A Fury in the Words: Love and Embarrassment in Shakespeare's Venice

Prologue: Language as Gesture

1 prol ogue Language as Gesture “i understand a fury in your words,/But not the words.” So a perplexed Desdemona stubbornly resists acknowledging the obvious cause of her husband’s sarcasm in Act 4 Scene 2 of Othello. One of the criticheroes of my youth, Richard P. Blackmur, borrows her words in the titular essay of his 1952 collection Language as Gesture. They introduce the anecdote with which he opens his account and I, in turn, open mine. Blackmur tells how, as a small boy in Cambridge, passing by little dead-end streets and looking up at the street-name signs, he was struck by an inscription mounted on a placard beneath the signs. It read “Private Way Dangerous Passing.” This was how the city warned passers-by that it was responsible neither for the state of the roadbed nor for any injury “sustained through its use.” But the placard “meant something else” to young Blackmur. It turned the dead-end street into a monstrous maw. “It meant,” he writes, “that there was in passing across its mouth a clear and present danger which might, and especially if it was dusk, suddenly leap out and overcome me. Thus . . . whenever I passed one of these signs, I had the regular experience of that heightened, that excited, sense of being . . . we find in poetry. I understood the fury in its words, but not the words. . . . There was a steady over-arching gesture in those words . . . that . . . meant more and touched me more deeply than any merely communicative words, deprived of their native gesture, can ever do.” “Gesture in language,” Blackmur concludes, “is the outward and dramatic play of inward . . . meaning,” and it “so animates . . . [meaning] as to make it independent of speaker or writer.”1 1. R. P. Blackmur, Language as Gesture (1952; rpt. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 4–6. 2 ‡ prologue Blackmur stops short of claiming that Desdemona’s utterance is itself a gesture. For him her words only describe or characterize “the situation in which language gains the force of gesture.”2 But for me the utterance is very much a gesture in his sense of the term, and I’ll return to it later. The gesture dormant in the words “Dangerous Passing ” remained a sleeping monster until Blackmur woke it up with his misreading. The gesture of fury in Desdemona’s words can only be awakened by a similar if monstrously more complex process of misreading. The name of this process is close interpretation. But uttering that name is like uttering a curse. Close reading interrupts the rhythm and flow of theatrical performance in order to create problems where no problems exist. It makes every scene a problem scene and every play a problem play. The standard complaint is that in the course of doing this it succeeds only in leaching out the theater’s “large effects.” I borrow that last phrase from a 1983 review of Jane Adamson’s ‘Othello’ as Tragedy. The reviewer, Patrick Grant, criticized the book because its focus on “fine-tuned, intimate social and psychological interchange” led Adamson to ignore the fury in the words—“things in the play that are . . . larger than life”—“the extravagant, melodramatic depiction of an extreme situation, the punishing boldness of an old-fashioned morality of heaven and hell.”3 Grant posed the central problem of what’s come to be known as the stage-versus-page conflict, which I subsequently described as a conflict between the wide-eyed playgoer and the slit-eyed armchair interpreter (for example, me). Your garden-variety slit-eyed reader takes the play out of the theater by inching over its text like a snail and leaving nasty little tracks of interpretive scurf all over the gorgeous language. A more wholesome, or stage-centered, model of interpretive interruption is the genre of performance criticism exemplified at its best by the wonderful studies of Barbara Hodgdon and Miriam Gilbert.4 In 2. Ibid., 4. 3. Patrick Grant, “Victims and Victimizers in Othello,” Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (1983): 363. 4. Barbara Hodgdon, The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare’s History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Miriam Gilbert, Shakespeare at Stratford: The Merchant of Venice (London: Thomson Learning, 2002). language as gesture ‡ 3 rich comparative analyses of episodes and scenes, they illuminate the possibilities of the text by attending with great critical sensitivity to the interpretations worked...