I've recently started reading Simon Critchley's Tragedy, the Greeks and Us and though I've not got far into the text, there's been enough to encourage me to write a little about Shakespeare's Othello. The reason for that is that I was helping a friend's daughter study the play earlier in lockdown and I was thinking a lot about possible meanings and interpretations. In fact, in a way, the play expresses the difficulties of finding a Goldilocks state.
Critchley quotes the fifth century sophist Gorgias who wrote that 'Tragedy is a form of deception in which the deceiver is more righteous than the non-deceiver, and the deceived wiser than the undeceived.' He concurs with this and states it as an essential of the genre. Let's consider Iago here. He is the deceiver of the play - and is he more righteous? Is he wiser? The immediate response is a categorical 'No!' But, maybe there's some illumination to be offered by considering the claim. If Iago's premise is that Othello is not the civilised man he appears to be, then he is, through his deceptions, in fact the 'non-deceiver', in proving that to be the case. He is certainly less righteous than Othello, the deceiver, is trying to be, if we read it as the view that the Moor has only the veneer of civilisation. Desdemona, the deceived, who believes in Othello's ultimate goodness, has a level of wisdom - though she is wrong, her view is the view that encourages the social contract, the expansion of civilisation, while also embracing the creative potential of those traditionally outside the polis.
There is, according to Critchley, an anachronism to tragedy. The hero is like a figure from myth, with the simplistic heroic values of another era, intruding into a 'modern' state. That feels right. Othello is a character from a story - Desdemona falls in love with a character from a story: an exotic outsider. But he has to conform to the mores of the polis. In the past and early scenes of the play, he manages to be what is expected of him in the contemporary, 'real' world of Venice - or at least of the idealised code of Venice represented by the Duke - but, faced with Iago's deceptions in the semi-barbaric place that is Cyprus, he slips back to embody a kind of mythic self: the barbarian, the man from an honour culture, the being from the past. There is a clash of ages as well as a clash of cultures. It's worth considering too that Iago's antagonism to the outsider and the feminine perhaps also present an anachronistic vision of the polis - the old order than cannot allow for any change or integration of 'other'.
Critchley goes on to say that the tragic hero is not the central character of the play: the real subject is the city-state, particularly as it breaks with myth and begins to embrace laws and reason. This too offers insights into Othello. Venice is the place of civilisation - of law and reason, just consider the way in which the Duke handles the dispute between Desdemona's father and Othello. Desdemona herself is a concrete example of some aspects of modernising order that the polis is seeking to establish. She understands the bonds of wife to husband as well as the bond from daughter to father. She embraces the idea of the city's ability to revitalise through enlarging its conception of 'who is a citizen'. She believes in the powerful effects of the codes of the city to control the behaviour of individuals, but also to accept the new, the different and the exotic into its self-definition. She, and the city, exemplify a model of a more egalitarian view of justice and law.
The Turks present the outside threat of barbarism, which can overhaul the state. Othello himself represents the internalised threat - how much of 'the other' can the polis embrace? In Venice, the status of the law and the codes of civil society contain his creative and destructive force. But once he is in Cyprus - a middle state between the polis and the barbarian - those chains of conduct are released and the threat he poses is realised. However, it's worth recalling that the real 'evil' is generated by Iago, a Venetian. Perhaps the resentments and chauvinism of the polis are what threatens the integration of aliens, rather than the inherent dangers of foreigners? Or that it is the antagonism between traditionalism and regeneration that is the real danger.
The play seems to rest on this ambiguity, ambivalence, about the potential civilising force of the polis and the potential threat of the outsider.
Moral ambiguity is another of Critchley's claims for an essential element of tragedy. He writes that there is no single conception of justice, there is right and wrong on both sides. I do see, as I have shown, one ambiguity in Othello, and another rests on Desdemona's response. She forgives. She seeks to exculpate him. Love makes a claim beyond justice, while the force of civilisation claims to have more power than it has. Both love and civilisation are seen to be limited or flawed in a way that we might find disquieting. All that said, while one can understand Othello's actions, I don't think anyone, outside a strict honour code culture, could excuse them, even when accepting his belief in the justification of his motives. That is relevant: if Desdemona had been unfaithful, what should be her punishment? Consider that Brabantio, when he too feels betrayed by Desdemona in her breaking of daughterly duties - of which in a sense she is guilty - also demands strong punishment. The play condemns the forceful retaliation of the traditional father or husband. In short, the role of woman in traditional domestic or alien culture is put into question.
