The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

In deceiving Cassio and Othello, on the other hand, Iago has to deal with characters who consciously think well of them­selves but are unconsciously insecure. With them, therefore, his tactics are different; what he says to them is always possi­bly true.

Cassio is a ladies' man, that is to say, a man who feels most at home in feminine company where his looks and good man­ners make him popular, but is ill at ease in the company of his own sex becuse he is unsure of his masculinity. In civilian life he would be perfectly happy, but circumstances have made him a soldier and he has been forced by his profes­sion into a society which is predominantly male. Had he been born a generation earlier, he would never have found himself in the army at all, but changes in the technique of warfare demand of soldiers, not only the physical courage and aggres­siveness which the warrior has always needed, but also in­tellectual gifts. The Venetian army now needs mathemati­cians, experts in the science of gunnery. But in all ages, the typical military mentality is conservative and resents the intel­lectual expert.

A fellow

That never set a squadron in the field

Nor the division of a batde knows

More than a spinster . . . mere pratde without practise

Is all his soldiership

is a criticism which has been heard in every army mess in every war. Like so many people who cannot bear to feel un­popular and therefore repress their knowledge that they are, Cassio becomes quarrelsome when drunk, for alcohol releases his suppressed resentment at not being admired by his com­rades in arms and his wish to prove that he is what he is not, as "manly" as they are. It is significant that, when he sobers up, his regret is not that he has behaved badly by his own standards but that he has lost his reputation. The advice which Iago then gives him, to get Desdemona to plead for him with Othello, is good advice in itself, for Desdemona ob­viously likes him, but it is also exacdy the advice a character- type like Cassio will be most willing to listen to, for feminine society is where he feels most at home.

Emilia informs Cassio that, on her own initiative, Des­demona has already spoken on his behalf and that Othello has said he will take the safest occasion by the front to restore him to his post. Hearing this, many men would have been content to leave matters as they were, but Cassio persists: the pleasure of a heart-to-heart talk with a lady about his fascinating self is too tempting.

While he is talking to Desdemona, Othello is seen ap­proaching and she says:

Stay and hear me speak.

Again, many men would have done so, but Cassio's uneasiness with his own sex, particulady when he is in disgrace, is too strong and he sneaks away, thus providing Iago with his first opportunity to make an insinuation.

Cassio is a ladies' man, not a seducer. With women of his own class, what he enjoys is socialized eroticism; he would be frightened of a serious personal passion. For physical sex he goes to prostitutes and when, unexpectedly, Bianca falls in love with him, like many of his kind, he behaves like a cad and brags of his conquest to others. Though he does not know who the owner of the handkerchief actually is, he certainly knows that Bianca will think that it belongs to another woman, and to ask her to copy it is gratuitous cruelty. His smiles, ges­tures and remarks about Bianca to Iago are insufferable in themselves; to Othello, who knows that he is talking about a woman, though he is mistaken as to her identity, they are an insult which only Cassio's death can avenge.

In Cinthio nothing is said about the Moor's color or religion, but Shakespeare has made Othello a black Negro who has been baptized.

No doubt there are differences between color prejudice in the twentieth century and color prejudice in the seventeenth and probably few of Shakespeare's audience had ever seen a Negro, but the slave trade was already flourishing and the Elizabethans were certainly no innocents to whom a Negro was simply a comic exotic. Lines like

... an old black ram is tupping your white ewe . . . The gross clasps of a lascivious Moor . . . What delight shall she have to look on the devil

are evidence that the paranoid fantasies of the white man in which the Negro appears as someone who is at one and the same time less capable of self-control and more sexually potent than himself, fantasies with which, alas, we are only too familiar, already were rampant in Shakespeare's time.

The Venice of both The Merchant of Venice and Othello is a cosmopolitan society in which there are two kinds of social bond between its members, the bond of economic inter­est and the bond of personal friendship, which may coincide, run parallel with each other or conflict, and both plays are concerned with an extreme case of conflict.