1 00:00:00,020 --> 00:00:08,520 Mark Colvin. OK, so thanks for coming to this lecture. First in a series called Approaching Shakespeare and they're all on specific plays. 2 00:00:08,520 --> 00:00:14,280 The first one is on Othello. Next week, I'm gonna to talk about Henry, the fifth in third week. 3 00:00:14,280 --> 00:00:18,280 I want to talk about measure for measure in fourth week and then to talk about Macbeth. 4 00:00:18,280 --> 00:00:23,910 And the superstitious can stay at home that day. Fifth week, The Winter's Tale. 5 00:00:23,910 --> 00:00:30,150 In each of the lectures, I'm going to aim to approach a specific critical question about the play. 6 00:00:30,150 --> 00:00:30,870 And in doing that, 7 00:00:30,870 --> 00:00:39,130 to demonstrate different methodological approaches and different kinds of material you might bring to bear on your Shakespeare work. 8 00:00:39,130 --> 00:00:45,060 And my hope then is that the lectures will give you some kind of a toolkit for approaching the other plays that I'm 9 00:00:45,060 --> 00:00:54,120 not talking about and ways that you might push through the sometimes overwhelming body of Shakespeare criticism. 10 00:00:54,120 --> 00:00:56,670 I'm actually not. Mostly I think I've stuck to this. 11 00:00:56,670 --> 00:01:03,840 I'm not mostly telling you or trying to tell you what to think about the play, or even particularly to give you my own readings, 12 00:01:03,840 --> 00:01:07,720 but rather to plot how you might put together an argument about Shakespeare 13 00:01:07,720 --> 00:01:12,420 by any Shakespeare play and what kinds of evidence you might use to do that. 14 00:01:12,420 --> 00:01:18,750 I do hope some of you will come back to the subsequent lectures, but the lectures will, as I said, will be on I tunes. 15 00:01:18,750 --> 00:01:26,310 Hello, if you're listening to it on iTunes. That's a weird kind of prolapsed this moment, but that's the evidence that really is life lecture, 16 00:01:26,310 --> 00:01:31,860 small love so you can listen to it when it's more convenient to you. 17 00:01:31,860 --> 00:01:40,920 But it would be nice for me if some people do come to hear it live. Okay, so let's start with Othello and the umbrella topic. 18 00:01:40,920 --> 00:01:48,240 The umbrella question on this play that I've chosen to focus on is the question, what is the significance to the play of Othello's race? 19 00:01:48,240 --> 00:01:57,330 What's the significance of the play of Othello's race? I'm going to start by thinking about the play's title page. 20 00:01:57,330 --> 00:01:59,580 Othello is probably written in about 60, you know, 21 00:01:59,580 --> 00:02:07,530 three sixteen oh four just at the time of James's accession to the English throne and around the time when Shakespeare's company, 22 00:02:07,530 --> 00:02:14,280 the Lord Chamberlain's men, are taken under the king's patronage and they become the king's men. 23 00:02:14,280 --> 00:02:18,600 We'll come back to the significance, I think, of the dating of Othello in a minute. 24 00:02:18,600 --> 00:02:27,320 Dating Othello is rather dangerous. That's a joke as well. Okay. 25 00:02:27,320 --> 00:02:34,500 Okay. That was an unscripted joke. Even the play is not, however, printed until 16 22. 26 00:02:34,500 --> 00:02:41,660 The title of the play, then, is The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice. 27 00:02:41,660 --> 00:02:48,070 The more of Venice, I think, is a kind of oxymoron, an oxymoron is a literary figure very important to the play Othello. 28 00:02:48,070 --> 00:02:57,430 There are lots of examples of it, perhaps most prominently in that phrase, honesty, Argo that we keep getting so, so, so solemnly. 29 00:02:57,430 --> 00:03:05,040 So the more of Venice is a kind of oxymoron. A more is not of Venice, a more cannot be of Venice. 30 00:03:05,040 --> 00:03:12,550 And in some ways I think we could see the whole play exploring this paradox of a man who both is and is not of Venice. 31 00:03:12,550 --> 00:03:15,700 The parallel with The Merchant of Venice is rather interesting, 32 00:03:15,700 --> 00:03:22,600 I think that play The Merchant of Venice is entered into the Stationers Register with a double title. 33 00:03:22,600 --> 00:03:29,020 The Merchant of Venice or The Jew of Venice. And in that case, the two titles are syntactically equivalent. 34 00:03:29,020 --> 00:03:34,390 But I think they make quite different use of the word of the merchant can be of Venice. 35 00:03:34,390 --> 00:03:43,180 And as Shylock finds out in the trial scene, a Jew can never be of Venice as an equal under the law, a citizen and so on. 36 00:03:43,180 --> 00:03:48,520 Looking at the title pages of Shakespeare's plays in print. It's a really fascinating insight into the development. 37 00:03:48,520 --> 00:03:52,870 Both of his reputation so early plays in print by Shakespeare. 38 00:03:52,870 --> 00:03:59,380 Don't have his name on them later plays do and so do some plays we think not to be by Shakespeare. 39 00:03:59,380 --> 00:04:05,530 So there's a sense that Shakespeare's name sells plays even if rather than identifies them. 40 00:04:05,530 --> 00:04:11,320 By the time Othello is published posthumously in 16 22, Shakespeare dies sixteen sixteen. 41 00:04:11,320 --> 00:04:18,080 The preface to the reader tells us the author's name is sufficient to vent his work. 42 00:04:18,080 --> 00:04:23,470 And if you look at title pages, you can also see what might be a have been attractive to their first readers or audiences, 43 00:04:23,470 --> 00:04:30,940 particularly in long descriptive titles. You can see all the early printed quartos of Shakespeare's plays. 44 00:04:30,940 --> 00:04:41,470 A Quarto is a small, cheap book made by folding a piece of key pieces of paper in it into quarters, two folds, hence quarto. 45 00:04:41,470 --> 00:04:47,070 So these are small, cheap, unbound pamphlet like publications of individual plays, 46 00:04:47,070 --> 00:04:51,360 and some of Shakespeare's plays are published, published in this format during his lifetime. 47 00:04:51,360 --> 00:04:57,640 You can see all those early printed quartos digitised very well, digitised freely online at the British Library. 48 00:04:57,640 --> 00:05:03,130 If you Google British Library, Shakespeare Quartos, you'll get the link. 49 00:05:03,130 --> 00:05:10,330 So let's go back to that title. More is a word with dense associations, two meanings. 50 00:05:10,330 --> 00:05:15,670 As the OED online tells us, jostle one is geographical. 51 00:05:15,670 --> 00:05:23,650 The more is an inhabitant of North Africa, Mauritania, present day Morocco and Algeria. 52 00:05:23,650 --> 00:05:30,730 The second meaning, which is associated but not entirely identical with this one, is a more general designation. 53 00:05:30,730 --> 00:05:42,370 More meaning. Muslim. Much critical ink has been spilt on whether we ought to understand Othello as an ethnically marked inhabitant of North Africa, 54 00:05:42,370 --> 00:05:49,810 the noble Arab captured in context a contemporary image of the BARBREE ambassador to London in sixteen hundred. 