Secret Motives in Othello

Abstract

Those who look for ‘secret motives’ in Shakespeare are sometimes treated as well-meaning lunatics, prospectors panning for fairy gold. To credit Hamlet with motives of which he himself remains unaware or, worse still, with impulses that contradict his stated motives, is, we are told, to confuse two different modes of being: a dramatic character has no past and no inwardness corresponding to yours or mine As I have already argued, these are slippery ideas and generalisation can be dangerous¹. In Shakespeare the boundaries between past and present, inner and outer, will not always be firmly marked; indeed, unless a play begins with a clear statement of intent (for example Richard III), it often obliges the audience to assume a lifelike character’s inwardness and to speculate about his ‘motives’ until he declares himself, and thus it positively encourages the habit of ‘secret motive hunting’. Even before Hamlet speaks (in I. 2) we are expected to wonder why he alone wears black and behaves so oddly; after he has soliloquised several times we wonder (with Hamlet) why his stated motives and actions fail to tally; and throughout the play one passing remark after another challenges us to spot the motive. ‘Art thou there, truepenny?’ A strange phrase — what can be the reason for it? ‘Buzz, buzz’ (to Polonius) — the reason? ‘Now could I drink hot blood’ — the reason? The fact that Hamlet may later prove to be entirely ‘unaware’ of some of the motives imputed to him by no means invalidates the spectator’s ‘secret motive hunting’ as such, a semi-conscious activity inseparable from a proper attentiveness to Shakespeare’s dramatic language.