the anti theatrical iago

8/3/2019 The Anti Theatrical Iago

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THE ANTI-THEATRICAL IAGO

Larisa KocicUniversity of Szeged

I n the very opening scene of Othello, lago confides to Roderigo: "I am notwhat I am" (I, i, 64). I Previous to this statement he professes his guidingprinciple as being that of pretence, especially when it comes to servingOthello (see I, i, 49-52). If one needed to describe lago with a single wordobviously 'hypocrisy' would pop in among the first. And it is precisely:"ypocrisy that is one of the main issues of anti-theatrical writers against thestage and the actors. For as Prynne defines it in his Histriomastix, hypocrisy is:.. . in the proper signification of the word, but the acting ofanolhers part or person on the Stage: or what else is an hypocrite,in his true ellma/ogle, but a S t a g e ~ p l a y e r , or one who acts ano/herspart .. . And hence is it, that not only divers moderne English andLarine Writers, but likewise sundry Fathers here quoted in theMargent, stile Stage-players hypocrites; Hypocrites, Stage-players.as being one and the same in substance. .. .2

The fact that the Elizabethan and Jacobean anti-theatrical writers blur thedistinction between poetical imitation and malicious lies' makes lago, with hisobvious wish to deceive, "same in substance" with Stage-players. And it isprecisely this aspect of lago, the player within the play in relation to anti-

William Shakespeare, Othello (Arden Shakespeare, 2003). All subsequent references to the[ext of Shakespeare's Othello are from this edition (hence Arden Shakespeare).

: Prynne quoted in Jonas Barish, The Antirheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1981),91-92.: Following in the footsteps of "sundry Fathers," Prynne, as well as his conlemporaries, fails,however, to follow Augustine who not only distinguishes "that which either feigns to be what isnot. or tends to exist but do not succeed" - the latter would include phenomena like images inthe mirror, and other optical illusions - but distinguishes in the first group also the "fallacious"and the "fabulous." In the first, the feigning to be what is not is driven by a wish to deceive,whereas in the lauer, the wish is to tell a story. Augustine thus "removes the onus from fabulationby differentiating the impulse behind it (the desire to please) from that behind falsehood (thedesire to deceive) and from the errors caused by faulty senSOl)/ apparatus." See Barish 54-55.


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theatrical notions, that is the object of my present paper. That Othello mightbe the only Shakespearean play lacking any explicit reference to theatre, andyet embodying the major fear of the anti-theatricalists, only enhances theinterest of the topic. However, to unveil this rather curious presence of antitheatricality in Othello it is crucial that I give a short introduction into itstheoretical background focusing mainly on its attacks against stage-players.

There is an undeniably hostile undertone to the anti-theatrical reproach ofhypocrisy that prompts Barish, in his exceptional book The AntitheatricaiPrejudice not only to pinpoint the whys of the attack against the stage, but alsothe reason for its passionate and obstinate nature. As he says, it is "not o n l ~because it symbolized irrational forces tbreatening chaos" that the wholecomplex of theater aroused a painful anxiety in the enemies of stage, "butbecause it represented a deeply disturbing temptation, which could only bedealt with by being disowned and converted into a passionate moral outrage."-

As the symbol, or, as some would see it, the sheer manifestation of "irrationalforces threatening chaos" the theater undermines the belief in absolute sincerity.which in turn results from the prevalent concept of absolute identity. In anargument that is built on religious foundation, Prynne writes as follows:

For God, who is truth iiselfe. in whom there is no variablenesse. noshadow of change no feign, na hypocrisie; as he hath given auniforme distinct and proper being to every creature, the bounds ofwhich may not be exceeded: so he requires that the actions of everycreature shouldbe hones! and sincere, devoyde ofall hyporcrisie, asall his actions, and their natures are. Hence he enjoy[n]es all men atall times, to be such in shew, as they are in truth: to seeme thatoutwardly which they are inwardly; to act themselves, not others.. .s

According to this, as Whitfield White puts it, "theatrical impersonationimpiously subverts one's God given identity and place in the sexual and socialorder and counters the biblical mandate to imitate Christ in all things."However, it is in a rather complex way that "theatrical impersonation"accomplishes its subversive effect.

