APUNTS SHAKESPEARE

SHAKESPEARE CONTEXT
The renaissance vs the early modern period
Renaissance → late 14th c in Italy, and late 15th/ early 16th to early 17th in England.
Renaissance means rebirth, revival of arts, culture under classical models.

Humanism: the study of humanities. There’s a shift from the importance of God to the
importance of individuals.
Classical scholarships on the classics.
The Renaissance as a movement of Christian humanism.
Translating the Bible.
Cultural and technical innovation was an ideological and scientific change.
Gradual disappearance of feudalism, beginning for enclosure, land ownership/tenancy.

Modern structured society.

Discovery of Ocean trade routes beyond Europe.

Astronomical discoveries.
Renaissance literary influences:
1. Petrarch’s sonnets: topics of mistress, subjectivity. Influential in 16th c.
2. Baldassare Castiglione, Il Cortegiano and the ideal renaissance man.
3. Niccolo Machiavelli’s, Il Principe: pragmatic approach to self-advancement and
politics.

The Elizabethan era was the height of the English Renaissance.

Technological and cultural motivation:
● First commercial purpose-built playhouses.
● Printing press.

1560-1642 → more than 3000 plays written.

The Early Modern period

Neutral term to go to the modern period.
The inception of practice and beliefs that are more modern. This is a nation state, middle
classes, nuclear family, capitalism and a modern sense of selfhood.

Two visions for Renaissance

1. J. Burckhardt. The renaissance man was the triumph of individuality, the “all-sided”
man, confident self-will and self-assertion.
2. S. Greenblatt. Individuals are inescapably shaped by cultural institutions, such as
family, religion and state.
*Subject. The ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society.

Proto-modern subjectivity. Insecurity, fragmentation and self-awareness.

THE REFORMATION
Radical rupture, priesthood of all believers.
16th c → Martin Luther
Justification by faith and predestination.

Mary I (1553-1558) → Extreme Catholic

Elizabeth I (1558-1603) → Anglican
James I/VI (1603-1625) → Anglican

SHAKESPEARE TIMES
Manufacturing, commerce and geographical discoveries: sense of national identity.
Social hierarchy
Social mobility: the malcontent
Death, disease and violence
The plague
Violent spectacles, public punishments and executions
Little education
Patriarchal society

SHAKESPEARE LIFE (1564-1616)

The Renaissance or the Early Modern Period
Elizabeth I on the throne (1559-1603) → James I of England / VI of Scotland (1603-1625).

Born in a commercial town.

Middle class
Language of instruction: Latin. Learning about the classics.
Elizabethan protestantism.
Class and gender are essential
Women were not allowed to enter the theatre until 1660 (worked).
1558-1592: Last years
1592 → actor and dramatist in London theatre
1994 → Lord Chamberlain’s men: theatre company

ACTOR + PLAY WRITER + THEATRE OWNER

1603 → company become The King’s men
Blank Verse (“iambic pentameter”)

*Conspiracy about the existence of Shakespeare, it is thought that there were many writers
writing Shakespeare novels.

APPROACHING SHAKESPEARE NOW

Origins of tragedy
- Ancient Greece
- Scapegoat?
- The hero as a scapegoat: a sacrifice to remove sins and so appease the gods
- Redemption

Aristotle and tragedy

- 384-322 BC
- Is an imitation of an action that is serious
 - A tragedy portrays a serious, complete and important action in an artistic way
- Suffering from: so,e fatal flaw or frailty of personality
- the hero moves from ignorance to knowledge (recognition)
- The tragedy arouses pity and fear to the spectator, and succeeds in purging and
purifying such emotions

Liberal humanism
Critical school on Shakespeare and literature in general.
tragedy “a story of exceptional suffering and calamity that leads to the death of the hero”.
Tragic hero: a high-degree man, a unique, but flawed individual often in conflict with himself.
Representative of the “human condition” or of “man” at large, a universal identity and
essence.

The tragic universe: A metaphysical or transcendent moral order.

The tragic ending and closure

Massive convulsion (conflict, chaos and disorder)
Return to harmony
Reconciliation
Restoration of spiritual unity in the hero
Healing and redemption sense
Purpose of tragedy: reconcile us to pain and suffering. Therapeutic cleansing of the
emotions by making us accept pain and suffering without bitterness or rebellion.

Implications
Tragic hero as a coherent, unitary essence: eternal, unchanging.
Tragedy as ahistorical: divorce between tragedy and history. Also separate from divisions of
gender, race and class.
A Christian/ religious type of criticism.
Reading for coherence and unity.

CULTURAL MATERIALISM
Opposing liberal humanism.
Based on Raymond Williams.

“State tragedy”: the historical focus.

Dealing with historical and social individuals, whose identities and conflicts are constituted
by specific social, political, economic and cultural forces.
Not universal but affected by specific structures of domination.
The human subject as the ideological product of the relations of power in a society.
Proto-modern subjectivity: fracture/ alienation/ insecurity.
Causes of suffering and conflict are socially and historically contingent or specific.

