1. Othello: structure and genre
Picture: Eamonn Walker as Othello in Wilson Milam’s Globe Theatre production, 2007

2. Structure Intensity and simplicity
A very simple plot, with no subplots to distract the audience
Relatively few characters: 7 main characters (12 in Hamlet, 9 in Macbeth, 11 in Anthony and Cleopatra)
tension mounting steadily from the moment Cyprus is reached

3. Time:
Rapidity of action: 1958 Arden ed: act I: a kind of prologue, representing ‘ a period of time not much longer than the time occupied on the stage’; acts II-V: ‘a little less than 33 hours’; act V: two short scenes, 4 deaths in just under 500 lines
3 nights: I. Venice (O and D’s wedding night interrupted) II. first night in Cyprus (drunken brawl: 2nd interruption) V. second night: D murdered on her wedding sheets
Our intro p 33: ‘events take place with such dizzying rapidity that even the question of whether their marriage is consummated remains clouded in uncertainty’
(NB: the ‘double time scheme’ theory: see pp 33-6)

4. Space:
a simple binary pattern: Venice to Cyprus, mvt towards the Orient; spacial unity if we consider act I as a prologue
Compare beg. of II.1 and end of V.2: from ‘A Sea-port in Cyprus. An open place near the Quay’ to ‘a bedchamber in the castle’ + ‘the bedcurtains are closed’ (1958 Arden) >> a narrowing down of scope, leading to a claustrophobic sense of confinement
I.2 lines 25-28: ‘But that I love the gentle Desdemona, / I would not my unhoused free condition / Put into circumscription and confine/ For the sea’s worth.’
Dramatic concentration and tension: maximized, emphasizing the unstoppable progression of the characters’ fate which moves on ‘with violent pace’ and follows its ‘compulsive course’; see III.3 lines

5. Plot: structural echoes/reversals: a mirror game:
Pivot of the play III.3: structural center:
reversal: 91-3: ‘Excellent wretch, perdition catch my soul / But I do love thee! And when I love thee not, / Chaos is come again.’ >>> : ‘ Now do I see ‘tis true. […] Yield up, O Love, thy crown and hearted throne / To tyrannous Hate. […]’
highlighting this reversal:
contrast between II.1: 179ff (O’s arrival from Venice as the new governor, ‘Trumpets within’ p 252: climax of marital bliss) vs IV.1: 224ff(Lodovico arrives from Venice with orders for Othello’s return and Cassio’s appointment as governor, ‘Trumpet sounds within’ p 336: O strikes D and publicly humiliates her)

6. On either side of III.3: two incidents involving Cassio engineered by Iago: II.3: drunken brawl + IV.1: eavesdropping scene with Bianca
Both scenes immediately preceded (II.1) or followed (IV.2) by scenes in which Iago convinces an initially sceptical Roderigo to do his bidding (to anger Cassio, and then to kill Cassio)
Beginning and end of play:
focus on Iago’s refusal to speak ;
context: again, night-time disruption (caused by Iago with Roderigo’s help);
marriage vs murder on Desdemona’s wedding sheets

7. Characters: also a system of echoes/foils:
3 couples: Othello + Desdemona; Iago + Emilia; Cassio + Bianca
Othello: black outside/ fair inside VS Iago: honest outside / a devil inside
Desdemona: ‘demonic’ sounding name but chaste vs Bianca: pure sounding name but a prostitute
Conclusion: a very carefully crafted, ‘architectural’ play
>> effect? Hightened tension and effectiveness
+ also possibly (and paradoxically): foregrounding of its own artificial dimension => aesthetic distance???

8. The generic dimension: tragedy
According to some observers, Othello apparently satisfies most of the audience’s expectations of what you should find in a tragedy
Cf M.H. Abrams, Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th ed. ‘Shakespeare’s Othello is one of the few plays which accords closely with Aristotle’s basic concepts of the tragic hero and plot.’

9. Tragedy: M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary terms.
To plagiarize and summarize Abrams:
The term ‘tragedy’ is broadly applied to literary, and especially to dramatic, representations of serious and important actions which turn out disastrously for the protagonist. A story that presents courageous individuals who confront powerful adverse forces with a dignity that reveals the breadth and depth of the human spirit in the face of failure, defeat, and even death. Ultimately a tragedy questions the meaning of life in the face of suffering, evil, and mortality.

