TO DIE UPON A KISS": LOVE AND DEATH AS METAPHORS IN" OTHELLO

“TO DIE UPON A KISS”: LOVE AND DEATH AS METAPHORS IN OTHELLO

Géza Kállay

1.

There are three plays in Shakespeare’s oeuvre that end with

the tableau of dead lovers: Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Antony and

Cleopatra. Romeo dies “with a kiss” (V,3;120)1, and Juliet,

before stabbing herself and falling on Romeo’s body, kisses

his lips in the desperate hope that “some poison yet doth hang

on them” (V,3;164). Antony, in turn, solemnly declares:

I will beA bridegroom in my death, and run into’t As to a lover’s bed (IV,12;100-101),

and Cleopatra begs the dying Antony to “die where thou hast

liv’d, / Quicken with kissing” (IV,13;38). Caesar, greatly

moved by the sight of Cleopatra’s suicide, orders that

She shall be buried by her Antony:No grave upon the earth shall clip in itA pair so famous. (V,2;360-361)

Finally, the title of this essay originates in Othello’s

well-known last two lines, spoken with the mortal weapon

already in his body: “I kissed thee ere I kill’d thee, no way

but this / Killing myself, to die upon a kiss” (V,2;359-360),

and Othello will fall on the bridal bed, beside his Desdemona.

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Three beds, one in the tomb, one in the grave, one in the

bedroom, where dead lovers kiss and cling to each other for

the last time in their hot, necrophilic rigidity. “Pitiful

sight” (V,3;174) – cries the First Watch in Romeo and Juliet. “A

heavy sight” (IV,13;40) -- the court sighs in Antony and

Cleopatra. “The object poisons sight” (V,2;365) – Lodovico

ruefully declares in Othello, and we would all too gladly –

borrowing Lodovico’s words – “let [them] be hid” (V,2;364)

because it is almost unbearable – as well as indecent – to

“look on the tragic lodging of [these] beds” (V,2;365). ‘Love

is mortal’ – we may draw the moral, now from a little

intellectual distance, testifying again to the archetypal

association of love and death. ‘Love is mortal’ – with his

three, deadly menacing stage-metaphors Shakespeare is

investigating various aspects of the meaning of this old

commonplace. Yet Othello’s case is, even at a first glance and

as the quotation (“I kill’d thee”) clearly indicates, a

special one. Othello not only commits suicide, like Romeo,

Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, but becomes a murderer, too,

rendering Desdemona the most innocent victim of all. Perhaps

this peculiar place Desdemona has in the drama explains why

the title of the play is not Othello and Desdemona, in contrast

with the other two, both joining the names of the lovers with

the conjunction and.

By contrast, in the story of the “star-crossed lovers”

(Prologue, line 6), Romeo and Juliet, two “comets” meet at an

adolescent speed, following the time of their own making in a

2

universe expanding at a totally different pace, a world set

into motion by inexplicable chance and by passionate hatred –

hatred which can find its match only in the desire the lovers

have for each other. A perfect match – yet, however the young

playwright, most probably also head over heals in his sonnet-

writing period, is aware that total loss should be sought in

total consummation, and however well he knows that – as Sonnet

42 says – “If I lose thee, my loss is my love’s gain” (line

9),2 the drama still “begs the question”: the problem why love

has to meet its tragic end is explained by the violent nature

of love itself, leaving important questions of self-identity

and unity practically untouched. In Antony and Cleopatra, most

probably written after the sequence of the ‘four great

tragedies’, the two main characters undoubtedly move on a

cosmic scale, between “new heaven, new earth” (I,1;17-18) and

they each represent for the other the other half of “the

world” politically, as much as erotically. The grandiose

scenes of bacchanalian revelries and desperate battles take

place before the public eye: when two great powers make love,

and make each other idols (and prostitutes), they lay claim to

the attention of the whole world. Consequently, intimacy is

nowhere to be found and the illegitimate quality of the affair

cannot make up for this lack, either. The most the ageing

couple is able to learn is that new gains and losses, new

excitement and pools of wine cannot do duty for potency and

burning desire, so they take the most heroic option they can:

instead of making death – as Stanley Cavell points out–”the

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totality and goal of love”,3 they treat death as if it were a

piquant, never-tasted excitement, and build death into life by

transforming it into the climax of the ecstasy which has

characterised their lives. So while both the tale of the

Veronese teen-agers and the story of the Roman and Egyptian

VIP-s unearth for us – both in the sense of ‘to discover’ and in

the over-literal sense of ‘to un-earth, i.e., let it become

heavenly’ – vital aspects of the relation between love and

death, in Romeo and Juliet they are too young, in Antony and Cleopatra

they are too old to completely inhabit an essential realm of

the love-and-death territory: marriage, which, by contrast, is

the main concern of Othello. It is the complication and

enrichment of the love-and-death story with the problem of

marriage that makes Othello unique.

Thus, the present discussion heavily drawing on, and in

constant conversation with, Stanley Cavell’s seminal essay on

Othello4, will try to build up the following argument.

I will, by and large, contrast “knowledge-as-love”

(“knowledge-in-marriage”, “knowledge-as-intimacy”) with Iago’s

knowledge, which is, typically and significantly, of “the

World.” It is Iago’s knowledge of the common, of the ordinary,

of the generally accepted which suggests for Othello that the

usual fate of marriages is that they end in cuckoldry. The

most exciting enigma of the play has, of course, always been

why Othello is unable to disregard Iago and why he,

paradoxically, even seems to be in need of Iago’s “pestilence”

4

in “his ear” (II,3;347): rather than dismissing his ensign

from his private life, he keeps squeezing him for further and

further information, he wants to devour from his poison more

and more.5 I will offer one possible solution to the enigma by

taking Iago’s knowledge (information) on Venetian customs, on

“the World” as the dramatic-metaphorical embodiment of the

Wittgensteinian “general agreement in a ‘form of life’”, of

the shared and common understanding, the founding possibility

of any kind of knowledge according to Philosophical Investigations. I

will argue that Iago in Othello’s eyes seems to be “honest”

because the “foundational” knowledge he represents is reliable

not only when one wishes to know but also when one, like

Othello, wishes to doubt.

In other words, what – at least in a Wittgensteinian-

Cavellian reading of the play – is at stake in Othello seems to

me to be precisely whether the Wittgensteinian “private

knowledge” is possible or not, whether one is able to “work

out” a private “definition” of to know with respect to a single

person. Having found everything in that person and staking his

whole being in her, may he happily (genuinely, entirely happily)

believe – at least initially – that the “knowledge of the

world”, the “common understanding” is negligible and

dismissible? For Othello the “private definition” of knowledge

is marriage and the meaning of this word is identical with its

“Biblical” sense: “And Adam knew Eve, his wife; and she

conceived and bore Cain” (Genesis 4:1, my emphasis). I will

argue that Iago’s venture is successful: Othello cannot

5

disregard Iago’s insinuations because they get a curious

testimony in Othello’s horrible awakening to the fact that the

act of union (as represented in the bridal night) always already

contains (“ontologically,” as it were), the element of

separateness: “imperfection” is inherently there in the

compelling force of contamination (defloration). I will also

argue – in line with the dialectic of tragedy, I believe –

that Iago’s venture is unsuccessful: what Iago says Othello

ultimately interprets from his “Biblical-ontological”

perspective, which makes the “honest” ensign become the

precise pseudo-form of the couple’s enterprise, his “superior”

knowledge downgraded to mere “gossip” and “idle talk”. At this

point I will introduce some of the terms of Martin Heidegger’s

Being and Time to characterise Iago as the typical “das Man” of

the play.1

NOTES

? Unless otherwise indicated, reference to Shakespeare’s

texts are according to the respective Arden editions.

2 Craig ed., 1957, 1112

3 Cavell 1987, 32

4 Cavell 1979, 481-496; a somewhat modified and extended

version is Cavell 1987, 125-142, entitled “Othello and the Stake of

the Other” – throughout this essay, I shall be referring to this

latter text.

5 Cf. Cavell 1987, 131.

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2.

Let us begin with the beginning, returning to the comparison

of Othello with Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra.

Othello, unlike Romeo and Juliet, starts with the consummation of

marriage which will serve as a witness to the union’s fate and

allow that consummation its final fulfilment on a higher

level. The “love is mortal” problem, now centred around the

Holy Sacrament of marriage – the archetypal image, and

reality, of becoming “one flesh” – opens up the awesome

possibility of studying the mystery of wholeness, unity,

separability, and thus, ultimately, the problem of the self.

And the comparison of Othello with Antony and Cleopatra makes it

even more difficult for us to comprehend why Othello and

Desdemona have to meet their tragic end. When we get to know

them in Act I, we see an Othello who is not old (yet one might

scornfully remark that he is much older6 than Desdemona), and

he is mature enough (at least in his own account) not merely

“to please the palate of [his] appetite” (I,3;262) with his

“gentle” wife (I,2;25). Although his passion is met – in his

own words – with “proper satisfaction”, (I,3;264), he also6 As Othello, characteristically after Iago’s insinuations,

will himself say, also reflecting on the difference in colour:

Haply, for I am black,And have not those soft part of conversationThat chamberers have, or for I am declin’dInto the vale of years, -- yet that’s not much --She’s gone, I am abused ... (III,3;267-271)

7

wants to be – as we hear him say – “free and bounteous of

Desdemona’s mind” (I,3;265), i.e., “he wants also the marriage

of true minds”.7 He appears to be brave, noble, an excellent

story-teller and rhetorician, like Antony but with the

additional charm of his exotic blackness, irresistibly

enticing the white Desdemona. (Though one might cynically

wonder again whether opposites like black and white will later

attract or repulse each other.) He is a perfect soldier, with

the solid job of being the mercenary general of the Venetian

Republic, but without the burden of the toil and trouble of a

whole empire. (However, one might raise some doubts again: is

the post of military commander not too public already to drown

the intimacy of the relationship?) Desdemona is no less

beautiful, passionate, and unflinching than Cleopatra, yet

Desdemona is gentler, purer, less artful, less spoiled and

less whimsical than the Egyptian empress, by far more

hearthbound and “domesticated” – all in all far less a holiday

flirt than a life-long companion.8 (Yet our disdainful inquirer

might start talking again: ‘Has there ever been such a woman?’