Jacobean tragedies: examining power structures, and the systems of belief supporting them.
Dealing with religious, political and gender conflicts.

Dissidence, containment and faultliness

Jacobean tragedies challenging, interrogating, subverting the contemporary structures of
domination.
Containment instead of liberation.
Power structures exposed.

Subjectivity, “character” and tragedy

Personal identity as discontinuous, discoherent and contradictory.
Critique of the idealist reading of character as a depoliticised ahistorical, humanist
subjectivity.

Reading questions
Cultural materialism is a critique of Shakespeare tragedies criticizing the dominant
institutions that affect the individual.

IDEALISM vs. CULTURAL MATERIALISM

Dollimore and Sinfield
Transformation of the social order.
Being critical about which theoretical perspective is used.
The text is central.
Political approach when criticizing.
Defend our position in the reading.

Tragedy in Early Modern England

Major influence of Seneca.
Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville , Gordbobuc (1565).
Thomas Kyd, The Spanish tragedy (1592).

HAMLET (1600-1601)
Play about revenge, political corruption, life and death.

PREPARATION > RISE > CLIMAX > FALL > CONCLUSION

→ Climax is on the Act 3, the play in the play is going to confirm that Claudius is a murderer.

HAMLET, PROVIDENTIALISM AND EARLY MODERN SOCIO-POLITICAL THEORY

Romantic approach to Hamlet
An idealist/traditional one
Concentrated on character
Discovery of inner self
Individual: human condition at large
*excess of thinking
A real, rounded, complete person
Cultural materialism
Not character but history interest

Providentialist view of the world

Providentialism: a belief that came from the middle ages.
Universe organized in a hierarchy:
1. GOD
2. angels
3. man
4. higher animals
5. lower animals
6. plants
7. minerals
8. four elements

The source of power:

- power/authority
- order
- justice
- meaning/being/identity

Strict analogy (correspondence):

- level of state
- level of the family

Elizabethan theory of kingship

Level of state
God, the head of the universe.
King, the head of the socio-political hierarchy.
*The body politic (Barker)

Captured crucial aspects of Tudor absolutist power.

Every member:
- essential bond
- specific place
- meaning/ being/ identity defined by position

→ People granting power to the king

(identity is given by the position in society)

Level of family
Father: head of the family
Conclusions:
- god/ king/ father
- obedience and submission
- no rebellion/ no challenge of authority
- extremely conservative ideology
- extremely patriarchal doctrine
Idealist account of providentialism
Harmonious ideology, smoothly operating, unchallenged

PLAY
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are spies of Claudius. (Act 3 body metaphor).
Providentialism.
Hamlet is seen as a tragedy of body and mind.

ACT 2
Identity is given by the position in society.
Hierarchy.
Claudius calls Hamlet father, my brother to legitimize himself as the new King. (i’m the new
king= message)
Plurale maiestatis.
The situation is delicate so Clauddius needs to be careful inorder to be accepted as the king.
The discourse is about a lot of different things: brother, marriage, Denmark, enemies,
family…

When he talks to Hamlet he does it in a way to get the affection of Hamlet. He wants to have
him by his side. Hamlet refuses to have the role of Claudius' son. He says although you
married my mother you’re not my dad.

Hamlet is looking for his identity, his subjectivity, consciousness and interiority. This is inner
essential truth, rejecting playing the role of Clauidu’s son.

Hamlet is a modern view of subjectivity.

Metaphor with the flute and Hamlet, meaning that he is empty. Failure of subjectivity.

IDENTITY: A HISTORICALLY= PREMATURE SEARCH FOR INTERIORITY

Body politic
Bodily metaphors.
The play’s corporal imagery.

Identity
Defined externally
Subjectivity, consciousness, interiority
Inner essential truth
Roles Hamlet has to play: courtier, son revenger, lover, politician

REVENGE THEORY
The ghost and the play within the play.
Generic codes: In English Renaissance drama a ghost’s presence on the use of a play
within the play is known as Revenge theory.

Ghost = source of authority and justice. Problematised because there is ambiguity.

Makes Hamlet decide whether to kill Claudius or not, so he has to challenge patriarchal
authority.

Crisis of authority in late Elizabethan times.

Theory of Kingship: obedience and submission to the king’s authority.
Hamlet rejects the external, providentialist definition of identity.
Hamlet transformation is more important than the plot because there is an internalization of
disobedience.

Hamlet:
- a socially marginal role
- a subversive potential
- more autonomy
- more alienated from the body politic
- protecting his subjectivity
- perceived by those inside the system as madness

Claudius: illigitimate head

Hamlet believes what the ghost tells him. He shows submission to the Ghost.
Hamlet is fulfilling his position in the body politic and the family body.

He calls Claudius a beast and that he did incestus, calling him a serpent.
Tormenting flames, walk through the night: Ghost in purgatory. He is in purgatory because
he committed fault crimes that can’t have redemption for them.

Kill the King = Decapitate the state

Fake madness.
Hamlet’s delay:
- Man of reflection (problem).
- He decides not to kill him in church because he will go to heaven.
- He wants to confirm that Claudius killed his father.