55 00:05:49,810 --> 00:05:57,700 Very easy to find online. Shakespeare's company performed at court during the time of that embassy. 56 00:05:57,700 --> 00:06:08,650 And so they may well have seen these visitors from North Africa or whether the epithet black when he Argo sneers 57 00:06:08,650 --> 00:06:17,720 sneeringly says We will drink the health of black Othello or his description that an old black rum is topping your white. 58 00:06:17,720 --> 00:06:22,150 You coupled maybe with Rodrigo's description of thick lips, 59 00:06:22,150 --> 00:06:29,770 whether this cluster of associations is supposed to suggest the racial typing of sub-Saharan Africa. 60 00:06:29,770 --> 00:06:37,570 Of course, this distinction, whether Othello is an Arab from North Africa or a black man from sub-Saharan Africa. 61 00:06:37,570 --> 00:06:46,060 This distinction is no more innocent now than then. For generations of earlier critics who were brought up on the inferiority of black 62 00:06:46,060 --> 00:06:51,790 slaves in America and the inferiority of the colonised peoples of the British Empire. 63 00:06:51,790 --> 00:06:57,010 The question of what kind of more Othello was was crucial to the sympathy that 64 00:06:57,010 --> 00:07:01,390 the play might generate and therefore crucial to the whole notion of tragedy. 65 00:07:01,390 --> 00:07:12,320 Put basely a black Othello at a dark, racially marked black, Othello was less sympathetic and therefore less tragic than an Arabic one. 66 00:07:12,320 --> 00:07:17,590 And a lot of what I'm saying about Othello is deeply enmeshed in the racial ideologies and 67 00:07:17,590 --> 00:07:25,390 prejudices of critics writing about the play in which I think I would include ourselves. 68 00:07:25,390 --> 00:07:33,580 So the arguments that Othello is sympathetic have tended to identify him as a noble mayor of North Africa. 69 00:07:33,580 --> 00:07:42,460 Arguments that find him less sympathetic have tended to link that with the idea that he was, as he was intended as a black man, a Negro. 70 00:07:42,460 --> 00:07:46,120 Thomas Rimer writing at the end of the 17th century. 71 00:07:46,120 --> 00:07:51,250 Rimer are white. MVR is one of the first critics of a Shakespeare. 72 00:07:51,250 --> 00:07:55,900 Substantial critics of the Shakespeare play. He's writing about Othello and he doesn't like it. 73 00:07:55,900 --> 00:08:01,900 He calls the play the tragedy of a handkerchief and a bloody farce. 74 00:08:01,900 --> 00:08:07,060 Therefore, something unworthy of the designation of tragedy. 75 00:08:07,060 --> 00:08:12,730 And this idea about the play's genre. This is the theme I'm going to come back to later in the lecture is inseparable 76 00:08:12,730 --> 00:08:18,910 from his view that the fact that they have a black hero is very improper. 77 00:08:18,910 --> 00:08:24,460 He derives from the play, the false morality. This may be a caution to all maidens of quality. 78 00:08:24,460 --> 00:08:31,240 How, without their parents consent, they run away with Blackmore's. 79 00:08:31,240 --> 00:08:38,260 So did Shakespeare intend Othello to be a Muslim? I don't know the answer to this question. 80 00:08:38,260 --> 00:08:44,680 I don't think we can answer the question, but I think there are some different ways we might investigate it. 81 00:08:44,680 --> 00:08:54,970 The first two aren't going to take up is firstly a close reading of the play itself and secondly, a reading of Shakespeare's sources. 82 00:08:54,970 --> 00:08:58,810 We might feel that to return to the text of the play is always the answer. 83 00:08:58,810 --> 00:09:07,270 The way to answer any literary question. But that turns out here as very often to be a rather difficult manoeuvre. 84 00:09:07,270 --> 00:09:10,480 There are very few references to Othello's religion in the play, 85 00:09:10,480 --> 00:09:17,300 although those Zahraa may suggest he's intended to be a Christian convert who uses the phrase by heaven, 86 00:09:17,300 --> 00:09:26,600 in fact, as the only character in the play to use that phrase by heaven. He accuses his brawling soldiers of having turned Terk. 87 00:09:26,600 --> 00:09:31,470 And he bids Desdemona pray before he murders her. 88 00:09:31,470 --> 00:09:41,010 Jago vows to make him renounce his baptism and some productions notably that by Start By and starring Laurence Olivier, 89 00:09:41,010 --> 00:09:46,230 have marked Othello's decline as a visible turning from adopted Christianity. 90 00:09:46,230 --> 00:09:49,440 Olivier has a fellow rip, a prominent cross. 91 00:09:49,440 --> 00:09:56,640 He's been wearing around his neck at the point of this religious reconversion or conversion back to Islam. 92 00:09:56,640 --> 00:10:02,880 There are lots of problems, of course, implicit in that interpretation where Christianity equals self-control, 93 00:10:02,880 --> 00:10:10,110 rationality, lucidity, Islam equals madness, murder, insane rage and so on. 94 00:10:10,110 --> 00:10:15,660 You can see snippets, some of them quite long, of Olivier's Othello on YouTube, 95 00:10:15,660 --> 00:10:20,580 although I can't vouch for the legality of their having been put there. 96 00:10:20,580 --> 00:10:28,890 That's a disclaimer I choose. They know all about intellectual property and I choose crucial to this religious interpretation. 97 00:10:28,890 --> 00:10:39,300 Then is Othello's last long finals final speech soft you a word or two before you go? 98 00:10:39,300 --> 00:10:44,400 I have done the state some service and they know it. No more of that. 99 00:10:44,400 --> 00:10:50,040 I pray you in your letters when you shall. These unlucky deeds relate. 100 00:10:50,040 --> 00:10:58,050 Speak of me as I am nothing extenuate nor set down or in malice then. 101 00:10:58,050 --> 00:11:05,490 Must you speak of one that loved not wisely, but too well of one not easily jealous, 102 00:11:05,490 --> 00:11:13,440 but being wrought perplexed in the extreme of one whose hand like the base Indian 103 00:11:13,440 --> 00:11:18,660 through a pearl away richer than all his tribe of one whose subdued eyes, 104 00:11:18,660 --> 00:11:29,850 albeit unused to the melting mood, drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees them a discernable gum sat you down this and say besides that 105 00:11:29,850 --> 00:11:38,370 in Aleppo once where a malignant kind of turbaned Turk took of the nation and traduced the state, 106 00:11:38,370 --> 00:11:43,200 I took by the throat the circumciser dog and smote him. 107 00:11:43,200 --> 00:11:49,440 Thus, it's a fabulous speech, a wonderful example of that exotic lyricism. 108 00:11:49,440 --> 00:12:00,300 Famously dubbed the Othello music by Jean Wilson Night, and which tells us something about the overall quality of the play's rhythms and registers, 109 00:12:00,300 --> 00:12:08,970 which might be something you'd want to follow up, perhaps by Verdi's opera Otello or the just musical Catch My Soul as a sideline. 