Everybody's Shakespeare: Reflections Chiefly on the Tragedies by maynard mack

Author:maynard mack [mack, maynard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Drama, Literary Criticism, Tragedy, Shakespeare, Political poetry; English
ISBN: 9780803282148
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Published: 1994-04-15T06:28:06+00:00

whom Macbeth calls "the common enemy of man" (3.1.69), and present an ingratiating stage manager comically engaged in exploding an "ex‐ sufflicate" or stuffed-shirt Othello. Possibly this distortion reflects the uneasiness, not to say downright discomfort, that in the age of Freud we tend to bring to the contemplation of whatever looks to be heroic or magnificent or grand. 69 Or possibly it springs from the current fashionable conviction in academic circles that all relationships are power relationships and the customary fidelities of the married state merely masks to hide a greedy capitalist enclosure of private property. Whatever its source, it has diminished our empathy with the play's hero and made more acceptable to us than they should be all those hard-bitten "truths," as it flatters us to call them, all those faint-hearted scepticisms and incredulities, by which like Iago we cut what makes us ugly down to an unthreatening size.

What should be noticed in particular is that, essentially, Shakespeare invented Iago; 70 set him down in his dramatis personae with the single epithet "a villain"; and devoted most of the play's lines and scenes to showing in detail the cunning, malignancy, and cruelty of his nature, including the cowardice of his murder of his wife. It seems to me therefore impossible to believe, as some recent critics would have us do, that the root causes of Othello's ruin are to be sought in some profound moral or psychological deficiency peculiar to him. He shows, to be sure, the degree of inexperience that follows naturally from his being a new husband, a soldier who has spent his entire previous life in the field, an outsider unacquainted with Venetian ways, and a man whose straightforward nature assumes the like in others. These are failings that a skilled manipulator can exploit, and their exploitation is precisely what we watch with sinking hearts. But once we go beyond this to postulate a deep and deadly fault in Othello's inmost being we come up against the implausible conclusion that one of the most experienced of dramatists has badly bungled his play. For what he has created in Iago, in that case, is a master intriguer and corrupter with no function proportionate to his stature, if what he exists to do has already been done for him by a self-doomed victim. A master intriguer, moreover, whose repeated asser

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