answers to believe.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote about Iago’s “motive-hunting of motiveless malignity,” and though it seems that more literal-minded commentators, critics, and readers have taken up the scattered and often preposterous clues that Iago himself throws to the audience (everything from professional envy to his belief that Othello has “leapt into my seat” by sleeping with his wife), Coleridge, I think, comes closer than most to defining the sense of absolute evil that Iago represents.  There is a terrifying void in his center, something that simply cannot be rationalized.  (As we’ve seen all to often in real life, including Adam Garza, the shooter at Sandy Hook, the Boston Marathon bombers…)  In one of Iago’s most chilling soliloquies, he even plays tricks with the one thing that is certain about him – his inexhaustible wickedness.  ‘And what’s he then that says I play the villain?’ he taunts,

When this advice is free I give, and honest…?:

(3.1.327-8)

Dispensing “advice” to anyone who asks (and those who don’t) under the cover of plain speaking honesty, Iago’s devilishness, as he goes on to boast, lies in his ability to produce “heavenly shows” while at the same time plotting the “blackest sins” imaginable – a triumph of duplicity that will see Othello calling his ensign “honest Iago” until almost the last moment of the play.

Once the Venetians are settled in on Cyprus, Iago sets to work.  He does so through the simple act of telling stories – more specifically, a single story, that Desdemona has been unfaithful with Cassio.  Here the power to transform is entirely in the service of evil, outlining his plan to ensnare Desdemona:

So will I turn her virtue into pitch,

And out of her goodness make the net

That shall enmesh them all.

Relying on his knowledge of human nature, on Desdemona’s open-heartedness and Othello’s absolute trust in his ensign, Iago deftly and remarkably turns each and every “virtue” into a flaw, and each characters into their own most destructive enemy.  In this sense, it is as though he’s rewriting Othello itself, which begins in the mode of a comedy, with a marriage achieved against all odds by a rebellious daughter (as in, say, The Merry Wives of Windsor or A Midsummer Night’s Dream), followed by a storm that represents deliverance, not evil – and yet which turns into monstrous tragedy, one that, as Iago boasts, does indeed trap everyone.

From Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning:

Iago knows that an identity that has been fashioned as a story can be unfashioned, refashioned, inscribed anew in a different  narrative: it is the fate of stories to be consumed, or, as we say more politely, interpreted.

—————————————

From Marjorie Garber:

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.“As if to mirror the impending doom, the next act opens with a storm. Venice was a maritime power, like England, and storms at sea were a common and often catastrophic fact of life. But a Shakespearean storm always has an emotional resonance far beyond the historical or meteorological, whether it is the storm in Twelfth Night that brings Viola and Sebastian to Illyria, the storm in The Tempest that will bring the shipwrecked Neapolitans to Prospero’s island, the storm of omens and portents that disturbed the landscape in Julius Caesar, or the thunder and lightning that assail both Lear and Macbeth. Our modern colloquial term ‘brainstorm’ gives some sense of the ease with which this figure can be seen as an interior as well as an exterior event, as, indeed, does Desdemona’s use of the phrase ‘storm of fortunes’ in describing her love for Othello to the Duke. The storm in Othello is a counterpart of the pervasive sea language we have already noticed: the ‘seas’ worth Othello would not, ordinarily, trade for his freedom; the Pontic sea that is as icy and compulsive as his jealous rage; and, in the final scene of the play, the lines ‘Here is my journey’s end, here is my butt/And very sea-mark of my utmost sail.’ In all these instances it is the language of interior journey as well as exterior storm.

Consider Othello’s greeting to his bride when he lands at Cyprus. ‘O my fair warrior!’ he says. This is affectionate and charming, but the oxymoron, the hint of an Amazonian Desdemona, will shortly usher in the language of civil war. There is a faintly ominous ring to his glad welcome to the end of storm, ‘If it were now to die,/’Twere now to be most happy,’ for, ironically, this will be the last truly happy moment either of them will enjoy. The omnipresent pun on ‘die,’ always operative in Shakespeare’s love tragedies, is especially so in Othello, where sexual consummation is deferred in the interest of war and civic duty, and where the lovers will ultimately die together on a bed fitted with their wedding sheets.

Moreover, the journey to the wild fastnesses of Cyprus is, we quickly learn, entirely futile: ‘News, friends: our wars are done, the Turks are drowned.’ There is no job here for Othello the soldier. His forte is waging external wars against an acknowledged enemy, in this case the barbarous, pagan Turk. But the end of these external wars means, as it does all too often in Shakespeare, the beginning of internal war, civil war: first, the drunken brawling of Cassio and the troops, stage-managed by Iago, and second, the war that ensues within Othello himself, as Iago’s monstrous birth comes to light and reveals itself as the monster jealousy. For Iago, serpent and tempter, is hard at work. Othello’s wars are done, but Iago’s are just beginning.

Once again the time is night, Iago’s natural element, and once again Othello and Desdemona withdraw to their marriage bed, for their marriage is as yet unconsummated. As Iago points out with a leer, it is early in the evening, not yet ten o’clock. ‘Come, my dear love,/The purchase made, the fruits are to ensue./The profit’s yet to come ‘tween me and you.’  The mercantile language here is Othello’s. The withdrawal of the married lovers allows Iago a clear shot at Cassio. Cassio is, as Iago complains, fastidiously courteous, kissing ladies’ hands and apologizing to their husbands for doing so. He is both patronizing and condescending (boasting that ‘[t]he lieutenant is to be saved before the ancient.’); and above all, he is a bad drinker, whose own eloquence deserts him for drunken mumbling (‘Fore God, an excellent song…Fore God, this is a more exquisite song than the other’), like some Florentine version of Sir Toby Belch. Yet Cassio, though he has his weaknesses and character flaws, does not number lust for Desdemona among them, and Iago fails in his tempter’s dialogue, one of the few comic moments in this relentlessly tragic play:

Iago [speaking of Othello’s early bedtime, with a wink]:

He hath not yet made wonton the night with her, and she is sport for Jove.

Cassio:   She’s a most exquisite lady.

Iago:  And I’ll warrant her full of game.

Cassio:  Indeed, she’s a most fresh and delicate creature.

Iago:  What an eye she has! Methinks it sounds a parley to provocation.

Cassio: An inviting eye, and yet, methinks, right modest.

Iago: And when she speaks, it is not an alarum to love?

Cassio:  She is indeed perfection.

Iago [giving up]:  Well, happiness to their sheets.

He has failed in his attempt to compromise Cassio directly, and – like Milton’s Satan – he will have to resort instead to trickery, to ‘other proofs.’

‘[H]appiness to their sheets.’ This second mention of the wedding sheets will not be the last, and they will emerge in the second half of the play as a powerful emblem of Othello’s fall. ‘Strangle her in her bed, even the bed she hath contaminated,’ Iago will suggest, and Othello will eagerly concur; “Good, good, the justice of it pleases.’ (4.1.197-199). But Iago’s plot is still in the process of building, and the second night provides him with a scenario very like that of the first night, in Venice, in which to work his designs. Again Roderigo is a willing assistant; again a hue and cry goes up, out of the darkness, the noise and confused shouts and – this is terrifically effective in the theater – a great bell begins to toll. Once again, Othello’s marriage rites – the rites for which Desdemona says she loves him – are interrupted, and Othello storms onto the stage:

From whence ariseth this?

Are we turned Turks, and to ourselves do that

Which heaven hath forbid the Ottomites?

…..

Silence that dreadful bell –…

………

What, in a town of war

Yet wild, the people’s hearts brimful of fear,

To manage private and domestic quarrel

In night, and on the court and guard of safety!

‘Tis monstrous…

Once again, the private and domestic are monstrous to him:

Othello:

Honest Iago, that looks dead with grieving,

Speak. Who began this? On thy love I charge thee.

Iago:

I do not know. Friends all but now, even now,

In quarter and in terms like bride and groom

Devesting them for bed…

“[B]ut now, even now’ – this is an echo, detectable to the audience but not to Othello, of Iago’s urgent statement to Brabantio in the opening scene: ‘Even now, now, very now, an old black ram/Is tupping your white ewe.’ And of course the scene is the same, as Iago goes on to insinuate by the use of an astonishingly familiar and insulting simile: the soldiers were ‘[i]n quarter and in terms like bride and groom/Devesting them for bed.’ The actual bride and groom, Desdemona and Othello, were presumably doing just that when the bell began to toll. Was the black ram tupping the white ewe? Or has Iago contrived to arrange that they are once again prevented from consummating their marriage? As always, though, the personal note seems to evade Othello. Even when Desdemona appears he returns to the language of the ‘fair warrior’ and the ‘flinty and steel couch of war’: ‘Come, Desdemona. ‘Tis the soldier’s life/To have their balmy slumbers waked with strife.’

Othello’s problem in the opening acts of the play is fundamentally a refusal to acknowledge the private nature of his own passion and his own person. Ultimately concentrated on the public self, on protecting that elusive entity that Cassio also seeks desperately to protect: ‘Reputation, reputation, reputation – O, I ha’ lost my reputation! I ha’ lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial!’ The speaker is Cassio, but it could easily be the Othello of the late acts. Iago’s trenchant reply marks the difference between him and Cassio coldly and clearly: ‘As I am an honest man, I had thought you had received some bodily wound.’ Why bother with a trifle like reputation? ‘As I am an honest man.’ The hollow refrain of ‘honest’ here echoes throughout the scene, as Iago’s honesty is mentioned four times in a hundred lines. The refractions of this word mark out the territories of the play, for ‘honesty’ in the period has a variety of meanings depending upon subject and context: it can stand for respectability, mortal virtue, female chastity, freedom from disgrace. And ‘honest,’ as an epithet meaning ‘worthy,’ might be used ‘in a patronizing way to an inferior,’ according to The Oxford English Dictionary (definition I.C). Cassio’s ‘honest Iago’ is thus conceivably as much a social put-down as a term of praise. That one man’ or woman’s ‘honesty’ is not the same as another’s is a complex and contestatory truth that lies at the heart of Othello – and of Othello.

It is Othello’s very refusal to regard the personal, to trust his own feelings, that gives Iago the opportunity he seeks, allowing him to divide the world into those who work ‘by wit’ and those who work ‘by witchcraft.’ ‘Thou know’st we work by wit and not by witchcraft,’ he reminds an impatient Roderigo ‘[a]nd wit depends on dilatory time.’ In the broad structure of the play, ‘wit’ is associated with Iago, with Venetian politics, with wordplay and doubleness, with plots and plotting, and with maleness: ‘witchcraft,’ with Africa (Othello the Moor; the Egyptian charmer who gave his mother the fatal handkerchief), with magic, charms, and enchantment, and with women (the charmer; Othello’s mother, Desdemona). ‘Wit and witchcraft’ is another way of saying ‘reason and passion,’ or even ‘Venice and Cyprus.’ And for Desdemona’s appeal to Othello on the grounds of the personal – of friendship for Cassio – however touching, is ultimately doomed. ‘Why, this is not a boon,’ she says. ‘’Tis as I should entreat you wear your gloves,/Or feed on nourishing dishes, or keep you warm.’ (3.3.77-79). She asks Othello to be a private person, to grant leeway to a friend who came with him when he wooed her. But rather like Julius Caesar, who brushed away the warning of the Soothsayer because it pertained to him personally, as an individual rather than as a public man (‘What touches us ourself shall be last served’ [Julius Caesar 3.1.8]), Othello distrusts the personal, and takes refuge in the public self.”

From Bloom, continuing his examination of the doomed relationship of Othello and Desdemona:

“Even in a Venice and a Cyprus without Iago, how does so improbable a romance domesticate itself? The high point of passion between Othello and Desdemona is their reunion on Cyprus:

OTHELLO

O my fair warrior!

DESDEMONA

My dear Othello!

OTHELLO

It gives me wonder great as my content
To see you here before me. O my soul’s joy!
If after every tempest come such calms,
May the winds blow till they have waken’d death!
And let the labouring bark climb hills of seas
Olympus-high and duck again as low
As hell’s from heaven! If it were now to die,
‘Twere now to be most happy; for, I fear,
My soul hath her content so absolute
That not another comfort like to this
Succeeds in unknown fate.

DESDEMONA

The heavens forbid
But that our loves and comforts should increase,
Even as our days do grow!

OTHELLO

Amen to that, sweet powers!
I cannot speak enough of this content;
It stops me here; it is too much of joy:
And this, and this, the greatest discords be

Kissing her
That e’er our hearts shall make!

From such an apotheosis one can only descend, even if the answering chorus were not Iago’s aside that he will loosen the strings now so well tuned. Shakespeare (as I have ventured before, following my master, Dr. Johnson), came naturally to comedy and to romance, but violently and ambivalently to tragedy. Othello may have been as painful for Shakespeare as he made it for us. Placing the precarious nobility of Othello and the fragile romanticism of Desdemona upon one stage with the sadistic aestheticism of Iago (ancestor of all modern literary critics) was already an outrageous coup of self-wounding on the poet-dramatist’s part. I am delighted to revive the now scoffed-at romantic speculation that Shakespeare carries a private affliction, an erotic vastation, into the high tragedies, Othello in particular. Shakespeare is, of course, not Lord Byron, scandalously parading before Europe the pageant of his own bleeding heart, yet the incredible agony we rightly undergo as we observe Othello murdering Desdemona has a private as well as public intensity informing it. Desdemona’s murder is the crossing point between the overflowing cosmos of Hamlet and the cosmological emptiness of Lear and of Macbeth.

…..

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Shakespeare invents in Iago a sublimely sadistic comic poet, an archon of nihilism who delights in returning his war god to an uncreated night. Can you invent Iago without delighting in your invention, even as we delight in our ambivalent reception of Iago?

Iago is not larger than his play, he perfectly fits it, unlike Hamlet, who would be too large even for the most unlimited of plays. I have noted already that Shakespeare made significant revisions to what is spoken by Othello, Desdemona, and Emilia (even Roderigo) but not by Iago; it is as though Shakespeare knew he had gotten Iago right the first time round. No villain in all literature rivals Iago as a flawless conception, who requires no improvement. Swinburne was accurate: ‘the most perfect evildom, the most potent demi-devil.,’ and ‘a reflection by hell-fire of the figure of Prometheus.’ A Satanic Prometheus may at first appear too High Romantic, yet the pyromaniac Iago encourages Roderigo to a

Dire yell

As when by night and negligence the fire

Is spied in populous cities.

[I.i.74-76]

According to the myth, Prometheus steals fire to free us; Iago steals us, as fresh fodder for the fire. He is an authentic Promethean, however negative, because who can deny that Iago’s fire is poetic? The hero-villains of John Webster and Cyril Tourneur are mere names on the page when we contrast them with Iago; they lack Promethean fire. Who else in Shakespeare, except for Hamlet and Falstaff, is so creative as Iago? These three alone can read your soul, and read everyone they encounter. Perhaps Iago is the recompense that the Negative demanded to counterbalance Hamlet, Falstaff, and Rosalind. Great wit, like the highest irony, needs an inner check in order not to burn away everything else: Hamlet’s disinterestedness, Falstaff’s exuberance, Rosalind’s graciousness. Iago is nothing at all, except critical; there can be no inner check when the self is an abyss. Iago has the single affect of sheer gusto, increasingly aroused as he discovers his genius for improvisation.

……..

Shakespeare’s finest achievement in Othello is Iago’s extraordinary mutations, prompted by his acute self-overhearing as he moves through his eight soliloquies, and their supporting asides. From tentative, experimental promptings on to excited discoveries, Iago’s course develops into a triumphal march, to be ended only by Emilia’s heroic intervention. Much of the theatrical greatness of Othello inheres in this triumphalism, in which we unwillingly participate. Properly performed, Othello should be a momentary trauma for its audience. Lear is equally catastrophic, where Edmund triumphs consistently until the duel with Edgar, but Lear is vast, intricate, and varied, and not just in its double plot. In Othello, Iago is always at the center of the web, ceaselessly weaving his fiction, and snaring us with dark magic: Only Prospero is comparable, a luminous magus who in part is Shakespeare’s answer to Iago.

You can judge Iago to be, in effect, a misreader of Montaigne, as opposed to Hamlet, who makes of Montaigne the mirror of nature. Kenneth Gross shrewdly observes that ‘Iago is at best a nightmare image of so vigilant and humanizing a pyrrhonism as Montaigne’s.’ Pyrrhonism, or radical skepticism, is transmuted by Hamlet into disinterestedness; Iago turns it into a war against existence, a drive that seeks to argue that there is no reason why anything should be, at all. The exaltation of the will, in Iago, emanates from an ontological lack so great that no human emotion possibly could fill it:

Virtue! a fig! ’tis in ourselves that we are thus or
thus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our
wills are gardeners: so that if we will plant nettles,
or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up tine, supply
it with one gender of herbs, or distract it with many,
either to have it sterile with idleness, or manured with
industry, why, the power and corrigible authority of
this lies in our wills. If the balance of our lives had not
one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the

blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us

to most preposterous conclusions: but we have
reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal
stings, our unbitted lusts, whereof I take this that
you call love to be a sect or scion.

(I, iii, 320-33)

‘Virtue’ here means something like ‘manly strength,’ while by ‘reason’ Iago intends only his own absence of significant emotion. This prose utterance is the poetic center of Othello, presaging Iago’s conversion of his leader to a reductive and diseased vision of sexuality. We cannot doubt that Othello loves Desdemona; Shakespeare also may suggest that Othello is amazingly reluctant to make love to his wife. As I read the play’s text, the marriage is never consummated, despite Desdemona’s eager desires.”

More on this in my next post (Thursday evening/Friday morning) in the meantime…any thoughts on the subject?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvUBIJCfcks&playnext=1&list=PL5630017891D53EB2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yybZc7DZ1nk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0DQQaWUwqk

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Clik here to view.

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Clik here to view.

Othello

Act Two, Part Two

By Dennis Abrams

————————————

To continue on where we left off in my last post with Bloom:

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Clik here to view.“Iago derides Othello’s ‘weak function’; that seems more a hint of Iago’s impotence than of Othello’s, and yet nothing that the Moorish captain-general says or does reflects an authentic lust for Desdemona. This certainly helps explain his murderous rage, once Iago has roused him to jealousy, and also makes that jealousy more plausible, since Othello literally does not know whether his wife is a virgin, and is afraid to find out, one way or the other. I join here the minority view of Graham Bradshaw, and of only a few others, but this play, of all Shakespeare’s, seems to me the most weakly misread, possibly because its villain is the greatest master of misprision in Shakespeare, or in literature. Why did Othello marry anyway, if he does not sexually desire Desdemona? Iago cannot help us here, and Shakespeare allows us to puzzle the matter out for ourselves, without ever giving us sufficient information to settle the question.  But Bradshaw is surely right to say that Othello finally testifies Desdemona died a virgin:

Now: how doest thou look now? O ill-starred wench,

Pale as thy smock. When we shall met at compt

This look of thine will hurl my soul from ehaven

And fiends will snatch at it. Cold, cold, my girl,

Even like thy chastity.

(V.ii.270-74)

Unless Othello is merely raving, we at least must believe he means what he says: she dies not only faithful to him but ‘cold…Even like thy chastity.’ It is a little difficult to know just what Shakespeare intends Othello to mean, unless his victim had never become his wife, even for the single night when their sexual union was possible. When Othello vows not to ‘shed her blood,’ he means not only that he will smother her to death, but the frightening irony is there as well: neither he nor Cassio nor anyone else has ever ended her virginity. Bradshaw finds in this ‘a ghastly tragicomic parody of an erotic death,’ and that is appropriate for Iago’s theatrical achievement.

I want to shift the emphasis from Bradshaw’s in order to question a matter upon which Iago had little influence. Why was Othello reluctant, from the start, to consummate the marriage? When, in Act I, Scene iii, the Duke of Venice accepts the love match of Othello and Desdemona, and then orders Othello to Cyprus to lead its defense against an expected Turkish invasion, the Moor asks only that his wife be housed with comfort and dignity during his absence. It is the ardent Desdemona who requests that she accompany her husband:

So that, dear lords, if I be left behind,

A moth of peace, and he go to war,

The rites for which I love him are bereft me,

And I a heavy interim shall support

By his dear absence. Let me go with him.

Presumably by ‘rites’ Desdemona means consummation, rather than battle, and though Othello seconds her, he rather gratuitously insists that desire for her is not exactly hot in him:

Let me 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.

And heaven defend your good souls that you think

I will your serious and great business scant

When she is with me. No, when light-winged toys

Of feathered Cupid seel with wanton dullness

My speculative and officed instrument,

That my disports corrupt and taint my business,

Let housewives make a skillet of my helm

And all indign and base adversities

Make head against my estimation

These lines, hardly Othello at his most eloquent, exceed the measure that decorum requires, and do not favor Desdemona. He protests much too much, and hardly betters the case when he urges her off the stage with him:

Come, Desdemona, I have but an hour

Of love, of worldly matter and discretion

To spend with thee. We must obey the time.

If that ‘hour’ is literal, then ‘love’ will be lucky to get twenty minutes of this overbusy general’s time. Even with the Turks impending, the state would surely have allowed its chief military officer an extra hour or two for initially embracing his wife. When he arrives on Cyprus, where Desdemona has preceded him, Othello tells us: ‘Our wars are done, the Turks are destroyed.’ That would seem to provide ample time for the deferred matter of making love to his wife, particularly since public feasting is now decreed. Perhaps it is more proper to wait for evening, and so Othello bids Cassio command the watch, and duly says to Desdemona: ‘Come, my dear love,/The purchase made, the fruits are to ensue: /That profit’s yet to come ‘tween me and you,’ and exits with her. Iago works up a drunken riot, involving Cassio, Roderigo, and Montano, governor of Cyprus, in which Cassio wounds Montano. Othello, aroused by a tolling bell, enters with Desdemona following soon afterward. We are not told whether there has been time enough for their ‘rites,’ but Othello summons her back to bed, while also announcing that he himself will supervise the dressing of Montano’s wounds. Which had priority, we do not precisely know, but evidently the general preferred his self-imposed obligation toward the governor to his marital obligation.

Iago’s first insinuation of Desdemona’s supposed relationship with Cassio would have no effect if Othello knew her to have been a virgin. It is because he does not know that Othello is so vulnerable. ‘Why did I marry!’ he exclaims, and then points to his cuckold’s horns when he tells Desdemona: ‘I have a pain upon my forehead, here,’ which his poor innocent of a wife attributes to his all-night care of the governor: ‘Why, that’s with watching,’ and tries to bind it hard with the fatal handkerchief, pushed away by him, and so it falls in Emilia’s way. By then, Othello is already Iago’s, and is incapable of resolving his doubts through the only sensible course of finally bringing himself to bed Desdemona.

This is a bewildering labyrinth for the audience, and frequently is not overtly addressed by directors of Othello, who leave us doubtful of their interpretations, or perhaps they are not even aware of the difficulty that requires interpretation. Shakespeare was capable of carelessness, but not upon so crucial a point, for the entire tragedy turns upon it. Desdemona and Othello, alas, scarcely know each other, and sexually do not know each other at all. Shakespeare’s audacious suggestion is that Othello was too frightened or diffident to seize upon the opportunity of the first night in Cyprus, but evaded and delayed the ordeal by devoting himself to the wounded Montano. The further suggestion is that Iago, understanding Othello, formented the drunken altercation in order to distract his general from consummation, for otherwise Iago’s manipulations would have been without consequence. That credits Iago with extraordinary insight into Othello, but no one should be surprised at such an evaluation. We can wonder why Shakespeare did not make all this clearer, except that we need to remember his contemporary audience was far superior to us in comprehending through the ear. They knew how to listen; most of us do not, in our overvisual culture. Shakespeare doubtless would not have agreed with Blake that what could be made explicit to the idiot was not worth his care, but he learned from Chaucer, in particular, how to be appropriately sly.

Before turning at least to Iago’s triumphalism, I feel obliged to answer my own question: Why did Othello marry when his love for Desdemona was only a secondary response to her primary passion for him? This prelude to tragedy seems plausibly compounded of her ignorance – she is still only a child, rather like Juliet – and his confusion. Othello tells us that he had been nine consecutive months in Venice, away from the battlefield and the camp, and thus he was not himself. Fully engaged in his occupation, he would have been immune to Desdemona’s charmed condition and to her genuine passion for his living legend. Their shared idealism is also their mutual illusion: the idealism is beautiful, but the illusion would have been dissolved even if Othello had not passed over Iago for promotion and so still had Iago’s loving worship, rather than the ancient’s vengeful hatred. The fallen Iago will teach Othello that the general’s failure to know Desdemona, sexually and otherwise, was because Othello did not want to know. Bradshaw brilliantly observes that Iago’s genius ‘is to persuade others that something they had not thought was something they had not wanted to think.’ Iago, having been thrown into a cosmological emptiness, discovers that what he had worshiped in Othello’s warlike fullness of being was in part another emptiness, and Iago’s triumph is to expand that part into very nearly the whole of Othello.”

———————–

And finally, to continue with A.C. Bradley:

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The character of Othello is comparatively simple, but, as I have dwelt on the prominence of intrigue and accident in the play, it is desirable to show how essentially the success of Iago’s plot is connected with this character. Othello’s description of himself as

one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
Perplexed in the extreme,

is perfectly just. His tragedy lies in this — that his whole nature was indisposed to jealousy, and yet was such that he was unusually open to deception, and, if once wrought to passion, likely to act with little reflection, with no delay, and in the most decisive manner conceivable.

17. Let me first set aside a mistaken view. I do not mean the ridiculous notion that Othello was jealous by temperament, but the idea, which has some little plausibility, that the play is primarily a study of a noble barbarian, who has become a Christian and has imbibed some of the civilisation of his employers, but who retains beneath the surface the savage passions of his Moorish blood and also the suspiciousness regarding female chastity common among Oriental peoples, and that the last three Acts depict the outburst of these original feelings through the thin crust of Venetian culture. It would take too long to discuss this idea, and it would perhaps be useless to do so, for all arguments against it must end in an appeal to the reader’s understanding of Shakespeare. If he thinks it is like Shakespeare to look at things in this manner; that he had a historical mind and occupied himself with problems of “Culturgeschichte”; that he laboured to make his Romans perfectly Roman, to give a correct view of the Britons in the days of Lear or Cymbeline, to portray in Hamlet a stage of the moral consciousness not yet reached by the people around him, the reader will also think this interpretation of Othello probable. To me it appears hopelessly un-Shakespearean. I could as easily believe that Chaucer meant the Wife of Bath for a study of the peculiarities of Somersetshire. I do not mean that Othello’s race is a matter of no account. It has, as we shall presently see, its importance in the play. It makes a difference to our idea of him; it makes a difference to the action and catastrophe. But in regard to the essentials of his character it is not important; and if anyone had told Shakespeare that no Englishman would have acted like the Moor, and had congratulated him on the accuracy of his racial psychology, I am sure he would have laughed.

18. Othello is, in one sense of the word, by far the most romantic figure among Shakespeare’s heroes; and he is so partly from the strange life of war and adventure which he has lived from childhood. He does not belong to our world, and he seems to enter it we know not whence — almost as if from wonderland. There is something mysterious in his descent from men of royal siege; in his wanderings in vast deserts and among marvellous peoples; in his tales of magic handkerchiefs and prophetic Sibyls; in the sudden vague glimpses we get of numberless battles and sieges in which he has played the hero and has borne a charmed life; even in chance references to his baptism, his being sold to slavery, his sojourn in Aleppo.

19. And he is not merely a romantic figure; his own nature is romantic. He has not, indeed, the meditative or speculative imagination of Hamlet; but in the strictest sense of the word he is more poetic than Hamlet. Indeed, if one recalls Othello’s most famous speeches — those that begin, “Her father loved me,” “O now for ever,” “Never, Iago,” “Had it pleased Heaven,” “It is the cause,” “Behold, I have a weapon,” “Soft you, a word or two before you go” — and if one places side by side with these speeches an equal number by any other hero, one will not doubt that Othello is the greatest poet of them all. There is the same poetry in his casual phrases — like “These nine moons wasted,” “Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them,” “You chaste stars,” “It is a sword of Spain, the ice-brook’s temper,” “It is the very error of the moon” — and in those brief expressions of intense feeling which ever since have been taken as the absolute expression, like

If it were now to die,
‘Twere now to be most happy; for, I fear,
My soul hath her content so absolute
That not another comfort like to this
Succeeds in unknown fate,

or

If she be false, O then Heaven mocks itself,
I’ll not believe it;

or

No, my heart is turned to stone; I strike it, and it hurts my hand,

or

But yet the pity of it, Iago! O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!

or

O thou weed,
Who are so lovely fair and smell’st so sweet
That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne’er been born.

And this imagination, we feel, has accompanied his whole life. He has watched with a poet’s eye the Arabian trees dropping their med’cinable gum, and the Indian throwing away his chancefound pearl; and has gazed in a fascinated dream at the Pontic sea rushing, never to return, to the Propontic and the Hellespont; and has felt as no other man ever felt (for he speaks of it as none other ever did) the poetry of the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war.

20. So he comes before us, dark and grand, with a light upon him from the sun where he was born; but no longer young, and now grave, self-controlled, steeled by the experience of countless perils, hardships and vicissitudes, at once simple and stately in bearing and in speech, a great man naturally modest but fully conscious of his worth, proud of his services to the state, unawed by dignitaries and unelated by honours, secure, it would seem, against all dangers from without and all rebellion from within. And he comes to have his life crowned with the final glory of love, a love as strange, adventurous and romantic as any passage of his eventful history, filling his heart with tenderness and his imagination with ecstasy. For there is no love, not that of Romeo in his youth, more steeped in imagination than Othello’s.

21. The sources of danger in this character are revealed but too clearly by the story. In the first place, Othello’s mind, for all its poetry, is very simple. He is not observant. His nature tends outward. He is quite free from introspection, and is not given to reflection. Emotion excites his imagination, but it confuses and dulls his intellect. On this side he is the very opposite of Hamlet, with whom, however, he shares a great openness and trustfulness of nature. In addition, he has little experience of the corrupt products of civilised life, and is ignorant of European women.

22. In the second place, for all his dignity and massive calm (and he has greater dignity than any other of Shakespeare’s men), he is by nature full of the most vehement passion. Shakespeare emphasises his self-control, not only by the wonderful pictures of the First Act, but by references to the past. Lodovico, amazed at his violence, exclaims:

Is this the noble Moor whom our full Senate
Call all in all sufficient? Is this the nature
Whom passion could not shake? whose solid virtue
The shot of accident nor dart of chance
Could neither graze nor pierce?

Iago, who has here no motive for lying, asks:

Can he be angry? I have seen the cannon
When it hath blown his ranks into the air,
And, like the devil, from his very arm
Puffed his own brother — and can he be angry?

This, and other aspects of his character, are best exhibited by a single line — one of Shakespeare’s miracles — the words by which Othello silences in a moment the night-brawl between his attendants and those of Brabantio:

Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.

And the same self-control is strikingly shown where Othello endeavours to elicit some explanation of the fight between Cassio and Montano. Here, however, there occur ominous words, which make us feel how necessary was this self-control, and make us admire it the more:

Now, by heaven,
My blood begins my safer guides to rule,
And passion, having my best judgment collied,
Assays to lead the way.

We remember these words later, when the sun of reason is “collied,” blackened and blotted out in total eclipse.

23. Lastly, Othello’s nature is all of one piece. His trust, where he trusts, is absolute. Hesitation is almost impossible to him. He is extremely self-reliant, and decides and acts instantaneously. If stirred to indignation, as “in Aleppo once,” he answers with one lightning stroke. Love, if he loves, must be to him the heaven where either he must live or bear no life. If such a passion as jealousy seizes him, it will swell into a well-nigh incontrollable flood. He will press for immediate conviction or immediate relief. Convinced, he will act with the authority of a judge and the swiftness of a man in mortal pain. Undeceived, he will do like execution on himself.

24. This character is so noble, Othello’s feelings and actions follow so inevitably from it and from the forces brought to bear on it, and his sufferings are so heart-rending, that he stirs, I believe, in most readers a passion of mingled love and pity which they feel for no other hero in Shakespeare, and to which not even Mr. Swinburne can do more than justice. Yet there are some critics and not a few readers who cherish a grudge against him. They do not merely think that in the later stages of his temptation he showed a certain obtuseness, and that, to speak pedantically, he acted with unjustifiable precipitance and violence; no one, I suppose, denies that. But, even when they admit that he was not of a jealous temper, they consider that he was “easily jealous”; they seem to think that it was inexcusable in him to feel any suspicion of his wife at all; and they blame him for never suspecting Iago or asking him for evidence. I refer to this attitude of mind chiefly in order to draw attention to certain points in the story. It comes partly from mere inattention (for Othello did suspect Iago and did ask him for evidence); partly from a misconstruction of the text which makes Othello appear jealous long before he really is so; and partly from failure to realise certain essential facts. I will begin with these.

25. (1) Othello, we have seen, was trustful, and thorough in his trust. He put entire confidence in the honesty of Iago, who had not only been his companion in arms, but, as he believed, had just proved his faithfulness in the matter of the marriage. This confidence was misplaced, and we happen to know it; but it was no sign of stupidity in Othello. For his opinion of Iago was the opinion of practically everyone who knew him: and that opinion was that Iago was before all things “honest,” his very faults being those of excess in honesty. This being so, even if Othello had not been trustful and simple, it would have been quite unnatural in him to be unmoved by the warnings of so honest a friend, warnings offered with extreme reluctance and manifestly from a sense of a friend’s duty. Any husband would have been troubled by them.

26. (2) Iago does not bring these warnings to a husband who had lived with a wife for months and years and knew her like his sister or his bosom-friend. Nor is there any ground in Othello’s character for supposing that, if he had been such a man, he would have felt and acted as he does in the play. But he was newly married; in the circumstances he cannot have known much of Desdemona before his marriage; and further he was conscious of being under the spell of a feeling which can give glory to the truth but can also give it to a dream.

27. (3) This consciousness in any imaginative man is enough, in such circumstances, to destroy his confidence in his powers of perception. In Othello’s case, after a long and most artful preparation, there now comes, to reinforce its effect, the suggestions that he is not an Italian, nor even a European; that he is totally ignorant of the thoughts and the customary morality of Venetian women; that he had himself seen in Desdemona’s deception of her father how perfect an actress she could be. As he listens in horror, for a moment at least the past is revealed to him in a new and dreadful light, and the ground seems to sink under his feet. These suggestions are followed by a tentative but hideous and humiliating insinuation of what his honest and much-experienced friend fears may be the true explanation of Desdemona’s rejection of acceptable suitors, and of her strange, and naturally temporary, preference for a black man. Here Iago goes too far. He sees something in Othello’s face that frightens him, and he breaks off. Nor does this idea take any hold of Othello’s mind. But it is not surprising that his utter powerlessness to repel it on the ground of knowledge of his wife, or even of that instinctive interpretation of character which is possible between persons of the same race, should complete his misery, so that he feels he can bear no more, and abruptly dismisses his friend (III. iii. 238).

28. Now I repeat that any man situated as Othello was would have been disturbed by Iago’s communications, and I add that many men would have been made wildly jealous. But up to this point, where Iago is dismissed, Othello, I must maintain, does not show jealousy. His confidence is shaken, he is confused and deeply troubled, he feels even horror; but he is not yet jealous in the proper sense of that word. In his soliloquy (III. iii. 258 ff.) the beginning of this passion may be traced; but it is only after an interval of solitude, when he has had time to dwell on the idea presented to him, and especially after statements of fact, not mere general grounds of suspicion, are offered, that the passion lays hold of him. Even then, however, and indeed to the very end, he is quite unlike the essentially jealous man, quite unlike Leontes. No doubt the thought of another man’s possessing the woman he loves is intolerable to him; no doubt the sense of insult and the impulse of revenge are at times most violent; and these are the feelings of jealousy proper. But these are not the chief or the deepest source of Othello’s suffering. It is the wreck of his faith and his love. It is the feeling,

If she be false, oh then Heaven mocks itself;

the feeling,

O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!

the feeling,

But there where I have garner’d up my heart,
Where either I must live, or bear no life;
The fountain from the which my current runs,
Or else dries up — to be discarded thence….

You will find nothing like this in Leontes.

29. Up to this point, it appears to me, there is not a syllable to be said against Othello. But the play is a tragedy, and from this point we may abandon the ungrateful and undramatic task of awarding praise and blame. When Othello, after a brief interval, re-enters (III. iii. 330), we see at once that the poison has been at work, and “burns like the mines of sulphur.”

Look where he comes! Not poppy, nor mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world,
Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou owedst yesterday.

He is “on the rack,” in an agony so unbearable that he cannot endure the sight of Iago. Anticipating the probability that Iago has spared him the whole truth, he feels that in that case his life is over and his “occupation gone” with all its glories. But he has not abandoned hope. The bare possibility that his friend is deliberately deceiving him — though such a deception would be a thing so monstrously wicked that he can hardly conceive it credible — is a kind of hope. He furiously demands proof, ocular proof. And when he is compelled to see that he is demanding an impossibility he still demands evidence. He forces it from the unwilling witness, and hears the maddening tale of Cassio’s dream. It is enough. And if it were not enough, has he not sometimes seen a handkerchief spotted with strawberries in his wife’s hand? Yes, it was his first gift to her.

I know not that; but such a handkerchief—
I am sure it was your wife’s — did I to-day
See Cassio wipe his beard with.

“If it be that,” he answers — but what need to test the fact? The “madness of revenge” is in his blood, and hesitation is a thing he never knew. He passes judgment, and controls himself only to make his sentence a solemn vow.

30. The Othello of the Fourth Act is Othello in his fall. His fall is never complete, but he is much changed. Towards the close of the Temptation-scene he becomes at times most terrible, but his grandeur remains almost undiminished. Even in the following scene (III. iv.), where he goes to test Desdemona in the matter of the handkerchief, and receives a fatal confirmation of her guilt, our sympathy with him is hardly touched by any feeling of humiliation. But in the Fourth Act “Chaos has come.” A slight interval of time may be admitted here. It is but slight; for it was necessary for Iago to hurry on, and terribly dangerous to leave a chance for a meeting of Cassio with Othello; and his insight into Othello’s nature taught him that his plan was to deliver blow on blow, and never to allow his victim to recover from the confusion of the first shock. Still there is a slight interval; and when Othello reappears we see at a glance that he is a changed man. He is physically exhausted, and his mind is dazed. He sees everything blurred through a mist of blood and tears. He has actually forgotten the incident of the handkerchief, and has to be reminded of it. When Iago, perceiving that he can now risk almost any lie, tells him that Cassio has confessed his guilt, Othello, the hero who has seemed to us only second to Coriolanus in physical power, trembles all over; he mutters disjointed words; a blackness suddenly intervenes between his eyes and the world; he takes it for the shuddering testimony of nature to the horror he has just heard, and he falls senseless to the ground. When he recovers it is to watch Cassio, as he imagines, laughing over his shame. It is an imposition so gross, and should have been one so perilous, that Iago would never have ventured it before. But he is safe now. The sight only adds to the confusion of intellect the madness of rage; and a ravenous thirst for revenge, contending with motions of infinite longing and regret, conquers them. The delay till night-fall is torture to him. His self-control has wholly deserted him, and he strikes his wife in the presence of the Venetian envoy. He is so lost to all sense of reality that he never asks himself what will follow the deaths of Cassio and his wife. An ineradicable instinct of justice, rather than any last quiver of hope, leads him to question Emilia; but nothing could convince him now, and there follows the dreadful scene of accusation; and then, to allow us the relief of burning hatred and burning tears, the interview of Desdemona with Iago, and that last talk of hers with Emilia, and her last song.