110 00:12:08,970 --> 00:12:15,090 I'd advise any of you who is here because you're studying Shakespeare for the finals paper to use your work on Shakespeare, 111 00:12:15,090 --> 00:12:18,210 really to write about things you know about you're interested in if you've been 112 00:12:18,210 --> 00:12:26,190 dying to write about children's literature or manga comics or cinema or theatre or, 113 00:12:26,190 --> 00:12:32,400 I don't know, literature, American literature or advertising or something. I mean, Shakespeare does give you a chance to do all of those things. 114 00:12:32,400 --> 00:12:36,300 And that's a much better technique for approaching this paper than grinding 115 00:12:36,300 --> 00:12:41,520 beautifully through Shakespeare's ideas of kingship or some old stuff like that. 116 00:12:41,520 --> 00:12:47,430 You know, try and translate your play to your strengths. So back to that big speech. 117 00:12:47,430 --> 00:12:53,910 It's a speech that captures Othello's complicated position. He is of Venice, as we had in the title. 118 00:12:53,910 --> 00:13:01,800 He is its defender against the turbaned Turk, but he is also the Turk himself. 119 00:13:01,800 --> 00:13:06,510 The gesture of killing that Turk is turned on himself in his suicide. 120 00:13:06,510 --> 00:13:12,030 I took by the throat the circumciser dog and smote him thus stage direction. 121 00:13:12,030 --> 00:13:22,360 He kills himself. So the play and its main character ends on a fisher, an incompatible religious ethnic split, 122 00:13:22,360 --> 00:13:27,960 which we might think of as having taken the life of its protagonist. 123 00:13:27,960 --> 00:13:34,050 It's striking that that final speech doesn't at all mention except in grandiloquent and exotic sized terms of value. 124 00:13:34,050 --> 00:13:41,010 The pearl richer than all his tribe. The speech doesn't at all mention the small matter of the murder of his wife. 125 00:13:41,010 --> 00:13:50,430 And to your fellow critics, most notably, perhaps T.S. Eliot, have been exasperated by the extreme self-centred ness of this final speech. 126 00:13:50,430 --> 00:13:56,550 Eliot's famous comment is that this is a fellow cheering himself up. 127 00:13:56,550 --> 00:14:06,120 Well, seems more interesting to me is that the self in that phrase, cheering himself up is actually much more problematic than Eliot allows. 128 00:14:06,120 --> 00:14:15,360 Any sense of a unified self seems to have been lost in this parable of multiple outsiderness. 129 00:14:15,360 --> 00:14:23,390 Instead, the interweaving of military and marital narratives which were going to come to later here. 130 00:14:23,390 --> 00:14:32,340 It here returns to the end of the play, the fatal bedchamber, very small, enclosed, claustrophobic scene. 131 00:14:32,340 --> 00:14:35,740 Remember, Amelia is knocking on the door outside trying to get in. 132 00:14:35,740 --> 00:14:41,760 And there's this terrible sense of claustrophobia about this, this scene in the bedchamber. 133 00:14:41,760 --> 00:14:52,110 In Othello's words, the bedchamber expands out into a huge geopolitical realm in which Christians and Muslims are fighting in various flashpoints. 134 00:14:52,110 --> 00:14:58,890 In his speech, it's Aleppo, the multicultural port of Aleppo. Elsewhere in the play, it's Venice or Cyprus. 135 00:14:58,890 --> 00:15:02,100 If you know Cyprus now, you'll know it's still a divided island. 136 00:15:02,100 --> 00:15:07,500 And still, because of its historic but both its strategic importance in the Mediterranean, 137 00:15:07,500 --> 00:15:17,190 but also that the fight over whether it's part of Christendom or the Ottoman Empire. 138 00:15:17,190 --> 00:15:22,530 So in some ways, I think is a fellow a Muslim is a question the play asks rather than answers. 139 00:15:22,530 --> 00:15:27,870 I think that's probably going to be the case with a lot of the questions that critics ask about Shakespeare plays. 140 00:15:27,870 --> 00:15:35,880 Are questions which are generated by the plays rather than answered by them and are contingent answers are always going to be ways of thinking, 141 00:15:35,880 --> 00:15:46,050 actually thinking about the question. It might therefore be interesting to view Othello alongside other conversion narratives in contemporary drama. 142 00:15:46,050 --> 00:15:53,670 There are a set of Turk plays collected by Daniel Vett Curse, which might be maybe good to look at. 143 00:15:53,670 --> 00:15:58,740 And those of you, again with an eye to the exams, may be reassured to know that markers of paper, too, 144 00:15:58,740 --> 00:16:04,400 are always keen for candidates to play Shakespeare in the context of early other early modern dramatists, 145 00:16:04,400 --> 00:16:10,260 and particularly if you can do it away from some very routines or gestures we don't really want. 146 00:16:10,260 --> 00:16:17,940 The Spanish tragedy in Hamlet is just too, too common. We don't really want the job of Malta and the Merchant of Venice again to comment. 147 00:16:17,940 --> 00:16:19,950 It's something with lots of people have done. 148 00:16:19,950 --> 00:16:25,530 And I want to encourage you to try and step out a bit and do some things which are which are more unexpected. 149 00:16:25,530 --> 00:16:35,490 And thinking about Turk plays, the three Turk plays collected by Vicas might be a way to do that. 150 00:16:35,490 --> 00:16:41,730 We all know how forbidden it is to try to deduce an author's intention from his works. 151 00:16:41,730 --> 00:16:49,970 And we also know that like many forbidden things, it's very tempting to try to do so if you're a secret authorial intentions junkie. 152 00:16:49,970 --> 00:16:55,890 The acceptable methadone version of this habit is a study of Shakespeare's sources. 153 00:16:55,890 --> 00:17:00,770 We're going to come back to these in later lectures, particularly when I get to The Winter's Tale in fifth week, 154 00:17:00,770 --> 00:17:06,120 and that I want to try and complicate the idea that Shakespeare is in control of his source material. 155 00:17:06,120 --> 00:17:11,220 There's often a way in which the source material retains a kind of ghostly hold over the play. 156 00:17:11,220 --> 00:17:16,080 However much Shakespeare seems to have changed it. 157 00:17:16,080 --> 00:17:21,660 But what I want to say today is that firstly, looking up Shakespeare's sources is really easy. 158 00:17:21,660 --> 00:17:28,920 They're pretty much all gathered together in Geoffrey Bullock's big, big series of books, narrative and dramatic sources of Shakespeare. 159 00:17:28,920 --> 00:17:34,100 So that's Bullock B, you double O, you G.H. Narrative and dramatic sources of Shakespeare, 160 00:17:34,100 --> 00:17:38,880 which which exists in Oxford in about 100 hundred copies, as it should be quite easy to find. 161 00:17:38,880 --> 00:17:50,840 You can also look at it a very. What I find not a very helpful interface on the Arden Shakespeare database, which you can get to via solar. 