Pre-Restoration
Pre-Restoration
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The Medieval Vice
The Medieval Vice
Iago resembles the figure of the Vice, a stock character from medieval morality plays that had made its way into popular Tudor dramas. The Vice was known for cracking jokes, making speeches directly to the audience about what was happening onstage, and often had one of (if not) the largest roles in the play. One of the Vice’s key responsibilities was to seduce the audience into becoming complicit in the Vice’s own evil plans.
Clare Wright makes particular note about the relationship between Vices and the audience in English morality plays, and discusses how the influence of Vice figures over audience members in Late Medieval morality plays was so strong that moralists saw the Vice’s “charismatic presence as undermining the moral, didactic purposes of the plays. Wright explains that the Vices exerted their influence through a variety of methods, including with music, rhythmic movement and speech (which she claims caused a “kinaesthetic experience” in the audience that led them to feel as if they were participating in the play as “doers” rather than observers), and direct addresses to the audience. When Elizabethan audiences saw Othello, it is likely that they would have picked up on the similarities between Iago’s character and the Vice of the morality plays. This similarity would have led the audience of Shakespeare’s play to have certain expectations about the way it would end and chiefly, that the truth of Iago’s perfidy would be revealed, that order would be restored, and that the wicked would be punished. Perhaps Shakespeare’s audiences would have been less conflicted about relishing Iago’s wit because they expected him ultimately to fail in his plans to put Othello “into a jealousy so strong / that judgement cannot cure” it (2.1.299-300).
The "Moores" and Iago's Use of Exonymic Language
The "Moores" and Iago's Use of Exonymic Language
For Shakespeare scholars, travel accounts of Africa have long been important sources of information about the stereotypes that Iago and Rodrigo bandy back and forth in the play's opening scene. Some of these accounts, like Leo Africanus's Geographical Historie of Africa (1600), offer largely accurate overviews of different African cultures and customs, while others, like Philippo Figafetta’s Report of the Kingdom of Congo (1597), focused on the more scandalous details, such as tribal practices of polygamy or cannibalism. But equally important for understanding the dialogue with the play opens, and the ways it beckons to the audience to make sense of Othello before he arrives, is the extant evidence of Africans living in Tudor England.
In her survey of Africans living in England between 1500 and 1640, historian Miranda Kauffman provides substantial evidence for the presence and treatment of 350 African individuals in Britain, which she concludes was different from “what one might expect had they really been viewed primarily as heathen, ape-like, libidinous savages, as the literary stereotypes sometimes indicate.” Rather, the evidence Kauffman cites indicates that Africans lived a wide variety of experiences and were accepted into society, with many working as servants in merchant and aristocratic households or practicing trades. A few were landowners. Kauffman argues that the societal perception of racial difference in Shakespeare’s time would not have been analogous to that of popular literature and implies that the “embedded” awareness of racial difference in Elizabethan society would have been less blatant than literary scholars suggest. Regarding the word “Moor,” Kauffman points out that, in Tudor records, most entries referring to Africans referred to the individual “by an ethnic description, such as ‘a blackamoor’ or ‘the Moor’... alongside their names.” However, she advises that:
Although many if not all of these terms sound derogatory to modern ears, they were not necessarily used as such in the sixteenth and seventeenth-century sources examined here. These terms described the most striking quality about African individuals from the perspective of the pale people who met them in Britain: their dark skin.
Therefore, it stands to reason that Shakespeare’s references to “the Moor”, as deployed by most characters in the script, are not used specifically as a means to isolate Othello’s character, so much as they are an employment of a common exonym. Most often, Desdemona, Cassio, and the other Venetians address Othello by his name, or as “my lord.” If they do address him or refer to him as a “Moor,” it is usually qualified with a positive attribute, such as when First Senator addresses him as “brave Moor” in 1.3.292.
The exceptions to this observation are the references to ‘Moors’ made by Iago, Roderigo, and Brabantio. Iago’s usage of the word “Moor” frequently occurs in tandem with subtle evocations of the barbarian stereotypes to which Vaughan refers. One particularly notable instance occurs in 1.3, in Iago’s addresses to both Roderigo and the audience. To the former, he seizes upon the convention that ‘Moors’ are sexually promiscuous in his assertion that “these Moors are changeable in their wills,” while, in his aside to the latter, he paints Othello as an easily manipulated barbarian who “will as tenderly be led by th’ nose / as asses are” (1.3.347, 396-401). Iago’s employment of racial stereotypes serve as effective invitations for Brabantio to utilize similar language in his descriptions of Othello, too; Brabantio (whom we learn through Othello’s speech in 1.3 loved Othello and often invited him to his home so that Othello could tell Brabantio the story of his life) picks up on Iago and Roderigo’s suggestive language about Othello, and his mind goes almost immediately to another seventeenth-century stereotype leveraged against Africans, inquiring whether Desdemona is the victim of “charms / by which the property of youth and maidenhead / may be abused” (1.1.169-171; 1.3.129-132).
It is not Shakespeare’s usage of the word ‘Moor’ in itself that would have brought to mind the racist, literary stereotypes of Renaissance literature, but the way in which he has Iago intentionally evoke these stereotypes to condition the audience to associate Othello’s appearance with barbarism. By establishing a close relationship between Iago and the audience from the play’s outset and taking advantage of Iago’s familiarity with them to frame the events unfolding onstage, Shakespeare is inviting his viewers to take on a perspective that was more closely aligned to the Venetian Iago.
Anxieties at Home and Abroad
Anxieties at Home and Abroad
At the start of the seventeenth century, Ayanna Thompson notes that:
Venice was both lauded and reviled in the early modern English imagination. It was lauded for being a cosmopolitan and diverse city… and for enabling most of Europe’s trade with Africa and the East…. Yet Venice also became a symbol of hedonistic excess… [it] fascinated the early modern English because of the city’s more liberal treatment of sexual relations where prostitution was actually regulated by the state… Thus, Iago gives voice to many early modern English stereotypes about Venice when he describes Othello and Desdemona as ‘an erring barbarian and a super-subtle Venetian.
Both Thompson and Vaughan suggest that Shakespeare’s choice to set Venice as the initial backdrop for Othello reflected the English population’s mixed feelings about the expansion of England as an international power and its increasingly diverse population that resulted from new trading routes established under Elizabeth I. Perhaps Shakespeare’s intent behind the way Iago frames Othello’s character in the play’s crucial first act was to seize upon the subconscious fears of his audiences, and encourage them to use Othello as a scapegoat for their anxieties. By creating an opportunity for the audience to align themselves with Iago, Shakespeare appears to be setting them up to recognize the qualities within themselves that allow them to go along with his villainous scheme. However, once Iago establishes trust with Othello and alleges Desdemona’s infidelity (3.3), his asides to the audience diminish in number and frequency and he spends the majority of his remaining lines on exerting an influence over Othello. Like Roderigo, perhaps the audience begins to suspect that they are being manipulated by Iago (4.2.175-85). While, as Sidney acknowledges, not all audience members may become conscious of their complicity in Iago’s schemes, others may realize their own responsibility as they watch the final stages of the plan unfold onstage. They know that Othello will kill his wife, but they are ultimately powerless to stop it.
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