31. But before the end there is again a change. The supposed death of Cassio (V. i.) satiates the thirst for vengeance. The Othello who enters the bed-chamber with the words,

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,

is not the man of the Fourth Act. The deed he is bound to do is no murder, but a sacrifice. He is to save Desdemona from herself, not in hate but in honour; in honour, and also in love. His anger has passed; a boundless sorrow has taken its place; and

this sorrow’s heavenly:
It strikes where it doth love.

Even when, at the sight of her apparent obduracy, and at the hearing of words which by a crowning fatality can only reconvince him of her guilt, these feelings give way to others, it is to righteous indignation they give way, not to rage; and, terribly painful as this scene is, there is almost nothing here to diminish the admiration and love which heighten pity. And pity itself vanishes, and love and admiration alone remain, in the majestic dignity and sovereign ascendancy of the close. Chaos has come and gone; and the Othello of the Council-chamber and the quay of Cyprus has returned, or a greater and nobler Othello still. As he speaks those final words in which all the glory and agony of his life — long ago in India and Arabia and Aleppo, and afterwards in Venice, and now in Cyprus — seem to pass before us, like the pictures that flash before the eyes of a drowning man, a triumphant scorn for the fetters of the flesh and the littleness of all the lives that must survive him sweeps our grief away, and when he dies upon a kiss the most painful of all tragedies leaves us for the moment free from pain, and exulting in the power of “love and man’s unconquerable mind.”

Our next reading:  Othello, Act Three

My next post:  Sunday evening/Monday morning

Enjoy.  And enjoy your weekend.

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Othello

Act Four, Part One

By Dennis Abrams

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Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Act Four:  Iago continues to fuel Othello’s growing jealousy, to the point where he collapses in a fit.  When he recovers, Iago “arranges” for him to overhear a meeting with Cassio, during which Othello becomes even more certain that Desdemona is unfaithful. He resolves to kill her, while Iago takes on the mission of killing Cassio. When a deputation arrives from Venice recalling Othello, he publicly abuses Desdemona (to everyone’s horror) and later, in private, accuses her of being a whore.

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In Othello, Shakespeare gives us little opportunity to catch our breath.  (Just wait until we get to Macbeth – a miracle of compression).  Moments after beginning to suspect Desdemona, Othello is racked by doubt; just a few minutes after that, he is swearing “capable and wide revenge” with Iago’s more than gleeful help, convinced by the “evidence” and resolved not to go back.  After the handkerchief makes its appearance and Cassio is effectively framed, the effect on our hero is devastating: “Lie with her? Lie on her?”  Othello desperately cries:

We say ‘like on her’ when they belie her.  Lie with her? ‘Swounds, that’s fulsome! Handkerchief – confessions – handkerchief. To confess and be hanged for his labour. First to be hanged and then to confess! I tremble at 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!

(He falls down in a trance)

And although Othello will quickly recover from his fit, the mental turmoil that it represents (as does the collapse in his use of language) will stay with him until the end of Act Five.

But first, Desdemona must die.  Although it was Iago who planted the idea of her infidelity into Othello’s mind, the idea of killing her in revenge is all her husbands. “O blood, blood, blood!” he rages, just moments before Desdemona appears, as innocent of the knowledge as she is in character.  She assumes that state business has distracted and frustrated Othello, making him unwell, but as we have seen, her ministrations do nothing but further infuriate him. The terrible cycle of jealousy does its work all to well.  After that horrific (is there any other word to describe it?) public shaming during which Othello actually hit her in front of guests from Venice, the couple have a final tearful argument. Othello taunts her with his own certainties and refuses to listen to her denials. “What, not a whore?” he cried incredulously?

Desdemona:

No, as I shall be saved.

Othello:

Is’t possible?

Desdemona:

O heaven forgive us!

Othello:

I cry you mercy then.

I took you for that cunning whore of Venice

That married with Othello.

There is something infinitely moving about Othello’s lingering torment, but of course, he is not its main victim.  That role will fall to Desdemona in Act Five.

From Garber:

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Clik here to view.“And what are Iago’s proofs? Two pieces of evidence: a handkerchief, and a conversation overheard. First, the handkerchief. A white handkerchief, spotted with strawberries. Othello tells the story of the handkerchief more than once, and the details differ in each telling. In one version it is a gift from his mother, woven by an Egyptian charmer, and said to have the power of guaranteeing love: ‘There’s magic in the web of it.’ In another version it has been given by Othello’s father to his mother. (These variations suggest that Othello’s story-telling abilities are even more sophisticated – and dangerous – than previously thought.) Othello, characteristically, takes the thing, the sign, for the intangible fact of Desdemona’s love, and when he fears she has lost the handkerchief, he is certain that he has lost her love. The handkerchief, properly a private love token, now becomes, again characteristically, a public spectacle. The white handkerchief marked with red becomes – because Othello makes it so – another version of the white wedding sheets that are so often mentioned in the play. The red embroidery now becomes the emblem of the blood of her virginity, and Othello is now convinced that Cassio has had them both. In a most serious and tragic sense he hangs out his dirty linen in public. For him the handkerchief is the wedding sheets, and the wedding sheets therefore become a shroud. Deferred sexual consummation, and again deferred sexual consummation – Othello the hero, the patient, public man, wedded to his ‘occupation’ as general and governor, willing to leave the marriage bed at the city’s command to instill order in the populace – and now he finds, or thinks he finds, his wedding sheets are already stained by someone else’s love. A short step leads to the second piece of ocular proof, the play-within-the-play so artfully staged by Iago, in which Iago and Cassio joke about Bianca, the courtesan, and Othello, again placed so that he can see but cannot hear, thinks they are joking about his wife. He misinterprets this dumb show, as Iago means him to do – for what he sees, after all, is the telltale handkerchief, given by Cassio to Bianca to ‘take the work out,’ to copy the design.

From the very beginning, Othello, whose tale would have won the Duke’s daughter, has denied his own eloquence: ‘Rude am I in my speech,/And little blessed with the soft phrase of peace’; ‘Haply for I am black,/And have not those soft parts of conversation/That chamberers have.’ Generations of audience and critics have responded to his stirring language, but the breakdown of Othello’s speech follows the loss of his faith in Desdemona, Iago’s manipulation of language through subtraction – insinuation, artful echo, pause, and silence – ultimately outlasts and outwits the grand speeches and resounding periods. Once again it is Iago who lures Othello into this state, and the turning point, fittingly, is the utterance of the ambiguous word ‘lie.’:

Othello:

What hath he said?

Iago:

Faith, that he did – I know not what he did.

Othello:

What, what?

Iago:

              Lie –

Othello:

                       With her?

Iago:

                                With her, on her, what you will.

Othello:

Lie with her? Lie on her? We say ‘lie on her’ when they belie her. Lie with her? ‘Swounds, that’s fulsome! Handkerchief – confessions – handkerchief. To confess and be hanged for his labour.  First to be hanged, and then to confess!…It is not words that shake me thus. Pish! Noses, ears, and lips! Is’t possible? Confess? Handkerchief? O devil!

Othello says, ‘It is not words that shakes me thus’ – yet is only words that do, Iago’s words.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Loss of language here, as elsewhere in Shakespeare, is emblematic of loss of humanity. Othello’s decline into incoherence, fragments of sentences about fragments of bodies, is a sign of his temporary abandonment of human codes and qualities. The ‘fit’ into which he falls, sometimes called ‘an epilepsy,’ and associated not only with linguistic loss of control but also with sexual orgasm, the ‘little death,’ marks the disintegration of the iron discipline he tried to enforce upon his own desire, his own sense of himself as a soldier, general, diplomatic, Venetian hero, and husband. The magic web of language has become for him a snare. Yet his magnificent language will return, at full throttle, in the final scenes of the play, during and especially after the murder. It is Iago who chooses the path of silence, and the ultimate, willed, dehumanization that accompanies it. ‘From this time forth,’ he will declare at the end of the play, ‘I never will speak word’ (5.2.310).  He will retreat into the archetype from which he grew, a ‘demi-devil,’ a Vice. We saw in a play like Measure for Measure that silence onstage is an emblem of death, as the muffled and unspeaking Claudio is dead – until he recovers to speech. Iago chooses this living death; he chooses against humanity. And yet he cannot be killed.

Iago is the ‘bad angel,’ and Desdemona the ‘good.’ The power of Desdemona’s extraordinary character is such that she, too, bursts through archetype. She is ripped from the play’s apparently ‘comic’ beginnings in courtship and marriage. A ‘maiden never bold,’ according to her father, she becomes bold, like Juliet, when she sees her husband and reaches out to him. She is ‘one entire and perfect chrysolite,’ and yet she is no Isabella – she articulates passion and desire, and she speaks out, finally to her own cost – she is an articulate and ardent woman who intervenes in the world of politics and policy conventionally reserved for me. Othello, even in his jealous agony, praises her skills as a seamstress and a musician, skills possessed by some of the most noteworthy Shakespearean women. And as if for emphasis, the play presents her framed by two women who reflect the very things she is not: Bianca, the courtesan; Emilia, the obedient and pragmatic wife. Bianca is the whore Desdemona is accused of being, yet she is in love with Cassio, who treats her lightly. Emilia, Iago’s wife, is a realist and a literalist, like Hamlet’s gravedigger, or Macbeth’s Porter. Like them, she sees things not for what they could be, but for what they are. Desdemona asks her, in tones of incredulity, whether she could imagine that a woman might be unfaithful to her husband, and Emilia’s reply has the frank, down-to-earth tone of Pompey the bawd in Measure for Measure:

Desdemona:

Wouldn’t thou do such a deed for all the world?

Emilia:

The world’s a huge thing. It is a great price for a small vice.

In this exchange lies a huge conflict of cultures. Emilia in Desdemona’s place would see no difficulties.  But Desdemona’s goodness, and belief in the goodness of others, is her death warrant.”

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From Bloom:

“Shakespeare creates a terrible pathos for us by not showing Desdemona in her full nature and splendor until we know that she is doomed. Dr. Johnson found the death of Cordelia intolerable; the death of Desdemona, in my experience as a reader and theatergoer, is even more unendurable. Shakespeare stages the scene as a sacrifice, as grimly countertheological as are Iago’s passed-over nihilism and Othello’s ‘godlike’ jealousy. Though Desdemona in her anguish declares she is a Christian, she does not die a martyr to that faith but becomes another victim of what could be called the religion of Moloch, since she is a sacrifice to the war god whom Iago once worshiped, the Othello he has reduced to incoherence. ‘Othello’s occupation’s gone’; the shattered relic of Othello murders in the name of that occupation, for he knows no other, and is the walking ghost of what he was.

Millicent Bell recently has argued that Othello’s is an epistemological tragedy; but only Iago has intellect enough to sustain such a notion, and Iago is not much interested in how he knows what he thinks he knows. Othello, as much as King Lear and Macbeth, is a vision of radical evil; Hamlet is Shakespeare’s tragedy of an intellectual. Though Shakespeare never would commit himself to specifically Christian terms, he approached a kind of Gnostic or heretic tragedy in Macbeth, as I will attempt to show. Othello has no transcendental aspect, perhaps because the religion of war does not allow for any. Iago, who makes a new covenant with Othello when they kneel together, had lived and fought in what he took to be an old covenant with his general, until Cassio was preferred to him. A devout adherent to the fire of battle, his sense of merit injured by his god, has degraded that god into ‘an honourable murderer,’ Othello’s oxymoronic, final vision of his role. Can such degradation allow the dignity required for a tragic protagonist?

A.C. Bradley rated Othello below Hamlet, Lear, and Macbeth [MY NOTE:  Until this reading, I had as well, now I’m not so sure.] primarily because it gives us no sense of universal powers impinging upon the limits of human power. I think those powers hover in Othello, but they manifest themselves only in the gap that divides the earlier, foregrounded relationship between Iago and Othello from the process of ruination that we observe between them. Iago is so formidable a figure because he has uncanny abilities, endowments only available to a true believer whose trust has transmuted into nihilism. Cain, rejected by Yahweh in favor of Abel, is as much the father of Iago [MY NOTE:  Good point!] as Iago is the precursor of Milton’s Satan.  [On this topic, there’s an interesting essay by Borges called “Kafka and his Precursors” –anyone interested in having me post it?]  Iago murders Roderigo and maims Cassio, it is as inconceivable to Iago as to u s that Iago seeks to knife Othello. If you have been rejected by your god, then you attack him spiritually or metaphysically, not merely physically. Iago’s greatest triumph is that the lapsed Othello sacrifices Desdemona in the name of the war god Othello, the solitary warrior with whom unwisely she has fallen in love. That may be why Desdemona offers no resistance, and makes so relatively unspirited a defense, first of her virtue, and then of her life. Her victimization is all the more complete, and our own horror at is thereby augmented.

Though criticism frequently has blinded itself to this, Shakespeare has no affection for war, or for violence organized or unorganized. His great killing machines come to sorrowful ends: Othello, Macbeth, Antony, Coriolanus. His favorite warrior is Sir John Falstaff, whose motto is: ‘Give me life!’ Othello’s motto could be ‘Give me honor,’ which sanctions slaughtering a wife he hasn’t known, supposedly not ‘in hate, but all in honour.’ Dreadfully flawed, even vacuous at the center as Othello is, he still is meant to be the best instance available of a professional mercenary. What Iago once worshiped was real enough, but more vulnerable even than Iago suspected. Shakespeare subtly intimates that Othello’s prior nobility and his later incoherent brutality are two faces of the war god, but it remains the same god. Othello’s occupation’s gone partly because he married at all. Pent-up resentment, and not repressed lust, animates Othello as he avenges his lost autonomy in the name of his honor. Iago’s truest triumph comes when Othello loses his sense of war’s limits, and joins Iago’s incessant campaign against being. ‘I am not what I am,’ Iago’s credo, becomes Othello’s implicit cry. The rapidity and totality of Othello’s descent seems at once the play’s one weakness and its most persuasive strength, as persuasive as Iago.”

And finally, as a special bonus for the weekend, William Hazlitt’s remarkable analysis of the play and its characters:

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Clik here to view.OTHELLO.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPpugaVJABs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nV4GZCGM1o

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28LDq-BI4Es

My next post:  Sunday evening/Monday morning.

Enjoy.  And enjoy your weekend.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Othello

Act Four, Part Two

By Dennis Abrams

For today’s post, we’re going to be looking at Othello from two very different angles – contemporary and old school.  First, from Polish avant-garde activist, critic, and theoretician, from his book Shakespeare Our Contemporary (I’ll be using this a lot when we get to King Lear – his reading of the play was extraordinarily influential)  As the New York Times said in their obituary when he died at the age of 87 in 2002,

“Mr. Kott was one of a handful of theater critics who have changed the perception of masterpieces. His main strong point as a critic lay in his skill at showing ”the way in which the history is part of the drama and the drama is part of the history,” as he put it in a 1985 interview.

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Clik here to view.In his influential book ”Shakespeare Our Contemporary” (1964, Doubleday), ”Kott sees Shakespeare in the light of our world, or, more pointedly and poignantly, in the light of his world,” Harold Clurman, a director, drama critic and author on theater, wrote in a review of the work in The New York Times Book Review. ”Being a Pole whose country suffered more than any other the holocaust of Nazism and later the oppression of Stalinism, Kott’s vision of our era is infernal.””

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From Kott:

“In what setting does Othello’s tragedy unfold? The question sounds absurd. The first act takes place in Venice, the remaining four in Cyprus. Venice and Cyprus had already been depicted by means of an open change; later it seemed that the revolving stage would solve all difficulties. Each scene could now have a new set. In English theaters of the early nineteenth century, Othello was usually set in contemporary middle-class interior. Only later did Othello gradually become an historical costume play. The naturalistic theatre even managed to reproduce St. Mark’s Square on the stage in its entirety. Othello has been identified with nineteenth-century stage design to such an extent that all of Shakespeare’s plays it is the most difficult to visualize on a bare stage. However, Venice and Cyprus in Othello are no more real than the cities and countries in all Shakespeare’s other tragedies and comedies. Cyprus and Venice are no less and no more real than Elsinore, Bohemia, Illyria, the forest of Dunsinane in Macbeth, or the cliffs of Dover from which blind Gloucester wanted to hurl himself into the abyss.

Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul

But I do love thee! and when I love thee not,

Chaos is come again.

(III, 3)

The action of Othello, like that of all Shakespeare’s other great tragedies, really takes place on the Elizabethan stage which is also the Theatrum Mundi. On that stage, as in Hamlet and King Lear, the world is unhinged, chaos returns, and the very order of nature is threatened.

If she be false, O, then heaven mocks itself!

I’ll not belive’t.

(III, 3)

On horror’s head horrors accumulate;

Do deeds to make heaven weep, all earth amaz’d.

(III, 3)

Even the firmament is shaken, the balance of heavenly spheres disturbed, as if madness descended on people from the stars:

It is the very error of the moon.

She comes more near the earth than she was wont

And makes men mad.

(V, 2)

And then, Desdemona having been murdered, apocalyptic night falls down on Othello’s world:

Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse

Of sun and moon, and that th’affrighted globe

Should yawn at alteration.

(V, 2)

A simultaneous eclipse of the sun and the moon is a vision of the end of the world found in Baroque painting. Night falls down on Othello. Not only a night without sun and moon; as in King Lear and Macbeth, the sky is empty.

Are there no stones in heaven

But what serves for the thunder?

(V, 2)

Othello, like King Lear and Macbeth is the tragedy of man under empty heaven. At the close of the play Iago is exposed to tortures. But it is really Othello who, from Act II onwards, is put on the rack. He steps downwards, like Lear, Macbeth, or Gloucester, and like them is brought to the ultimate point. He exhausts fully one of human experiences. As in King Lear and Macbeth, in Othello the plummet has been thrown down to the bottom, darkness has been sounded fully. Fundamental questions about the meaning, or meaninglessness, of the world can be answered only at the end of the road, at the lowest depths.

G. Wilson Knight was the first to reveal the music of Othello. But he denied Othello universality. In comparison with King Lear and Macbeth, Othello is to him a play that does not achieve the power of symbol and remains enclosed in its literality. For Mr. Knight, Othello is not a cosmic tragedy.  [MY NOTE:  I see his point.]  I prefer Victor Hugo’s view, in spite of his unbearable romantic rhetoric:

Now what is Othello? He is night. An immense fatal figure. Night is amorous of day. Darkness loves the dawn. The African adores the white woman. Desdemona is Othello’s brightness and frenzy! And then how easy to him is jealousy? He is great, he is dignified, he is majestic, he soars above all heads, he has an escort bravery, battle, the braying of trumpets, the banner of war, renown, glory; he is radiant with twenty victories, he is studded with stars, this Othello: but he is black. And thus how soon, when jealous, the hero becomes monster, the black becomes the Negro! How speedily has night beckoned to death!

The above fragment is not devoid of a genuine theatrical vision; it almost seems to fit Sir Laurence Olivier’s latest interpretation of the part of Othello.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDo-GHN_Kk

Iago near Othello is the precipice near the landslip. ‘This way!’ he ways in a low voice. The snare advises blindness. The being of darkness guides the black. Deceit takes upon itself to give what light may be required by night. Jealousy uses falsehood as the blind man his dog. Iago the traitor, opposed to whiteness and candour, Othello the Negro, what can be more terrible! These ferocities of the darkness act in unison. These two incarnations of the eclipse comprise together, the one roaring, the other sneering, the tragic suffocation of light. Sound this profound thing. Othello is the night, and being night, wishes to kill, what does he take to slay with? Poison? The club? The axe? The knife? No, the pillow. To kill is to lull to sleep. Shakespeare himself perhaps did not take this into account. The creator sometimes, almost unknown to himself, yields to his type, so much is that type a power. And it is thus that Desdemona, spouse of the man Night, dies stifled by the pillow, which has had the first kiss, and which has the last sigh.

Olivier’s Othello enters the stage with the step of a dancer, holding a rose in his mouth. Olivier’s Othello stifles Desdemona among kisses.

Iago always caused the most difficulties for commentators. For the Romantics he was simply the genius of evil. But even Mephistopheles must have his own reasons for acting. Iago hates Othello, just as he hates everybody. Commentators observed long ago that there is something disinterested in his hate. Iago hates first, and only then seems to invent reasons for his hate. Coleridge’s description hits the nail on the head: ‘motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity.’ Thwarted ambition, jealousy of his wife, of Desdemona, of all women and all men: his hate constantly looks for nourishment to feed itself on and is never satisfied. But if hate looks for reasons to justify itself, what are the arguments it uses?

There are two other excellent descriptions of Iago. Carlyle called him ‘an inarticulate poet’; Hazlitt, ‘an amateur of tragedy in real life.’ Iago is not satisfied with devising the tragedy; he wants to play it through distribute all the parts and act in it himself.

Iago is a diabolic stage manager, or, rather – a Machiavellian stage manager. His motives for acting are ambiguous and hidden, his intellectual reasons clear and precise. He formulates them in the early scenes when, for instance, he soliloquizes loudly: ‘Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners.’ (I, 3)

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Clik here to view.The demonic Iago was an invention of the Romantics. Iago is no demon. Like Richard III, he is a careerist, but on a different scale. He, too, wants to set in motion a real mechanism, make use of genuine passions. He does not want to be cheated. ‘We cannot all be masters, nor all masters/Cannot be truly follow’d.’ (I,1)  This is not a demonic statement, but rather one obvious to the point of vulgarity. ‘Preferment goes by letter and affection.’ This is not a demonic statement either. Iago is an empiricist, does not believe in ideologies, and has no illusions: ‘Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit and lost without deserving.’ (II, 3)

Of course, Iago is a Machiavellian, but Machiavellianism for him merely means a generalized personal experience. Fools believe in honour and love. In reality there are only egoism and lust. The strong are able to subordinate their passions to ambition. One’s own body can also be an instrument. Hence Iago’s contempt for everything that benumbs a man, from moral precepts to love.

Iago believes in will power. One can make everything of oneself, and of other people. Others, too, are only an instrument. They can be molded like clay. Iago, like Richard III, despises people even more than he hates them.

Says Iago: The world consists of villains and fools; of those who devour and those who are devoured. People are like animals; they copulate and eat each other. The weak do not deserve pity, they are just as abominable, only more stupid than the strong. The world is vile.

Says Othello: The world is beautiful and people are noble. Love and loyalty exist in it.

If we strip Othello of romantic varnish, of everything that is opera and melodrama, the tragedy of jealousy and the tragedy of betrayed confidence become a dispute between Othello and Iago: the dispute on the nature of the world. Is this world good or bad? What are the limits of suffering; what is the ultimate purpose of the few brief moments that pass between birth and death?

Like Richard III, Iago sets in motion the mechanism of vileness, envy, and stupidity, and, like Richard, he will be destroyed. The world, in which Othello can believe in Desdemona’s infidelity, in which treachery is possible, in which Othello murders Desdemona, in which there is no friendship, loyalty, or faith, in which Othello – by agreeing to the murder of Cassio – gives consent to secret assassination, such a world is bad. Iago is an accomplished stage manager.

…..Thou hast set me on the rack.

(III, 3)

He has proved that the world consists of fools and villains. He has destroyed all around him, and himself. He goes to torture, in a tragedy devised by himself. He has proved that neither the world nor himself deserves any pity. Richard’s defeat confirms the working of the Grand Mechanism; just as Iago’s failure does. The world is vile. He was right. And the very fact that he was right proved his undoing. This is the first paradox. [MY NOTE: The name of Kott’s essay is “The Two Paradoxes of Othello.”]

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Clik here to view.In the last scene Iago is silent. Why should he talk? Everything has become clear. The world has fallen; but for Othello; not for him. They will crush his bones, but he can triumph. The torture and death of Iago do not restore justice; they do not serve any purpose, and they happen outside the play, even in the literal sense. But Iago wins not only on the intellectual plane of the tragedy; he wins in its very fabric and texture, in its language.

In Act III Othello crawls at Iago’s feet, foaming at the mouth in a fit. Shakespeare is never afraid of cruelty. Gloucester shall have his eyes torn out, Lear shall go mad. The magnificent, proud, beautiful Othello has to degrade himself physically. Othello’s world, he himself, everything will be dissolved, as if eaten away by acid. (This is how G. Wilson Knight has described it.)

…..O, now for ever

Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!

Farwell the plumed troop, and the big wars

That make 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!

And O ye mortal engines whose rude throats

Th’ immortal Jove’s great clamours counterfeit

Farewell! Othello’s occupation gone!

(III, 3)

Othello is endowed by Shakespeare with all the attributes of feudal heroics found in knightly epic and romance. There is enchanting poetry here, but at the same time a decaying set of values. To start with, there is royal blood:

….I fetch my life, and being

From men of royal siege.

(I, 2)

Next, there are the heroic stereotypes, inherited from Roman rhetoric:

The tyrant custom, most grave senators,

Hath made the flinty and steel couch of war

My thrice-driven bed of down.

(I, 3)

And then, there are the elements of fairy tale, dream, legend. Iago is all reality, everyday life, pure matter. Othello belongs to a different world, the world of the exotic that ranges from the adventures of Ulysses to the expeditions of Renaissance sailors. He talks to Desdemona:

…of the cannibals that each other eat,

The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads

Do grow beneath their shoulders…

(I, 3)

With Othello, the bare Elizabethan stage has been filled with the seascape of all oceans.

…..Like to the Pontic sea,

Whose icy current and compulsive course

Ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on

To the Propontic and the Hellespont;

Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace,

Shall ne’er look back, ne’er ebb to humble love,

Till that a capable and wide revenge

Swallow them up.

(III, 3)

The system of values in Othello disintegrates together with the play’s poetry and language. But there is another language, another rhetoric in this tragedy. Iago uses it. In Iago’s semantic sphere there stand out, as word-slogans, word-clues, evocative words – names of things and animals, arousing abhorrence, fear, disgust. Iago talks about glues, baits, nets, poisons, drugs, enemas, pitch and sulphur, plague and pestilence.

So will I turn her virtue into pitch,

And out of her own goodness make the net

That shall enmesh them all.

(II, 3)

Even more characteristic is the bestiary invoked by Iago. It contains helpless and powerless animals (‘Drown theyself? Drown cats and blind puppies!’ I,3), symbols and allegories of stupidity and ugliness (guinea-hens, baboons), lust and lewdness (‘…as primes goats, as hot as monkeys,/As salt as wolves in pride.’ III, 3)

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Clik here to view.Othello’s speech is gradually reduced to mumbling. The pathos and poetry of feudal heroics are destroyed in language and in imagery. Mr. Knight has already observed this. Not only shall Othello crawl at Iago’s feet; he shall talk his language. These broken sentences are at the same time one of the earliest inner monologues – in the modern sense of the word – that we find in drama.

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 hang’d for his labour – first to be  hang’d, and then to confess! I tremble at 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!

Othello will now rave incessantly about whoring and breeding, fire and sulphur, cords, knives, and poison. He will invoke the same bestiary. Iago spoke of jackdaws looking for prey; Othello will now be haunted by the image of “…the raven o’er the infected house’ (IV, 1). He will take over from Iago all his obsessions, as if he were unable to break away from the images of monkeys and goats, mongrels and lewd bitches.’ “…Exchange me for a goat,’ he says (III, 3). Even while he is ceremoniously receiving Lodovico, he cannot contain himself: ‘You are welcome, sir, to Cyprus. Goats and monkeys!’ (IV, 1)

Caroline Spurgeon in her catalogue of Shakespearean images compared the bestiaries of Othello and King Lear. In both tragedies animals appear in the semantic sphere of suffering and cruelty; suffering that has to be endured, torments that have to be inflicted.  In King Lear there are magnificent and fierce beasts of prey:  tiger, vulture, boar; in Othello – reptiles and insects. The action of the tragedy takes place in the course of two long nights, at least according to the clock of passions. The internal landscape of Othello, in which the leading characters of the tragedy are more and more deeply submerged, the landscape of their dreams, erotic obsessions, and fears, is the landscape of darkness; of the earth without sun, stars, or moon; a dungeon full of spiders, blindworms, and frogs.

     I had rather be a toad

And live upon the vapour of a dungeon

(III, 3)

And again:

The fountain from the which my current runs

Or else dries up – to be discarded thence,

Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads

To knot and gender in.

(IV, 2)

The difference between the animal sphere of Othello and King Lear is not only one of degree. The animal symbolism of Othello serves to degrade the human world. Man is an animal. But what sort of animal?

Man – the description of man, in which are contained the kinds almost alike, such as baboon, ape and others which are many.

This is s note by Leonardo, very similar in intention and in choice of comparisons. Man can be described as animal. A bloodthirsty and cowardly, deceitful, and cruel animal. Man, considered as animal, inevitably rouses revulsion.

With as little a web as this will I ensnare as great a fly as Cassio.

(II, 1)

This is the most significant image in the tragedy. Flies and spiders, spiders and flies. Cassio, Roderigo, Othello – are all flies for Iago. Small flies and big flies. The white Desdemona, too, will turn into a black fly. Othello will take over all Iago’s obsessions.

Desdemona:

I hope my noble lord esteems me honest.

Othello:

O, ay! as summer flies are in the shambles,

That quicken even with blowing.

(IV, 2)

The image of flies will return in King Lear, in a sentence that contains one of man’s ultimate experiences:

As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods.

They kill us for their sport.

(Lear, IV, 1)

To whom can a fly appeal? What can justify the suffering of a fly? Does a fly deserve pity? Can a fly ask men for compassion? Can men asks the gods for compassion?

Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law

My services are bound.

(Lear, I, 2)

Those words are spoken by Edmund in King Lear. In the great Shakespearean tragedies we are witness to an earthquake. Both human orders have fallen; the feudal hierarchy of loyalty, as well as the naturalism of Renaissance. The world’s history is just that of spiders and flies.

Iago (Spider):

…’Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus.

(I, 3)

Iago (Spider):

Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,

But seeming so, for my peculiar end.

(I, 1)

Iago (Spider):

I follow him to serve my turn upon him.

(I,1)

Othello (Fly):

My parts, my title, and my perfect soul

Shall manifest me rightly.

(I,2)

Desdemona (Fly):

Good night, good night. Heaven me such uses send,

Not to pick bad from bad, but by bad mend!

(IV, 3)

Othello came to find himself not only in Iago’s semantic sphere, but in ‘a close-shut murderous room’ (Bradley). Othello, like King Lear, is put to the torture and driven to madness.

Ay, let her rot, and perish, and be damn’d to-night; for she shall not live. No, my heart is turn’d to stone. I strike it, and it hurts my hand. O, the world hath not a sweeter creature! She might lie by an emperor’s side and command him tasks…Hang her! I do not but say what she is. So delicate with her needle! an admirable musician!…I will chop her into messes!

(IV, 1)

Othello talks the language of the mad Lear. All kinds of rhetoric have been smashed to pieces. And so have people. Othello, like King Lear, like Macbeth in his last scene, has found himself in the area of the absurd.”

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Clik here to view.

Stanislavski as Othello

I found this remarkably persuasive.  For me, the key passage:

“Says Iago: The world consists of villains and fools; of those who devour and those who are devoured. People are like animals; they copulate and eat each other. The weak do not deserve pity, they are just as abominable, only more stupid than the strong. The world is vile.

Says Othello: The world is beautiful and people are noble. Love and loyalty exist in it.”

What do you all think?  Is Kott’s reading supported by the play itself (I tend to think it is), or is he reading into it something that isn’t there based on his own life in cold war Poland?

And to finish today’s post, I’d like to continue from A.C. Bradley:

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But before the end there is again a change. The supposed death of Cassio (V. i.) satiates the thirst for vengeance. The Othello who enters the bed-chamber with the words,

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,

is not the man of the Fourth Act. The deed he is bound to do is no murder, but a sacrifice. He is to save Desdemona from herself, not in hate but in honour; in honour, and also in love. His anger has passed; a boundless sorrow has taken its place; and

this sorrow’s heavenly:
It strikes where it doth love.

Even when, at the sight of her apparent obduracy, and at the hearing of words which by a crowning fatality can only reconvince him of her guilt, these feelings give way to others, it is to righteous indignation they give way, not to rage; and, terribly painful as this scene is, there is almost nothing here to diminish the admiration and love which heighten pity. And pity itself vanishes, and love and admiration alone remain, in the majestic dignity and sovereign ascendancy of the close. Chaos has come and gone; and the Othello of the Council-chamber and the quay of Cyprus has returned, or a greater and nobler Othello still. As he speaks those final words in which all the glory and agony of his life — long ago in India and Arabia and Aleppo, and afterwards in Venice, and now in Cyprus — seem to pass before us, like the pictures that flash before the eyes of a drowning man, a triumphant scorn for the fetters of the flesh and the littleness of all the lives that must survive him sweeps our grief away, and when he dies upon a kiss the most painful of all tragedies leaves us for the moment free from pain, and exulting in the power of “love and man’s unconquerable mind.”

3

32. The words just quoted come from Wordsworth’s sonnet to Toussaint l’Ouverture. Toussaint was a Negro; and there is a question, which, though of little consequence, is not without dramatic interest, whether Shakespeare imagined Othello as a Negro or as a Moor. Now I will not say that Shakespeare imagined him as a Negro and not as a Moor, for that might imply that he distinguished Negroes and Moors precisely as we do; but what appears to me nearly certain is that he imagined Othello as a black man, and not as a light-brown one.

33. In the first place, we must remember that the brown or bronze, to which we are now accustomed in the Othellos of our theatres is a recent innovation. Down to Edmund Kean’s time, so far as is known, Othello was always quite black. This stage-tradition goes back to the Restoration, and it almost settles our question. For it is impossible that the colour of the original Othello should have been forgotten so soon after Shakespeare’s time, and most improbable that it should have been changed from brown to black.

34. If we turn to the play itself, we find many references to Othello’s colour and appearance. Most of these are indecisive; for the word “black” was of course used then where we should speak of a “dark” complexion now; and even the nickname “thick-lips,” appealed to as proof that Othello was a Negro, might have been applied by an enemy to what we call a Moor. On the other hand, it is hard to believe that, if Othello had been light-brown, Brabantio would have taunted him with having a “sooty bosom,” or that (as Mr. Furness observes) he himself would have used the words,

her name, that was as fresh
As Dian’s visage, is now begrimed and black
As mine own face.

35. These arguments cannot be met by pointing out that Othello was of royal blood, is not called an Ethiopian, is called a Barbary horse, and is said to be going to Mauritania. All this would be of importance if we had reason to believe that Shakespeare shared our ideas, knowledge and terms. Otherwise it proves nothing. And we know that sixteenth-century writers called any dark North-African a Moor, or a black Moor, or a blackamoor. Sir Thomas Elyot, according to Hunter, calls Ethiopians Moors; and the following are the first two illustrations of “Blackamoor” in the Oxford English Dictionary: 1547, “I am a blake More borne in Barbary”; 1548, “Ethiopo, a blake More, or a man of Ethiope.” Thus geographical names can tell us nothing about the question how Shakespeare imagined Othello. He may have known that a Mauritanian is not a Negro nor black, but we cannot assume that he did. He may have known, again, that the Prince of Morocco, who is described in the Merchant of Venice as having, like Othello, the complexion of a devil, was no Negro. But we cannot tell: nor is there any reason why he should not have imagined the Prince as a brown Moor and Othello as a Blackamoor.

36. Titus Andronicus appeared in the Folio among Shakespeare’s works. It is believed by some good critics to be his: hardly anyone doubts that he had a hand in it: it is certain that he knew it, for reminiscences of it are scattered through his plays. Now no one who reads Titus Andronicus with an open mind can doubt that Aaron was, in our sense, black; and he appears to have been a Negro. To mention nothing else, he is twice called “coal-black”; his colour is compared with that of a raven and a swan’s legs; his child is coal-black and thick-lipped; he himself has a “fleece of woolly hair.” Yet he is “Aaron the Moor,” just as Othello is “Othello the Moor.” In the Battle of Alcazar (Dyce’s Peele, p. 421) Muly the Moor is called “the negro”; and Shakespeare himself in a single line uses “negro” and “Moor” of the same person (Merchant of Venice, III. V. 42).

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Clik here to view.37. The horror of most American critics (Mr. Furness is a bright exception) at the idea of a black Othello is very amusing, and their arguments are highly instructive. But they were anticipated, I regret to say, by Coleridge, and we will hear him. “No doubt Desdemona saw Othello’s visage in his mind; yet, as we are constituted, and most surely as an English audience was disposed in the beginning of the seventeenth century, it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro. It would argue a disproportionateness, a want of balance, in Desdemona, which Shakespeare does not appear to have in the least contemplated.” Could any argument be more self-destructive? It actually did appear to Brabantio “something monstrous to conceive” his daughter falling in love with Othello, — so monstrous that he could account for her love only by drugs and foul charms. And the suggestion that such love would argue “disproportionateness” is precisely the suggestion that Iago did make in Desdemona’s case:

Foh! one may smell in such a will most rank,
Foul disproportion, thoughts unnatural.

In fact he spoke of the marriage exactly as a filthy-minded cynic might now speak of the marriage of an English lady to a negro like Toussaint. Thus the argument of Coleridge and others points straight to the conclusion against which they argue.

38. But this is not all. The question whether to Shakespeare Othello was black or brown is not a mere question of isolated fact or historical curiosity; it concerns the character of Desdemona. Coleridge, and still more the American writers, regard her love, in effect, as Brabantio regarded it, and not as Shakespeare conceived it. They are simply blurring this glorious conception when they try to lessen the distance between her and Othello, and to smooth away the obstacle which his “visage” offered to her romantic passion for a hero. Desdemona, the “eternal womanly” in its most lovely and adorable form, simple and innocent as a child, ardent with the courage and idealism of a saint, radiant with that heavenly purity of heart which men worship the more because nature so rarely permits it to themselves, had no theories about universal brotherhood, and no phrases about “one blood in all the nations of the earth” or “barbarian, Scythian, bond and free”; but when her soul came in sight of the noblest soul on earth, she made nothing of the shrinking of her senses, but followed her soul until her senses took part with it, and “loved him with the love which was her doom.” It was not prudent. It even turned out tragically. She met in life with the reward of those who rise too far above our common level; and we continue to allot her the same reward when we consent to forgive her for loving a brown man, but find it monstrous that she should love a black one.

39. There is perhaps a certain excuse for our failure to rise to Shakespeare’s meaning, and to realise how extraordinary and splendid a thing it was in a gentle Venetian girl to love Othello, and to assail fortune with such a “downright violence and storm” as is expected only in a hero. It is that when first we hear of her marriage we have not yet seen the Desdemona of the later Acts; and therefore we do not perceive how astonishing this love and boldness must have been in a maiden so quiet and submissive. And when we watch her in her suffering and death we are so penetrated by the sense of her heavenly sweetness and self-surrender that we almost forget that she had shown herself quite as exceptional in the active assertion of her own soul and will. She tends to become to us predominantly pathetic, the sweetest and most pathetic of Shakespeare’s women, as innocent as Miranda and as loving as Viola, yet suffering more deeply than Cordelia or Imogen. And she seems to lack that independence and strength of spirit which Cordelia and Imogen possess, and which in a manner raises them above suffering. She appears passive and defenceless, and can oppose to wrong nothing but the infinite endurance and forgiveness of a love that knows not how to resist or resent. She thus becomes at once the most beautiful example of this love, and the most pathetic heroine in Shakespeare’s world. If her part were acted by an artist equal to Salvini, and with a Salvini for Othello, I doubt if the spectacle of the last two Acts would not be pronounced intolerable.