He doesn’t hesitate when killing Polonius.

Hamlet’s delay is a search for a different definition of identity.

“TO BE OR NOT TO BE”, SOLILOQUY

Hamlet rejects both identities.

Insinuation of ending one’s life (suicide).

There’s an afterlife.
Corruption of the world.
A lot of negative aspects of existence.

Hamlet is in a state of confusion (marriage of his mum and the Ghost, Ophelia.
Meaning of the soliloquy: suicede, revenge.
It is shown with a question.

He asks himself if he should fight against life difficulties: sea of troubles.

“To die, to sleep, no more” he wants to die, and die is just a peaceful sleep.

Dreaming is related to the afterlife.

Synonym of death = quietus, bodkin (weapon like a dagger).
Death is an undiscovered land where no traveller has returned.
Conscious thinking prevents action to take revenge. Thos reflection helps him not to go and
kill Claudius.
Contrasts, repetitions.
Modern subject (intention to be it)
References to Seneca (indirectly)

SUBVERSION OR CONTAINMENT?
ACT V
Both the text and its protagonist retreat from the abyss of a unique but empty subjectivity.
- The play goes back to a revenge tragedy (act I act V)
- The middle of the play is alternative systems of government and notions of identity.

Hamlet discards his ”antic disposition”.

He is reabsorbed into the limits of the body politic.
- Leaves aside the concept of identity to follow consciousness.
- Hamlet returns to Denmark. He stops the research of identity and the fake of
madness.

Hamlet becomes the man of action.

- Madness is a rejection of the identity: until Act V where he takes the roles the body
politic gives him and he becomes the man of action instead of the man of reflection.
With this has his revenge.

Action:
● jumps into Ophelia’s grave
● challenges Laertes
● plots R and G death
● fights Laertes and kills Claudius

- Is sad because the only identity he has chosen is madness and he has to renounce
it.
He inserts himself again into the traditional, Christian providentialism view of the world.
Revenge: inder of autonomy, manifestation of her inferiority, sign of submission to the ghost.

He doesn’t decide to kill Claudius, because he followed his father’s commands.

HAMLET’S DEATH
Extinction of his problematic subjectivity + replacement by the soldier- prince Fortinbras:
simulacrum of Hamlet = Impossibility of the text’s project to give a voice to a new, modern
subjectivity.

The promised interiority is offered and once again deferred.

Hamlet gives his dying voice to Horatio and to Fortinbras.

- Interiority at the subject appears in his last words.

- He asks Horatio to tell his story to know what was inside of him.
- hamlet speaks all the time during the play but at the end he stops.
 - Fortinbras doesn’t tell the story of Hamlet nor does Horatio.

FORTINBRAS: A simulation of Hamlet

Both Hamlet and Fortinbras have lost their fathers and must avenge their death.
Fortinbras plunges straightaway into his role/identity as dutiful son and revenge whereas
Hamlet rejects his role/identity.

Alternative system of government where people could choose those in power (challenging).
A new notion of identity.
The play ends in containment but some things are subversions.
Is a transitional text written on the threshold of the moment.

HAMLET, GENDER AND SEXUALITY

Subordination of women
In Early modern England, marriage, woman, family, gender and sexuality were patriarchal
systems.
Medieval type of family to a nuclear family. This came with more restrictions on the woman’s
role and her behaviour.
Women had no Renaissance.
Impact of protestantism, to appear to be more tolerant with the role of sexuality in women
than catholicism.

● celibacy: absent of sexual relation

● liberated posibility that tolerated sex within marraige
● at first looked more permissive but in reality it wasn’t

Double standard
Problem: women inferior to men
Fundamental rules for women to follow:
- virginity when they were young
- fidelity when they were in a marriage
- chastity when they were widows

Modesty was another rule.

All those rules needed to be followed, if not they were demonized and punished.

Gertrude
Adultery and Incest.
Rose is a symbol of chastity (is disappearing)
Gertrude is seen with an irrational unbounded sexuality.
The vocabulary reflects the sexual activity of Gertrude.

Gertrude is in a n under position, she is sitting on the bed, whereas Hamlet is not sitting
anywhere, he is in a higher position. Submission and inferiority.
Gertrude gives aside this sexuality that has been attributed to her.

Bed is the image of marriage.

An obedient, submissive woman.
Gertrude’s interest in Hamlet and Claudius satisfying her. She tries to accommodate them.
She makes the toast in order to disobey Claudius, because she drinks whereas Claudius
told her not to, but the punishment for disobedience was immediate because he was
poisoned when drinking and then dies. The problem is that no matter a woman’s position
she is not going to do more than sitting beside a man.

Early modern life rules:

1. chastity
2. modesty
3. obedience

Gertrude followed most of the norms for women. She was a widow who remarried whereas
she couldn’t marry anyone else. Widows were wealthy if their husbands had money and they
were threatening people.

Gertrude is disrupting the power structure.

“Queen Elizabethan didn’t marry” and Gertrude is treated as badly as the queen was treated.