7 Ridley ed., 1964, 37

8 It is interesting to note, however, that while in Antony and

Cleopatra years elapse between the acts, in Othello the whole

action takes place – at least from the strictly dramaturgical

point of view – within three days and nights, the span of a

long weekend (say, a bank holiday) – a curious instance of the

Shakespearean treatment of time.

8

‘Can the possibility that one day a white and younger man will

catch her eye be ruled out with absolute certainty? Is there not

at least a little chance – a meagre likelihood is already

enough ! – that even the most perfect woman may be led into

temptation?’)

But then, if Othello and Desdemona are so valuable, if they

are so pure and excellent, if they love and want each other so

much, if their marriage is such a good one, then why do they

have to die, Desdemona from Othello’s hand? The scornful,

cynical, disdainful and sceptical questions and remarks I put

between parentheses above, are significant enough to be asked

and made by Iago, yet they and their implications in

themselves are by far insufficient to give a full solution to

the central question of tragic death. The answer to the

initial riddle of “to die upon a kiss” calls for further

investigation and in order to become more intimate with it we

should first examine the relation of the Shakespearean tragic

hero to death in general and then the mystery of marriage, the

specific plight of Othello and Desdemona, in particular. Thus,

I use this opportunity to give a brief account of my

conception of the protagonist in Shakespearean tragedy.

3.

When in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, Hemming

and Condell, Shakespeare’s fellow- actors in his theatrical

company, compiled the first folio edition of his plays, they

grouped those dramas under the label of “tragedy” which ended

9

with the – in most cases violent – death of an important

character.9 Hemming and Condell were following the general

theatrical convention of the age, which, guided mainly by

Latin examples, found the possibility of the metaphorical

expression of “the tragic” in an indisputable quality of

death: irreversibility. “Thou’lt come no more, / Never, never,

never, never, never” (V,1;17-18) – yells the madly grieving

King Lear after his daughter, Cordelia, who is, in Hamlet’s

words, in “the undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No

traveller returns” (III,1;79-80). Tragedy opens up the eye for

the greatest scandal and the most incomprehensible absurdity

of the human condition: the fact that one day we shall be no

more. Therefore tragedy, at least in a first approximation, is

the genre of an ultimate loss of value.10 Not only because life

in itself is valuable but because the tragic hero is a great

and original personality, though by no means without faults.

On the contrary, he makes – to resort for a moment to

“ordinary” terms – mistakes and commits the most dreadful and

deadly sins one after the other: Hamlet turns into a murderer

and drives Ophelia mad, Othello takes uncertain conjectures as

indisputable facts and kills his innocent wife, Lear is rash,9 Cf. Géher 1991, 167-174.

10 It would of course be impossible to make even a brief

summary of the endless approaches to the genre of tragedy; the

most helpful account still seems to me to be Clifford Leech’s

“The Implications of Tragedy” (in Lerner 1963, 285-298), giving an

excellent survey of the most important definitions.

10

stubborn and lacks the sense of proper judgment, which

ultimately brings about the death of his dearest daughter, and

Macbeth becomes a butcher, slaughtering men, women, and

children indiscriminately. Yet, there is one thing the

Shakespearean tragic hero can never lose (as we have seen via

the example of Macbeth): his human dignity and integrity, in

other words, his being fully human. Not even Macbeth – as we

could witness to it – loses his human dignity. His example has

rather shown how very difficult – or impossible – it is for

man, even by killing more and more people, to get rid of the

human core in him, to really become an inhuman beast and to be

finally damned. In Shakespeare’s theatre even incurring the

final judgment is something one not only has to deserve but

also has to become worthy of.

The tragic hero’s human dignity lies first and foremost in

his full knowledge of the situation, in his awareness that he

is as much the sufferer, the object of an inevitable fate as

he is the fully active maker, the subject of his destiny,

rebelling against it but identifying himself with it at the

same time. He fights fate by making himself one with it. The

unity is by no means accidental: it indicates that Renaissance

English tragedy saw the solution of the age-old question of

whether the source of tragedy lies in the tragic situation, or

the tragic character, in making one the metaphor of the other:

the world’s mouth gapes to gorge itself on the tragic hero

while he opens up his heart and mind to embrace, to

internalise the world wholly and indiscriminately, Thus the

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tragic world around him – for us the often mentioned plot of

the drama – forms “in his own image,” while his “purpose” and

“end”– to paraphrase Hamlet’s instruction to his actors – is

“to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to” the world (III,2;21-22)

the good and evil in it alike.

Therefore, the tragic hero’s enterprise must include death.

Full awareness of being is impossible without the full

awareness of non-being and the indiscriminate strife for the

whole of the world must find its retribution in having to

internalize its transitoriness as well. And is there anything

more exciting than non-being itself? In their case, too, the

highest form of knowledge would be the knowledge of the

unknowable, the utmost degree of sensation would be the

sensing of the state where there is either the perception of

everything with all the sense-organs or where there is

absolutely no sensation at all. The highest degree of

existence would be the descent into non-being while being

still in being. This finds its metaphorical expression in, for

example, the last act of Hamlet, where the Prince, with the

mortal poison already in his body, and he himself a “ghost,”

is still vigorous enough to kill Claudius. The tragic hero is

inside and outside of life simultaneously. His

“characterisation” cannot be anything but a series of self-

contradictory statements: his presence is able to comprise his

absence, his perfection his imperfection, his sufficiency his

insufficiency, his fullness his void, his plenty his lack, his

wholeness his partiality. He becomes – to paraphrase King

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Lear’s words – “the thing”11 by including everything through the

incorporation of even nothing. In this way, death (annihilation,

non-being, non-existence) is just as much his total success as

it is his failure in the first degree, it is an immense gain

in the same proportion as it is an irredeemable loss. The

tragic hero’s striving for everything through his desire for

nothing culminates in his “want for nothing.” Thus, for him

death is neither the “natural end of life,” nor the “wages of

sin” (Romans 6:5) but the reward of experiencing, in full

awareness, the whole scale of human existence.

4.

It was the exposure of the tragic hero to this exalting

damnation that the “experimental workshop” of tragedy set out

in search for the “new type of man” who could live up to the

challenges of the era we conventionally call the Renaissance.

The “new hero” of “new universal life”12 was in demand, a kind

of life England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth

11 Cf. Lear’s words to the naked, deprived Edgar: “thou

art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a

poor, bare, forked animal as thou art” (III,4;104-106).

12 Ernst Cassirer’s expressions in his epoch-making The

Individual and Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, cf.: “ the following

pages will show how the new universal life sought by the

Renaissance leads to the demand for a new cosmos of thought, and

how the new life reflects and finds itself in this thought”

(Cassirer 1963, 6, emphasis original).

13

century became particularly sensitive to, owing to her

changing position on the world-map and in history. What are

the possibilities of man in the new situation? Are they

endless or are they limited? If limited, then where are the

limits? Where is the demarcation between man and beast, man

and God? If – with crude and conscious simplification – we

identify the main concern of the Middle Ages with the profound

and rewarding study of being and to be and man’s relation to

their supreme form, God,13 then, by contrast, we might say that

the great “discovery” of the Renaissance was the problem of

may be: Nicholas Cusanus, “the first modern thinker,” according

13 Cf. with a paragraph from St. Thomas Aquinas’ Concerning

Being and Essence: “But because being is asserted absolutely and

primarily of substances and secondarily and as if in a certain

respect of accidents, hence it is that essence also exists

truly and properly in substances, but exists in accidents in a

certain mode and in a certain respect. Some substances indeed

are simple and others are composite, and in both there is an

essence. But essence is possessed by simple substances in a

truer and more noble mode according as simple substances have

a more exalted existence, for they are the cause of those

which are composite, – at least the primary substance, which

is God, is. But since the essences of these substances are

more concealed from us, therefore we must begin from the

essences of composite substances in order that instruction may

be made more suitably from what is easier.” (Fremantle ed.,

1984, 167).

14

to Ernst Cassirer, made his first step by “asking not about

God, but about the possibility of knowledge about God,”14 Hamlet

does not believe his father’s Ghost because it “may be a

devil” (II,2;595, my emphasis) and Othello will shout at Iago:

I think my wife be honest and think she is notI think that thou art just, and think thou art not;I’ll have some proof. (III,3;390392)

and Iago will “console” his general with: “she may be honest

yet” (III,3;440, my emphasis). What may there be in the world

and beyond it and what may the human being become?

Linguistic analysis usually distinguishes between two basic

meanings of may; the so-called “epistemic” sense: Othello may kill

Desdemona – “Othello is not barred by some authority from

killing Desdemona”, “it is possible for Othello to kill

Desdemona”; and the so-called “deontic” sense: Othello may kill

Desdemona – “I am not barred by my premises from the conclusion

that Othello will kill Desdemona”, “it is very much possible

that Othello will kill Desdemona.”15 The two meanings might be

used to sum up symbolically the forces working at the roots of

the Renaissance: the “possibility” sense (“Is it possible

that...?”, “Is it possible to...?”) gives rise to notorious

and fertile scepticism, the “permission” sense (“Am I allowed

to...?”, “Do I dare to...?”)16 gives rise to hope and despair.

Let me substantiate the above points by juxtaposing two

quotations, one from the beginning, the other from towards the

14 Cassirer 1963, 10 (my emphasis).

15

end of the Renaissance. The first text is from Petrarca’s The

Ascent of Mount Ventoux, where he writes the following:

I admired every detail, now relishing earthlyenjoyment, now lifting up my mind to higher spheresafter the example of my body, and I thought it fit tolook into the volume of Augustine’s Confessions [...] Itis a little book of smallest size but full of infinitesweetness. I opened it with the intention of readingwhatever might occur to me first: nothing, indeed, butpious and devout sentences could come to hand. Ihappened to hit upon the tenth book of the work. Mybrother stood beside me, intently expecting to hearsomething from Augustine on my mouth. I ask God to bemy witness and my brother who was with me: Where Ifixed my eyes first, it was written: “And men go toadmire the high mountains, the vast floods of the sea,the huge streams of the rivers, the circumference ofthe ocean, and the revolutions of the stars – anddesert themselves.” I was stunned, I confess. I bade mybrother, who wanted to hear more, not to molest me, andclosed the book, angry with myself that I still admiredearthly things. Long since I ought to have learned,even from pagan philosophers, that “nothing is

15 Cf. Sweetser 1990, 52-60

16 I mention just in passing that it is by no means

accidental that T. S. Eliot in his The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

(containing lots of references to Hamlet, tragedy and other

Renaissance pieces) puts questions of “daring” into the mouth

of his talking “persona”: “And indeed there will be time / to

wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’[...] Do I dare /

Disturb the universe? [...] Shall I part my hair behind? Do I

dare to eat a peach? / I shall wear white flannel trousers,

and walk upon the beach” (Eliot 1940,1981, 9-14).