40. Of course this later impression of Desdemona is perfectly right, but it must be carried back and united with the earlier before we can see what Shakespeare imagined. Evidently, we are to understand, innocence, gentleness, sweetness, lovingness were the salient and, in a sense, the principal traits in Desdemona’s character. She was, as her father supposed her to be,

a maiden never bold,
Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion
Blushed at herself.

But suddenly there appeared something quite different — something which could never have appeared, for example, in Ophelia — a love not only full of romance but showing a strange freedom and energy of spirit, and leading to a most unusual boldness of action; and this action was carried through with a confidence and decision worthy of Juliet or Cordelia. Desdemona does not shrink before the Senate; and her language to her father, though deeply respectful, is firm enough to stir in us some sympathy with the old man who could not survive his daughter’s loss. This then, we must understand, was the emergence in Desdemona, as she passed from girlhood to womanhood, of an individuality and strength which, if she had lived would have been gradually fused with her more obvious qualities and have issued in a thousand actions, sweet and good, but surprising to her conventional or timid neighbours. And, indeed, we have already a slight example in her overflowing kindness, her boldness and her ill-fated persistence in pleading Cassio’s cause. But the full ripening of her lovely and noble nature was not to be. In her brief wedded life she appeared again chiefly as the sweet and submissive being of her girlhood; and the strength of her soul, first evoked by love, found scope to show itself only in a love which, when harshly repulsed, blamed only its own pain; when bruised, only gave forth a more exquisite fragrance; and when rewarded with death, summoned its last labouring breath to save its murderer.

41. Many traits in Desdemona’s character have been described with sympathetic insight by Mrs. Jameson, and I will pass them by and add but a few words on the connection between this character and the catastrophe of Othello. Desdemona, as Mrs. Jameson remarks, shows less quickness of intellect and less tendency to reflection than most of Shakespeare’s heroines; but I question whether the critic is right in adding that she shows much of the “unconscious address common in women.” She seems to me deficient in this address, having in its place a frank childlike boldness and persistency, which are full of charm but are unhappily united with a certain want of perception. And these graces and this deficiency appear to be inextricably intertwined, and in the circumstances conspire tragically against her. They, with her innocence, hinder her from understanding Othello’s state of mind, and lead her to the most unlucky acts and words; and unkindness or anger subdues her so completely that she becomes passive and seems to drift helplessly towards the cataract in front.

42. In Desdemona’s incapacity to resist there is also, in addition to her perfect love, something which is very characteristic. She is, in a sense, a child of nature. That deep inward division which leads to clear and conscious oppositions of right and wrong, duty and inclination, justice and injustice, is alien to her beautiful soul. She is not good, kind and true in spite of a temptation to be otherwise, any more than she is charming in spite of a temptation to be otherwise. She seems to know evil only by name, and, her inclinations being good, she acts on inclination. This trait, with its results, may be seen if we compare her, at the crises of the story, with Cordelia. In Desdemona’s place, Cordelia, however frightened at Othello’s anger about the lost handkerchief, would not have denied its loss. Painful experience had produced in her a conscious principle of rectitude and a proud hatred of falseness, which would have made a lie, even one wholly innocent in spirit, impossible to her; and the clear sense of justice and right would have led her, instead, to require an explanation of Othello’s agitation which would have broken Iago’s plot to pieces. In the same way, at the final crisis, no instinctive terror of death would have compelled Cordelia suddenly to relinquish her demand for justice and to plead for life. But these moments are fatal to Desdemona, who acts precisely as if she were guilty; and they are fatal because they ask for something which, it seems to us, could hardly be united with the peculiar beauty of her nature.

43. This beauty is all her own. Something as beautiful may be found in Cordelia, but not the same beauty. Desdemona, confronted with Lear’s foolish but pathetic demand for a profession of love, could have done, I think, what Cordelia could not do — could have refused to compete with her sisters, and yet have made her father feel that she loved him well. And I doubt if Cordelia, “falsely murdered,” would have been capable of those last words of Desdemona — her answer to Emilia’s “O, who hath done this deed?

Nobody: I myself. Farewell.
Commend me to my kind lord. O, farewell!

Were we intended to remember, as we hear this last “falsehood,” that other falsehood, “It is not lost,” and to feel that, alike in the momentary child’s fear and the deathless woman’s love, Desdemona is herself and herself alone?

Our next reading:  Othello, Act Five

My next post:  Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning

Enjoy

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Othello

Act Five, Part One

By Dennis Abrams

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Clik here to view.Act Five:  At Iago’s bidding, Roderigo attacks Cassio but only managed to wound him, and in the confusion that follows Iago stabs Roderigo to death. Othello, meanwhile, is about to kill the sleeping Desdemona when she wakes up, and despite her anguished denials, he smothers her in her own bed. Discovering them both, Emilia insists on her mistresses’ innocence, and when Othello mentions the fatal strawberry handkerchief, the full extent of Iago’s villainy is revealed. Iago has since arrived, but when Othello attacks him, he flees after killing Emilia. Returning under arrest, he refuses to give any reason for his actions. Othello finally realizes the truth and, after asking Cassio’s forgiveness, stabs himself.  He dies, clutching Desdemona’s body.

Even though we know how it’s going to end, there is still something infinitely moving about Othello’s torment.  Of course, he’s not its main victim – instructing Desdemona to prepare herself for bed, he is readying himself for her cold-blooded execution. Even so, the testimony of her sleeping body almost (I said almost) persuades him not to go through with it. “It is the cause, it is the cause,’ he murmurs, stepping silently into her bedroom,

Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars,

It is the cause. Yet I’ll not shed her blood,

Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow.

Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men.

(5.2.1-6)

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Clik here to view.He will not (and probably cannot or could not) “scar” her alabaster skin, but he will kill her before the scene has ended. This is probably the most chilling of Iago’s many purely malicious victories: as well as robbing Othello of his sanity, he turns him into a villain created by a racist’s worst fantasy – a black murderer entering into a white girl’s bedchamber.  Worse still, Othello seems all too aware of the fact, drawing attention to her “whiter” complexion rather than his “foul,” “filthy” murder. Emilia informs Othello what many seventeenth audiences would have suspected all along: “O, the more angel she, and you the blacker devil.”

And with that, the play is almost over…but not quite.  Though it is too late for either Desdemona or Othello, the truth does come out. Following Emilia’s furious testimony (like her namesake in The Winter’s Tale she is a fierce guardian of the truth), the real story emerges. “O thou dull Moor,” she yells, “that handkerchief thou speak’st of/I found by fortune and did give my husband…(5.2.232-3). Realizing that his lies are collapsing around him, Iago makes a last attempt to rewrite the conclusion and lunges brutally at Emilia, wounding her. Othello, meanwhile, begins his slow and tragic journey back to himself, to realization. He, too, is desperate to be understood. ‘When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,” he tells the assembled crowd, as it gathers around the corpses on the stage,

Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate,

Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak

Of one that loved not wisely but too well,

Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,

Perplexed in the extreme, of one whose hand,

Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away

Richer than all his tribe…

(5.2.350-7)

But for Iago, the storytelling has come to an abrupt end.  “Demand me nothing,” he says sneeringly, “What you know you know.”  (5.2.309-10).  There will be no more answers.

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From Harold Bloom:

“Desdemona dies so piteously that Shakespeare risks alienating us forever from Othello:

Desdemona:

O, banish me, my lord, but kill me not.

Othello:

Down, strumpet!

Desdemona:

Kill me tomorrow, let me live tonight!

Othello:

Nay – if you strive –

Desdemona:

But half an hour!

Othello:

       Being done, there is no pause –

Desdemona:

But while I say one prayer!

Othello:

It is too late.

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Clik here to view.Rather operatically, Shakespeare gives Desdemona a dying breath that attempts to exonerate Othello, which would strain credulity if she were not, as Alvin Kernan put it, ‘Shakespeare’s word for love.’ We are made to believe that this was at once the most natural of young women, and also so loyal to her murderer that her exemplary last words sound almost ironic, given Othello’s degradation: ‘Commend me to my kind lord – O, farewell!’ It seems to much more for us to bear that Othello should refuse her final act of love: ‘She’s like a liar gone to burning hell:/Twas I that killed her.’ The influential modern assaults upon Othello by T.S. Eliot and F.R. Leavis take their plausibility (such as it is) from Shakespeare’s heaping up of Othello’s brutality, stupidity, and unmitigated guilt. But Shakespeare allows Othello a great if partial recovery, in an astonishing last speech:

Soft you, a word or two before you go.

I have done the state some service, and they know’t:

No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate,

Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak

Of one that loved not wisely, but too well;

Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,

Perplexed in the extreme, of one whose hand,

Like the base Judean, threw a pearl away

Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,

Albeit unused to the melting mood,

Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees

Their medicinable gum. Set you down this,

And say besides that in Aleppo once,

Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk

Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,

I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog

And smote him – thus! He stabs himself.

This famous and problematic outburst rarely provokes any critic to agree with any other, yet the Eliot-Leavis interpretation, which holds that Othello essentially is ‘cheering himself up,’ cannot be right. The Moor remains as divided a character as Shakespeare ever created; we need give no credence to the absurd blindness of ‘loved not wisely, but too well,’ or the outrageous self-deception of ‘one not easily jealous.’ Yet we are moved by the truth of ‘perplexed in the extreme,’ and by the invocation of Herod, ‘the base Judean’ who murdered his Maccabean wife, Mariamme, whom he loved. The association of Othello with Herod the Great is the more shocking for being Othello’s own adjustment upon himself, and is followed by the Moor’s tears, and by his fine image of weeping trees. Nor should a fair critic fail to be impressed by Othello’s verdict upon himself: that he has become an enemy of Venice, and as such must be slain. His suicide has nothing Roman in it: Othello passes sentence upon himself, and performs the execution. We need to ask what Venice would have done with Othello, had he allowed himself to survive. I venture that he seeks to forestall what might have been their politic decision: to preserve him until he might be of high use again. Cassio is no Othello, the state has no replacement for the Moor, and might well have used him again, doubtless under some control. All of the rifts in Othello that Iago sensed and exploited are present in this final speech, but so is a final vision of judgment, one in which Othello abandons his nostalgias for glorious war, and pitifully seeks to expiate what cannot be expiated – not, at least, by a farewell to arms.”

Bloom had me until we got to his “venture” of what Venice would have done with Othello?  Really?  Your thoughts?

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And from Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare For All:

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Clik here to view.“The death scene itself is framed in legalisms. Othello has sought ‘proof’ (‘Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore’). When he comes to her bedside he speaks of ‘the cause,’ as if submitting his case to a heavenly – or infernal – judge:

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul.

Let me not name it to you, you chase stars.

It is the cause. Yet I’ll not shed her blood,

Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,

And smooth as monumental alabaster.

Yet she must dies, else she’ll betray more men.

Put out the light, and then put out the light.

If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,

I can again thy former light restore

Should I repent me; but once put out thy light,

Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature,

I know not where is that Promethean heat

That can thy light relume. When I have plucked the rose

I cannot give it vital growth again.

It needs must wither. I’ll smell thee on the tree.

In dramatic action as well as in language the play has been seeking light all this time, from the moment in the first scene when Brabantio called for light, and in scene after scene, shrouded in darkness, when the call went up for ‘lights, lights.’  Here Othello compares Desdemona’s life to the candle he holds in his hand, prefiguring later moments in other tragedies (Macbeth’s ‘brief candle’ speech; Lady Macbeth’s desperate command to have light by her continually). Yet even here, shrouded in the mocking whiteness of her wedding sheets, Desdemona’s purity and generosity make themselves manifest. Othello smothers her, and yet she speaks. He has closed the bed-curtains, making of the marriage bed and death bed another inner stage, and from behind the curtains, as if from death itself, Desdemona speaks: ‘O, falsely, falsely murdered!…A guiltless death I did.’ When Emilia asks ‘who hath done this deed,’ Desdemona’s answer is exculpatory and enigmatic: ‘Nobody, I myself. Farewell./Commend me to my kind lord.’ Her recovery to speech, which has been so insistently equated with humanity, it itself brief, but essential. She speaks from the brink of the grave, as Iago refuses speech. He is dead, even as he lives; she alive, even as she dies.

As for Othello, at the close of the play surrounded by horrified spectators who represent the return of Venetian law, he speaks to them, and through them to the audience in the theater. Like Hamlet at the close of his tragedy, he speaks finally to us, his first words like the restraining arm of Coleridge’s Ancient mariner, enforcing attention even on the unwilling:

Soft you, a word or two before you go.

I have done the state some service, and they know’t:

No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate,

Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak

Of one that loved not wisely, but too well;

Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,

Perplexed in the extreme, of one whose hand,

Like the base Judean, threw a pearl away

Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,

Albeit unused to the melting mood,

Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees

Their medicinable gum. Set you down this,

And say besides that in Aleppo once,

Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk

Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,

I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog

And smote him thus.

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Clik here to view.Othello kills Othello. He is both Turk and Venetian, as he has been all along, and he dies in the act of describing a noble public gesture, the killing of a public enemy, in front of Venetian ambassadors who are public men themselves. The famous textual crux, ‘base Indian (the Quarto reading) or ‘base Judean’ (the Folio reading), is produced by the fact that the capital letters for modern I and J were the same, and the letter n could look like the letter u (the piece of type – u or n – could also be inserted upside down within the frame). Like many textual ambiguities in Shakespeare, this one, however accidental, is salutary, for it has produced competing readings of great power. If the image is that of the ‘base Indian,’ the context is New World exploration and discovery, the ‘savage’ man who does not know the value of the jewel he finds. If the phrase is read as ‘base Judean,’ the figure invoked is that of Judas Iscariot. The ‘pearl of great price’ (Matthew 13: 44-52) he throws away, ‘richer than all his tribe,’ is the Kingdom of Heaven. [MY NOTE:  Compare this reading with that of Bloom, above.]

Othello wants to be remembered for his private sins and for his public virtue. His appeal is finally to the civilizing power of language: ‘a word or two before you go; ‘[w]hen you shall these unlucky deeds relate’; ‘[s]peak of me as I am’; [t]hen must you speak.’ As at the end of Hamlet and indeed throughout Shakespearean tragedy, retelling becomes the tragic hero’s only path to redemption. The request to retell is an injunction to replay the play, to speak of Othello again and again, to learn from tragic drama as we learn from history, by taking its example seriously as a model of conduct.

Samuel Johnson, the great eighteenth century lexicographer, biographer, essayist, and editor of Shakespeare, wrote at the conclusion of his edition of Othello: “I am glad that I have ended my revisal of this dreadful scene; it is not to be endured.’ As was the case in Romeo and Juliet, womb becomes tomb, wedding becomes funeral, marriage bed becomes deathbed. But Johnson’s response is a sign of the scene’s power. It is to be endured – that is its purpose. ‘Look on the tragic loading of this bed,’ says Lodovico, the Duke’s emissary, to Iago. ‘This is thy work.’ In the final scene the audience in the theater is offered its chance to measure the tragic work of two competing dramatists, Iago and Shakespeare. Throughout the play Iago had made us his unwitting and unwilling co-conspirators, presuming on our silence. Now, through Othello’s plea, ‘Speak of me as I am,’ the audience can be said to find its own role in the drama. Language, refused by Iago, regained by Desdemona, becomes at last the joint instrument of actor, playwright, and spectators. By gazing upon the final tableau, the tragic loading of the bed, and by replaying, remembering, and even editing the play, the silent audience can find its voice.”

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28LDq-BI4Es

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q0H-V5Qvp0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THTR1IzFWS0

And so, too can silent readers.  Follow Othello’s words, and share with the group your thoughts…Speak of him…

My last post on Othello:  Thursday evening/Friday morning.

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Othello

Act Five, Part Two

By Dennis Abrams

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Let’s start by finishing up with Jan Kott:

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Clik here to view.“They talk about her even before she has appeared. They shout that she has run away with a Negro. Her image is already being shown in the sphere of animal eroticism:

…..an old black ram

Is tupping your white ewe.

The prologue of Othello is a brutal one. Iago and Roderigo want to anger Brabantio. This, however, does not explain the obstinacy with which animal comparisons are used. They are there by design. The union of Othello and Desdemona is presented from the very first moment as mating of animals.

…you’ll have your daughter cover’d with a Barbary horse; you’ll have your nephews neigh to you; you’ll have coursers for cousins, and gennets for germans.

Othello is black, Desdemona is white. Victor Hugo, in the fragment quoted [in my last post], wrote about the symbolism of black and white, of day and night. But Shakespeare had been more specific than the Romantics; more material and carnal. Bodies in Othello are not only tormented; they also attract each other.

…your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs.

The image of the animal with two backs, one white, the other black, is one of the most brutal and, at the same time, most fascinating representations of the sexual act. But there is in it also the atmosphere of modern eroticism, with its longing for pure animality, its fascination with ‘being different,’ its breaking of sexual taboo. That is why its area is so often black and white. Othello is fascinated by Desdemona, but Desdemona is much more strongly fascinated by Othello.

…and she, in spite of nature,

Of years, of country, credit, everything,

To fall in love with what she fear’d to look on?

She has given up everything. She is in a hurry. She does not want a simple empty night any more. She will follow Othello to Cyprus.

That I did love the Moor to live with him,

My downright violence, and storm of fortunes,

May trumpet to the world.

In days of Kean, Desdemona use to go to bed in a nightcap. Modern Desdemonas not infrequently still wear that Victorian nightcap. Heine felt uneasy about Desdemona having moist hands. He wrote that sometimes he felt sad at the thought that, perhaps, Iago was partially right. Heine interpreted Shakespeare with far greater pungency than Schlegel, Tick, and all the other sentimental Germans. He compared Othello to Titus Andronicus, ‘In both the passion of a beautiful woman for an ugly Negro is represented with particular relish,’ he wrote.

Desdemona is two to four years older than Juliet; she could be Ophelia’s age. But she is much more of a woman than either one of them. Heine was right. Desdemona is obedient and stubborn at the same time. She is obedient to the point where passion begins. Of all Shakespeare’s female characters she is the most sensuous. More silent than Juliet or Ophelia, she seems absorbed in herself, and wakes only to the night,

…Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion without some instruction.

She does not even know that she disturbs and – promises by her very presence. Othello will only later learn about it, but Iago knows this from the onset. Desdemona is faithful, but must have something of a slut in her. Not in actu but in potential. Otherwise the drama could not work, because Othello would be ridiculous. Othello must not be ridiculous. Desdemona is sexually obsessed with Othello, but all men – Iago, Cassio, Roderigo – are obsessed with Desdemona. They remain in her erotic climate.

…The wine she drinks is made of rapes. If she had been blessed, she would never have lov’d the Moor…Didst thou not see her paddle with the palm of his hand?…They met so near with their lips that their breaths embrac’d together.

In Othello’s relation to Desdemona a violent change will occur; a change that cannot be explained fully by Iago’s intrigues. It is as if Othello were suddenly horrified by Desdemona. Robert Speaight in his reflections on Othello wonders where their marriage was consummated – in Venice, or only in Cyprus, the night when Iago made Cassio drunk. Such a question may sound absurd, applied to a Shakespearean tragedy, with its double time of invents and synthetic motivations. But, perhaps because Shakespeare leaves out no motivation, this question touches on a dark sphere in Othello’s relations with Desdemona. Othello behaves as if he found a different Desdemona from the one he expected. As Iago says, ‘She that, so young, could give out such a seeming…’ (III, 3). It is as if the outburst of sensuality in a girl who not long ago listened to his tales with her eyes lowered, amazed and horrified Othello.

His bed shall seem a school, his board a shrift…

From the very first night Desdemona felt herself a lover and a wife. Eroticism was her vocation and joy; eroticism and love, eroticism and Othello are one in the same. Her Eros is a substance of light. But for Othello Eros is a trap. It is as if, after the first night, he got lost in darkness, where love and jealousy, lust and disgust were inextricably bound together.

The more violently Desdemona becomes engrossed by love, the more of a slut she seems to Othello; a past, present, or future slut. The more she desires, the better she loves, the more readily Othello believes that she can, or has, betrayed him.

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Turnip Top Acting Troupe
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Iago sets all the world’s evil in motion and falls victim to it in the end. Desdemona is the victim of her own passion. Her love testifies against her, not for her. Love proves her undoing. This is the second paradox.

In no other great Shakespearean drama, with the possible exception of King Lear, is the word ‘nature’ uttered so frequently as in Othello.

It is a judgment maim’d and most imperfect

That will confess perfection so could err

Against all rules of nature…

The idea is repeated several times, almost in the same words:

And yet, how nature erring from itself –

What is nature? What is against nature? Desdemona deceived her father. In King Lear we look at daughters with the eyes of the exiled old man. We hear his curses. In Othello, the viewpoint is different. Othello and Desdemona stand in the foreground. Brabantio does not rouse our compassion. But only for the time being: his words will later be repeated by Othello:

Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see.

She has deceiv’d her father, and may thee.

Respect her father, husband, family, class, and estate is consistent with nature. Social order is natural. Everything that destroys it is against nature. Eroticism is nature too. But nature can be good or evil. Eroticism is nature depraved. The theme of Othello, like that of Macbeth and King Lear, is the fall. The Renaissance tale of the cunning villain and the jealous husband has been changed into a medieval morality.

Othello:

Why, what art thou?

Desdemona:

Your wife, my lord; your true

And loyal wife.

Othello:

Come swear it, damn thyself;

Lest, being like one of heaven, the devils themselves

Should fear to seize thee. therefore be double-damn’d—

Swear thou art honest.

Desdemona:

Heaven doth truly know it.

Othello:

Heaven truly knows that thou art false as hell.

Angel turns into devil. After animal symbolism, in which eroticism has been enclosed, this is, in frequency, the second semantic sphere of the tragedy. Othello’s landscape consisted of the earth without moon and stars, then of the world of reptiles and insects. Now the setting, as in medieval theatre, consists of two gates: of heaven and hell. Even the sober and down-to-earth Emilia turns into a hellish gate-keeper:

….You, mistress,

That have the office opposite to Saint Peter

And keep the gate of hell!

In front of the two gates Othello utters his great closing speeches before he kills himself:

….When we shall meet at compt,

This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven,

And fiends will snatch at it.

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Clik here to view.But in fact Othello is no more a morality, or a mystery, than it is an opera or a melodrama. Nature is depraved and cannot be trusted. Eros is nature and cannot be trusted either. There is no appeal to nature, or her laws. Nature is evil, not only to Othello, but also to Shakespeare.  It is just as insane and cruel as history. Nature is depraved but in live, unlike a medieval morality play, it is not redeemed. There is no redemption. Angels turn into devils. All of them.

…turn thy complexion there

Patience, thou young and rose-lipp’d cherubin!

Ay, there look grim as hell!

It is the mad Lear who continues the argument:

Behold yond simp’ring dame,

Whose face between her forks presageth snow,

That minces virtue, and does shake the had

To hear of pleasure’s name.

The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to’t

With a more riotous appetite.

Down from the waist they are Centaurs,

Though women all above.

But to the girdle do the gods inherit,

Beneath is all the fiend’s.

There’s hell, there’s darkness, there’s the sulphurous pit; burning, scalding, stench, consumption.

(King Lear, IV, 6)

Othello and Lear stay in the same sphere of madness. Nature has been put on trial. Once again Shakespeare’s hatred of nature forecasts that of Swift. Nature is depraved, above all in its reproductive function. Love tales, stories of lovers and married couples, are just as ruthless and cruel as the histories of kings, princes, and usurpers. In both, dead bodies are carried away from the empty stage.

All the landscapes of Othello, the gestures, the rhetoric – the last also in its gradual destruction – belong to the poetics of the Baroque. I visualize Othello, Desdemona, and Iago in black and gold, dipped in Rembrandtan darkness. Light falls on their faces. The first crowd scene, when Brabantio with his retinue sets out in search of Othello, always reminds me of the Night-watch.

Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.

Othello is a tragedy of gestures. This, too, is part of Baroque. But the gestures are stayed, held up in the air, as it were. Everyone is motionless for a moment. I would have Othello’s final gestures held up in the same way. Let him approach Desdemona lying on her bed. And let him draw back. He knows now that Iago has won the final argument. The world is sufficiently vile, if she could have betrayed him, if he has come to believe in her infidelity, if he could believe in it even.

…To be once in doubt

Is once to be resolv’d.

Othello does not have to kill Desdemona. The play would be more cruel, if, in that final and decisive moment, he just left her. Cressida does not die after her act of betrayal, nor does Troilus kill himself. Their play ends in a mocking tone.

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Clik here to view.Othello kills Desdemona to save the moral order, to restore love and faith. He kills Desdemona to be able to forgive her; so that the accounts be settled and the world returned to its equilibrium. Othello does not mumble any more. He desperately wants to save the meaning of live, of his life, perhaps even the meaning of the world.

And say besides that in Aleppo once,

Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk

Beat a Venetian and traduc’d the state,

I took by th’throat the circumcised dog

And smote him – thus.

Othello’s death can save nothing. Desdemona is dead, and so is the world of feudal loyalty. The condottieri are anachronistic; together with their enchanting poetry, with their rhetoric, their pathos and their gestures. One such gesture is Othello’s suicide.

Desdemona is dead, so are the stupid fool Roderigo and the prudent Emilia. In a while Othello will die. All of them die: the noble ones and the villains; the level-headed ones and the madmen; the empiricists and the absolutists. All choices are bad.

Desdemona:

Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?

Emilia:

Why, would not you?

Desdemona:

No, by this heavenly light!

Emilia:

Nor I neither, by this heavenly light,

I might do’t as well I’ th’ dark.

Desdemona:

Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?

Emilia:

The world’s a huge thing. It is a great price for a small vice.

Iago keeps silent. Probably even on the rack he will not utter a word. He has won all the arguments; but only the intellectual ones. In all great Shakespearean dramas, from Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida onwards, the moral order and the intellectual order are in conflict with one another. They will remain so up to The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. The world is as Iago sees it. But Iago is a villain. Like our world, Shakespeare’s world did not regain its balance after the earthquake. Like our world, it remained incoherent. In Shakespeare’s Othello everybody loses in the end.”

And with that, we come to the end of Othello.  For me, this has been a fascinating experience.  For years, it had been my “least favorite” (relatively speaking) of the tragedies:  I tended to agree with Bradley and the like that it lacks the “cosmic’ depth of the others, that it’s too “specific” a tragedy and, quite honestly, I tended to find Othello’s quick plunge into jealousy and rage not quite believable.

But  this time all that changed.  Reading the play along with Garber and (especially) Kott, changed my perception of the play.  Kott, in particular, I thought, brought the play into a completely new light for me:  his view of the play makes sense for me, and elevated the play from a seemingly domestic tragedy into one that’s larger than I’d imagined.

And one more observation of a more general variety…is everyone else noticing how much “easier” it is to read Shakespeare now?  My guess is, it’s in part because of his progression as a writer, but even more because we know how to read him.

So now I’d like to throw it over to all of you.  What did you think about Othello?  If you’ve never read it, what were your initial impressions?  And if you’re read it before, how did your interpretation/experience change?  Please…share with the group!

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K7xjPyMl-w&list=PL48F22AF61832B590

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZb7G4vse6w&list=PL48F22AF61832B590

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSQK_mjqmcE&list=PL48F22AF61832B590

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFsOiaYTB0E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DF7YQrC7HM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IynoOLAk3bM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgGTkaovWzw

My next post will be Sunday evening/Monday morning, Sonnet #135, with another post Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning introducing our next play:  All’s Well That Ends Well.  (Heads-up – the title is seriously ironic.  And yes, it’s a comedy.)

Enjoy.  And enjoy your weekend.

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Clik here to view.

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Timon of Athens

An Introduction

By Dennis Abrams

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Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.It’s a story as old as money itself:  the fable of the big-spending man who uses, then loses all of his wealth – and with it, his wits and everything he owns.  But Shakespeare’s variation on the theme – clearly indebted to medieval morality plays – ranks as one of his most neglected works.

Timon also has bears an interesting relationship to Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus in its portrayal of an (anti)hero who risks it all for ultimate glory – in Faustus’s case by trading his soul for the knowledge of the divine, in Timon’s by losing his vast Athenian fortune via a lifestyle of sensationally hedonistic proportions. Other ways of viewing the play:  a philosophical debate between epicurianism and cynicism; as a more domestic version of Lear.  But whereas both Faustus and Lear are tragic masterpieces, Timon of Athens, with a tone veering between tragedy and satire, is less certain in tone, and certainly more puzzling to understand.

The great sixteenth century essayist and philosopher Montaigne, noting that “what we hate we take to heart,” chose Timon of Athens as the kind of man who becomes so possessed by hatred of the world that he flees it. Timon’s dilemma – in Shakespeare play he is driven to madness by his own mad generosity and the stinginess of his friends – has a tragic ring to it, but at the same time, there is something savagely comic about his story.  Forced into poverty, Timon digs for roots, but, to his rage, unearths gold coins; leaving the city he becomes a hermit who has to deal with an unending stream of greedy visitors. In fact, Montaigne mentions Timon while discussing another famous philosophical paradox: whether one should weep over mankind’s tragic situation, or, simply laugh at the utter futility of it all.

Timon seems to enter the same wild territory as King Lear, a play to which is often compared.  Both have heroes who descend into insanity in response to the unkindness of others, yet who are themselves both tragically culpable; both, too, expose the painful fact that there is nothing noble about madness.  Coriolanus, also with its own hero unable to adjust to his place in society also resembles Timon, but perhaps it’s closest Shakespearean cousin is the playwright’s earliest tragedy, Titus Andronicus, which also counterpoints comic and tragic scenes to such unsettling effect that even now audiences can struggle to take it all in.  Where Titus’s sufferings are often so unbearably intense that he can only burst out laughing, exclaiming that “I have not another tear to shed,” Timon’s darker misanthropy expresses itself in brilliantly scabrous insults against anyone – or anything – who has the misfortune to get in his way. You’ll see, I think as we’re reading, that it’s difficult to know whether to laugh, cry, or rant with him.

And, like Titus, Timon’s status as genuine Shakespeare has frequently been brought into question. Dr. Johnson, noting “perplexed, obscure, and probably corrupt” stretches of text, was among the first to ask whether it was in fact unfinished, though he approved of its moral value (a quality he felt all too deficient in Shakespeare). By doing so he unleashed two large questions that still dominate critical discussion of the play: if Timon is finished; and whether or not it was co-written (most likely in collaboration with the young brilliant satirist, Thomas Middleton – I’ll have more on this in my next post).

In any case, as Timon has been more widely read (even if not widely performed), it has been appreciated as a work of art in its own right – one with a particular relevance to our time.

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From Marjorie Garber:

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.The Life of Timon of Athens is Shakespeare’s remarkable play about philanthropy and misanthropy. Among those many Shakespeare plays that have been discovered, by audiences in every generation, to be in uncanny conversation with their present-day concerns, Timon, with its luxury-loving lords living on credit, influence, loans, and gifts, is possibly the most pertinent to modern and postmodern life. Yet for a variety of reasons this play is comparatively unknown outside of Shakespearean circles. The text is difficult, at times, and made more so by a number of interpretive ‘cruxes’ about which editorial scholars have disagreed, making even the basic language of the play seem inaccessible, prior to the question of meaning. Timon himself, surnamed in history ‘the Misanthrope,’ is in the course of the unfolding actions initially bland and ultimately aversive. Despite the brief appearance of two literally gold-digging whores accompanying Alciblades into exile, there is no conventional love plot to divert attention from the prevailing climate of flattery and greed; and the ‘churlish philosopher’ Apermantus, the truth-telling wise fool of the play, is, with his imprecations and curses, at best an acquired taste. So far as we know, the play was never staged in Shakespeare’s lifetime.

Nonetheless, Timon is a superb piece of writing, characterization, and theater, and it deserves more recognition. The play is divided into two parts, the first of which shows Timon to be extraordinarily generous, giving gifts, money, entertainments, and banquets to a variety of noble dependents, described in the First Folio’s list of ‘Actors’ Names’ as ‘Flattering Lords.’ In the second half of the play, once Timon has lost his money – he tries to call upon those to whom he has given gifts and support in the past, and is turned away with an amusingly diverse array of (im)plausible excuses – he flees Athens, takes up residence in a cave, digs in the earth and with bitter irony discovers gold, and flings the gold at visitors unwise enough to call upon him.

Critics interested in history do not have to look far to find models for wealthy patrons, sycophantic flatters, and mutual disenchantment in the Jacobean (or the Elizabethan) court. One early-twentieth-century scholar suggested an equivalence between Timon and the Earl of Essex, and between Ventidius and Sir Francis Bacon, reading the play as a political allegory of patronage and betrayal. However likely or unlikely any such specific historical identification might be (and this reading has not fared well among subsequent scholars), it seems to me, as always, that the power of the play comes from its transhistorical resonances rather than from any Jacobean references. If Timon is timeless, it is because it is always timely. The brilliance of the play is the way in which its self-serving and hypocritical flatterers resemble those of every economic and social era.”

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From Harold C. Goddard:

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Clik here to view.“Timon of Athens is one of the doubtful plays in the sense that its Shakespearean authorship has often been questioned. It was apparently put in the First Folio to take the place of Troilus and Cressida when that play was moved from the position originally assigned to it among the Tragedies. This fact lends a certain plausibility to the view that someone besides Shakespeare may have had a hand in its composition, a view which, in turn, is given some support by the disparity in merit between its best and its worst passages.

Yet it is beyond comprehension how anyone could doubt that Timon himself, and hence the central conception and impact of the play, is a product of Shakespeare’s imagination. The date of the work is not known. But it seems to be related to King Lear somewhat as Troilus and Cressida is to Hamlet. [MY NOTE:  As I have throughout this project, I’m going with the way in which Oxford dates the plays – some place Timon between Lear and Antony and Cleopatra, others even later.] If Troilus can be called the intellectual twin of Hamlet, Timon might be called the emotional twin of King Lear (or better perhaps its dark satellite.) The generalization of course immensely oversimplifies the truth, to say nothing of the fact that there is plenty of emotion in Troilus and plenty of thought in Timon. It might be closer to the truth to say that the two plays appear to be safety valves through which Shakespeare blew off excess thought and emotion, in the case of Troilus partly for the edification of a special audience, in that of Timon perhaps for his own relief. In the latter play he seems to let himself go and to express through the mouth of Timon exactly what he thought and how he felt about humanity at some moment of mingled anger and disillusionment – disillusionment, however, not with life but with mankind, particularly with senators and their associates among the nobility. ‘All covered dishes!’ a Second Lord exclaims at the banquet of lukewarm water Timon has prepared for his former friends The symbolism is plain, though the Second Lord is unconscious of what he has said. When a man lets himself go, as Shakespeare apparently did in the character of Timon, we learn much about him.”

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And, finally, from the great William Hazlitt:

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Clik here to view.“Timon of Athens always appeared to us to be written with as intense a feeling of his subject as any one play of Shakespeare. It is one of the few in which he seems to be in earnest throughout, never to trifle or go out of his way. He does not relax in his efforts, nor lose sight of the unity of his design. It is the only play of our author in which spleen is the predominant feeling of the mind. It is as much satire as a play; and contains some of the finest pieces of invective possible to be conceived, both in the snarling, captious answers of the cynic Apemantus, and in the impassioned and more terrible imprecations of Timon. The latter remind the classical reader of the force and swelling impetuosity of the moral declamations in Juvenal, while the former have all the keenness and caustic severity of the old Stoic Philosophers. The soul of Diogenes appears to have been seated on the lips of Apemantus. The churlish profession of misanthropy in the cynic is contrasted with the profound feeling of it in Timon, and also with the soldier-like and determined resentment of Alcibiades against his countrymen, who have banished him, though this forms only an incidental episode in the tragedy.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMJ-BvZC3Lw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EJbH84OftI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8ZUvfth95Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3W2Ak-HWWJA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XQB5xGhi3o

I have a confession to make here:  I think this is the first time I’ll be reading Timon of Athens, so this should be an interesting experience for all of us.

Our next reading:  Timon of Athens, Act One

My next post:  Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning

Enjoy.

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Clik here to view.

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Clik here to view.

Timon of Athens

Act One

By Dennis Abrams

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MAJOR CHARACTERS

Lord Timon of Athens

Lords and Senators of Athens

Timon’s false friends: Lucius, Lucullus, Sempronius and Ventidus

Alcibiades, an Athenian soldier

Apemantus, an ill-tempered philosopher

Servants of Timon’s various creditors

Flavius, Timon’s steward (head servant)

Timon’s other servants: Flaminius, Lucillus and Servillus

Phrynia and Timandra, prostitutes with Alcibiades

Thieves

A Poet, a Painter, a Jeweller and a Merchant, all in Timon’s pay

An Old Athenian

A Fool

DATE

All conjecture:  Some critics argue for a date prior to King Lear (1605) – I’m going with this; others put it closer to Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus (1606-08); while others see it as one of Shakespeare’s very last plays – if it is, indeed, entirely by him.  Thomas Middleton, among others, has been suggested as a collaborator.

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SOURCES

As with the Roman Plays, Plutarch’s Lives (in Thomas North’s 1579 translation), seems to be the key course – enough to feature word-for-word in some places. An anonymous play, Timon (c. 1602) seems to have had some influence (although it is also possible it was written in response to Shakespeare’s version), as does William Painter’s collection of tales, The Palace of Pleasure (1566), the basis for numerous other works by Shakespeare.

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TEXTS

Timon first appeared in print in the 1623 Folio (F1) – apparently in the place where Troilus and Cressida had been meant to go.

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Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Act One:  Timon’s enormous wealth – and, more importantly, his generosity – is the talk of Athens, and artists and tradesmen line up to gain his favor.  Though the Poet has written a fable warning his patron that Fortune is, indeed, fickle, Timon accepts his work, and that of all the others, without blinking an eye, pausing only to pay his frie3nd Ventidius’s bail and to give his servant Lucillus money so that he can marry his wealthy sweetheart. Timon has even invited the churlish philosopher Apemantus to a great banquet for his fawning friends. At the party, Apemantus throws insults at the assembled guests and is particularly incensed when Timon insists on presenting expensive gifts to all the attendees.  The fact that Timon is heavily in debt is known to only one man – his steward Flavius.

Timon opens with a Poet, Painter, and various other craftsmen and salesmen, all gathering to pay their respects to the “worthy lord” Timon – and of course, to advertise their work in the hope of selling it to him.  The importance of patrons like Timon was a fact of life for playwrights and poets looking to make a living (Shakespeare himself had dedicated two poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, to the Earl of Southampton, and the 1623 Folio was addressed to two aristocrats), but nowhere else in Shakespeare’s drama is the paradoxical place of art in the fiscal economy so openly explored. Commending the Painter’s piece as “admirable,’ insisting that “it tutors nature,’ the Poet explains that his own work will do something similar. It warns Timon to beware of the “great flood of visitors” who cluster around him in the hope of material reward. Should Fortune decide to look the other way, the Poet insists, those crawling admirers will be the first to desert Timon:

When Fortune in her shift and change of mood

Spurns down her late beloved, all his dependants,

Which laboured after him to the mountain’s top

Even on their knees and hands, let him fall down,

Not one accompanying his declining foot.

