Renaissance Forum: Volume 7, Winter 2004: M.W. Rowe

Philip C. Kolin. Ed. 2002. Othello: New Critical Essays. New York and London: Routledge. 458 pp. ISBN 0-8153-3574-1. £65.

This capacious and scholarly collection gives a good idea of the work currently being done on Othello in American universities. The editor supplies a long introduction about the history of Othello criticism (including film and stage criticism), and his twenty contributors cover a wide range of topics: race, power, gender, the state, jury trials, medicine, symbolism, the early history of the texts, stage violence, performance history, and much else.
The first 168 pages are frankly stodgy. The pot of race/gender/power/performance is thoroughly stirred but nothing distinctive or nutritious emerges from it. However, matters improve on p.169, when one reaches 'The Curse of Cush: Othello's Judaic Ancestry' (169-188) by James R. Andreas, Sr. This begins by highlighting some important parallels between Othello and The Merchant of Venice. Othello's subtitle, he notes, is The Moor of Venice, while The Merchant of Venice was also known as The Jew of Venice (169). Does this hint at other, more significant, connections? In both plays, Andreas observes, a father witness the 'theft' of his daughter into a marriage which is complicated by racial and religious factors; both plays have aliens who are encouraged to stay because of a service they can provide (lending money and military expertise); both have aliens who are finally expelled (by ostracism and suicide); both encourage the audience to sympathize with the alien (170). I would also add there are frequent verbal echoes of The Merchant in Othello: 'Now, by two-headed Janus' (Merchant, I.i.50), 'By Janus, I think no' (Othello, I.ii.33); 'the Jew my master who, God bless the mark . . .' (Merchant, II.ii.21-2), 'And I, God bless the mark, his Moorship's ancient' (Othello, I.i.33); 'And shudd'ring fear, and green-eyed jealousy!' (Merchant, III.ii.110), 'O beware, my lord, of jealousy / It is the green-eyed monster . . .' (Othello, III.iii.67-8); 'O, be thou damned, inexecrable dog' (Merchant, IV.i.127), 'O Spartan dog' (Othello, V.ii.357).
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as is well known, Jews and Moors could be bracketed together as races hostile to Christians: the Jews branded as 'Christ-killers', the Moors, because of their colour, associated with sin and the devil (170). What Andreas makes clear is that, for the people of the Renaissance, the connection was far more intimate and important. For them, it was genetic, because the black races were widely supposed to have Judaic ancestry.
The theological story runs as follows. After the flood, Noah's sons inadvertently came across their father naked and drunk on his own vintage. Shem and Japhet turned away, but Ham continued to look. For this, Ham was not punished directly, but his sons, Canaan and Cush, were cursed with eternal servitude. The curse was linked to black skin. Some authorities felt that this was because Ham's wife at the time of conception was thinking of something black; others, that it was because she longed for black things while pregnant (174). St Jerome and St Augustine held that it was because the name 'Ham' itself denotes something dark and hot (175). Since the descendants of Ham peopled Africa, this both explained why they were black and also served as a justification for enslaving them.
A slightly different version of the same story is told in A True Discourse of the Late Voyages of Discoverie; for Finding a Passage to Cathaya, George Best's 1578 book on the habitability of all parts of the globe. Best argues that because Noah and his wife, as well as all his precursors before the flood, were white, all their descendants 'should have begotten . . . white children' (174). However, during the course of the flood, Noah commanded his sons to abstain from sex with their wives. This injunction Ham disobeyed, and to punish the transgression, God proclaimed that 'a sonne should bee born whose name was Cush, who not only it selfe, but all his posteritie after him should be so blacke and loathsome, that it might remain a spectacle of disobedience to all the worlde. And of this blacke and cursed Cush came all these blacke Moores which are in Africa' (175). All black races were descended from Cush's Jewish line, and the cause of their blackness was a Jewish sin (174). Joseph Glanvill even excitedly tried to trace the origin of chimpanzees back to Ham, thus giving added and terrible point to a 1970s German production of Othello, reported in the introduction, where the protagonist appears 'dressed in an absurd King Kong costume, his uniform jacket inside out . . . a carnival paper-maché mask of a stereo-typed African over his already blackened face' (36).
