Issues
1: Views of Love
Issues 2: The Role of Reputation
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Issues
1: Views of Love
Our contemporary views of love are a mixture of assumptions (sometimes contradictory) that we have inherited from recent and ancient history:
Othello: But that I love the gentle Desdemona,
I would not my unhoused free condition
Put into circumscription and confine
For the seas'worth.(1.2.24-27) 237K
Desdemona: That I did love the Moor to live with him,
My downright violence and storm of fortunes
May trumpet to the world; my heart's subdued
Even to the very quality of my lord;
I saw Othello's visage in his mind,
And to his honours and his valiant parts
Did I my soul and fortunes consecrate.
Othello: She loved me for the dangers I had passed,
And I loved her that she did pity them. (1.3.166-7)
Othello: Perdition catch my soul But I do love thee [Desdemona]! And when I love thee not
Chaos is come again!
Othello: If I do prove her haggard ["wild"--a term from falconry]
Though that her jesses [straps on a falcon's leg] were my dear heart-strings,
I'ld whistle her off, and let her down the wind
To prey at fortune. Haply, for I am black,
And have not those soft parts of conversation
That chamberers [polished gentlemen] have, or for I am declin'd
Into the vale of years (yet that's not much),
She's gone. I am abus'd, and my relief
Must be to loathe her. O curse of marriage!
That we can call these delicate creatures ours,
And not their appetites! I had rather be a toad
And live upon the vapor of a dungeon
Than keep a corner in the thing I love
For others' uses.
Desdemona: Unkindness may do much
And his unkindness may defeat my life,
But never taint my love. I cannot say 'whore.'
To do the act that might the addition [that description] earn,
Not the world's mass of vanity could make me.
Othello: It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul;
Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars,
It is the cause. Yet I'll not shed her blood,
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,
And smooth as monumental alabaster.
Yet she must die, else she'll betray more men.
Desdemona: O, falsely, falsely murder'd! . . . A guiltless death I die.
Emilia: O, who hath done this deed?
Desdemona: Nobody; I myself. Farewell! Commend me to my kind lord. O, farewell! [Dies] (5.2.116-125)
Othello: O! I were damn'd beneath all depth in hell
But that I did proceed upon just grounds
. . . Had she been true,
If heaven would make me such another world
Of one entire and perfect chrysolite,
I'd not have sold her for it.
Othello: Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,Question 1: Describe how you see the love of Desdemona and Othello at the beginning and explain why you think it can lead to Desdemona's death and Othello's self-execution. Consider some or all of the quotations above. Especially consider the metaphors that people use to describe their love and what the implications are of these metaphors.
Nor set down aught in malice: then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinable gum. Set you down this;
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog.
And smote him, thus.
[Stabs himself.]
Iago tries to sound noble to Othello about "reputation," but with terrible dramatic irony we know the truth about him and the manipulative, vengeful purposes to which he puts his own reputation:
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,Here "reputation" is more like a commodity that can be stolen, in contrast to Cassio's "reputation," which seems more dependent on inner worth.
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; 't is something, nothing;
'T was mine, 't is his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
Iago's "reputation" lies in the control of "what people say." Cassio's lies in what a person does.
Consider what concept of "reputation" underlies one or more of the following actions: