Having written recently about Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight (1965), it occurred to me that I may not have ever mentioned his powerful 1952 film version of Othello, which is a must-see for every Shakespeare fan. It's also a must-see for movie fans: It's simply amazing visually - in fact, its opening scenes (showing events that occur after the play's action) seem to me an obvious precursor and influence to such acknowledged masterpieces as Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957) and several others. Like the play itself, the film takes many liberties with the order of events and the normal unfolding of time. But it's all done (in both cases) with a purpose: the portrayal of a mind in psychological torment. Welles, like Shakespeare, would never sacrifice the revelation of human truth for the sake of such relatively trivial matters as temporal accuracy.

With the recent news that a publisher is coming out with a version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that will be excised of racial slurs, once again people are turning to Shakespearean examples, especially The Merchant of Venice and Othello, for evidence in making their cases, whatever they may be. And so once again, I feel compelled to write the following: Shakespeare didn't say anything in his works; his characters did. Yes, things of a prejudiced nature are said in the plays, but to assume that a character is speaking for the author is a mistake of frightening magnitude. Gentle readers, please do me this favour: Inform as many people as you possibly can of the foolishness of this position. It's an error that has prevented many, many people from having the right perspective toward reading Shakespeare - and Twain as well, for that matter - and even worse, in some cases, from reading them at all.

Here are three quotes which may help in building your arguments:

"Tell all the truth, but tell it slant."

- Emily Dickinson

"That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care."

- William Blake

"Shakespeare was in one sense the least moral of all writers: for morality (commonly so called) is made up of antipathies; and his talent consisted in sympathy with human nature in all its shapes, degrees, depressions, and elevations."

- William Hazlitt

Most scholars agree that Othello was written in 1604, a year before King Lear. Yesterday's post was concerned with how Shakespeare used Pliny's Naturalis Historia as a source for a considerable amount of Othello's vocabulary. And he may have retained the content of Pliny's dedication of the work for an important moment in King Lear, as well. Pliny's dedication is an unusual one: it's to nature itself. Here it is:

Hail to thee, Nature, thou parent of all things! and do thou deign to show thy favour unto me, who, alone of all the citizens of Rome, have, in thy every department, thus made known thy praise.

Now compare that with the first words spoken by Edmund, the treacherous half-brother of Edgar, and one of the most villainous characters in Shakespeare. Edmund, who believes in what might be called a dog-eat-dog or survival-of-the-fittest approach to life, is here delineating why his plan to frame Edgar and become the sole inheritor of his father's land and title is from his point-of-view "natural":

Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law

My services are bound. Wherefore should I

Stand in the plague of custom, and permit

The curiosity of nations to deprive me,

For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines

Lag of a brother?

It certainly seems possible at least that the seed that created this unequaled subplot (the story of Gloucester, Edgar and Edmund) was planted as Shakespeare was reading for his work on Othello.

Another major source for Othello was Philemon Holland's translation of Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia, an encyclopedia published in approximately 77 AD. It was the likely source of some of the more exotic natural references found in the play, particularly in the speeches of the title character. According to Norman Sanders (see yesterday's post), it was where Shakespeare found "the cannibals, anthropophagi, hollow caves, mines of sulphur, gum-dropping Arabian trees, chrysolite, mandragora, colloquintida, the movement of the Propontic and the Hellespont waters, and possibly his reply to Brabantio's charge of seducing his daughter by means of witchcraft".

This fact helped to answer a question that I've always had in regard to the plays: How is it that each one has its own linguistic world, clearly distinctive from the rest? Part of the answer has to be that he allowed his reading to deeply influence not just the plots of his plays, but also their diction. At times, his work seems to be almost of a synthesizing nature - as he allowed his imagination (with its unparalleled education in poetry and drama) to be fertilized with the knowledge he found in the preparatory reading that he did for each play.

The assimilative nature of English is due to a number of factors, one of which is definitely the work of Shakespeare. The ever-expanding vocabulary of the language (already easily the largest in the world) at least partially owes its nature to Shakespeare's approach. For example, in working with the Italian prose tale of Cinthio in the writing of Othello, he seems to have made verbal allusions to both the Italian original and a French translation done by Gabriel Chappuys. At this point, I'll quote (at some length) Norman Sanders' introduction of the New Cambridge edition:

"There are four verbal links that draw the play and the Italian version together. Othello's demand, 'Give me the ocular proof... Make me to see't' (3.3.361-5) is closer to Cinthio's 'se non mi fai...vedere co gli occhi' than to Chappuys' 'si tu ne me fais voir'. [The first quarto's] use of the unusual word 'acerbe' ('bitter' in the Folio) at 1.3.338 may be an echo of Cinthio's 'in acerbissimo odio'; just as Iago's gloating 'I do see you're moved' (3.3.219) is nearer to the Italian 'ch' ogni poco di cosa voi moue ad ira', where describing the enchafed flood at 2.1.16, may have been influenced by Cinthio's Moor who speaks of the sea in a similar way in a passage omitted by Chappuys: 'ogni pericolo, che ci soprauenisse, mi recherebbe estreme molestia'.

Evidence that it was the French version that Shakespeare used is of the same kind. The words 'if it touch not you, it comes near nobody' (4.1.187) seem to echo Chappuys' 'ce qui vous touche plus qu'a aucun autre', where the Italian verb is 'appartiene'; and Iago's emphasis on the importance of Cassio's 'gestures', as Othello spies on them in 4.1, is nearer to the French 'gestes' than the Italian 'atti'. Perhaps more substantial than these verbal similarities, however, is one of Chappuys' additions to the original text. In the lines of the play concerning Cassio's request that Bianca copy the embroidery of the handkerchief, the phrase 'take out the work' (or a variant of it) is used three times (3.3.298, 3.4.174, 4.1.145) - a sense of 'take out' found nowhere else in Shakespeare. No similar phrase occurs in Cinthio; but Chappuys adds to the Italian passage dealing with Cassio's decision the phrase 'tirer le patron' (copy the pattern)."

It seems evident, therefore, that Shakespeare found ways of echoing other languages while writing in English. It is a trait that English has yet to lose. More on the sources of Othello tomorrow.

Wednesday's post concerned Shakespeare's use of Cinthio's prose tale as a source in the writing of Othello. Over the next couple of days, I'll discuss some of the other sources delineated by Norman Sanders in his introduction to the New Cambridge edition, and give some conjecture regarding Shakespeare's way of working with them. Incidentally, there is no evidence that Shakespeare ever left England. This puzzles some, who feel that first-hand knowledge must be necessary for someone to write so convincingly of settings as diverse as those found in the plays. I would argue that all the evidence points to Shakespeare being what Blake called a "mental traveller", and that his reading provided his imagination with everything it needed. And so, in honour of the upcoming film version of The Tempest, I'll end with an appropriate quote from Prospero (often considered to be an alter-ego of the author), who in telling his daughter Miranda about the treachery that led to their exile, recounts the kindness of Gonzalo who saved them and allowed Prospero to keep his most-loved possessions:

Some food we had and some fresh water that

A noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo,

Out of his charity, being then appointed

Master of this design, did give us, with

Rich garments, linens, stuffs and necessaries,

Which since have steaded much; so, of his gentleness,

Knowing I loved my books, he furnish'd me

From mine own library with volumes that

I prize above my dukedom.

The better that we know a Shakespeare play, the more interesting it becomes. As we become aware of how much it contains, and how deeply each part is related to the whole, our experience of learning from it and interacting with it becomes deeper. Also, knowledge of the play allows us to appreciate the scholarship, criticism and commentary related to it, which can lead to new ways of considering history, art, philosophy, political science, and the human condition.

In spending time with Othello recently, and writings related to it, I found that there was much more in the play than I had realized. Today, I'll mention just one area of revelation: the way that seemingly innocuous scenes contain thematic information vital to understanding the play. For example, the exchange between a clown and the musicians at the beginning of act three, where he asks them to play only if they "have any music that may not be heard" (in other words to stop), is usually considered to be little more than momentary comic relief, but as Harold Goddard points out in his essay on the play in his excellent The Meaning of Shakespeare (1951), it actually foreshadows a great deal more: the "sudden interruption in the music of Othello's love which is to be the subject of the act." This made me consider the nature of music itself, in that it can only be appreciated in certain states of mind, and that our attitude towards it and other subtle beauty in life is the result of our thought. It also reminded me that no part of a Shakespeare play should be overlooked.