Ophelia
From the margins to the centre.
Can be a bit of incestus between Laertes and Ophelia and between Polonius (his father) and
Ophelia.
The “runnery scene” where Hamlet treats Ophelia with violence, shouting at her. He felt
betrayed by her but she was following rules imposed for her.

Hamlet kills Polonius and Ophelia starts being mad and ends up killing herself.
She drowns herself or she drowns by an accident because they cover it to give her a good
funeral.
Madness is a protest and a way to rebel.

Hair is sexualized, songs, clothes…

OTHELLO (1604)
Othello is a general who works for the Venice army.
Iago is Emilia’s husband who works for Othello.
Desdemona is Othello's wife and Barbantio’s daughter.
Brabantio is the senator of Venice.
Rodrigo is a gentleman used for Iago because of money.
Cassio is Desdemona’s presumed lover. Works for Venice.
Bianca is in a relationship with Cassio, she is a courtesan.

ACT I:
- Roderigo informs Brabantio, Desdemona's father, of her relationship with Othello
- The Duke sends Othello to Cyprus to fight the Turks
- Iago explains his plan (the adultery plot) first to Roderigo and then to the audience
- Othello denies that his attraction for Desdemona is merely physical and promises the
Senate that his love for her will not distract him from his military duties
 - Brabantio complains to the Duke that Othello bewitched his daughter and had
intimate relations with her
- Desdemona speaks openly at the Senate about her passion for Othello

ACT II:
- Iago manipulates Cassio into drinking too much

ACT III:
- Iago plants seeds of doubt in Othello's mind about Desdemona's fidelity especially
where Cassio is concerned
- Emilia finds the handkerchief and gives it to Iago, who then places it in Cassio’s room

ACT IV:
- Persuaded by Iago’s slander, Othello starts verbally abusing Desdemona
- Iago invites Othello to listen to a conversation between him and Cassio, pretending
Cassio is talking about Desdemona
- Emilia helps Desdemona prepare for bed and they discuss the relationship between
men and women
- Lodovico visits Othello in Cyprus and Othello strikes Desdemona in public
- Bianca asserts her agency and refuses to copy the handkerchief

ACT V:
- Emilia reveals Iago has killed Roderigo
- Othello, realising what he has done, kills himself with a concealed weapon and lies
on the bed beside his wife
- Emilia decides to speak out and not to go back home to her husband Iago
- Othello tells Emilia he killed Desdemona, and Emilia, despite Iago's attempts to
silence her, reveals the truth about the handkerchief
- Cassio is placed in charge of Iago and Lodovico leaves to recount the tragic events
to the Venetian state
- Emilia dies, singing the ‘Willow Song’, before denouncing Othello for killing
Desdemona
- Othello kills Desdemona by strangling her in her bed
- Emilia suspects that Desdemona has been slandered

ACT III
The conflict was that Desdemona (white) loves Othello (black) and love between different
races was not allowed. Missogyny.
Venice was Cyprus.
Iago invents the rumor being adulterous to Othello with Cassio, because he hates him.
Othello starts abusing Desdemona and ends up killing her.

Is about:
- trust
- love triangle
- jealousy
- revenge
- prejudices
 - identity

The play has been approached in two different ways liberal humanism and cultural
materialism.
● Liberal humanist approach with jealousy turns Otherllo into an animal.
● Cultural materialism is the new historicism approach with the identities of Othello and
Desdemona as race and sexuality/gender.

Context
England as an emerging colonial nation.
European voyages of exploration in the late 15th c. Those voyages were aimed to explore,
make trades and do transformations on the economic level.

Writings about other worlds because of these voyages:

- travel narratives
- philosophical/theological treatises
- the classics
- fictional representations of “otherness” (Ohtello)

Tragedy
Moor is a words used as African, Etiopia, Indian, Negro.
Otherness. It is difficult to establish a race for Othello, because he has an ambiguous origin,
race, skin colour and religion.
Association with “Barbary” place in the North of Africa.
Moor was to define a person who was not like the others, or was described as the racial
other.

Stereotypes
Idealisation: “moors'' were innocent, civil, reliable, rational. This was corrupted by society.
Demonisation of moors because they were unreliable, savage, irrational, sexual active and
seducing women, monstrous and deceptive.

Fear of disempowerment.
Protentastism.

Patriarchal system of family. Because of the rules: chastity, modesty and obedience.

Venice
Providentialism.
Comercial and cosmopolitan republic.
Turks: the Others
Cyprus (the other settlement) was a Veneice possession but fell to the Ottoman Empire.
The holy league.

OTHELLO’S DUALITY
Othello is described with prejudices. He is described as eloquent, pretty build up, lascivious,
depraved, a thief…
He is idealized and demonized at the same time.
Sexually charged image because he is a savage.
Othello is considered an insider, one of us.
Barbantio calls Othello a thief.
Desdemona never wanted to get married. Virgin picture.
Anxiety of Brabantio because of the loss of power over Desdemona. Othello knows hot to
fight because he has been a soldier all his life.