162 00:17:50,840 --> 00:17:57,560 So Bullett gathers together the acknowledged sources for Shakespeare's plays and he lists Cluster's Them byplay. 163 00:17:57,560 --> 00:18:00,810 So it couldn't really be easier, except that by definition, 164 00:18:00,810 --> 00:18:06,570 Bulloch leaves out the things that don't seem to have influenced Shakespeare's writing of the play. 165 00:18:06,570 --> 00:18:10,230 In some ways, what's been left out is often the most interesting thing. 166 00:18:10,230 --> 00:18:13,890 What makes Shakespeare look down for? I don't want that in my play. 167 00:18:13,890 --> 00:18:20,370 So it's worth sometimes going back from Bulloch to the complete sources, which will be on PEBO. 168 00:18:20,370 --> 00:18:25,710 Now, Shakespeare's main source for Othello is the Italian prose writer Geraldo Chinh. 169 00:18:25,710 --> 00:18:32,360 Theo c i. N t h i. Chin FiOS series of stories, which is called Hecate Timothy Hecate. 170 00:18:32,360 --> 00:18:40,470 Timothy was published in fifteen sixty five. He also uses this source for another play. 171 00:18:40,470 --> 00:18:45,960 He's writing at the same time as a fellow. Measure for measure. And I'm going to come back to that later in this lecture. 172 00:18:45,960 --> 00:18:56,340 And in more detail in third week in Jim Theos story from which Shakespeare takes Othello, none of the characters except Desdemona. 173 00:18:56,340 --> 00:19:03,180 She's called. Desdemona is named. We have a character called More Shakespeare's Othello. 174 00:19:03,180 --> 00:19:09,240 Captain Shakespeare's Casio and an Enson. Shakespeare's Iago. 175 00:19:09,240 --> 00:19:10,440 We might pause for a minute on the way. 176 00:19:10,440 --> 00:19:17,190 Shakespeare names his central protagonist to see if it bears on this question about the significance of Othello's race. 177 00:19:17,190 --> 00:19:27,120 We don't actually know where he gets the name Othello, but it may draw on the name for l'eau, which Ben Johnson gives to another jealous husband. 178 00:19:27,120 --> 00:19:34,720 But this time in a comedy, every man in his humour. We know Shakespeare to have acted in, every man in his humour. 179 00:19:34,720 --> 00:19:40,320 This lineage of Shakespeare gets something of the name Othello from Perello in every man in his humour. 180 00:19:40,320 --> 00:19:45,520 This suggests that what's important about Othello is that he's jealous, not that he's black. 181 00:19:45,520 --> 00:19:55,380 Whatever black means. So he becomes a type of a jealous husband rather than a type of a more jealousy is not a racial identity. 182 00:19:55,380 --> 00:20:00,690 Irrational jealousy is not a particular quality of Maus in Shakespeare's own work. 183 00:20:00,690 --> 00:20:07,380 Aaron Black, character in Titus Andronicus has lots of flaws, but sexual jealousy is not one of them. 184 00:20:07,380 --> 00:20:12,270 Neither Klaudia in much ado about nothing nor lay on Teis in The Winter's Tale. 185 00:20:12,270 --> 00:20:17,790 Both of whom are husbands who fall prey to a manic jealousy about their wives fidelity. 186 00:20:17,790 --> 00:20:25,470 Neither of those is racially marked. So that possible connexion to everyone in his humour brings up a kind of comic structure, 187 00:20:25,470 --> 00:20:28,890 maybe underpinning Othello, which I was going to come back to. 188 00:20:28,890 --> 00:20:36,290 It may be that Shakespeare intended his name Othello, perhaps with a hard t Otello to recall Otterman, 189 00:20:36,290 --> 00:20:47,280 a play with a name we do get in the play Ottoman Turk and thus to reiterate his otherness, perhaps giving him a first name. 190 00:20:47,280 --> 00:20:52,830 I hesitate to say a Christian name is a way to humanise and to individuate Othello. 191 00:20:52,830 --> 00:20:57,270 He is a person, not a type. He's a type in Cynthia's story. 192 00:20:57,270 --> 00:21:06,300 He's just called more. Although we then have to notice that the person in the play who mentions Othello's name most is Othello himself, 193 00:21:06,300 --> 00:21:13,560 and that every other character, including Desdemona, calls him more more than once. 194 00:21:13,560 --> 00:21:20,140 For Chinta, though, the unnamed moor is both marked and unmarked by his race. 195 00:21:20,140 --> 00:21:24,370 There's one interesting thing about the source, the source material in Cynthia. 196 00:21:24,370 --> 00:21:33,890 We hear that the More and Desdemona live in happiness after they're married in Venice for many years, they have a period of a happy marriage. 197 00:21:33,890 --> 00:21:39,220 There's nothing intrinsically catastrophic about their relationship in the source. 198 00:21:39,220 --> 00:21:43,990 Actually, I think there is in Shakespeare's play. Let's look at how Shakespeare structures act. 199 00:21:43,990 --> 00:21:47,650 One scene, one of Othello to try and push that point again. 200 00:21:47,650 --> 00:21:53,560 How problematic he sees the relationship between Othello and Desdemona. 201 00:21:53,560 --> 00:22:02,590 Act one, scene one of Othello is a night scene with the Argo and Rodrigo rousing the sleeping senator rebundle 202 00:22:02,590 --> 00:22:10,690 here with Korth revelations about his daughter Desdemona having eloped with the more romantic ends, 203 00:22:10,690 --> 00:22:15,730 that opening scene arranging a party of officers to apprehend her. 204 00:22:15,730 --> 00:22:21,350 And the more they're going to be tipped off as to their whereabouts by Rodrigo. 205 00:22:21,350 --> 00:22:29,180 The second scene of the place is a fellow talking to a Jago who is disingenuously warning him about Briganti as anger, 206 00:22:29,180 --> 00:22:37,550 a party with lights approaches Othello in the argot. And naturally, we assume that this is Bourbon Theo's posse come to get him. 207 00:22:37,550 --> 00:22:45,830 But no, it's the Duke's servant summoning Othello for a conference about Cyprus in the next scene. 208 00:22:45,830 --> 00:22:53,420 These two stories come together. Two things have happened. One, the elopement of a daughter without her father's permission. 209 00:22:53,420 --> 00:23:01,490 And in this story, Othello is potentially at fault. In the other, an attack or a feared attack on Cyprus by the Turkish fleet. 210 00:23:01,490 --> 00:23:08,310 Othello is potentially the saviour is the solution to the problem rather than its cause. 211 00:23:08,310 --> 00:23:14,660 A sardonically rhyming exchange makes the play's equivalence between the elopement between the moor and the Venetian, 212 00:23:14,660 --> 00:23:21,020 on the one hand, and the threat to the Venetian property by the Turks on the other. 213 00:23:21,020 --> 00:23:29,360 The Duke tries to cheer Bramante up after he hears that Desdemona has willingly chosen Othello for her husband rather than being bewitched. 214 00:23:29,360 --> 00:23:38,330 He urges him to accept the inevitable. When remedies are passed, the Greeks are ended by seeing the worst, which are late on hopes depended. 215 00:23:38,330 --> 00:23:46,590 The robt that smiles steal something from the thief. He robs himself that spends a bootless grief. 