The History of Evil in the Early Modern Age by Daniel Robinson

Author:Daniel Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

This graphic imagery rapidly provokes Othello’s first declared intention to murder: ‘I’ll tear her all to pieces’ (437).

At this point, Othello is not yet in the grip of a passion ‘so strong that judgment cannot cure’ (II.i.300–1). At certain moments, Othello’s rage is ‘cooled’, a key criterion for the commission of deliberate murder. However, Iago interrupts and manipulates precisely these junctures. When Othello insists that his wife is ‘A fine woman! A fair woman! A sweet woman!’, Iago responds, ‘Nay, you must forget that’ (IV.i.190). When Othello insists that Desdemona is ‘of so gentle a condition’, Iago retorts, ‘Ay, too gentle’, converting the gentleness of nobility into the ‘gentle’ touch of sensuality (188–9). Whenever Othello’s anger begins to subside, Iago revives the graphic associations: for example, long after a verbal depiction of Cassio wiping his sweaty beard with Desdemona’s precious handkerchief, Iago’s single word, ‘handkerchief’, provokes an anguished, ‘By heaven, I would most gladly have forgot it./ Thou said’st it – O, it comes o’er my memory,/ As doth the raven o’er the infected house’ (IV.i.22–3). At one point, Othello exclaims, ‘It is not words that shake me thus. Pish! Noses, ears, and lips!’ (IV.i.46–7). Indeed, it is not mere words, but potent mental images that powerfully impinge upon, and temporarily cripple, the capacity of free deliberation. In this way, Iago rekindles the ‘heat of the blood’ so that Othello’s passion is never fully ‘cooled’.

The early modern period can sometimes be sweepingly associated with a ‘mechanistic’ view of the emotions as a source of evil, according to which ‘blind’ or ‘unreasoning’ passions simply bypass reason in the commission of wrongful actions (e.g., Kahan and Nussbaum 1996). However, Shakespeare resists this reductive view: the passions must work through reason, thus providing a meaningful (though in this case, marginal) role for the will. Whereas some believed that, in the grip of passion, ‘wee be transformed into the nature of euill beasts’ when ‘a violent desyre & passion dothe oppresse the iudgement’ (Granger 1616: 31), Othello’s deliberative faculty is not eliminated like an animal’s but is substantially crippled. Othello’s earlier plan to divorce Desdemona if she could be proven guilty (see above, pg. 9) revealed how he would respond to adultery ‘if he were at his free choyse’ (Mosse 1595: 86), but now, in an impassioned condition of impaired volition, the absolutized value of fidelity has fully overshadowed the value of Desdemona’s life. Othello grasps for a flimsy pretext (‘she must die, [or] else she’ll betray more men’) before justifying her death as an act of distorted ‘justice’ (V.ii.6,16).6 For, even if we know ‘what is just, &. what is vniust in the dooings of things’ in an abstract sense, ‘yet we can fail in guiing judgement’ because ‘our lust [desire] joineth it selfe vnto the weaker argument’ (Marten 1583: 252–3). In this way, the emotions propelling Othello towards murder are not ‘mechanistically’ ‘blind’ or ‘unreasoning’; they impair volition not through bypassing reason altogether but by severely constraining the scope within which it operates.

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