Timon’s fall, when it does come, will be horribly lonely; his fawning “dependents” will not hesitate to make themselves scarce as soon as trouble arises.

But the Poet’s stark warning is by no means disinterested. For one thing, Timon accepts the poem without even reading it, warmly inviting the author to dinner without a second thought. For another, as Apemantus sourly jibes, the Poet is as bad as the rest – poetry, like painting or jewelry, is a flattering art, and the Poet writes in order to earn a living. Furthermore, as the Jeweler observes of the expensive jewel he presents to Timon,

     My lord, ‘tis rated

As those which sell would give; but you well know

Things of like value differing in the owners

Are prized by their masters.

Which is to say, of course, that everything is relative; value has no value when money is involved. What something is worth depends entirely on what someone else is prepared to pay for it. That goes for poetry as well; and Timon is prepared, as with everything else, to pay the highest of prices. One question that the play poses is whether a Jeweler and a Poet can be though of as the same type of salesmen: one selling precious stones, the other pleasing words.

Another problem in Timon – in fact, Timon’s own problem – is that, contrary to the Jeweler’s assertion, our hero doesn’t “well know” the value of possessions at all.  Or rather, his apparently boundless generosity blurs the meanings of value so badly that it becomes impossible for him to know the real worth of anything, as gifts of astronomical costs trade hands between his “friends” as liberally as if they were free.  The word “priceless” does not appear in this play (Shakespeare seems to have invented the word, but used it just once in his entire career, in The Rape of Lucrece) but the concept of something that is worth everything and yet nothing hovers over it continually. At the lavish banquet thrown for his friends at the end of Act One, Timon receives extravagant gifts from his acquaintances – “Four milk-white horses trapped in silver” from Lucius, “two braces of greyhounds” from Lucullus – but no sooner are they delivered than Timon demands that other, even costlier presents be returned to them as compensation. As he declares to Ventidius, “there’s none/Can truly say he gives if he receives.” In this way the workings of gift exchange become as debased as those of the financial economy: Timon’s friends give him things not out of “free love” as Lucius declares, but because they hope they will get something even more valuable in return. A concept familiar to cultures around the world, for Timon’s first audience this competitive gift-giving may also have played on their own anxieties about inflation, which had sky-rocked through the 1590s to the point that indebtedness had become more commonplace than ever before.

There is more than a touch of fantasy in Timon’s seemingly unstoppable largess, and he is just as free with his promises as he is with his possessions. “Methinks I could deal kingdoms to my friends,/An ne’er be weary,” he explains, and his friends have no doubt that he would. But watching helplessly as his lord liberally gives out jewels to his dinner guest, his steward Flavius knows that Timon’s spectacular behavior is just that – a spectacle. “What will this come to?” he frets,

He commands us to provide and give great gifts,

And all out of an empty coffer;

Nor will he know his purse, or yield me this:

To show him what a beggar his ehart is,

Being of now power to make his wishes good,

His promises fly so beyond his state

That what he speaks is all in debt, he owes

For every word.

“He is so kind,” Flavius mournfully continues, “he now pays interest for it.” Behind the appearance of infinite wealth lurks the reality of poverty;: despite acting as if nothing has a price tag (if you need to know, you can’t afford it), Timon is himself without worth, his very “words” indebted to his creditors.

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From Garber:

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Clik here to view.“The Timon story was well known in classical times, and also in early modern England, where scholars have found references in the works of many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries (including the playwrights John Lyly, Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, Thomas Dekker, and John Marston). Both Greene and Dekker refer to ‘Timonists,’ indicating that the equivalence Timon = misanthrope must have been widely accepted; otherwise the term could not have been understood.

In Sir Thomas North’s 1579 of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, the version Shakespeare would have read, Timon is twice called ‘Timon Misanthropos,’ the appellation Misanthropos used as an ‘addition’ or surname, just as ‘Coriolanus’ (the conqueror of Corioles’) is used for Caius Martius. Shakespeare’s principal source for Timon of Athens would have been Plutarch’s ‘Life of Marcus Antonius,’ where the Timon story is told with great emphasis on what in the play is the second half of the narrative: Timon’s self-banishment, his odd affinity for Apemanus (‘Because he was much like of his nature and conditions,’) his affection for the ‘bold and insolent’ Alcibiades (whom Timon said he liked because he knew that ‘one day he would do great mischief unto the Athenians.’), Timon’s invitation to the Athenian lords to come and hang themselves on his fig tree, and the two epitaphs said to be written on his tomb, one composed by Timon, the other by the poet Callimachus. [MY NOTE:  It’s because of Shakespeare’s use of Plutarch as his source material for the play, and in particular, his use of the chapter on Marcus Antonius, that many think Timon was written after Antony and Cleopatra.] Shakespeare includes both of the epitaphs, virtually word for word, in his text, although, as many commentators have observed, they contradict each other: the first instructing the passerby, ‘Seek not my name,’ the second declaring, ‘Here lie I, Timon.’

Indeed, the name Timon was so strongly associated with this devolution into rage and general hatred that he became a type, as is clear in a passage from Montaigne’s Essays, where (in the John Florio translation of 1603) we hear of

‘Timon, surnamed the hater of all mankinde. For looke what a man hateth, the same thing he takes to hart. Timon wisht all evill might light on us: He was passionate in desiring our ruine. He shunned and loathed our conversation as dangerous and wicked, and of a depraved nature.’  Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Democritus and Heraclitus’

Montaigne thought Timon was a captive of his own emotions; he closes his assessment of philosophers who ‘laugh’ or ‘weepe’ ‘at the spectacle of humanity by expressing the view that ‘[o]ur owne condition is as ridiculous as risible, as much to be laught at as able to laugh.’

Francis Bacon’s essay ‘Of Goodness, and Goodness in Nature’ brings together the key words ‘philanthropy’ and ‘misanthropy’ by defining goodness as what ‘the Grecians call philanthropia,’ calling it ‘of all virtues and dignities of mind…the greatest’ and expressing his conviction that ‘without it man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.’ But even philanthropia, this ‘habit so excellent,’ is prone to error, and Bacon’s list of the possible errors of the philanthrope, the benevolent lover of mankind, reads like a primer of good advice for Timon: ‘Seek the good of other men, but be not in bondage to their faces or fancies; for that is but facility or softness; which taketh an honest mind prisoner. Neither give thou Aesop’s cock a gem, who would be better pleased and happier if he had had a barley-corn.’ In Aesop’s fable, ‘The Cock and the Pearl’ a rooster unearths a pearl in the farmyard, but would prefer something to eat, however humble: ‘You may be a treasure,’ quoth Master Cock, ‘to men that prize you, but for me I would rather have a single barley-corn than a peck of pearls.’ In the same way Shakespeare’s Timon will come to prefer a root dug from the earth to unwanted and corrupting gold, once he has seen through the ‘faces or fancies’ of his flatterers. (There is probably a trace memory here, too, of the Sermon on the Mount – ‘Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine’ [Matthew 7:6].)

For Bacon the disposition to goodness in some men is matched, in others, by a ‘natural malignity,’ whether through crossness, difficulty, envy, or ‘mere mischief.’ This sounds like a good description of Shakespeare’s Iago (we might compare ‘natural malignity’ with Coleridge’s famous phrase ‘motiveless malignity’), but the canonical example Bacon gives, the personage who personifies misanthropy is, once again, Timon of Athens. Thus Bacon writes of ‘misanthropi that make it their practice to bring men to the bough, and yet never a tree for the purpose of their gardens, as Timon had.’ The reference is to the well-known incident in the Timon story told by Plutarch, in which Timon invites Athenians, ‘if any of you be desperate’ to hang themselves on the fig tree in his garden. Shakespeare dramatizes this event in act 5, scene 1, of his play.

The general effect of this story is thus to turn Timon, as we have seen from the word ‘Timonist,’ into a kind of allegory of misanthropy. A striking comparison from a narrative poem of the period is the incident, described by Edmund Spenser in the third book of The Faerie Queene, of the transformation of a tormented character called Malbecco into an emblem of jealousy:

Yet can he never dye, but dying liues,

And doth himself with sorrow new sustaine,

That death and life attonce vnto him giues,

And painefull pleasure turnes into pleasing paine.

There dwels he euer, miserable swaine,

Hatefull both to him selfe, and euery wight;

Where he through priuy griefe, and horrour vaine,

Is woxen so deform’d, that he has quight

Forgot he was a man, and Gealousie is hight.

Spenser, The Faerie Queen, book 3, canto 10, stanza 60

This is a version of the general pattern of metamorphosis that, following Ovid (and indeed Homer’s Circe), details the upward or downward conversion of a human being into a flower, jewel, beast, or constellation. It is also the same kind of transformation into archetype that took place with Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida. Timon’s story, like that of Pandarus, would have been familiar to Shakespeare’s audiences, whose interest would presumably therefore lie in how, rather than whether, the expected change would take place.

The transformation is explicitly performed in act 4 of Shakespeare play, when the self-exiled Timon encounters the self-exiled Alcibiades:

Alcibades:

What art thou there? Speak.

Timon:

A beast, as thou art…

……………………..

Alcibiades:

What is thy name? Is man so hateful to thee

That art thyself a man?

Timon:

I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind.

Timon 4.3.48-53

In the course of historical transmission the name Timon becomes the equivalent of “Misanthrope’ – a living contradiction, as Alcibiades observes.

It is a measure of the acuteness and acerbity of Timon of Athens that it begins with one of those familiar Shakespearean scenes of exposition-via-secondary-character, but instead of lords, servants, or soldiers the commenting onlookers here are artists and artisans: a painter, a jeweler, and a merchant. Each of course, regards Timon as a patron. The Painter and the Poet are particularly vain and empty, the Poet is full of false modesty (‘A thing slipped idly from me’ is how he describes his current piece of verse, dedicated, as the Painter observes, ‘To the great lord,’ while the Painter displays his work to the vapid approbation of his colleague: ‘What a mental power/This eye shoots forth! How big imagination/Moves in this lip! To th’dumbness of the gesture/One might interpret.’ The Painter is as archly modest as his friend, pressing him for more (‘is’t good?’), and receives the benison of a further banality: ‘Artificial strife/Lives in these touches livelier than life.’ But as self-absorbed as these creative personages are made to seem, they are accurate enough when it comes to assessing favor and fickleness in Timon’s followers Although all follow him now, ‘his lobbies fill with tendance,/Rain sacrificial whisperings in his ear,/Make sacred even his stirrup/’ the minute his luck changes they will desert him.

On the heels of this dire prophecy Timon enters and, as the stage direction says, ‘address[es] himself courteously to every suitor.’ He is the personification of assured elegance and modest attentiveness, a generous patron whose flaw, if he can be seen to have one, is that he seems invested in his own persona as a source of endless bounty. The first to need his assistance is a messenger from Ventidius, whose debts have landed him in prison. Not only will Timon ‘pay the debt and free him,’ but also sends for Ventidius to give him further aid: ‘Tis not enough to help the feeble up,/But to support him after.’ The next man Timon helps is Lucilius, who wants to marry but is not wealthy enough to satisfy his lady’s father. Again Timon is ready to help, offering to double the dowery. Needless to say, these will be among the first to deny him when he comes to them for succor.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.From the first it is clear that Timon is not only generous but liberal. When Ventidius tries to repay him, he insists that the money was a gift, not a loan. The first scene ends with the sight of guests enroute to ‘Lord Timon’s feast,’ and the feast itself, including a masque of Cupid and another of Amazon ladies, features the influential men of Athens displaying ‘much adoring of Timon’ (stage direction, act 1, scene 2) as they give and receive yet more gifts. Cautionary notes punctuate this event: first, the invective of Apemantus, who scorns the feast, warns the host, and reflects to himself, ‘[W]hat a number of men eats Timon, and he sees ‘em not!’, and second, the dismay of Flavius, Timon’s loyal steward, a figure often compared to Kent in King Lear, who sees his master’s folly and is powerless to stop him:

Flauvius [aside]

What will this come to?

He commands us to provide and give great gifts,

And all out of an empty coffer;

Nor will he know his purse, or yield me this:

To show him what a beggar his heart is,

Being of now power to make his wishes good.

His promises fly so beyond his state

That what he speaks is all in debt, he owes

For every word. He is so kind that he now

Pays interest for ‘t…”

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And finally, from the introduction to the Oxford edition of the play, a look at the question of collaboration:

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Clik here to view.“Timon of Athens is a peculiar and to some an unpalatable play: the plot is rather more allegorical than is typical of Shakespeare, there are many loose ends and insufficiently integrated episodes, several of the characters have generic rather than personal names, the verse is frequently uneven and the main character is hard to sympathize with – he starts as a pathologically generous and ends a misanthrope. Unlike the classic Shakespearean tragic hero, he dies offstage (exactly what kills him remains uncertain) and leaves behind only an ambiguous epitaph. But the play turns what might seem like disadvantages into assets; its sheer ferocity, its intense concentration on the destructiveness of economic relations and its virulent critique of human ingratitude have won it a valued place among present-day performers and playgoers. Though it may never have been staged in Shakespeare’s day and was rarely produced before the twentieth century, it has, over the past thirty or forty years, proved to be not only relevant but brilliantly effective in performance.

This edition of Timon of Athens is a collaborative one. To us, this seems eminently appropriate, since the text we have edited and her present to readers and performers is also the result of collaboration. It was written by two playwrights, William Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton, whose work together may account for some of the play’s apparent oddity. [MY NOTE:  I’ll just say that not everyone agrees with this.]  Each author has unique characteristics that contribute to making the play what it is while at the same time their separateness is sometimes blurred or complicated by the process of working together and adapting to the other’s habits. Much work has been done on the problem of the play’s authorship, starting with the pioneering study by nineteenth-century editor Charles Knight, who first cast doubt on Shakespeare’s authorship of the whole text, and continuing up to the most recent scholarly edition of the play…Until recently there was strong disagreement on the issue of collaboration, but it is now widely, though not universally, accepted that Middleton was responsible for a sizeable proportion of the text. Earlier analysts, focusing on style and versification, with some attention also to distinctive vocabulary and phrasing, showed that there were major inconsistencies in the writing, casting doubt on Shakespeare’s authorship of the whole play but without identifying who his collaborator might have been. Recent studies, refining older techniques and adding evidence gathered from statistical mapping of such writerly habits as the use of certain contractions or grammatical forms, have homed in on Middleton as the co-author. The result has been an accumulation of convergent evidence that is, in our view, convincing.

Almost everything that has been written recently about the play’s authorship has been devoted to sorting out which parts of the play were written by whom. We will turn to that issue in due course. But it might be fruitful to begin with a more fundamental, if, at the same time, unanswerable question. Why did Shakespeare, who, except at the beginning and end of his career, typically wrote his plays single-handedly, turn to another, much less experienced playwright for help with this one? The plays that he wrote around the time Timon was composed are, among his greatest and most famous works:  King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra. Why did he change his habits at such a juncture? Although this question is unanswerable, to think about the issue is, we hope, to cast some light on what makes this play so distinctive.

Timon combines tragedy and urban satire in a way that is unique in the Shakespearean canon. While satire plays a role in several of his plays, notably Troilus and Cressida, none of the others trains its sights on the sordid details of modern urban greed and economic relations in quite the way Timon does. Such themes were Middleton’s forte and so it seem possible, even likely, that Shakespeare sought him out to provide both the required sardonic tone and a vivid attention to the grittiness of city life (the Athens of the play resembles Jacobean London more than it does the city of Aristophanes or Plato). The play is first and foremost about money – who has it, who doesn’t, who owes what to whom, and how debts both mount up and are (or are not) collected. The tension between gifts and debts is a key theme: Timon regards his vast fortune as a treasure house for gift-giving, but in order to sustain his munificence he has to borrow, and those debts are not forgiven. He goes from being immensely rich to desperately poor, and since his friends, whose love and admiration he has bought dearly, refuse to bail him out, he turns against them and all mankind, retreating to a nearby forest to live in a cave and eat roots. That he finds a cache of gold while scrabbling for sustenance is the key irony of the play, bestowing on him a power and centrality he no longer wants. His virulent misanthropy is impressive and infectious, and the language he finds to express his scorn is unmatched in the rich mine of Shakespearean invective. This latter fact may provide a clue as to why Shakespeare was initially drawn to a story, decidedly allegorical in shape and without the typical Shakespearean focus on family relations, that was perhaps not as well suited to his talents as other, more expansive possibilities such as those offered by King Lear. And so, in mulling over the possibility of making a play out of the Timon story he might well have recognized that he would benefit from some help to achieve the mixed tone that he felt it needed. The play itself also shows signs of hasty composition, as if it was in fact the case that it needed to be written quickly, Middleton would have been the natural choice to assist Shakespeare in moving the project along briskly.”

More from this in my next post, looking at the process of how the script was (if indeed it was) put together.

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Our next reading:  Timon of Athens, Act Two

My next post:  Thursday evening/Friday morning

Enjoy!

And as a reminder – I know that Timon probably won’t rank among your favorite plays (although you might be surprised), but after we’re done with this…Macbeth, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra.  It doesn’t get much better than that.

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Timon of Athens

Act Two

By Dennis Abrams

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Clik here to view.Act Two:  Timon’s creditors are getting restless and send their servants to request that he pay off his debts. Flavius is attempting to stall them when Timon appears and demands to know what is going on. Flavius informs that he has squandered his estate by his extravagance and that there is nothing left to pay off even half of what he owes. But Timon is undaunted, and remains confident that his friends will help him out.

Despite Flavius’s fears, when those creditors begin circling, the steward is forced to tell all.  Finally telling his master about the state of his financial affairs – to Timon’s utter disbelief it must be said – Flavius sets into motion events that will occupy the rest of the play. To his credit, Timon does spring into action with impressive resolution, at first demanding that his land be sold (Flavius reveals that is already gone) and then suggesting that his “friends” will of course step in to help him out.  But as we shall see, Timon’s judgment of character is even less grounded in reality than his assessment of his accounts…

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From Garber:

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Clik here to view.“When the steward finally succeeds in convincing Timon that all his money has run out – act 2, scene 2, begins with a particularly vivid portrait of a man of business tearing his hair out at the profligacy of his noble client: ‘No care, no stop; no senseless of expense/That he will neither know how to maintain it/Nor case his flow of riot’ – Timon is serenely confident. ‘I am wealthy in my friends,’ he asserts. All he will need to do is ask them for their assistance. As was the case in Lear, however, the answer to his appeals is ‘no’ – however cleverly disguised the reply. First he sends to the Senators for help. ‘They answer in a joint and corporate voice,’ the steward reports,

That now they are at fall, want treasure, cannot

Do what they would, are sorry, you are honourable,

But yet they could have wished – they know not –

Something hath been amiss – a noble nature

May catch a wrench – would all were well – ‘tis pity…

In short, with fine and empty words, ‘They froze me into silence.’ But Timon is unfazed: ‘These old fellows/have their ingratitude in them hereditary.’ Flavius and the servants will have better luck if they try younger man, specifically those who have received beneficent and timely gifts from him, like Ventidius, whom he rescued from debtors’ prison, and whose father has just died and left him a great estate. The second act ends, finely, on this happy expectation, which everything in the audience’s dramatic sense, even without knowledge of the historical Timon, will lead them to expect to fail.”

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And this from A.D. Nuttall’s Shakespeare the Thinker:

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Clik here to view.“If the writer of King Lear was strangely drawn to mathematical notation, Timon of Athens has the form of a demonstration in Euclid. One almost expects to read at the end the words, ‘Quod erat demonstrandum.’ Although there are some rough edges in Timon of Athens (the play as we have it may be an unfinished version of a collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton) the central structure has an icy clarity – and it is all about ingratitude. Timon gives freely to all comers; he then falls on hard times. The friends he has showered with gifts reject him. He who has loved all mankind becomes in consequence a hater of mankind, a misanthrope. Timon is Lear without any of the old king’s grandeur of language and, more important, without any family. He has only friends, or perhaps I should say, ‘friends.’

In the first part of the play it is clear that Timon’s gifts are lavished on others with no expectation of a material return. Indeed, one sure way to secure an expensive present from Timon is to give him something. He seems to be driven by some inner force to outdo the giver, on a spectacular scale, at once. A notion of reciprocal payment is beginning to emerge here, but it operates in a reverse direction: Timon is not worried about securing a return from others, he is rather harassed by the thought that he must give back more than he received. Marcel Mauss observes how in certain societies this very different reciprocity-of-honour could become codified. The writes of the American Indian of the Northwest, ‘One does not have the right to refuse a gift or a potlatch. To do so would show fear of having to repay.’ He adds interestingly that it in certain circumstances a refusal can be an assertion of strength. Mauss is describing a society composed entirely of Timons. In Shakespeare’s play he is alone. The recipients of Timon’s gifts feel no obligation whatever to reciprocate his generosity. Their indifference to obligation can make them seem strong and Timon, inversely, weak in Maussian terms.

We may think for a moment that Timon in the first half of the play is like one of those sad children who take presents to school in the hope of buying friendship. But Timon did not give with the conscious intention of obtaining anything for himself. He really does give freely (freedom is at the heart of the grace-gratitude-gratuitous complex of terms). The thought of a return does not cross his mind until he is financially ruined. Then indeed he assumes that his dear friends will come to his aid as he would certainly have gone to theirs in like circumstances. When Timon poured out his good things upon others they were really gifts, gratuitous extras, outside and above the low world of contracts. But now he thinks that after all a return is in order. Gracious giving is properly answered by gratitude, and gratitude may even be expected on occasion to express itself financially. This does not mean that he has slipped back into the sphere of legally enforceable bonds. Timon is not looking for ‘the money due to me,’ he is looking for an ethical response. The freedom of his original beneficence depended on his continuing unawareness that an obligation was being created in the recipient. But the grateful recipient is conscious of obligation. How, then, can we say that he makes his grateful return freely? The freedom lies in the fact that the return is not enforced by any legal sanction. The recipient of bounty responds only because he wants to, but from the ethical point of view, he ought to want to. A wholly sincere suspension of all legal obligation can without inconsistency coexist with an implicit belief in ethical obligation. That said, we must add that the original giver must retain a certain innocence. If the giver is too vividly aware that the secondary ethical obligation is always there, he may begin to give with an eye to having help at hand later, a sort of insurance policy. If this happens, his giving is no longer gracious, disinterested, and the whole scheme is now tainted. But Timon (who is not one of Shakespeare’s clever characters) is entirely innocent.

Nineteenth-century critics tended to see Timon as a noble spirit vilely used by others. Earlier critics saw him as less than admirable, a fool or an extravagant show-off. Ethically, his generous actions ask for a generous response. On the practical level his near-hysterical giving virtually invites abuse from the recipient. There is the low idiom; ‘He asked for it.’

We now have an extraordinarily subtle structure in counterpoint to that we saw exposed in The Merchant of Venice. In the earlier play Shylock, the man of legal bonds, takes the Christians at their word. In effect he says, ‘You all know very well that I function usefully in your society as the man who deals not in charity but in strict business terms – and now I want what is owing to me,’ and the Christians are aghast. In Timon of Athens the faithless friends take Timon at his word and say in effect, ‘You are the man who is above bonds and contracts, the free giver, the man to whom we owe nothing, right?’ and he is aghast.

In The Merchant of Venice it is clear that the opposite of grace is bond. Portia never uses the word ‘grace’ in her famous appeal to Shylock to be merciful, but for all that she is talking about grace (to this day we can feel that the Christian Venetians are graceful and that Shylock is graceless without understanding the full meaning of the terms we continue to use). In Twelfth Night, the Fool says, ‘Words are very rascals since bonds disgrac’d them.’ This is far too clever for your average twenty-first-century audience. The Fool means, ‘You may give me your words and this would have been fine in the good old days when gentlemen were gentlemen and people like Shylock were kept out of sight, but now the growth of legal safeguards has removed the old element of gentlemanly generosity (‘dis-grac’d’) in promises. Since then words can no longer be trusted.’ My paraphrase is long because it is adapted to the reduced understanding of modern readers (of whom I am one).

Because Timon is not intelligent he does not philosophize as Ulysses does in Troilus and Cressida. But it is no straining of terms to say that Shakespeare philosophizes in Timon of Athens. The analysis of the intricate dance of social giving in which obligation is first erased and then reinscribed, conducted with careful attention to linguistic usage, would have delighted J.L. Austin. It is his sort of thing, but, I am tempted to say, cleverer than anything in Austin’s writings. The subsequent embedding of this paradox of giving in a bleakly cynical society then throws further light on the way causes operate (sometimes in unexpected ways) between individuals and groups – something that as we have seen fascinated Shakespeare from the beginning. This also is very intelligent but perhaps belongs more with social psychology than with philosophy (if a label must be attached). Certainly, Shakespeare is thinking in this play.”

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And finally, more from the introduction to the Oxford edition of the play, and a look how the collaboration between Shakespeare and Middleton (if indeed there was one) might have worked:

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Clik here to view.“How, then, was the actual process of putting together the script developed? Again, we are on speculative ground here, but we need imaginatively to reconstruct the course of development when we consider each author’s contribution – how, that is, they divided their labor. Writing collaboratively can be handled a number of ways: Elizabethan dramatists were sometimes assigned different acts or scenes of plays and wrote them without much interaction with their fellow authors. But certain collaborations, most famously that between Beaumont and Fletcher, seems to have involved a fair amount of give and take, even when, as occasionally happened and may have been the case here, the authors worked from different source documents. It seems to us that Timon is more likely to be an example of this closer collaborative process, since there is evidence of cross-fertilization. The way we see it Shakespeare probably took the lead, not only contributing about 65 percent of the whole, but producing the overall plan. By 1606-7, when the play was probably written [MY NOTE:  Or not], he was the foremost playwright of the time, while Middleton was just coming into prominence, with a series of biting urban comedies, including Michaelmas Term (1604-5) and A Trick to Catch the Old One (1605), and the irreverent and parodic tragedy The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606). Shakespeare no doubt recognized his younger colleague’s satirical skills, especially when they were aimed (with a kind of jaunty cynicism) at human greed and hypocrisy. Mapping out the story in general terms, Shakespeare would then have suggested that his partner take on certain elements: the tawdry masque and banquet scene, spiced up with witty commentary on the party of the cynic Apemantus (1.2), the scene of attempted borrowing (3.1 to 3.3), the debt-collecting sequences (parts of 2.2, 3.4) and most of the sections involving the faithful steward, Flavius. Shakespeare took the meatiest scenes for himself, such as the long opening sequence, with its brilliant interweaving of ambiguous magnanimity in the characterization of Timon and satirical portraiture in the representation of the false friends who flock to his house; and, no doubt recognizing the potential for invention that eventually came to mark the great speeches of imprecation in the fourth act, he reserved most of the final two acts for himself: the vehement vituperation of the forest scenes as well as the elegiac and muted ending.

As we ourselves have learned over the long stretch of time that we have been working together on this edition, collaborators have a way of harnessing each other’s ways of thinking, of adopting their partner’s verbal patterns and suiting their individual characteristics to the joint project. While there are obvious and multiple differences between the patterns of collaboration typical of seventeenth-century playwrights and twenty-first century editors, there are similarities as well. Like Shakespeare and Middleton, we too divided our labors, with Dawson taking initial responsibility for Acts 1, 3, and 5, and Minton for Acts 2 and 4. But before long we found ourselves thinking about, and working with, material from each other’s segments. And of course we read, discussed and revised what each of us did to such a point that individual differences, while still there and important, were partly submerged. We have little doubt that if someone wanted to take the trouble to analyse our writerly characteristics (not that anyone would), it would be possible to figure out which parts of our commentary were written by whom; but we also know that there would be a kind of overlay, a mixture of styles, that would make decisions about certain parts of occur text difficult to ascribe to one of us or the other. Our view of what Middleton and Shakespeare contributed to Timon has been influenced by this experience. There are certain parts of the play that seem purely one or the other playwrights’ work. But there are other parts where it is harder to tell and which we prefer to leave open. We can be confident that the opening scene is Shakespeare’s and the one that follows, Middleton’s, that the first three scenes of Act 3 are likewise clearly by Middleton, while the first and third scenes of Act 4 (possibly excepting 4.3.453-531) and much of Act 5 are Shakespeare’s. Act 2 is a little more murky. The first, short scene with the Senator has been attributed to both playwrights by different scholars, while much, though not all, of the next scene (2.2) seems to be Middleton’s. There is similar uncertainty about the mock banquet scene (3.7) and about the senate house scene with Alcibiades (3.6), which has many Middletonian characteristics but also reads in part like Shakespeare’s work.”

Of course Bloom just dismisses the whole thing:  “Some recent scholars assign several scenes of the play to Thomas Middleton, but their evidence is not at all persuasive, and one or two of them would be glad to give much of Macbeth to Middleton, which arouses absolute distrust in me.”

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So what are your thoughts so far…about the play?  about the possible collaboration?  Share with the group!

Our next reading:  Timon of Athens, Act Three

My next post:  Sunday evening/Monday morning

Enjoy.  And enjoy your weekend.

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Timon of Athens

Act Three

By Dennis Abrams

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Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Act Three:  One by one, Timon’s so-called “friends” refuse to help him, all making the feeblest of excuses.  As the servants of Timon’s creditors move in pressing their claims, Timon enters enraged, but instead of paying them, invites their masters to dinner one last time. His guests assemble thinking that Timon’s good fortune has been restored, but when the meal is served, it turns out to be nothing but warm water (which Timon promptly throws at them) as he rails against their duplicity. Meanwhile, the soldier Alcibiades has been banished from Athens for pleading for one of his soldiers, who is under sentence of death for manslaughter. Alcibiades storms out, swearing to have his revenge on the city.

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One by one, over three extraordinary scenes, Timon’s so-called friends refuse to help the man who has given them so much. Lucullus has the nerve to claim that Timon had it coming to him, and offers a far smaller amount than Timon had requested; Lucius is free with his promise, but when push comes to shove, pleads poverty; and Sempronius pretends to be offended that Timon did not come to him first – and then refuses him altogether.

In what seems to be an echo of the events of Titus Andronicus, Timon decides to get his revenge by inviting them all to dinner. But his approach will be far less grisly than his Roman counterpart, Titus, who as you recall famously baked a pie from the sons of his guest of honor. Timon decides to give his former friends food for thought instead: serving them bowls full of stones and warm water, he shouts, “Uncover, dogs, and lap”:

May you a better feast never behold,

You knot of mouth-friends. Smoke and lukewarm water

In your perfection. This is Timon’s last,

Who, stuck and spangled with your flattery,

Washes it off, and sprinkles in your faces

Your reeking villainy.

It is fitting that events come to a head at dinner, given that at the play’s previous feast – one sufficiently lavish enough to boast a chorus of dancing girls and a boy dressed as Cupid – the play’s resident cynic, Apemantus, had exclaimed: ‘O you gods, what a number of men eats Timon, and he sees ‘em not. It grieves me to see so many dip their meat in one man’s blood. (1.2.38-40)

As Timon’s situation worsens, images of cannibalism begin to reverberate in his language too. Though the bloody events of Titus are not repeated, his words continually hark back to the earlier tragedy – as well as to a tragedy narrowly averted, that of Antonio in The Merchant of Venice. Facing howling demands for his creditors’ “bills,” Timon offers the messenger nothing less than his body in repayment:

Timon:

Knock me down with ‘em, cleave me to the girdle.

Lucius’ Servant:

Alas, my lord.

Timon:

Cut my heart in sums.

Titus’ Servant:

Mine fifty talents.

Timon:

Tell out my blood.

Lucius’ Servant:

Five thousand crowns, my lord.

Timon:

Five thousand drops pays that.

If comparisons with Antonio seem obvious, for some critics read Timon’s betrayal by his so-called “friends” as nothing less than an analogy to Christ’s betrayal by Judas, especially given that images of them drinking his blood and eating his body seem to align nicely with the flesh-and-blood substance of the Christian Eucharist, which itself replays Christ’s final supper with his disciples. Other commentators however, (myself included) find it difficult to squeeze that much…nobility out of the situation, particularly given that Timon’s tragic mistake is, strictly speaking, his reluctance to confront the accountants.

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From Garber:

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Clik here to view.“The second act ends, finely, on this happy expectation [of getting help from his friends] which everything in the audience’s dramatic sense, even without knowledge of the historical Timon, will lead them to expect to fail.

And fail it does, spectacularly. The ‘busyness’ of these rich men and their oblivious self-absorption have something of the spirit of Ben Jonson’s comedies, just as the whole story of a good rich man surrounded by pretentious climbers has something in common with Jonson’s great country-house poem, ‘To Penshurst.’  The first three scenes of the third act present three man, all recently – and in our sight onstage – given lavish gifts by Timon, each turning away Timon’s embassy with excuses that are simultaneously comic and painful. Lucullus, hearing that one of Timon’s men is at the door, expects yet another gift – ‘I dreamt of a silver basin and ever tonight’ – and addresses the messenger in flirtatious terms: ‘And what hast thou there under thy cloak, pretty Flaminius?’ Told it is ‘nothing but an empty box,’ which Timon hopes he’ll fill with money, Lucullus instantly turns prig and scold: ‘Many a time and often I ha’ dined with him and told him on’t, and come again to supper to him of purpose to have him spend less.’ Business is business: ‘[T]his is no time to lend money, especially upon bare friendship without security.’ Lucullus tries to offer Flaminius a tip, or a bribe, to go away: ‘Here’s three solidares…[W]ink at me, and say thou saw’st me not’

The next encounter, with Lucius, is brilliantly conceived to show the quickwittedness that accompanies a complete lack of moral fiber. First Lucius expresses incredulity at the gossip about Timon (‘He cannot want for money;), then surprise at the news that Lucullus denied to help him (‘Denied that honourable man?…I should ne’er have denied his occasion). Then, when approached himself, he expresses disingenuous regret about ‘[h]ow unluckily it happened’ that he has managed not to have the funds on hand to help his friend: ‘[T]ell him this from me: I count it one of my greatest afflictions, say, that I cannot pleasure such an honourable gentleman.’ What makes the scene both more amusing and more pointed is the fact that Lucius, like Lucullus before him, has misperceived Timon’s emissary as someone who is bring gifts, not seeking them:

Servilus:

May it please your honour, my lord hath sent:

Lucius:

Ha! What has sent! I am so much endeared to that lord,

he’s ever sending. How shall I thank him, think’st thou? And

what has he sent now?

Servilius:

He’s only sent his present occasion now, my lord, requesting

your lordship to supply his instant use with so many talents.

As for the third ungrateful friend, Sempronius, his response is equally devastating and equally funny. This part of the play is Shakespeare at his social-satirical best. Why bother me? Sempronius begins by asking of Timon’s servant. Others have benefited from Timon’s lavishness, like Lucius, Lucullus, and Ventidius. ‘All these/Owe their estates unto him.’ Told that Timon has asked them, and that all three have ‘denied him’ (the echo of Christ and Peter cannot be completely accidental), Sempronius immediately mounts his high horse and demands to know why he is being approached only now: ‘Must I be his last refuge?’ If Timon had just asked him first, he says, he would happily have sent him three times what he is requesting. ‘And does he think so backwardly of me now/That I’ll requite it last? No.’ ‘No’ is of course the point here. These lords are experts at getting to no, by whatever route necessary. The rest of the act turns sharply colder as the creditors gather, presenting their bills to the steward and Timon, who have no money to pay them. Like Lear, Timon is ill-used by those to whom he has been generous. He has also, it seems clear, been unwise, not only in his choice of ‘friends’ but in his management of money. His generosity – like that of many patrons and philanthropists, of whatever era – has become not only a way of live but a self-definition and a self-justification. It is not entirely surprising that Timon, bereft of money and grateful hangers-on, should dwindle into a railing caricature, and then into a pair of epitaphs.

The four major characters of the play – Timon, Apemantus, Alcibiades, and the steward, Flavius – are compared and contrasted with one another in various ways. Like Timon, whom he counts as friend, Alcibiades finds himself at odds with Athens, though for political and pragmatic rather than ethical reasons. In act 3 he pleads with the Senators for clemency for an unnamed friend, in an oration that has been compared to Portia’s and Isabella’s eloquent pleas for mercy. The Senators, as befits their structural role as well as their nature, insist repeatedly, ‘We are for law; he dies.’ In the upshot, when Alcibiades persists in his suit, they banish him from the city, incurring his wrath in return: ‘[Banish me? /Banish your dotage, banish usury,/That makes the senate ugly.’ This intemperate rejoinder has something of Coriolanus in it (‘I banish you’ [Coriolanus 3.3.127]), and indeed the ‘Life of Alcibiades’ was partnered in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans with the ‘Life of Coriolanus.’ Each man, being banished, led an army against his own city. But Alcibiades is far more politic and judicious than Coriolanus, and less a suffering ‘tragic hero.’ He occupied the position in this play that is held in other tragedies by the political man who closes out the action: Octavius Caesar in Antony and Cleopatra, Aufidius in Coriolanus, Fortinbras in Hamlet, Richmond in Richard III, even Malcolm and Edgar in the final scenes of Macbeth and King Lear, respectively. Such a man, that is to say, is always ultimately a rationalist, even a compromiser when it suits his circumstances. Like Octavius and Aufidius, Alcibiades is not a tragic character – he will avoid suffering, rather than endure it, if he can. He not only survives the play, but speaks its last, conventional lines of mourning and recovery.

        Dead

Is noble Timon, of whose memory

Hereafter more. Bring me into your city,

And I will use the olive with my sword,

Make war breed peace, make peace stint war, make each

Prescribe to other as each other’s leech.

Let our drums strike.

(5.5.84-90)

Flavius, the steward, tries repeatedly to warn Timon against his fair-weather friends, who, like the elder daughters of King Lear, flatter him to his face and take his gifts, but turn against him, full of self-righteousness and self-justification, the minute he requires something of them. Once Timon has turned misanthrope and taken refuge in his cave, the steward will join him, declaring his fidelity to his master in a way that again recalls Kent’s fidelity to Lear:

Flavius:

I’ll follow and enquire him out.

I’ll serve his mind, with my best will,

Whilst I have gold I’ll be his steward still.

(4.2.49-51)

Timon, unlike Lear, remains resolute in his distaste for mankind, despite a variety of overtures (Alcibiades wants him to fight against Athens; the Senators want him to defend it). Ultimately he writes his own epitaph, which is declaimed, with suitable solemnity by Alcibiades to the Athenian Senators as they make their peace at the end of the play.

As for Apemantus, he, too, is a familiar Shakespearean type, closely akin to ‘philosophical’ or skeptical commentators like Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, Jaques in As You Like It, and even Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. Identified as a ‘churlish philosopher,’ Apemantus is often called a ‘dog’ in the text’ thus he is linked with the philosophical school of the Cynics (literally ‘doglike, currish,’ although the name came from that of the Athenian gymnasium, Cynosarges where this philosophy was taught). The omnipresence of dog imagery and dog language in this play (Painter to Apemantus: ‘You’re a dog’; Apemantus: ‘Thy mother’s of my generation’; Page to Apemantus: ‘Thou was whelped a dog, and thou shalt famish a dog’s death’; Timon to Apemantus; ‘I had rather be a beggar’s dog than Apemantus’, plus the frequent use of words like ‘bites,’ ‘fangs,’ etc. (the examples are too numerous to mention), is not only thematic, indicating a general tone of carnivorous destruction, nor merely an allusion to the Cynics, but also allegorical in the same veiled though ultimately discernible way that the name of Timon is allegorical. As the play’s tragic hero is a ‘man-hater,’ so the fool is a ‘dog.’ In fact, the many canine references applied to Apemantus the Cynic, starting as they do so early in the play, function as a kind of model or ‘control’ for the emergence of Timon, within the dramatic action, as a one-dimensional symbol of the qualities historians had already attached to him.