One of the most remarkable things that I learned in preparing for today's lecture on Othello came from Norman Sanders' splendid introduction to the New Cambridge edition. In it, he gives a concise but thorough summary of the sources that Shakespeare used in writing the play. The most important of these was the original prose story version from Giraldi Cinthio's Hecatommithi, or The Hundred Tales, in English. Shakespeare followed it quite closely, particularly in acts three to five, but he made many changes and additions as well. The most striking example of which concerned the small amount of original material that led to the creation of some of the play's most memorable moments: "A sentence in Cinthio to the effect that Desdemona's family wished her to marry another man is the seed that produced Desdemona's noble birth, her elopement and her distraught and racially prejudiced father, indeed much of the matter contained in the first three scenes of the play... Perhaps most remarkable of all are the breathtaking addresses to the Senate by Othello and Desdemona which Shakespeare conjured out of one bald statement from the Italian original: 'It happened that a virturous lady of wondrous beauty called Disdemona, impelled not by female appetiete but by the Moor's good qualities, fell in love with him, and he, vanquished by the lady's beauty and noble mind, likewise was enamboured of her.'" (The altered spelling of Desdemona is not a typo. It's Cinthio's.) It seems, therefore, that one of the ways that Shakespeare worked was to begin with a result (in this case, Desdemona's family's thwarted wish regarding her choice of husband) and to work backwards from it. Sanders' introduction has many enlightening moments such as this one. It's highly recommended.

Another example of telescoped time can be found in 2.3 of Othello, which begins with Othello giving Cassio instructions for the evening's watch, and with Iago stating it is "not yet ten o' the clock." We then witness drinking and singing on the part of the soldiers - all of which is staged by Iago for the purpose of getting Cassio drunk and into a brawl with Roderigo, who is waiting offstage. When an awakened Othello intercedes, he listens to the accounts of the incident and admonishes and demotes Cassio on the spot. Iago then pretends to sympathize with Cassio, and suggests that he should present his case to Desdemona, who will, out of kindness, convince Othello to change his mind. Then follows a soliloquy by Iago during which he gives his real plan:

... whiles this honest fool

Plies Desdemona to repair his fortunes

And she for him pleads strongly to the Moor,

I'll pour this pestilence into his ear,

That she repeals him for her body's lust;

And by how much she strives to do him good,

She shall undo her credit with the Moor.

After this, Roderigo, who is both secretly in love with Desdemona and Iago's dupe, enters and is told to have patience and to go get some sleep, because "'tis morning''. The entire scene is usually performed in slightly less than twenty minutes.

The New Cambridge edition of Othello contains a brilliant introduction by its editor, Norman Sanders. From it, I learned most of the following: In 1850, John Wilson wrote a piece for Blackwood's Magazine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwood's_Magazine), in which he gave his theory of the "double-time scheme" in Othello. He noted that the first two acts depict real time - that they portray events in a period of time very close to what they would take to occur. But then everything changes. "Short time" is then used to keep a continuous flow of events, and "longer time" is used, primarily through the use of reference, to create a much larger temporal background. For example, the length of the marriage of Othello and Desdemona is hard to accurately ascertain. At some points, we are led to believe that they are newly wed, but at others, that their marriage has been going on for quite some time. And there are several other examples as well, involving virtually every major character in the play. Some critics have forwarded the theory that these inconsistencies are the result of Shakespeare's method of working on this particular play: i.e. that he wrote the final three acts first, followed by the first two, and that this led to the incongruity. It's possible, certainly. Others, like Fintan O'Toole, have postulated that Shakespeare did it deliberately, for reasons related to the play's thematic content. I'll summarize that position, and give a few thoughts of my own, tomorrow.

If you read commentary on Othello, you won't get far without running into a discussion of Shakespeare's handling of the passing of time. In this play (which uses the famous "double time" effect) and elsewhere, it is one of the aspects of his work that remains an area of study and contention. (By the way, I'm very glad that Shakespeare never wrote any how-to books for budding dramatists - not that they wouldn't have been useful, but I find his work retains its mystery more effectively with our continuing efforts to try to understand the principles and methods that he employed.) It is an area that interests me a great deal, and over the next little while I'll be reporting on some of my findings - including an explanation of the technique referred to above.