Starting from the external to the internal, there is, first of all, theproblem of apparel. The sumptuary laws, dictated by both the national and

'Barish 1t5.5 From prynne Hislriomaslix, quoted in Barish 92. The same notion can be traced back to

Plato's Republic (434b-d) too, so i( cannot be reduced to Christian thought alone.6 Paul Whitefield White, The Theatre and Reformation: Protestatnrism, Patronage, andPlaying in Tudor England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 140.


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local governments, legislating what items of dress could be worn byvarious ranks of people, were enacted in the spirit of the above mentionednotions that demanded stability of one's identity as well as the stability ofrelations among members of different sexual and social orders. Andalthough the concern with the 'proper' standard of dress was by no meansonfined to the stage alone,' it was there that it rose to alarming heights. AsCerasano notes:

Accounts of the Elizabethan theater are replete with references tothe sumptuary laws and the frequent complaints against playerswho "jell in their silks" thus aping their social betters. Finally theplaying companies were capable of purchasing clothing thatindividual actors were legally prohibited from wearing except onthe stage where they impersonated those who had sold them theclothes, thus ''borrowing'' both robe and title,'

The issue in question, however, goes beyond simple borrowing of "robe andtitle." Paraphrasing Deuteronomy, chapter twenty-two, Stubbes writes:"Apparel was giuen vs as a signe distinctiue to discern betwixt sex and sex, &therefore on to wear the Apparel of another sex is to participate with the same,and to adulterate the verities of his own kinde.'" It seems that by borrowing3pparel of a different gender one puts one's own gender in jeopardy, for theact meant participation "with the same" with consequential adulteration ofone's own true nature. This opinion was not limited to instances of crossdressing, for as Peter Stallybrass argues: "In their assumption of clothes fromcourt and church, the actors put the meaning of these clothes in crisis" because. Gosson's following exclaim is on a general note lamenting the vanity of human nature thattends to transgress the limits enforced by sumptuary laws: "How onen hath her Maiestic withthe graue aduise of her honorable Councell, sette downe the limits of apparel to euery degree,and how soone againe hath the pride of our harts ouerflowed the chanel?" Stephen Gosson,The Schoole ofAbuse (online text based on the Atber edition of 1895).S. P. Cerasano, "'Borrowed robes,' costume prices, and the drawing of Titus Andronicus," inShakespeare Studies 22 (1994): 55. At this point it is important to note that there is asignificant difference between private and public theaters. For while the private theater did notdisplay a capacity to redefine the place or power of their audience (mostly because the courtmasque was produced and performed by and for aristocracy and state officials, thus being "anexclusive affair designed to entertain, reflect, and consolidate its privileged audience") [hepublic theater contained a transversal power because it had an extraordinary range of social:md cultural references enacted before an audience of heterogeneous social and economicbackground. See Bryan Raynolds, "The Devil's House, 'or worse': Transversal Power andAntitheatrical Discourse in Early Modern England," Theatre Journal 49 (1997): 153-4.Phillip Subbes, The Ana/amie ofAbuses (London, 1583), 73.


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the "clothing could carry the absent body, memory, genealogy, as well asliteral and material value."10

But even more disconcerting and dangerous than the "borrowed robes"were the different roles enacted by the actors. The actual danger of becomingwhat one acts is amply demonstrated in Heywood's recount of an incidentwhen Julius Caesar in the role of Hercules actually kills the actor playing hisenemy in the performance of Hercules Furens:

although he was, as our tragedians use, but seemingly to kill him bysome false imagined wound, yet was Caesar so extremely carriedaway with the violence of his practised fury, and by the perfectshape of the madnesse of Hercules, to which he had fashioned all hisactive spirits, that he slew him dead at his foot, and after swoonghim, terque quaterque Cas the poet says) about his head."

