Othello's last words

With William Shakespeare, we speakers of English can boast of the greatest author who ever lived — immensely creative in his language; a many-minded genius who could, like Dante, achieve four or five ends simultaneously in a single line; a dramatist whose plots are webs of intricacy and interrelationships, and whose sense of the dramatic moment is unsurpassed; and a creator of characters of such variety that only Charles Dickens can approach him. Think about the four plays that people say are his greatest tragedies, and think about their central figures, each of whom dies in the last moments of the play.

Macbeth is ambitious, open to temptation, appalled by evil but courting it also, “supping with horrors,” so that in the end his death feels to us like ridding the world of a virulent disease. King Lear is old and foolish, but also noble-minded, impetuous, “every inch a king,” so that we understand why the good Earl of Kent would disguise himself to continue to serve the master he loves, even after Lear has banished him from the realm. Hamlet is the intellectual caught in his trains of thought, the student from the University of Wittenberg, a schemer, yet one to whom things happen rather than who makes things happen; certainly more admirable than his murdering uncle, King Claudius, but less of a ruler. And then we have Othello, open-hearted, a man of action, intelligent, well-spoken, deferent to his superiors in Venice but never fawning, one who has seen and done and suffered much, and who has lived most of his life on the boundary between a world of civil law and a world of imperial autocracy or outright savagery — between Venice and the Turk, or pirates on the high sea. Of all four, I feel sorriest for Othello, wrought upon by that cold brain of evil, Iago, to suspect his wife Desdemona of adultery with his friend and military adjutant, Cassio. He loses his mind with jealousy, though he has shown no inclination that way, not before Iago works him over. He smothers her, and only afterwards is told that it was all a lie — he has given away his whole life for nothing, even less than nothing.

In our entry this week for the word pearl, I wrote about the “pearl of great price,” to which Jesus compares the kingdom of God. You would give everything up for that pearl, as the merchant did, who sold all he had to obtain it. In the speech that serves as our Poem of the Week, Othello compares himself to “the base Indian” who threw away a pearl worth all his tribe. That’s as one text has it, but another has this variant, which I prefer — “the base Judean.” Indians fish for pearls, but we’re not sure what Indian our poet has in mind; or maybe he was thinking of the Indians of the Americas, who might not know how valuable a pearl could be. But if it’s the “base Judean,” then I think we’ve got a possible candidate, quite a specific one. It would be Judas. He threw away the pearl of great price, and if you ask what that pearl was, those singers for Fisk University that we mentioned yesterday could tell you: Give Me Jesus, they sang.

Poor Othello knows what he has done, and in his despair he cannot imagine forgiveness. He knows that the Venetian councilors, who in the play are presented as capable men who govern by law, will try him and find him guilty of a capital crime. He is called “the Moor of Venice,” meaning the Arab of Venice, or the Moroccan of Venice, or, what he really is in fact, the Mauritanian of Venice. He is not a Muslim. He is a baptized Christian, baptized somewhere along the way of his life of adventures and mishaps, for Othello never had a calm and clear childhood and youth. He is, for all that he has been tempted into savage jealousy masking itself as justice, loyal to Venice. So he begs the Venetians, when they return to the city, neither to exaggerate nor extenuate his crimes, and to feel some pity for a man who “loved not wisely, but too well.”

Christian Koehler, “Othello with His Sleeping Wife,” 1859

And in his final words, he becomes both the Venetian and the Turk, the vindicator of the state and the traducer of the state, the faithful Christian and the Saracen; judge, executioner, and victim all at once. For he still has the means to enact that final judgment. Whether you view it as suicide or condign punishment, despair or submission to justice, whether you believe it portends a loss of all hope for this noble soul, or you believe there is yet something in Othello that has not thrown away the pearl of great price — not Desdemona do I mean here, but the Kingdom of God — you must acknowledge the power of the scene. That power depends on our accepting a couple of things as fact: Desdemona, pure and guileless and loyal, was worth all the rest of Othello’s world; and the Kingdom of God is the one pearl for which you would give up everything, so that to lose it is to lose your own soul.

Our passage begins with the words of Lodowick, a young and upright emissary from Venice to war-threatened Cyprus, where these terrible deeds have taken place. Lodowick is speaking to Othello. The “slave” who will be punished with torment is Iago the villain. Lodowick intends to defer Othello’s trial to Venice and her senators, Venice being presented as the realm of law and order. Othello then replies. The body of Desdemona lies in view.

LODOWICK. You must forsake this room, and go with us:
Your power and your command is taken off,
And Cassio rules in Cyprus.  For this slave,
If there be any cunning cruelty
That can torment him much and hold him long,
It shall be his.  You shall close prisoner rest,
Till that the nature of your fault be known
To the Venetian state.  -- Come, bring away.

OTHELLO.  Soft you! -- a word or two before you go.
I've done the state some service, and they know it;
No more of that.  I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice: then you must speak
Of one that loved not wisely, but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Judean, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinal gum.  Set you down this:
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog
And smote him -- thus.  [Stabs himself]

LODOWICK.  O bloody period!
GRAZIANO.                                   All that's spoke is marred.

OTHELLO.  I kissed thee ere I killed thee; no way but this,
Killing myself, to die upon a kiss.  [Falls upon Desdemona; dies]

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