Othello has often been a difficult play for English-speaking audiences, from the day it was written. It's difficult for several reasons, but the chief one among them is the villain's racism. Linguistic changes have recently rendered Iago's racism difficult to interpret for the untrained, and thus have made the play more palatable to contemporary society. But, the play is still unavoidably about race. It's hero is a black man, and it's heroine is a white woman. The fact that their marriage is interracial is central to the play.
However, that is not what you will hear if you attend a high school class where the play is interpreted. This holds true whether you are in a public elementary school, or in a private school. Probably even in a charter school. You will hear this play being erroneously held up as an example of Aristotelian Tragedy. Shakespeare did write an excellent example of that type: Macbeth. Though even here he mixed it up by having not one, but two, tragic heroes: Macbeth and his wife. Both are undone by their increasing paranoia: led down a path of tyranny and bloodshed, which alienates even their once loyal vassals, giving Malcolm the power he needs to take them down. But Othello is not an example of this type. It is not his flaw which is his undoing, for he is not truly undone in the usual sense.
Othello does have a flaw: jealousy. He is indeed very possessive of his wife, Desdemona. Is his jealousy unreasonable though? let us remember our setting: it's a military camp. The men here are bored out of their skulls waiting for the Ottomans to show up, and Desdemona is the only high-status woman around. Othello also knows that many of the men resent him being in command, since he is a foreigner and black. Messing with his wife would be a way of shaming him, to discredit him and make him lose his position. Especially because their marriage was secret, Othello's worry is understandable and totally warranted. His jealousy does blind him to Iago's machinations, but it isn't unreasonable or unwarranted. It is a flaw, but it is not what leads to his death.
It is true that Othello kills Desdemona believing that she has slept with another man. But we, the audience, know that isn't true. We know that this is Iago's plan, because we overheard him making the plan with Brabantio in the first scene of the play. While this scene is often removed when the play is performed, it is always in the versions that kids read at school. But, nevertheless, teachers insist on saying that Othello is undone by his jealousy. What Iago didn't count on however, was that Othello would kill himself after killing Desdemona. He did not count on Othello loving her that much, or having that much honor. Desdemona is the victim of an honor killing: Iago simply got Othello to do the actual dirty work for him so that he wouldn't get in trouble. Her crime however was not adultery, but rather anti-racism. Iago uses the accusation of adultery to kill Desdemona: but Shakespeare is very careful to make sure that the audience knows this accusation is false. Othello kills himself because it is the only way he can retain his honor. It's not really out of guilt, but rather because he realizes Brabantio will use his killing of Desdemona to discredit him.
Othello is not just a foreigner, he's a defector. He left the Ottoman Empire voluntarily, and Brabantio at one point protected him. But, Brabantio is only fine with Othello being around if he stays the hell away from Desdemona. Both race and class are factors here: Othello may be a general, but in the world of Renaissance Italy (when the play is set) that doesn't get you much in the way of status. Brabantio is a wealthy merchant, and he wants his daughter to marry into royalty. Othello would not have been a good match if he were white: but Brabantio might very well have let it be if Othello were not also a black foreigner. Remember Lord Capulet's reaction in Romeo and Juliet when Juliet is forced to spill the beans? He kicks her out of the house, but he doesn't have her killed: and that would be the expected reaction to a disobedient daughter. While the plan to kill Desdemona is Iago's, the fact that Brabantio agrees with it damns him as well. Othello likely knows exactly what would wait for him if he were turned over to the Ottomans: castration and slavery. Othello would rather die like a general, like the Roman and Greek and Egyptian generals of old: by his own sword. Shakespeare does not treat Othello's suicide as ignoble or as an undoing: just like he doesn't treat Juliet's suicide as ignoble. Whatever Shakespeare the Catholic might have thought of suicide, he knows he's writing for an audience that is in love with all things Greco-Roman: and that in Greece and Rome, suicide was considered an honorable death. The plays he uses as inspiration are written through that framework. So that is how suicide usually appears in Shakespeare.