Providentialism, state and family

Racism as a self-defensive strategy.
Fear of disempowerment creates fictions.
Racism and power.

OTHELLO AND DESDEMONA AT THE SENATE

Othellos’ vulnerability and fear of disempowerment
The characters have always already experienced submission to narrativity. This is clearest
and most important in the case of Othello himself.

Othello is vulnerable in relation to:

- the culture of Venice
- Desdemona
Othello’s identity as a matter of narrative self-fashioning.
Othello conceives his life as a story.

Reiteration of his fidelity to the norms of white society.

A borrowed, “theatrical identity”.
Othello’s life as a performance using the language of Venice.

Othello as a colonised subject existing on the terms of white Venetian society and trying to
internalise its ideology (Sinfield).
Such an uncritical internalisation is debilitating and turns Othello’s existence into a perpetual
performance.

Othello loses himself because of Desdemona’s love and Iago’s hate.

Othello’s ambivalent relationship to sexuality.
Iago will activate in Othello an orthodox, Christian Protestan doctrine of sexuality.
Anxiety and revulsion of sexuality which lay deep within protestantism.

Desdemona and the early modern discourse on gender and sexuality

Women, marriage, the family, gender and sexuality in early modern England.
Early modern England as a restrictive period.
The rise of the patriarchal nuclear family.
The impact of Protestantism.
Protestantism, sexual morality and female sexuality.
The double standard.
The “companionate marriage” and arranged marriages.

Desdemona and the Early Modern discourse on gender and sexuality

Desdemona’s speeches to the senate.
The three rules regulating women’s behaviour in the early modern period, and the automatic
link between them:
- chastity
- modesty
- obedience

Desdemona is not obedient, because she marries a man without parental permission. Her
father doesn’t approve of her marrying a black man.

“Divided duty” speech.

CYPRUS: the two desdemonas and the two emilias

In ACT II the action is moved to Cyprus.

Cyprus is a metaphorical way to stress the position chosen of Desdemona and Othello.
Cyprus was under attack by the storm and it was considered a precarious place where
Othello and Desdemona had chosen to occupy.

Othello’s vulnerability: sexuality and race.

Desdemona’s vulnerability: sexuality and gender.

Ohtello’s ambivalence is because he is sexually attracted to Desdemona but also he rejects

her.

The storm and reunion in Cyprus

Othello and Desdemona on the margins.
Relieve after the storm that destroyed a lot of things.
They express happiness for the reunion. This reunion is a very passionate moment and they
express it in everything they say.
In this particular moment Othello’s ambivalent sexuality can be found.
References to death in what Othello says. Death is also a way to define orgasm.
The storm is implying a threat, danger, loss of control, and this can be related with his sexual
desire for Desdemona.

He is referring to the sexual connection that he desires to have with Desdemona. Although
he is tempted, he rejects the idea of having it because of the death. Death is seen as the
orgasm.
Tempest bark is the boat at sea. Oscillating movement where there is a description of the
sexual course, an up and down.
“If i die now i would be happy” → there is an acceptance of his sexual desire whereas during
his speech there is the contrast of the rejection of it.

Protestant discourse.

Desdemona’s lack of limits is shown in this part of the play.

Early modern Protestant discourse on sexuality
“An adulterer is he who is too ardent a lover of his wife”
A man who was very attracted to his wife was considered the same as being adulterous. He
is trying to control himself but Desdemona needs more and has no limits.
He needs to put an end to the person that makes him feel with a lot of passion, so he starts
thinking about killing Desdemona.
This moment is when Iago decides to start the rumours about Desdemona, and tempts
Othello with Desdemona’s infidelity converting him to a monster.

The man who shows no comeliness in sexual intercourse is committing adultery with his
wife.
She denies control of identity.

The two Desdemonas and the two Emilias

Emilia’s dissidence.
Emilia’s final transgression.
Their martial and emotional bonds take precedence over their common cause as women.

IAGO AS A “CULTURAL EMBLEM”

The problem of Iago’s motivation.
Iago’s disempowerment and construction of Othello as a racial Other.
Racism and power.
The play’s dissidence.

Iago’s double-facedness.
Dramatic irony as a dramaturgic strategy.
Iago as Machiavellian, a new historical type.

First and second soliloquies

First soliloquy:
- Othello and Emilia
Second soliloquy:
- Iago and Desdemona
- Othello and Emilia
- Cassio and Emilia

In Iago’s first soliloquy it is shown the improvised paper does the nature of the villain’s plot.
Marks of improvisation.

Constructing racism and sexism. Truth vs. plausibility.

Iago does six soliloquies, shows his dramatic irony and dissidence. He takes advantage of
the assumptions of the dominant culture and exploits them for his own purposes.
Iago manipulates the ideologies of gender and race because of his fear of disempowerment.
The invention of racism/sexism as a fiction driven by power with the aim of re-empowerment
of the dominant elite.
Iago at work: Iago and Roderigo
Roderigo as a testing ground.
He appeals to culturally dominant notions of racial difference and female sexuality.
Negative stereotype of the Moor.
Contradictory construction of Desdemona based on the binary role of a woman.

