othello and race prejudice

Othello and Race PrejudiceAuthor(s): Philip MasonSource: Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 3 (September 1962), pp. 154-162Published by: University of the West Indies and Caribbean QuarterlyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40652820 .

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Othello and Race Prejudice (An Extract from Mr. Mason's third lecture in Jamaica: The Collective

Unconscious and Othello) This lecture is based on a lecture given at the University in 1 962 as part of the

Open Lecture Series by Philip Mason c.i.e., o.b.e., Director of the Institute of Race Relations, London.

Some years ago I read an argument by a learned sociologist that race prejudice was a by-product of imperialism; before we in Britain had an Empire, he argued, we had no prejudice about race, and he adduced Othello in proof. This struck me at once as very odd and made me read the play again; I came to just the opposite conclusion from his.

Othello is of course a tragedy and in any tragedy it is essential that we - the audience - should feel involved; this almost always, and certainly in the great Shakespearean tragedies, means that we should feel a sympathy with the hero. Perhaps this was what was in the sociologist's mind and what his unstated argument may have been : the audience has to sympathise with Othello, and therefore there cannot have been racial prejudice in Elizabethan England. This however is an argument of the type : A thing must be either black or white : this is not black : therefore it must be white. I do of course agree that in Elizabethan England there was no such extreme racial prejudice as exists among white South Africans, but I maintain that there was some prejudice and that in the play it shows itself most strongly in just the kind of people in whom you would expect to find it. Indeed, I would go further and say that the play would lose much of its point if it were not for racial prejudice. The problem of making Othello the Moor sympathetic to his audience may have been the very challenge that caught Shakespeare's attention.

Let us start with Othello the Moor, the general. We hear of him before we see him. As the play opens lago is protesting that he hates Othello, tfce general whom he serves. lago is thus what is called in the law courts a hostile witness and the first scene makes it clear to the audience that he is a villain he says that he is serving the Moor as a matter of self-interest and pretending to be what he is not. It follows from his hostility that any admissions he makes in Othello's favour are doubly telling. And we notice that he never questions Othello's ability as a soldier; what is more, he recognises explicitly that he is an outstanding leader and that Venice cannot do without him. lago does not flatter himself that the Venetian government can be persuaded to get rid of Othello; he says :

Another of his fathom have they none To do their business . . . (Li. 153)

The other character in this first scene is also hostile; the total effect of the scene is to rouse expectation. We are ready for someone who is big, a man

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of real stature, and we are unconsciously ready to give him our sympathy because we don't take to lago. When Othello does appear, in the second scene, lago is telling him how a villain - Brabantio - "prated against your Honour" and how lago had defended him; Othello is magnanimous and forbearing about the injury and confident that the state will remember him because of his great services. He speaks with modesty yet firm certainty and tells lago, whom he regards as a faithful friend, that he is no upstart but of high birth : ...

"I fetch my life and being From men of Royal siege and my demerits May speak unbonneted to as proud a fortune As this that I have reached". (I.ii.20)

And before the first Act is ended, we have seen the respect with which he is greeted by the Doge of Venice and his counsellors, we have heard Brabantio attempt to charge him with sorcery because he has won Desdemona's heart and we have heard his defence and triumph. He has won our sympathy completely.

Almost everyone who has written about race relations in Britain today has made the point that prejudice is very much reduced for anyone who can establish - preferably by something everyone can see like a college blazer or a clerical collar - that he belongs to the upper half of the class structure, that he is a student or a clergyman or the son of a chief. It is remarkable how many chief's sons there are in London today. And here is Shakespeare, knowing his audience, using this native English snobbery for his own purpose three and a half centuries ago. And my own feeling is that he takes more trouble to establish sympathy with Othello than he would if Othello were European and if Shakespeare did not expect prejudice. All through the first half of the play, the flat characters, who have no life of their own but who are vaguely good, go out of their way to refer to him as "noble Othello", "brave Othello", "the noble Moor", "the war-like Moor". " Tis a worthy Governor", says Montano, and again :

"I have served him and the man commands Like a full soldier", (II. i.)