Here's another thought to consider: in Antony and Cleopatra, the action portrayed takes place over approximately twelve years, whereas a performance of the play takes approximately three hours. And each moment seems to flow convincingly from the last. How is this (what the Chorus in Henry V calls "turning the accomplishment of many years into an hour-glass") achieved? As I mentioned above, I'm going to see what I can learn about it. Stay tuned.

Another principle that seems consistent throughout Shakespeare's work is that his main interest was rarely, perhaps never, to create plots simply for the purpose of realism. Rather, he used the stories to maximize the dramatic effect on both the audience and the characters. For example, Othello, at the beginning of the play, is the type of successful and respected military man who would never choose to show his inner workings and true emotions. But the plot doesn't give him any choice, and by the end of the story, all is revealed. One of the most powerful moments in 3.3, the scene where Othello is psychologically turned upside down by Iago, occurs when he realizes that his confidence and therefore his career are in the past:

O, now, for ever

Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content!

Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars,

That make ambition virtue! O, farewell!

Farewell the neighing steed, and the shrill trump,

The spirit-stirring drum, the ear-piercing fife,

The royal banner, and all quality,

Pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war!

And, O you mortal engines, whose rude throats

The immortal Jove's dead clamours counterfeit,

Farewell! Othello's occupation's gone!

It's particularly remarkable for the fact that ordinarily we would never see a military professional admit that some aspects of war are enjoyed. But as Picasso once said, "Art is the lie that reveals the truth."

Here's another observation regarding Othello: The character of Roderigo is an extraordinary one. He's the chap that is so far gone in infatuation with Desdemona, that he allows himself to be utterly manipulated by Iago. Iago lies to him about everything, spends his money and ultimately convinces him to murder Cassio. He doesn't succeed, though. He merely wounds Cassio, and so Iago, having to cover his tracks, walks up and kills him. At which point Roderigo sees the truth of his life for the first time, albeit very briefly. But the really remarkable thing about the character is that Shakespeare was able to control his telling of the story carefully enough, so as to make Iago the only person that interacts with him in the play. Roderigo literally allows another person to shape his entire view of the world. I forget who said that "all a poet can do is warn", but this character is the best illustration of that thought possible. One must consider one's sources.

Further to yesterday's post on act three, scene three from Othello, it is interesting to juxtapose the powerful and complex figurative language that Othello uses to convey his murderous psychological state with the very simple line that ends the scene. Because, for me anyway, it contains the most frightening statement in Shakespeare. We'll have to go back for a moment before we get to it. At the play's opening, Iago tells Roderigo (and the audience) that his hatred for Iago comes from his having been passed over for a promotion (and if you think this doesn't sound plausible, either you haven't been in the working world for very long, or you've been very fortunate). The position of lieutenant to Othello was given to Michael Cassio instead, and so, Iago begins to formulate a plan to destroy both of them. At the end of 3.3, Iago has convinced Othello that his wife, Desdemona, has been having an affair with Cassio. But as Othello's rage grows, Iago pretends to hedge, and Othello speaks the passage discussed yesterday. Then Iago kneels down and swears an oath to help his "friend" in any way he can. So Othello asks him to kill Cassio. Here is the rest of the scene, including the aforementioned final line:

IAGO

My friend is dead; 'tis done at your request:

But let her live.

OTHELLO

Damn her, lewd minx! O, damn her!

Come, go with me apart; I will withdraw,

To furnish me with some swift means of death

For the fair devil. Now art thou my lieutenant.

IAGO

I am your own for ever.

Act 3, scene 3 of Othello, where Iago turns the title character from a happy man who loves his wife into a maniac with no thought but murder, is a technical tour de force. Its treatment of time has been written about and studied many times. Its psychological content, the way that a mind can be led a great distance with just a slight suggestion, is remarkable and unfortunately, very true-to-life. Today I'd like to look at one segment just for the power of its poetry. At this point, Iago's work is almost done: Othello is convinced his wife is unfaithful, and he wants revenge. Iago then pretends that he's trying to dissuade him from violence:

IAGO

Patience, I say; your mind perhaps may change.

OTHELLO

Never, Iago: Like to the Pontic sea,

Whose icy current and compulsive course

Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on

To the Propontic and the Hellespont,

Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace,

Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble love,

Till that a capable and wide revenge

Swallow them up.

What fierce and frightening power this metaphor contains. It brings to mind Alfred Whitehead's axiom that "language should embody what it indicates". (More on this scene tomorrow.)