Othello
Lecture Notes

"Far away his eye fell upon a couple - A red-headed woman and a man walking along pressed close together - A shock passed through him - the blood rushed in his ears and the dreadful suspicion was there again." [Edvard Munch, commenting on his painting, Jealousy I (1895)]

Topics & Themes
Click here for general background

Click here for notes on early-modern exploration & "negative self-definition"

early-modern European notions of Africa
- exploration, travel, & trade
-- initially Portuguese: Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama (15c.)
-fabulous narratives of riches & monsters ("anthropophagi")
-- compare contemporary fictions + films
- few Africans in England
- beginnings of slave trade
- exhibitions of exotic creatures
"Moor" = "blackamoor" = both African & Arab (any non-white people)
- issue of Othello's color persists

See Links for contemporary exhibit about early-modern Europe-Asian encounters

no early-modern "science of difference" (anthropology, genetics)
- reliance on "evident" difference (skin color, facial features, language)
- plus superstitious information
social differences perceived as "natural" are in fact constructed
- major mode of construction is narrative: tales tribes tell (aka cultural myths)

horror + fascination with miscegenation
- notion of "purity polluted"
-- (white) woman as object // (black) man as agent of pollution

ethical-theological stereotype of blackness as evil (devil), savage, bestial, hypersexual
- cultural fictions that haunt us still
- e.g., Gertrude's "black spots" in her soul (Hamlet 3.4.90)

Costume from Inigo Jones, The Masque of Blackness (c. 1610)

Othello's status as alien or stranger
- in Venice, as black man in European city
- as soldier (public life of aggression) turned husband (private life of affection)
- as older man (about 50) with young wife (about 20)

Venice as powerful maritime city-state & center of European trade with Orient
- Christian culture (see Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice)
- aggressive-defensive relation to "pagan" countries (like Turkey)
- Venice takes Cyprus in 1489 // Turks take Cyprus in 1571

Elizabethan stage conventions
- Aaron the Moor in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus
- medieval Morality Play figure of "the Vice"
-- agent of mischief & disorder, related to Devil

New Comedy structure of old husband + young bride
typical Shakespearean comic geography of dual locations
-"green world" or "second world"
- Venice = city = reason // Cyprus = wilderness = irrationality

Othello

1.1.1-6 ("Tush, never tell me!")
play opens with nonverbal sound, unreferenced pronoun, & denial
Iago's technique of denying his thoughts
introduction of "dream" & "abhor"

1.1.80-117 ("What ho, Brabantio!")
"What is the reason?"
base reduction of marriage to bestial copulation

1.1.142-143 ("This accident ...")
"accident ... dream ... belief ..."
- external event coincides with internal fantasy to produce belief & "oppression"
- model for Iago's manipulation-seduction of Othello
1.1.169-172 ("O heaven ...")
paternal doubt = disbelief
- vision of daughter similar to Othello's later vision of wife

1.3 (Duke's war council)
question of encountering "the Turk": Study Question 2: Who is the Turk?
last effective use of reason acting upon evidence
= "pageant / To keep us in false gaze" (1.3.17-19)

1.3.94-108 ("A maiden never bold ...)"
a father's patriarchal assumptions & idealizations
problem of "unnatural" attraction
issue of witchcraft & conjuration
Duke notes difference between accusation & proof
- "poor likelihoods of modern seeming"
-- i.e., frailty of superficial assumptions

1.3.127-172 ("Say it, Othello.")
Desdemona won (& lost) by fabulous stories