![]() ![]() One trace of Barabas abides in Iago, though transmogrified by Shakespeare’s more glorious villain: self-delight. We can observe that Iago transcends Barabas, just as Prospero is beyond Marlowe’s Dr. “Iago’s terrible greatness (what else can we term it?) is also Shakespeare’s triumph over Christopher Marlowe, whose Barabas, Jew of Malta, had influenced the young Shakespeare so fiercely. Time, it seems, is just another ingredient of Iago’s plot. Shakespeare steals time from us too, just as Iago steals from Othello his mind. Those “sto’ln hours” are, of course an impossibility there is simply no time available in the action of the play (even if there were reason) for Desdemona to be unfaithful. ![]() Let him not know’t and he’s not robbed at all. He that is robbed, not wanting what is stol’n, I saw’t not, though it not it harmed not me … “What sense had I of her stol’n hours of lust?” he cries, Though he is ignorant of it, Othello picks up on this impossible, torturing tension (to those on stage and us in the audience). The effect is of a play at once too long and too short: long enough for Othello and Desdemona’s marriage to feel genuinely convincing, yet short enough for it to be insecure short enough for Iago’s plot to remain secret, yet long enough for it to works it way to completion. On stage, of course, Othello FEELS much longer, seemingly lengthened by Shakespeare’s scattered gestures to more extended time periods. It has been no more than 33 hours – just under a day and a half. Othello is the site of one of Shakespeare’s most virtuosic theatrical coups, the so=-called “double time-scheme.” Othello and Desdemona have, on one level of the play, almost implausibly little time together: their new marriage is threatened first by her father’s angry intervention, then by the news that Othello must be sent to Cyprus in the same way, their wedding-night is interrupted by Cassio’s brawl (leading some critics to infer that the match remains unconsummated – I tend to go with this), and then by the witless group of musicians he pays to play outside their window in a misguide attempt to win back Othello’s favor. The play’s greatest perversity, though, is seemingly built into its very structure. Desdemona’s well-meaning, innocent eagerness to help Cassio comes back against her Emilia’s attempts to earn her husband’s love make her an unwitting accessory to his plot. As Iago jubilantly (and rightfully) declares, “trifles light as air/Are to the jealous confirmations strong/As proofs of holy writ.” Thomas Rymer, who famously belittled (as we read in my last post) Othello as a “bloody farce,” irreverently suggested that it should be called “the Tragedy of the Handkerchief,” and while few have been brave enough to defend him, Rymer, I think, does put his finger on the absolute horror of what the play presents: a husband, clearly in love with his wife, who is persuaded into murderous jealousy by mere gossip, with a wife sent to her death by a “little napkin” – even if, as Othello later claims, that the handkerchief was woven for his mother and has “magic in the web of it.” But, maybe, that IS the point – even the tiniest or apparently most insignificant details are put under huge pressure by this play, and when they fail to take the weight, the whole tragedy collapses with spectacular force. Seized on by Emilia, who hands it over to her husband, the handkerchief then makes it way to Cassio’s chamber and becomes the sole piece of evidence proving Desdemona’s guilt. That “proof,” absurdly, is a handkerchief, “spotted with strawberries,” that Desdemona happens to drop. As Iago had planned, Othello’s is “a jealousy so strong/That judgment cannot cure,’ and he will be convinced by what seems to be the flimsiest of grounds. Othello persuades himself that he is acting rationally by demanding “some proof” of Desdemona’s infidelity, but he fails to take into account Iago’s skill at manipulation – or the mysterious workings of chance.
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