Othello and Interpretive Traditions (review)

Othello And Interpretive Traditions. By Edward Pechter. Studies in Theatre History and Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999; pp. ix + 255. $32.95.

If you like the work of Stanley Fish you will greet Edward Pechter's book on Othello with excitement. Dedicated to Fish himself, Pechter's provocative study is deeply invested in reader response criticism seeing Othello as problematic, contradictory, and adversarial, trapping and implicating audiences through its textual instabilities, or slippages. Though Pechter claims that his work "proceeds along interpretive rather than theoretical or metacritical lines" (x), he clearly offers an enlightened epistemology of belief and representation in Othello, particularly for those theatrical equivalents that cannot be portrayed on stage (for example, Cassio's dream; the consummation). Scrupulously scouring the text, Pechter correlates performance history with the rise and fall of major critical views and cultural events (Renaissance theologies of warfare to the O.J. Simpson case). Ultimately, he concludes that Othello criticism is contaminated because it has not acknowledged the balance between the Othello and Iago spheres, which he argues are indivisible and exchangeable. Appropriately enough, an early chapter on disconfirmations foregrounds the audience's resistance to anxiety over inhabiting these two worlds at once.

Even so, Iago becomes the central player on Pechter's stage. He poisons the audience, the other characters, and the critics themselves--as Pechter puts it, "[h]e subtends and determines belief" (75). Speaking more than one third of the lines in the play, Iago occupies a privileged space; he is the chief narratologist. Pechter charges that audiences are engaged personally with him through his asides, soliloquies, and that we are impelled to believe his delusions even when we know he is delusional. It is Iago, not Shakespeare, who brands the independent and honest Bianca a whore, because, as Pechter implausibly claims, even Ralph Crane, who compiled the dramatist personae for the Folio fell under Iago's knavery when he listed Bianca as "a courtesan." The critical response to Othello overall has "increasingly aborded itself into Iago's unillusioned and self-assured generalizations, to the point where contemporary commentary . . . seems designed as an instrument for Iago's voice" (161). Listening to Kenneth Burke, Pechter hears Iago's whispers everywhere.

Othello's fortunes have plummeted, and justly so for Pechter. In a piercing chapter "The Death Without Transfiguration," he dismantles (David) Bradleyism (and like-minded travelers E.M.W. Tillyard and Helen Gardner) to strip "Othello Agonistes" of his heroic status. According to Pechter, Othello's murder of Desdemona and suicide have been wrongly honored as sacramental or ritualistic, and he catalogues a host of reasons why (textual and contextual), chief of which is that we do not merit (nor will Iago allow) a scapegoat to purge us of deeds that Dr. Johnson said "could not be endured." Pechter thus disallows claims of Othello's "transcendent nobility" to get us off the hook Iago cleverly has us bite. Moreover, a heroic Othello leaves too many questions unanswered--to wit, the whys and hows of act five. Pechter's views of Othello may be too draconian for directors, I fear, to cast the play.

For the most part, though, Pechter's line of reasoning is compelling because of his keen historicizing. He aptly details the stage traditions that have elevated or erased various critical manifestoes advanced by Samuel Coleridge, Bradley, T.S. Eliot, Kenneth Burke, Stephen Greenblatt, Karen Newman, and Stanley Cavell. Throughout he contextualizes performances by Tommaso Salvini, Edwin Booth, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, Charles Fechter, Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, right up to Laurence Fishburne--especially their visual metaphors--the theatrical equivalents for various critical/cultural positions. Pechter chooses apt illustrations. Victorian productions with lionized Othellos often ended with the Moor's death speech, diminishing if not negating Iago's brooding malevolence. One valorized nineteenth-century Othello, dressed as a gentleman, sat at a desk during the temptation scene (3.3). Fearful of any "womanly presence" (114), eighteenth-century productions cut the role of Bianca entirely. Irving's...