The “motive-hunting” of motiveless malignity

Constant recourse to narrative then is both the affirmation of absolute self-interest and the
affirmation of absolute vacancy.

Iago as a cultural emblem

Iago’s stories work because they are plausible.
The racism and sexism in the play should not be traced just to Iago’s character.
Iago is representing the fears and Othering strategies of his culture in a condensed form.
Iago is not improvising in a vacuum, but in a culture, the culture of Venice.

OTHELLO’S DEMONISATION AND RACIAL OTHERING

Iago’s demonisation of Othello: Sexual revulsion and racial Othering
Iago will activate in Othello an orthodox, Christian Protestant doctrine of sexuality.
Anxiety and revulsion of sexuality which lay deep within Protestantism.
Racial Othering which Othello himself internalises.

Othello’s ambivalent relationship to sexuality

Desdemona’s “erotic submission”. Her disruption of the hierarchical relationship between
gender.
Othello’s fear of disempowerment.
Play’s juxtaposition of her actual chastity with Iago’s manipulation (soliqualies)= dissidence.

Iago’s demonisation of Othello: Protestanitms and sexuality

Iago’s improvisation on the religious sexual doctrine in which Othello believes, for Othello
becomes pollution.

Iago’s demonisation of Othello: Sexual revulsion and racial Othering

The temptation scene (Act 3, scene 2)
Iago convinces Othello about Desdemona’s infidelity with Cassio. Racial difference and the
sexual and gender ideology is in what is based on Iago's narrative.

Othello’s soliloquy. He is persuaded of his inferiority because of racial fact and also by
Desdemona’s inconstancy. Because of that he becomes the “erring barbarian”. Othello
moves from being a colonized subject on white society and trying to internalize its
ideologies, towards being marginalized from it.

Othello’s duality: monstrosity and representing the white male norms the play encodes
through Iago, Roderigo, Barbantio.

Othello as a colonised subject

- Give me your hand
- stranger her in her bed
 - chaste stars

Conclusion: The murder of Desdemona and Othello’s suicide

A necrophilic fantasy. The execution of the adulterer.
Othello’s loss of narrative control.
Othello becomes the enemy. He converted himself into the black muslim other. He has
become the ugly stereotype. “Cruel Moor”. He faces this identity, enacts his own punishment
and damns himself by killing the Turk he has become.

The end: containment?

Othellos stabs himself, recognizing himself as an outsider.
He enacts his own punishment.
Conflicts end by the death of Othello and the women and everything comes back to order.
He is killing the self who is the other, the turk, the moor, as an act og Venetian patriotism.
Othello becomes white.
Venice is not a place that can tolerate differences: the only characters left alive on stage are
white men.

The end: Reading for subversion/dissidence

Othello becomes aware that his wholehearted embrace of Venetian culture has debilitated
him.
Emilia uncovers the truth and dissents.
By showing us the bed Shakespeare criticises the Venetian race and gender ideologies.
The different signs of dissidence we encounter in the play tell us the dominant order is not
satisfactory.
A critique and deconstruction of Western “superiority” as based upon an exercise of violence
against the Other.

Is not a racist play. Othello says that is a racist play, Iago says that it is not.
- Racism because of omission.
- Not to fall on playing stereotypes.
- Racist interpretations.

KING LEAR (c. 1605)

Lear is the king who has a temper. 3 daughters: Cordelia, Regan, Gonerill. Cordelia is his
favourite and he favours her.
Edgar is Edmund’s brother. They are the sons of Gloucester.
Edmund is a bastard.
Kent is in the service of Lear, and is a very loyal servant like Gloucester.

Generations: different views from the world

Gloucester, Kent and Lear are the older generations.
Gonerill, Cornwall, Albany are the middle generations.
Cordelia, France, Edgar are the younger generations.
Exercise
Act I:
● Gonerill begins to ignore Lear and to make him unwelcome at her house
● Kent defends Cordelia and Lear banishes him
● Kent and Gloucester gossip about the king’s decision to divide the kingdom, and
Gloucester jokes about Edmond’s conception
● Lear puts his daughters through the ‘love test’, and each daughter professes how
much they love him
● Edmond is introduced by means of a soliloquy where he rages against his bastardy
● Gloucester is deluded into believing that Edgar has plotted against him
● Cordelia refuses to exaggerate her love for Lear and he disowns her
● Gonerill asks Lear to get rid of his knights

Act II:
● Gonerill and Regan join forces and ask Lear to get rid of his knights
● Lear leaves Gloucester’s castle in a rage and a storm begins
● Edgar loses his identity as a nobleman and disguises himself as Poor Tom, a Bedlam
beggar

Act III:
● Gloucester is blinded by Cornwall and Regan and he realises that Edmond has
betrayed him
● Lear loses his mind on the heath under the storm
● Lear meets Poor Tom and the ‘naked wretches’ at the hut and realises that he has
not helped the poor enough
● Gloucester tells Edmond that he will help Lear, and Edmond decides to betray him by
informing Cornwall about it

