Shakespeare and the Rival Playwrights, 1600-1606 by Farley-Hills David;

Author:Farley-Hills, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2002-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Here the same patterns of dark and light emerge with an effect that is not primarily aesthetic, but psychological: the hell to which women constantly tempt men and that leads to the ‘firing out’ of venereal disease, expresses a profound hostility to the hidden nature of women’s sexuality. The dark/light opposition is an emphasis on sexual difference, made all the more emphatic by the sexual sameness of the friend. The ‘otherness’ of femininity is vividly expressed in the sonnet by the revival of the medieval identification of the vagina with the mouth of hell15 in the line: ‘I guess one angel in another’s hell’. In Othello the opposition remains as firmly entrenched, only the gender values have been reversed. The male/female opposition is again seen as absolute, but now that opposition is expressed in terms of female ‘whiteness’ and angelic purity against the demonic and dark forces of male sexuality and violence. There is also in Othello an important shift in Shakespeare’s response to the contrast, which is treated less as a subject of moral outrage and more as a subject of aesthetic patterning, much as Renaissance painters liked to hit off colour contrasts in the painting of male and female flesh.16

Certainly this sense of male and female contrast dominates the play. Even Cassio, who is clearly both attractive to women and attracted by them, (‘He has a person and a smooth dispose…fram’d to make women false’, I, iii, 395–6) shows his essential hostility to female ‘otherness’ in his contemptuous treatment of the infatuated Bianca (IV, i, 106ff). The most acute expression of this opposition is in Iago’s relation to Desdemona. Desdemona’s world is presented in markedly domestic terms, in a preoccupation with bed-linen, needlework (IV, i, 197), her fan, her gloves and mask (IV, ii, 8), her nightclothes—and it is yet another of the play’s paradoxes that it is a handkerchief that brings her downfall. What other Shakespearean heroine would argue her case in terms of looking after her husband’s health:

Why, this is not a boon,

’Tis as I should entreat you wear your gloves;

Or feed on nourishing dishes, or keep you warm,

Or sue to you, to do a peculiar profit

To your own person…

(III, iii, 77–81)

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