216 00:23:46,590 --> 00:23:51,560 People, people in early Shakespeare's plays often rhyme and rhyme. 217 00:23:51,560 --> 00:23:57,170 Blank verse. What's blank about blank verses that it doesn't rhyme. But there are exceptions. 218 00:23:57,170 --> 00:24:03,770 Lots of exceptions to blunt verse and Shakespeare's in Shakespeare's work, including rhymed verse like this. 219 00:24:03,770 --> 00:24:09,080 Early in Shakespeare's career, people can use and end rhymed verse like that that I've just read quite seriously. 220 00:24:09,080 --> 00:24:12,500 But by this point it sounds sing-song as it does to us now. 221 00:24:12,500 --> 00:24:22,280 It sounds insincere or it sounds old bumper sticker, kind of a kind of philosophy which isn't really fit fit for the complexities of the world. 222 00:24:22,280 --> 00:24:29,030 So the Duke's trying to tell a yo, you know, just cheer up about it. 223 00:24:29,030 --> 00:24:33,950 We can sound anything so long as we're so cheerful and bright. Pantyhose Reply is very telling. 224 00:24:33,950 --> 00:24:40,930 So let the Turk of Cyprus as beguiles. We lose it not so long as we can smile. 225 00:24:40,930 --> 00:24:44,870 Buntin says that the loss of his daughter is like the loss of Cyprus. 226 00:24:44,870 --> 00:24:53,060 You can see that Othello is a really interesting linchpin in both these this domestic story and this more military one that the 227 00:24:53,060 --> 00:25:00,760 elopement of Desdemona and Othello is a microcosm or a metaphor for a broader geopolitics is hinted at but never developed. 228 00:25:00,760 --> 00:25:09,650 Or to put that point another way, it's hard to know whether the conflict between Venice and the Turk is the background for a domestic tragedy, 229 00:25:09,650 --> 00:25:15,860 which is really about a marriage is what Othello is really about a marriage which breaks down, 230 00:25:15,860 --> 00:25:19,850 or is the marriage a metaphor for a crucible, 231 00:25:19,850 --> 00:25:26,120 for a broader discussion about the savage incompatibility of Christian and Muslim in the play's imagination? 232 00:25:26,120 --> 00:25:29,900 So which is foreground and which is background? 233 00:25:29,900 --> 00:25:36,020 We might just look at one more aspect of the soul story to try and focus on Shakespeare's particular telling of this story. 234 00:25:36,020 --> 00:25:45,500 And that's the role of the AGA. We all know the cliché of the Argo's motiveless malignity, motiveless malignity, as Coleridge put it. 235 00:25:45,500 --> 00:25:50,690 The fact that he argues it's many excuses for his behaviour. Othello slept with Amelia. 236 00:25:50,690 --> 00:26:00,890 He Yalgoo has been passed over for promotion. But these never seem to offer sufficient or logical causes for the destruction that he brings about. 237 00:26:00,890 --> 00:26:03,350 He offers only an obstinate silence. 238 00:26:03,350 --> 00:26:12,290 What you know, you know, when Othello asks him, demand that demi devil, why he has thus ensnared my soul and body. 239 00:26:12,290 --> 00:26:17,240 This is an excellent example of what Stephen Greenblat in a readable book, 240 00:26:17,240 --> 00:26:29,690 a biography of Shakespeare called Will in the World Within the World, calls Shakespeare's strategic opacity strategic opacity. 241 00:26:29,690 --> 00:26:34,520 And by that, he means that Shakespeare purposely makes motivation opaque. 242 00:26:34,520 --> 00:26:46,200 Where in the sources it was clear that Shakespeare strips out explanations and substitutes questions for answers. 243 00:26:46,200 --> 00:26:52,470 The opening of King Lear is a good case in point. If we read the earlier play King Lear al e i. 244 00:26:52,470 --> 00:26:59,850 R one of Shakespeare sources for the play, we can see there that Lears love test is explicitly prompted by the death of his wife, 245 00:26:59,850 --> 00:27:06,620 his own feelings of mortality, his concern about his daughters without a mother to look after them. 246 00:27:06,620 --> 00:27:15,000 But Shakespeare avoids this kind of prologue and begins his play already with that ominous division of the kingdoms and makes therefore, 247 00:27:15,000 --> 00:27:22,500 Lear's motivation a question to be explored rather than a fact to be conveyed in Othello. 248 00:27:22,500 --> 00:27:29,730 The motivation of the Argo is clearly removed from what Shakespeare found in his sources in Chinh Theo The End Inside, 249 00:27:29,730 --> 00:27:34,920 Jago professes himself in love with Desdemona and its being in love with Desdemona. 250 00:27:34,920 --> 00:27:39,330 That prompts his behaviour throughout the story. 251 00:27:39,330 --> 00:27:47,010 If we take this away, the evidence that Yalgoo, the clear statement in the other Iago, the younger character, is in love with Desdemona. 252 00:27:47,010 --> 00:27:52,950 That may be just a slight vestige of that in that flirtation between Iago and Desdemona on the key side, 253 00:27:52,950 --> 00:27:57,030 as they wait for Othello to come back to Cyprus, which is a scene people have found. 254 00:27:57,030 --> 00:27:59,430 Critics have found very uncomfortable. 255 00:27:59,430 --> 00:28:10,770 They don't want a flirty Desdemona, as if that doesn't quite fit somehow the innocence they want to preserve, which is an odd, odd, odd problem. 256 00:28:10,770 --> 00:28:16,000 But if we take away this motivation, we have Iago in any Arga. 257 00:28:16,000 --> 00:28:23,550 His motivation is famously opaque. Perhaps it allows that race is part of his hatred of Othello. 258 00:28:23,550 --> 00:28:29,140 I do hate him. Yalgoo announces in the play's first scene. 259 00:28:29,140 --> 00:28:30,600 And there is something unsettling, 260 00:28:30,600 --> 00:28:38,250 perhaps about the simultaneous attractiveness of Iago and the suspicion that his activity may be racially motivated. 261 00:28:38,250 --> 00:28:46,850 The play may draw us unwittingly into racist assumptions about Othello by its clever creation of closeness and sympathy with the argot. 262 00:28:46,850 --> 00:28:52,830 The figure who talks to us and draws us in and its maintenance of distance from Othello 263 00:28:52,830 --> 00:29:01,090 was a very lofty and aloof figure who never really acknowledges that we are there. 264 00:29:01,090 --> 00:29:07,440 I've discussed some of these ideas more length in my book for the writers in their work series, where I've argued partly for the sake of it, 265 00:29:07,440 --> 00:29:14,510 since we don't often do this, that Othello is a deeply racist play and could hardly be otherwise. 266 00:29:14,510 --> 00:29:22,780 But you'll be entirely welcome to to argue with that. But perhaps here is time to consider the possible significance of Iago's name. 267 00:29:22,780 --> 00:29:27,430 The Spanish saint Iago, from which we get Santiago, 268 00:29:27,430 --> 00:29:36,490 was known as a conqueror of the Moors following one of his famous exploits beating the Moorish army in the 10th century. 