The design of the play is marked by telling repetitions: two banquets, two encounters with the Poet and the Painter, two sets of occasions on which Timon deals with his flattering friends. In each case the second event undoes any hope or optimism engendered by the first.

The first banquet is a sumptuous feast, its splendor resisted only by Apemantus, who sits alone at a separate table, and sees through the shallowness of the occasion:

I scorn thy meat, ‘Twould choke me, for I should ne’er flatter thee. O you gods, what a number of men eats Timon and he see ‘em not! It grieves me to see so many dip their meat in one man’s blood.

(1.2.37-40)

A masque and gifts given by the host to his guests complete the magnanimity of the occasion, which is marked by Timon’s unfailing courtesy and openhandedness. The second banquet, arranged after his requests for aid have been ingeniously rejected by his self-serving ‘friends,’ is quite the reverse. Cautioned by his steward that ht does not have enough money left ‘to furnish out/A moderate table’ Timon determines, nonetheless, that he will ‘once more feast the rascals.’ The blindly flattered flatterers, now assuring one another that they would have come to Timon’s assistance – ‘I am sorry when he sent to borrow of me that my provision was out’ – and that it is clear now he was only testing the, sit down to the ‘noble feast’ they confidently expect, only to have the dishes uncovered to reveal nothing but warm water and stones. ‘Uncover, dogs, and lap’ is Timon’s memorable invocation. His railing against the ‘knot of mouth-friends’ begins here in earnest, as they stumble out of the banquet hall, leaving behind their caps and gowns:

Most smiling, smooth, detested parasites,

Courteous destroyers, affable wolves, meek bears,

You fools of fortune, trencher-friends, time’s flies,

Cap-and-knee slaves, vapours, and minute-jacks!

In the next scene, the beginning of the fourth act, Timon has left Athens…”

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And finally, from Nuttall’s Shakespeare the Thinker:

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Clik here to view.“The connection with The Merchant of Venice is strong, but the link to King Lear is stronger still. I am assuming that King Lear is earlier than Timon of Athens, but the date of Timon is hard to fix. It could belong to 1604, the year of Measure for Measure, with King Lear following in 1605. When Lear says, ‘Our basest beggars/Are in the poorest thing superfluous’ (II, iv, 265-265), his thought flows from his grief at what he calls ingratitude in a way that modern audiences, again, usually miss. He has moved into the logic of the ‘grace’ nexus. The essence of grace is that it is superfluous to desert or requirement. When Alexander Pope wrote of the ‘nameless graces’ of poetry, he was setting aside the rational Augustan scheme he had set up in order to acknowledge the possibility of inexplicable splendours the scheme itself could never generate. The whole point of a gratuity to a waiter is that it be over and above the sum named on the restaurant bill. If play is allowed to speak to play, when Lear notes that even the poorest will have about them odd, gratuitous objects that are not valued solely for their efficacy in the practical business of survival, he counters one central drive of The Merchant of Venice, which is to suggest that grace is a luxury that only the rich can afford, something unavailable to the economic work-horses on whom Venice depends. ‘No,’ says Lear, ‘Such graces are the property of humanity, in whatever condition.’ Yet when Lear says later,

     Take physic, pomp,

Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,

Then mayst thou shake the superflux to them,

And show the heavens more just.

he implicitly assents to the claim of rational justice: that the extra wealth should be distributed not in pure, unsystematic freedom but in accordance with demonstrable need and desert. But of course Lear is here speaking at the level of the ethical, not the contractual. What shows in the word ‘just’ is that the scheme deemed contrary to cold justice, the scheme of grace, can lead us, as we move from contract to ethical desert, back to the claim of justice – now having high moral status! This is exactly the sequence played out in Timon of Athens.

In fact it looks as if Shakespeare’s mind must have passed from The Merchant of Venice to Measure for Measure before he wrote King Lear. In Measure for Measure Angelo offers the unlovable proposition that in practical life the rigorous application of punitive law may in the long run be more merciful (that is, may cause less pain) than the generous forgiveness the Duke has been freely granting to criminals. In King Lear the supremacy of unconditional charity is reasserted with even more power than Portia could give it in The Merchant of Venice. But to make the good, loving Cordelia the mouthpiece of quantified love, as she is when she says she will need so much love for husband, leaving so much for her father, is as disconcerting as it was to make the wicked, punitive Angelo the mouthpiece of practical mercy. Lear expects reciprocal gratitude after the gift of the kingdom to his three daughters at the beginning of the play. Goneril and Regan are like Timon’s false friends. They profess love but are insensible of any ethical obligation. They simply hang on to whatever they can get. Lear’s folly, we could say (as we said of Timon’s), ‘asked for it.’ This the King could have borne, but when Cordelia begins to ‘mathematize’ and hesitate, he snaps. Cordelia has perceived that the King’s free (though hierarchically ordered) generosity has become enmeshed in its predicable practical effect: the creation of a mercenary temper in the recipient. Political economists used to like to point out that charity pauperizes the supposed beneficiary. This also is like Timon of Athens. Cordelia is bewildered by her sudden apprehension of the dangerous social context, tries to resolve the matter by moving into the cooler medium of rationally demonstrable desert.  This makes her language uncomfortably similar to that employed by her sisters in their wholly destructive application of mathematics to human flesh and blood.

‘Grace’ normally refers to the initial act of generosity, but ‘Grace before meat’ is prayer of thanksgiving, the other side of the equation. This too get into Timon of Athens at III, v., 70-84, where the protagonist utters a parodic Grace. Man to God, giver to Giver, he warns the Supreme Being not to give, because the recipients will only despise the giver. He ends by asking God to destroy his creatures and by explaining that his own guests will be given no food at all: ‘In nothing bless them, and to nothing are they welcome.’

With these words Timon modulates from a parodic Grace into something even more shocking, a parodic Eucharist. It is entirely natural when staging this scene to place Timon in the center of the far side of a long table, with his guests on either side. Already the composition of innumerable Last Suppers, from Leonardo da Vinci and earlier to Luis Bunuel’s version in the film Viridiana (as savage as Shakespeare’s), is in place. This is Timon’s last supper and he is, as we think, on the point of inviting his guests to ‘take, eat,’ but then we hit – or are hit by – the word, ‘nothing.’ On this word, according to the Folio stage direction, ‘The dishes are uncovered and seen to be full of warm water.’ It is possible that the stage direction is incomplete and that the words ‘and stones’ should be added. As the terrified and embarrassed guests fall over each other in their haste to get their hats and coats and leave, one says, ‘One day he gives us diamonds, the next day stones.’ If Timon had indeed served them stones in water we have a reversal of Jesus’ words, ‘If a son should ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone?’ (Luke 11:11). These words follow closely on the passage in which Jesus teaches his disciples the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLWuiuMJV5o

‘Grace before meat’ is the giving of thanks for that physical sustenance God has given us in response to our prayer, ‘Give us this day…’ This elemental form can be seen in one of the Graces printed in The Primer set forth by the Kinges Majestie and his Clergie of 1545: ‘Most mightie lord and merciful father we yeld the hartie thankes for our bodily sustenance,’ but the prayer of simple thanksgiving immediately slides into a petitionary prayer for the grace of God (grace in its primary sense). Further conceptual contortions followed in later Graces, until we get, instead of ‘Thank you for this food,’ a plea to be made grateful (‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.’) Christian devotion is invaded by the convulsive neurosis proper to competitive courtesies among fallen human beings. In the original Last Supper, meanwhile, a more fundamental transposition of terms takes place, as the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, the host of the supper. Eucharist belongs to the ‘grace-gratitude’ nexus. In modern Greek eucharisto means ‘thank you.’ ‘Charity,’ we now see, belongs to the same family of terms.

The questions whether the body and blood of Christ are actually consumed by participants in the Mass or Holy Communion, or whether the whole business is to be understood figuratively, was a matter of hot contention in the sixteenth-century. The transition from ordinary bread and wine to Christ’s body can seem, especially in an Anglican context, a move to a higher plane. But the notion of eating one’s god and drinking his blood carries simultaneously a charge of barbarous magic. I am sure that Shakespeare was sensible of all these things. The heavily recurrent cannibalistic imagery of the play, joined as it is to the parodic Grace and Eucharist, presented as a great set-piece, must have the effect of sanitizing us to the primitive force latent in the doctrine. The most interesting instance is at 1.ii, 41. ‘So many dip their meat in one man’s blood.’ This evokes the moment in the Last Supper when Jesus dips the sop and passes it to the traitor, Judas (John 13:26). Nor is this the only one. ‘The fellow that sits next him, now parts bread with him…is the readiest man to kill him.’ (I, ii. 46-49) and ‘Who can call him/His friend that dips in the same dish? (III, ii, 46-49) keep the thought alive.

Does this mean that Timon is a Christ figure? G. Wilson Knight had no doubt about the matter. After all we have seen Angelo as a redeemer. Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice are not the only plays in which Shakespeare allows his mind to be engrossed by theology. If Timon is a Christ figure he is so, in a curiously trivial manner, in the first half of the play only; thereafter he becomes, as the hater of all mankind, an inverse Christ figure.  He is monumentally inconsistent, moving from witless love to insane loathing…Even in the first part of the play Timon’s bounty never seems Christlike. If he is crucified he is crucified as much by his society and his own stupidity as by treachery. Even in his final phase of total misanthropy he lacks moral grandeur. The phrase ‘inverted Christ’ might suggest a frightening devil, but that is not what we are given. Instead, the prolonged ranting begins to sound unreal in our ears. Perhaps, in the words of Albert Camus, he is ‘the only Christ we deserve.’”

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Our next reading;  Timon of Athens, Act Four

My next post:  Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning.

Enjoy.

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Timon of Athens

Act Four

By Dennis Abrams

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Clik here to view.Act Four:  Although his servants remain loyal to him, Timon is now driven insane with anger; he curses the city and its residents, and leaves to lives in the woods. While digging for roots in the forest, he discovers gold, but still remains implacable in his hatred – even when Alcibiades makes an appearance accompanied by two whores and offers to help him. Timon gives gold to Alcibiades for his campaign against Athens, and also to the whores, encouraging them to go forth and spread disease among the citizens. Timon is also visited by Apemantus, who insists that his misanthropy is just another kind of pride. Only the visit of Flavius manages to touch what remains of his humanity, but Timon even dismisses him.

Who’s to blame?  Timon’s view seems to be that is not his own behavior that was at fault, but money itself – a conclusion that is reinforced by a bitter irony, for when he tried digging the ground for roots toe at, he somehow (fairy tale here?) finds gold. Counting it out in his hands, he addresses what he calls the “yellow slave” in tones of wonder:

O, thou sweet king-killer, and dear divorce

‘Twist natural son and sire; thou bright defiler

Of Hymen’s purest bed; thou valiant Mars;

Thou ever young, fresh, loved, and delicate wooer,

Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow

That lies on Dian’s lap; thou visible god,

And mak’st them kiss, that speak’st with every tongue

To every purpose; O thou touch of hearts:

Think thy slave man rebels, and by thy virtue

Set them into confounding odds; that beasts

May have the world in empire.

I’ve read that Marx quoted Timon’s words in his early Political Economy and Philosophy (1844), describing the way in which money acts as “the universal whore…the alienation of human capacity” in early capitalist societies, but it is tempting to say that in doing so he missed (or more likely chose to ignore) Shakespeare’s larger suggestion. Timon diagnoses money as the root of all his troubles – the alienating effect of money, which perverts good things into evil – when in point of fact it is his alienation from himself and others that begins his downfall. Even while pouring scorn on the “sweet king-killer,” Timon is still unable to get away from its glittering allure. Blaming money for everything, just like giving vast amounts of it way, has no meaning: the 100% all or nothing attitude makes both acts meaningless. As Apemantus himself declares to Timon on a trip to the forest, “the middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extremity of both ends.”

In fact, Timon’s attack on money seems to be an expression of a terrible poverty of spirit. While Lear’s ravings (as we shall see), which express in a convoluted way the king’s own overwhelming guilt at his own personal failings, have a kind of savage grandeur, Timon’s ravings are passionate only in their absolute hatred of absolutely everything – with the important exception of himself. Handing gold to a group of thieves who come across his dean in the forest, he promises to “example you with thievery,” but his philosophy is sadly limited in its scope:

The sun’s a thief, and with his great attraction

Robs the vast sea. The moon’s an arrant thief,

And her pale fire she snatches from the sun.

The sea’s a thief, whose liquid surge resolves

The moon into salt tears. The earth’s a thief,

That feeds and breeds by a composture stol’n

From gen’ral excrement.

From Garber:

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Clik here to view.“In the next scene, the beginning of the fourth act, Timon has left Athens and, outside its walls, addresses the audience in a lengthy soliloquy of invective ending in a prayer: ‘[G]rant, as Timon grows, his hate may grow/To the whole race of mankind, high and low./Amen.’ Since the entire railing speech is an apostrophe of topsy-turvy instructions, and since Timon is alone on the stage, the recipients of his contempt are the spectators in the theater:

     Matrons, turn incontinent!

Obedience fall in children! Slaves and fools,

Pluck the grave wrinkled statue from the bench

And minister in their steads!

…………

     Maid, to thy master’s bed!

Thy mistress is o’th’ brothel. Son of sixteen,

Pluck the lined crutch from thy old limping sire;

With it beat out his brains!

As the speech continues, the personal turns general, and the spirit of Lear railing against the storm is joined with the tone of Ulysses’ speech on ‘degree’ (in Troilus and Cressida):

      Piety and fear,

Religion to the gods, peace, justice, truth,

Domestic awe, night rest, and neighborhood,

Instruction, manners, mysteries, and trades,

Degrees, observances, customs, and laws,

Decline to your confounding contraries,

And let confusion live!

Timon’s two chief encounters with Apemantus mark both the difference between these two characters and their points of intersection. At the feat in act 1 Apemantus, sitting apart, offers a grace that ends, prophetically, ‘Rich men sin, and I eat root.’ (1.2.70). As we will see, the opposition between ‘root’ and ‘rich,’ or, more specifically, between ‘root’ and ‘gold,’ will provide a chief imagistic narrative within the play.

Both gold and roots are products of the earth uncovered by digging. ‘Gold’ in its various senses is omnipresent in Shakespeare, although the use perhaps the most closely analogous to that in Timon of Athens comes in Romeo and Juliet, which begins with the mention of a woman who will not ‘ope her lap/To saint-seducing gold,’ moves on to an apothecary shop where gold and poison are equated, and ends with the extravagant and empty gesture of two gold statues raised in memory of the dead lovers. In folktales and fairy tales, and as, for example, in Chaucer’s ‘Pardoner’s Tale,’ those who seek gold – especially buried or hidden gold – often find death instead. (It is perhaps worth noting that the other well-known ‘digging scene’ in Shakespeare takes place in a graveyard, in Hamlet.) The cautionary tale of King Midas, who asked for the gift of turning everything he touched to gold and therefore almost starved to death, was told vividly in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Once he has left the city, Timon, digging for roots for sustenance, in a deeply ironic moment discovers gold, the last thing he wants:

     What is here?

Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?

No, gods, I am no idle votarist:

Roots, you clear heavens…

……………

This yellow slave

Will knit and break religions, bless th’ accursed,

Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves,

And give them title, knee, and approbation.

It is here that he sounds his most Lear-like, railing twice against ‘ingrateful man,’ invoking ‘tigers, dragons, wolves, and bears’ and ‘new monsters.’

To his cave will come, in steady succession, whores, bandits, and the Poet and the Painter, all hungry for the gold that cannot nourish them. (‘Believe’t that we’ll do anything for gold,’ says Alcibiades’ mistresses.) Timon will keep digging until he finds the ‘one poor root’ he seeks for food. The word ‘root’ is surprisingly omnipresent in the play, from the scene of the first feast, where Apemantus mentions it twice, to the digging scene (4.3), where Timon digs passionately in the earth, longing aloud (five times) for roots to eat. Unlike ‘gold,’ this is not a Shakespearean commonplace; ‘root’ appears more times in Timon than in any other play, and other uses tend to refer more metaphorically to history or to family trees. In the digging scene the two terms come emphatically together, as Timon, eating a root, is asked by Apemantus what news he would like borne back to Athens:

Timon:

Tell them there I have gold. Look, so I have.

Apemantus:

Here is no use for gold.

Timon:

The best and truest,

For here it sleeps and does no hired harm.

It may be that this ‘root’ symbolism is related in some way not only to the common theme of digging (and the opposition of humble and exalted, nature and artifice) but also to the hanging tree of the Timon story. In any case, it is Timon himself who will wind up ‘entomb’d’ at the end of the play.

When Timon, digging for sustenance, finds gold instead, he offers a rueful panegyric:

O, thou sweet king-killer, and dear divorce

‘Twist natural son and sire; thou bright defiler

Of Hymen’s purest bed; thou valiant Mars;

Thou ever young, fresh, loved, and delicate wooer,

Whose blush doth thaw the consecrated snow

That lies on Dian’s lap; thou visible god,

That sold’rest close impossibilities

And mak’st them kiss, that speak’st with every tongue

To every purpose; O thou touch of hearts:

Think thy slave man rebels, and by thy virtue

Set them into confounding odds, that beasts

May have the world in empire.

Apemantus’s pledge, ‘I’ll say thou’st gold./Thou wilt be thronged to shortly,’ immediately comes true, as a group of outlaws, or ‘bandits,’ tries to come to steal it. ‘Where should he have this gold?’ asks one. ‘It is noised he hath a mass of treasure,’ another replied. These are lower-class versions of the Senators and suitors who swarmed around Timon in the beginning of the play, but they are more direct, and, oddly, more honourable: ‘We are not thieves, but men that much do want.’ Timon tries to persuade them that nature possesses sufficient bounty: ‘Behold, the earth hath roots./Within this mile break forth a hundred springs.’ When they protest, ‘We cannot live on grass, on berries, on water,/As beasts and birds and fishes,’ he faces them down with the same charge of cannibalism that Apemantus had leveled at the lordly flatterers in the court. ‘[W]hat a number of men eats Timon, and he sees ‘em not!’ Apamentus had said, scorning the meat at the feast, and now Timon echoes him to the bandits, noting that they are not content to eat even the birds, beasts, and fishes, much less the roots and berries: ‘You must eat men.’

Timon sees clearly, as should audience, that the bandits are less venal and less self-deceiving than the rich men: ‘Yet thanks I must you con/That you are thieves professed, that you work out/In holier shapes.’ And when he gives them gold, together with a ringing lecture about how ‘[e]ach thing’s a thief,’ from the laws to the sun, moon, and earth, concluding, ‘Steal no less for this I give you,/And gold confound you howsoe’er. Amen,’ they contemplate the same kind of conversion as the one effected by the eloquent virgin Marina among the brothel-goers in Pericles. ‘He’s almost charmed me from my profession,’ says one, and another says, ‘I’ll believe him as an enemy, and give over my trade.’ Although at leas tone editor prefers to regard these declarations as ironic (‘Shakespeare can hardly have wanted at this stage of the play to give a repentant thief the last word;), it seems to me that the contrast between the dishonest, self-blinded noble thieves of the first half of the play and the self-aware and threadbare bandits of the fourth act makes a key point.

No sooner do they exit than the loyal steward, Flavius, enters, seeking his master as Kent sought Lear in the storm:

Flavius:

O you gods!

Is yon despised and ruinous man my lord,

Full of decay and failing? O monument

And wonder of good deeds evilly bestowed!

Timon’s recognition of the steward as ‘[o]ne honest man,’ and his ironic recognition that the one honest man is a steward, who manages the money and estates of another, moves naturally – once he has sent Flavius away, rejecting his company and comfort – into the second embassy of the Poet and the Painter, again come in search of ‘gold’ from their former patron (‘[o]ur late noble master’), and ironically addressed by Timon as ‘honest men’ over and over again, eight times in thirty lines. Again the satire against patronage is savage. This time, instead of actual works of art, these workmen come bearing nothing but promises. They have learned that ‘intent’ always looks better than the product itself.”

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Clik here to view.And finally, from Harold Bloom.  Now, Bloom isn’t the biggest fan of this play, “As Bloom Brontosaurus Bardolater, an archaic survival among Shakespearean critics, I do not hesitate to find an immense personal bitterness in Timon of Athens, including a fierce animus against sexual indulgence. Timon, when he raves to Alcibiades’ whores, is outrageously obsessed with venereal infection, as Pandarus was in the Epilogue to Troilus and Cressida. There is an excessive fury that pervades Timon of Athens, a near-madness that transcends Timon’s outrage at ingratitude…the play in some crucial aspects is an open wound,” but his analysis of Act Four is very much worth reading.

“Timon is the most vivid cartoon in his play, and almost the only one who matters. There is his faithful steward, Flavius, Apemantus the Cynic, described in the list of characters as ‘a churlish philosopher’; and there is Alcibiades, much diminished from his appearances in Plato and in Plutarch. All the rest are sycophants, flatters, and whores; not even Macbeth so centers his drama as Timon does. Coriolanus lacks inwardness, but not in comparison with Timon, who lacks not less than everything until he cascades into his first rage in Act III, Scene iv, when he instructs his steward to invite all the flatters, leeches, and false friends to a final feast, which will consist of lukewarm water and stones in covered dishes. After throwing the water in the faces of his guests and pelting them out with stones, Timon at last touches a rancorous eloquence in his farewell to Athens:

Timon:

O blessed breeding sun, draw from the earth
Rotten humidity; below thy sister’s orb
Infect the air! Twinn’d brothers of one womb,
Whose procreation, residence, and birth,
Scarce is dividant, touch them with several fortunes;
The greater scorns the lesser: not nature,
To whom all sores lay siege, can bear great fortune,
But by contempt of nature.
Raise me this beggar, and deny ‘t that lord;
The senator shall bear contempt hereditary,
The beggar native honour.
It is the pasture lards the rother’s sides,
The want that makes him lean. Who dares, who dares,
In purity of manhood stand upright,
And say ‘This man’s a flatterer?’ if one be,
So are they all; for every grise of fortune
Is smooth’d by that below: the learned pate
Ducks to the golden fool: all is oblique;
There’s nothing level in our cursed natures,
But direct villany. Therefore, be abhorr’d
All feasts, societies, and throngs of men!
His semblable, yea, himself, Timon disdains:
Destruction fang mankind! Earth, yield me roots!

This is so sublimely outrageous as to cross over into the grotesque, as Shakespeare clearly recognizes. The satire begins to bite backwards, against Timon and his creator, when we hear the exuberant suggestion that the dimpled babe be minded ‘sans remorse.’ Shakespeare is not done with us, and returns to Timon’s horror of sexuality. After urging Alcibiades’ camp followers to ‘be whores still,’ Timon surpasses himself with a litany of venereal invective that makes me believe, with the late Anthony Burgess, that Shakespeare had endured something of this:

Timon:

Consumptions sow
In hollow bones of man; strike their sharp shins,
And mar men’s spurring. Crack the lawyer’s voice,
That he may never more false title plead,
Nor sound his quillets shrilly: hoar the flamen,
That scolds against the quality of flesh,
And not believes himself: down with the nose,
Down with it flat; take the bridge quite away
Of him that, his particular to foresee,
Smells from the general weal: make curl’d-pate
ruffians bald;
And let the unscarr’d braggarts of the war
Derive some pain from you: plague all;
That your activity may defeat and quell
The source of all erection. There’s more gold:
Do you damn others, and let this damn you,
And ditches grave you all!

This hymn to syphilis is unmatched and unmatchable. Wilson Knight, carried away by a visionary enthusiasm, commends ‘the unity of his curses: he is violently antagonized by human health, bodily or social,’ Much as I still revere Wilson Knight, I blink in astonishment, and I would hope that Shakespeare also, whatever his possible agony, mastered this madness by expressing it so magnificently. In the power of Timon’s utterance, we are halfway between scourging prophecy and self-satire, but that is Timon’s perpetual dilemma, and the expressive genius of this extreme drama. Lear’s curses, even at their wildest, maintained a certain royal decorum. Timon is beyond any restraints, social or political, and he has no inwardness to check him. What can we do with such hatred, particularly when Shakespeare has done nothing to foreground or otherwise account for Timon’s zeal against sexuality? All of us doubtless respond to the denunciations of the crooked lawyer, and the false priest (flamen), and braggart nonsoldiers, but the graphic reductions of syphilis seem disproportionate to the sin of ingratitude. Shakespeare does little to distance us, or himself, from Timon. Alcibiades, although an honourable enough soldier, is certainly one of Shakespeare’s failures of representation, the charisma of Socrates’ would-be lover is never located by Shakespeare. Where we might expect an Athenian Prince Hal or at least a Hotspur, we get an earnest plodder. That leaves only the Cynic philosopher Apemantus, but he also fails to inspire Shakespeare to much zest. Apemantus arrives, in order to see for himself whether Timon has become a true Cynic or merely a complainer. Wit deserts Shakespeare, as these two codgers rail away at each other, making us long for Rosalind, whom Apemantus parodies by offering Timon a medlar:

Apemantus:

The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the
extremity of both ends: when thou wast in thy gilt
and thy perfume, they mocked thee for too much
curiosity; in thy rags thou knowest none, but art
despised for the contrary. There’s a medlar for
thee, eat it.

Timon:

On what I hate I feed not.

Apemantus:

 Dost hate a medlar?

Timon:

Ay, though it look like thee.

Apemantus:

An thou hadst hated meddlers sooner, thou shouldst
have loved thyself better now. What man didst thou
ever know unthrift that was beloved after his means?

Timon:

Who, without those means thou talkest of, didst thou
ever know beloved?

Apemantus:

Myself.

Timon:

I understand thee; thou hadst some means to keep a
dog.

Apemantus:

What things in the world canst thou nearest compare
to thy flatterers? 

Timon:

Women nearest; but men, men are the things
themselves.

This is the height of their exchanges, which decline into shouting insults at each other. This has a certain liveliness on the stage, but yields little as language or insight.”

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So…what do you all think so far?  Is the play little seen/read/performed for a reason?  Or is there more here than meets the eye?

Our next reading:  Timon of Athens, Act Five

My next post:  Thursday evening/Friday morning.

Enjoy.

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Timon of Athens

Act Five

By Dennis Abrams

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Clik here to view.Act Five:  The Poet and the Painter head out to the forest in hope of payment, but Timon drives them away. By this time Alcibiades is threatening Athens itself, and two Senators, accompanied by Flavius, turn to Timon in the hope that he can help. But Timon, only dream of death, is unmoved, and states that he does not care if the city is destroyed. As Alcibiades enters Athens, the senators plead with him to spare the innocent, and he agrees to punish only his enemies as well as those of Timon’s. As the gates of the city are opened to him, news arrives that Timon has died (conveniently offstage); leaving an epitaph that curses his enemies and exhorts all others to pass by and ignore the gravestone in front of them.

Timon, perhaps alone among Shakespeare’s gallery of “heroes” doesn’t learn or change.  Longing for death, he neither repents nor acknowledges his mistakes.  How can he? All that is left for him is a curse, as his self-written epitaph records: ‘Here likes a wretched corpse,” it begins,

   ‘Of wretched soul bereft.

Seek not my name. A plague consume

   You wicked caitiffs left!

Here lie I, Timon, who alive

   All living men did hate.

Pass by and curse thy fill, but pass

  And stay not here thy gait.

So, while the play might be structured like a traditional morality play, in the end, Timon of Athens denies that there is anything to learn.

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From Garber:

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Clik here to view.Ultimately, Timon is a play not only about philanthropy and misanthropy, but also about the use and abuse of patronage. The word ‘patron’ derives ultimately from the same word as ‘father’ (Latin pater), and originally it denoted someone who stood to others in a relationship analogous to that of a father – that is, as a protector and defender. (Our word ‘pattern,’ for an exemplar or model is related to this: thus Lear says he will be the ‘pattern of all patience.’) The classical use of patronus, ‘patron,’ in Roman antiquity influenced the sense, common in the early seventeenth century, of a patron as one who accepted the dedication of a book, and led to our modern concept of a ‘patron of the arts.’ One contrast between King Lear and Timon of Athens is that the paternal-patron Lear and the arts-patron Timon, though they are addressed in very similar ‘ingrateful’ terms by those who benefit from their generosity, are seen from a modern perspective to be owed something different by daughters and by protégés.  Thus sentiments that sound both heartless and tragic when spoken by Goneril and Regan in King Lear take on, in Timon, a discomfiting air of satirical comedy in the mouths of the flattering lords Lucius, Lucullus, and Sempronius.

The epistle dedicatory to the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, addressed to Shakespeare’s friends and colleagues John Heminge and Henry Condell to the Earls of Pembroke and Montgomery, observes with customary praise, ‘There is a great difference, whether any book choose his patrons, or find them: This hath done both.’ Their purpose, Heminge and Condell say, is ‘only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend, and fellow, alive, as was our Shakespeare, by humble offer of his plays, to your most noble patronage.’ Heminge and Condell invoke as well the older sense of the patron as paternal protector, referring to the plays, significantly, as ‘orphans’ left behind by the death of their author-father: ‘We have but collected them, and done an office to the dead, to procure his orphans, guardians, without ambition either of self-profit, or fame.’ It is a matter of some small interest, perhaps, that at this moment in the history of the English language the word ‘patron’ was in the spirit of nascent capitalism, being extended to what we would today call ‘customers’ or ‘clients,’ so that Ben Jonson’s Volpone, disguised as a mountebank, or charlatan, addresses a crowd of potential purchasers as ‘most noble gentlemen, and my worthy patrons!’ By the time of Timon, the word was thus in use to describe both a noble benefactor and a mercantile consumer. The First Folio, with its separate invocation to ‘the great variety of readers’ to ‘buy it first…whatever you do, buy,’ is poised at the moment of this dichotomy, with two prefatory letters, one addressed to noble patrons, the other to potential purchasers (‘the fate of all books depends upon your capacities, and not of your heads alone, but of your purses’). Something of the same tension, and the same anxiety, can be found in Timon.

Timon’s epitaph, significantly, cannot be read by the simple soldier who first discovers it, presumably because the inscription is in another language (either Latin, the language of many early modern tomb inscriptions, or Greek). The Soldier therefore determines to take the ‘character,’ or writing, in a wax impression and bring it to Alcibiades, ‘[a]n aged interpreter, though young in days.’ Thus the stage is set for the play’s final moments, in which the Senators ask clemency from Alcibiades and his troops; he answers in tones of mild and equitable justice – ‘Those enemies of Timon’s and mine own/Whom you yourselves shall set out for reproof/Fall, and no more’ – and he reads aloud, to the audience of Senators on the city walls and patrons in the theater, Timon’s angry two-part epitaphs: ‘Seek not my name; ‘Here lie I, Timon.’ It is Alcibiades, the ‘[n]oble and young’ captain who has the final words, Alcibiades who has custody of Timon’s story and his reputation, ‘of whose memory/Hereafter more.’ He is, at the last, both pattern and patron, replacing – as we see so often at the ends of Shakespeare’s tragedies – something like greatness with something like efficiency.”

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From Bloom:

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Clik here to view.“Fortunately, Shakespeare rallies to grant Timon two final excursions into eloquence before his apparently self-willed and mysterious death. The first is his last benediction for Athens:

Come not to me again; but say to Athens,

Timon hath made his everlasting mansion

Upon the beached verge of the salt flood,

Who only a day with his embossed froth

The turbulent surge shall cover. Thither come,

And let my grave-stone be your oracle.

Lips, let four words go by and language end;

What is amiss, plague, and infection mend!

Graves only be men’s works and death their gain;

Sun, hide thy beams, Timon hath done his reign.

The two epitaphs Timon writes for himself are useless doggerel in contrast to that. When Cordelia and Lear die, we are more moved than Dr. Johnson could tolerate. Timon’s vanishing rests our ears, in our out of the theater. Shakespeare, a great self-critic, probably made an aesthetic judgment upon this play, and so dismissed it as largely unworthy of him. Perhaps he glanced back at the best lines spoken by the Poet at the play’s start:

Our poesy is a gum which oozes

From whence ‘tis nourish’d. The fire i’ th’ flint

Shows not till it be struck.

Not enough of the fire of poetry is shown to redeem Timon of Athens from its furies. It was time for Shakespeare to embark [MY NOTE:  Assuming, as Bloom does, that it’s a much later play than I’ve placed it] upon the ‘unpath’d waters, undreamed shores,’ of his final, visionary phase.”

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And from Nuttall:

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Clik here to view.“When Timon tells his guests he is giving them nothing, we may think of Cordelia’s more frightening ‘Nothing,’ the key word of King Lear. Timon really is a kind of nobody. It may be that pure negation, as distinct from the slow approach to negation, is un-dramatizable. The approach to nothingness is exciting, but nothingness itself is boring and featureless. Even Hamlet, unmanned though he was by an enervating darkness within, was able to embark on the strenuous business of filling the inner void with fictive, histrionic ‘selves’; ‘the joker,’ ‘the bloody avenger,’ and so on. Lear is broken down and dies in error, but he dies on a loving error. ‘Love survives’ is, I suppose, a cliché, but at the end of King Lear it is no cliché. But Timon in the wilderness is thoroughly dehumanized. Aristotle said that the unsocial man is either a god or a beast (Politics, 1253a). Coriolanus is unsocial and is an artificial god-man operated by his mother. Timon, having turned his back on society, is a beast. He can still talk but he uses language only to curse. This is tedious, but it is necessitated by the strong intellectual form of the drama.

It may be an accident arising from the unfinished character of the text before us, but this boring sub-man in one way embodies a more perfect negation than any other figure in Shakespeare. What I mean is that he simply vanishes. We do not see him die as we see Lear die. As with the visual field as Wittgenstein described it, there is the visible Timon, and then elsewhere, later, there is no Timon. The eye cannot check the line between them any more than it can check the border of the visual field. Timon of Athens has an oddly Greek feel to it. We seem to be looking at figures in profile, in a frieze. The pattern of a hero humiliated to whom come, in succession, various figures soliciting his aid can be seen in Sophocles’ Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus, in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound

(if the play is indeed his), and, after Shakespeare’s death, in Milton’s ultra-Greek Samson Agonistes. Timon of Athens is conspicuously frigid from the opening paragone, or ‘contest of the arts.’ Instead of dying Timon dissolves, and then re-forms as a succession of monuments, recording his strange tick-tock life. Imagery of dissolution runs through the play. Perhaps this is enough to justify the inference that the mysterious ending is deliberate. Even the letters incised in stone on the surviving monument are transferred as we watch to a softer medium, as the passing soldier takes their impression in wax. When the good servant departs, he goes ‘into this sea of air.’ Later Timon says, addressing himself,

Then, Timon, prepare thy grave;

Lie where the light form of the sea may beat

Thy grave-stone daily.

Later still he says,

     say to Athens,

Timon hath made his everlasting mansion

Upon the beached verge of the salt flood,

Who once a day with his embossed froth

The turbulent surge shall cover.

Timon’s identity dislimns. It merges first with stone and then with the eroding sea and air. If he remains he remains only in his epitaph – as words. Notoriously it is difficult to set up a murder trial if there is no body as central exhibit. In like manner it is hard to have a tragedy in which the protagonist, as physical being, slips through our fingers before the end comes. The generic status of Timon of Athens is a puzzle.  Is it a tragedy?  It is the strangest of Shakespeare’s plays.”

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And finally, Harold Goddard’s concluding thoughts:

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Clik here to view.“Whether by choice or because the last scenes lacked revision, the main point of the play is left so merely intimated that the majority of readers miss it entirely. Yet nothing is really in doubt. An illiterate soldier brings an impression in wax of the epitaph Timon wrote for himself. Alcibiades reads it, and then utters the moving words that conclude the play:

These well express in thee thy latter spirits:

Though thou abhorr’dst in our human griefs,

Scorn’dst our brain’s flow and those our droplets which

From niggard nature fall, yet rich conceit

Taught thee to make vast Neptune weep for aye

On thy low grave, on faults forgiven. Dead

Is noble Timon, of whose memory

Hereafter more. Bring me into your city,

And I will use the olive with my sword,

Make ward breed peace, make peace stint war, make each

Prescribe to other as each other’s leech.

Let our drums strike.

Timon is dead. But the spirit of the rarer Timon (how mistake it? the very accent is the same) has passed into Alcibiades and, in the teeth of the mad Timon’s misanthropy, has brought peace to Athens. ‘He has almost charmed me from my profession,’ the Third Thief confessed to the living Timon. The dead Timon has the same effect, even more powerfully, on this professional warrior and revenger. Alcibiades’ ‘occupation’s gone.’

Timon in the first part of the play was a deluded and foolish man, and in the last half a wild and frenzied one. But he was a lover of truth and sincerity. And the play seems to say that such a man, though buried in the wilderness, is a better begetter of peace than all the instrumentalities of law in the hands of men who love neither truth or justice.”

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So…that’s it for Timon of Athens.  What did you all think?  Better than you expected?  Worse?  Share your questions and thoughts with the group!

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My next posts:

Sunday evening/Monday morning:  Sonnet #137

Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning:  My introduction to our next play (and it’s one of the big ones):  Macbeth

Enjoy.  And enjoy your weekend.

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Macbeth

An Introduction

By Dennis Abrams

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Clik here to view.It’s Shakespeare’s shortest tragedy.  And his darkest.  But more than 400 years after it was written, it still retains its ability to shock.  “The Scottish Play,” as it is superstitiously known in the theater, is attached by longstanding tradition all number and manner of unlucky events – quite apart from those in the script which are, let’s face it, more than brutal enough.

The play was probably written to honor King James VI of Scotland, who in 1603 took over the English throne and whose ancestor Banquo appears in the play as the most honorable of Macbeth’s victims. But the tragedy itself refuses to be simply in terms of black and white; while Othello’s evil is found in the temper Iago, in Macbeth the hero steadily becomes the villain and our ethical compass (assuming we have one of course) is forced to recalibrate as a result.  So too with the merciless Lady Macbeth, who despite being in many ways the most fearsome (and notorious) character of all (far more so than her husband) ends up being a victim of the play, her sanity broken by the horrifying march of events.  And while many great productions (including Trevor Nunn’s famous 1976 version at the RSC with Ian McKellan and Judi Densch) have responded well to this unique tragedy’s otherworldly and eerie aspects, the play itself never lets us forget that the demons we conjure ourselves are the ones we need to fear the most.  The clergyman George Gifford wrote in his Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraft (1593), ‘the power of devils is in the hearts of men.”

DATE

From the play’s internal evidence – notably a somewhat cryptic reference to the trial of the Gunpowder Plot conspirators – Macbeth was probably first performed in 1606, around the time that Antony and Cleopatrawas written.

And here I’m going out almost on my own.  Most of the chronologies of Shakespeare’s plays place King Lear before Macbeth, which is then followed by Antony and Cleopatra.  So why are we reading Macbeth first?  First of all, these three plays were, and this fact astonishes me no matter how often I think about it, written within a year and a half of each other, so matters of chronology here really aren’t that big a consideration.

