Othello – William Shakespeare (Arden Shakespeare 2006)

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate/Speak of me as I am….

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A well-known poet, Daljit Nagra, once told me that Othello is the best thing ever written. I don’t feel qualified to judge such a claim but I know how good a play it is, and I can see how closely its concerns correspond with his: the poison of racial prejudice and the insecurities it reveals in perpetrators and victims. Shakespeare shows how rapidly the exotic qualities of his ‘extravagant and wheeling stranger/ Of here and everywhere’ can be turned against him, transforming apparently supreme self-confidence into murderous self-doubt. Othello’s tragedy is succumbing to the view certain others have of him.

And the view of others – made explicit by Iago but also latent in some of the Venetian nobility who are Othello’s paymasters – is clear from the play’s opening scene. Out in the street, under cover of darkness, Iago rouses a Venetian senator from his sleep with a filthy tirade about what the senator’s daughter, Desdemona, is at that moment doing with ‘an old, black ram’. The racist and bestial imagery – she’s ‘making the beast with two backs’ in ‘the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor’ – infects Iago’s mind and drives forward his destructive plotting.

At the start of the play, Othello’s eloquence, self-control, modesty and military brilliance suggest he’s the embodiment of that paragon of masculinity, the Renaissance Man. He faces down an armed rabble using only his ‘perfect soul’, is cleared of charges of ‘beguiling’ Desdemona with ‘spells and medicines’ and accepts the commission to defend (and govern) Cyprus against the Ottoman Turk on his very wedding night. There is no situation, it seems, in which he is not ‘all-in-all sufficient’. His confidence is such that he takes his young, white, Venetian bride with him to Cyprus. But neither of them comes back.

Various critical objections are made about the play – it’s a domestic (rather than political) tragedy; Othello changes too quickly; Iago’s character lacks verisimilitude – which seek to place it below Hamlet and King Lear in the Shakespeare canon. However, I think each one can be countered. Firstly, not only is Othello military commander in Cyprus, he is also a ‘worthy governor’ – the holder of all political power on the island. Secondly, the vulnerabilities in his character are there from the start – his long-standing outsider status in Venice is the source of all his insecurity. And, finally, I think it perfectly believable that a brilliant but unstable mind such as Iago’s, beset by jealousies, suspicions and resentments, should desire the destruction of happiness wherever it is perceived.

And Shakespeare does an interesting thing with time in this play. The action – from Iago waking Brabantio in Venice to Iago being escorted offstage under arrest – takes less than 48 hours. But there are elements of the drama which obviously require much longer (not least a sea voyage from Venice to Cyprus), so critics refer to ‘short’ and ‘long’ time in Othello. This also answers the objection to the rapidity of Othello’s change – it’s a dramatic device to intensify the tragedy.