Of feathered Cupid seel with wanton dullness I will your serious and great business scant
Othello desdemona free#
Nor to comply with heat, the young affectsīut to be free and bounteous to her mind.Īnd heaven defend your good souls that you think Vouch with me, heaven, I therefore beg it not Presumably by ‘rites’ Desdemona means consummation, rather than battle, and though Othello seconds her, he rather gratuitously insists that desire for her is not exactly hot in him: The rites for which I love him are bereft me, So that, dear lords, if I be left behind, It is the ardent Desdemona who requests that she accompany her husband:
Why was Othello reluctant, from the start, to consummate the marriage? When, in Act I, Scene iii, the Duke of Venice accepts the love match of Othello and Desdemona, and then orders Othello to Cyprus to lead its defense against an expected Turkish invasion, the Moor asks only that his wife be housed with comfort and dignity during his absence. I want to shift the emphasis from Bradshaw’s in order to question a matter upon which Iago had little influence. Bradshaw finds in this ‘a ghastly tragicomic parody of an erotic death,’ and that is appropriate for Iago’s theatrical achievement. When Othello vows not to ‘shed her blood,’ he means not only that he will smother her to death, but the frightening irony is there as well: neither he nor Cassio nor anyone else has ever ended her virginity. Unless Othello is merely raving, we at least must believe he means what he says: she dies not only faithful to him but ‘cold…Even like thy chastity.’ It is a little difficult to know just what Shakespeare intends Othello to mean, unless his victim had never become his wife, even for the single night when their sexual union was possible. This look of thine will hurl my soul from ehavenĪnd fiends will snatch at it. Now: how doest thou look now? O ill-starred wench, But Bradshaw is surely right to say that Othello finally testifies Desdemona died a virgin: Why did Othello marry anyway, if he does not sexually desire Desdemona? Iago cannot help us here, and Shakespeare allows us to puzzle the matter out for ourselves, without ever giving us sufficient information to settle the question. I join here the minority view of Graham Bradshaw, and of only a few others, but this play, of all Shakespeare’s, seems to me the most weakly misread, possibly because its villain is the greatest master of misprision in Shakespeare, or in literature. This certainly helps explain his murderous rage, once Iago has roused him to jealousy, and also makes that jealousy more plausible, since Othello literally does not know whether his wife is a virgin, and is afraid to find out, one way or the other. “Iago derides Othello’s ‘weak function’ that seems more a hint of Iago’s impotence than of Othello’s, and yet nothing that the Moorish captain-general says or does reflects an authentic lust for Desdemona. To continue on where we left off in my last post with Bloom:
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