16

admirable besides the mind; compared to its greatnessnothing is great”.17

Petrarca in his last sentence quotes from the Eighth Letter of

Seneca – he is the example of the “pagan philosopher.” Here is

“Renaissance Man”: around, above and in front of him the

infinite universe, he is holding Ancient and Medieval authors

in his hands and his heart is filled with boundless faith in

the power of the mind.

Yet, Augustine and Seneca are referred to by Michel

Montaigne, too, in his Apology for Raymond Sebond:

Inter caetera mortalitatis incommoda et hoc est, caligo mentium;nectantum necessitas errandi, sed errorum amor. [Among the otherinconveniences of mortality this is one, to have theunderstanding clouded, and not only a necessity oferring, but a love of error.]18 Corruptibile corpus aggravatanimam, et deprimit terrena inhabitatio sensum multa cogitantem. [Thecorruptible body stupefies the soul, and the earthlyhabitation dulls the faculties of the imagination].19

Not much before this totally different selection from the

authors Petrarca invoked, Montaigne puts down the following to

support his claim to the noble faculties of the human being:

17 Cassirer, Kristeller and Randall eds., 1948, 44

18 The quotation is from Seneca’s De Ira, (ii, 9), cf.

Montaigne 1957, 215; the translation is by Charles Cotton.

19 This text is from St. Augustine’s City of God, (xii, 15),

cf. Montaigne 1957, 215; the translation is again by Cotton.

17

Let us now consider a man alone, without foreignassistance, armed only with his own proper arms, andunfurnished of the divine grace and wisdom, which isall his honour, strength, and the foundation of hisbeing; let us see what certainty he has in his fineequipment. Let him make me understand by the force ofhis reason, upon what foundation he has built thosegreat advantages he thinks he has over other creatures:what has made him believe, that this admirable movementof the celestial arch, the eternal light of thoseplanets and stars that roll so proudly over his head,the fearful motions of that infinite ocean, wereestablished, and continue so many ages, for his serviceand convenience? Can anything be imagined to be soridiculous that this miserable and wretched creature,who is not so much a master of himself, but subject tothe injuries of all things, should call himself masterand emperor of the world, of which he has not power toknow the least part, much less to command it. And thisprivilege which he attributes to himself, of being theonly creature in this grand fabric that has theunderstanding to distinguish its beauty and its parts,the only one who can return thanks to the architect,and keep account of the revenues and disbursements ofthe world; who, I wonder, sealed for him thisprivilege? Let us see his letter-patent for this greatand noble charge; were they granted in favour of thewise only?20

Here is “Renaissance man” again, the “other,” who had read

the same Ancient and Medieval writers differently, who, in

Lear’s words, “is no more but such a poor, bare forked animal”

(III,4;105-106) and who looks around himself in a frightful

and uncanny universe, appalled by his own smallness as much as

by his infinite possibilities. “Neither a fixed abode nor a

form that is thine alone nor any function peculiar to thyself

20 Montaigne 1957, 213-214

18

have we given thee, Adam” – Pico della Mirandola makes God say

to Man in his famous “Oration on the Dignity of Man,” one of the

foundational texts of the Renaissance –,

to the end that according to thy longing and accordingto thy judgement thou mayest have and possess whatabode, what form, and what functions thou thyself shaltdesire. The nature of all other beings is limited andconstrained within the bounds of laws prescribed by Us.Thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance withthine own free will, in whose hand We have placed thee,shalt ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature.[...] We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth,neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom ofchoice and with honor, as though the maker and molderof thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatevershape thou shalt prefer. Thou shalt have the power todegenerate into the lower forms of life, which arebrutish. Thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul’sjudgement, to be reborn into the higher forms, whichare divine.21

The crucial point, again, is deontic possibility (“thou

mayest have and possess...,” “Thou ... shalt ordain...,” “thou

mayest fashion thyself...,” “thou shalt prefer,” “thou shalt have

the power”), yet, since Pico puts these words into God’s

mouth, here the deontic and the epistemic senses seem to

overlap: God is typically “relinquishing authority” and allows

Man to dare as much as he can dare, while the “declarative,”

“creative” mode of God’s speech22 (strengthened by shalt, too)

also makes Man’s possible enterprise “factually -

epistemically” grounded: it is not only possible for Adam to do

21 Cassirer, Kristeller and Randall eds., 1948, 224-225

19

what God offers him but it is, from God’s point of view, also

very much possible that he will do as he was told.

I take this overlap of the two meanings of may (the

epistemic one reinforced by shalt) to be symbolic in one of the

foundational texts of the Renaissance. The overlap can, of

course, be corroborated historically-linguistically as well.

According to Péter Pelyvás’s recent and brilliant

argumentation, it is the ‘ability’ meaning of may, now

extinct, which is the source of the two meanings through

extensions in two directions: “into the deontic meaning [...]

on the one hand, and, through a process of metaphoric

extension, into the epistemic domain”23. Pelyvás reconstructs

the process as follows:

In contrast to can, the auxiliary expressing ability inPresent Day English, the origins of which go back to‘have the mental or intellectual capacity to’; ‘knowhow to’ (Old English cunnan [...]), the original abilitysense of MAY had much closer links with strength: ‘tohave the physical capacity to’; ‘be strong’ (OldEnglish magan, maeg, cognate with Modern English might[...]). The fact that this meaning is based on strengthrather than skill suggests an easy route for extensioninto the deontic domain [...] (and perhaps goes someway towards explaining why it is obsolete). The basisof the meaning is potentiality in the form of the subject’s strength-- a potential force. But physical strength is usuallyseen as being relative: it can only be properlymanifested in relation to other forces that it is ableto overcome. We can postulate that such counteractingforces, of which the speaker’s may be one (and thisleads almost directly to the deontic meaning) are/werealways understood to be present in a situationdescribed by the ability meaning of MAY [...]. Extension

20

into the deontic meaning retains the structural aspectof the subject’s relative strength. highlights [...] the relativeweakness of a possible counterforce (typically the speaker’s),and adds the subject’s intention, which makes the forceactual. These three elements together make up thedeontic meaning. [...] Epistemic MAY is attested quiteearly in the development of the modal system,especially in impersonal constructions [...] Theepistemic meaning [...] is in general only weaklysubjective in all (pre)modals in Old English, withstrongly subjective meanings requiring strong speakerinvolvement only occurring centuries later (around the17th century [just Shakespeare’s time]).24

22 John Searle, the great authority on speech-acts,

characterises declarations (the fifth category in his

classification of “verbal deeds”) in the following way :

“Declarations are a very special category of speech acts”

[...] It is the defining characteristic of this class that the

successful performance of one of its members brings about the

correspondence between the propositional content and reality,

successful performance guarantees that the propositional

content corresponds to the world: [...] if I successfully

perform the act of nominating you as candidate, then you are a

candidate; if I successfully perform the act of declaring a

state of war, then war is on, if I successfully perform the

act of marrying you, [an example not at all uninteresting from

the point of view of Othello] then you are married. [...] There

are two classes of exceptions to the principle that every

declaration requires an extra-linguistic institution. When,

e.g., God says “Let there be light” that is a declaration.”

(Searle 1979, 16-19)

21

In the Renaissance the two meanings of may still

“rejoice”over their common semantic root of “ability”, making

us able to see this period as one in which the human being

takes “authority”25 over from God, tests his “relative

strength” and “relative weakness,” yet, as it turns out in

Montaigne’s essays or in Shakespearean drama, Man’s “potential

force” appears with respect to a “possible counterforce” (God?

the Devil? – this is the question precisely at stake), to

“split”, as it were, the single meaning of may into two –

perhaps for ever.

In my reading, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth

(the “four great tragedies”) play an eminent role in the

Renaissance “test of abilities”. Each of them investigates the

confines and possibilities of the human being from a specific

angle. In Hamlet, one of the central questions is whether one

can absorb everything through thinking, whether the human mind

could ever rival divine intelligence in keeping count of each

and every factor in the world, including even itself, whether

being may entirely consist in cognitive existence. I suggest

23 Pelyvás 1994, 168

24 Pelyvás 1994, 168-170, emphasis original.

25 Cf. with the following exchange: “ Lear. What would’st

thou? Kent. Service. Lear. Who would’st thou serve? Kent. You.

Lear. Dost thou know me, fellow? Kent. No, Sir; but you have

that in your countenance which I would fain call master. Lear.

What’s that? Kent. Authority” (I,4;22-30)

22

that King Lear, Shakespeare’s most “existentialist” play,

studies, in the first place, how many layers of being the

individual has, and what remains when those layers are

methodically – and mercilessly– taken away. What is necessary

for man to remain man and what is superfluous26? Does man’s

essence coincide with the condition of the naked, “poor, bare,

forked” (III,4;105-106) animal, or with the mode of the madman

with a kingly vision of the relativity of sin, or with the

status of an impotent God, unable to give life to his most

beloved child for the second time? Macbeth is especially

exciting from the point of view of the problem of the freedom

of the will; Macbeth knows his future, and if for Hamlet

thinking paralyses action, then for Macbeth it is action that

drowns first imagination and later thinking. Macbeth tries to

meet non-existence “face to face” by becoming a fully active

ally to destructive forces.

So far, three “visions” of the possibility of existence: the

possibility of existence through thinking, the possibility of

existence as such, and the possibility of existence through

destructive action. And Othello, now our main concern? Othello

investigates, as mentioned earlier, the possibility of

existence through the Other: whether the self may be entirely

26 Cf. with Lear’s words: “O! reason not the need; our

basest beggars / Are in the poorest thing superfluous: / Allow

not nature more than nature needs, / Man’s life is cheap as

beast’s (II,4;262-265).

23

through another self, whether it is possible for two selves to

completely merge.

5.