But more than that I have to agree with Harold Goddard who wrote:  “Macbeth and King Lear were so nearly contemporary that the question of their exact dates is not of overwhelming importance. It is psychological development, not chronology, that counts. And the two are not the same. We frequently go back in going forward. There are eddies in the stream. Ascent and descent are not continuous. We may go down temporarily in climbing a mountain. The child often resembles a grandparent more than he does either father or mother, and there is a similar alternation of generations in the world of art. Because one work is full of echoes of another does not prove that it must have immediately succeeded it. The likeness of Macbeth to Hamlet is no obstacle to the belief that Othello came between them, nor that of King Lear to Othello to the possibility that Macbeth may have intervened.

But somehow the idea that King Lear was written before Macbeth seems to involve more than this. It is a bit like thinking that The Brothers Karamazov was written before Crime and Punishment. The analogy is not a casual one. Macbeth, like Crime and Punishment, is a study of evil through a study of murder. Each is its author’s most rapid, concentrated, terrific, and possibly sublime work. Each is a prolonged nightmare lifted into the realm of art. King Lear and The Brothers Karamazov are also studies of evil; but if they sound no lower depths, they do climb to greater heights than Macbeth and Crime and Punishment…”

And as Bloom says in The Western Canon:  “For many readers the limits of human art are touched in King Lear, which with Hamlet seems to be the height of the Shakespearean canon. My own preference is for Macbeth, where I never get over my shock at the play’s ruthless economy, its way of making every speech, every phrase count. Still, Macbeth has only the one huge character, and even Hamlet is so dominated by its hero that all the lesser figures are blinded (as we are) by his transcendent brilliance. Shakespeare’s power of individualization is strongest in King Lear and, oddly enough, in Measure for Measure, two plays in which there are no minor characters. With Lear, we are at the center of centers of canonical excellence, as we are in particular cantos of the Inferno or the Purgatorio, or in a Tolstoyan narrative like Hadji Murad. Here, if anywhere, the flames of invention burn away all context and grant us the possibility of what could be called primal aesthetic value, free of history and ideology and available to whoever can be educated to read and view it.”

And that’s why we’re reading Macbeth first.

SOURCES

Raphael Holinshed’s massive Chronicles (revised in 1587) provided Shakespeare with the story of Macbeth and Duncan, as well as other material. George Buchanan’s Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582) possibly offered further information, and Matthew Gwynne’s pageant Tres Sibyllae (performed for James I in 1605) has, albeit tenuously, been linked with Macbeth,

TEXTS

Only the Folio version (1623) survives.

From Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare:  The Invention of the Human:

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Clik here to view.“Theatrical tradition has made Macbeth the unluckiest of all Shakespeare’s plays, particularly for those who act in it. Macbeth himself can be termed the unluckiest of all Shakespearean protagonists, precisely because he is the most imaginative. A great killing machine, Macbeth is endowed by Shakespeare with something less than ordinary intelligence, but with a power of fantasy so enormous that pragmatically it seems to be Shakespeare’s own. No other drama by Shakespeare – not even King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Tempest – so engulfs us in a phantasmagoria. The magic in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest is crucially effectual, while there is no overt magic or witchcraft in King Lear, though we sometimes half expect it because the drama is of such hallucinatory intensity.

The witchcraft in Macbeth, though pervasive, cannot alter material events, yet hallucination can and does. The rough magic in Macbeth is wholly Shakespeare’s; he indulges his own imagination as never before, seeking to find its moral limits (if any). I do not suggest that Macbeth represents, Shakespeare, in any of the complex ways that Falstaff and Hamlet may represent certain inner aspects of the playwright. But in the Renaissance sense of imagination (which is not ours), Macbeth may well be the emblem of that faculty in Shakespeare, a faculty that must have frightened Shakespeare and out to terrify us, when we read or attend Macbeth, for the play depends upon its horror of its own imaginings. Imagination (or fancy) is an equivocal matter for Shakespeare and his era, where it meant both poetic furor, as a kind of substitute for divine inspiration, and a gap torn in reality, almost a punishment for the displacement of the sacred into the secular. Shakespeare somewhat mitigates the negative aura of fantasy in his other plays, but not in Macbeth, which is a tragedy of the imagination. Though the play triumphantly proclaims, ‘The time is free,’ when Macbeth is killed, the reverberations we cannot escape as we leave the theater or close the book have little to do with our freedom.

Hamlet dies into freedom, perhaps even augmenting our own liberty, but Macbeth’s dying is less of a release for us. The universal reaction to Macbeth is that we identify with him, or at least with his imagination. Richard III, Iago, and Edmund are hero-villains; to call Macbeth one of that company seems all wrong. They delight in their wickedness, Macbeth suffers intensely from knowing that he does evil, and that he must going on doing ever worse. Shakespeare rather dreadfully sees to it that we are Macbeth; our identity with him is involuntary but inescapable. All of us possesses, to one degree or another, a proleptic imagination, in Macbeth, it is absolute. He scarcely is conscious of an ambition, desire, or wish before he sees himself on the other side or shore, already having performed that crime that equivocally fulfills ambition. Macbeth terrifies us partly because that aspect of our imagination is so frightening: it seems to make us murders, thieves, usurpers, and rapists.

Why are we unable to resist identifying with Macbeth? He so dominates his play that we have nowhere else to turn. Lady Macbeth is a powerful character, but Shakespeare gets her off the stage after Act III, Scene iv, except for her short return in a state of madness at the start of Act V. Shakespeare had killed off Mercutio early to keep him from stealing Romeo and Juliet, and had allowed Falstaff only a reported death scene so as to prevent Sir John from dwarfing the ‘reformed’ Hal in Henry V. Once Lady Macbeth has been removed, the only real presence on the stage is Macbeth’s. Shrewdly, Shakespeare does little to individualize Duncan, Banquo, Macduff, and Malcolm. The drunken porter, Macduff’s little son and Lady Macduff are more vivid in their brief appearances than are all the secondary males in the play, who are wrapped in a common grayness. Since Macbeth speaks fully a third of the drama’s lines, and Lady Macbeth’s role is truncated, Shakespeare’s design upon us is manifest. We are to journey inward to Macbeth’s heart of darkness, and there we will find ourselves more truly and more strange, murderers in and of the spirit.”

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From Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare After All:

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Clik here to view.“The play is about transgressions and witches, unleashed powers that have, as theatrical events unfold, already crossed the threshold into the supposedly safe space of the stage. Any idea the audience may have had that events onstage would act as a safety valve, a buffer, or a social astringent, drawing out the poison, making things happen onstage so that they do not have to happen offstage in our ‘real’ world and lives, has already been challenged in a Shakespearean context by the unintended murder of Polonius in Hamlet. Safely stowed, as he thought, on the other side of the arras, or curtain, and thus situated as ‘spectator’ rather than participant or combatant, Polonius is stabbed by a nervous Hamlet when he breaks the code of silence that is enjoined on audience members. He cries out. Hamlet thinks he may be ‘the King,’ and the watcher and auditor becomes actor and victim.

This border crossing takes many forms in Shakespearean drama, some of them ameliorative rather than (or as well as) dangerous. The epilogue of certain plays – As You Like It, The Tempest, Henry V – reach across the boundaries of the stage to engage the audience in the theater as empowering actors, co-conspirators, or forces of cultural memory. In Macbeth, though, the border crossing comes, significantly, at the beginning and throughout the play as well as at its close. And this is no conventional ‘induction,’ like the opening of The Taming of the Shrew or the first scene of Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, settling a frame audience on the stage to observe and comment on the ensuing action.

Macbeth begins with witches. Before the inception of the play proper, before the audience is introduced to the title character or any of the Scottish nobility or soldiery, the stage is overtaken by creatures from another world. But who are these ‘witches,’ as they are usually called? Are they male? Female? Real or imaginary? Benevolent or wicked? Are they, indeed, supernatural, or they merely old Scottish ladies with a curious rhyming dialect of speech? Critics from Shakespeare’s time to ours have debated whether they are ‘English,’ ‘Scottish,’ or ‘Continental’ witches – this last category, as we will see, conventionally regarded as the most malevolent, powerful, and dangerous. In fact, only once in the actual spoken text of the play is one of them called a witch, and that is in an account of an offstage moment – the rude refusal of a sailor’s wife to share her chestnuts: ‘Anoint thee, witch,’ the rump-fed runnion cries’ (1.3-5). This injudicious act calls upon a curse upon the woman’s husband, the ‘pilot’ of a ship rather than of state.

Usually, however, the witches in Macbeth are called not ‘witches’ but ‘weird sisters.’ Wyrd is the Old English word for ‘fate,’ and these are, in a way, classical witches as well as Scottish or Celtic ones, Fates as well as Norns. The Three Fates of Greek mythology were said to spin, apportion, and cut the thread of man’s life. But the Macbeth witches are not merely mythological beings, nor merely historical targets of vilification and superstition: on the stage, and on the page, they have a persuasive psychological reality of their own.

In part the play owes its witches to King James I, first James VI of Scotland and then, succeeding Queen Elizabeth I, king of both countries. James, since 1603 the protector of Shakespeare’s company (renamed in his honor the King’s Men), was a scholar or witches and witchcraft, the author of a book called Daemonologie (1597). The play was performed in front of him and probably at his request, and the presence of witches in the play, as well as the Scottish locale and (adjusted) Scottish history, acknowledges his interests and underscores his power. James’ Daemonologie is one of several key texts on witches and their craft that would have influenced the contemporary view. The earlier Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches (1484), was, in effect, a professional manual for witch-hunting, while Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) offered an expose of witch-hunters, claiming that witchcraft did not exist (the word ‘discovery,’ here as in ‘discovery space,’ for the area at the rear of the stage, means ‘exposure’ or ‘revelation.’ It survived today in legal discourse, where ‘discovery’ pertains to the pretrial interrogation of witnesses in search of salient facts.) Continental witches, according to these various accounts, engaged in practices like cannibalism, the ritual murder of infants, and perverse sexual relations with demons (all activities, we might note in anticipation, that will be displaced onto the ‘real’ figure of Lady Macbeth). These witches are said to fly, to hold witches’ Sabbaths, and to be seriously malign and powerful. Local English and Scottish witches, by contrast, had less reach. They were often described as retaliatory, exacting retribution for wrongdoing. Their activities were part of a folk culture of superstation and mysterious agency, regional rather than national, pagan rather than Christian – and, at least to a certain extent, female rather than male.

There is another dimension to James I’s relationship to powerful or empowered women of which it may be useful to take brief note here, since we will return to it when we come to an extended discussion of Lady Macbeth. James was the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, who was imprisoned in England for nearly twenty years and then executed, in 1587, for her supposed complicity in a plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. James, the son of one of these queens and the designated heir of the other, made only a perfunctory protest at Mary’s execution. Somewhere behind the dominant figure of King James, whose image is everywhere in Macbeth, lie the shadows of these strong female figures, ‘mothers’ and queens, with their inescapable aura and their evident power over his life, his fate, and his future.”

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From G. Wilson Knight’s The Wheel of Fire:

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Clik here to view.Macbeth is Shakespeare’s most profound and mature vision of evil. In the ghost and death themes of Hamlet we have something of the same quality; in the Brutus-theme of Julius Caesar we have an exactly analogous rhythm of spiritual experience; in Richard III we have a parallel history of an individual’s crime. In Macbeth, all of this, and the many other isolated poetic units of similar quality throughout Shakespeare, receive a final, perfected form. Therefore analysis of Macbeth is of profound value: but it is not easy. Much of Hamlet, and the Troilus-Othello-Lear succession culminating in Timon of Athens, can be regarded as representations of the ‘hate theme.’ We are there faced by man’s aspiring nature, unsatiated of its desire among the frailties and inconsistencies of its world. They point us to good, not evil, and their very gloom of denial is the shadow of a great assertion. They accordingly lead themselves to interpretation in terms of human thought, and their evil can be regarded as a negation of man’s positive longing. In Macbeth, we find not gloom, but blackness: the evil is not relative, but absolute. In point of imaginative profundity Macbeth is comparable alone to Antony and Cleopatra. There we have a fiery vision of paradisal consciousness; here the murk and nightmare torment of a conscious hell. This evil, being absolute and therefore alien to man, is in essence shown as inhuman and supernatural, and is mot difficult of location within any philosophical scheme. Macbeth is fantastical and imaginative beyond other tragedies. Difficulty is increased by that implicit blurring of effects, that palling darkness, that overcasts plot, technique, style. The persons of the play are themselves groping. Yet we are left with an overpowering knowledge of suffocating, conquering evil, and fixed by the basilisk eye of a nameless terror…

It is dangerous to abstract the personal history of the protagonist from his environment as a basis for interpretation. The main theme is not primarily differentiated from that of the important subsidiary persons and cannot stand alone. Rather there is a similarity, and the evil in Banquo, Macduff, Malcolm, and the enveloping atmosphere of the play, all forms so many steps by which we may approach and understand the titanic evil which grips the two protagonists. The Macbeth universe is woven in a texture of a single pattern. The whole play is one swift act of the poet’s mind, and as such must be interpreted, since the technique confronts us with separated integers of ‘character’ or incidents, but with a molten welding of thought with thought, event with event. There is an interpenetrating quality that subdues all to itself. Therefore I shall start by noticing some of the more important elements in this total imaginative effect, and thence I shall pass to the more purely human element. The story and action of the play alone will not carry us far. Here the logic of imaginative correspondence is more significant and more exact than the logic of plot.

Macbeth is a desolate and dark universe where all is befogged, baffled, constricted by the evil. Probably in no play of Shakespeare are so many questions asked. It opens with ‘When shell we three meet again? And ‘Where the place?. The second scene starts with ‘What bloody man is that?, and throughout it questions are asked of the Sergeant and Ross. This is followed by:

First Witch:  Where hast thou been, sister?

Second Witch? Killing swine.

First Witch: Sister, where thou?

And Banquo’s first words on entering are: ‘How far is’t called to Forres? What are these…? Questions succeed each other quickly throughout this scene. Amazement and mystery are in the play from the start, and are reflected in continual questions…”

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And finally, from Mark Van Doren:

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Clik here to view.“The brevity of ‘Macbeth’ is so much a function of its brilliance that we might lose rather than gain by turning up the lost scenes of legend. [MY NOTE:  There are a few who believe that, because the play is so short, especially in comparison to the other tragedies, that somewhere along the way, scenes have been lost.]  This brilliance gives us in the end somewhat less than the utmost that tragedy can give. The hero, for instance, is less valuable as a person than Hamlet, Othello, or Lear; or Antony, or Coriolanus, or Timon. We may not rejoice in his fall as Dr. Johnson says we must, yet we have known too little about him and have found too little virtue in him to experience at his death the sense of an unutterable and tragic loss made necessary by ironies beyond our understanding. He commits murder in violation of a nature which we can assume to have been noble, but we can only assume this. Macbeth has surrendered his soul before the play begins. When we first see him he is already invaded by those fears which are to render him vicious and which are finally to make him abominable. They will also reveal him as a great poet. But his poetry, like the poetry of the play, is to be concerned wholly with sensation and catastrophe. ‘Macbeth’ like ‘Lear’ is all end; the difference appearing in the speed with which doom rushes down, so that this rapidest of tragedies suggests whirlwinds rather than glaciers, and in the fact that terror rather than pity is the mode of the accompanying music. ‘Macbeth,’ then, is not in the fullest known sense a tragedy. But we do not need to suppose that this is because important parts of it have been lost. More of it would have had to be more of the same. And the truth is that no significant scene seems to be missing.  ‘Macbeth’ is incomparably brilliant as it stands, and within its limits perfect. What it does it does with flawless force. It hurls a universe against a man, and if the universe that strikes is more impressive than the man who is stricken, great as his size and gaunt as his soul may be, there is no good reason for doubting that this is what Shakespeare wanted. The triumph of ‘Macbeth’ is the construction of a world, and nothing like it has ever been constructed in twenty-one hundred lines.”

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1_I36qHDts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uQ6htOrhb4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdIMzdm_neM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuFFTTymqc8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVSc1lCO-Yg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wmWBki06yc

Excited to start?  I am.

Our next reading:  Macbeth, Act One

My next post:  Thursday evening/Friday morning.

Enjoy.

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Clik here to view.

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Clik here to view.

Macbeth

Act One, Part One

By Dennis Abrams

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MAIN CHARACTERS

King Duncan of Scotland

Malcolm, Duncan’s elder son

Donalbain, Duncan’s younger son

A Captain in Duncan’s army

Macbeth, Thane of Glamis

Lady Macbeth, Macbeth’s wife

Porter at Macbeth’s castle

Seyton, servant of Macbeth

Banquo, a thane, and his son Fleance

Macduff, Thane of Fife

Lady Macduff, Macduff’s wife

Lennox, Ross, Angus, Caithness and Menteith, thanes

Siward, Earl of Northumberland, and his son Young Siward

Hecate, Queen of the Witches

Six Witches

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Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Act One:  War divides Scotland as the rebellions Macdonald fights against King Duncan. But Duncan has the more than resolute Macbeth, Thane of Glamis, on his side, and the battle goes their way. Returning from the war, Macbeth and his fellow general Banquo encounter three Witches (or weird sisters) who tell Macbeth that he will be rewarded and one day will be king, while his companion’s descendents will prosper. As the Witches vanish, a party from Duncan arrives announcing – just as predicted – that Macbeth is now Thane of Cawdor. Stunned by the news, Macbeth writes to his wife, who resolves that her husband needs to be helped along (or pushed) on his way to power. So when news arrives that King Duncan plans to stay at their castle, she persuades the reluctant Macbeth to murder him.

Macbeth is, from start to finish, a murky play.  As one of my favorite critics A.C. Bradley put it (and I’ll be going back to him continuously during our reading), “Darkness, we may even say blackness, broods over this tragedy. It is remarkable that almost all the scenes which at once recur to memory take place either at night or in some dark spot.” Those ‘dark corners’ – Macbeth’s vision of the dagger, Duncan’s murder, Banquo’s murder, Lady Macbeth’s tormented sleepwalking – provide an easy summary of the play, as it travels from the early stages of the Macbeth’s ambition for power, the brutal murders they have to do to get it, and the steady erosion into nothingness of everything that’s important to them.

But, as much as I worship Bradley, there is one component missing from his scheme, and it is far more memorable to audiences:

First Witch

When shall we three meet again

In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

Second Witch

When the hurlyburly’s done,

When the battle’s lost and won.

Third Witch

That will be ere the set of sun.

First Witch

Where the place?

Second Witch

Upon the heath.

Third Witch

There to meet with Macbeth.

First Witch

I come, Graymalkin!

Second Witch

Paddock calls.

Third Witch

Anon.

ALL

Fair is foul, and foul is fair:

Hover through the fog and filthy air.

Though centuries of familiarity have done a good job of stripping the Weird Sisters of (at least some) of their capacity to inspire terror, Shakespeare’s audiences, brought up on stories about the potency of witchcraft (and who indeed might have witnessed first-hand the persecution of women believed to be witches), would not have been so relaxed. And though it is unclear whether this brief scene, the very first in the play, takes place at night, it still deserves to be on any list of Macbeth’s eeriest moments. If convincingly acted, the Witches bring something genuinely terrifying into the play, bridging the gap between the world we know and understand, and the wild and chaotic space that exists just beyond it. The Sisters “look not like th’inhabitants o’th’ earth,” Banquo exclaims, “and yet are on’t.”

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Clik here to view.The oldest meaning of the word “weird” refers, perhaps surprisingly, to the magical ability to govern fate, and the message the Witches deliver to Macbeth (that he will be “king hereafter”) confirms that they live up to their name – as Macbeth himself realizes when their first prediction, that he will be made Thane of Cawdor, comes true. “this supernatural soliciting,” he murmurs, “cannot be ill, cannot be good.”

    If ill,

Why hath it given me earnest of success

Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor.

If good, why do I yield up to that suggestion

Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair

And make my seated heart knock at my ribs

Against the use of nature?

And of course, one man who took witches seriously enough to publish a book about them was the ruler for whom, in all probability, Macbeth was written: James I. Many (if not most) scholars believe that the “Scottish play” was written in honor of the Edinburgh-born king who had recently taken control of the English throne, uniting the two nations for the first time (while also extending his patronage to Shakespeare’s company.)  Shakespeare repaid his and his colleague’s debt in fine style, returning to the main source for his English histories, the sprawling Chronicles, and drawing out from the “History of Scotland” the story of the eleventh-century thane Banquo, believed to be the ultimate ancestor of all Scottish monarchs, James included, and so pointing out the new king’s legitimate right to the throne.  But at the same time, by concentrating on the story of Macbeth, Banquo’s sometime companion and ruler, Shakespeare gave himself the freedom to construct a play in which witchcraft could play a forceful role (according to Holinshed, Macbeth relied on supernatural advice to govern Scotland). Along with further flattering King James’ interest in those topics, Shakespeare also created a dramatic world in which witchcraft and humankind become dangerously – and ultimately tragically – entangled.  In a strange way (and this play is nothing if not strange), the Witches can be seen as, as critic Terry Eagleton put it, “the heroines of the piece.”

A few things to consider as we read:

1.  Take note of the some of the play’s most obsessive interests:  the way that political and dynastic successions depends upon a cycle (birth, death, birth); the importance of motherhood and fathering and the unanticipated ways (Caesarian birth etc.) that they can become unpredictable; the echoing statements and restatements among the sisters (or witches) Lady Macbeth and Lady Macduff.

2.  Also note the brevity and directness of the play, and how it effects the audience/reader.  Maurice Morgann, in his Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff wrote:

‘The Understanding must, in the first place, be subdued; and lo! How the rooted prejudices of the child spring up to confound the man! The Weird sisters rise, and order is extinguished. The laws of nature give way, and leave nothing in our minds but wildness and horror. No pause is allowed us for reflection:…daggers, murder, ghosts, and inchantment, shake and possess us wholly…we, the fools of amazement, are insensible to the shifting of place and the lapse of time, and till the curtain drops, never once wake to the truth of things, or recognize the laws of existence.’

3.  Multiples – doubles, triples, quadruples – are all characteristic of the play’s language, starting right off the bat with the sister’s ‘Double, double toil and trouble.’ ‘Twoness’ – multiples of two – also appears throughout the play.  Look, for example at how the witches’ line “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” is echoed in Macbeth’s very first line “So foul and fair a day I have not seen.”

4.  Note how the play’s language combines “sublime magniloquence” with everyday language of great theatrical power.

5.  And this question:  how much power do the witches have?  Are they in control?  Does Macbeth’s fate inescapable?

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From Harold Bloom:

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Clik here to view.“Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, Macbeth is a visionary drama, and difficult as it is for us to accept that strange genre, a visionary tragedy. Macbeth himself is an involuntary seer, almost an occult medium, fully open to the spirits of the air and of the night. Lady Macbeth, initially more enterprising than her husband, fall into a psychic decline for causes more visionary than not. So much are the Macbeths made for sublimity, figures of fiery eros as they are, that their political and dynastic ambitions seem grotesquely inadequate to their mutual desires. Why do they want the crown? Shakespeare’s Richard III, still Marlovian, seeks the sweet fruition of an earthly crown, but the Macbeths are not Machiavellian over-reachers, nor are they sadists of power-obsessed as such. Their mutual lust is also a lust for the throne, a desire that is their Nietzchean revenge against time and time’s irrefutable declaration: ‘It was.’ Shakespeare did not care to clarify the Macbeth’s childlessness. Lady Macbeth speaks of having nursed a child, presumably her own but now dead, we are not told that Macbeth is her second husband, but we may take him to be that. He urges her to bring forth men children only, in admiration of her ‘manly’ resolve, yet pragmatically they seem to expect no heirs of their own union, while he fiercely seeks to murder Fleance, Banquo’s son, and does destroy Macduff’s children, Freud, shrewder on Macbeth than on Hamlet, called the curse of childlessness Macbeth’s motivation for murder and usurpation. Shakespeare left this matter more uncertain; it is a little difficult to imagine Macbeth when he is, at first, so profoundly dependent on Lady Macbeth. Until she goes made, she seems as much Macbeth’s mother as his wife.

Of all Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists, Macbeth is the least free. As Wilbur Sanders implied, Macbeth’s actions are a kind of falling forward (‘falling in space,’ Sanders called it). Whether or not Nietzsche (and Freud after him) were right in believing that we are lived, thought, and willed by forces not ourselves, Shakespeare anticipated Nietzsche in this conviction. Sanders acutely follows Nietzsche in giving us a Macbeth who pragmatically lacks any will, in contrast to Lady Macbeth, who is a pure will until she breaks apart. Nietzsche’s insight might be the clue to the different ways in which the Macbeths desire the crown: she wills it, he wills nothing, and paradoxically she collapses while he grows even more frightening, outraging others, himself outraged, as he becomes the nothing he projects. And yet this nothingness remains a negative sublime, its grandeur merits the dignity of tragic perspectives. The enigma of Macbeth, as a drama, always will remain its protagonist’s hold upon our terrified sympathy. Shakespeare surmised the guilty imaginings we share with Macbeth, who is Mr. Hyde to our Dr. Jekyll. Stevenson’s marvelous story emphasizes that Hyde is younger than Jekyll, only because Jekyll’s career is still young in villainy while old in good works. Our uncanny sense that Macbeth somehow is younger in deed than we are is analogous. Virtuous as we may (or may not) be, we fear that Macbeth, our Mr. Hyde, has the power to realize our own potential for active evil. Poor Jekyll eventually turns into Mr. Hyde and cannot get back. Shakespeare’s art is to suggest we could have such a fate.

Is Shakespeare himself – on any level – also a Dr. Jekyll in relation to Macbeth’s Mr. Hyde? How could he not be, given his success in touching a universal negative sublime through having imagined Macbeth’s imaginings? Like Hamlet, with whom he has some curious affinities, Macbeth projects an aura of intimacy: with the audience, with the hapless actors, with his creator. Formalist critics of Shakespeare – old guard and new – insist that no character is larger than the play, since a character is ‘only’ an actor’s role. Audiences and readers are not so formalistic: Shylock Falstaff, Rosalind, Hamlet, Malvolio, Macbeth, Cleopatra (and some others) seem readily transferable to contexts different from their drama. Sancho Panza, as Kafka demonstrated in the wonderful parable ‘The Truth About Sancho  Panza,” can become the creator of Don Quixote. Some new and even more Borgesian Kafka must rise among us to show Antonio as the inventor of Shylock, or Prince Hal as the father of Sir John Falstaff.

To call Macbeth larger than his play in no way deprecates my own favorite among all of Shakespeare’s works. The economy of Macbeth is ruthless, and scholars who find it truncated, or partly the work of Thomas Middleton, fail to understand Shakespeare’s darkest design. What notoriously dominates this play, more than any other in Shakespeare, is time, time that is not of the Christian mercy of eternity, but devouring time, death nihilistically regarded as finality. No critic has been able to distinguish between death, time, and nature in Macbeth; Shakespeare so fuses them that all of us are well within the mix. We hear voices crying out the formulae of redemption, but never persuasively, compared with Macbeth’s soundings of night and the grave. Technically, the men in Macbeth are ‘Christian warriors,’ as some critics like to emphasize, but their Scottish medieval Catholicism is perfunctory. The kingdom, as in King Lear, is a kind of cosmological waste land, a Creation that was also a Fall, in the beginning.

Macbeth is very much a night piece; its Scotland is more a mythological Northland than the actual nation from which Shakespeare’s royal patron emerged. King James I doubtless prompted some of the play’s emphases, but hardly the most decisive, the sense that the night has usurped the day. Murder is the characteristic action of Macbeth, not just King Duncan, Banquo, and Lady Macduff and her children are the victims. By firm implication, every person in the play is a potential target for the Macbeths. Shakespeare, who perhaps mocked the stage horrors of other dramatists in his Titus Andronicus, experimented far more subtly with the aura of murderousness in Macbeth. It is not so much that each of us in the audience is a potential victim. Rather more uneasily, the little Macbeth within each theatergoer can be tempted to surmise a murder of his or her own.

I can think of no other literary work with Macbeth’s power of contamination, unless it be Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, the prose epic profoundly influenced by Macbeth. Ahab is another visionary maniac, obsessed with what seems a malign order in the universe. Ahab strikes through the mask of natural appearances, as Macbeth does, but the White Whale is no easy victim. Like Macbeth, Ahab is outraged by the equivocation of the fiend that lies like truth, and yet Ahab’s prophet, the Parsi harpooner Fedallah, himself is far more equivocal than the Weird Sisters. We identify with Captain Ahab less ambivalently than we do with King Macbeth, since Ahab is neither a murderer nor a usurper, and yet pragmatically Ahab is about as destructive as Macbeth, all on the Pequot, except for Ishmael the narrator, are destroyed by Ahab’s quest. Melville, a shrewd interpreter of Shakespeare, borrows Macbeth’s phantasmagoric and proleptic imagination for Ahab, so that both Ahab and Macbeth become world destroyers. The Scottish heath and the Atlantic ocean amalgamate: each is a context where preternatural forces have outraged a sublime consciousness, who fights back vainly and unluckily, and goes down to a great defeat. Ahab, an American Promethean, is perhaps more hero than villain, unlike Macbeth, who forfeits our admiration though not our entrapped sympathy.”

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And from Mark Van Doren:

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Clik here to view.“The triumph of ‘Macbeth’ is the construction of a world, and nothing like it has ever been constructed in twenty-one hundred lines.

This world, which is at once without and within Macbeth, can be most easily described as ‘strange.’ The word, like the witches, is always somewhere doing its work. Even in the battle which pre cedes the play the thane of Glamis has made ‘strange images of death,’ and when he comes home to his lady his face is ‘as a book where men may read strange matters.’ Duncan’s horses after his murder turn wild in nature and devour each other – ‘a thing most strange and certain.’ Nothing is as it should be in such a world. ‘Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him/’ There is a drift of disorders in all events, and the air is murky with unwelcome miracles.

It is a dark world too, inhabited from the beginning by witches who meet on a blasted heath in thunder and lightning, and who hover through fog and filthy air as they leave on unspeakable errands. It is a world wherein ‘men must not walk too late,’ for the night that was so pretty in ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ and ‘The Merchant of Venice’ has grown terrible with ill-smelling mists and the stench of blood. The time that was once a playground for free and loving spirits has closed like a trap, or yawned like a bottomless pit. The ‘dark hour’ that Banquo borrows from the night is his last hour on earth which has lost the distinction between sun and gloom.

Darkness does the face of earth entomb,

When living light should kiss it.

(ii, iv, 9-10)

The second of these lines make a sound that is notable in the play for its rarity: the sound of live in its normal ease and lightness. Darkness prevails because the witches, whom Banquo calls its instruments, have willed to produce it. But Macbeth is its instrument too, as well as its victim. And the weird sisters no less than he are expressions of an evil that employs them both and has roots running farther into darkness than the mind can guess.

It is furthermore a world in which nothing is certain to keep its shape. Forms shift and constitencies alter, so that what was solid may flow and what was liquid may congeal to stone.

The earth hath bubbles, as the water has,

And these are of them,

says Banquo of the vanished witches. Macbeth addresses the ‘sure and firm set earth,’ but nothing could be less firm than the whole marble and the founded rock he has fancied his life to be. At the very moment he speaks he has seen a dagger which is not there, and the ‘strange infirmity’ he confesses at the banquet will consist of seeing things that cannot be. His first apostrophe to the witches had been to creatures

That look not like the inhabitants o’ the earth,

And yet are on ‘t.

So now a dead man lives; Banquo’s brains are out but he rises again, and ‘this is more strange than such a murder is.’

Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves

Shall never tremble.

(iii, iv, 102-3)

But the shape of everything is wrong, and the nerves of Macbeth are never proof against trembling. The cardinal instanced of transformation is himself. Bellona’s bridegroom has been turned to jelly.

The current of change pouring forever through this universe has, as a last effect, dissolved it. And the dissolution of so much that was solid has liberated deadly fumes, has thickened the air until it suffocates all breathers. If the footing under men is less substantial than it was, the atmosphere they must push through is almost too heavy for life. It is confining, swarming, swelling; it is viscous, it is sticky; and it threatens strangulation. All of the speakers in the play conspire to create the impression that this is so. Not only do the witches in their opening scene wail ‘Fair is foul and foul is fair,’ but the military men who enter after them anticipate in their talk of battle the imagery of entanglement to come.

     Doubtful it stood,

As two spent swimmers that do cling together

And choke their art…

The multiplying villainies of nature

Do swarm upon him…

So form that spring whence comfort seem’d to come

Discomfort swells.

[MY NOTE:  “As two spent swimmers that do cling together/And choke their art…”  Prefiguring Macbeth and Lady Macbeth?]

Macbeth’s sword is reported to have ‘smok’d with bloody execution,’ and he and Banquo were ‘as cannons overcharg’d with double cracks;’ they

Doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe.

The hyperbole is ominous, the excess is sinister. In the third scene, after what seemed corporal in the witches has melted into the wind, Ross and Angus join Banquo and Macbeth to report the praises of Macbeth that had poured in on Duncan ‘as thick as hail,’ and to salute the new Thane of Cawdor. The witches then have been right in two respects, and Macbeth sans in an aside:

     Two truths are gold,

As happy prologues to the swelling act

Of the imperial theme.

But the imagined act of murder swells in his mind until it is too big for its place, and his heart beats as if it were choking in its chamber.

     Why do I yield to that suggestion

Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair

And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,

Against the use of nature? Present fears

Are less than horrible imaginings.

My thoughts, whose murder yet is but fantastical,

Shakes so my single state of man that function

Is smother’d in surmise, and nothing is

But what is not.

Meanwhile Lady Macbeth at home is visited by no such fears. When the crisis comes she will break sooner than her husband does, but her brittleness then will mean the same thing that her melodrama means now: she is a slighter person than Macbeth, has a poorer imagination, and holds in her mind less of that power which enables it to stand up under torture. The news that Duncan is coming to her house inspires her to pray that her blood be made thick; for the theme of thickness is so far not terrible in her thought.

    Come, thick night,

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,

That my keen knife see not the would it makes,

Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark

To cry, ’Hold, hold!’

The blanket of the dark – it seems to her an agreeable image, and by no means suggests an element that can enwrap or smother. With Macbeth it is different; his soliloquy in the seventh scene shows him occupied with images of nets and tangles: the consequences of Duncan’s death may coil about him like an endless rope.

If it were done when ‘t is done, then ‘t were well

It were done quickly. If the assassination

Could trammel up the consequence, and catch

With his surcease success; that but this blow

Might be the be-all and the end-all here,

But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,

We’d jump the life to come. But in these cases

We still have judgment here, that we but teach

Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return

To plague the inventor.

And his voice rises to shrillness as he broods in terror upon the endless echo which such an echo may make in the world.

    His virtues

Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongu’d, against

The deep damnation of his taking-off;

And pity, like a naked new-born babe

Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin hors’d

Upon the sightless couriers of the air,

Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,

That tears shall drown the wind.

It is terror such as this that Lady Macbeth must endeavor to ally in what is after all a great mind. Her scolding cannot do so.”

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Clik here to view.And for your weekend bonus, from AC Bradley:

     A Shakespearean tragedy, as a rule, has a special tone or atmosphere of its own, quite perceptible, however difficult to describe. The effect of this atmosphere is marked with unusual strength in Macbeth. It is due to a variety of influences which combine with those just noticed, so that, acting and reacting, they form a whole; and the desolation of the blasted heath, the design of the Witches, the guilt in the hero’s soul, the darkness of the night, seem to emanate from one and the same source. This effect is strengthened by a multitude of small touches, which at the moment may be little noticed but still leave their mark on the imagination. We may approach the consideration of the characters and the action by distinguishing some of the ingredients of this general effect.

     Darkness, we may even say blackness, broods over this tragedy. It is remarkable that almost all the scenes which at once recur to memory take place either at night or in some dark spot. The vision of the dagger, the murder of Duncan, the murder of Banquo, the sleep-walking of Lady Macbeth, all come in night-scenes. The Witches dance in the thick air of a storm, or, ‘black and midnight hags,’ receive Macbeth in a cavern. The blackness of night is to the hero a thing of fear, even of horror; and that which he feels becomes the spirit of the play. The faint glimmerings of the western sky at twilight are here menacing: it is the hour when the traveller hastens to reach safety in his inn, and when Banquo rides homeward to meet his assassins; the hour when ‘light thickens,’ when ‘night’s black agents to their prey do rouse,’ when the wolf begins to howl, and the owl to scream, and withered murder steals forth to his work. Macbeth bids the stars hide their fires that his ‘black’ desires may be concealed; Lady Macbeth calls on thick night to come, palled in the dunnest smoke of hell. The moon is down and no stars shine when Banquo, dreading the dreams of the coming night, goes unwillingly to bed, and leaves Macbeth to wait for the summons of the little bell. When the next day should dawn, its light is ‘strangled,’ and ‘darkness does the face of earth entomb.’ In the whole drama the sun seems to shine only twice: first, in the beautiful but ironical passage where Duncan sees the swallows flitting round the castle of death; and, afterwards, when at the close the avenging army gathers to rid the earth of its shame. Of the many slighter touches which deepen this effect I notice only one. The failure of nature in Lady Macbeth is marked by her fear of darkness; ‘she has light by her continually.’ And in the one phrase of fear that escapes her lips even in sleep, it is of the darkness of the place of torment that she speaks.¹

     The atmosphere of Macbeth, however, is not that of unrelieved blackness. On the contrary, as compared with King Lear and its cold dim gloom, Macbeth leaves a decided impression of colour; it is really the impression of a black night broken by flashes of light and colour, sometimes vivid and even glaring. They are the lights and colours of the thunderstorm in the first scene; of the dagger hanging before Macbeth’s eyes and glittering alone in the midnight air; of the torch borne by the servant when he and his lord come upon Banquo crossing the castle-court to his room; of the torch, again, which Fleance carried to light his father to death, and which was dashed out by one of the murderers; of the torches that flared in the hall on the face of the Ghost and the blanched cheeks of Macbeth; of the flames beneath the boiling cauldron from which the apparitions in the cavern rose; of the taper which showed to the Doctor and Gentlewoman the wasted face and blank eyes of Lady Macbeth. And, above all, the colour is the colour of blood. It cannot be an accident that the image of blood is forced upon us continually, not merely by the events themselves, but by full descriptions, and even by reiteration of the word in unlikely parts of the dialogue. The Witches, after their first wild appearance, have hardly quitted the stage when there staggers on to it a ‘bloody man,’ gashed with wounds. His tale is of a hero whose ‘brandished steel smoked with bloody execution,’ ‘carved out a passage’ to his enemy, and ‘unseam’d him from the nave to the chaps.’ And then he tells of a second battle so bloody that the combatants seemed as if they ‘meant to bathe in reeking wounds.’ What metaphors! What a dreadful image is that with which Lady Macbeth greets us almost as she enters, when she prays the spirits of cruelty so to thicken her blood that pity cannot flow along her veins! What pictures are those of the murderer appearing at the door of the banquet-room with Banquo’s ‘blood upon his face’; of Banquo himself ‘with twenty trenched gashes on his head,’ or ‘blood-bolter’d’ and smiling in derision at his murderer; of Macbeth, gazing at his hand, and watching it dye the whole green ocean red; of Lady Macbeth, gazing at hers, and stretching it away from her face to escape the smell of blood that all the perfumes of Arabia will not subdue! The most horrible lines in the whole tragedy are those of her shuddering cry, ‘Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’ And it is not only at such moments that these images occur. Even in the quiet conversation of Malcolm and Macduff, Macbeth is imagined as holding a bloody sceptre, and Scotland as a country bleeding and receiving every day a new gash added to her wounds. It is as if the poet saw the whole story through an ensanguined mist, and as if it stained the very blackness of the night. When Macbeth, before Banquo’s murder, invokes night to scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day, and to tear in pieces the great bond that keeps him pale, even the invisible hand that is to tear the bond is imagined as covered with blood.