This is at the beginning of the Second Act, when we are expecting him to land from the storm. All are full of his praises and of anxiety for his safety; we left him triumphant over Brabantio, having won the sympathy of the Doge and the Senate as well as the love of the incomparable Desdemona; am I right in thinking that all this build-up at the beginning is more than Hamlet or Lear gets? Macbeth does get something of the same treatment, but then he is going to murder a king and a guest; the problem is the same, and both of them have to win our sympathy in spite of something which tells against them.

Cassio too admired Othello, in a rather juvenile hero-worshipping kind of way; Cassio is on the whole a sympathetic character but distinctly 1 1 •

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immature and public school. He is a man of good family and good looks, a staff college man skilled in the theory of war, smooth of manners, attractive to women, a man to whom everything has come easily. He feels no racial prejudice; why should he? It is easy to be liberal and generous when you have everything you want. And Cassio in this as in everything else is sharply contrasted with lago, and to a lesser extent with the other two characters who really are racialists, Roderigo and Brabantio.

lago has been passed over for promotion. He was the senior man, and had been tried in battle under Othello's eye, he says, but the post of second- in-command goes to Cassio, a mere staff officer, but one who was at the Right Kind of School and knew all the Right People. This is Iago's first professed grievance but he hunts round for another; he throws out at different points in the play casual remarks to the effect that he suspects his wife Emilia has been unfaithful with Othello and also with Cassio. But he does not sound as though he really believed it and I am confident that Shakespeare did not mean us to think he did - still less that he meant us to think it was true. Of course, being passed over for promotion was not what any rational man would possibly regard as a reasonable motive for such malignity as Iago's; there must have been something deeply wrong with a man for him to behave as lago does and everything lago says when he is off his guard bears this out.

He has a grudge against life. He has married beneath him and seems quite incapable of any affection for Emilia. He feels a grudge against life for that, as well as over Cassio's promotion - but the grudge must have been there from his earliest days. I feel sure that his real grudge against Othello is that the general "has a daily beauty in his life" which makes lago feel mean and small.

lago has a dirty mind - and by that I do not mean either that he is highly sexed or that he talks cheerful honest bawdy. Romeo was highly sexed and so are most young men in Shakespeare; Falstaff and plenty of others make bawdy jokes. But no one I can think of except lago contrives so often to bring all sexual affection down to the farmyard level. Hear for instance the way he tells Brabantio that his daughter has left his house in secret to marry Othello - and notice that he is a racialist in the same breath as he uses this language about marriage. He is speaking from the dark - I almost said from the Shadow - and Brabantio cannot see him and does not know who is speaking, so he can let himself go :

"Even now, now, very now, an old black ram Is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise! Awake the snorting citizens with the bell Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you". (Li. 89 et seq.)

And he goes on : "You'll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse, you'll have your nephews neigh to you; you'll have coursers for cousins and gennets for germans".

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Brabantio asks - into the dark : "What profane wretch art thou?' And from the dark comes lago' s answer : "I am one, Sir, that comes to tell you that your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs". The point really needs no more labouring; as soon as lago is alone with Roderigo he is at it again, suggesting that Desdemona "must change for youth; when she is sated with his body, she will find the error of her choice" (I.iii.348 et seq.). And a good deal more the same effect, even more grossly expressed, when he is persuading Roderigo that Desdemona is in love with Cassio (Il.i. 240-250). Notice the comparison he used when he is reporting the quarrel he has contrived between Cassio and Roderigo : he does not know how it began, he says, they were "friends all but now . . . like bride and groom devesting them for bed" (II.iii.183). And there is a brief conversation with Cassio about Desdemona which contrasts the two men perfectly. lago says that Othello has left them early because he "hath not yet made wanton the night with her - and she is sport for Jove". Cassio, the perfect officer and gentleman and full of a charming if rather schoolboyish admiration, almost reverence, for Desdemona, replies : "She's a most exquisite lady", lago goes on : "And, I'll warrant her, full of game". Cassio's eyebrows are still raised; he says "Indeed, she is a most fresh and delicate creature", lago : "What an eye she has! Methinks it sounds a parley of provocation". Cassio : "An Inviting eye; and yet methinks right modest". And so on; lago ends the colloquy with the phrase : "Happiness to their sheets!". (II. iii. 16-29) .

