Tragic Consummation in Othello PDF

10/21/2020 English & Media Centre | Articles | emagazine Tragic consummation in Othello Adrian Blamires challenges the assumption that Othello and Desdemona's marriage is consummated and argues that, in a play fuelled by jealousy and sexual tension, this mistaken reading is of fundamental importance...

10/21/2020 English & Media Centre | Articles | emagazine Tragic consummation in Othello Adrian Blamires challenges the assumption that Othello and Desdemona's marriage is consummated and argues that, in a play fuelled by jealousy and sexual tension, this mistaken reading is of fundamental importance. Is the marriage of Othello and Desdemona ever consummated? Yes, according to a long critical tradition - when the newlyweds retire to bed in Act 2 Scene 3. Granville Barker, for example, describes the matter as 'plain' in his 1945 preface to the play. Laurence Lerner likens the pair to Romeo and Juliet in that they sleep together once. However, a challenge to this assumption has been mounted in the last twenty-five years, with critics such as Nelson & Haines, Graham Bradshaw and Harold Bloom arguing that the marriage is never consummated. Does it matter? Bloom calls the point 'crucial... for the entire tragedy turns upon it', yet the debate has barely surfaced in the notes and introductions of the major editions of the play. My intention is to review and extend the evidence that supports the non-consummation reading and to suggest why it is indeed 'crucial' to a full appreciation of Shakespeare's tragedy. The focus on marital consummation is central from the start: Even now, now, very now, an old black ram Is tupping your white ewe. Iago's urgent intensifiers here, together with his 'Call up her father' speech, reveal the purpose of such shock tactics: to disrupt the consummation, to: throw such chances of vexation on't As it may lose some colour. Iago's diabolic instinct tells him that this may do much. He tries to ascertain his success in the following scene, delicately enquiring: But I pray, sir, Are you fast married? https://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/e-magazine/articles/14716 1/5 10/21/2020 English & Media Centre | Articles | emagazine According to Canon law, a marriage could be annulled if it remained unconsummated (cf. Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet, urging Romeo to 'Ascend [Juliet's] chamber' before his exile). 'He will divorce you' says Iago of Brabantio, a point also grasped by Desdemona: hence her determination to accompany Othello to Cyprus, her frank acknowledgement of 'the rites for which I love him' and her dismay that he must depart on their wedding night. The first Iago/Cassio exchange ('He's married' 'To who?' 'Marry, to -') hints, teasingly, at a crucial interruption. This impression is confirmed in Act 2, with Othello's 'The purchase made, the fruits are to ensue:/ That profit's yet to come 'tween me and you'. How should an actor deliver these lines? The mixture of the sensual and the mercantile might suggest both anticipation and reserve. Other characters reveal a widespread prurient fascination with the controversial union. Cassio declares that Othello's priority on arrival in Cyprus will be to 'Make love's quick pants in Desdemona's arms'. Iago starts to reel Cassio in with the polite v. vulgar exchange of Act 2 Scene 3, where the consummation is again the voyeuristic focus: He hath not yet made wanton the night with her... Well, happiness to their sheets! The fight in Act 2 Scene 3 seems designed not only to bring down Cassio but also, once more, to prevent the consummation. Iago probes wickedly at this sore point when he refers to Cassio and Montano as: now, even now In quarter and in terms like bride and groom Divesting them for bed then suddenly: Swords out, and tilting one at other's breasts In opposition bloody. These lines have received extraordinarily little attention, yet they encapsulate the tragedy: how love will turn to violence on the marriage bed. Surely Iago only risks such an insensitive image in the belief that Othello and Desdemona have themselves been interrupted at this point, inflaming the general's anger towards Cassio still further. Othello promised the senate that his marriage would not interfere with military duty, but his problem now is rather the reverse. The next scene reveals that Iago is not alone in making this assumption. It was traditional for a serenade to greet a couple following their wedding night. A bad-tempered Othello sends a servant/clown to pay the musicians not to play: 'the general so likes your music that he desires you, for love's sake, to make no more noise with it'. The clown's smutty banter here requires our attention: CLOWN: Are these, I pray you, wind instruments? FIRST MUSICIAN: Ay, marry are they, sir. CLOWN: O, thereby hangs a tail. https://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/e-magazine/articles/14716 2/5 10/21/2020 English & Media Centre | Articles | emagazine FIRST MUSICIAN: Whereby hangs a tale, sir? CLOWN: Marry, sir, by many a wind instrument that I know. The musician's declarative 'marry are they' (meaning 'they certainly are') is wilfully misconstrued as a question: 'are they married?' The clown implies that the marriage is as yet unconsummated: the 'tail' (penis) is hanging; the 'tale' remains to be told. Nelson & Haines suggest that a set of bagpipes 'ludicrously reminiscent of the male genital organs' be played, its sound more appropriate to the mocking charivari that would greet an old man who had taken a young bride. Is this how Othello hears the music? It is a shame that this vital exchange is rarely, if ever, performed nowadays. And what of the handkerchief? It is there in Cinthio, Shakespeare's source, but why does the playwright embroider it with strawberries? Intriguingly, an account of Moorish