Thus, Green, Heywood's anti-theatrical contemporary, concludes that "the formthat consists in the Actor, is the parts they play,"l2 suggesting that the actor infact becomes the role he plays. Moreover, as Anthony Munday puts it, "are they[players] not cornmonlie such kind of men in their conversation, as they are inprofession? Are they not variable in hart, as they are in their part?"" Munday'srethorical, and let us add derogatory, questions presume that by playing differentroles the actor's own nature, penetrated by various role-playing, would belacking the principal virtue lauded throughout the Elizabethan era: constancy.For constancy resembles God, "with whom is no variableness, neither shadowof turning,"14 and thus it serves as a rule of how close or, for that matter,distanced one is from God. To change is to fall, or, as Barish puts it, "to reenactthe first change whereby Lucifer renounced his bliss and man alienated himselffrom the Being in whose unchanging image he was created."" Consequently,10 Peter Slallybrass, "Worn Worlds: Clothes and Identity of the Renaissance Stage," in MargrelaDe Grazia, Maureen Quilligan and Peter Slallybrass eds., Subject and Object in RenaissanceCuLture (Cambridge, 1996),306,310, quoted in Adrian Streete, "Reforming Signs: Semiotics,Calvinism and Clothing in Sixteenth-century England," Literature & History 12:1 (2003): 9.

" Thomas Heywood,An Apologyfor Actors (1612, l]lt. London: The Shakespeare Society, 1853),45." John Greene, A Refutation oft/U! Apologyfor Actors (London, 1615), 56, quoted in Reynolds 155.13 Barish 104.14 James 1.17.IS Barish 105. Barish, of course, notes that consistency is valued even in il1-doing, just aschangeability is despised even in virtue. As he says, "Queen Elizabeth's motto, Sempereadem, speaks only of the certainty with which she can be counted on to remain herself. Notof lhe nature of that self." Ibid. One should also nOle, that constancy is not merely a sixteenthcentury favored virtue, for it is precisely the resoluteness ofMilton's Satan not to "repent orchange" (PL 1.96) that makes him a celebrated champion with the poelS of Romanticism.


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the actor "becomes a lively image of fallen man, the one who renews the primaldegradation every day of his life, and so places himself beyond the pale."16

lt is here that we must turn back to Barish's explanation of the "passionateand obstinate nature" of the attack against the stage. So far I have shown thereasons why the stage was considered as a symbol of "irrational forcesthreatening chaos." Now, I will turn to its representation of "a deeply disturbingtemptation" which, according to Barish, "could only be dealt with by beingdisowned and converted into a passionate moral outrage."

The theater's tempting nature had already been voiced by Plato, in hisRepublic, when recounting Socrates' anti-theatrical discourse: "Its power tocorrupt, with rare exceptions, even the better sort is surely the chief cause foralarm" (605c).17 In a good natured way, Socrates illustrates the tempting forceof theater as follows:

Listen and reflect. I think you know that the very best of us, whenwe hear Homer or some other of the makers of tragedy imitatingone of the heroes who is in grief, and is delivering a long tirade inhis lamentations or chanting and beating his breast, feel pleasure,and abandon ourselves and accompany the representation withsympathy and eagerness, and we praise as an excellent poet the onewho most strongly affects us in this way ... (Rep. 605c-605d)

On a more hostile note, John Rainoldes, a fellow anti-theatricalist of Greene,voices the same seductive power of the stage-plays:

can wise men been perswaded that there is no wantonnesse in theplayers partes, when experience sheweth (as wise men haueobserved) that men are made adulterers and enemies of all chastityby coming to such plays? That senses are mooved, affections aredelighted, heartes though strong and constant are vanquished bysuch playes?'8

Although both Socrates and Rainolds see the "chief cause for alarm" in thefact that the stage-plays have effect even on hearts "strong and constant," it isin Rainolds that the affect of theater penetrates the observer and adulterateshislher nature. Thus, far from being merely self-destructing, the actor bringsBarish 105.

11 Plato, Republic. Plato in Twelve Volumes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969),Vols.5&6.John Rainoldes, Tit' Overthrow ofStagePJayers (London, 16(0), 18, quoted in Reynolds 155.