lago, then, is a man dis appointed in the world, which has never recognised his true merits and ability, a man coldly obsessed with sex yet unable to love just the sort of man you would expect to be a racialist. His racialism comes out in the very first scene; he resents serving under the Moor : "And I - God bless the mark! - his Moorship's* ancient". The post he held seems to have been personal, a kind of military secretary. I have mentioned already the way he announces the marriage to Brabantio; to Roderigo he says "these Moors are changeable" (I. iii. 338) and "what delight shall she have to look on the devil?" (I Li. 230). To Othello himself he eventually - once his poison has begun to do its work - uses most significant language. He has worked Othello into a frenzy of suspicion and agitation, and has reminded him of Brabantio's words - "She has deceived her father and may thee" - and also of Brabantio's conviction that only witchcraft could make her love a Moor. And this doubt - something rooted in racialism - comes to Othello's own lips : "And yet" it is a groan wrung from his pain - "And yet how nature, erring

♦ This is the reading of Q2 and Fl. Ql has "worship" instead of "Moorship" and is the source usually to be preferred, but no one could have changed "worship" to "Moorship" by mistake. I prefer to think "wordship" was a printer's error corrected by Shakespeare; if it is an amendment by another hand, it is a brilliant one.

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from itself . . ." - he cannot finish the sentence and lago pounces eagerly on this crack in the armour of the great general's composure, drives in the point of his knife and prises it wider open. He says :

"Ay there's the point; as, to be bold with you, Not to affect many proposed matches Of her own clime, complexion and degree Whereto we see, in all things nature tends; Foh! one may smell in such a will most rank, Foul disproportion, thoughts unnatural. But pardon me . . ."

he continues, and well he might, for what more unpardonable thought could he have expressed? (III.iii.230)

Here I think is the place to notice how integral a part of Iago's plans is race prejudice. He could never have poisoned Othello's mind if Othello had not all his life struggled with this prejudice and overcome it by building up a persona, a mask to front the world, of the calm, resolute and modest commander, unaware of prejudice. But once the crack is made, it is clear that-- deepest tragedy of all - he has himself been infected by the thing he fought. He thinks Desdemona cannot possibly like his face, that she loves his mind and spirit in spite of his colour; he says :

"She loved me for the dangers I had passed And I loved her that she did pity them". (I.iii. 167)

Desdemona herself never says this; she does say that she first loved his mind but her plea to Brabantio is simply that she loves him and is married to him and there is never any sign in her of loving him in spite of his appear- ance. But he is infected with this prejudice of the surrounding world - which today, when there is so much more meeting of different races, we know by daily evidence to be untrue : "Yet she had eyes and chose me ..." he says (III.iii.189). And again, in that same almost unbearably painful scene :

"Haply, for I am black And have not those soft parts of conversation That chamberers have, or, for I am declin'd Into the vale of years - yet that's not much - She's gone . . ." (III.iii.265)

Here note the order - blackness, lack of polish, age - in which he lists his supposed disabilities.

To read Othello is a purging and ennobling experience, because the love of Othello and Desdemona is something above the animal lust which lago would make it, a whole and beautiful thing above race prejudice and snobbery and the sheer evil malice which these things generate. Today we know from experience that there are marriages which successfully overcome the difficulties that prejudice causes, which may indeed be stronger because they have overcome those difficulties, but how did Shakespeare know?