269 00:29:36,490 --> 00:29:42,790 Santiago was traditionally pictured on a white horse trampling mauls underfoot. 270 00:29:42,790 --> 00:29:49,800 It's the picture that's on the cover of Larry Maguires. Really good book, Studying Shakespeare. 271 00:29:49,800 --> 00:29:57,280 And that name and those associations which Shakespeare bundles up with the character by calling him Jago, 272 00:29:57,280 --> 00:30:05,120 may give that figure an agenda which needs to be understood as racial. 273 00:30:05,120 --> 00:30:11,120 OK, so so far, I've tried to look at the significance of of Othello's raised by reading the play itself closely and by seeing 274 00:30:11,120 --> 00:30:16,820 where it deviates from its source as a way of trying to pinpoint what Shakespeare thinks is important. 275 00:30:16,820 --> 00:30:24,980 I want now to turn to a couple of other ways of looking at this question, which, by extension, you might use about similar questions in other plays. 276 00:30:24,980 --> 00:30:32,180 Firstly, I want to try and think about each Othello's race in an early modern context and secondly, in a more modern context. 277 00:30:32,180 --> 00:30:38,180 But I also want to complicate the ways those seem to be distinct. Early, modern and modern. 278 00:30:38,180 --> 00:30:42,590 Our interest in history and in historicism is really, I think, 279 00:30:42,590 --> 00:30:48,440 a fig leaf for a kind of presentist narcissism where always writing about our own period, 280 00:30:48,440 --> 00:30:58,670 really even when we think we're being historical, our categories for thinking about race are formed by our own environment quite properly. 281 00:30:58,670 --> 00:31:06,670 And we have a big critical investment in using historical evidence to prove that Shakespeare is uniquely liberal and advanced. 282 00:31:06,670 --> 00:31:10,340 It would be very difficult for Shakespeare to have the position in our culture that he does. 283 00:31:10,340 --> 00:31:16,440 If we were to say, but he's a terrible racist who is a terrible racist playing so much of the material in, 284 00:31:16,440 --> 00:31:19,640 say, Andrew Hadfield's excellent source book on Othello, 285 00:31:19,640 --> 00:31:27,250 which gives documents about early modern Venice and about its sexual mores, which are loose its views of Africans. 286 00:31:27,250 --> 00:31:32,030 They are savages. The treatment of Moors in non Shakespearean drama. 287 00:31:32,030 --> 00:31:40,640 They are wily. This is all used to show how Shakespeare breaks existing stereotypes by making a black character a tragic hero. 288 00:31:40,640 --> 00:31:49,460 The truth, I think, is more complicated. It's hard to find that there is a stereotype of blackness on the stage before Othello and therefore clearly 289 00:31:49,460 --> 00:31:58,670 were in danger of importing or back projecting retrofitting somehow the play with our own later stereotypes. 290 00:31:58,670 --> 00:32:02,940 But if we do want to look at earlier works, you might think about Shakespeare's own Moors Air. 291 00:32:02,940 --> 00:32:13,760 And again, in Titus Andronicus, Aaron has at least as many of the qualities of the Argo as he does of Othello and the Prince of Morocco, 292 00:32:13,760 --> 00:32:17,900 one of Portia's impossible suitors in the Merchant of Venice. 293 00:32:17,900 --> 00:32:23,050 His blackness seems a clear visual shorthand for his unsuitability as a husband 294 00:32:23,050 --> 00:32:27,830 is never going to pick the right casket because he wouldn't be a good husband. 295 00:32:27,830 --> 00:32:33,410 If you want to look at Mor's in other plays, I would have a look at Peel's Battle of Alcazar. 296 00:32:33,410 --> 00:32:44,450 George Peale. The Battle of Alcazar. And finally, on this sort of material, I think I would point to Dymphna Callahans important argument in her book, 297 00:32:44,450 --> 00:32:50,690 Shakespeare Without Women, Calahan, Shakespeare Without Women. 298 00:32:50,690 --> 00:32:57,620 Callahan argues Othello was a white man because since there were no black actors, 299 00:32:57,620 --> 00:33:04,070 Othello's blackness on the early modern stage was always performed rather than essential. 300 00:33:04,070 --> 00:33:12,850 It's always about face paint and a curly wig, not some immutable essence which distinguishes one race from another. 301 00:33:12,850 --> 00:33:17,570 And that historical argument links with more recent disputes about how to perform Othello. 302 00:33:17,570 --> 00:33:21,170 Now a history of white actors playing the role. 303 00:33:21,170 --> 00:33:28,340 More or less Black Dub has been almost entirely superseded by black actors playing Othello, 304 00:33:28,340 --> 00:33:35,120 while other roles in Shakespeare plays may be cast in what the Royal Shakespeare Company calls colour-blind ways. 305 00:33:35,120 --> 00:33:43,520 So that if you see the current production of as you like it in Stratford, Charles, the Wrestler and Duke Senior are both played by black actors. 306 00:33:43,520 --> 00:33:50,240 But there isn't a sense that the character is black. Othello has been segregated from this tendency, 307 00:33:50,240 --> 00:33:57,290 presumably because of the view that race is intrinsic to this character in a way it isn't intrinsic to the majority of parts. 308 00:33:57,290 --> 00:34:04,790 Shakespeare wrote. But one black actor at the Royal Shakespeare Company has questioned this casting consensus. 309 00:34:04,790 --> 00:34:16,340 Hugh Quasi Q you a. R. S S.H. i.e. Hugh Squashy confesses to a nagging suspicion that casting black actors as Othello gives a spurious 310 00:34:16,340 --> 00:34:22,820 credence to the play's depiction of a black man and ends by saying that of all the parts in the canon, 311 00:34:22,820 --> 00:34:32,850 Othello is the one which should not be played by a black actor. 312 00:34:32,850 --> 00:34:39,250 We could address the significance of Othello's race by looking at it in more contemporary terms. 313 00:34:39,250 --> 00:34:44,830 Let's take and just take one example from film, because we're a little bit short of time. 314 00:34:44,830 --> 00:34:52,720 And I take Orson Welles 1952 film, much the best film of Othello in cinematic terms, 315 00:34:52,720 --> 00:35:02,170 the only one you would probably go to the cinema and watch Welles cast himself in the title role. 316 00:35:02,170 --> 00:35:09,130 Well, as a white actor in the title role, but he shoots the whole film in black and white. 317 00:35:09,130 --> 00:35:14,620 There's no obvious attempt in this colour palette to identify him as black. 318 00:35:14,620 --> 00:35:19,390 And in fact, race is of relatively little relevance to his interpretation of the play. 319 00:35:19,390 --> 00:35:24,490 So if you want a version of Othello where race is not important. Have a look at Welles. 320 00:35:24,490 --> 00:35:26,230 Have a look at Welles film. 321 00:35:26,230 --> 00:35:33,100 The cinematography, the choice of black and white film inevitably means that the two colours the play tries to set up as a binary. 