PASSION PLAY:

OTELLO, AN INTRODUCTION TO A PRAYER

by

M.C. GARDNER

 In Harold Bloom's SHAKESPEARE, THE INVENTION OF THE HUMAN, we find:

 … the worship of Shakespeare ought to be even more a secular religion than it already is. … After Jesus, Hamlet is the most cited figure in Western consciousness; no one prays to him, but no one evades him for long either.

Verdi felt the same conviction for the protagonist of a different play. "Otello" is an opera of dark passion and spiritual sublimity. The librettist / composer, Boito felt daunted by the scale of it. He took his libretto to the retired elder statesman of Italian opera. Only a masterpiece of the highest order could, once again, tempt Verdi to scale the floorboards of La Scala. He knew that only the loftiest of themes and the greatest of his tragic scores would justify a return to the stage. The inclusion of an Ave Maria, not found in Shakespeare, suggests that Verdi and Boito thought the tragedy, as well, a Passion Play.

 There is strong evidence that Shakespeare's tragedy is a secular reenactment of events that unfolded fifteen centuries before he again took up the theme.  Nietszche said that there was only one Christian -- and that he died on the cross.  One needs not be Christian to be moved by the Christian myth or to use it as a subtext in one's art.

 In the year of Shakespeare’s birth, Michelangelo died while working on the marble of his final masterpiece - the Rondindini Pieta. With it he pared away the final months of his life and, as well, any hint of musculature and flesh on the bodies of Mary and the dead Christ. The Rondindini Pieta is a valediction to his art and life. He had sculpted the quintessence of spirit from the intransigence of stone – and then he died.

 By stressing the purity of Desdemona’s spirit over the confused exigencies of Othello’s flesh, Shakespeare, as well, sculpted an essence as pure as that which the sculptor had earlier hewn from the stone.  Desdemona is the most completely spiritual character that the poet would ever pen. She is a counterpart to Michelangelo’s pieta – but here Shakespeare accomplishes the double miracle of implying the divinely sensual Desdemona to be both the mother of God and the sacrificed son, lovingly cradled in her arms.

 Shakespeare’s “negative capability,” (his ability to disappear within the consciousness of his characters) makes any inference as to his own beliefs a dubious enterprise.  However, the sentiments of Shakespeare’s clowns do, in the very least, offer ironic commentary on facets of his drama.

 At the beginning of Act III we have such a clown.*. It is not off-point to see, at the first, he speaks the merest burlesque. He disdains a musician’s art as: “wind instruments that speak to the nose.” Yet, in a masterpiece of this magnitude we should be suspect of any passage found by the critics to be of “little consequence.” 

 Othello has sent the clown to dismiss the musicians:  

Clown:   But, masters, here’s money for you; and the general so likes your music that he desires you, for love’s sake, to make no more noise with it.

Musician:  Well, sir, we will not.

Clown: If you have any music that may not be heard, to’t again.  But, as they say, to hear the music,  the general does not really care.

Musician: We have none such, sir.

Clown: Then put up your pipes… for I’ll away. Go vanish into air, away!

 If we follow the hint of a   “music that may not be heard,” we need look no further to the harmony which Othello is thwarted from enjoying -- the music of Desdemona. Shakespeare takes pains to keep the action at a frenzied “unconsummated’ sexual pitch. This ratchets up the tension but, as well, brings to mind the unconsummated union of Mary and Joseph, as related in the Gospels.

 Other hints are scattered throughout the text. The first (and not the least telling) is the first word that Iago utters: “’Sblood.”  Taken from Iago, simply an expletive tossed off to Roderigo, but from the lexicon of the Elizabethan, ‘sblood is a contraction of “God’s blood.”

 Where might the trail of God’s blood lead us in a drama about the murder of innocence?  Most readers of the play believe Desdemona to be killed by suffocation – either strangulation or beneath a pillow.  But within a line of the stage direction: “He smothers her,” we have Othello asking three questions.

          What noise is this? Not dead? Not quite dead?

And,

I that am cruel am yet merciful. I would not have thee linger in thy pain. So, so.

How he attempts to end her pain, in the interval of that “So, so,” is the point of conjecture. Goddard believes he stabs her with the same instrument with which he ends his own life. For purposes of these reflections I ask the reader to remember another solider, a Centurion who pierced the side of a fabled innocent nailed upon plank before him. For if Christ takes the sins of the world upon himself in Gethsemane , so, as well, does Desdemonda, upon her deathbed.

  In answer to Emilia’s impassioned query,

 "Who hath done this deed?"

 Desdemonda responds,  

"Nobody – I myself. "  

And as Christ concludes his agony with:

 "Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit,"

 so also,  Desdemona concludes her own with,

 "Commend me to my kind lord. O, farewell."

 The stage direction: [She dies.], follows immediately. God’s blood, indeed.

 Othello’s own judgment, of her murder, is usually read from the Quarto,

 "One whose hand, like the base Indian, threw a pearl away richer than his tribe."

  But the folio reading is,   

 "One whose hand, like the base Judean, threw a pearl away richer than his tribe."

 This allusion to Judas, taken with: “I kissed thee ere I killed thee,” is as exact a parallel to a subtext as any found in Shakespeare. The play is, of course, larger than any schemata attempting to elucidate its mysteries. But Shakespeare, more than any major writer, was drawn to the mystery of consciousness and so became a master of it.  He knew that there was nothing good nor bad but thinking makes it so – yet Macbeth sups full of horrors. Ghosts, witches and portents are restive in the wings and at any moment the wild mares of night might trample forth from gapping fissures found in earth or mind. Hamlet ponders the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns. Falstaff babbles of green fields as death climbs from foot to knee to thigh, and the doctor in Macbeth remarks that Lady Macbeth’s inability to wash the blood from her hands needs “more the divine than the physician.” These beliefs belong to their characters, they are the manifest of their consciousness.

 Of what consciousness did Shakespeare imbue Desdemona? Speaking of her, after relating tales of his adventures, Othello says

 "She wished heaven had made her such a man."

  It is only when we remember that Shakespeare delights in commingling the sexes (of his more highly evolved characters) that the second meaning of her wish emerges.

 "She wished heaven had made her such a man."

 This under-meaning is thrown in greater relief by Othello’s exclamation, greeting her upon arrival from the storm:

 "O my fair warrior!"

  Each speaks to an otherworldly strength, as much beyond gender as Christ was believed to be beyond mortality. The correspondence between the one tale and the other is purely allusive, but its cumulative effect grows with each reading. It might seem a stretch to suggest that Desdemona’s “Nobody, I myself” is shorthand for Christ’s atonement.  

We are prepared for this alignment at an earlier juncture in the text. In Act 4 Scene 1

 Desdemona speaks of her desire to reconcile Othello with Cassio:

 "I would do much T’atone them."  

Over hearing this, Othello rages atonement’s exact opposite:  

"Fire and brimstone!”

 He then calls her a devil and  strikes her to the floor and repeats the charge:

 "O Devil, Devil!"

 Act 4 Scene 2 is one of the most psychologically devastating in the world’s literature. In it, as he does in the 3^rd act of the opera, Othello considers his wife’s claim of innocence:

" Is it possible?"

 Desdemona grasps at the hope inherent in his seeming doubt of  infidelity has proclaimed.  She exclaims,

 "O heaven, forgive us!"  

She then melts before the prospect of their reconciliation. In his,

 " I cry you, mercy then."

 Desdemona believes that heaven has granted light to their love’s renewal. But it was a feint and a false hope. The complete line reads:

 "I cry you mercy then, I took you for the cunning whore of Venice ,   

   that married with Othello."

  He then tosses coins in her face as payment for the pleasures he imagines she shared with Cassio. In the episode that follows Shakespeare explores another of his psychological reversals. Desdemona unknowingly, summons the one person responsible for her misfortunes. At the nadir of her consciousness she confronts Shakespeare’s greatest villain at the absolute height of his - she summons Iago. The ever-voluble Iago is, here, near speechless in the face of her beauty and pain.  Far from being a whore, she can not even speak the word.  She asks Iago: “Am I that name?"

 The “good” incapable of utterance and “evil” rendered mute by the purity of its flame. It is a prelude of his final silence. The defeat of the Turbaned Turk begins here.  In the face of this “fair warrior” he can barely link words together in a phrase: “What is the matter, lady?” and “What name, fair lady?’  His, “Do not weep, do not weep,” suggests something of her affect upon him.  She calls him “good friend” and kneels before him as Christ had knelt before Pilate. 

 And when Emilia proclaims some cozening slave, to get office, has devised the slanders under which she suffers, Desdemona replies: “If any such there be, heaven pardon him.” Only on Calgary do we find anything of its equal. And only in a desert temptation do we find the equal of Desdemona’s

 "Beshrew me if I should do such a wrong for the whole world."

That is her strength and the world’s hope.  The Roman Empire learned that of Christ. The British Empire learned it of Gandhi. The reader learns it again, of Desdemona at the end of Act 4 as she concludes:

 "Good night, good night. Heaven me, such uses send, not to pick bad from bad but by bad mend."

 In Act 5, Othello pronounces Desdemona to be on her deathbed, her  “banish me, my lord, but kill me not,” echoes the  “Father, let this cup pass from my lips” of the Gospels. Othello confirms her fate, “Thou art to die.” Desdemona replies: “Then Lord have mercy on me.”  And Othello concludes:   “I say amen.”  In those three words Othello has usurped heaven and found himself at the center of Dante’s frozen hell. The “I say amen” is also the Christian God confirming that the cup shall not pass from the lips of the anointed one. Othello tells Desdemona that her death is not a murder, but a sacrifice.

 Near the end of Act 4 Scene 3, Desdemona speaks again of atonement. If we remember that atonement means “at one ment,” that through God’s grace, mental separateness, which is the prerogative of passion and sin, is resolved in the “at one ment” of Divine union, we shouldn’t be surprise to hear Desdemona declare, in the final hour of her life:

 "All’s one. Good Father how foolish are our minds. "

 And then to Emilia,

"If I do die before, prithee, shroud me in these same sheets. "

 Here Shakespeare and Verdi follow with the pathos and resignation of the “Willow Song.” Following it, Verdi provides the prayer that Othello only inquires about in the play: “Hath thou prayed tonight?” Desdemona’s,  “Ay, my Lord” precedes her murder.

 In the opera, however, Verdi desires that we hear the music that “may not be heard,” requested by the clown in Act 3.  Mayhaps, had Othello heard Desdemona’s transcendental prayer, his “I say amen,” might have been the benediction to a far different play. Here now, is Susana Montal's performance of “Ave Maria,” from Verdi’s “Otello.” 

Ave Maria

(Sound File Available only on a PC)

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* I am indebted to Professor Harold C. Goddard for directing my thoughts to the deserving, though much neglected, clown of the third act. We differ in the direction the unheard music leads us, but his reading of Shakespeare remains one of the most humane and provocative of the last century.