Claiming that Othello was undone by jealousy is teaching racism. It exonerates Iago and Brabantio: absolving them from guilt in causing Othello's death. Othello was not undone, he died with honor. Iago and Brabantio are to blame for his death, and for Desdemona's. Othello's jealousy prevented him from seeing them for what they were, dirty cowards and scumbags: but it did not bring him down. He did what he believed to be right based on the evidence he was presented with. Confronted with the fact that he had believed a lie and done something horrible as a result: Othello prefers death by his own hand rather than deportation and bondage. Iago and Brabantio are responsible for the lie that Othello believed causing Desdemona's death: a lie which they knew he would believe because of his flaw, jealousy. They conspired to cause Desdemona's death at Othello's hands, and then Othello's death by his own hand: for it is Iago who ultimately reveals what he did to Othello. Iago and Brabantio and their racism are responsible for what happened here. Students should be told that in school. This is a play about race, and indeed it is a play about racism. It is about an interracial marriage, and it is about a racist society. It is about how poisonous and destructive racism is. Shakespeare is writing a play slamming racists.
This should not be a surprise. Shakespeare was a Catholic, as I mentioned before. Here's the thing about Catholics in England: they're not very big on Empire and Colonialism. It has to do with that whole being a minority religion in a theocracy thing. Those who benefited from England's various imperial adventures were largely Protestant, the descendants of the traditional gentry rather than aristocracy. Catholic kings might have been perfectly happy to conquer various French towns, but they had no particular desire to set up plantations worked by slaves in far-flung locales. Their claims to these French towns were based on heritage, not economics. Shakespeare lived at the time when the British Empire was just getting started: and he likely had very little love for any of the political machinations of Empire-building that were happening around him. The Queen wasn't terribly keen on it either, she had more pressing concerns like Mary Queen of Scots and her bothersome Spanish cousin Philip. She was all for building up trade and a strong navy, but not for using it to get slaves or force out Indian princes. It was the House of Commons who had the Imperial ambitions: as it was full of gentlemen looking to make a quick buck wherever they could. Unlike most at his time however, Shakespeare must have seen the connection between Empire-building and racism. That shouldn't surprise us either: he was a man highly attuned to the literal word on the street. His plays were so wildly successful in part because his characters talked like ordinary people would, using all the newfangled words and expressions that were a part of everyday life. Shakespeare likely didn't make up most or any of the vast number of words that he was the first to use in print: but he likely did overhear them in the street. He would have noticed the uptick in casual racism before anyone else did: and he would have seen it's connection to Empire-building easily, simply by observing who was racist and who wasn't.
Othello is an anti-racist text. If there's one thing Shakespeare knows how to do, it's how to make us empathize with a character. He pulls out all the stops for Othello, because he knows that there are racists in his audience. Hearing people from the 18th and 19th centuries talk about Othello, it's clear that they also sympathized with him. But, they were racists, and needed to preserve a racist system. So they invented this explanation that he was "undone" by his jealousy. Yet deep down, they know. They know that Othello was not undone at all, much less by his jealousy. They know that Othello was in fact killed by racism. Iago is such a despicable person in nearly every way that it's hard not to feel wrong exonerating him. Likewise, Brabantio is agreeing to a plan to kill his daughter: a crime against nature. High school students are rarely satisfied with the explanation that they get from their teachers that Othello is undone by his jealousy. However, they are teenagers, they chalk it up to teachers being idiots. Later on, they have the same motivations as the people in the 18th and 19th centuries: to preserve a racist system, they must preserve the racist explanation of Othello's death.
This is deliberate. Kids are not encouraged to question this interpretation and they are not given the tools to do so. Even the very analytical minds in your classroom are unlikely to work out the truth because they don't have any knowledge of the play's historical context (due to the deliberate failure of your colleague the World History teacher). If the student goes on to study the 17th Century, they're likely not going to think much about Shakespeare or Othello. But just in case one of your students does bring up the historical context: postmodernism can save you. Postmodernist literary theory takes the principle of Death of the Author to it's logical extreme: saying that not only do the author's intentions not matter, but the historical context of the work do not matter. This however misses the point. Death of the Author is indeed true: but not because the Author's identity doesn't matter. Rather it is because the Author's intentions don't matter: that is, what the Author consciously believed he or she was doing.