322 00:35:33,100 --> 00:35:37,120 You're either black or white. Turn it into shades of grey. 323 00:35:37,120 --> 00:35:40,210 That's what makes it black and white. Film shades of grey. 324 00:35:40,210 --> 00:35:47,680 And it makes the discourse of blackness a poetic, possibly an ethical matter rather than an ethnic one. 325 00:35:47,680 --> 00:35:55,420 Or you might look at there's a famous photo negative version of the play directed by Jude Kelly, where Patrick Stewart, a white actor, 326 00:35:55,420 --> 00:36:06,550 played Othello amid a largely black cast, a flip flipping that racial polarities, or Laurence Fishburne in the Oliver Parker film of 1995, 327 00:36:06,550 --> 00:36:15,160 which casts a prominent black actor in the main role and highlights his otherness by giving him sort of tribal scar markings on his face, 328 00:36:15,160 --> 00:36:21,670 but kind of undermines him by having the best actor, the most confident actor in the film. 329 00:36:21,670 --> 00:36:23,470 Kenneth Branagh as a young girl. 330 00:36:23,470 --> 00:36:33,730 So it's a kind of black black Othello, but one that will not strops so focussed on many of those films that are available to borrow from the faculty. 331 00:36:33,730 --> 00:36:41,050 You might also look at Julie Hanks book, H.A., N.K., why it's a great name for someone writing on Othello in the book Shakespeare. 332 00:36:41,050 --> 00:36:54,010 Shakespeare Chesbrough in Production series. Recent criticism has been preoccupied with the meaning of Othello's race for the modern academy. 333 00:36:54,010 --> 00:37:01,290 Most critics, most current critics would be most comfortable in arguing that the play interrogates racism. 334 00:37:01,290 --> 00:37:05,980 So it's about racism rather than being racist, is it? 335 00:37:05,980 --> 00:37:10,230 You'll see a similar manoeuvre with another uncomfortable play like Taming of the Shrew, 336 00:37:10,230 --> 00:37:18,740 where it becomes a play about sexism, rather, or about misogyny, rather than being itself misogynistic. 337 00:37:18,740 --> 00:37:23,370 So most critics have been comfortable arguing that the play interrogates racism and that it 338 00:37:23,370 --> 00:37:29,970 shows us an Othello whose racist significant not because it makes him essentially savage, 339 00:37:29,970 --> 00:37:34,860 but because it exposes him to the terrible vulnerability of being an outsider. 340 00:37:34,860 --> 00:37:40,230 So race is important to that view view of Othello, not because it makes him behave in a particular way, 341 00:37:40,230 --> 00:37:46,960 but because it makes him vulnerable, because he's an outsider. Against that, though, 342 00:37:46,960 --> 00:37:52,780 we might place the plays strangely voyeuristic preoccupation with Othello and Desdemona sex 343 00:37:52,780 --> 00:37:59,440 life from that vivid image of the black ram to the final scene in the couples waiting sheets, 344 00:37:59,440 --> 00:38:05,400 a bed brought out onto the stage. Not a particularly easy prop to manoeuvre in the early modern theatre. 345 00:38:05,400 --> 00:38:09,490 And so must be important, must be worthwhile to bring out. 346 00:38:09,490 --> 00:38:18,230 It's striking that every time the couples seem to be offstage in bed together, some stage convulsion is manufactured to disturb them. 347 00:38:18,230 --> 00:38:22,810 A kind of coitus interruptus. Jago rants to prevent you. 348 00:38:22,810 --> 00:38:29,680 The Turks set a fleet for Cyprus. The soldiers all get drunk in Cyprus. 349 00:38:29,680 --> 00:38:37,810 The flip the play seems to be fascinated and rather disturbed by this spectacle of interracial sexuality. 350 00:38:37,810 --> 00:38:42,910 In this, we might feel it's actually more inhibited than Titus Andronicus, 351 00:38:42,910 --> 00:38:49,880 which ends with a baby born of the relationship between the more Aaron and his white lover. 352 00:38:49,880 --> 00:38:53,800 It may be a sign of Othello's different possibilities that some critics have 353 00:38:53,800 --> 00:38:58,810 even wanted to wonder whether the couple ever consummate their relationship, 354 00:38:58,810 --> 00:39:04,300 perhaps with the feeling that it would be preferable if they didn't. 355 00:39:04,300 --> 00:39:07,810 It's easier to see this attitude in the criticism of the past. 356 00:39:07,810 --> 00:39:17,350 If you look at the selections at the beginning of the casebook or that those kinds of things where you gasp get snippets of early criticism, 357 00:39:17,350 --> 00:39:22,660 but I think it's probably probably suggests attitudes which are still prevalent in this respect. 358 00:39:22,660 --> 00:39:28,840 The significance of Othello's race must be that it engages with categories. We still find it difficult to talk about. 359 00:39:28,840 --> 00:39:31,510 I've just been at a conference in Shakespeare on France, 360 00:39:31,510 --> 00:39:37,750 where one of my French colleagues told me that she had replaced her set Shakespeare text Macbeth with Othello. 361 00:39:37,750 --> 00:39:40,060 She felt that this would enable her students in France, 362 00:39:40,060 --> 00:39:47,260 a country which is trying to ban the burqa and deport the Roma to discuss issues of race in the play and beyond. 363 00:39:47,260 --> 00:39:55,960 I didn't know really whether to be pleased. I think if you got your racial politics from Othello, you'd probably be even worse than France. 364 00:39:55,960 --> 00:40:02,970 Okay. The final thing I want to talk about is genre. 365 00:40:02,970 --> 00:40:11,300 The critic Frederick Jamieson has made a useful contribution to genre theory by dividing ideas of genre into two categories. 366 00:40:11,300 --> 00:40:13,990 I'm going to go over this quite quickly cause I'm going to do it again. 367 00:40:13,990 --> 00:40:20,440 When we come to measure for Measure, Jemison has two categories and he calls them syntactic. 368 00:40:20,440 --> 00:40:32,470 On the one hand, from syntax, syntactic and semantic syntactic and semantic syntactic ideas of genre are structural. 369 00:40:32,470 --> 00:40:39,910 So the syntax of tragedy, according to Jamison, might be the decline of a significant person catharsis. 370 00:40:39,910 --> 00:40:47,290 Those kinds of things. That would be the syntax of tragedy. Semantic ideas about genre are tonal. 371 00:40:47,290 --> 00:40:53,020 So the semantics of tragedy would be serious, lofty, philosophical, meaningful. 372 00:40:53,020 --> 00:40:57,040 They're all that kind of tonal things we associate with tragedy. Not funny. 373 00:40:57,040 --> 00:41:00,820 Serious. And where genre is being played with. 374 00:41:00,820 --> 00:41:04,300 In Shakespeare. If you're thinking about The Winter's Tale. 375 00:41:04,300 --> 00:41:08,410 If you're thinking about measure, measure Aldo's all's well that ends well. 376 00:41:08,410 --> 00:41:18,820 Whatever problem plays. All those playing with genre in Shakespeare tend to be a clash between syntactic and semantic 377 00:41:18,820 --> 00:41:24,910 properties so that it has the structure of one play and the tonal properties of another. 