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"Farewell the tranquil mind; farewell content Farewell the plumed troops and the big wars . . . That make ambition virtue - Oh, farewell!" (III.iii.350)

Think of his terrible cry : "Oh, lago, the pity of it, lago, the pity of it!", and of that bloody resolution :

"Like to the Pontick sea Whose icy current and compulsive course Ne'er feels retiring ebb but keeps due on To the Propontick and the Hellespont, Even so my bloody thoughts ..."

In the last scene, almost every word Othello speaks is the purest poetry, from Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk ..." ". . . . in Aleppo once

They owe, these people, much of their reality to the magic of words but even when robbed of the glory of the verse - and the great speeches come crowding forward, protesting that they are an inseparable part of the play and won't be banished - even stripped of their poetry and laid out naked on the psycho- analyst's couch, the people still seem alive. Surely in this Jung is right and they do come from somewhere deep in universal human experience, as Oedipus and Electra do.

Let us come back to Brabantio. He is the rich old lord, a senator, related to most of the leading people in Venice. Like Cassio, he had no need to feel envious or discontented; he was hospitable and liberal and when Othello first came to Venice, some nine months before the play begins, after a life-time of war and adventure, Brabantio asked him to his house. "Her father loved me", Othello says; in modern English of course, we should say "Her father liked me". No doubt it was the fashionable thing to do. But prejudice was there, latent, waiting only for the occasion to bring it out : when he under- stands what lago is telling him, he says "This accident is not unlike my dream". He had been afraid that his daughter would marry a black man though no doubt felt that in modern Venice this wasn't the thing to say. There are plenty of people just like this in London today. But as soon as the threat develops, up it all comes, bubbling up from the Id or the Shadow. He thinks at once of charms "By which the property of youth and maidhood may be abused" and when he meets Othello asks how, except by witchcraft, anyone could suppose that a maid "so tender, fair, and happy" could

"To incur a general mock Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom Of such a thing as thou".

As the whole party hurries off to the Doge's council, he throws out a remark very typical of the racialist; if this kind of thing is going to happen, "Bond slaves and pagans shall our statesmen be". As I have already pointed out, Othello is of royal blood and it is quite clear that he is a Christian and goes regularly to confession. But facts like this will make no difference to Brabantio; it is almost a definition of this kind of person that he does not

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test his prejudice against facts. Arrived before the Doge, whose council has met at midnight because of important war news demanding immediate decision, Brabantio, although himself a senator, clamours for immediate private justice, before he will even hear the news, because he says . . .

"My particular grief Is of so flood-gate and o'er-bearing nature That it engluts and swallows other sorrows ..." (I.iii.54)

Nothing matters but his own trouble; his daughter has been stolen from him and "For nature so preposterously to err Being not deficient, blind, or lame of sense Sans witchcraft could not".

When Desdemona appears, he asks her : "Do you perceive in all this noble company Where most you owe obedience?"

She replies, in language very like Cordelia's, that she has a divided duty: "I am hitherto your daughter; but here's my husband And so much duty as my mother showed To you, preferring you before her father, So much I challenge that I may profess Due to the Moor my lord". (I.iii. 1 85)

This is too much for Brabantio; he says : "I had rather to adopt a child than get it . . ." And we perceive that he is the authoritarian personality incarnate, that like Lear (and to a lesser extent Prospero) he cannot bear that his child should have a life of her own and be anything but obediently his.

