Othello: A Study Commentary - Contents and Sample Section

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CONTENTS

Act One Scene One  

Commentary   

Overview:  other things to note 

The commentary above covers much of the scene’s detail. When you’re working close to the printed text like that, however, you can lose sight of the play…so it’s a good idea to step back and pay attention to some of the larger aspects of each scene before you move on. The headings below will help you do that – the first five represent common aspects of nearly all plays and novels, and much poetry.

Under this set of headings are notes on some of the significant features of Scene One. You may wish to look in the text for examples. You may also decide to make your own notes, under the same headings, on other things you think are important or interesting. 

Setting (‘where the story happens’. There are different kinds of setting – geographical, historical, social, economic, philosophical):

• The sense of place Shakespeare establishes, not by including physical details of Venice but by giving us some idea of what matters to people of importance (Brabantio and his family; the Senators) there.

Character (who the people in the story are and why they do what they do. Characterisation – the methods the dramatist uses to help us see his characters clearly – is also important):

• Iago: His cynicism and bitter cleverness, of course; but also his passion for principle, ‘the right way of doing things’. He is, surprisingly, a man of principle, who lives according to his own beliefs…particularly his belief in self-interest and the importance of controlling our own lives. He seems to enjoy upsetting Brabantio: is that a sign that he resents his success and power?

• Brabantio: In this scene just a functional  figure (outraged father of abused daughter)…but see how Shakespeare adds to him in the next two scenes.

• Roderigo: His wateriness…with the exception of his effective speech beginning line 119. Has Shakespeare in that speech slipped up a bit on the general rule that characters should be consistent in what they do and say? There are signs much later in the play that Roderigo does have some backbone.

Action (‘what happens’,  and the way the story is told):

• The early sense of foreboding to which Brabantio’s dream of something ‘not unlike’ (line 141) and Iago’s intensity both contribute.

•  The feeling that there are strong forces at work – within the characters and also in the world around them.

•  How Shakespeare prepares for future developments. He

- has laid the ground for the transfer of the action to Cyprus

- presents Cassio as a man (in Iago’s view) with less than a full understanding of how things ‘work’  in the world. When Cassio finds himself in a mess he turns readily, and fatefully, to others (Desdemona, Iago) for help

- notes (again through Iago, so we must be cautious) Othello’s pride and wilfulness

- foreshadows the central movement of the story. Just as Brabantio is transformed in this scene from a secure to a distraught father, so will Othello, also under Iago’s hand, be turned from a trusting husband into one who believes himself immensely betrayed. 

Style (the words and images characters and Shakespeare choose, and how they are put  together for particular purposes):

•  Iago’s language and its power to get others to move forward while he stands back

• The way sentence structure can convey state of mind. The words of the play will be spoken on stage, and their rhythms are very important.

•  The differing effects of poetry and prose

Themes (the recurrent ideas of the play, which become part of its pattern):

• A man’s worth (how we judge it)

• The importance of other people’s opinion of us (‘reputation’)

• Self-determination (deciding what we want for ourselves and making it happen)

• Deceitfulness (contriving to hide reality by appearances)

• Justice and accountability

• Human insecurities and desires (and how easy it is to play on them)

General (anything else of interest, particularly how the play works as a play):

Plays (mostly) tell stories. The stories begin with ‘situations’. People like their lives to be stable and as far as possible enjoyable. A situation arises when something happens to threaten stability or enjoyment. That something may have already taken place by the time the play begins, or it may occur during the opening scenes. The rest of the play tells the story of how the situation is resolved (the problem is sorted out) and stability, with the possibility of enjoyment, restored.

Go back a month or so before the opening of Othello. Venice is a wealthy and secure city-state. Brabantio is a proud father. Desdemona is a contented daughter (maybe). Othello is a successful professional. Iago is a soldier with a future. Roderigo is a hopeful lover.

Then the Turks threaten to attack Cyprus, a part of the Venetian commercial empire. Iago is passed over for promotion. Brabantio and Roderigo both lose Desdemona to Othello. Problems!

Do the problems have much in common? No, but they interlock. Brabantio will look to the State to help him with his problem by punishing Othello, but Venice needs Othello to solve theirs. Iago will try to use bits of everybody else’s problem (Brabantio’s anger, Roderigo’s pain, Venice’s troubles in Cyprus) to work on his – which at this point in time seems to be simply the need to get his own back on Othello.  

In this interlocking of problems we begin to see the shape of the situation, which is what we call the plot of the play (as opposed to its action, which is just what happens in it).

Student Response

The class are already held by elements in the story. They have focussed readily on Iago’s nastiness and Roderigo’s foolishness, and have been quick to identify the examples of prejudice and racism. There have been some sideways glances: they are themselves from a mixture of backgrounds, and some eyebrows have been raised at Roderigo’s ‘thick-lips’ and at the way Iago uses Othello’s African-ness against him. They don’t immediately see, though, that Shakespeare’s interest in the racist elements in the situation would have been startlingly new to those of his audience who picked up on it. (Shakespeare made more of the matter than the writer from whom he borrowed the tale; and the idea of a black man as a ‘good’ man would have been unusual in the literature of the time.) This has led to a discussion on how our response to a piece of literature is partly determined by our own situation. I’ve given them sight of a typical examination essay question (with some slight modifications it could be an IB, A Level or AP question):  

‘Plays take us into worlds different from our own, but must have something to say about issues of importance in the world to which we, the audience, will return.’ 

  Show how issues relevant to today’s world have been raised in plays you have studied.  

Here we have a play, Othello, written almost exactly four hundred years ago (its first production may have been in 1602) which raises a very live social issue of our time. We need to be careful when we read or watch the play that we don’t see the theme of racism as more central than Shakespeare intended it to be. 

As an extension of that we should be aware of Shakespeare’s overriding compassion for man in all of his forms – even his prejudiced ones…and the misshapen ones like Caliban in The Tempest. Does he have any sympathy at all for the morally bent Iago? We’ll ask that question at the end of the play.

There are even more intimate links with the class’s own lives. Some of the girls have already seen connections between Brabantio’s restrictive attitude towards Desdemona and their own experiences (several of them are from traditional Asian backgrounds). We’ve discussed whether there is satire in Shakespeare’s representation of Brabantio as a possessive parent whose values are predominantly commercial and who may have lost his daughter by trying too hard to keep her. The class will soon be studying Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. That play attacks The American Dream and tells the story of how a father alienates his elder son by trying to force a way of life on him. Is Othello in some small way an attack on ‘The Venetian Dream’? If it begins as such, the issue is soon swallowed up by larger ones. 

We need to be careful in any case not to squeeze the text too hard for significance. Afya has pointed out that references to Hell and the Devil are common enough in everyday speech: why then, she has asked, do we see Iago’s use of them as revealing? Good question; and the only answer we can give is that it’s the frequency of his use of them which suggests that Shakespeare was trying to make connections in his audience’s mind. What I’ve called ‘over-reading’ remains a danger when we study any text in detail.