Knowledge of these myths helpfully refocuses attention on the Moorish element in The Merchant: the two black characters (the Prince of Morocco and the off-stage Negro mistress of Lancelot Gobbo); why Shylock swears by Cush (III.ii.384); and why Shylock is referred to as being 'black as jet' (171and 176). Similarly, it focuses attention on the Jewish element in Othello; in particular, it reanimates the debate about whether Othello likens himself to 'the base Judean, (who) threw a pearl away…' as in the First Folio, or whether he likens himself to 'the base Indian, (who) threw a pearl away' as in the Quarto (V.ii.343). Both have their problems, but Andreas persuaded me that 'Judean' has a more intimate connection with Othello's own circumstances, and also with the 'circumcised dog' whom he recalls stabbing eight lines later (V.ii.351).
Andreas is sober, scholarly and informative. By contrast, 'The "O" in Othello: Tropes of Damnation and Nothingness' by Daniel J.Vitkus (347-62) is a virtuoso display: flashy, self-preening, and slightly drunk on its own ingenuity, but still exhilaratingly original and clever. Vitkus observes that there are more 'O's and 'Oh's in Othello than in any other Shakespeare play except Romeo and Juliet (360). For those who like figures, Spevack's concordance notes the relative frequency of repetition in Othello is .579 compared with the Shakespearean average of .224, but Vitkus notes that in Act V there are seventy-five repetitions – a wholly unprecedented number (349). With this he begins his examination of the figure's multiple meanings in the play. The wooden O of the playhouse, fullness and plenitude, nothing and emptiness (347), loss of identity, chaos, death, the mouth of Hell (356-7); O-groans and inarticulate emotion that lies beyond language, 'apostrophic invocation, lovelorn lamentation, a moan of horror, simply gaping in silent, slack-jawed wonder' (348), the open mouth of death (358); the round world, the all-encompassing concentric universe (349), the wheel of fortune, 'the incurvate form of the monster Jealousy that turns back on itself like the worm Ouroboros, swallowing its own tail' (350), the sign for the female genitalia, particularly after loss of virginity, and the form of man's life (357).
The central section of the essay is devoted to the importance of turning and other circular movements in the play ('she can turn, and turn, and yet go on, / And turn again' (IV.i.243)). Most of this is thought-provoking in a playful kind of way. Indeed, I became so caught up in the general exuberance that I began to wonder why Vitkus didn't examine the connection between Desdemona's behaviour and the characteristic movement of the hawk (like Yeats' falcon, 'Turning and turning in the widening gyre'); after all, Othello elaborately compares her to such a bird in Act III ('If I do prove her haggard / Though that her jesses were my dear heart-strings, / I'd whistle her off and let her down the wind / To prey at fortune' (III.iii.262-4)). However, sobriety returned when Vitkus suggested that Othello's Spanish sword is perhaps 'a curved, Moorish scimitar' (357), and that the language in which his self-stabbing is described 'suggests a circular cutting, another version of the circular form that structures the text' (356). At this point, ingenuity is drifting off into hallucination.
These are the two most striking papers in the collection, but I would also recommend Bevington's 'Othello: Portrait of a Marriage', Ronan's article on water imagery, Schiffer's piece on Othello and the sonnets, and Sloan's paper on the semiology of eyes. Mary F. Lux's quirky but memorable, ' "Work on my med'cine": Physiologies and Anatomies in Othello', makes us rethink the role and nature of illness in the play, even though she shares with several other contributors the view that Cassio is an alcoholic (surely he just can't hold his drink?).
One rather remarkable fact about this book (more obvious, no doubt, since 9/11) is that Islam is strikingly absent. One would not think that Othello (or his family) is an apostate – someone from a Muslim background fighting other Muslims as a hired mercenary for their Christian enemies – or that this might give rise to a very particular and very stressful set of psychological pressures. To begin to remedy this omission, the reader will have to turn to some of Jonathan Bate's recent articles.
Overall, this is a well edited, well produced book that should find a useful place in every university library, although its merits are enhanced by judicious supplementation and skipping.

M.W. ROWE
UNIVERSITY OF YORK