Neil Bowen on
From The Art of Drama, Volume 6
Animals and beasts
Probably when we mentioned animal imagery in Shakespeare’s other great tragedies some similar images from Othello immediately sprung to mind. How many images of animals can you recall without referring to the text? From the top or our heads, there’s the ‘old black ram’ and ‘Barbary horse’, the ‘white ewe’, Desdemona as a hunting hawk and as disgustingly polluted, like a ‘cistern, for foul toads’, Othello himself not wanting to be like a toad and being led ‘like an ass’ by the nose by Iago. Added to that Iago describes Cassio as a great ‘fly’ to be trapped in his web of intrigue and Desdemona’s singing is described as capable of soothing the ‘savageness out of a bear’. Othello refers to sheep and goats and, in exasperation, to goats and monkeys. Meanwhile, Cassio calls Bianca a ‘fitchew’, a kind of polecat. Check the text and you’ll find other animals, with references to cats, a guinea-hen, blind puppies, a swan and perhaps most surprisingly, a baboon.
When applied to the characters this imagery is obviously debasing and dehumanising. It implies that under the surface, human beings are really no more civilised or noble or good or loving than dumb beasts, that we are driven more by base appetites than we are by fine principles and values. Which character holds and promulgates this contemptuous and cynical view of human beings and of society? Iago, of course. Overwhelmingly the animal imagery in the play is used by Iago. The distinguished critic G. Wilson Knight argued in 1930 that Othello speaks, contrastingly, in a lovely, lyrical, almost hypnotic way, a style Wilson Knight dubbed the ‘Othello music’. It is a poignant part of the tragedy that Iago manages to infect and pollute this music to such an extent that Othello begins to use the same animalistic
imagery of contempt and disgust, even about himself.
A step further away from humans are the unnatural animals, the beasts and monsters, in the play, such as ‘the green-eyed monster’ of jealousy, the image of a husband turned into the monstrous ‘horned man’, the cuckold, and of Desdemona as a ‘white devil’. Some critics suggest that as the play progresses the animals mentioned become increasingly more monstrous.
Blackness and whiteness
Unsurprisingly, some of the animalistic imagery also uses the binary colour imagery of black and white. From the examples cited about, for instance, there’s Othello as an ‘old black ram’ and the ‘fair’ Desdemona as a ‘white devil’. The colour imagery in the play engages with contemporary ideas about race, religion and gender. In the Jacobean period, whiteness was not only associated with purity and virtue but also with Christianity, whereas blackness was associated with Islam as well as with evil, corruption and danger. The play raises awkward questions about a series of relationships, not only between white and black or goodness and evil, but also between whiteness and evil and blackness and Christianity. For example, was it possible during the renaissance to be a black person and also to be a good Christian? Are Iago’s evil deeds the result of his warped humanity or a toxic product of white, Christian Venice?
Kim F. Hall has suggested that during the early modern period darkness and lightness became a vehicle through which the English could begin to construct ideas of ‘self’ and ‘other’, with whiteness construed as good and self and blackness as evil and other. Taking this idea on, some critics have focused on the interplay of the black and white imagery in Othello to suggest that the frequently antithetical relationship between the two colours expresses a fear of miscegenation, the mixing of races to produce mixed race offspring. Certainly, early critics were not disgusted so much by Shakespeare making the noble hero black, but by the idea of his relationship with Desdemona’s whiteness and maidenly purity. Anxiety about interracial mingling has been felt acutely too by some audiences, such as those during Apartheid in South Africa and in the U.S.A. during segregation, as the infamous story of a nineteenth century American audience member shooting the actor playing Othello suggests.
Patricia Parker has explored how racialised language of colour is used specifically about the female characters. Iago tells us, for example, that he intends to blacken Desdemona’s name, by turning her ‘virtue’ into ‘pitch’. Meanwhile, Shakespeare seems to deliberately undermine contemporary racial ideas of virtue and sin by making a character called Bianca a prostitute.
Of course, a terrible and poignant feature of the play is how Iago corrupts Othello’s mind to such an extent that even he begins to use racial stereotypes. As Kiernan Ryan notes, eventually Othello views his marriage to Desdemona ‘through white Venetian eyes and in white Venetian terms' showing how ‘deeply he has absorbed the entrenched prejudice of Venetian culture’. The most notorious example of this, of course, is the pejorative simile Othello uses about Desdemona in Act III, Sc. 3:
‘Her name, that was fresh/As Dian’s visage, is now begrimed and black/ as my own face.’
In this horribly tormented image, Othello sees himself and his own colour not as a symbol or strength or purity, but as dirty and as a symbol of corruption