10. One of the most influential theorists of this genre was the Greek philosopher Aristotle, in his Poetics: his basic criteria for a good tragedy:
tragedy = the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself.
in the medium of poetic language
in the manner of dramatic rather than narrative presentation.
incorporating ‘incidents arousing pity and fear wherewith to accomplish the catharsis (purgation, purification) of such emotions’

11. the tragic hero according to Ar
the tragic hero according to Ar. will most effectively evoke both our pity and our terror if he is neither thoroughly good nor thoroughly evil, but a mixture of both, and the tragic effect will be stronger if the hero is ‘better than we are’ in other words of more than ordinary moral worth.
the hero suffers a change in fortune from happiness to misery because of a mistaken act, to which he is led by his hamartia, his error of judgement, or because of his tragic flaw. A very common tragic flaw for which the hero is eventually punished: hubris: often translated as overreaching (: trying to do more than one is able to do) pride, a sort of insolent daring, a haughty overstepping of cultural codes or ethical boundaries.
he moves us to pity because his misfortune is greater than he deserves, he also moves us to fear because we recognize similar possibilities of error in our own lesser and fallible selves
the plot should be unified, and is usually based on a conflict, with an antagonist, or with fate, the gods, or an obstacle or other, and it follows a continuous sequence of beginning, middle, and end.

12. The typical dramatic structure in five stages as described by Gustav Freytag in The Technique of the Drama (1863) (Freytag’s triangle or pyramid) (see Abrams on PLOT):
I. Opening scene and exposition: Act I: presentation of the main characters and of their relationships, Iago’s decision ‘to abuse Othello’s ear / That [Cassio] is too familiar with his wife’.
II. Rising action, or complication in Aristotelian terms: act II: the plot thickens as Iago manages to cause Cassio’s disgrace. (NB: usually the complication corresponds to a progression towards the climax – the highest point - of the hero’s fortunes, but in Othello this climax seems to be reached early – see II.1.187: If it were now to die, / ‘Twere now to be most happy; for I fear / My soul hath her content so absolute / That not another comfort like to this / Succeeds in unknown fate – and it is Iago, rather than Othello, who controls the action once the characters are in Cyprus.)

13. III. Crisis: the turning point in the hero’s fortune (usually corresponding to the climax, but in Othello if we take into account the previous quote there is a discrepancy): act III (esp III.3: the pivot of the play) Iago triumphs as he manages to dupe Othello into believing that Cassio and Desdemona are guilty and must die, which inaugurates the :
IV. Falling action: the antagonist (the villain) is in control, or at least the hero no longer is: act IV: Othello loses control, ‘falls in a trance’ (IV.1) and hits Desdemona (IV.2)
V. Catastrophe, or outcome, or denouement: often involving a discovery causing a reversal, also called peripety, in the hero’s fortunes, more specifically in tragedy the peripety is the hero’s destruction. Act V: Othello kills Desdemona, Iago’s plot is revealed, Othello kills himself (V.2).

14. Question for students: Othello = a tragic hero?
neither thoroughly good nor thoroughly evil?
‘better than we are’?
his error of judgement?
Hamartia in the sense of a ‘tragic flaw’?
hubris?
his misfortune is greater than he deserves?
similar possibilities of error in our own lesser and fallible selves => pity and fear?

15. Othello as comedy: ‘a generic monster’?
(see Michael Neill, ‘Race, Adultery and the Hideous in Othello’ Norton p 319)

16. +pp 10-12 intro to the 2016 ed of the Arden Othello:
Ayanna Thompson:
Iago inspired by the Vice figure in morality plays: connivence with the audience, cracks jokes with individual members of it
+pp intro to the 2016 ed of the Arden Othello:
Shakespeare […] blended several unlikely generic bedfellows together […]. For instance, several comedic motifs get folded into Othello’s web. First, there is the plotline of the father who cannot control his wily daughter. Because a daughter’s obedience was prized in early modern English society, plots capitalized on the humour that can ensue when daughters intentionally deceive their fathers. […] Of course, a daughter’s desobedience can also be the stuff of tragedy […].
Yet Shakespeare adds to the generic comic expectations by also weaving in the familiar plotline of the older husband who is cuckolded by his younger wife. Chaucer helped to popularize the comedic structure of the so-called January- May romance genre in […] the Canterbury Tales […]

17. By pointing out the comic plotlines that Shakespeare embeds in Othello, I am not suggesting that the play is any less tragic than it is. Rather, I want to emphasize the way Shakespeare cannibalized and transformed familiar structures, plots and character types, thereby subverting audience expectations.’

18. Peter J. Smith, ‘A good soft pillow for that good white head’:Othello as comedy,
Othello, on the other hand, is a play striking in its everydayness; as Barbara Everett points out, ‘Othello is Shakespeare’s only tragedy set entirely in the present.’ The play is contemporary in time, space and occurrence: it is merely about infidelity (or rather suspected infidelity), about jealousy, about petty rivalry (one soldier is promoted over the head of another), and about the ubiquity and tyranny of desire.
[…]
Othello is characterised as a play that is remarkable for its straightforwardness,
unusual in its usualness, and it will be the contention of this essay that this surprising critical consensus is predicated upon the play’s departure from a number of tragic conventions—that is, that Othello is not really a tragedy at all, but, in its very fabric, it employs a series of devices that are closer to the standard mechanisms of comedy.

