The Improbability of “Othello”: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood by Joel B. Altman (review)

Decades in the making, Joel Altman’s The Improbability of “Othello” is a book with more than a few things to say. In its 428 pages of small print—including hundreds of discursive endnotes—it adds appreciably to what scholars know about Shakespeare’s use of rhetoric and dialectic (logic). It relates the legacy of these ancient verbal disciplines to the role of improbability in Othello, along with other Shakespearean plays. And it frames its intervention in the venerable debate over Shakespeare’s “learning” as part of a reworking of historicist critics’ claims about early modern selfhood and subjectivity.

The book’s subtitle, Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood, announces its twist on those recent views that emphasize the disruptive and often destructive instability of early modern selves. Whereas many historicist critics (old and new alike) have identified a sense of radical conflict in Renaissance expressions of the self, relating it to various sixteenth-century factors, Altman points to a cause older than, say, the Reformation or the new social mobility of courtiers. This is the fundamental tension—voiced by the ancient Greeks and Romans, but felt more acutely by later Christians—between the ascription of worldly power to probable fictions, and the unworldly wish for a liberated self undetermined by discourse. The probable fictions are those of rhetoric and dialectic, which promised their students the ability to rule themselves and others by representing experience and the self through decorous and credible imitations. And the insufficiency of all such artificial personae is expressed in the feelings of “complexity and inconsistency” that, in Shakespeare, bedevil all such attempts at “troping the self ” (236).

Altman thus recasts the division of the early modern psyche as a struggle between rhetorical canons of self-subjection and the self ’s insurgent desire for redemption from those canons. In a suggestive formulation, Shakespeare “transformed an ancient mode of rhetorical proof—the assumption of an appropriate ethos—into the instrument of an early modern psychoanalysis” (236). On the one hand, the poet “fashioned dramatic parts that were informed by swift rhetorical turns of the self as it assumed an ethos inducted by time, place, and occasion” (236). On the other hand, he went far beyond the rhetorical theory of humanist schoolmasters, “to reveal performatively how adherence to decorum could issue in a multiplex self sometimes bewildering to others and often deeply troubling to the participating agent” (236).

Why make Othello a proof text for this thesis—that Shakespeare’s characters are born in the gap between inchoate selves and the fictions that make them probable to the world? For critics since Thomas Rymer, Othello has been the play that most severely tests our faith in probability as a touchstone of persuasive and poetic efficacy. It presents two of the most notorious improbabilities in Shakespeare: Iago’s consummate deception of Othello, absent convincing proof, and Shakespeare’s own arrangement of the main events along dual and irreconcilable timelines. For Altman, both of these masterful manipulations or suspensions of an auditor’s judgment reflect Shakespeare’s deep involvement with “the art of the sophist” (203), and both uncouple persuasion from decorum.

For the Ciceronian humanist, the rhetorical art of probable discourse was the supreme art for those aspiring to govern their fate and that of others. Yet Iago’s frauds and Shakespeare’s opportunistic anachronisms do not rely on probability, in the classical sense of consistency with prior knowledge or with empirical observations of human nature (including differences of individual character, ethos and mores). Instead, Othello suggests that what the mind approves at a given moment depends more on the fickle sway of the “historically positioned psyche,” with its “improbable energies of will, reason, and imagination” (205). The play thus prompts us to question the classical precept of decorum that makes probability the criterion of dramatic imitation and rhetorical persuasion alike. But to abandon the decorous and the probable...