A good example here is JK Rowling. She may very have had it in mind that Dumbledore was gay all along. She failed to drop anything resembling a good hint: except for one line in the Prisoner of Azkaban, maybe. So, when she revealed it at a press conference, people called queerbaiting. Conversely, she may not have intended to write Sirius Black and Remus Lupin as lovers: but she kinda did. That's really the only way that McGonagall's behavior towards Lupin and her comments about James Potter make any sense (keeping in mind the politics of the 70s). She may have originally envisioned Hermione as black or mixed-race (probably the latter), but then she didn't tell the casting director that for the movie. It was a detail that should have been in the book if it had been intended because knowing that detail would cast Malfoy's behavior towards her in a strikingly more sinister light. If she's white, then he's just a normal bully. If she's black or mixed then he's a racist. In the end, it's probably good that Hermione is white though, because then there's no mistaking the Death Eaters' ideology for what it is: evil. Because there is no physical difference between the people they are preying on and themselves, they are clearly abusive and evil. If physical differences were introduced, then this would be made less obvious.
Rowling's intentions do not matter since they can only be speculated on, they would have no relevance for me if I were critiquing her work. Her identity however is something anyone can find out. When she started writing her books she was a white, lower-middle class single mom, and a neophyte writer. This helps to explain why although she might have envisioned characters in a certain way she might have forgotten to put those details in: she didn't really know what she was doing when she sat down to write the first book. Fair enough. Understanding that she was a neophyte writer IS immensely important for me as a critic. She has said plenty about what her inspirations were behind various characters, and that is all important and valuable information for a critic. Her class background is also important: her text is very much about class struggle. She is none-too-subtly pointing out the crypto-fascism of the British elite. So is the political atmosphere of the 1990s. One has to analyze the books in the context of a good economy, relative global stability, and a zeitgeist of hope superimposed over the reality of a socially restrictive society. She could hardly include sympathetically portrayed openly gay characters in a kid's book in 1995: so it's understandable that she ended up queerbaiting by accident. If she were writing this book today, neither Dumbledore nor Lupin would not have felt the need to keep their sexuality secret from Harry or anyone else. Coming off the heels of the Satanic Panic in the 1980s, a book portraying wizardry in a sympathetic light was pretty dangerous already. Her political beliefs can also be read from the book, and anybody can check up on what they are pretty easily since voting registrations are public record. She definitely seems to align with Labour, given her overall message of working-class solidarity, and her portrayal of Viktor Krum. Realizing this is important because it explains a lot of the backlash in certain places to her book.
We certainly cannot know on Shakespeare's intentions. But, if we teach his plays without their historical context then we are perpetuating the biases handed down to us by older generations. To understand Othello we must know both Shakespeare's historical context, and Othello's. While it's great to set Othello in different time periods and see what happens: one must first understand the setting of Renaissance Italy. And one must understand the setting in which the playwright worked. Furthermore, we do not just need to know the politics of the 17th Century, we need to know our playwright's place within them. What group does he align with? why? Shakespeare is with Queen Elizabeth, but in opposition to the House of Commons. Although a commoner, he aligns more closely with the traditional aristocracy due to his Catholic faith. Remember Kaidu? Well, Shakespeare is kind of in the same boat: a revolutionary conservative. His vision of a good society is partly a romanticized picture of the Medieval past: but with some modern elements like better social status for women. This we can easily glean from the work he left behind. His intentions are irrelevant to us, because we cannot know them. But we do not need to know his intentions in order to say that Othello is an anti-racist text: we only need to know his identity.
When he wrote the text during his career or what he might have been responding to, we can't know for sure. But we can know that Shakespeare was a man from the lower-middle class, a Catholic, and against Empire-building. We can know that racism is intrinsically connected to imperialism: because the reason why people bother to be racist is to justify economic exploitation. Thus it follows logically that Shakespeare would be against racism, for no other reason than that the people who were his political enemies were racists. By situating his story in 14th Century Venice he is softening the ego blow, but without dulling his message. Othello was a historical figure that people would have known about. While this story is probably entirely invented, the hero at it's center is not. This means that the audience has no way of getting around the fact that Shakespeare's message is applicable to real life. There is no supernatural element here. The focus is entirely on the human evil of racism, and the human flaws of the characters. Racism leads you and those around you into sin. That's the message of The Tragedy of Othello.
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