19. Of the three tragedies with which Othello is contrasted here—that is, Hamlet, King Lear and Macbeth—we might suggest that their common shape is towards increase; the world of the plays grows, not merely in setting but in import. […] But Othello moves in the opposite direction; if Shakespearean tragedy tends to universal expansion, Othello is a black hole that draws everything to the centre. There are no widespread consequences, no elemental challenge to the stability of the nation […] Instead there is a series of domestic wrangles between men and their wives, between officers and their soldiers and between rakes and their whores. Othello’s island setting contains the randomness of its ‘justice’. Lodovico is the only means whereby the story of the Moor is to be disseminated: ‘Myself will straight aboard, and to the state / This heavy act with heavy heart relate’ (V. ii, 360). Alongside the absolute disintegration of the other plays, the upshot of Othello is comparatively trivial.

20. Othello ends with the private deaths of Othello and Desdemona and the unfortunate but unpremeditated stabbing of Emilia. […]Venice remains politically untouched by the tragedy […].In short, there is no lasting damage from the domestic crime; its ramifications are firmly contained and the State goes on as normal. […] Usually Shakespearean tragedy lays waste to its world, it demonstrates the unspeakable devastation in politics and in Nature that flows from usurpation, fratricide, or dynastic rivalry. Up until the last scene, the worst that has happened in Othello is the blow inflicted on Desdemona (which, for Bradley, is ‘rather sensational than tragic’) and the cynical disposal of Roderigo.

21. Perhaps the most visible means whereby Shakespeare has deliberately constrained the scope of this ‘tragedy’ is in his manipulation of his sources at the point of Desdemona’s murder. […] Shakespeare stages the murder not with a dagger or an improvised club but with a more risible murder weapon—a pillow. […] Othello, on the other hand, emphasises the comic absurdity of this mode of killing […]. The comic effect of just such a protracted death and unexpected resurrection can be seen in the melodrama of Pyramus’s suicide (played by the virtuoso of am-dram, Nick Bottom), the ‘tragic’ climax of the insert play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

22. It is not only during its final moments that the play seems reluctant to conform to a tragic scheme. Othello is notable for a singular lack of dramatic action. […] in Othello, the menace of theTurkish campaign simply disappears. […] Correspondingly, very little happens in the last three acts of the play. What we have instead of action is a deluge of gossipy stories not so different from the scandal and chatter that comprises standard Shakespearean intrigue comedy and occupies the populations of Messina or Illyria—places in which (just like Cyprus) characters eavesdrop on each others’ conversations, lovers are accused of infidelity, gulls imagine themselves consummating impossible affairs and jealousy all but destroys the possibility of lasting happiness.
Messina: Much Ado About Nothing
Illyria: Twelth Night

23. Iago is at the centre of this web of deception, spinning yarns in every direction. Alan Sinfield calls him ‘the great manipulator of the prevailing stories of his society’ and we see him as the master tell-tale, the comic impresario, stage-managing the delusions of others. […] In ‘The Improvisation of Power’, Stephen Greenblatt compares Iago’s to the comic intelligence of Mosca (in Ben Jonson’s Volpone) noting that what they share is the ability to extemporise their way forward no matter what situation arises to meet them. Each character is ‘fully aware of himself as an improviser and revels in his ability to manipulate his victims.’ […]

24. Iago’s is a floating selfhood as the play insists upon his comic mutability— ‘Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago’ (I. i, 56), ‘I am not what I am’ (l. 64), ‘I must show out a flag and sign of love [to Othello], / Which is indeed but sign’ (ll ). The caustic hypocrisy of Iago insisting on the match between inward essence and outward show belongs to a long tradition of comic irony: ‘Men should be’, he pronounces with feigned sagacity, ‘what they seem / Or those that be not, would they might seem none’ (III. iii, ).

25. Iago’s capacity to manage those around him by stealth rather than authority makes him another version of the comic dissembler. His descriptions of his next plan of action, aired with disarming candour to the audience, are a marked proclivity of the comic Machiavel that Shakespeare had so brilliantly developed in his characterisation of Richard III. But in his particular antipathy to the state of married happiness Iago is closer to Don John who, when he hears of an impending marriage, growls malevolently, ‘Will it serve for any model to build mischief on? What is he for a fool that betroths himself to unquietness?’ (Much Ado, I.iii, 42).

26. Iago’s is the role of the insolent jester, part-Feste, part-Touchstone
Iago’s is the role of the insolent jester, part-Feste, part-Touchstone. It is no surprise then, as he eclipses the Moor’s dramatic centrality by means of his candid relationship with the audience, that the epic tone of high tragedy is also thrown into shadow. His presiding comic intelligence, like that of Mosca and Face, is finally more interesting than that of the dupes (including Othello) that surround him. Kiernan Ryan ventures: ‘we are encouraged throughout to identify more with the viewpoint and values of Iago than with Othello.’ Edward Pechter is even more forthright, ‘The play writes us into Iago’s perspective at the beginning and in one way or another succeeds in sustaining this alliance, no matter how unholy we understand it to be, up to the end.’
Feste: jester in Twelth Night
Touchstone: jester in As You Like It

27. It is not only the presence of Iago’s ironic malevolence that makes Othello more comic than tragic (after all Edmund in King Lear performs a similar role, though to a much lesser extent); it is its obsession with crude sexual scandal and the extensive use of obscene slang that prevents the play’s comfortable grouping alongside the other tragedies. In this it allies itself closely with Much Ado, Measure for Measure, Twelfth Night and As You Like It.

28. […] obscenity in Othello has a traditional, comic ribaldry to it
[…] obscenity in Othello has a traditional, comic ribaldry to it. Iago’s anti- feminist descriptions of various types of women are, in Desdemona’s opinion, no more than ‘old fond paradoxes to make fools laugh i’th’ alehouse’ (II. i, 138)—that is, they are miles away from the venomous misogyny found in Hamlet or King Lear. Later in the play, as Emilia greets her husband with the gift of the handkerchief, she remarks, ‘I have a thing for you -’. Iago fires back, ‘You have a thing for me? it is a common thing -’ (III. iii, 305-6). As E. A. J. Honigmann explains, ‘Iago pretends to misunderstand thing as pudendum.’
Contrast with ‘Let it be Hid’: The Pornographic Aesthetic of
Shakespeare’s Othello 22
LYNDA E. BOOSE

29. Nor is it Iago alone who speaks what Mikhail Bakhtin calls ‘the language of the market-place’; Shakespeare puts it into the mouth of the play’s most delicate figure. As Desdemona laments her husband’s accusation that she is a whore, she squeamishly resists saying the word: ‘I cannot say whore: / It does abhor me now I speak the word’ (IV. ii, 163-4). Not only do we relish the comic irony of her pronouncing a word that she can’t bring herself to say—she has to say it to tell us what it is she cannot say— but, as if that were not enough, Shakespeare requires her to say the word ‘abhor’ in the next line, the second syllable of which is homophonic with the taboo word. Desdemona’s protestations are laughably inadequate and her prissy self-consciousness is punctured by the playwright.

30. […] Othello seems deliberately to undercut, with obscene reference or comic quibbling, its claims to high tragic status. These smutty jokes are not casual but are woven into the core of the drama. They signify the play’s dominant theme of sexual jealousy, a theme which, both traditionally and in the case of Shakespeare, is a staple comic subject. Cuckoldry or fear of cuckoldry animates many of the other comedies—Much Ado, Merry Wives, Cymbeline and so on— while the motif of the young wife leaving her old husband for a younger lover goes back at least to Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale. Thirty years ago Barbara De Mendonça conclusively demonstrated the affinities between Othello and commedia dell’arte.Not only are the motifs of young wives and lovers, jilted older husbands and sexual scandals familiar from this dramatic mode, but even the bases for different kinds of character are generically determined. Iago is thus a zanni or confidence trickster; Desdemona an innamorata; Emilia a servetta; Bianca a courtesan and so on. Brabantio, looking out of his window (perhaps with a night-cap on his head like the roused Malvolio) is a version of Pantalone.
Malvolio: Twelth Night

31. […] as I have tried to show, Othello maintains throughout the employment of comic devices—in the use of its setting, its theme, its characterisation (especially in regard to Iago) and its widespread bawdy. Finally, in its murder scene, it stifles its tragic potentiality with nothing more belligerent than, in the words of my title, ‘a good soft pillow’. In the light of these observations we might credit Rymer’s bilious final verdict with rather more seriousness than it usually receives:
There is in this Play, some burlesk, some humour, and ramble of Comical Wit, some shew, and some Mimickry to divert the spectators: but the tragical part is, plainly none other, than a Bloody Farce, without salt or savour.

32. Conclusion: The comedic elements : can be highlighted or toned down (even erased) depending on the stage director’s choices, but their existence is undeniable. Smith’s observations on several points = quite valid : - narrow (and narrowing) scope of the play, - triviality of the murder weapon and comic potential of Desdemona’s protracted death, - focus on ‘gossipy tales’, - part played by Iago as comic dissembler, - omnipresence of bawdy language and obscenity, - emphasis on sexual jealousy

33. Much depends on: - whether we manage to connect with Othello and Desdemona, in spite of Iago’s attractiveness. - whether we see sexual jealousy as the dominant theme of the play or not. + for a different interpretation of the bawdy language and obscenity in the text: see ‘Let it be Hid’: The Pornographic Aesthetic of Shakespeare’s Othello, by Lynda E. Boose (on Moodle)