Unpinning Desdemona

Unpinning Desdemona

One of the more striking differences between the quarto (1622) and the First Folio (1623) texts of Othello is in the scene (4.3) that presages Desdemona's murder as Emilia undresses her and prepares her for bed. While F unfolds through a leisurely 112 lines that include the Willow Song, Q clips along with only 62 lines, cutting the scene by nearly half.¹ These two versions also differ thematically. F presents both Desdemona and Emilia as complex characters. By delving deeply into her feelings, it portrays an active and tragically nuanced Desdemona and raises empathy for her with its psychological exposé. F also contains a surprisingly insightful and impassioned Emilia, who defends the behavior of wives against the ill usage they suffer at the hands of their husbands. In contrast, Q, while it retains the narrative structure of the longer F scene, significantly alters the characterization of the women by presenting both as one-dimensional: Desdemona as the patient Griselda and Emilia as the shallow, saucy maid. This essay offers a theory to explain why the two versions of this scene differ so greatly.

The excellent work that debates the questions posed by F and Q texts focuses on their many differences and the complicated textual issues they raise. Looking more closely at a single difference—that occurring at the end of Act 4—raises intriguing possibilities about the texts. Concentrating on the curious issues of staging in that scene is even more enlightening, especially the questions about Emilia's "unpinning" of Desdemona. This essay will analyze original staging practices in order to argue that Othello 4.3 was edited when the company moved into the Blackfriars and that this editing had disastrous consequences for the scene and for the character of Desdemona.

While the textual history of Othello is fraught with complex questions, one principal concern that impacts this argument revolves around whether F was revised and expanded or whether Q was edited and reduced.² Scott McMillin augmented Alice Walker's theory that Q originated from a version of the script the company used in production. Walker argued that Q is an obviously inferior work, based on an acted version of the play that was compiled from memory by a bookkeeper, and that it suffers from the "insensitive effort"³ of an unreliable transcriber, along with the corrupting influence of actors who cut the text for presentation, peppered it with vulgarizations, and forgot or extemporized lines. McMillin contended, instead, that both the F and Q texts derived from separate performance scripts. He blamed "scribal mishearings" for many of the variations between the texts, hypothesizing that the scribe preparing Q for printing was listening to the play, taking dictation from either a performance or an oral reading.⁴ However, McMillin maintained that both F and Q are important as discrete acting versions of the play, which suggests that in order to understand the two texts, authorial intention may be less important than theatrical practice. Most important here, McMillin believed that 4.3 was reduced for Q, not expanded for F; he hypothesized that Q reflects playhouse cuts made to affect the pace.⁵ He noted that the cuts occur primarily in the fourth and fifth acts, with half of all missing lines in Q coming from the roles of Desdemona and Emilia, which perhaps indicates that the play was lagging near the end, that the boy actors proved uninteresting, or, finally, that someone decided simply to excise material that failed to advance the plot.⁶

I would argue that, in the case of 4.3, the F version of Othello offers more than a longer text that someone decided to cut; as McMillin implies, it also requires notably different staging. This issue of staging provides compelling evidence that affects the debate surrounding the play's textual history. McMillin argued that both F and Q originate from playhouse books and that significant variants between the texts reflect different production requirements. An...