“Whether it is possible”– yes, that is the question. Surely

not an unfounded one, since this marriage is in imminent

danger right from the beginning, though first, in Act I, still

from the outside. The play does not begin with Othello and

Desdemona, singing the song of each other’s beauty, of

everlasting love and immortality, but with the quarrelsome and

dubious pair of Iago and his finicky friend, Roderigo and we

first learn about the wedding in terms of the obscene and

sinister images Iago displays before Brabantio, Desdemona’s

father: “Even now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping

your white ewe” (I,1;88-89), this “very now” coinciding,

perhaps (we can never be absolutely certain, as I will argue

below) with the time of the bridal night. Earlier, Iago tried

everything to tarnish Othello before Roderigo – and, of

course, before us – so until we really get to know Othello and

Desdemona, standing together before the council of Venice, we

might be no less biased against them27 – and thus we are no

less deceived by Iago – than those who charge Othello with

“stealing” Desdemona “by spells end medicines” and

“witchcraft” (I,3;60-61), and who, led by the abused

Brabantio, start hunting him in the streets. And it is so easy

to share the filthy malice of public feeling if what the

27 Cf. Ridley ed., 1964, xlix-l.

24

Venetians can see appears to be, at least at first sight, the

visible incompatibility of Othello’s blackness and Desdemona’s

whiteness. We know from Othello’s fine speech that Brabantio

did “love” the Moor, he “oft invited” (I,3;128) him – but

surely, marriage was not on the schedule! The strangeness of

these two people appearing as man and wife first seems to

provide everyone with the “ocular proof”28 that Iago could

possibly be right: all the metaphorical implications of the

unmatching colors are exploited to remind us that a good

marriage in the public eye can be anomalous to the extent of

murky crime, that love is a kind of witchcraft and a

combination of black and white magic, and that sometimes it

may be so hard to believe that something which is so

incredible can indeed be beautiful, and something that is

beautiful can, at the same time, be true.

How does the newly wed couple respond? Othello with dignity,

wisdom and self-assurance, winning the Duke and the council-

members over to his cause with a beautiful piece of rhetoric,

with language, full of carefully chosen legal terms, with

musical words, “dilating”29 to them his story, reminding them

of his valour (though not of his services to the state or his

noble birth, as he originally suggested to Iago30), and of the

28 Cf. Othello’s later words: “Villain, be sure thou prove

my love a whore / Be sure of it, give me the ocular proof”

(III,3;365-366).

25

fact that there are even more curious freaks in the world than

him, for example

the Cannibals, that each other eat;The Anthropophagai, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders. (I,1;143-145)

Othello’s proof against the charges is his whole life, now

consummated by his recent marriage and his witness is

Desdemona: “Here comes the lady, let her witness it”

(I,3;170). Not so much in what she is going to say but rather

in her presence, her whole being, now reflecting him with her

ability to see “Othello’s visage in his mind” (I,3;252), which

Cavell glosses ingeniously:

We know more specifically, I take it, that Othello’sblackness means something. But what specifically doesit mean? Mean, I mean, to him – for otherwise it is notOthello’s color that we are interested in but somegeneralized blackness, meaning perhaps “sooty” or“filthy,” as elsewhere in the play. This difference mayshow in the way one takes Desdemona’s early statement:“I saw Othello’s visage in his mind” (I,iii,252). Ithink it is commonly felt that she means she overlookedhis blackness in favor of his inner brilliance; and

29 Cf. “That I would all my pilgrimage dilate” (I,3;153).

30 Cf.: “Let him do his spite; / My services, which I have

done the signiory, / Shall out-tongue his complaints; ‘tis yet

to know – / Which, when I know that boasting is an honour / I

shall provulgate – I fetch my life and being / From men of

royal siege, and my demerits / May speak unbonneted to as

proud a fortune” (I,2;17-23).

26

perhaps further felt that this is a piece of deception,at least of herself. But what the line more naturallysays is that she saw his visage as he sees it, that sheunderstands his blackness as he understands it, as theexpression (or in his word, his manifestation) of hismind – which is not overlooking it.31

If, for Othello, blackness is the expression of his mind and

if, I dare to add, his marriage is a manifestation

(consummation) of his life, then for Desdemona it is clearly

an (almost Bottom-like) transformation: Brabantio and the

council gape in astonishment at the freshly aroused sexuality

in Desdemona, which could change a „maiden” „so still and

quiet, that her motion / Blushed at her self” (I,3; 94-95)

into a fully mature woman:

That I did love the Moor, to live with him,My downright violence, and scorn of fortunes,May trumpet to the world: my heart’s subduedEven to the utmost pleasure of my lord... (I,3;248-251)

Desdemona is willing to “consecrate” her “soul and fortunes”

to her husband’s “honours, and his valiant parts” (I,3;253-

254) and she is ready to be his companion on the irregular and

risky “honeymoon” to Cyprus, the Venetian colony, threatened

with war by the Turkish fleet. Of course the perlocutionary

effect – in speech-act theory the influence, the “effect

speech has on the actions, thoughts or beliefs, etc. of the31 Cavell 1987, 129.

27

hearers”32 – of Othello’s eloquence and Desdemona’s demeanour

is considerably assisted by the fact that Othello, the first-

rate military leader, is indispensable “against the general

enemy Ottoman” (I,3;48), and Desdemona is well worth the

safety of Venetian property for the Duke and the council

(except, of course, for Brabantio). Thus, this marriage does

get consummated from the legal point of view and both of them

are allowed to leave for Cyprus (though separately, so not

even the “just married” sign can be put on the same boat).

6.

But is legal consummation enough? When does a marriage get

consummated? On the bridal night, of course. Yet the play is

markedly obscure on the point when the wedding night actually

takes place. The couple’s first night is disturbed by Iago,

“warning” his general about the approaching foul and

contaminated flood of charges and accusations, brought on

them, of course, primarily by Iago himself. Later the urging

haste with which Othello has to leave for Cyprus interferes

with the hope of spending more than one hour together.33 The

second night is spoiled, at least partially, by the once more

Iago-incurred, aggravating brawl between Cassio, Othello’s

lieutenant and Montano, the governor of Cyprus. And the third

32 Searle 1969, 25

33 Cf. “Come, Desdemona, I have but an hour / of love, of

wordly matters, and direction, / To spend with thee; we must

obey the time" (I,3;298-300).

28

night is already the night of murder and suicide. It is then

that we are allowed into the intimacy of the bedroom, it is

then that we see Othello and Desdemona together in bed. Does

this imply that during the previous night nothing happened?

Whether it did or did not is – I wish to claim – in fact

irrelevant because of a curious double time-scheme34 in the

play. The drama follows, as it unfolds before us, a strict and

logical chronology (the scenes in Venice, going to Cyprus,

Cassio’s dismissal, Iago’s insinuations, Othello becoming

jealous, the losing and stealing of the handkerchief, the

deputy from Venice, the ambush on Cassio’s life and the final

scenes in the bedroom), and there are several references in

the play to indicate that the plot stretches out over a

relatively long time-span. For example, in Cyprus already,

Bianca blames Cassio for having “kept away” from her for

“seven days and nights”,35 whereas we have the impression that

they have been there for twenty-four hours the most; Emilia

claims that Iago, her “wayward husband hath a hundred times /

Woo’d” her “to steal” the notorious handkerchief (III,3;296-

297), and it is well-nigh impossible that Othello’s letter to

Venice with the news of the destruction of the Turkish fleet

34 There is much critical literature on this point; see

especially Ridley ed., 1964, lxvii-lxx; Granville Barker 1948,

24-30; and R. M Frye 1982, 170-172.

35 Cf. “What, keep a week away? seven days and nights?”

(III,4;171).

29

would receive a response in Lodovico’s personal arrival the

same afternoon,36 and we could easily find further examples.37

Yet there is the other, much shorter time-scheme brought into

play as well, which rather follows the sequence-upsetting

“private time” of Othello’s jealous mind. This temporal

pattern obscures the clear-cut boundaries of chronological

time and thereby all the important landmarks of a marriage can

get condensed into three days and nights. Therefore, while

following the chronological sequence of events, we – “at the

same time”– also get lifted out of it, the resulting impression

of “timelessness” being our aid for thinking of the last

night as a symbol, as the night standing for all the previous

ones and for all those that would have come. This last night

is, in one sense, Othello’s and Desdemona’s first night, to which

we have to come back repeatedly, “the scene”– as Stanley

Cavell points out – “that Iago takes Othello back to again and

again,” “the thing denied our sight”38 until the end of the play.

36 It seems that Othello sends the latter in the morning

of their first full day in Cyprus (cf. III,2), Lodovico seems

to arrive with the announcement that in Cyprus Cassio would

take Othello’s place (cf. IV,1;210-278) on the afternoon of

the same day, and it further, very curiously, seems that it is

on the night of that very day that Othello kills Desdemona.

37 An excellent summary of the problem of the “double-time

scheme” (discovered first by John Wilson in 1849) can be found

in Sanders ed., 1984, 14-17.

30

We get the “ocular proof” (III,3;366) of the consummation of

this marriage exactly when it is already over. It is then and

there, on the wedding sheet and in the act that something gets

defeated, something which now attacks this marriage not from

the outside, as in Venice, but from the inside, from Othello’s

heart and mind. What is this something? In short: the fear of

nothing. A nothing which is initiated by a nobody. Shakespeare

called him Iago.

Iago: curiously – though not accidentally – he has become the

main hero of much of the critical literature on Othello as well

as of many notable performances,39 thereby ironically carrying

out his program of “being not what he is.”40 For Iago, I claim,

is not the secret protagonist of the play, and if we speculate

too much about his motives (inferiority complex?, “motiveless

malignity”?,41 being the Devil – “Pure Evil” – himself?, hating

the “daily beauty” (V,1;19) of the couple’s romance?, being in

love with Othello?, getting a kick out of exercising his

brilliant intelligence over the stupid Moor?) and about Iago’s

ability to deceive Othello (because the small but tragic flaw

in Othello character is gullibility?, because he has no reason

38 Cavell 1987, 13

39 Cf. especially Wine 1984, 57-66

40 Cf. his saying early in the play, to Roderigo: “I am

not what I am” (I,1;65).

41 Coleridge’s well-known phrase, cf. Kernan 1963, 206,

and see below.