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ruin on his audience, too. In Anglo-phile Eutheo's words, "al other euilspollute the doers onlie, not the beholders, or the hearers ... Onlie the filthinessof plaies, and spectacles is such, as maketh both the actor & beholders gil tiealike."1' One would like to argue that the actor's guilt is far worse, for in hiscase, it is a conscious participation and molding, whereas the beholders, asReynolds argues, are affected unawares:

Typically, identity becomings are sometime partly consciousendeavors (such as those, perhaps, of actors, witches, andtransvestites), but they never actually or completely occur on purpose.People do not consciously submit to identity becomings, they areinfected by them; as Gosson says of the theatre's audience, "they thatcarne honest to a play, may depart infected." Like an infectiousdisease, identity becomings are an anti-rational, inspirational,contagion. They are the virus of the Devil, "or worse."20

Therefore, the audience is a victim of stage-players: they enter the theate:-"honest" but "depart infected" and "are made adulterers and enemies of aLchastity." But why would their virtues fall so easily as victims of stage-plays'Where, in the views of anti-theatricalsts, lies the "deeply disturbing temptationof the theater?

Chastity, constancy, temperance, and the likes are all forged against Olenatural tendencies, that are, like the actors, the images "of fallen men" which is precisely why the unrestricted representation of those tendencies 010stage has such a profound, and tempting appeal. When Socrates asks Glauco!:to consider whether it is reasonable to take pleasure and approve a conduct 0:a character in a play that would but in a personal conduct be shameful aneabominable, Glaucon's forceful negation of the question - "No, by Zeus, i:does not seem reasonable" (Rep. 605e) - is met with a surprising, tolerant anebenevolent explanation by his mentor of how the emotions stirred within usby the play are very much indeed reasonable:

If you would reflect that the part of the soul that in the former case,in our own misfortunes, was forcibly restrained, and that hashungered for tears and a good cry and satisfaction, because it is its

19 Anglo-phile Eutheo, A second and third blast of retrait from plaies and Theaters (London..1580, rpt. in W. C. Hazlitt ed., The English Drama and Stage Under the Tudor and Stuar;princess, 1543-1664 (London, 1869), 104, quoted in Tanya Pollard, "Beauty's PoisonousProperties." Shakespeare Studies 27 (1999): 199.

20 Reynolds 157.


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nature to desire these things. is the element in us that the poetssatisfy and delight, and that the best element in our nature, since ithas never been properly educated by reason or even by habit, thenrelaxes its guard over the plaintive part, inasmuch as this iscontemplating the woes of others and it is no shame to it to praiseand pity another who, claiming to be a goodman, abandons himselfto excess in his grief; but it thinks this vicarious pleasure is somuchclear gain, and would not consent to forfeit it by disdaining thepoem altogether. (Rep. 606a--606b)

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The pleasure one takes in beholding a character of a play in an excess of griefis but the pleasure of recognition of our own natural desire that hungers "fortears and a good cry and satisfaction" when met with a personal, off-stagecalamity. It is a vicarious pleasure for it satisfies our own need for satisfactionin the excesses of emotion that is denied in personal misfortune. Aristotle'snotion of dramatic catharsis as the purging of one's soul is built on the sameobservation. However, in contrast with Aristotle's opinion, Socrates and, evenmore forcibly, the anti-theatrical contemporaries of Shakespeare see in thisexperience not a liberating purification but an undermining force that "watersand fosters these feelings" of sex and anger, and all the appetites and pains andpleasures of the soul which accompany our actions when one's desiredonduct ought to be to dry them up. As a result, these rampant emotions areestablished "as our rulers when they ought to be ruled, to the end that we maybe better and happier men instead of worse and more miserable" (Rep. 606d)21

Having said this, the first thing that strikes the reader by surprise whenencountering Renaissance acting theory is the opposition between itsinstructions of acting and the effects the same acting produces in the audience.For whilst the anti-theatricalists attacked the theater and the players forfreeing inhibitions in the audience, Renaissance acting theory "tended toinstruct the actor not to free inhibitions but to foster them, to exert a controlover a far too easily stirred body."" "The Elizabethan actor had to work"' Socrates applies the same principle "to tbe laughable" for he says: "if in comic representations,or for that matter in private talk, you take intense pleasure in buffooneries that you wouldblush to practice yourself, and do not detest them as base, you are doing the same thing as inthe case of the pathetic? For here again what your reason, for fear of the reputation of buf-foonery, restrained in yourself when it fain would play the clown, you release in turn, and so,fostering its youthful impudence, let yourself go so far that often ere you are aware youbecome yourself a comedian in private" (Rep. 606c-606d).Anthony Dawson, "Perfonnance and participation," in Anthony Dawson and Paul Yachnin,The culture of PJaygoing in Shakespeare's London. A Collaborative Debate (Cambridge:Cambridge UP, ZOOl), 17.