Act IV:
● Cordelia reveals that she holds no grudge against Lear and that she will help him
● Lear and Gloucester are reunited
● Cordelia and Lear reunite and Lear momentarily recovers his sanity after a long sleep

Act V:
● Having relapsed into madness, Lear enters with Cordelia dead in his arms
● Kent, Edgar and Albany are left alive and finally Edgar accepts the crown
● Edmond, about to die, cancels the order that Cordelia should be hanged
● The French army has been defeated and Lear and Cordelia are sent to prison
● Gonerill poisons Regan, Edgar defeats Edmund and Gonerill kills herself

Lear expelt Cordelia out of the kingdom, and divides the land to the other two daughters. He
decides to spend time with her daughters and he goes with 100 knights in order to see them.
Once the daughters have the land they want to get rid of their father. They start by getting rid
of the knights. When he discovers what they are doing he decides to leave.
He ends up in the middle of nowhere. Kent helps him and takes him to Dova where his
youngest daughter and France are waiting for him. In Act IV there is this change of place. In
Act V Lear and Cordelia are taken prisoners and both die.
Plots
Main plot: King Lear and his daughters
Subplot: Glaustecer and his sons. Edmund the bastard starts a fight against his brother in
order to have the land. Edgar is blinded. Edgar takes Glousceter in act IV to Dova, where
Lear and him are reunited. Edgar confronts Edmund and kills him.

Ends with Lear entering the scene with a dead Cordelia in his arms and he goes mad and
ends up dead. Edgar turns out to be the new king.

THE “LOVE TEST”: LEAR, GONERILL, REGAN AND CORDELIA (Act I, Scene i)
Cultural framework: source materials
This allegory was extremely popular in the Elizabethan period, as its political and didactic
implications echoed widespread anxiety.
James I/VI became king in 1603.

Cultural framework: myht, legend, folktale

An archetypal narrative scheme.
A man’s choice between three women.
Sigmund Freud’s “The theme of the Three caskets”. Freud studied the mythical,
anthropological and psychoanalytical models underlying the text.

The “love test”

A social reading is how socio-historical meanings are encoded in the play’s grammar, syntax
and rhetoric.
Gloucester, Kent and the division of the kingdom.
Lear as an arbitrary and absolutistic monarch.
Comparatives and superlatives.
The old medieval order: axiological order, semiotic network of differential degree.
Lear, Gonerill, Regan and Cordelia.

The affection is balanced in the sense that the division is balanced. He gives the same
amount of territory to both of them.
Materialistic affection based on property. Notion of love is something measurable/quantitative
instead of something qualitative. This is going to be Lear’s main problem. This is shared by
Lear, Kent and Gloucester who embody the old order.
Use of comparatives and superlatives in order to show the differences and point the social
political hierarchy and the old order related to feudalism
The way they talk about the division of the kingdom says that it is equal and it is known
earlier. This tells us that Lear is an unsecure king, and is materialistic because he measures
love with material things, he is arbitrary, he is unpredictable. Lear is absolutistic.
Later the division, the test is going to take place.

The “love test” and the division of the kingdom

Reasons of division of the kingdom:
- He is too old and he wants to stop being the king.
- To show the love for his daughters.
- He wants to prevent future strikes.
To shake all cares and business from our age. Conferring them on younger strengths.
The future strife.
As the head of the old order, Lear embodies the equation of love/affection (qualitative
system) with power/property (quantitative system).
Competition/discrimination.
A destructive equation.

Use of plural.
Darker purpose has a connection with the old order. Secret purpose that everybody knows.
It was not up to the king to end up being the king. He cannot change the rules.
Identity was given externally by the position of society. If he leaves the throne he is going to
lose his identity, and disrupt the social political order.
He intends to keep the privilege of being the king. He wants to stop being the king in relation
to obligations.
He wants to keep the identity as a father.
In the end of the play he will die having lost everything.

Goneril’s and Regan’s answers

Gonerill’s and Regan’s answers attempt to break at all with this logic of comparison and the
equation of love and power/property.
Highly hyperbolic language
Quantifying love.
Providing the guarantee of Lear’s superlative status and identity on the family plane.

They follow Lear’s game quantifying love. Following Lear’s frame of mind.
Goneril is contradicting herself.
Regan delitels Goneril’s affection for Lear.

Cordelia’s answer
“Nothing, my lord” is a rejection of the contest.
Love and silence.
Questions:
1. Is Cordelia being subversive regarding the power Lear represents?

2. Does she break any of the “golden rules” for women?

Cordelia is a bit direct and she doesn’t say what Lear wants to hear. She is chase. She is not
obedient because she is speaking the truth and not playing the game, like she was
supposed to. She is challenging Lear. She justifies herself in a way that he is answering a bit
in the way Lear needs to hear.
3. What is the significance of her answer in relation to the play?

4. Does Cordelia challenge patriarchy?

Yes in a way.