31

to suspect his “honest” ensign?, because Othello has an

inferiority complex about his colour and age?, because he has

secret sexual problems?, because he is too much in love to

think?)42 we might easily be deceived into losing sight of the

much more mysterious married couple. Yet the problem is simply

that Iago cannot be ignored. He cannot be ignored by Othello,

42 Debates concerning Othello crystallise around three

basic questions, yet these questions (like the Holy Trinity)

in fact involve a single problem, since the answering of one

of them naturally implies the rest of the answers. The

questions, as I can see them, are: (a) is Othello basically

noble, (good, clever, etc.) or is he fundamentally corrupt

(stupid, evil, etc.)? (b) is the marriage of Othello and

Desdemona a good one? (c) why does Iago want to deceive

Othello? These three questions clearly mark the borderline of

a triangle, in the vertexes of which we may put the three

protagonists (Othello, Desdemona and Iago), and the main

problem of course is their relationship. Yet there is by no

means any consensus about this triangle being isosceles or

rather equilateral, i.e. some critics do not consider the

Desdemona-Othello relationship to be as important as the Iago-

Othello one and favour concentration on the latter. An

absolute opposition may be perceived between Bradley (1950)

and Leavis (1937): Leavis wrote his famous article

specifically against Bradley. Critics may practically be

arranged “behind” the two of them, though, of course, with

some “variations on the theme”. Bradley’s name has rightly

32

either, whom I definitely do not take to be stupid or unable

to think: he is no less in love with Desdemona when he

delivers his logical, well composed speech before the senate

than when Iago starts his insinuations about Desdemona’s

infidelity. Why should Othello later lose his ability to

think? Othello is no less an artful rhetorician than Iago and

become associated with the figure of a noble and romantic

Othello (cf. Bradley 1950, 187). Bradley does not consider the

marriage to be an especially good one (“[Othello] cannot have

known much of Desdemona before his marriage”, 192; “[Othello]

is totally ignorant of the thoughts and the customary morality

of Venetian women”, 193), still he anchors the main cause of

Othello’s downfall in Iago’s machinations, making the ensign

the combination of a superior intellect and extreme evil (cf.

237). Othello’s tragedy, according to Bradley, is that he has

to get disappointed – under Iago’s influence – in his love and

faith (194). He kills Desdemona not out of anger but out of

honesty – he wishes to save her from himself (cf. 197).

Further, Bradley finds the main motive of Iago to be the

ensign’s careerism, though he admits that, all in all, Iago’s

motives are incoherent and contradictory (cf. 222-225). Leavis

considers this approach simply “sentimental” (Leavis 1937,

127), and traces Othello’s tragedy back – and this is the

decisive difference – to the Moor’s “self-idealization” which

“is shown as blindness and the nobility as no longer something

real, but the disguise of an obtuse and brutal egoism. Self-

pride becomes stupidity, ferocious stupidity, an insane and

33

he definitely is a keen observer of human nature: after all,

he has chosen Desdemona. But then why does he not say: “apage

Satanas, I will not talk to you,” why does he enter into a

discussion with one of his subordinates about his marriage,

his most private world, why does he insist on Iago’s honesty?

self-deceiving passion. The habitual ‘nobility’ is seen to

make self-deception invincible, the egotism it expresses being

the drive to catastrophe” (144). Iago is just an ‘appendix’, a

necessary dramaturgical device – the whole of responsibility

lies with Othello. Of course, neither Bradley’s, nor Leavis’

position is without antecedents. One of Bradley’s forerunners

is undoubtedly Coleridge with his famous Shakespeare-notes,

with references to “the almost superhuman art of Iago” and to

Iago’s quest as “motive-hunting of motiveless malignity”

(Coleridge 1930, 46 and 51).Coleridge thinks Iago to be

diabolic in his mere existence, whose evil nature does not

need any explanation because he is Evil incarnate (cf. 52).

From the “classic” critics he is among the first to call

attention to the strangeness of Othello’s and Desdemona’s

relationship, creating, nevertheless, a good marriage: “as we

are constituted [...] it would be something monstrous to

conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a

veritable negro” (45); “Othello had no life but in Desdemona”

(53). Leavis’ position, on the other hand can be traced back

to Thomas Rymer’s early and categorical judgement in 1693:

“the tragical part is, plainly none other than a Bloody Farce,

34

Much is at stake in answering these questions because if

Iago is not a worthy adversary for Othello, if Iago does not

stand for a cause formidable enough to put Othello on the

rack, then the Moor will cease to be a hero of tragedy and the

drama will sink onto the level of bloody farce, an otherwise

popular conception of the play ever since Thomas Rymer.43 To

ask what the peril of Iago incarnates for Othello is

tantamount to asking why the particular quality Iago

represents was regarded by Shakespeare as being the most

dangerous enemy of marriage.

without salt or savour” (Rymer 1693, 245). Leavis’ position

was echoed by no less a critic than T. S. Eliot, who claims

that after Iago has shattered Othello into pieces, the Moor

can never re-fashion himself again: “ I have always felt that

I have never read a more terrible exposure of human weakness –

of universal human weakness – than the last great speech of

Othello” [...] “What Othello seems to me to be doing in making

this speech is cheering himself up. He is endeavouring to escape

reality, he has ceased to think about Desdemona, and is

thinking about himself” (Eliot 1934, 213-214). See further

Gardner 1956; Holloway 1961; Campbell 1961; Rogers 1969;

Alexander 1968; Gardner 1968; Bradbrook 1971; Muir 1972 and

Honigman 1976. Cavell’s approach to Othello receives a very

negative assessment in Vickers 1993, 308-320, yet an adequate

response would require a separate study.

43 Cf. my previous footnote.

35

7.

“Are you fast married?” – Iago inquires of Othello when we

see them together for the first time,

For be sure of this That the magnifico is much belov’d,And hath in his effect a voice potentialAs double as the duke’s; he will divorce you. (I,2;11-14)

How can Iago know such a thing? Is he only bluffing? He knows

what he knows. Iago typifies the well-informed guy:

I know our country disposition well;In Venice they do let God see the pranksThey dare not show their husbands (III,3, 205-207)

he tells Othello in the great temptation scene, when he

insinuates Desdemona’s infidelity for the first time. Othello

will comment:

This fellow’s of exceeding honesty,And knows all qualities, with a learned spiritOf human dealings. (III,3;262-264)

What Iago knows, and Othello knows that Iago knows, is how

people usually, ordinarily, normally live their lives. The

sixth meaning of the lexical item world in Collins Cobuild English

Language Dictionary is “the way of life most people have.” It is

in this sense that Iago represents the world for Othello.

Admittedly, this world is by no means an appealing one. This

36

is a world that will respond to Othello’s bitter outburst “a

horned man’s a monster, and a beast” (IV,1;62) by saying:

“There’s many a beast in a populous city, / And many a civil

monster.” (IV,1;63-64) Whether good or bad, Iago whispers into

Othello’s ear, this is the way most people generally live –

including Iago himself, for whom marriage is a kind of part-

time job. Whether you like it or not, in this world the

common, the usual, the customary, the habitual, the ordinary is that

husbands are cuckolded, wives are “false as water” (V,2;134),

marriages go to pieces. And what is ordinary is the standard,

the norm, the common consent, the public agreement. Not an

agreement people arrive at sitting round conference tables but

one people “are in” – as Cavell points out – ”throughout,”44 a

kind of tacit, mutual understanding that ultimately arrives

from sharing the same “form of life,”45 a kind of general

consensus, in most cases not even called to consciousness by

those who have reached it, which regulates people’s lives as

“rules” or “conventions.” Cavell writes in The Claim of Reason:

there is a background of persuasive and systematicagreements among us, which we had not realized, or hadnot known we realize. Wittgenstein sometimes calls themconventions, sometimes rules.46

44 Cavell 1979, 32

45 Cf. with Wittgenstein’s famous crux: “It is what human

beings say that is true or false, and they agree in the language

they use. This is not agreement in opinion but in a form of

life” (Wittgenstein 1958, para. 241, 88).

37

This “background of persuasive and systematic agreements”

ensures that people are in harmony, that they act co-

operatively, in short, that they are able to live together. I

wish to claim that we might get a new reading of the play if

we try to understand Othello’s inability to “look the other

way,” and we consider his specific plight from the angle of

Philosophical Investigations and as it is interpreted and extended by

Cavell.

One of Wittgenstein’s insights is that it is this agreement

“in form of life” upon which our ability to use language

depends: because we agree – unknowingly – in a certain way of

life, we agree – tacitly – on certain rules that guide the

uses (meanings) of our linguistic signs. I think one of

Wittgenstein’s greatest merits was indeed the discovery that

these linguistic – or, as he preferred to call them,

grammatical47 – rules have a decisive role in the structuring

of human knowledge. Wittgenstein points out that these rules

tell us what to call a thing (“what to say”48) in a particular

situation, they provide us with the various categories we can

put phenomena into, they are “the means by which we learn what

our concepts are,”49 in other words these rules can be

identified as the criterion by which we judge and evaluate

46 Cavell 1979, 30

47 Cf., once again, Cavell 1979, 16 and 30.

48 Cf. this time also Cavell 1969, 1-43.

49 Cavell 1979, 16

38

everything we judge or evaluate. Thus, the criterion not only

provides us with the possibility of knowing what counts as

evidence for a claim, but also of knowing what counts as a

claim at all; it not only serves as the foundation of our

certainties but also as the ground for raising our doubts.

“All our knowledge, everything we assert or question”50 is

grounded by criterion. And since this criterion is identical

with the rules that govern our uses of words, asking about the

foundation of the criterion is tantamount to asking about the

foundation of language, and since the linguistic rules depend

upon the agreement “in a form of life,” asking about the

foundation of language is equal to asking about the foundation

of that agreement.51 And what is deeper than “the fact, or the

extent of agreement itself”?52

So I think Othello cannot ignore Iago because Iago’s

knowledge of human dealings, of Venetian customs, “translated” for

the Moor into terms of marriage, embody for Othello that

criterion Wittgenstein and Cavell so aptly characterise. Thus,

asking Othello to get rid of Iago would be equal to asking him

to disregard all standards that have come about by public

agreement, the criterion one has to use and cannot transcend in

Venice (in the play, I claim, the symbol of the world) if he

wants to know, judge, doubt, or assert. I think Othello’s

50 Cavell 1979, 14

51 Cf. Cavell 1979, 32

52 Cavell 1979, 32

39

obsession with Iago’s honesty lies in the human realization

that this criterion is reliable, in the sense that we have nothing

else to turn to but criterion if we want to know and in the

sense that it offers itself as the norm, i.e., as the only

possible way to normality. From this point of view, Iago’s

legendary lack of motive for starting his whole campaign

against Othello, his hunting for motives, all of them

inconsistent and none of them persuasive enough, can be

accounted for by recalling that criterion is the foundation itself

and there is not much hope for going any deeper. So is it

possible that Shakespeare failed to provide a single,

straightforward, and unambiguous motive for Iago because he

knew (undoubtedly also relying here on the Mediaeval tradition

of the Vice-figure) that criterion is not in need of

justification because its nature is just to be there, given,

always already simply to be accepted?