     Let us observe another point. The vividness, magnitude, and violence of the imagery in some of these passages are characteristic of Macbeth almost throughout; and their influence contributes to form its atmosphere. Images like those of the babe torn smiling from the breast and dashed to death; of pouring the sweet milk of concord into hell; of the earth shaking in fever; of the frame of things disjointed; of sorrows striking heaven on the face, so that it resounds and yells out like syllables of dolour; of the mind lying in restless ecstasy on a rack; of the mind full of scorpions; of the tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury; — all keep the imagination moving on a ‘wild and violent sea,’ while it is scarcely for a moment permitted to dwell on thoughts of peace and beauty. In its language, as in its action, the drama is full of tumult and storm. Whenever the Witches are present we see and hear a thunderstorm: when they are absent we hear of ship-wrecking storms and direful thunders; of tempests that blow down trees and churches, castles, palaces and pyramids; of the frightful hurricane of the night when Duncan was murdered; of the blast on which pity rides like a new-born babe, or on which heaven’s cherubim are horsed. There is thus something magnificently appropriate in the cry ‘Blow, wind! Come, wrack!’ with which Macbeth, turning from the sight of the moving wood of Birnam, bursts from his castle. He was borne to his throne on a whirlwind, and the fate he goes to meet comes on the wings of storm.

     Now all these agencies — darkness, the lights and colours that illuminate it, the storm that rushes through it, the violent and gigantic images — conspire with the appearances of the Witches and the Ghost to awaken horror, and in some degree also a supernatural dread. And to this effect other influences contribute. The pictures called up by the mere words of the Witches stir the same feelings — those, for example, of the spell-bound sailor driven tempest-tost for nine times nine weary weeks, and never visited by sleep night or day; of the drop of poisonous foam that forms on the moon, and, falling to earth, is collected for pernicious ends; of the sweltering venom of the toad, the finger of the babe killed at its birth by its own mother, the tricklings from the murderer’s gibbet. In Nature, again, something is felt to be at work, sympathetic with human guilt and supernatural malice. She labours with portents.

burst from her. The owl clamours all through the night; Duncan’s horses devour each other in frenzy; the dawn comes, but no light with it. Common sights and sounds, the crying of crickets, the croak of the raven, the light thickening after sunset, the homecoming of the rooks, are all ominous. Then, as if to deepen these impressions, Shakespeare has concentrated attention on the obscurer regions of man’s being, on phenomena which make it seem that he is in the power of secret forces lurking below, and independent of his consciousness and will: such as the relapse of Macbeth from conversation into a reverie, during which he gazes fascinated at the image of murder drawing closer and closer; the writing on his face of strange things he never meant to show; the pressure of imagination heightening into illusion, like the vision of a dagger in the air, at first bright, then suddenly splashed with blood, or the sound of a voice that cried ‘Sleep no more’ and would not be silenced.¹ To these are added other, and constant, allusions to sleep, man’s strange half-conscious life; to the misery of its withholding; to the terrible dreams of remorse, to the cursed thoughts from which Banquo is free by day, but which tempt him in his sleep: and again to abnormal disturbances of sleep; in the two men, of whom one during the murder of Duncan laughed in his sleep, and the other raised a cry of murder; and in Lady Macbeth, who rises to re-enact in somnambulism those scenes the memory of which is pushing her on to madness or suicide. All this has one effect, to excite supernatural alarm and, even more, a dread of the presence of evil not only in its recognized seat but all through and around our mysterious nature. Perhaps there is no other work equal to Macbeth in the production of this effect.²

     It is enhanced — to take a last point — by the use of a literary expedient. Not even in Richard III., which in this, as in other respects, has resemblances to Macbeth, is there so much of Irony. I do not refer to irony in the ordinary sense; to speeches, for example, where the speaker is intentionally ironical, like that of Lennox in III. vi. I refer to irony on the part of the author himself, to ironical juxtapositions of persons and events, and especially to the ‘Sophoclean irony’ by which a speaker is made to use words bearing to the audience, in addition to his own meaning, a further and ominous sense, hidden from himself and, usually, from the other persons on the stage. The very first words uttered by Macbeth,

are an example to which attention has often been drawn; for they startle the reader by recalling the words of the Witches in the first scene,

When Macbeth, emerging from his murderous reverie, turns to the nobles saying, ‘Let us toward the King,’ his words are innocent, but to the reader have a double meaning. Duncan’s comment on the treachery of Cawdor,

is interrupted¹ by the entrance of the traitor Macbeth, who is greeted with effusive gratitude and a like ‘absolute trust.’ I have already referred to the ironical effect of the beautiful lines in which Duncan and Banquo describe the castle they are about to enter. To the reader Lady Macbeth’s light words,

summon up the picture of the sleep-walking scene. The idea of the Porter’s speech, in which he imagines himself the keeper of hell-gate, shows the same irony. So does the contrast between the obvious and the hidden meanings of the apparitions of the armed head, the bloody child, and the child with the tree in his hand. It would be easy to add further examples. Perhaps the most striking is the answer which Banquo, as he rides away, never to return alive, gives to Macbeth’s reminder, ‘Fail not our feast.’ ‘My lord, I will not,’ he replies, and he keeps his promise. It cannot be by accident that Shakespeare so frequently in this play uses a device which contributes to excite the vague fear of hidden forces operating on minds unconscious of their influence.^”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clG8ha2D26g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xHlngY6Bgk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTBsKBfiUYI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe5uRWnzUig

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H781xFkUeHU

My next post:  Sunday evening/Monday morning, continuing our look at Act One of Macbeth.

Enjoy.  And enjoy your weekend.

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Macbeth

Act One, Part Two

By Dennis Abrams

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Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.It would be fascinating to know what James I – or any of his contemporaries for that matter – made of the other strong female character in the play – the one that wasn’t a witch (albeit subtly linked to them) – Lady Macbeth.

From just a few hints in Holinshed, mainly the bald statement that Lady Macbeth was “very ambitious,” Shakespeare created a character who, despite the many things about her that remain enigmatic (her first name, for example, which is never mentioned, not even by her loving husband, or whether there was a first husband, or…) has exercised a powerful influence over the imagination of audiences and critics alike – to the extent that she has become a sort of cultural shorthand for an ambitious, threatening, ruthless figure of woman (think of comparisons to Hillary Clinton while she was in the White House). Shakespeare had already created malevolent features who literally wrestle with demons (think of Joan la Pucelle aka Joan of Arc in Henry VI Part 1), but never ones who, like Lady Macbeth, attempt to turn their sex inside out. Receiving the news that Duncan is to stay that night in their castle, she calls upon “you spirits/That tend on mortal thoughts” to

     unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood,

Stop up th’access and passage to remorse,

That no compunctious visitings of nature

Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between

Th’effect and it. Come to my woman’s breasts,

And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers…

Lady Macbeth imagines “stooping” her sensitivity to “remorse” as it if were menstrual blood; being “unsexed” and inhuman are, to her, one and the same thing. But she draws power from her womanliness as well:  her “woman’s breasts” both give out “gall” and take it in. elsewhere she makes the connection between maternal nurture and destructive power all too clear.  Mocking Macbeth’s last minute nerves before he goes off to murder Duncan, she boasts, “I have given suck,”

     and know

How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me.

I would, while it was smiling in my face,

Have plucked my nipple from its boneless gums

And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn

As you have done to this.

Lady Macbeth will stop at nothing in driving her husband on to kill Duncan – at first taunting his manliness (“Was the hope drunk/Wherein you dressed yourself?” she scoffs), then claiming that she would “dash the brains out” of her own child had she undertaken to do so. Though the question of whether the Macbeths actually have children (or whether she had one from a previous marriage) – remains unanswered (although not for lack of trying on the part of some critics), what is important here is that Lady Macbeth’s ghastly words make her sound like the Witches: both mother and murderer, good and evil, fair and foul.

The play, though, would be meaningless if witchcraft had sole sway over the events:  it would, in effect, be over with before it began. The Sisters may ordain (or predict), but they are not the ones who perform the many “horrid deed[s]” that Macbeth and his wife willingly take upon themselves on their bloody path to the throne. Yet the presence of the witches do make the hero’s grip on events seem disturbingly slippery. While it may be difficult to notice while watching a performance (things just move too fast), what is striking while Macbeth is that the idea of killing Duncan, the play’s all-important point of now return, seems to originate out of nowhere. The Witches insinuate that Macbeth will be King of Scotland, but say nothing about how he should go about achieving it. Even Lady Macbeth, after hearing of their prophecies, skirts around the matter, noting somewhat astringently that though her husband is “not without ambition,” he is “too full o’th’ milk of human kindness/To catch the nearest way.” – “the nearest way” meaning, of course, murdering their ruler (and guest) in cold blood. Although the milk she has eradicated from herself apparently remains in her husband, ironically, it is she who can’t quite bring herself to spell out death.

Macbeth, by contrast, does his utmost to confront the complexity of his situation. Though initially comforting himself with the thought that “if chance will have me king, why chance may crown me/Without my stir,” it soon becomes all too apparent that Fate will require some urgent prompting.  By the time that Duncan has entered the castle and a feast is prepared in his honor, Macbeth is already imagining in a kind of jumpy doublethink past his murder to what lies beyond:

If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well

It were done quickly. If th’assassination

Could trammel up the consequence, and catch

With his surcease success: that but this blow

Might be the be-all and the end-all, here,

But here upon this bank and shoal of time,

We’d jump the life to come.

The extraordinary choppy texture of these lines, and their tongue-tripping quality for actors, show that Macbeth is trying to think through what seems unthinkable. His language is thick with euphemisms – “assassination” is a chilly coinage for “murder (this is its first appearance in the English language by the way – and in that same speech, the first use of “be-all and end-all.”)  He imagines cause and effect being “trammeled” (bundled up) together into one instant, feverishly plotting far beyond the immediate moment (“this bank and shoal of time”) into “the life to come.” “The meanings cannot be remembered all at once, however often you read it,” William Empson mentioned on this speech.” “It remains the incantation of a murderer, disheveled and fumbling across the powers of darkness.”

A couple of notes:

In Act One, Scene 4, note that immediately after Duncan’s speech about the former Thane of Cawdor, “There’s no art/To find the mind’s construction in the face./He was a gentleman on whom I built/An absolute trust,” Macbeth enters.

In Act One, Scene 6, lines 15-17, “All our service,/In very point twice done and then done double,/Were poor and single business to contend…” continues the language of duplication and multiplication begun by the Captain (I.2. 35-40) “…As cannons overcharged with double cracks;/So they doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe,” continued by the sisters, (1.3, 33-4) “Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine,/And thrice again, to make up mine…” and soon to be used by Macbeth (1.7.12) “To our own lips. He’s here in double trust…”

In Act One, Scene 7, lines 1-2, while Duncan is eating his “last supper,” Macbeth is playing Judas, for to Judas Jesus at the Last Supper said: “That thou doest, do quickly.”

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From Marjorie Garber:

“The word ‘equivocation’ was much in use in this period, since it was a technical term used to describe the ‘mental reservation’ by which Jesuits, often suspected of treason because of their Catholic faith, could tell untruths or partial truths under interrogation without breaking their word to God. One of the historical events shadowing Macbeth was the so-called Gunpowder Plot, a conspiracy of English Roman Catholics to blow up Parliament, King James, his wife, and his elder son on November 4, 1604, in protest against the King’s refusal to grant further religious toleration. The plot was discovered in time; the conspirators were killed while resisting arrest, or later tried and executed. The plot exacerbated the already bad relations between English Protestants and Catholics, and led to rigorous enforcement of legislation requiring attendance at Anglican church services.

‘[T]h’equivocation of the fiend,/That lies like truth’ Macbeth will call it, when he realizes near the close of the play that he has misinterpreted the witches’ apparitions. Equivocation is closely akin to ambiguity, as well as to indecisiveness, an unwillingness to commit oneself either way. ‘[D]rink,’ says the Porter, may be said to be an equivocator with lechery,’ since ‘it provokes and unprovokes: it provokes the desire but it takes away the performance’ (2.3.28-29, 27-28). The Porter belongs to that category of truth-telling realists that also include Emilia (in Othello), Pompey (in Measure for Measure), and the gravedigger (in Hamlet). Like them – and like the ‘wise fools’ (Bottom, Costard, Dogberry), who preceded them – the Porter speaks truth. In fact, the only other appearance of the word ‘equivocation’ in Shakespeare, outside of this play, comes in the graveyard scene in Hamlet, where Hamlet warns Horatio ‘We must speak by the card’ – that is literally – ‘or equivocation will undo us.’ Equivocation: ambiguity, the dangerous double meanings of language. Macbeth, we will see, is an equivocator in all things: a man who is split in two directions, who commits murder to become King, and suffers every moment once he is King.

‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair,’ says the witches. In their world, nonhuman and antihuman, everything is equivocal – literally double-voiced. And Macbeth – whose mind encompasses these witches, so that they reflect his own appetite, his own uncensored wish fulfillment – declares, the first time we see him, in his very first words, ‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen. So foul and fair. His mind is already in a condition to receive the witches and their tempting message. His echo of them is unconscious, but it is there.

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Clik here to view.[MY NOTE:  Let me backtrack briefly to what Garber had to say earlier about the Witches:  “What Shakespeare did with the weird sisters was make them into an emblematic state of mind – again, the onstage and unmetaphored counterpart of the ambiguous and powerful Lady Macbeth. Are the ‘witches’ inside or outside Macbeth? Are they part of his consciousness, prompting him to ambition or murder – or are they some external supernatural force? The nature of theater does not require an either/or answer to this question; the success of Shakespeare’s play is in producing both of these effects, alternately and concurrently. The witches are both inside and outside the mind of the protagonist. They tell him what he has already been thinking, just as Iago’s vivid animal imagery told Brabantio what he had already been thinking about Desdemona and Othello in bed. If the witches are causative, it is not because they tell Macbeth what to do – or, in fact because they tell him anything – but because, like Iago, they allow him to interpret things as he wants to see them. They are ‘real’ in the sense that they are visible and audible onstage, unlike, for example, the dagger that he sees before him, ‘[t]he handle toward my hand,’ or the voice that cries “’Macbeth shall sleep no more’” Modern stage directors and filmmakers often use special effects to produce these illusions for the audience in a manifest form: a dagger tied to an invisible filament descends from the flies; an amplified voice booms, seemingly from nowhere. But the stage ‘reality’ of the witches is clearly coded, by the play, as of a different order. Unlike the voice and the dagger, the witches are seen, heard, spoken to, and vouched for by another onstage witness, Banquo, who provides very much the same kind of independent assurance as does Horatio, in Hamlet, who sees the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Both Horatio and Banquo play a crucial role in establishing a link of verisimilitude with the audience. They are – in the play’s terms – ordinary people like ourselves. They are the confidants and companions of the tragic hero. And what they confess to seeing and hearing, we may believe also…The witches are ‘real’ in a dramatic sense – they are visible and audible onstage – and their placement on the borders of the play suggests that they are potentially out there still, ready to whisper into other susceptible ears.”]

“Double, double, toil and trouble,’” the witches chant. The word ‘double,’ too, is a sign of equivocation, of the fatal split in Macbeth, appearing again and again throughout the play, eleven times in all, always in negative contexts: Duncan is at Macbeth’s castle in double trust, yet Macbeth will murder him; Macduff, according to the witches’ apparition, seems to pose no threat, yet Macbeth will make assurance double sure, and kill him; Lady Macbeth, called by Duncan ‘our honoured hostess,’ who can scarely wait till nightfall brings the death of her royal guest, tell him that ‘[a]ll our service/In every point twice done, and then done double’ is not enough for so worthy a king. Doubleness is everywhere, and the ‘toil’ of which the witches speak is both a trouble and a snare. As he mulls the message of the witches he has just heard, Macbeth performs and enacts the very equivocation he will later rue:

This supernatural soliciting

Cannot be ill, cannot be good. If ill,

Why hath it given me earnest of success

Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor.

If good, why do I yield to that suggestion

Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair

And make my seated heart knock at my ribs

Against the use of nature? Present fears

Are less than horrible imaginings.

My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical,

Shakes so my single state of man that function

Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is

But what is not.

His ‘single state of man’ has already become doubleness, divided against itself, and equivocation will undo him. Nothing is but what is not.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.When we first hear of Macbeth, before we ever meet him, he seems to be in a single state, a state of heroism – fighting, as is characteristic of Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists at the onset of their journeys, an external war. ‘[B]rave Macbeth’ he is called, and the message of his heroism is brought to the King’s camp by a captain. The whole scene (1.2) deserves our close notice, because in some sense it is the first real scene of the play, and it begins with a question so startling that the question itself seems to present a dumb show: ‘What bloody man is that?’ These are Duncan’s first words, the king’s first words. A man covered in blood, who seems to foreshadow all the bloody language to come in this play. (As Lady Macbeth would later muse, brokenly, in the sleepwalking scene, ‘who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’ The ‘bloody man’ in the second scene of the play is literally a soldier, figuratively the dead Duncan, and ultimately Macbeth himself, ‘in blood/Stepped in so far,’ unable to wash it from his hand.

To Duncan this bleeding Captain arrives with his tale of rebellion and reason:

     Doubtful it stood,

As two spent swimmers that do cling together

And choke their art…

This is one of my favorite Shakespearean images, evoking as it does a vivid picture (we see the exhausted swimmers clearly, though they are nowhere in the cast of characters) and pointing forward to a moment when the two Macbeths, likewise ‘[d]oubtful’ and exhausted, doom each other and pull each other down. The image is itself a powerful diagram of doubleness, and the loss of power that comes with doubleness. The Captain’s report tells the tale of a victory over treason, and no sooner is it heard that Ross appears to announce another traitor: the Thane of Cawdor. By the scene’s end this wartime traitor, whose sins are in plain sight, will be replaced as  both Thane and treasonous subject: ‘What he hath lost, noble Macbeth hath won.’ Lost – and won. Foul – and fair. We have already heard the witches speak of ‘[w]hen the battle’s lost and won,’ as if it does not matter who wins and who loses. One notorious Thane of Cawdor replaces another. Heroism in war becomes ambition in peace, and the King of Scotland appoints, unwittingly, his own murderer, his own usurper, to a place of highest trust.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Duncan is a crucial figure for this play: all the drama swirls around him. And Shakespeare’s Duncan differs importantly from his source in the historical chronicles. Where Holinshed’s Duncan is a weak king, succeeded by a powerful and fair-minded Macbeth who reigns for ten years, Shakespeare makes his king nobler and more virtuous, the usurper more precipitate and vile in his designs, the action much quicker, the outcome more definitive, the King’s death more disastrous. Duncan is for this play the opposite of the witches and of Lady Macbeth – h e is a benevolent figure of order and trust, evoked regularly and insistently in terms of light and of fertility associated with the land. When he invests Macbeth with his new office he does so in a phrase, offered evenhandedly to Macbeth and to Banquo, that links them directly with nature:

     Welcome hither.

I have begun to plant thee, and will labour

To make thee full of growing…

Banquo, as a loyal subject, responds in a similar figure:

     There if I grow

The harvest is your own.

Duncan speaks of his ‘plenteous joys,/Wanton in fullness.’ Banquo had earlier asked the witches, ‘If you can look into the seeds of time/And say which grain will grown and which will not,/Speak then to me.’ We hear continually about ‘the seed of Banquo,’ his fruitfulness, his children. Banquo was thought to be an ancestor of King James, so that in Shakespeare’s time it would have been true to say that Banquo’s ‘seed’ still ruled the land. By contrast, Macbeth is barren, without issue; ‘[h]e has no children,’ as Macduff will say bitterly, lamenting the impossibility of retribution. Duncan’s son Malcolm will inherit from this father the same language of plantation and harvest, speaking in the play’s last scene of ‘[w]hat’s more to do/Which would be planted newly with the time.’ This is not merely decorative language; despite the growth of cities like London and Edinburgh, England and Scotland were at the time still largely open land – forests and fields, pasturage and farm. The political clock was ticking in the direction of nationalism, the unification of Scotland and England, Christian teleology and absolute monarchy. But the ideology of seasonal cycle is embedded at the center of the play. In a way, the more pointedly national and eschatological the plot, the more essential was the counterpart of planting and harvesting. As we will see, the tension between cycle and line (even literally, in Banquo’s and James’s ‘line’ of kings) maps the structure of the play at every point from first to last.

We have seen this same gesture toward fertility and seasonal-cyclical renewal at the close of other Shakespearean plays about kingship. Thus Richmond (who will become Henry VII, Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather) speaks in similar terms about plenty and harvest at the end of Richard III, a play that Macbeth echoes and resembles in many ways. But Duncan is liked with growth more insistently than any other Shakespearean king. When he arrives at Macbeth’s castle, whish is to be his doom, he speaks in a language that is almost pastoral, and is answered in the same spirit by Banquo:

King Duncan:

This castle hath a pleasant seat. The air

Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself

Unto our gentle senses.

Banquo:

    This guest of summer,

The temple-haunting martlet, does approve

By his loved mansionry that the heavens’ breath

Smells wooingly here. No jutty, frieze,

Buttress, nor coign of vantage but this bird

Hath made his pendant bed and procreant cradle;

Where they most breed and haunt I have observed

The air is delicate.

‘Nimbly and sweetly’; ‘pendant bed and procreant cradle’; ‘breed and haunt.’ These are images of birth, spring, and provident nature. But ‘haunting’ in the sense of customary habitation will become, insidiously, ‘haunting’ in the sense of ghostly presence. And the ‘temple-haunting martlet,’ the pious and fertile bird, will shortly be exchanged in the play’s economy of images for the raven, invoked by Lady Macbeth, and the crow, another black bird and bird of night, called up by Macbeth:

     Light thickens, and the crow

Makes wing to th’ rooky wood.

Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,

While night’s black agents to their preys do rouse.

3.2.51-54

Duncan is linked with light, day, and stars; Macbeth, with darkness, night, and a ‘brief candle.’ The pattern is elegant, pervasive, and cumulatively powerful, these language clusters offering an almost subliminal imagistic counterpoint to the ongoing dramatic action, as if the play’s unconscious were pushing events forward beyond, as well as through, the conscious agency of the protagonists. Thus we have Duncan’s public pronouncement, conferring the title of Thane of Cawdor upon Macbeth and proclaiming that ‘signs of nobleness, like stars, shall shine/On all deservers.’ Moments later Macbeth, aside, speaks the underside of the same figure: ‘Stars, hide your fires, Let not light see my black and deep desires.’ Duncan wants the stars to shine, Macbeth commands them to hide. In a moment the audience will hear Lady Macbeth call for blackness:

     Come, thick night,

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,

That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,

Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark

To cry, ‘Hold, hold!’

With the death of Duncan, in the poignant little ‘window scene’ between Ross and an Old man reporting the state of popular opinion, we will hear that ‘[b]y th’ clock ‘tis day,/And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp…/That darkness does the face of earth entomb/When living light should kiss it.’ We hear also that Duncan’s horses, ‘a thing most strange and certain –/…Turned wild in nature’ and ‘ate each other.’ (2.4.14-16, 19). Night replaces day, nature turns against itself in cannibalistic excess, and the apparition scene with the witches ends, famously, with two great images of the paradoxical and unnatural: a man not born of woman, and a moving grove.

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Clik here to view.There is a way in which, as I have noted, the unwitting and dangerous innocence of Duncan resembles the innocence of Desdemona in Othello. Both characters are naïve, optimistic, and trusting, and both are murdered. I mention this because it is an important point about Shakespearean structure: in historical terms, in terms of literary source or genre, in terms of gender and cultural power, these figures (a ‘real’ Scottish king; the ‘fictional’ daughter of a Venetian nobleman) have little or nothing in common. Shakespeare changes his ‘source’ here, as he does so often in the history plays, to make his Duncan more virtuous, and more heedless, than the Duncan of the historical chronicles. To read this play as a play about Scottish, or even about English, politics will take us only so far. To see what is so powerfully, eloquently, and immediately Shakespearean about it we need to ask different questions, questions about formal structure and role. Duncan – Shakespeare’s Duncan – is too innocent for his world, and he is murdered. His credulousness and faith in human nature cannot survive in a world in which wit and witchcraft are represented by Lady Macbeth and the ‘weird sisters,’ the two forces edging Macbeth toward his fatal action. This is evident as early as the play’s fourth scene, when Duncan expresses surprise that the previous Cawdor could have been disloyal: ‘There’s no art/To find the mind’s construction in the face./He was a gentleman on whom I built/An absolute trust.’ But the lesson to be learned, if there is one, eludes the King, she he promptly repeats his error, building an ‘absolute trust’ on the new Thane of Cawdor, who is, of course, Macbeth. Duncan wants to ‘find the mind’s construction in the face,’ but Macbeth has resolved that ‘[f]alse face must hide what the false heart doth know.’ ‘False face’ here includes the wearing of visors and disguises; Macbeth’s usurpation and murder are conceived throughout the play as an equivocation expressed in and through the language of dress.

Here the reader and critic – if not significantly, the audience – encounter the celebrated notion of ill-fitting clothing as an ‘imagistic motif’ in Macbeth. The phrase is that of Cleanth Brooks, a powerful reader of poetry associated with the literary school of the 1940s and 1950s known as New Criticism. Like many critics, including Shakespeare critics, of his time, Brooks analyzed the language of the plays as if they were poems – which, of course, they are. Shakespeare scholars and critics like Caroline Spurgeon (Shakespeare’s Imagery, 1935) and Wolfgang Clemen (The Development of Shakespeare’s Imagery, 1951), charted patterns of imagery within and across the plays, suggesting a kind of subliminal theme or subtext of images, governed not by the conscious choices of individual characters but by an underlying dynamic, a kind of imagistic unconscious, that undercut as often as it supported the aims and agency of the dramatic speakers. Thus, to summarize such an argument about clothing imagery briefly, Macbeth begins with clothing that fits him, and moves rapidly, in the course of this relatively short play, toward descriptions of increasing sartorial grotesqueness. His

The Thane of Cawdor lives. Why do you dress me

In borrowed robes?

spoken to the witches at the beginning of the play turns quickly into Banquo’s

     New honours come upon him,

Like our strange garments, cleave not to their mould

But with the aid of use.

Time will make these ‘strange garments’ fit, if Macbeth will only be patient, and for a moment he seems inclined to wait for events to unfold, until he is goaded by his wife into untimely action:

Macbeth:

We will proceed no further in this business.

He hath honoured me of late, and I have bought

Golden opinions from all sorts of people,

Which would be worn now in their newest gloss,

Not cast aside so soon.

Lady Macbeth:

     Was the hope drunk

Wherein you dressed yourself?

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Clik here to view.By the end of the first act Macbeth is firmly committed to disguise, making – as he will alter say – ‘our faces visors to our hearts,/Disguising what they are’ (3.2.35-36). From this point the language of clothing is continually associated with Macbeth and his usurpation; Macduff fears ‘[l]est our old robes sit easier than our new’ (2.4.39) – that is, lest Macbeth’s rule be less fit than Duncan’s. And in act 5, on the field near Dunsinane, two Scottish noblemen, Caithness and Angus, perceiving Macbeth’s imminent downfall, will speak of him in clothing images more exaggerated than any before: ‘He cannot buckle his distempered cause/Within the belt of rule,’ says one, and the other replies,

    Now does he feel his title

Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe

Upon a dwarfish thief.

Thus is the plot of clothing imagery, uncontrollable by Macbeth, controlled only by the playwright and the play. Macbeth has shrunk and withered beneath the borrowed robes, become a caricature of a king: the image is sharply visual, even though it may not be mirrored by actual ‘borrowed robes’ upon the stage.

Yet we should pause here to remember that actors’ clothing was indeed often ‘borrowed,’ some items the relicts of the wardrobes of ‘real’ noblemen and courtiers. In a culture like that of early modern England, where the notion of sumptuary laws still obtained, ‘ill-fitting’ clothing was not only that which was a size too big or small, but also that which pertained to a rank inappropriate for the wearer. The sumptuary laws ordained proper clothing, fabrics, and ornaments for each rank, and – as in a comedy like Twelfth Night – some of the class-jumping activities of would-be nobleman, like Malvolio, were held up to ridicule precisely because those who practiced them aspired to a sartorial level above their actual station. The idea was one of a legible society, in which you were what you wore: a version of ‘uniform’ was ordained for each rank, with an added economic impetus, since low-status persons were asked to wear clothing of native materials (English wool), whereas aristocrats and noblemen could wear imported fabrics and lace. Actors occupied a very low social station. Technically they were servants, the ‘King’s Men’ or the “Lord Chamberlain’s Men,’ a subterfuge to get around the fact that, if not employed by a nobleman, they were ‘masterless man’ and thus subject to a law designed to curb the roaming of ‘vandals’ and troublemakers across the English countryside. (Acting companies traveled, especially in the summer months and when London was beset by plague.)

The plot of clothing imagery in Macbeth speaks to a number of cultural anxieties, current and historical, about both the legibility of social rank and the legitimacy of rule. It is not merely decorative; if it influences the ‘poetry’ of the play, it does so at the level of action, motivation, psychology, and design. above all, it signifies another level of subliminal control, like the plot of the witches, of which Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are only imperfectly aware, and which constitutes a counterplot to their intentions and desires. Whether the ill-fitting-clothing plot was in practice doubly subversive – whether it suggested, as in an earlier history play like Richard III and Henry V, that even ‘real’ kings were men in costume – is a question that lingers at the borders of the play.

As with the clothing imagery, so with the ‘weird sisters”: they function by indirection and insinuation. The witches never directly suggest a course of action, nor do they tell Macbeth to kill Duncan. It is his own ‘horrible imaginings’ and his wife’s prompting that move him in the direction of action. For Macbeth, as for Othello, the play becomes a psychomachia, an internal tug-of-war between, on the on hand, the loyalty of a subject, the gratitude of a recently honored vassal, and the duties of a host, and, on the other, ‘[v]aulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself/And falls on th’other’. As was the case with Othello, so, too with Macbeth: the nature of his language charts the pattern of his inner struggle. But in this case the nature of his language charts the pattern of his inner struggle. But in this case the murder comes not at the end of the play, but near its beginning. The play becomes an examination, not of whether he will do the deed, but of what the deed will do to him.

Just as he shrinks form the happy and hesitant wearer of borrowed robes to a dwarfish thief enfolded in a costume meant for a giant, so Macbeth will move from sensitivity to insensitivity. From his first interior agony and moral doubt he will move downward toward a condition in which he feels and sense nothing at all, where has supped full with horrors, has forgotten the taste of fears, cannot be moved by the death of his wife, and fittingly becomes at the last no logner a man but a rare monster painted upon a pole: a caricature of a tyrant. This is the downward slope, the tragic pattern of Macbeth’s fall, and it parallels the exaggerated unfolding of the clothing imagery, from fit to unfit. But it begins in equivocation, in moral ambiguity and interior battle.

The demonstrated equi-vocation, equal voicing, of ‘[t]’his supernatural soliciting’ that ‘cannot be ill, cannot be good,’ balancing moral and immoral possibilities as if they were somehow perfectly equal, becomes a tone at once more emotionally fraught and more wishfully hypothetical as Duncan approaches the castle:

Macbeth:

If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well

It were done quickly. If th’assassination

Could trammel up the consequence, and catch

With his surcease success: that but this blow

Might be the be-all and the end-all here,

But here upon this bank and shoal of time,

We’d jump the life to come…

Macbeth sounds here a little like Hamlet, in his mediation on self-slaughter. If there were no consequences, action would be easy. But in these ‘[w]e still have judgment here,’ says Macbeth. ‘This even-handed justice/Commends th’ingredience of our poisoned chalice/To our own lips.’ But what is most striking about Macbeth’s ruminations is their involuted and convoluted style. ‘If it were done [completed and past[ when ‘tis done [performed]’; ‘catch/With his surcease success.’ Syntax, double meaning, and deceptive near-rhymes are battling inside him. Now,  bolstered by Lady Macbeth’s mingled encouragement and scorn, he finds himself waiting for her signal, the bell – that tolling symbol out of Othello – and he speaks in the same troubled and contorted language when confronted with a terrifying vision.”

More to come…

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ft2Lthl9q5Y

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgIIMDAR1DI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe5uRWnzUig

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JLdA7QECiw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsR5JCRpRtg&list=PLCF68F52FE0B0C605

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMdAGCqM2Ok&list=PLCF68F52FE0B0C605

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3CL7pysJww&list=PLCF68F52FE0B0C605

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jrjyek0OlKw&list=PLCF68F52FE0B0C605

Our next reading:  Macbeth, Act Two

My next post:  Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning

Enjoy.

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Macbeth

Act Two, Part One

By Dennis Abrams

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Clik here to view.Act Two:  As Macbeth moves towards Duncan’s chamber, his resolve falters as he comes across Banquo and then is troubled by strange hallucinations. Nonetheless, as Lady Macbeth waits and Duncan’s drugged guards sleep, he kills the King. Shortly afterward, Macduff arrives at the palace and discovers Duncan’s corpse. Feigning horror, Macbeth murders the guards, who Lady Macbeth has attempted to frame by smearing them with blood.  Fearing for their own lives, Duncan’s sons Donalbain and Malcolm flee – and arouse suspicion of their own involvement. Macbeth is now king:  the Witches’ prophecy has come true.

Duncan is dead.  But despite Macbeth’s best hopes, that murder isn’t by any means the “be-all and the end-all”; it is only the beginning.  “Blood,” as Macbeth will note in Act Three, “will have blood,” and the lurid vision of a dagger stained with “gouts of blood” that led him to Duncan’s chamber proves an apt symbol of what Macduff calls the “bloody-sceptred” tyrant who seized control of Scotland.  Just after the deed is done, Macbeth gazes at his blood-stained hands, imagining them polluting the entire visible world:

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red.

Macbeth’s terror is more than the fear that their crime will be discovered: is it that he has unleashed forces that will ultimately destroy him. The vision of oceans stained crimson by Duncan’s assassination is too gruesomely extravagant to be true.  But in a world that seems to have fallen into darkness, a world where “Duncan’s horses, a thing most strange and certain/Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race,/Turned wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out,/Contending ‘gainst obedience as they would/Make war with mankind./’Tis said, they eat each other,” it seems that anything is possible.

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From Bloom:

“Hazlitt remarked of Macbeth that ‘he is sure of nothing but the present moment.’ As the play progresses to its catastrophe, Macbeth loses even that certitude, and his apocalyptic anxieties prompt Victor Hugo’s identification of Macbeth with Nimrod, the Bible’s first hunter of men. Macbeth is worthy of the identification: his shocking vitality imbues the violence of evil with biblical force and majesty, giving us the paradox that the play seems Christian not for any benevolent expression but only insofar as its ideas of evil surpass merely naturalistic explanations. If any theology is applicable to Macbeth, then it must be the most negative of theologies, one that excludes the Incarnation. The cosmos of Macbeth, like that of Moby Dick, knows no Savior; the heath and the sea alike are great shrouds, whose dead will not be resurrected.

God is exiled from Macbeth and Moby-Dick, and from King Lear also. Exiled, not denied or slain; Macbeth rules in a cosmological emptiness where God is lost, either too far away or too far within to be summoned back. As in King Lear, so in Macbeth: the moment of creation and the moment of fall fuse into one. Nature and man fall into time, even as they are created.

No one desires Macbeth to lose its witches, because of their dramatic immediacy, yet the play’s cosmological vision renders them a little redundant.

Between what Macbeth imagines and what he does, there is only a temporal gap, in which he himself seems devoid of will. The Weird Sisters, Macbeth’s Muses, take the place of that will; we cannot imagine them appearing to Iago, or to Edmund, both geniuses of the will. They are not hollow men; Macbeth is. What happens to Macbeth is inevitable, despite his own culpability, and no other play by Shakespeare, not even the early farces, moves with such speed (as Coleridge noted). Perhaps the rapidity augments the play’s terror; there seems to be no power of the mind over the universe of death, a cosmos all but identical both with Macbeth’s phantasmagoria and with the Weird Sisters.

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Clik here to view.Shakespeare grants little cognitive power to anyone in Macbeth, and least of all to the protagonist himself. The intellectual powers of Hamlet, Iago, and Edmund are not relevant to Macbeth and to his play. Shakespeare disperses the energies of the mind, so that no single character in Macbeth represents any particular capacity for understanding the tragedy, nor could they do better in concert. Mind is elsewhere in Macbeth; it has forsaken humans and witches alike, and lodges freestyle where it will, shifting capriciously and quickly from one corner of the sensible emptiness to another. Coleridge hated the Porter’s scene (II, iii), with its famous knocking at the gate, but Coleridge made himself deaf to the cognitive urgency of the knocking. Mind knocks, and breaks into the play, with the first and only comedy allowed in this drama. Shakespeare employs his company’s leading clown (presumably Robert Armin) to introduce a healing touch of nature where Macbeth has intimidated us with the preternatural, and with the Macbeth’s mutual phantasmagoria of murder and power:

Porter
  1   Here’s a knocking indeed! If a man were
  2   porter of Hell Gate, he should have old turning the
  3   key. (Knock.) Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there,
  4   i’ the name of Beelzebub? Here’s a farmer, that hang’d
  5   himself on th’ expectation of plenty. Come in time!
  6   Have napkins enow about you; here you’ll sweat for’t.
  7   (Knock.) Knock, knock! Who’s there, in the other
  8    devil’s name? Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could
  9   swear in both the scales against either scale, who com-
 10   mitted treason enough for God’s sake, yet could
 11   not equivocate to heaven. O, come in, equivocator.
 12   (Knock.) Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there? Faith,
 13   here’s an English tailor come hither, for stealing
 14   out of a French hose: come in, tailor; here you may
 15   roast your goose. (Knock.) Knock, knock! Never
 16   at quiet! What are you? But this place is too
 17   cold for hell. I’ll devil-porter it no further: I had
 18   thought to have let in some of all professions that go
 19   the primrose way to the everlasting bonfire. (Knock.)
 20   Anon, anon! [Opens the gate.] I pray you, remember
 21   the porter.

Cheerfully hungover, the Porter admits Macduff and Lennox through what indeed is now Hell Gate, the slaughterhouse where Macbeth has murdered the good Duncan. Shakespeare may well be grimacing at himself on ‘a farmer that hang’d himself on th’ expectation of plenty,’ since investing in grain was one of Shakespeare’s favorite risks of venture capital. The more profound humor comes in the proleptic contrast between the Porter and Macbeth. As keeper of Hell Gate, the Porter boisterously greets ‘an equivocator,’ presumably a Jesuit like Father Garnet, who asserted a right to equivocal answers so as to avoid self-incrimination in the Gunpowder Plot trial of early 1606, the year Macbeth was first performed. Historicizing Macbeth as a reaction to the Gunpowder Plot seems only a compounding of darkness with darkness, since Shakespeare always transcends commentary on his own moment in time.  [MY NOTE:  On the other hand, Garry Wills, in his book Witches & Jesuits, views the play in just that way, linking it to what he calls “a rash of Gunpowder plays in 1606.”  It’s an interesting read.]  We rather are meant to contrast the hard-drinking Porter with Macbeth himself, who will remind us of the Porter, but not until Act V Scene v, when Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane and Macbeth begins: ‘To doubt th’ equivocation of the fiend,/That lies like truth.’ De Quincey confined his analysis of the knocking at the gate in Macbeth to the shock of the four knocks themselves, but as an acute rhetorician he should have attended more to the Porter’s subsequent dialogue with Macduff, where the porter send up forever the notion of ‘equivocation’ by expounding how alcohol provokes three things:

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Clik here to view.Porter:

Marry Sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine. Lechery, Sir, it provokes, and unprovokes: it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance. Therefore, much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him  on, and it takes him off; it persuades him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not stand to: in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and giving him the lie, leaves him.

