Language as Action

Abstract

The key to Othello is language. In it lies the centre that articulates his emotional development from a romantic to a tragic figure. Because of the constantly shifting perspectives of the play, it is easy to interpret anything that Othello says equivocally. To do so, however, is to overlook the important consideration of structure, and Othello’s place in it, and to examine language in isolation. In the final scene, Emilia shouts to Othello, ‘O gull! O dolt! / As ignorant as dirt!’ [v ii 162–3], and many have praised her as the ‘voice of reality’. But, when we start talking about ‘reality’, we ourselves confront the inadequacy of language in normal discourse. What Emilia says at this particular moment is true enough, but her words hardly begin to define the totality of Othello’s character. Is what Othello says in this scene and throughout the play ‘unreal’? In a famous passage in ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’ (1927), T. S. Eliot called into question the sincerity of Othello’s final speech and opened the way for the modern denigration of all his great speeches:

I have always felt that I have never read a more terrible exposure of human weakness — of universal human weakness — than the last great speech of Othello.… It it usually taken on its face value, as expressing the greatness in defeat of a noble but erring nature.… What Othello seems to me to be doing in making this speech is cheering himself up.

These sentences, to sugar or to gall

Being strong on both sides, are equivocal. [i iii 214–15]