378 00:41:24,910 --> 00:41:30,310 There's a famous shorthand for ideas of inductive reasoning, beloved of American conservatives. 379 00:41:30,310 --> 00:41:37,660 If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck if duck is tragedy. 380 00:41:37,660 --> 00:41:45,580 Stay with me. Othello is a duck, which doesn't really look or sound like one. 381 00:41:45,580 --> 00:41:49,450 Just as measure for measure is a play that sounds and looks like one. 382 00:41:49,450 --> 00:41:57,460 But isn't the proximity of the writing of these two plays and their shared source material helps us to argue maybe that this is 383 00:41:57,460 --> 00:42:05,140 a period of conscious generic experimentation by Shakespeare that having written comedies and histories during the 15 nineties, 384 00:42:05,140 --> 00:42:13,490 he's pushing the possibilities of comedy in measure for measure, and he's drawing on comic frameworks for Othello. 385 00:42:13,490 --> 00:42:15,980 Let me explain a bit more what I mean about the second part of that sentence, 386 00:42:15,980 --> 00:42:19,880 comic frameworks for Othello, the Bedau measure of measure will have to wait for a couple of weeks. 387 00:42:19,880 --> 00:42:27,950 How is Othello like a comedy? There are many aspects of comic structure in Othello. 388 00:42:27,950 --> 00:42:37,790 The witty, clever servant Iago is a figure from the comic playwright Plautus, and he's often depicted on stage laughing at his own cleverness, 389 00:42:37,790 --> 00:42:44,140 memorably dubbed by W.H. Auden, the Joker in the pack, the Joker in the pack. 390 00:42:44,140 --> 00:42:50,390 The anger seems to mark a stage transition from the comic servant figures like lumps like Gobbo in the Merchant of Venice, 391 00:42:50,390 --> 00:42:56,460 or the drama shows in comedy of errors towards figures of more malign agency like them. 392 00:42:56,460 --> 00:43:02,150 Malcontent Bosler and the Duchess of Malfi, which you may have done last year. 393 00:43:02,150 --> 00:43:11,480 Part of the Argo's great attractiveness is his plotting and plotting has tended to be a feature of comedy rather than of tragedy. 394 00:43:11,480 --> 00:43:15,950 So too much plot tends to what happens in comedy rather than tragedy. 395 00:43:15,950 --> 00:43:22,770 And in this, Thomas Reimer's dismissive tragedy of a handkerchief might turn out to be a useful observation. 396 00:43:22,770 --> 00:43:27,890 The oh the stage managed intrigues making Othello believe Cassio is discussing Desdemona when 397 00:43:27,890 --> 00:43:33,020 he's really talking about the anchor and the emphasis on the comic prop of a handkerchief. 398 00:43:33,020 --> 00:43:40,580 These all ally. The play's unfolding less to the workings of chance and the anger of the gods in classical tragedy, 399 00:43:40,580 --> 00:43:48,820 but more and more to the human interventions of characters like the people in much ado about Nothing who want to get Beatrice and Benedick together. 400 00:43:48,820 --> 00:43:56,510 Okay, so in comedies, plots are usually people working hard to make things happen, and that's what happens in Othello. 401 00:43:56,510 --> 00:44:00,640 That's what's comic about the structure of Othello in tragedy. 402 00:44:00,640 --> 00:44:06,560 It's not so usually not quite so much about human agency. 403 00:44:06,560 --> 00:44:12,130 The figure of the jealous husband, which we've already had from Everyman in his humour, is a figure from comedy. 404 00:44:12,130 --> 00:44:16,900 Shakespeare knows that when he uses it in much ado about nothing. And the merry wives of Windsor. 405 00:44:16,900 --> 00:44:21,850 Both of which end in the jealous husband being brought to his senses and a comic resolution. 406 00:44:21,850 --> 00:44:28,810 It's a rule of thumb in Shakespeare, possibly even in life, that the men who think their wives are having an affair never are the ones where they are. 407 00:44:28,810 --> 00:44:37,450 Never know. Othello may flirt with the possibility that the jealous husband will come around at the end, 408 00:44:37,450 --> 00:44:44,650 that things can be resolved in the terrible slowness of the scene in which Othello prepares to and then murders Desdemona. 409 00:44:44,650 --> 00:44:52,360 It seems so spun out and so long so attenuated, as if it's waiting for somebody to come in and stop it. 410 00:44:52,360 --> 00:44:58,840 It's like it's like the woman attacked attached to the railway tracks or something. 411 00:44:58,840 --> 00:45:03,880 Everything slows down at that point because we know that somebody is going to come in and stop it. 412 00:45:03,880 --> 00:45:08,170 I think the place is teasing us with that possibility, although we never get it. 413 00:45:08,170 --> 00:45:16,510 Even Desdemona momentarily returning to life after she has been smothered by Othello may be a last gasp, 414 00:45:16,510 --> 00:45:20,100 as it were, of a comic resolution that maybe it's actually going to be all right. 415 00:45:20,100 --> 00:45:26,140 But she just expires without any further further activity. 416 00:45:26,140 --> 00:45:34,060 Act one of Othello is a miniature. Comedy lovers overcome differences to be together in Verdi's opera Otello. 417 00:45:34,060 --> 00:45:40,300 He does away with the whole of the first act, beginning instead with the storm that brings the couple to Cyprus. 418 00:45:40,300 --> 00:45:44,410 It's a neat interpretation of the opening is all just a kind of extended storm, 419 00:45:44,410 --> 00:45:48,970 which in Twelfth Night and in The Tempest is something which is going to usher in comic. 420 00:45:48,970 --> 00:45:54,940 Calm says something which starts Storm Alley. You think it's going to end in calm. 421 00:45:54,940 --> 00:46:02,200 So does the presence of comedy in this play make the tragedy more or less tragic? 422 00:46:02,200 --> 00:46:06,520 And how does that question of genre to bring us back to my focus for this lecture? 423 00:46:06,520 --> 00:46:14,790 How does that intersect with Othello's race, with Thomas Reimer's scorn that a more could ever be considered a tragic hero? 424 00:46:14,790 --> 00:46:24,760 And with debates about ethnic, geographical and ultimately moral connotations of Othello skin colour. 425 00:46:24,760 --> 00:46:31,150 So in this lecture, I've tried to approach the question of the significance of Othello's race via a range of different methodologies, 426 00:46:31,150 --> 00:46:36,970 comparing it with the source, thinking about other plays by Shakespeare and by his contemporaries through criticism, 427 00:46:36,970 --> 00:46:41,920 through performance, and through a reading of the language and structure of the play. 428 00:46:41,920 --> 00:46:49,120 Next week, I want to try something similar with Henry. The Fifth Ducks strangely recur as well. 429 00:46:49,120 --> 00:46:57,450 Questions of national identity. Just wars in the Elizabethan period and in our own and Shakespeare's relation to the genre of history. 430 00:46:57,450 --> 00:47:02,123 Thank you.