If this argumentation sounds convincing, then Othello, in the

figure of Iago, encounters one of the greatest challenges a

human being can ever meet, his struggle is with one of the

most fundamental questions of human existence: the basis of

human knowledge. This is an adversary that looks for such a

long time a friend, since when we are in trouble, when we want

to know something, something for certain, so certain “that” –

in Othello’s words – “the probation bear no hinge, nor loop, /

To hang a doubt on” (III,3;371-372), then who else could we

turn to?

40

I think that the “great temptation scene” of Act III, Scene 3

can also be read as the reconstruction of the process of human

thinking. From certain signs, visible evidence (Cassio

stealing away from Desdemona) and past experiences (the

previous night Cassio misbehaved and earlier he had acted as a

go-between for Othello and Desdemona), Othello has to infer

certain things and always with the help of Iago: it is Iago,

and only he who can confirm or deny what Othello is able to

perceive:

Oth. Was not that Cassio parted from my wife?............. ...discern’st thou aught in that?Is he [Cassio] not honest?............What dost thou think? (III,3;38,103-104,108)..............if more Thou dost perceive, let me know more, set onThy wife to observe; (III,3;242-244)

On the basis of Iago as criterion, the “sense-data” will have

to take the shape of thought, the “source” being Iago still:

Oth. By heaven, he echoes me,As if there were some monster in his thought,Too hideous to be shown: thou didst mean something;I heard thee say but now, thou lik’st not that,When Cassio left my wife: what didst not like?...........And didst contract and purse thy brow together,As if thou then hadst shut up in thy brainSome horrible conceit: if thou dost love me,Show me thy thought................Nay, yet there is more in this:I prethee, speak to me as to thy thinkings,

41

As thou dost ruminate, and give the worst of thoughtThe worst of word...................By heaven I’ll know thy thought.(III,3;110-114, 117-120, 134-137, 166)

Then thought becomes a claim, characteristically in the form of

a question, in need of “verification”:

Ha, ha, false to me, to me?................Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore,Be sure of it, give me the ocular proof....................I’ll have some proof........................would I were satisfied!................Give me a living reason, that she’s disloyal. (III,3;339, 365-366, 392, 396, 415)

And what can criterion, Iago, bring forth as evidence?

It were a tedious difficulty, I think,To bring ‘em to that prospect, damn ‘em then,If ever mortal eyes did see them bolsterMore than their own; what then, how then?What shall I say? where’s satisfaction?It is impossible you should see this,Were they as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys,As salt as wolves, in pride; and fools as grossAs ignorance made drunk: but yet I say,If imputations and strong circumstances,Which lead directly to the door of truth,Will give you satisfaction, you may ha’t. (III,3;404-414)

42

Iago, of course, applies his usual technique: he over-

dramatizes his own perplexity to avoid open confrontation. Yet

what his words also – diabolically but truly – imply is that

any kind of verification is perplexing. Verification is neither

“mortal eyes” seeing “facts”, nor is it perceiving some

“evidence” that may give one “satisfaction” but a “vision” of

a totally different sort, a vision which already contains

“things” and “persons” as this or that, for example Cassio and

Desdemona as goats, monkeys or wolves. The implication, in

other words is the following: if Othello is able to see his

wife and his lieutenant in terms of Iago’s metaphors (in his

imagination, with his “mind’s eyes”) now, then he will also

see them as monkeys, goats and wolves when “evidence” is shown

and, most importantly, once the metaphorical vision is

established, anything will count as evidence. What Iago

disguises here as “indirect evidence” (“impuation and strong

circumstances,” both important terms of invention, the first

operation in contemporary rhetorical practice),53 is in fact a

series of scenes, “pictures”, “visions” – even a dream54 –

showing Cassio and Desdemona in various positions in bed. Yet

however vivid the metaphors are, however strongly they apply

to Othello’s imagination, they would, in themselves, be not

enough to drive Othello mad. If Othello were not in need of

some knowledge, then he would simply be blind to Iago’s

images. But what does Othello want to know? Is not the

certainty that he loves “the gentle Desdemona,” and that he is

loved by her, satisfactory?

8.

43

The point, precisely, is that this love is so satisfactory.

If it were not, Othello could so easily adopt the Iagoian way

of treating his marriage as a kind of part-time job and later

he would most probably find himself, together with Iago,

“making fools laugh in the alehouse” (II,1;138-139) with his

sad story of cuckoldry. The crucial fact is just that Othello

is in love (while Iago is not). This is one of the most

significant insights of Cavell’s interpretation:

I am claiming that we must understand Othello [...] towant to believe Iago, to be trying, against hisknowledge, to believe him. Othello’s eager insistenceon Iago’s honesty, his eager slaking of his thirst forknowledge with that poison, is not a sign of hisstupidity in the presence of poison but of hisdevouring need of it. I do not quite say that he couldnot have accepted slander about Desdemona so quickly,to the quick, unless he already believed it; but ratherthat it is a thing he would rather believe as somethingyet more terrible to his mind; that the idea ofDesdemona as an adulterous whore is more convenient to

53 Cf. Howell 1956, 6 and passim.

54 Iago. I lay with Cassio lately, [...] There are a kind of men so loose of soul,That their sleeps will mutter their affairsOne of this is Cassio:In sleep I heard him say “Sweet Desdemona,Let us be wary, let us hide our loves;”And then, sir, would he gripe and wring my hand,Cry out, “Sweet creature!” and then kiss me hard,As if he pluck’d up kisses by the roots,That grew upon my lips, then laid his legOver my thigh, and sigh’d, and kiss’d, and thenCried “Cursed fate, that gave thee to the Moor!”Othello. O monstrous, monstrous!Iago: Nay, this was but his dream.Othello. But this denoted a foregone conclusion (III,3;419-434).

44

him than the idea of her as chaste. But what could bemore terrible than Desdemona’s faithlessness? Evidentlyher faithfulness. But how?55

I do not think of Othello as having been in an everydaysense impotent with Desdemona. I think of him, rather,as having been surprised by her, at what he haselicited from her; at, so to speak, a success ratherthan a failure. [...] Surprised, let me say, to findthat she is flesh and blood. It was the only thing hecould not imagine for himself. [...] Iago knows it, andOthello cannot bear what Iago knows, so he cannotoutface the way in which he knows it, or knowsanything.56

It is precisely love, the good marriage of Desdemona and

Othello that sends him off in quest of a kind of knowledge,

which, somewhat supplementing Cavell’s analysis, I identify as

knowledge in the Biblical sense: “And Adam knew Eve, his wife;

and she conceived and bore Cain” (Genesis, 4:1). So Iago’s offer

of knowledge and criterion arrives when Othello himself is

just in the middle of (“head over heels in”) the great venture

of getting to know: getting to know Desdemona and, therefore, his

self.

In this sense of knowledge Othello’s status as the black

stranger becomes the metaphor of man forever a stranger for

(and in opposition to) the woman, since what could differ more

than two humans, the one male, the other female? Can this

difference ever be overcome? Yes, if you see – to paraphrase

Desdemona’s words – the other’s visage in his mind, or if,55 Cavell 1987, 133.

56 Cavell 1987, 136

45

with Adam in the Bible, you say: “This is now bone of my

bones, and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis, 2:23). But how are we to

interpret this becoming one? Does the great enterprise of

becoming a unity mean the one getting lost in the other by

becoming one (“single”), does it mean the two disappearing in a

great, “monolithic” One, now qualitatively different from

both? If “getting lost” and “disappearing” also involve

“losing one’s self” (one’s identity, one’s being) then, I

think, this is not the road Othello and Desdemona want to

take. Their venture – if possible – is even more paradoxical

than that. I think that “getting lost” and “disappearing in

the other” in the sense of “losing one’s self” is the negative

paradox of the play, while the endeavour of the married couple

is the positive one. The negative paradox is embodied, of

course, in Iago, especially in his famous sentence: “I am not

what I am” (I,1;63). And why this seems to me to be the most

dangerous threat for the married couple is because it almost

looks like the goal of the lovers: they also wish to be “not

what they are.” Each of them wants to be the other, but – and

here lies the important difference – they, at the same time,

also want to remain what they are: two should become one by

simultaneously retaining the quality and quantity of two. From

Othello’s point of view we might represent this total paradox

in number and in kind as follows: “I will become fully

Desdemona while and by remaining fully Othello and she will

become fully Othello while and by remaining fully Desdemona.

For she should forever remain a woman (white, innocent, a

46

virgin) so that I could forever desire her and love who she is

(her self, her essence, her identity) and I should forever

remain a man (potent, black with desire) so that she could

desire and love who I am (my self, my essence, my identity).

So I will be to the extent I know her, to the extent I am she,

and she will (or: shall) be to the extent she knows me, to the

extent she is me”. Equation with two unknowns. And Othello

becomes Othello by becoming Desdemona and Desdemona becomes

Desdemona by becoming Othello. The plan is as paradoxical as it

is the rule in tragedy: to be and not to be at the same time.

So on the “ontological” multiplication table of Othello and

Desdemona l x 1 = 2, 2 x 1 = 1 and 2 x 2 = 2.

This “mathematical-metaphysical derivation” aims at the

highest: it wants knowledge to exactly coincide with being, it

wants a “theory of knowledge” (“epistemology”) to completely

overlap with a “theory of being” (“ontology”). For Othello

there is “no way but this”57 to avoid primordial chaos, the

chaos of not being able to love: “when I love thee not, /

Chaos is come again” (III,3;92-93). For him this is the only

way not to feel ashamed about being naked in the Biblical

sense: “And the eyes of them both were opened and they knew

that they were naked” (Genesis 3:7), that is, not to realize

that they are in fact different, black and white, man and

woman: different to the extent of being separate.57 Cf. with the following famous lines, spoken by Othello

and quoted above: “I kiss’d thee ere I kill’d thee, no way but

this, / Killing myself, to die upon a kiss” (V,2;359-360).