wedding customs by Leo Africanus, in which a napkin is used to exhibit virginal blood, was translated into English in 1600. Desdemona's napkin, 'dyed in mummy... Conserved of maiden's hearts', appears to symbolise virginity as well as fidelity. Hence, in Act 3 Scene 4, Othello's 'Is't lost? Is't gone?' becomes an enquiry after his wife's maidenhead. Iago has hinted that Cassio was more than just a go-between, a point unwittingly reinforced by Desdemona herself: What! Michael Cassio, That came a-wooing with you? And so many a time... Hath ta'en your part. Before long Iago makes far more bold: Cassio will confess Where, how, how oft, how long ago, and when He hath, and is again, to cope your wife. Othello's wild claim that Desdemona 'hath the act of shame/A thousand times committed' has nothing to do with the supposed double-time scheme and everything to do with his believing her 'that cunning whore of Venice/That married with Othello.' The lack of marital consummation is, as Bloom says, 'crucial'. Othello does not know whether he has married a virgin; he has not had the 'oracular proof'. And this is what Iago must work to prevent - it would disprove all that he is claiming. Why doesn't Othello simply make love to Desdemona? Why ask Iago to 'prove my love a whore' when it is within his own compass to prove her a virgin? There isn't space here for a full investigation, only to suggest some possible lines of enquiry. Sexual failure: Have the stressful events of Acts 1 and 2, as the clown insinuates, adversely affected Othello's sexual performance? How would he then hear Desdemona's 'I'faith you are to blame' and talk of a 'more sufficient man'? Might Othello be under pressure to live up to the 'lascivious Moor' image? Sexual aversion: Often noted in Iago, but what of Othello? Does his loathing of 'the slime/That sticks on filthy deeds' refer not simply to adulterous acts but to sex itself? Hence the virgin idealised, the whore demonised? Female sexual power: Is Othello afraid of a Desdemona who, as Iago puts it, 'shall play the god/with his weak function'? Does he see himself 'enfettered', in thrall to female power like so many men-of-action in Shakespeare? https://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/e-magazine/articles/14716 3/5 10/21/2020 English & Media Centre | Articles | emagazine Othello had to overcome an extremely negative view of marriage ('circumscription and confine') to be with Desdemona. He speaks, in Act 1 Scene 3, of his readiness to 'obey the time', putting military duty first. We need not take his politic statements at face value, but we might detect a hint of relief in the way he embraces ('With all my heart') the life he has always known. In Act 2 Scene 3 he puts tending to Montano above returning to bed with Desdemona. Othello's career has been his life; Iago's dutiful, near homoerotic, expressions of 'love' are those he trusts most readily. Their vows in Act 3 Scene 3 ('I greet thy love'/'I am your own forever') eclipse those of Othello and Desdemona. Consider the boastful (and phallic) image: Behold I have a weapon: A better never did itself sustain Upon a soldier's thigh. Othello, in his final anguish, perceives this as mere braggadocio ('O vain boast!'). On each wedding night - drawing his sword against Brabantio's men, breaking up the drunken brawl, wielding the supposed sword of Justice - he proves himself as soldier, not lover. The matter of consummation underpins the structure of the play from first to last. Everything dovetails in the final scene. Approaching the marriage bed, Othello is faced with alternative consummations, loving or fatal. Desdemona's desire for the former is seen in her poignant request for the wedding sheets to be re-laid, though she fears they will prove her winding-sheets. Lying upon them, she appears to Othello's double-vision as both whore and virgin. He tortuously persuades himself that by killing the former he may preserve the illusion of the latter: 'I'll not shed her blood'. Since he believes he cannot now pluck the 'rose' of her virginity, it must serve as a metaphor for taking her life. Iago persuades Othello to 'strangle her in her bed, even the bed she hath contaminated'. He wants Othello to take the full blame, but also to satisfy his own perverse cravings. What began as 'sport' becomes a macabre pornography: the death of love on the marriage bed. Graham Bradshaw calls Othello's murder of Desdemona 'their marriage's only consummation and the ghastly tragicomic parody of an erotic death' - death as the common Renaissance metaphor for orgasm. This time there is no interruption before the crucial act. The disturbance arrives momentarily too late, Emilia's cries of 'my lord!' overlapping with Desdemona's paroxysm. The exchange that follows is close to bedroom farce. Othello can be seen as the blackest of comedies, with the tragedy all the more lacerating for it. The play is formed around a central irony: the much discussed and anticipated sexual union never occurs. Desdemona, killed for being a whore, dies a virgin. I hope to have demonstrated that the nuptial disturbance is very much part of Shakespeare's (and Iago's) conscious design. This reading points toward other possibilities, for instance that Shakespeare provides an even more searching examination of male sexual psychoses than earlier readings have demonstrated. The focus on the marriage bed is held to the last, as its lifeless tableau comes under Iago's silent gaze: Look on the tragic loading of this bed: This is thy work. Article Written By: Adrian Blamires https://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/e-magazine/articles/14716 4/5 10/21/2020 English & Media Centre | Articles | emagazine This article was first published in emagazine 31, February 2006. Print © 2020 | English & Media Centre. 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