Brabantio in short is just the kind of person - I should say one of the kinds whom we expect to find a racialist. And Roderigo is another. No doubt he has been infected by lago, who may well have put into his head the things he actually says. But they would not have grown in Cassio's mind nor in the Doge's; Cassio, satisfied with his easy successes, would have shrugged and smiled, while the Doge, knowing that he needed Othello, would have put them aside as firmly as he does Brabantio' s complaints. But Roderigo is another matter; he is of Desdemona' s own class and no doubt met her at teen-age dances or the Venetian equivalent (that is, of course, at Shakespeare's idea of the Venetian equivalent). He has land, which he is selling to meet lago' s inordinate demands. On paper, he would be a suitable match for Desdemona; unfortunately for him, however, nobody regards him as of any account. Brabantio has forbidden him the house because Desdemona is not for him and he is making a nuisance of himself. lago remarks in an aside that he would not waste time on "such a snipe" "But for my sport and profit"; again, he calls him "this poor trash of Venice" - and the audience is bound to agree that he is weak and silly and despicable in every way. The aristocrat who is not fitted by nature to hold a privileged position - he is another of the people who we thought likely to be intolerant about a class not their own or a race not their own. And sure enough in the first scene he

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shows it; he calls Othello "the thick-lips" and speaks of Desdemona going "to the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor". We need not waste more time on him.

It is more interesting to consider whether Shakespeare himself had some mental picture of a "Moor" as having in some way a different temperament from an Englishman. And I think the answer must be that he had, but that, at least for the purpose of this play, he ennobled the vulgar stereotype and saw the best in it. His moor is not lascivious, as Roderigo suggests all Moors must be; indeed in a very deep sense he is profoundly chaste. Nor is he sentimental; he does not need a woman's support, is not in love with marriage, regrets the loss of independence; his is a sturdy self-reliant personality and he comes late to love, but beneath the calm which is an essential part of his persona, his passions have a depth and fire which are not to be found any- where else in Shakespeare; his love really is "the fountain From the which his current runs". The weakness is that the mask with which he fronts the world has had to be built up with such a tremendous effort of discipline and repression that, once it is cracked, all goes with it. He is generous and simple, not given to malice or suspicion. Emilia asks : "Is he not jealous?" and Desdemona says : "Who! he? I think the sun where he was born Drew all such humours from him". lago sees the same quality and sees how he can use it.

"The Moor is of a free and open nature That thinks men honest that but seem to be And will as tenderly be led by the nose As asses are. (I.iii).

Frank, generous, brave, swift in decision but mature in judgment, passionate but master of his passion - not the most ardent apostle of negritude and the African personality could ask for better than this! Swinburne said that Othello was the noblest man of man's making. But his character does have a relationship to one English stereotype of the Negro, the most favourable, as simple, generous and passionate, and surely his is just the personality that would crumble quickly, once the horrible suspicion was sown that there was something morbid and unnatural in Desdemona' s choice.

I hope I have said enough to convince you that, far from Othello showing that there was no racial prejudice in Elizabethan England, prejudice is the root of two central points in the play. It is closely tied up with the causes of lago' s malignity and it is an essential part of his plot that Othello should himself have been infected with racialism and should suspect it in Desdemona. Roderigo and Brabantio as well as lago are the kind of people in whom a psychologist would expect to find racialism - and there it is. Brabantio provides a nice demonstration of the sociologist's concept of social distance; he will ask Othello to tea but won't have him as a son-in-law. Brabantio also feeds one's suspicion of the things people say when they answer a questionnaire; there is likely to be a difference between what they say and what they do. In short, although Othello was not a social problem in Venice - it

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sounds as though he was the only Moor in the army - the play leaves on me the impression that race prejudice was much the same in Shakespeare's England as today.

How does this fit my first point, of the change in race and class relations during the period between Blenheim and Mons, between Defoe and say Evelyn Waugh? It is not inconsistent. There is nothing formal or fixed about race relations in Shakespeare's day; there is nothing comparable with the customs of the Deep South or of South Africa. Indeed, there is no relationship of dominance. There is curiosity, wonder, an initial prejudice - a readiness to identify with the Shadow - but it is something that can be overcome; it is like the first meeting of Hawkins and Akbar, of Cortes and Montezuma. But there the prejudice is and not much will be needed to turn it into downright hostility. During the next three centuries, many forces were to play on it and affect it before it reached the stage of crisis where we now stand.

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