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Shakespeare Quarterly 52.4 (2001) 535-537



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Book Review

"Othello" and Interpretive Traditions


"Othello" and Interpretive Traditions. By Edward Pechter. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999. Pp. xiv + 257. $32.95 cloth.

"Working on Othello means inhabiting a contaminated site," concludes Edward Pechter; "you want to say the right thing, but it comes out sounding terribly wrong" (181). The contamination is inherent in what Pechter terms the "interpretive traditions," the corpus of critical commentary and theatrical practice that began with Thomas Rymer's 1693 A Short View of Tragedy,continued through nearly four centuries of stage performance, and affects critical inquiry today. Yet, despite his own imbrication in "the accumulated weight of historical prejudice" (180), Pechter offers here a thought-provoking reexamination of the "tragedy of choice" for our time.

The reasons for Othello's current popularity are not Pechter's reasons for writing this book. He admits the play's resonance with contemporary feminist, postcolonial, and historicist critics, not to mention its appeal for popular culture--O. J. and all that. Othello can be seen, after all, as a black immigrant, a "guest worker" who crossed racial and class lines to marry the white boss's daughter and strangle her in an "honor killing." To Pechter, however, Othello's importance lies in its persistent affective and aesthetic power. This book, he claims, "proceeds from the conviction that, given our current situation, it is a good and useful function of criticism at the present time to sustain a focus on the formal and affective qualities of a play like Othello" (10).

Why, one wonders, "at the present time" and "in our current situation"? I suspect the answer lies in Pechter's conviction that literary studies are at a crossroads and, in some educational environments, even in danger of extinction. As a somewhat strident combatant in the culture wars of the 1980s and '90s himself, Pechter has now turned away from direct confrontation to the quiet and systematic cultivation of his own garden.

In this book that garden is the text. "Othello" and Interpretive Traditions signals a return, for Pechter at least, to what continues to be the core of literary studies in most classrooms--close reading. Not the claustrophobic hermeneutics of New Criticism, however, but textual analysis informed by wide reading in critical commentary and theatrical [End Page 535] history. Drawing on the wealth in the interpretative tradition of critical and theatrical commentary, Pechter reintroduces his reader, with frequent wit and occasional self-mockery, to the sheer pleasure of reading Othello and meditating on its action and language, scene by scene.

Pechter begins with a brief overview of Othello's place in critical and literary history, stressing that Othello, unlike other tragedies, has evoked loud exclamations and even interventions from its audiences ever since the Restoration. In addition to its unusual emotional power, Othello is the only Shakespearean tragedy to give equal weight to both antagonist and protagonist, for throughout its lengthy stage history Iago and Othello have competed for our attention. In our own era, Pechter argues, Iago has been the consistent victor.

The contest begins in Act 1, where Iago creates the monstrous image of the "beast with two backs" underneath Brabantio's balcony, a picture that is "disconfirmed" by the appearance of the noble Moor in 1.2. and 1.3 (30ff). But, Pechter argues, despite the seemingly comedic conclusion of the senate scene, the doubts raised in 1.1. linger; and the end of 1.3 returns to Iago as the play's spokesman and the action's catalyst. The ensign takes full charge of Act 2. The critical and theatrical traditions have amply explored his negativity, but the seeds of doubt he sows about Desdemona, about women in general, nevertheless germinate. Or, as Pechter asks, "if laughter is a kind of assent, what does it mean that we laugh at Iago's jokes?" (74). Pechter proceeds to a discussion of Othello's temptation; he surveys the various explanations offered for the hero's fall (many of them contradictory), particularly the psychosexual analyses offered by Stephen Greenblatt and Edward...

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