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and afterwards imitates him keeping "the manner corrected with prudentmediocre":

Good name in man and woman, dear lord,Is the immediate jewel of their souls.Who steals my purse, steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands:But he that filches from me my good nameRohs me of that which not enriches himAnd makes me poor indeed. (III, iii, 154--159)

Interpreting Iago as an actor, with the rest of the cast put into the role of audience,one comes to understand why Iago "displays none of the passion that belong withresentment, sexual jealousy, or outraged honor."27 Successive generations ofcritics and scholars have wrestled with the question of Iago's motives and thereason why they "exhale flippancy instead of a passion equivalent to theirgravity"" and the question still seems to haunt new generations to come. Whilenot assuming all snfficiency to my answer, I do see in it an alternativeexplanation to Iago's much debated lack of satisfying motives that might settle atleast a few of the perplexing speculations concerning Iago. When, for example,Spivak notes that the multitude ofIago's motives "dilutes their seriousness" I cannot but recall Wright blaming the actors for the lack of seriousness, although hecommends the "perfection of their exercise."'9 Like a puzzle put together fromdifferent sources (i.e. observations) Iago's act is perfect, dominant, with apowerful effect, yet his motives - the pieces of the puzzle that serve the purposeof constructing the whole picture - do not pass the scrutiny of those who seek butto fmd real emotions and passions behind them. For his motives are shells"adequate enough in the abstract as motives theoretically sufficient"](} purged ofthe "excesse and exorbitant levitie" of passions.

However, Elizabethan acting did not only require a control over one'sbody, but also a hannony of conduct. Heywood in his Apology of Actorsinsists that "rethoricke" (and, drawing on a previously set parallel, acting, too)instructs man "to fit his phrases to his actions, and his actions to his phrases,and his pronounciation to them both"JI arguing thus, that playing, contrary tothe belief voiced by the anti-theatricalists, creates a unity of conduct. How27 Bernard Spivak, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, t958), 17.28 Spivak 7.29 Dawson 18 ..30 Spivak 7.]1 Thomas HeywOO


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ironic that Iago, being the only one in Othello to exhibit continuous controlover his passions, is, on the one hand a paragon of the values praised by theanti-theatricalists, and, on the other hand, the very epitome of their charges bypretending to be something other than he really is.

I t is, nevertheless, in the person of Othello that the undermining effect ofIago's playing of another is fully realized. In the beginning of the play, Othellois the true epitome of the values praised and propagated by the antitheatricalists. In Ludovico's retrospective description, Othello is "the nobleMoor" whom the full senate of Venice calls "all in all sufficient" and "whomnature could not shake" and "whose solid virtue / The shot of accident nor dartof chance / Could neither graze nor pierce" (IV, i, 264-268). Iago himselfclaims him to be of a "free and open nature, / That thinks men honest that butseem to be so" (I, iii, 398-399); an observation of his that will enable him tolead Othello tenderly by "th' nose / As asses are" cr, iii, 400--401). To explainOthello's fit of jealousy Honigmann in his introduction to Othello quotes JohnLeo's A Geographical Historie of Africa, where we read the followingaccount of the Moors: "No nation in the world is so subject vnto jealousy; forthey will rather leese [lose] their liues, then put vp any disgrace in the behalfeof their women."32 Leo's account would indeed give a sufficient explanationfor Othello's insane jealousy - of which he became a popular icon - were itnot for an interesting exchange between Emilia and Desdemona that putsOthello's jealousy in a quite different perspective:

EMILIA: Is he not jealous?DESDEMONA: Who, he? 1think the sun where he was bornDrew all such humours from him. (III, iv, 29-31)

This small exchange explains why Othello would, in his final apologia, wantto be remembered as "one not easily jealous" (V, ii, 343). Also, it should stopus from disregarding his claim as a mere delusion" and make us consider howsuch a change could, from an unmoving frrmness to a display of uncontrolledrage, be "wrought" in him to the surprise of all in the play. What makes himloose that perfect control that before no "shot of accident nor dart of chance /Could neither graze nor pierce"?Both Othello and Desdemona, the principal victims of Iago, are described

as being of "free and open nature" (in Desdemona's case of "so free, so kind,so apt, so blest disposition" [II, iii, 315]) and therefore vulnerable subjects of32 Arden Shakespeare 4.33 Kenneth Muir, "Introduction," in William Shakespeare, Othello (Harmondsworth, Middlesex,England: Penguin Books, 1971), 25.


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the actor's infectious acuvlty. When reading the anti-theatrical chargesattacking the stage, we should note that the "adulterating power" of the theatermostly has its effect on men and women described with similar terms. Thevictims of the plays are honest, chaste, pious, virtuous, etc. Not much concernis given to the possibility that the stage-play might change the nature of awhore, a transvestite, a drunkard or of an adulterer. The anti-theatricalists, ofcourse, do acknowledge the possibilities, and the occurrences of low-classprostitutes becoming, for example, "men" (female-to-male transvestitism);but those concerns are again expressed in the wider context of a fear that their"change" or, as Reynolds likes to call them, "identity becomings", will infectthe existing and fixed social order. There is also the view, expressed byReynolds, that "Confidence tricksters, pickpockets, beggars, and prostitutes... commonly operated within and near the theaters" and in a sense "theiroperations were theater, toO."34 In a way, these "social dissidents" wereunaffected by the theater, for they were already void of the very thing thattheater robs people of: the control exercised over the passions of their bodies.As I noted before, chastity, constancy, temperance, and the likes are all forgedagainst our natural tendencies, or, in other words, created by the control oneexercise over one's bodily passions. Othello and Desdemona both posses, orrather exercise some measure of control over, their bodily passions, and it isprecisely this control that Iago aims to erode."Most fascinating about Iago's scheming, however, is his echoing the verynotion of the anti-theatrical writers. The repeated argument against the actorsis their playing of another's part, for it violates the demand that "Every manmust show him self outwardly to be such as in deed he is."36 "Men should bewhat they seem," says Iago, "Or those that be not, would they seem none"(III, iii, 129-130). Iago's statement contains not just the demand to be seenoutwardly as one is, but also the uncompromising contempt, even thecondemnation, of those that do not confirm to this demand: "those that be not[what they seem], would they seem none [and thus be not at all]." Thisstatement, just as the declaration of the anti-theatricalists, does not allow fora stage-player who by role-playing seems everything but what he is.As the repeated anti-theatrical emphasis on the necessary harmonybetween inward truth and outward appearance did nothing to nullify thesuspicion that the anti-theatricalists nourished against what was seen on the"Reynolds 158.J j I am not elaborating on the case of Cassie, however, the same is applicable to him as well. Itis his control exercised in temperance that is atlacked by Iago. ''If I can fasten bm one cupupon him, I Whit that which he hath drunk: tonight already / He'lJ be as full of quarrel andoffence I As my young mistress' dog" (II, iii, 45-48)

J6 Stephen Gosson, Plays Confuted, in Kinney, Market ofBawdrie, 177, quoted in Barish 94.