47

So, from the “ontological” perspective of Othello’s and

Desdemona’s enterprise (to be entirely through being the other)

Iago’s acclaimed “I am not what I am” (I,1;65) and even his

similarly famous “Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago”

(I,1;57) can be interpreted as indications of the “pseudo-

form” of the couple’s venture: Iago is not what he is not

because he is “the Other” but because he is always “another.”

Iago is in contact and communication with all the important

characters of the play: he encourages Roderigo, he advises

Cassio, he counsels Othello, he even comforts Desdemona. Iago

is always ready to take up the attitude and cause of the one

he is, in a certain moment, talking with, he is always capable

of adapting himself “to change of company and circumstance,”58

this is why he is always able to improvise (but this is why

his punishment is that he can only improvise). He goes up to

everyone to reflect their faces in his distorting mirror but

only at the cost of being himself faceless: the wages for his

“versatility,” for his “getting lost” and “disappearing in the

other” is that he is empty. Iago is everywhere (somehow

“always already there,” from the dark streets of Venice to

Othello’s most private thoughts) and therefore he is in fact

nowhere; he is forever curious, sticking his nose into

everything:

As I confess it is my nature’s plagueTo spy into abuses, and oft my jealousy Shapes faults that are not (III,3;150-151)

58 Granville Barker 1948, 104

48

and therefore he learns nothing; he can be everybody, he is

“an accomplished actor from the beginning”59 and therefore he

is a nobody. He is the typical parasite, milking the tank of

the other’s existence to enable himself to be.

9.

My conception of Iago as a dramatic character finds a curious

resonance in the way Martin Heidegger describes “das Man”

(“the they” in the English translation) in Chapter IV of Being

and Time,60 or – I would like to say – Iago might be thought of

as the dramatic-metaphorical “incarnation” of Heidegger’s

portrayal of “das Man”. The connection between the early

Heidegger and the late Wittgenstein seems to be possible via

their shared interest in the problem of everydayness, too: in

analysing “certain structures of Dasein which are

equiprimordial with Being-in-the-world”, Heidegger approaches

“this phenomenon by asking who it is that Dasein is in its

everydayness”, he wishes to “characterize [...] ontologically”

and “existentially” the “phenomenal domain of Dasein’s

everydayness”61. The link between Heidegger and Wittgenstein as

regards scepticism is explicitly established by Cavell, with

important implications for everydayness:

An admission of some question as to the mystery of theexistence, or the being, of the world is a serious bondbetween the teaching of Wittgenstein and that of

59 Granville Barker 1948, 104

60 Heidegger 1962, 1987, 149-168

61 Heidegger 1962, 1987, 149, emphasis original.

49

Heidegger. The bond is one, in particular, that impliesa shared view of what I called the truth of skepticism,or what I might call the moral of skepticism, namely,that the human creature’s basis in the world as awhole, its relation to the world as such, is not thatof knowing, anyway not what we think of as knowing.[...] Both Wittgenstein and Heidegger continue, byreinterpreting, Kant’s insight that the limitations ofknowledge are not failures of it. Being and Time goesfurther than Philosophical Investigations in laying out how tothink about what the human creature’s relation to theworld as such is (locating, among others, thatparticular location called knowing); but Wittgensteingoes further than Heidegger in laying out how toinvestigate the cost of our continuous temptation toknowledge, as I would like to put it. In Being and Timethe cost is an absorption in the public world, theworld of the mass or average man. (I find Heidegger’sdescription of such a world, especially in Chapter IVof Being and Time, the least original and the mostsuperficial passages in that uneven book.) In theInvestigations the cost is arrived at in terms (e.g., ofnot knowing what we are saying, of emptiness in ourassertions, of the illusion of meaning something, ofclaims to impossible privacies) suggestive of madness.[...] And in both the cost is the loss, or forgoing, ofidentity or of selfhood.62

I do not agree that Chapter IV of Being and Time would contain

the “least original and most superficial passages”, though I

agree that it is an uneven book, and I fully agree with

Cavell’s insight implied via pointing out the two philosophers’

different attitudes to scepticism. Whereas in Hediegger’s

assessment everydayness exclusively belongs to the “fallen” or

even “vulgar” aspects of Dasein – Dasein, significantly

though, being defined by Heidegger as “an entity which is in

each case I myself”63 – for Wittgenstein this is only one of its62 Cavell 1979, 241-242

50

possible meanings and, as I was arguing above, he assigns to

it the greatest preserving and conserving power with respect

to human knowledge, as well as to human existence in general.

A significant – if not the most significant – interpretation

of everydayness in Philosophical Investigations is, indeed, given as the

single alternative to madness, an interpretation hardy

negligible from the point of view of the Shakespearean tragic

hero. Yet since I wish to interpret Iago as the very

embodiment of the “fallen-,” the “vulgar-,” the pseudo-form of

the relationship between Desdemona and Othello, it is

precisely Heidegger’s account of everydayness which gives me

the opportunity to show a character of drama “philosophically”

and to “back-read” a philosophical text in terms of a powerful

stage-metaphor. Let us consult some of Heidegger’s passages

on “das Man” (the “they”):

The “they” has its own ways in which to be. Thattendency of Being-with which we have called“distantiality” is grounded in the fact that Being-with-one-another concerns itself as such withavaregeness, which is an existential characteristic ofthe “they”. The “they”, in its Being, essentially makesan issue of this. Thus the “they” maintains itselffactically in the avarageness of that which belongs toit, of that which it regards as valid and that which itdoes not, and of that to which it grants success and towhich it denies it. In this averageness with which itprescribes what can and may be ventured, it keeps watchover everything exceptional that thrusts itself to thefore. Every kind of priority gets noiselesslysuppressed. Overnight, everything that is primordialgets glossed over as something that has long been wellknown. Everything gained by a struggle becomes justsomething to be manipulated. Every secret loses its

63 Heidegger 1962, 1987, 150

51

force. This care of averageness reveals in turn anessential tendency of Dasein which we call the“levelling down” [Einebung] of all possibilities ofBeing.64

Distantiality, averageness, and levelling down, as waysof Being for the “they”, constitute what we know as‘publicness’ [“die Offentlichkeit”]. Publicnessproximally controls every way in which the world andDasein get interpreted, and it is always right – notbecause there is some distinctive and primaryrelationship-of-Being in which it is related to‘Things’, or because it avails itself of sometransparency on the part of Dasein which it hasexplicitly appropriated, bur because it is insensitiveto every difference of level and of genuineness andthus never gets to the ‘heart of the matter’ [“auf dieSachen”]. By publicness everything gets obscured, andwhat has thus been covered up gets passed off assomething familiar and accessible to everyone.65

The they is there alongside everywhere [ist überalldabei], but in such a manner that it has always stolenaway whenever Dasein presses for a decision. [...] Thusthe particular Dasein in its everydayness isdisburdened by the “they”. Not only that; by thusdisburdening it of its Being, the “they” accommodatesDasein [kommt ... dem Dasein entgegen] if Dasein hasany tendency to take things easily and make them easy.And because the “they” constantly accommodates theparticular Dasein by disburdening it of its Being, the“they” retains and enhances its stubborn dominion.66

Everyone is the other, and no one is himself. The“they”, which supplies the answer to the question of the“who” of every Dasein, is the “nobody” to whom everyDasein has already surrendered itself in Being-among-one-other [Untereinandersein]. [...] ... the they, as

64 Heidegger 1962, 1987, 164-165

65 Heidegger 1962, 1987, 165

66 Heidegger 1962, 1987, 165

52

the “nobody”, is by no means nothing at all. On thecontrary, in this kind of Being, Dasein is an ensrealissimum, if by ‘Reality’ we understand a Being withthe character of Dasein67.

Heidegger returns to the everydayness of Dasein also in

Chapter V of Being and Time, characterising its understanding and

interpreting as taking place in the medium of “Gerede” [“idle

talk”]:

The Being-said, the dictum, the pronouncement[Ausspruch] – all these now stand surely for thegenuineness of the discourse and of the understandingwhich belongs to it, and for its appropriateness to thefacts. And because this discoursing has lost itsprimary relationship-of-Being towards the entity talkedabout, or else has never achieved such a relationship,it does not communicate in such a way as to let thisentity be appropriated in a primordial manner, butcommunicates rather by following the route of gossipingand passing the word along [...sondern auf dem Wege desWeiter- und Nachredens]. What is said-in-the-talk assuch, spreads in wider circles and takes on anauthoritative character. Things are so because one saysso. Idle talk is constituted by just such gossiping andpassing the word along – a process by which its initiallack of grounds to stand on [Bodenständigkeit] becomesaggravated to complete groundlessness [Bodenlosigkeit].[...] The average understanding [...] understandseverything.68

Iago’s “idle talk” (Gerede) seems, indeed, to be drawing on

rumour:

67 Heidegger 1962, 1987, 165-166

68 Heidegger 1962, 1987, 212

53

I hate the Moor, And it is thought abroad, that ‘twixt my sheets He’s done my office; (I 3;384-386))

and follows the route of “gossiping and passing the word

along.” Iago’s language expresses the standard, the common,

the ordinary, and, therefore, the average he represents, in

his numerous and characteristic general statements, “known

truths,”69 commonplace pieces of wisdom (Aristotle’s Rhetoric

calls them maxims). For example:

We cannot be all masters, nor all mastersCannot be truly followed. (I,1;42-43) Virtue? a fig! ‘tis in ourselves, that we are thus,or thus: our bodies are gardens, to which our willsare gardeners... (I,3;321-320) These Moors are changeable in their wills... (I,3;347)

69 Cf. Aristotle’s Rhetoric: “From this definition of maxim

it follows that there are four kinds of maxims. In the first

place, the maxim may or may not have a supplement. Proof is

needed when the statement is paradoxical or disputable; no

supplement is needed where the statement contains nothing

paradoxical, either because the view expressed is already a

known truth, e.g. ‘Chiefest of blessings is health for a man’

as it seems to me, this being the general opinion: or because,

as soon as the view is stated, it is clear at a glance. e.g.