Drunkenness is another equivocation, provoking lust but then denying the male his capacity for performance. Are we perhaps made to wonder whether Macbeth, like Iago, plots murderously because his sexual capacity has been impaired? If you have a proleptic imagination as intense as Macbeth’s, then your desire or ambition outruns your will, reaching the other bank, or shoal, of time all too quickly. The fierce sexual passion of the Macbeths possesses a quality of baffled intensity, possibly related to their childlessness, so that the Porter may hint at a situation that transcends his possible knowledge, but not the audience’s surmises.

Macbeth’s ferocity as a killing machine exceeds even the capacity of such great Shakespearean butchers as Aaron the Moor and Richard III, or the heroic Roman battle prowess of Antony and of Coriolanus. Iago’s possible impotence would have some relation to the humiliation of being passed over for Cassio. But if Macbeth’s manhood has been thwarted, there is no Othello for him to blame; the sexual victimization, if it exists, is self-generated by an imagination so impatient with time’s workings that it always overprepares every event. This may be an element in Lady Macbeth’s taunts, almost as if the manliness of Macbeth can be restored only by his murder of the sleeping Duncan, whom Lady Macbeth cannot slay because the good king resembles her father in his slumber. The mounting nihilism of Macbeth, which will culminate in his image of life as a tale signifying nothing, perhaps then has more affinity with Iago’s devaluation of reality than with Edmund’s cold potency.

A.C. Bradley found in Macbeth more of a ‘Sophoclean irony’ than anywhere else in Shakespeare, meaning by such irony an augmenting awareness in the audience far exceeding the protagonist’s consciousness that perpetually he is saying one thing, and meaning more than he himself understands in what he says. I agree with Bradley that Macbeth is the masterpiece of Shakespearean irony, which transcends dramatic, or Sophoclean, irony. Macbeth consistently says more than he knows, but he also imagines more than he says, so that the gap between his overt consciousness and his imaginative powers, wide to begin with, becomes extraordinary. Sexual desire, particularly in males, is likely to manifest all the vicissitudes of the drive when that abyss is so vast. This may be part of the burden of Lady Macbeth’s lament before the banquet scene dominated by Banquo’s ghost:

     Naught’s bad, all’s spent,

Where our desire is got without content:

‘Tis safer to be that which we destroy,

Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.

(III.ii.4-7)

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Clik here to view.The madness of Lady Macbeth exceeds a trauma merely of guilt, her husband consistently turns from her (though never against her), once Duncan is slain. Whatever the two had intended by the mutual ‘greatness’ they had promised each other, the subtle irony of Shakespeare reduces to a pragmatic desexualization once the usurpation of the crown has been realized. There is a fearful pathos in Lady Macbeth’s cries of ‘To bed,’ in her madness, and a terrifying proleptic irony in her earlier outcry ‘Unsex me here.’ It is an understatement that no other author’s sense of human sexuality equals Shakespeare’s in scope and in precision. The terror that we experience, as audience or as readers, when we suffer Macbeth seems to me, in many ways, sexual in its nature, if only because murder increasingly becomes Macbeth’s mode of sexual expression. Unable to beget children, Macbeth slaughters them.

Though it is traditional to regard Macbeth as being uniquely terrifying among Shakespeare’s plays, it will appear eccentric that I should regard this tragedy’s fearsomeness as somehow sexual in its origins and in its dominant aspects. The violence of Macbeth doubtless impresses us more than it did the drama’s contemporary audiences. Many if not most of those who attended Macbeth also joined the crowds who thronged public executions in London, including drawings-and-quarterings as well as more civilized beheadings. The young Shakespeare, as we saw, probably heaped up outrages in his Titus Andronicus both to gratify his audience and to mock such gratification. But the barbarities of Titus Andronicus are very different from the savageries of Macbeth, which do not move us to nervous laughter.

For brave Macbeth (well he deserves that name),

Disdaining Fortune, with his brandish’d steel,

Which smok’d with bloody execution,

Like Valour’s minion, carv’d out his passage,

‘Till he fac’d the slave;

Which ne’er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,

Till he unsem’d him from the nave to th’ chops,

And fix’d his head upon our battlements.

I cannot recall anyone else in Shakespeare who sustains a death wound from the navel all the way up to his jaw, a mode of unseaming that introduces us to Macbeth’s quite astonishing ferocity. ‘Bellona’s bridegroom,’ Macbeth is thus the husband to the war goddess, and his unseaming strokes enact his husbandly function. Devoted as he and Lady Macbeth palpably are to each other, their love has its problematic elements. Shakespeare’s sources gave him a Lady Macbeth previously married, and presumably grieving for a dead son by that marriage. The mutual passion between her and Macbeth depends on their dream of a shared ‘greatness,’ the promise of which seems to have been an element in Macbeth’s courtship, since she reminds him of it when he wavers. Her power over him, with its angry questioning of his manliness, is engendered by her evident frustration – certainly of ambition, manifestly of motherhood, possibly also of sexual fulfillment. Victor Hugo, when he placed Macbeth in the line of Nimrod, the Bible’s first ‘hunter of men,’ may have hinted that few of them have been famous as lovers. Macbeth sees himself always as a soldier, therefore not cruel but professional murderous, which allows him to maintain also a curious, personal passivity, almost more the dream than the dreamer. Famously a paragon of courage and so no coward, Macbeth nevertheless is in a perpetual state of fear. Of what? Part of the answer seems to be his fear of impotence, a dread related as much to his shared dream of greatness with Lady Macbeth.

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Clik here to view.Critics almost always find an element of sexual violence in Macbeth’s murder of the sleeping and benign Duncan. Macbeth himself overdetermines this crucial discovery when he compares his movement toward the murder with ‘Tarquin’s ravishin strides’ on that tyrant’s way to rape the chaste Lucrece, heroine of Shakespeare’s poem. Is this a rare, self-referential moment on Shakespeare’s own part, since many in Macbeth’s audience would have recognized the dramatist’s reference to one of his nondramatic works, which was more celebrated in Shakespeare’s time than it is in ours? If it is, then Shakespeare brings his imagination very close to Macbeth’s in the moment just preceding his protagonist’s initial crime. Think how many are murdered onstage in Shakespeare, and reflect why we are not allowed to watch Macbeth’s stabbings of Duncan. The unseen nature of the butchery allows us to imagine, rather horribly, the location and number of Macbeth’s thrusts into the sleeping body of the man who is at once his cousin, his guest, his king, and symbolically his benign father. I assumed that, in Julius Caesar, Brutus’s thrust was at Caesar’s privates, enhancing the horror of the tradition that Brutus was Caesar’s natural son. The corpse of Duncan is described by Macbeth in accents that remind us of Antony’s account of the murdered Caesar, yet there is something more intimate in Macbeth’s phrasing:

     Here lay Duncan,

His silver skin lac’d with his golden blood;

And his gash’d stabs look’d like a breach in nature

For ruin’s wasteful entrance.

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Clik here to view.Macbeth and ‘ruin’ are one, and the sexual suggestiveness in ‘breach in nature’ and ‘wasteful nature’ is very strong, and counterpoints itself against Lady Macbeth’s bitter reproaches at Macbeth’s refusal to return with the daggers, which would involve his seeing the corpse again. ‘Infirm of purpose!’ she cries out to him at first, and when she returns from planting the daggers, her imputation of his sexual failure is even more overt: ‘Your constancy/Hath left you unattended,’ another reminder this his firmness has abandoned him. But perhaps desire, except to perpetuate himself in time, has departed forever from him. He has doomed himself to be the ‘poor player,’ an overanxious actor always missing his cues. Iago and Edmund, in somewhat diverse ways, were both playwrights staging their own works, until Iago was unmasked by Emilia and Edmund received his death wound from the nameless knight, Edgar’s disguise. Though Iago and Edmund also played brilliantly in their self-devised roles, they showed their genius primarily as plotters. Macbeth plots incessantly, but cannot make the drama go as he wishes. He botches it perpetually, and grows more and more outraged that his bloodiest ideas, when accomplished, trail behind them a residuum that threatens him still. Malcolm and Donalbain, Fleance and Macduff – all flee, and their survival is for Macbeth the stuff of nightmare.

Nightmare seeks Macbeth out; that search, more than his violence, is the true plot of this most terrifying of Shakespeare’s plays. From my childhood on, I have been puzzled by the Witches, who spur the rapt Macbeth on to his sublime but guilty project. They come to him because preternaturally they know him: he is not so much theirs as they are his. This is not to deny their reality apart from him, but only to indicate again that he has more implicit power over them than they manifest in regard to him. They place nothing in his mind that is not already there. And yet they undoubtedly influence his total yielding to his own ambitious imagination. Perhaps, indeed, they are the final impetus that renders Macbeth so ambiguously passive when he confronts the phantasmagorias that Lady Macbeth says always have attended him. In that sense the Weird Sisters are close to the three Norns, or Fates, that William Blake interpreted them as being: they gaze into the seeds of time, but they also act upon those they teach to gaze with them. Together with Lady Macbeth, they persuade Macbeth to his self-abandonment, or rather they prepare Macbeth for Lady Macbeth’s greater temptation into unsanctified violence.

Surely the play inherits their cosmos, and not a Christian universe. Hecate, goddess of spells, is the deity of the night world, and though she calls Macbeth ‘a wayward son,’ his actions pragmatically make him a loyal associate of the evil sorceress. One senses, in rereading Macbeth, a greater preternatural energy within Macbeth himself than is available to Hecate or to the Weird Sisters. Our equivocal but compulsive sympathy for him is partly founded upon Shakespeare’s exclusion of any other human center of interest, except for his prematurely eclipsed wife, and partly upon our fear that his imagination is our own. Yet the largest element in our irrational sympathy ensues from Macbeth’s sublimity. Great utterance continuously breaks through his confusions, and a force neither divine nor wicked seems to choose him as the trumpet of its prophecy:

     Besides, this Duncan

Hath borne his facilities so meek, hath been

So clear in his great office, that his virtues

Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongu’d against

The deep damnation of his taking-off,

And Pity, like a naked new-born babe,

Striding the blast, or heaven’s Cherubins, hors’d

Upon the sightless couriers of the air,

Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,

That tears shall drown the wind.

Here, as elsewhere, we do not feel that Macbeth’s proleptic eloquence is inappropriate to him; his language and his imaginings are those of a seer, which heightens the horror of his disintegration into the bloodiest of all Shakespearean tyrant-villains. Yet we wonder just how and why this great voice breaks through Macbeth’s consciousness, since clearly it comes to him unbidden. He is, we know, given to seizures; Lady Macbeth remarks, ‘My Lord is often thus,/And hath been from his youth.’ Visionary fits come upon him when and as they will, and his tendency to second sight is clearly allied both to his proleptic imaginings and to the witches’ preoccupation with him. No one else in Shakespeare is so occult, not even the hermetic magician, Prospero.

This produces an extraordinary effect upon us, since we are Macbeth, though we are pragmatically neither murderers nor mediums, and he is. Nor are we conduits for transcendent energies, for visions and voices; Macbeth is as much a natural poet as he is a natural killer. He cannot reason and compare, because images beyond reason and beyond competition overwhelm him. Shakespeare can be said to have conferred his own intelligence upon Hamlet, his capacity for more life upon Falstaff, his own wit upon Rosalind. To Macbeth, Shakespeare evidently gave over what might be called the passive element in his own imagination. We cannot judge that the author of Macbeth was victimized by his own imagination, but we hardly can avoid seeing Macbeth himself as the victim of a beyond that surmounts anything available to us. His tragic dignity depends upon his contagious sense of unknown modes of being, his awareness of powers that lie beyond Hecate and the witches but are not identical with the Christian God and His angels. These powers are the tragic sublime itself, and Macbeth, despite his own will, is so deeply at one with them that he can contaminate us with sublimity, even as the unknown forces contaminate him. Critics have never agreed as to how to name those forces; it seems to me best to agree with Nietzsche that the prejudices of morality are irrelevant to such daemons. If they terrify us by taking over this play, they also bring us joy, the utmost pleasure that accepts contamination by the daemons.”

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 And since Bloom mentioned it, this seems the perfect time to include the most interesting essay by Thomas de Quincey, “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”

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Clik here to view.“From my boyish days I had always felt a great perplexity on one point in Macbeth. It was this: the knocking at the gate, which succeeds to the murder of Duncan, produced to my feelings an effect for which I never could account. The effect was, that it reflected back upon the murder a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity; yet, however obstinately I endeavored with my understanding to comprehend this, for many years I never could see _why_ it should produce such an effect.

Here I pause for one moment, to exhort the reader never to pay any attention to his understanding when it stands in opposition to any other faculty of his mind. The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind, and the most to be distrusted; and yet the great majority of people trust to nothing else; which may do for ordinary life, but not for philosophical purposes. Of this out of ten thousand instances that I might produce, I will cite one. Ask of any person whatsoever, who is not previously prepared for the demand by a knowledge of perspective, to draw in the rudest way the commonest appearance which depends upon the laws of that science; as for instance, to represent the effect of two walls standing at right angles to each other, or the appearance of the houses on each side of a street, as seen by a person looking down the street from one extremity. Now in all cases, unless the person has happened to observe in pictures how it is that artists produce these effects, he will be utterly unable to make the smallest approximation to it. Yet why? For he has actually seen the effect every day of his life. The reason is–that he allows his understanding to overrule his eyes. His understanding, which includes no intuitive knowledge of the laws of vision, can furnish him with no reason why a line which is known and can be proved to be a horizontal line, should not _appear_ a horizontal line; a line that made any angle with the perpendicular less than a right angle, would seem to him to indicate that his houses were all tumbling down together. Accordingly he makes the line of his houses a horizontal line, and fails of course to produce the effect demanded. Here then is one instance out of many, in which not only the understanding is allowed to overrule the eyes, but where the understanding is positively allowed to obliterate the eyes as it were, for not only does the man believe the evidence of his understanding in opposition to that of his eyes, but, (what is monstrous!) the idiot is not aware that his eyes ever gave such evidence. He does not know that he has seen (and therefore _quoad_ his consciousness has _not_ seen) that which he _has_ seen every day of his life. But to return from this digression, my understanding could furnish no reason why the knocking at the gate in Macbeth should produce any effect, direct or reflected. In fact, my understanding said positively that it could _not_ produce any effect. But I knew better; I felt that it did; and I waited and clung to the problem until further knowledge should enable me to solve it. At length, in 1812, Mr. Williams made his _debut_ on the stage of Ratcliffe Highway, and executed those unparalleled murders which have procured for him such a brilliant and undying reputation. On which murders, by the way, I must observe, that in one respect they have had an ill effect, by making the connoisseur in murder very fastidious in his taste, and dissatisfied by anything that has been since done in that line. All other murders look pale by the deep crimson of his; and, as an amateur once said to me in a querulous tone, “There has been absolutely nothing _doing_ since his time, or nothing that’s worth speaking of.” But this is wrong; for it is unreasonable to expect all men to be great artists, and born with the genius of Mr. Williams. Now it will be remembered that in the first of these murders, (that of the Marrs,) the same incident (of a knocking at the door soon after the work of extermination was complete) did actually occur, which the genius of Shakspeare has invented; and all good judges, and the most eminent dilettanti, acknowledged the felicity of Shakspeare’s suggestion as soon as it was actually realized. Here, then, was a fresh proof that I was right in relying on my own feeling in opposition to my understanding; and I again set myself to study the problem; at length I solved it to my own satisfaction; and my solution is this. Murder in ordinary cases, where the sympathy is wholly directed to the case of the murdered person, is an incident of coarse and vulgar horror; and for this reason, that it flings the interest exclusively upon the natural but ignoble instinct by which we cleave to life; an instinct, which, as being indispensable to the primal law of self-preservation, is the same in kind, (though different in degree,) amongst all living creatures; this instinct therefore, because it annihilates all distinctions, and degrades the greatest of men to the level of “the poor beetle that we tread on,” exhibits human nature in its most abject and humiliating attitude. Such an attitude would little suit the purposes of the poet. What then must he do? He must throw the interest on the murderer. Our sympathy must be with _him_; (of course I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into his feelings, and are made to understand them,–not a sympathy[1] of pity or approbation.) In the murdered person all strife of thought, all flux and reflux of passion and of purpose, are crushed by one overwhelming panic; the fear of instant death smites him “with its petrific mace.” But in the murderer, such a murderer as a poet will condescend to, there must be raging some great storm of passion,–jealousy, ambition, vengeance, hatred,–which will create a hell within him; and into this hell we are to look.

[Footnote 1: It seems almost ludicrous to guard and explain my use of a word in a situation where it would naturally explain itself. But it has become necessary to do so, in consequence of the unscholarlike use of the word sympathy, at present so general, by which, instead of taking it in its proper sense, as the act of reproducing in our minds the feelings of another, whether for hatred, indignation, love, pity, or approbation, it is made a mere synonyme of the word _pity_; and hence, instead of saying "sympathy _with_ another," many writers adopt the monstrous barbarism of "sympathy _for_ another."]

In Macbeth, for the sake of gratifying his own enormous and teeming faculty of creation, Shakspeare has introduced two murderers: and, as usual in his hands, they are remarkably discriminated: but, though in Macbeth the strife of mind is greater than in his wife, the tiger spirit not so awake, and his feelings caught chiefly by contagion from her,–yet, as both were finally involved in the guilt of murder, the murderous mind of necessity is finally to be presumed in both. This was to be expressed; and on its own account, as well as to make it a more proportionable antagonist to the unoffending nature of their victim, “the gracious Duncan,” and adequately to expound “the deep damnation of his taking off,” this was to be expressed with peculiar energy. We were to be made to feel that the human nature, _i.e._, the divine nature of love and mercy, spread through the hearts of all creatures, and seldom utterly withdrawn from man,–was gone, vanished, extinct; and that the fiendish nature had taken its place. And, as this effect is marvellously accomplished in the _dialogues_ and _soliloquies_ themselves, so it is finally consummated by the expedient under consideration; and it is to this that I now solicit the reader’s attention. If the reader has ever witnessed a wife, daughter, or sister, in a fainting fit, he may chance to have observed that the most affecting moment in such a spectacle, is _that_ in which a sigh and a stirring announce the recommencement of suspended life. Or, if the reader has ever been present in a vast metropolis, on the day when some great national idol was carried in funeral pomp to his grave, and chancing to walk near the course through which it passed, has felt powerfully, in the silence and desertion of the streets and in the stagnation of ordinary business, the deep interest which at that moment was possessing the heart of man,–if all at once he should hear the death-like stillness broken up by the sound of wheels rattling away from the scene, and making known that the transitory vision was dissolved, he will be aware that at no moment was his sense of the complete suspension and pause in ordinary human concerns so full and affecting, as at that moment when the suspension ceases, and the goings-on of human life are suddenly resumed. All action in any direction is best expounded, measured, and made apprehensible, by reaction. Now apply this to the case in Macbeth. Here, as I have said, the retiring of the human heart and the entrance of the fiendish heart was to be expressed and made sensible. Another world has stepped in; and the murderers are taken out of the region of human things, human purposes, human desires. They are transfigured: Lady Macbeth is “unsexed;” Macbeth has forgot that he was born of woman; both are conformed to the image of devils; and the world of devils is suddenly revealed. But how shall this be conveyed and made palpable? In order that a new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear. The murderers, and the murder, must be insulated–cut off by an immeasurable gulph from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs–locked up and sequestered in some deep recess; we must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested–laid asleep–tranced–racked into a dread armistice: time must be annihilated; relation to things without abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion. Hence it is, that when the deed is done, when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard; and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced: the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them.

O, mighty poet! Thy works are not as those of other men, simply and merely great works of art; but are also like the phenomena of nature, like the sun and the sea, the stars and the flowers,–like frost and snow, rain and dew, hail-storm and thunder, which are to be studied with entire submission of our own faculties, and in the perfect faith that in them there can be no too much or too little, nothing useless or inert–but that, the further we press in our discoveries, the more we shall see proofs of design and self-supporting arrangement where the careless eye had seen nothing but accident!”

My next post:  Thursday evening/Friday morning:  More on Act Two

Enjoy

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Macbeth

Act Two, Part Two

By Dennis Abrams

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I hope you’re all enjoying Macbeth as much as I am.  Having read as much Shakespeare as I’ve done (and as you’ve done) over the last year and a half, I feel so much better equipped to appreciate the play, so much more in tune to Shakespeare’s writing and rhythms and language…are you all feeling the same way?

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Macbeth, Stark Naked Theater Company, Houston

A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to see a very good production of Macbeth here in Houston performed by Stark Naked Theater Company.  (And no, it wasn’t a stark naked production.)  The company’s co-founder Philip Lehl (who starred in the production along with his wife and fellow co-founder Kim Tobin) was generous enough to share me with his thoughts on taking on one of the most challenging roles in theater:

“I didn’t anticipate how bleak I found the character of Macbeth to be.  I really believe he is driven mad (as mad as his wife) through his attempts at dealing with the murders he commits.  I had an argument with a friend of mine, who said, “he redeems himself at the end!”  I asked for textual proof, he answered with “blow wind, come wrack/ at least we’ll die with harness on our back.” (Which I didn’t find very convincing.) I then pointed out that immediately previous, Macbeth has come to the conclusion that life signifies “nothing.”  And that subsequently, upon finding out that Macduff was “untimely ripped” from his mother’s womb, Macbeth says “I’ll not fight with you” and tries to run.  This killing machine, this great soldier, because of his transgressions, and the fact that he does have a conscience, has been turned into a coward.

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Philip Lehl, Macbeth, Stark Naked Theater Company, Houston

I’m saying that I found him utterly despicable, and had a hard time coming to grips with that as an actor.  Tyrone Guthrie once told Laurence Olivier that he needed to “love” the character he was playing (Sergius in Shaw’s ARMS AND THE MAN.)  I was never able to love Macbeth.

I’ve been musing about some of the other major characters from this period of Shakespeare – Othello, Hamlet, Lear – and wondering if I would have the same reaction.

Don’t get me wrong!  I’m glad to have wrestled with this character, and found great satisfaction as an actor in finding my way through the play.  But either I missed the way in to loving that character, or there isn’t a way in, and that remains frustrating to me.

On another note: I’m fairly proud of our decision to try to present the play in a way that invited, and forced the audience to use its imagination to create horror.  For instance, I believe that the decision to have almost all of the blood in the play be invisible to the audience – thereby inviting them to see blood in their imaginations – was effective.  A friend asked me, “was that a budgetary decision?” to which I replied, “absolutely not!”  I was sorry that he had to ask, and understand that some might have thought we were being cheap, but it was all about trying to engage the audience.  I believe, by the way, that every Shakespeare play works best when presented in this way.  ”O for a muse of fire…” is my textual support for that!”

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From Garber:

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Clik here to view.“…bolstered by Lady Macbeth’s mingled encouragement and scorn, [Macbeth] finds himself waiting for her signal, the bell – that tolling symbol out of Othello – and he speaks in the same trouble and contorted language when confronted with a terrifying vision. As I have noted above, filmmakers and theater directors occasionally try to ‘dramatize’ this vision by presenting an actual dagger to the audience’s eyes; this takes pressure off the actor, but it also places the audience’s-eye view squarely within the consciousness of Macbeth, whereas the play itself is brilliantly careful in the way it offers a variety of competing points of view.

Macbeth:

Is this a dagger which I see before me,

The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.

I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible

To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but

A dagger of the mind, a false creation

Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

I see thee yet, in form as palpable

As this which now I draw.

Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going.

………………………………………

     I see thee still,

And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,

Which was not so before. There’s no such thing.

It is the bloody business which informs

Thus to mine eyes…

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Clik here to view.‘Is this…?”; ‘I have thee not,…I see thee still’; ‘There’s no such thing.’ Internal debate and dialectic, as the invisible dagger turns bloody before his eyes. It is at this point that Macbeth approaches the dread word ‘murder,’ which he has all this time been avoiding. His ‘horrible imaginings’ in act I produced a murder that was ‘but fantasical.’ Now the fantasy is about to merge with reality, and ‘murder’ is mentioned for only the second time in the play. We may notice how hard he tried to avoid the word, to avoid putting a verb to the noun, an action to the idea:

    Now o’er the one-half world

Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse

The curtained sleep. Witchcraft celebrates

Pale Hecate’s offerings, and withered murder,

Alarumed by his sentinel the wolf,

Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,

With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design

Moves like a ghost…

Macbeth displaces the agency from himself onto a personified ‘murder,’ who resembles one of the witches (‘withered’). Subordinate clause after subordinate clause postpones and retards the move to the verb “moves’; three lines of verse are interposed between ‘murder’ and ‘Moves.’ Language here mirrors Macbeth’s own doubt and delay; he cannot say the deed, which is tantamount to not doing the deed – and then the bell rings, and the suspense is over:

I go, and it is done. The bell invites me.

Hear it not. Duncan; for it is a knell

That summons thee to heaven or to hell.

The reference to Tarquin, above (‘With Tarquin’s ravishing strides’), is worth our pausing over for a moment, not only because it suggests affinities with Shakespeare’s poem The Rape of Lucrece but because, as some critics have noticed, it obliquely ‘feminizes’ King Duncan. Lucrece, or Lucretia, was a virtuous wife, whose husband’s praise of her led men of the court of the Roman Emperor Tarquinius Superbus to find her specially desirable. The Emperor’s nephew, Tarquinius Sextus, stole upon her and raped her, and Lucretia killed herself out of shame. The Roman historian Levy says Tarquin was ‘inflamed by her purity and beauty,’ (Holinshed’s Chronicles describes King Duncan as perhaps too ‘soft and gentle of nature’ and says the rebels regarded him as ‘a faint-hearted milksop.’) In a play in which conventionally ‘male’ and ‘female’ qualities are often deliberately displaced, where witches who ‘should be women’ have beards, and Macbeth commends his wife to ‘[b]ring forth men children only’ in accordance with her manly spirit, this further deplacement, the slightly indecorous recasting of the story of Lucrece with Duncan in the title role, continues the sense of unease. Nothing is but what is not.

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Clik here to view.Macbeth’s language before the murder, then, is knotty, contorted, difficult to follow and to unscramble syntactically. But a striking change comes over his diction the minute the murder is accomplished: it becomes fragmented, disoriented, and disordered, the words dropping singly, like stones down a well, and echoing as they fall:

Lady Macbeth:  Did you not speak?

Macbeth:                         When?

Lady Macbeth:                                Now.

Macbeth:                                               As I descended?

Lady Macbeth:  Ay.

Macbeth:              Hark! – Who lies ‘i’th’ second chamber?

Lady Macbeth:  Donalbain.

Macbeth:         [looking at his hands]  This is a sorry sight.

Strikingly now, Macbeth begins to worry about things he could not say:

Macbeth:

One cried ‘God bless us’ and ‘Amen’ the other,

As they had seen me with these hangman’s hands.

List’ning their fear I could not say ‘Amen’

When they did say ‘God bless us.’

Lady Macbeth:

Consider it not so deeply.

Macbeth:

But wherefore could I not prounounce ‘Amen?’

I had most need of blessing, and ‘Amen’

Stuck in my throat.

Yet again we encounter, in this character compact of language, a loss of control over speech – not a deliberately postponed conclusion now (‘murder…Moves’), but a failure to be able to speak, to finish a thought. Macbeth has himself become one of those ‘imperfect speakers,’ unfinished and enigmatic.

Methoughts I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more,

Macbeth does murder sleep’ – the innocent sleep.

Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,

The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,

Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,

Chief nourisher in life’s feat –

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Clik here to view.Somewhat to our relief, Lady Macbeth impatiently interrupts this catalogue that threatens to go on forever. ‘What do you mean?’ she asks, and ‘Who was it that thus cried?’ At this point in the play she, unlike her husband, is untouched by horror. Her crisis will come later, and be even more terrible. But at this point, anticipating her own sleepwalking (and hand-washing) scene, she says, dismissively, ‘A little water clears us of this deed.’ For Macbeth, though, the horror is already fully present from the moment of the murder, and the curse upon him is sleeplessness, disorder in the world of human nature, the same disease that afflicted Henry IV, and Richard III, and other kings guilty of murder – as well as Brutus when he was contemplating the murder of Caesar.

The murder of Duncan is discovered when Macduff and Lennox knock at the gate of the castle, asking to see their king. The knocking at the gate is itself, on a stage, particularly hollow and horrible, and the Porter, who jokes about being ‘porter of hell-gate,’ marks and guards a threshold to nightmare. Like the dangerously permeable border between witches and soldiers, like the literally transgressive boundary between actors and audience, or onstage and offstage, so this gateway is also dramatically and thematically established as a place of crisis. ‘Up, up, and see/The great doom’s image,’ cries Macduff. ‘As from your graves rise up, and walk like sprites/To countenance this horror.’ They are all in a living nightmare, the image of the Last Judgment, the earth’s final catastrophe. The characteristic central event of a Shakespearean tragedy is a kind of stripping or divestment, and Macbeth, as we have seen, is now stripped of language, and of sleep, by his horror at his own action. So it is particularly fitting, in the following scene, to find him stripped of clothing as well. Dressed as he is in his nightclothes, without weapons or armor, he receives the ‘news’ that is no news to him, and cloaks himself, once more, in borrowed robes, the borrowed robes of language.

Lady Macbeth’s response, a superb failure of emphasis – ‘What, in our house?’ – calls semicomic attention on the gross violation of the central value of hospitality, and her almost surely spurious faint is a stratagem of distraction rather than a sign of female frailty. When Macbeth speaks blithely and pictorially of his supposed discovery of Duncan’s body, describing that body almost as if it were a work of art – ‘Here lay Duncan,/His silver skin laced with his golden blood’ – we can recall her scornful pun at the time of the murder:

     Infirm of purpose!

Give me the daggers…

……………………………

I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal,

For it must seem their guilt.

Guilt is internal; gilt, external – another equivocation. Macbeth’s image of Duncan’s golden blood suggests that the internal struggle has been replaced by a ‘false face.’ His language takes on a deceptive ornateness, markedly different from the involuted contortion of his earlier equivocation, and also from the naked blankness of his first shock and horror. His sudden, politic volubility – ‘Had I but died an hour before this chance/I had lifed a blessed time, for from this instant/There’s nothing serious in mortality’ – is truer than he perhaps intends, and the sudden silence of the real mourners, Duncan’s sons, marks their temporary loss of power and his ascendancy. From this point will come the murder of Banquo, and the attempted murder of his innocent son, Fleance, and the inexcusable and brutal murder of Lady Macduff and her children, until Macbeth has nothing left, finally, of the emotion that had filled him with fear. When Banquo, alone on the stage, says ruefully at the beginning of Act 3, ‘Thou has it now: King, Cawdor, Glamis, all/As the weird sisters promised; and I fear/Thou play’st most foully for’t,’ the moment will mark both Macbeth’s ascendancy and his decline.

The terrible language of equivocation reenters the play as a sign of moral failure, and it does so, significantly, at the play’s midpoint, act 3, scene 4. The time is equivocal, too, the night ‘[a]lmost at odds with morning, which is which.’ Macbeth’s situation, like his language, recalls that of Richard III:

Macbeth:

I am in blood

Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o’er.

‘Tedious’ weary, disagreeable, tiresome, exhausting. The tragic and the tedious are, in a way, as much ‘at odds’ as morning and night. Macbeth is in a sense already beyond human emotion, and these centrally placed lines act as a fulcrum, a watershed, a split. Like the equivocator described by the Porter, ‘that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven,’ Macbeth is well along the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire.

Like Richard II, Macbeth has a chiastic, or X-shaped, structure, charting at once the upward and downward trajectories of its two protagonists. As Macbeth moves downward toward inhumanity and loss of affect, Lady Macbeth moves upward, toward feeling and horror. At the beginning of the play it is Macbeth who hears voices, sees visions: the dagger before him, coated with blood, the voice that cries ‘Sleep no more’; the ghost of Banquo. Lady Macbeth sees and hears nothing. Like Iago, she has no interior dimension in which to feel the emotional tug-of-war, this battle of the soul. But by the play’s close it is Lady Macbeth who has the most terrible vision, presented to us like a play-within-the-play: the vision of a bloody hand that cannot be cleaned. And this exchange of qualities takes place between Macbeth and his wife, two characters whom Freud would use as case studies for ‘disunited parts of a single psychical individuality’ in ‘Some Character Types Met with in Psycho-Analytical Work.’ Yet in the opening scenes we see in Lady Macbeth none of this frailty. We see instead rigidity, resolution, and the rejection of a restricted notion of a woman’s place. Lady Macbeth is the stronger character in the play. From the first moment we see her she is resolute, apparently without moral reservation, and devastatingly scornful of her husband’s inner struggles, which she equates with unmanliness. The opposite of ‘man’ in this case can be either ‘child’ or ‘woman.’ Thus we hear her say,

     Yet do I fear thy nature,

It is too full o’th’ milk of human kindness

To catch the nearest way…

……………………………………

     What thou wouldst highly,

That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false,

And yet wouldst wrongly win…

And later even more scornfully,

              Infirm of purpose!

Give me the daggers…

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Clik here to view.Lady Macbeth will take the daggers from her husband and return to the scene of the crime to finish the task of implicating the grooms in Duncan’s murder. In fact, as she repeatedly makes clear, she sees herself as the stronger, the dominant, the more conventionally ‘masculine’ of the two. I think we can say with justice that those unisex witches, with their women’s forms and their confusingly masculine beards, are, among other things, dream images, metaphors, for Lady Macbeth herself: physically a woman but, as she claims, mentally and spiritually a man. It’s well to remember at points like these that the actor playing Lady Macbeth, like the actor playing the far more ‘feminine’ Lady Macduff, would have been male.  [MY NOTE:  And it’s so well to note here that there are some who believe that the same actor would have played both Lady Macbeth AND Lady Macduff (they’re never on stage at the same time)]  Gender on the early modern public stage was performed rather than ‘natural.’ Like darkness, which sometimes needed to be invoked by language – or props, such as onstage candles and lanterns – in the middle of an afternoon performance, gender difference, femaleness, was an achieved effect rather than a mirror of reality. And this is very germane to the question of Macbeth’s manliness, which his wife so regularly challenges. Neither manliness nor womanliness can be taken for granted in a world, and on a stage, where gender is by definition an act.

Lady Macbeth’s language from the outset troubles this boundary between proper and improper femaleness or femininity. In two famous speeches early in the play, she undoes the conventions about the naturalness of maternal feeling:

    Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

Of direct cruelty. Make thick my blood…

…………………………..

     Come to my woman’s breasts,

And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers,

And yet again,

     I have given suck, and know

How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me

I would, while it was smiling in my face,

Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums

And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn

As you have done to do this.

A famous essay of 1933 that critiques the concept of character and reality in drama mockingly asks in its title, ‘How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?’ The question, as posed by the critic L.C. Knights, seems to suggest that such curiosity is extratextual: we cannot answer it, and should not try, since there is no evidence within the play to tell us. Yet Lady Macbeth’s evocation of lactation and nursing, at odds with Macduff’s later statement about Macbeth, “He has no children,’ does have a point within the play. It contrasts her with the paragon of onstage motherhood, Lady Macduff, and it associates her with the ‘unnatural,’ since her emotions run so counter to the maternal, and her cry to be ‘unsexed’ is itself contrary to physical nature. Most of all, though, it suggests the displacement or replacement of what is conventionally called ‘maternal instinct.’ For in place of offspring Lady Macbeth has her husband, whom she alternately taunts and cossets as a ‘baby’ or a child. Thus, as we have seen, she says he is too full of ‘the milk of human kindness’ to make the nearest way to the throne – murder.”

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And as a bonus for the weekend:  a link to more from AC Bradley: (Consider it extra-credit reading if you will – I know Bradley is old-school, old-fashioned and probably an acquired taste, but I love him.)  I suggest pages 200-206 – click here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jnb9RKhmK4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hto5zXrZdrM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AkTJtGTu78

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xz2tFuwUUM&list=PL0130300D0B8ECA83&index=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xz2tFuwUUM&list=PL0130300D0B8ECA83&index=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JFp_NkGB58&list=PL0130300D0B8ECA83

Our next reading:  Macbeth, Act Three

My next post:  Sunday evening/Monday morning

Enjoy.  And enjoy your weekend.

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Image may be NSFW.
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Macbeth

Act Three

By Dennis Abrams

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Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.Act Three:  Although Banquo has doubts about his friend Macbeth’s role in recent events, he agrees to celebrate the coronation at a banquet. But Macbeth wants Banquo dead, and arranges for assassins to murder him and his son Fleance. The attempt is botched, though, and Fleance escapes. That night at the banquet, Macbeth alarms his guests when he see what he thinks is Banquo’s bloody ghost. The dinner breaks up in disarray. Lennox and another Lord discuss their misgivings about Macbeth and how Macduff is trying to raise an army against him.

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From Harold Bloom:

“So accustomed to Macbeth to Macbeth to second sight that he evidences neither surprise nor fear at the visionary knife but coolly attempts to grasp this ‘dagger of the mind.’ The phrase ‘a false creation’ subtly hints at the Gnostic cosmos of Macbeth, which is the work of some Demiurge, whose botchings made creation itself a fall. With a wonderful metaphysical courage, admiration for which helps implicate us in Macbeth’s guilts, he responds to the phantasmagoria by drawing his own dagger, thus acknowledging his oneness with his own proleptic yearnings. As in King Lear, the primary meaning of fool in this play is ‘victim,’ but Macbeth defiantly asserts the possibility that his eyes, rather than being victims, may be worth all his other senses together.

This moment of bravura is dispersed by a new phenomenon in Macbeth’s visionary history, as the hallucination undergoes a temporal transformation, great drops of blood manifesting themselves upon blade and handle. ‘There’s no such thing,’ he attempts to insist, but yields instead to one of those openings-out of eloquence that perpetually descend upon him. In that yielding to Hecate’s sorcery, Macbeth astonishingly identifies his steps towards the sleeping Duncan with Tarquin’s ‘ravishing strides’ toward his victim in Shakespeare’s narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece. Macbeth is not going to ravish Duncan, except of his life, but the allusion would have thrilled many in the audience. I again take it that this audacity is Shakespeare’s own signature, establishing his complicity with his protagonist’s imagination. ‘I go, and it is done’ constitutes the climactic prolepsis; we participate, feeling that Duncan is dead already, before the thrusts have been performed.

It is after the next murder, Banquo’s and after Macbeth’s confrontation with Banquo’s ghost, that the proleptic utterances begin to yield to the usurper’s sense of being more outraged than outrageous:

Blood hath been shed ere now, i’ th’ olden time,

Ere humane statute purged the gentle weal;

Ay, and since too, murthers have been perform’d

Too terrible for the ear: the time has been,

That, when the brains were out, the man would die,

And there was an end, but now, they rise again,

With twenty mortal murthers on their crowns,

And push us from our stools. This is more strange