"I fetch my life and being from men of royal siege": Ghostly Paradigms in Othello

Sharon Cadman Seelig "I fetch my life and being from men of royal siege": Ghostly Paradigms in Othello And the bird called, in response to The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery, And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses Had the look of flowers that are looked at. — T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton In this essay I hope to exorcise a ghost and to deal with questions of methodology; to consider what we as readers do when we find unbidden, possibly even unwanted or inappropriate presences in the texts we read; how we sort out the effect of such presences — be they echoes, allusions, or simply connections peculiar to ourselves — and more specifically, how we evaluate such links if religious concepts or biblical echoes are involved. My concerns about how we read or listen grow out of long-standing questions about Othello and the kinds of patterns to be found in it, but the conclusions apply to Shakespearean texts more broadly. J.A. Bryant describes the coincidence of early modern knowledge and postmodern ignorance of biblical texts and theological concepts: The average Elizabethan (who was religious and Christian, whatever his doctrinal persuasions may have been) would probably have sat, or stood, through a Shakespeare play without noticing the astonishing number of allusions to Scripture, Prayer Book, and dogma generally. He would have missed them because to him they were commonplace; we miss them because to us they are almost completely 2 Sharon Cadman Seelig foreign, and their strangeness seems but a part of the general strangeness of an unfamiliar language.1 With each decade, readers and listeners are increasingly unlikely to notice Shakespeare's biblical allusions or uses of paradigmatic form, with the result that the even more challenging task of explaining how they function in his plays, as opposed to what they tell us about him, remains unfinished. When I first heard ghostly voices in Othello, I thought, somewhat nervously, that I might be imagining things, that my impression was the unintended consequence of having several times taught Othello during Holy Week. But I soon realized that others had heard such echoes too, and that, rather than having to argue for these presences, I would need to distinguish my particular hearing from that of other readers. In the nineteenth century, Shakespeare was frequently claimed as a presenter of universal, humane values and — though the paradox was largely unnoticed — the pervasiveness of biblical quotation and allusion in his work seemed to confirm the notion.2 More recent critics have found it possible to deduce specific theological positions from Shakespeare's dramatic texts;3 others have seen large symbolic patterns or more specific allegorical meanings.4 But while so much company might have been comforting, I increasingly found myself among those whose assumptions I could not share. For some, the template clearly precedes the text. For Roy Battenhouse, Our critical problem . . . becomes one of discriminating the patterns by which Christian ethics and Christian art declare themselves; and then testing the relevance of such patterns to the actual texture of Shakespeare's drama. Is there manifest in the poetry, we will ask, any of the imagery, symbol, and myth traditional in Christian story? If so, an attempt to explore these aspects may open up the deeper meaning of the play.5 And G. Wilson Knight, writing about Measurefor Measure, finds that "The play must be read, not as a picture of normal human affairs, but as a parable, like the parables of Jesus."6 But the drama, in such an interpretation, becomes a structure of ideas. "Not until we view it as a deliberate artistic pattern of certain Ghostly Paradigms in Othello3 pivot ideas determining the play's action throughout shall we understand its peculiar nature," argues Knight; thus "the play tends toward allegory or symbolism," and the characters are pressed into the service of such concepts, so that "the persons of the play tend to illustrate certain human qualities chosen with careful reference to the main theme."7 Such readings inevitably simplify and schematize Shakespeare's text: "Thus Isabella stands for sainted purity, Angelo for Pharisaical righteousness, the Duke for a psychologically sound and enlightened ethic."8 Given such a...