She seems to be resisting Lear’s (king and father) power within the family structure.
Limitations of Cordelia’s answer
Her real transgression is speaking in a way which threatens to show too clearly how the laws
of human kindness operate in the service of property, contractual and power relations.

Cordelia’s saving love, so much admired by critics, works in the action less as a redemption
for womankind than as an example of patriarchy restored.
Cordelia’s alternative humanism or recycled providentialism.

She loses the position in her family and she loses her identity becoming nothing, emptiness.
Her marriage to France will give her a new identity as Queen, she will be reabsorbed into the
patriarchal system.

Cordelia’s banishment
Kents confronts Lear because Lear banishes Kent and he loses his position as Cordelia. He
adopts a new identity helping Lear through the play.

Kent, Cordelia and Edgar:

- Edgar will have to escape because of Edmund. He loses his identity.
- Cordelia is banished and loses her identity and needs to find another.
- Kent is banished and loses his identity and needs to find another.

Old Order: the medieval order

- Kent
- Lear
- Gloucester

New order which is negative and disruptive are Regan, Goneril, Edmund, Cornwall and
Albany. They are characterised by individuality.

Cordelia and Edgar represent new humanism connected with providentialism. Is in the
middle between the old and the new but much connected with the old.

The “love test” and Cordelia’s banishment

Division of the kingdom: disruption of the socio-political hierarchy.
Cordelia’s banishment is the disruption of the family body.
The responsible for those things is Lear, the head of the old order.
Lear’s anger has a disruptive passion.
Play about power, property and inheritance.

When Kent confronts Lear it appears a different type of anger. Kent tries to preserve the
order in contrast to Lear.

The representatives of old order Lear and Gloucester are blind to the realities of the power
they represent.
GLOUCESTER, EDGAR, EDMOND AND PROVIDENTIALISM
From the start the semiotics of the play are dominated by its rhetoric and grammar.
Gloucester, Edgar and Edmund.
Edmund is younger than Edgar. He is a bastard, because Gloucester was adulterous and
had a baby not in his marriage.
He is talking about him as a joke.
Gloucester's attitude towards his son is saying that he loves them both but it is not true.
Edmund is discriminated against by his father for being illegitimate. (poor son, knave) He
was out for 9 years in exile because he was a bastard and has no identity, he is nothing.
Two words that define Gloucester: saucily, sport (references to last).

Edmund as a bastard has no place in the social hierarchy.

Nature is his goddess. Edmund as a malcontent.
Highlights contradictions of Providentialism.
Edmund was malcontent, dissatisfied with the social structure of the time.

“Edmund’s sceptical independence is itself constituted by a contradiction: his

illegitimate exclusion from society gives him an insight into the ideological basis of
that society even as it renders him vulnerable to and dependent upon it” (Dollimore,
1989, p. 201).

Edmund embodies the process whereby, because of the contradictory conditions of its
inception, a revolutionary (emergent) insight is folded back into a dominant ideology.
Gloucester and Edmund’s different views of the world. Gloucester has a lack of human
responsibility whereas Edmund is responsible.

Gloucester has no divine justice.

An anti-christian interpretation of suffering.
Against the providentialist view of the universe being ruled by just God.
Responsibility as the humanist alternative to Providentialism and to the new, destructive
individualism.

LEAR’S DOOMED QUEST FOR IDENTITY

Looking to preserve the identity of the king by maintaining the 100 knights. To maintain the
identity as a father he does the love test. He loses a bit of his identity when confronting
Cordelia.
He begins a metaphorical journey to search for identity on a personal level and in historical
terms (Lear’s identity crisis as signalling the great epistemological breakdown of the
renaissance/ early modern period).

Oswald is taking the identity of Lear’s kingship.

Gonerill wants to take the kingship.
Reversal of roles where Lear is going to be the fool, the nothing.
Lear and Gonerill are going to fight for the question of the knights.
Lear’s outburst of anger: ingratitude + animal imagery + bodily pain.
Lear’s curse of Gonerill he needs to resume the shape of being a king, a father and a man.
Lear and Regan.
Kent in the stocks undermining Lear's authority, erasing his identity.
Inversion of the love test and reversal of power relations.
Lear’s disempowerment as a patriarchal figure.
This is the moment when the audience starts connecting and empathizing with Lear.
Universalization of Lear’s situation.
Patience is going to be important.

Act III → Climax

→ The king goes mad and Gloucester goes blind.
He begins to be an animal instead of a human because of the discussion with his daughters.
The place of the king-father, which is a source of order, meaning, being, authority and
identity, is emptied.
Disruption of the necessary bonds of nature: the authority relations fundamental to
patriarchal authority are upset.
Lear disarticulated the continuous equivalents of kinship, family, universal order and sense.
He loses position as a king and as a father so he loses all his identity.

Lear fails to obtain a guarantee of absolute primacy on the effective plan within the family.
Without property, Lear is expelled from the hierarchical order of Providentialism. Because of
that Lear goes mad and starts the quest for identity.
Storm is mirroring Lear’s madness.
He is recognizing his mistake to the Fool. He takes into consideration the suffering he did not
consider before.