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stage, so Iago's pinpointing the necessity of unity between what men are andwhat they seem to be, serves only to drive Othello's rising suspicion furtherinto restless contemplation:

IAGO: Men should be what they seem;Or those that be not, would they might seem none.OTHELLO: Certain, men should be what they seem.[AGO: Why, then, I think Cassia's an honest man.OTHELLO: Nay, yet there's more in this: ... (III, iii, 1129-133)

Othello's once "free and open nature, I that thinks men honest that but seem to beso" (I, ill, 393-4) is contaminated by lago. His freedom of discourse and relationis now heavily yoked by the doubt in what he sees. Whether this perceptual shiftin Othello - ignited by lago's insinuations - was fostered by the controversy ofhis own personality (outward blackness versus inward whiteness) is undoubtedlya question of interest; however, it is not in the focus of my paper. WhetherOthello's racial status played a role does not influence the fact that his perceptiondid undergo a disintegration of internal essence and outward appearance.However, the disintegration does not take place in an instant. Although not ableto trust his eyes anymore (the pestilence poured into his ear did not gounaffected), Othello still wages a war against his new perception; he still demandsan "ocular proof' (ill, iii, 363). "Make me to see't" (ill, iii, 367), cries Othello,wanting to discern "Her honour," which, according to lago, "is an essence that'snot seen" (IV, i, 16).

For Othello there is only one solution to his agony. "She's gone, I amabused, and my relief I Must be to loath her" (III, iii, 271-272). His moralindignation bears a semblance to that of the anti-theatrical writers, who, withBarish's words, perceive in the theater "a deeply disturbing temptation" thatshould be "disown" and the inclination that even the anti-theatricalsts feeltowards it (for none is exempt of its seductive power) should be converted"into a passionate morale outrage." By letting Desdemona live Othello wouldexpose himself to the temptation of being "fond over her iniquity," to whichIago tauntingly adds, "give her I patent to offend, for if it touch not you, itcomes near nobody" (IV, i, 194-195).

By drawing this parallel between Othello's rage and the moral indignationof the anti-theatrical writers I am not suggesting that Desdemona is arepresentation of a misjudged and innocently accused Elizabethan stage.:n Barish 127. The only instance of pretence in her behavior is at her arrival (0 Cyprus when

awaiting for the arrival of Othello she partakes in a banter with Iago ("I am nOl merry, but Ido begnile !The thing t am by seeming otherwise" (II, i, 122-123)).


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Especially, since Desdemona "exemplifies the total sincerity desiderated bythe moralists, the unswerving adherence to a single standard of behavior."37Actually, by making her the principal victim" of the play Shakespeareconfirms the most dreaded fear of the anti-theatrical writers: once the belief inabsolute sincerity, and thus in the concept of absolute identity, is underminedby the contaminating effect of stage players (in our case, rago) the wholestructure of their world - built on these very values - is coming crumbling tothe ground. It is a rather peculiar shift of irony that the very personrepresenting the merits of that world is charged with transgression of its lawsand therefore "extirpated" at the end of the play.

The very foundation of the drama and of Iago's deception is his disguiseinto something that he is not. raga's playing of another brings forth thechange, or rather the undermining ofOthello, who is the epitome of the stableand ordered self at the outset of the play. What makes things more interestingis that the "poison" that works the change in Othello contains the very notionsof the principle it attacks - like a reversed antidote that contains but in a smallmeasure the poison it tends to cure. Thus the tragedy of Othello - and, asReynolds argues, the "loss" of the anti-theatricalists repeatedly expressed intheir charges against the stage39 - is due to the same extent to the notionspraised by the proponents of anti-theatricality. For it is the concept of absoluteidentity that drives Othello to extremes - first to perceive rago as a "honestfellow," all white, and then to see Desdemona as a "strumpet" all "begrimedand black." His fall, and that of his beloved, is not due to his "trustful" nature,as Dostoevsky would call it, but to his persistence in regarding those aroundhim in unified colors of absolute identity. Thus, rather than being on oppositesides, anti-theatricality works hand in hand with deceit to bring fort thedestruction of its own values.

3& Although the play bears the name of Othello, it was not him that elicited the concern ofElizabethan playgoers. As much as his tragedy bears resemblance of his beloved (Othello isalso the picture of valor, and of unswerving adherence to a single standard of behavior to thepoint that it becomes the device of his tragedy) yet "the pity of the spectator was invoked bythe sight of Desdemona lying on the bed, and this was apparently the most moving part ofthe play." R. S. White, Innocent Victims. Poetic injustice in Shakespearean tragedy (London:The Athlone Press, 1986),77.

39 Reynolds 157.

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