Magical Properties: Vision, Possession, and Wonder in Othello

A specter is haunting new historicism—the specter of the aesthetic: the attributes of beauty and sublimity, the realm of wonderful objects and feelings of awe. From Louis Montrose’s evocation of the uncanny connections between Simon Forman’s dream of Queen Elizabeth and William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Stephen Greenblatt’s book, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, we can discern an investment in wonder among those whom we might have expected to be more attuned to the political dimensions of literature. ¹ Of course, materialist criticism is entitled to examine the forms of wonder, since wonder is as much involved in the socio-political realm as is gender, rank, or race. But it is not merely a cool-headed interest in wonder that we find in new historicism; on the contrary, it is an undertaking to arouse amazement in the reader. For some practitioners, the attempt to awe their readers has to do with the cachet associated with the mystifying style of postmodernist French theory, but for lucid writers such as Montrose and Greenblatt, the attempt to arouse wonder has its roots in other ground. That ground is Shakespeare.

My focus is the operations of wonder in Shakespeare’s playhouse, but I also will examine the differences between Renaissance versions of theatrical wonder and later forms in Shakespeare as literature. These versions are linked by their relationship with subjectivity, possession, and the nature of the object, but are produced in different ways and toward different ends—theatrical wonder is largely visual, processive, and collective; literary and critical wonder is “visionary,” possessive, and directed toward the individual as individual. Roughly speaking, it is the difference between an outing to the circus and a morning in church; we tend to misinterpret the earthly pleasures of the former in light of the heavenly raptures of the latter.

Othello is an illuminating text for the purposes of my discussion because it is both wonderful in itself and critical of how “magical” properties can seduce the eye and mind. By analyzing Othello’s attempts to fetishize theatrical properties, we can begin to understand the fetishistic investments made by present-day readers and critics. This is not to suggest that the play is magically prescient. Rather its fictions of possession and wonder imply the conditions of its production and make the contradictions in that production visible as ideology. Pierre Machery tells us that “the book revolves around this myth [i.e., that the book is uncannily alive]; but in the process of its formation the book takes a stand regarding this myth, exposing it. This does not mean that the book is able to become its own criticism: it gives an implicit critique of its ideological content, if only because it resists being incorporated into the flow of ideology in order to give a determinate representation of it.” ² So while Shakespeare is the source of the specter haunting recent Shakespeare criticism, his play’s “implicit critique of its ideological content” might nevertheless provide something like an exorcism.

Shakespeare’s attempts to reconfigure playgoing as conversional wonder have meshed with the emergence of the aesthetic as a major cultural formation; however, it is unlikely that his drama in fact transformed the experiences of Renaissance playgoers. ³ They, no doubt, continued to expect recreation rather than re-creation. In Othello, Shakespeare maneuvers to make wonder out of the material he has to work with, which, among other things such as language and costume, includes the fabric of the handkerchief and the body of the boy actor who plays Desdemona. These two objects are constructed so as to enhance the cultural status of the play by raising it above the commercialism and materiality of actual play production. But if we can deploy a strategic resistance to the play’s sublimity (a resistance that came more easily to the original audiences), then the ordinariness of these “wonders” and the particular ways in which they are presented will allow us critical insight into the mystifications of Shakespeare and Shakespeare criticism.

To move toward a historical understanding of Shakespearean...