‘No love is true, save that which loves for ever.’ (Rhetoric,

1394b, 7-16; in Roberts ed., 1954, 136).

54

Men should be that they seem,Or those that be not, would they might seem none! (III,3;130131) Good name in man and woman’s dear, my lord;It is the immediate jewel of our souls:Who steals my purse, steals trash, ‘tis something, nothing,‘Twas mine, ‘tis his, and has been slave to thousands:But he that filches from me my good nameRobs me of that which not enriches him,And makes me poor indeed. (III,3;159-165) What if I had said I had seen him do you wrong?Or heard him say – as knaves be such abroad,Who having, by their own importunate suit,Or voluntary dotage of some mistress,Convinced or supplied them, cannot chooseBut they must blab – (IV,1;24-29) there’s millions now aliveThat nightly lies in those unproper bedsWhich they dare swear peculiar ... . (IV,1;67-69)

From Heidegger’s ontological point of view, what Iago prompts

Othello is to “disburden himself of his being”.

When Othello hits Desdemona,70 when he pries into Cassio’s

affairs, sneaking behind a tree,71 while he treats Desdemona as

a whore, as – to exploit the pun – a “public commoner”

(IV,2;75), he does accept the public, common standard of Iago

70 Desdemona: My lord? Othello: I am glad to see you mad.

Desdemona: How, sweet Othello? Othello: Devil! [Striking her.]

[...] Lodovico: What, strike his wife? (IV,1;234-235, 268)

71 Cf. Act IV, Scene 1; 92-166.

55

and Venice and he is no better than the prototypical cuckold

(so often made fun of in comedy). But does he “disburden

himself of his being” as well?

10.

Never. Disburdening himself of his being for Othello would

mean that he puts up with the fact that – as Iago said above –

“there’s millions now alive / That nightly lies in those

unproper beds / Which they dare swear peculiar,” or he could

relieve himself by abandoning Desdemona. Paul Hauck, the

author of the book called Jealousy72 (published in Hungary in the

series “Everyday Psychology”), would most probably suggest

Othello that he should seek a divorce. But how could Man

divorce his world, his whole Universe?73 Even while Othello

takes Desdemona “for that cunning whore of Venice” (IV,2;99)

he desires to be Desdemona: he identifies himself with her

imagined lewdness by using the most lecherous possible images:

I had rather be a toad,And live upon the vapour in a dungeon,Than keep a corner in a thing I love,For others’ uses... (III,3;274-277) I had been happy if the general camp,Pioners, and all, had tasted her sweet body,So I had nothing known... (III,3;351-353) Lie with her, lie on her? – We say lie on her, whenthey belie her, – lie with her, zounds, that’s fulsome! Handkerchief – confessions – handkerchief!

72 Hauck (1990)

73 Cf. Geher 1991, 218.

56

To confess, and be hanged for his labour. First, tobe hanged, and then confess; I tremble at it. Nature would not invest herself in such shadowing passion without some instruction. It is not words that shake me thus. Pish! Noses, ears and lips. Is’t possible? – Confess? – Handkerchief? – O devil! (IV,1;35-43) Goats and monkeys! (IV,1;259) But there, where I have garner’d up my heart,Where either I must live, or bear no life,The fountain, from 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;58-63)

It is exactly through the vision of these filthy images that

the nightmare of being different to the extent of being separate

comes to Othello: the idea of separation takes its inevitable

appearance in the horrific realisation of what overcoming the

difference involves: the cruelty, the (deadly) wound of the

wedding night, the smell of blood, the sight of stain, the

scream of pain, the compelling force of contamination. Cavell

is highly illuminating here again:

The whole scene of murder is built on the concept of sexual intercourse or orgasm as dying. There is a dangerously explicit quibble to this effect in the exchange:OTH. Thou art on thy death bed.DES. Ay, but not yet to die. (V, ii, 51-2).The possible quibble only heightens the already heartbreaking poignance of the wish to die in her marriage bed after a long life. [...] Though Desdemona no more understands Othello’s accusations of her than, in his darkness to himself, he does, she obediently

57

shares his sense that this final night and that it is to be some dreamlike recapitulation of their former twonights. This shows in her premonitions of death [...] as if knowing that only with these sheets on their bed can this dream of her be contested. The dream is of contamination. The fact the dream works upon is the actof deflowering. Othello is reasonably literal about this, as reasonable as a man in a trance can be: “When I have pluck’d the rose, / I cannot give it vital growth again, / It must needs wither; I’ll smell it on the tree, / A balmy breath, that doth almost persuade /Justice herself to break her sword: once more: / Be thus, when thou art dead, and I will kill thee, / And love thee after. (V, ii, 13-19). [...] Is the final, fatal re-enactment of their wedding night a clear denial of what really happened, so that we can just read off, by negation, what really happened? Or is it astraight re-enactment, without negation, and the flowerwas still on the tree, as far as he knew? [...] On suchissues, farce and tragedy are separated by the thickness of a membrane. [...] We of course have no answer to such questions. But what matters is that Othello has no answer; [...] The torture of logic in his mind we might represent as follows: Either I shed her blood and scarred her or I did not. If I did not then she was not a virgin and this is a stain upon me. If I did then she is no longer a virgin and this is a stain upon me. Either way I am contaminated.74

However, it is not sexual aberration – I would, following

Cavell, like to claim – that Othello’s vision of impurity

implies. Far from it. It rather wakes up to the horrible shock

that sex contains filth by its nature, that the fact of

separation is already built into the act of union. Iago wants

Othello to believe that he does not yet fully possess

Desdemona. Othello looks into himself and can only desperately

74 Cavell 1987, 134-135

58

acknowledge that Iago’s suggestion, in one sense at least, is

true. Othello, in his revelation of the mortal scar finds in

himself – in Desdemona – a curious testimony, an odd proof for

the “verification” of the common, ordinary, average filth the

Iagoian criterion displays before his eyes.

Where, however, the Iagoian criterion totally miscalculates

Othello’s response is that it keeps talking to the Moor as if

he were in need of a piece of information. Yet what Iago whispers

into Othello’s ear “epistemologically,” Othello interprets

“ontologically.” Othello is not interested in the question

what Desdemona is like. He wants to make sure of his and the

Other’s existence, or, more precisely, of his own existence

solely and completely through and within the Other’s being, he

wants a guarantee concerning the existence of the Universe –

hence the significance of the planetary metaphors he starts to

use immediately after the murder:

My wife, my wife, my wife; I ha’ no wife’O insupportable! O heavy hour!Methinks it should be now a huge eclipseOf sun and moon, and that the affrighted globeShould yawn at alteration. (V,2;99-102)

This kind of “ontology” will never stay satisfied with

criterion if it wants to know. On the ontological level, it

seems, criterion will simply not work. For, as Cavell points

out in The Claim of Reason, criterion can only tell us with

certainty that something is so but never that something is so,

never that it exists.75 Criterion will not guide in ontology.

59

Criterion can bring forth a legion of evidence, still, from

the ontological point of view, it – like jealousy, like

scepticism itself – will only “mock / That meat it feeds on”

(III,3; 170-171): the more evidence is brought in, the deeper

the jealous-sceptical crisis becomes. So Othello may accept

that “it is so” that Desdemona is an adulteress, he may accept

that some of his “concepts” about Desdemona were “improperly

applied” and he may even “correct” them on the basis of the

Iagoian criterion, yet all this is of no avail: Othello does

not only want to know about Desdemona but he wants to know (to

love, to be) Desdemona. Knowledge that aims at being,

epistemology that wishes to overlap with ontology will never

be, because it cannot be, satisfied with criterion. Othello’s

heroism lies in remaining “sufficiently open to the threat of

scepticism”,76 refusing to put up for good with the common,

average, ordinary, and, therefore, natural and normal criterion

in Iago. Othello’s greatness consists in daring to identify

the epistemological lack (I will never be able to know her

completely) with ontological finitude (because I am a mortal

man).77

76 Cf. “One misses the drive of Wittgenstein if one is not

[...] sufficiently open to the threat of skepticism (i.e., to

the skeptic in oneself); or if one takes Wittgenstein [...] to

deny the truth of skepticism.” (Cavell 1979, 47).

77 Cf. “According to me further, his [Othello’s]

professions of skepticism over her faithfulness are a cover

60

So Othello does not take his wife’s hand to lead her out from

the Garden of Eden. He does not cry bitter tears together with

her on the morning of their bridal night. He does not make the

compromises of “common sense” we, ordinary people, (Iagos?)

who participate in the metaphor of the tragic hero not

literally, as Othello, but only through our “visions and

revisions”, might find the only way to retain our “normality.”

We do want “to save our lives,” we might even believe that it

is possible to inhabit the realm Othello occupies even in our

everydayness – and genuinely so. We might, indeed, believe that

it is possible to participate in his horrible mimesis

ordinarily, too, in a mimesis which in fact resorts to the

impossible: Othello, when deciding to kill Desdemona, wants to

become the Man of the Fall and the jealous, vengeful, yet

story for a deeper conviction; a terrible doubt covering a yet

more terrible certainty, an unspeakable certainty. But then

this is what I have throughout kept arriving at as the cause

of skepticism – the attempt to convert the human condition,

the condition of humanity, into an intellectual difficulty, a

riddle. (To interpret “a metaphysical finitude as an

intellectual lack”)” (Cavell 1979, 138).

75 Cf. “Criteria are ‘criteria for something’s being so’,

not in the sense that they tell us of a thing’s existence, but

of something like its identity, not of its being so, but of its

being so. Criteria do not determine the certainty of

statements, but the application of the concepts employed in

statements” (Cavell 1979, 45).

61

merciful God at the same time. He wants to separate (like once

God divided the light from the darkness, the waters from the

waters) the soul from the body that can be scarred, he wishes

to sacrifice the impure for the pure, the imperfect for the

perfect, the average for the outstanding, the ordinary for the

extraordinary, the finite for the infinite, the profane for

78 Cf. Iago’s “and wit depends on dilatory time”

(II,2;363). On “dilation” and its connection with corruption

and accusation see Patricia Parker’s brilliant “Shakespeare and

Rhetoric: ‘dilation’ and ‘delation’ in Othello” in Parker and Hartman eds.,

1985, 54-74, especially 55-58.

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