I suppose, to go into a deeply metaphorical reading, one could argue that the forces of barbarism are striking back at the unrealistic expectations of a civil, legal, Christian code; or the forces of realpolitik are striking at the heart of an idealised conception of perfectibility. Perhaps the hubris here is the idea that the modern order can contain the disruptive power and energy of the world.
Another element of tragedy Critchley cites is the desperate problem of the politics of sexual difference at the core of the political order. This is interesting with regard to Othello. We have three women: Desdemona, the perfect, idealised, angelic, forgiving exemplar of all that is good; Emilia, who is flawed and realistic, recognising that she would commit adultery given certain circumstances, involved in Iago's plotting, torn between her husband's evil and her own compassion and morality; and Bianca, the courtesan, who loves but is outside the realm of respectability. All three women are restricted and constrained by the men around them. All three are betrayed and used. All three are treated with varying levels of contempt. All three offer the potential to be better, in various ways, than the men around them allow or are willing to see. Even in Venice, Desdemona owes duty to men - father and then husband. Yet she is the one unambiguously 'good' figure - with the exception perhaps of the wise council leader, the Duke of Venice. He is wisdom to her love. And both are required in a good society, yet what the women offer - and all three show love - is ignored or undervalued.
As we saw above, the play asks us to examine the role of female in general terms - only a forward thinking culture, capable of embracing both foreigners and women with tolerance, compassion and a degree of egalitarianism seems to stand up to any scrutiny. And the values of that reformed, modern society have a tenuous hold at best on its citizenry.
Critchley then states that in tragedy the limits of human agency are exposed. The world is only partially intelligible. Characters are in a sense dependent on fate and circumstance. Indeed, the belief in autonomy is itself an act of hubris. I think this stands up: Othello cannot escape the force of his passions. That fierce energy that makes him such a fine soldier, such a magical storyteller, which he contains as a subject of Venice, by showing, in the early scenes, an incredible self-control, cannot be entirely constrained. There is a force in it that, one loosed, cannot be reined in. The polis demands the autonomy of its citizens to hold in their base nature, but that end can never be fully realised. Iago is the tinder that ignites this destructive tendency.
His next point is as though written expressly for this play: 'The tragic hero is a problem, not the solution to a problem. The hero is a riddle, not the solution to a riddle. The human being in tragedy is both an agent and the one acted upon, both innocent and guilty—something baffling, incomprehensible, and monstrous.'* This is precisely how I see Othello. The Moor who has become a subject of Venice, the 'otherness' within the polis. The man with vast potential and vast strengths, who has constrained his destructive attributes and made full use of his creative attributes, but who remains ambivalent. He carries the seeds of his own destruction along with the possibility of exemplary self-transcendence. He is deceived, but has also deceived himself by failing to recognise that he is not bound by the rules of the ideal polis as strongly as he maintained. In his final speech, he underlines this - he is both the soldier killing and the villain killed.
Finally, Critchley states that the mood of tragedy is ultimately sceptical. There is no clear answer to the question 'What shall I do?' The world is uncertain and no action seems entirely rational. Indeed, reason is lost. this relates back to the conception of no moral certainty. And I do see this: how does a legalistic framework draw in the regenerative power of creativity and difference, the redemptive power of love and feminine compassion while maintaining the solid status of the social structure? Can rigid law (as typified by Desdemona's father Brabantio) be softened without threatening the social order? Can the social hierarchy be enlivened by newcomers like Othello without risking its own destruction? Is Desdemona's purely Christian forgiveness and love a better alternative, a state in which crime goes unpunished?
The play does not answer these questions.
But Shakespeare does explore them in other plays. In Macbeth, Lady Macbeth demonstrates a contrasting archetype of the female, as do Hamlet's Gertrude and Ophelia. In The Winter's Tale, Hermione can forgive because Leontes has suffered and repented, has learned from his mistakes - as can the betrayed daughters Perdita, Imogen and Marina, when, unlike Cordelia, they have the chance. And it is in these daughters - sent out into the barbarian world but holding on to their virtue and their capacity for love - that I believe Shakespeare finds an answer to his driving questions: What is good? What should a person do? Where can flawed reality find redemption?
Of course, these plays - The Winter's Tale, Cymbeline and Pericles - are not tragedies. Idealism is allowed. They bear a different relationship between myth, fairy tale, reality and imagination. Their structural break away from the concepts of tragedy outlined above allow for some answers, which tragedy cannot.
* Critchley, S, Tragedy, the Greeks and Us, Profile Books, 2019
I am deficient in Shakespeare. You have given me some new ways to think about tragedy and non-tragedy.