The Prophetic Law: Essays in Judaism, Girardianism, Literary Studies, and the Ethical

“Nothing Extenuate”

149 “Nothing Extenuate” Love, Jealousy, and Reading in Shakespeare’s Othello “Is not this man jealous?” —Emelia in Othello, iii.iv.94 “Exchange me for a goat When I shall turn the business of my soul To such exsufflicate and blown surmises, Matching this inference.” —Othello in Othello, iii.iii.180–83 “Thou dost stone my heart, And mak’st me call what I intend to do a murder which I thought a sacrifice.” —Othello in Othello, v.ii.63–65 Prologue I should say at the outset that I have a particularly personal relation to this play. When I first started to write my doctoral dissertation with René Girard Shakespeare’s Othello 150 The Prophetic Law at suny Buffalo in 1972, it was on Shakespeare’s Othello that I started to write, although, in the end, when I turned in my dissertation, I submitted an essay on Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus. I should also say as I begin that I encountered in the writing of this essay a problem very much like the problem I found in writing my dissertation— namely, that I had too much to say. If I stop early, therefore, and close down my discussion of the play before I say all that I would like to say about it, I would suggest that in some way we always stop early in reading Shakespeare, and that perhaps in this play especially that idea is very much a part of the internal structure. Part One: The Genesis of A Theater of Envy The genesis of René Girard’s interest in Shakespeare can be dated with a fair amount of precision. Between 1968 and 1973, I was a graduate student in the English Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Girard had newly arrived from Johns Hopkins University, fresh from the 1966 conference on the “Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” (a conference destined to change the face of criticism in this country).1 I had heard him lecture for the first time in a course he was giving in the English Department (on “Literature, Myth, and Prophecy”) in the spring of 1969. Sometime between the spring of ’69 and the fall of ’72, Girard was asked, along with C. L. Barber, to participate in a critical theory experiment. Girard, of course, was famous at that moment for publishing, in addition to Mensonge romantique et vérité romantique, a collection of essays in English on Proust, and Barber had dazzled the Shakespeare studies world with his book on Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy in which myth and ritual studies were taken up in the historical setting of Elizabethan England.2 Someone suggested (it may have been Al Cook) that these two maverick scholars reverse their customary roles and speak on each other’s topics. Girard would commit to talking about Shakespeare (who was more or less unknown to him at the time) and Barber would commit to talking about Proust. The experiment proved a great success. The night before the lecture (Girard was later to tell me), he and his wife, Martha, had guests to their home, and while Martha was entertaining them in the other room, René’s Shakespeare’s Othello 151 thoughts wandered to the lecture he was to give the following day. It happened there was a version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream playing on television (with Mickey Rooney as Puck), and somehow René thought he saw things in the English writer he had never noticed before, things familiar to him from his work on the European novel.3 He came in the next day, delivered the famous lecture on “Myth and Ritual in Midsummer Night’s Dream”, and afterwards C. L. Barber was the first to respond. Sitting in the front row, the grand old man of myth and ritual criticism in America arose and pronounced judgment. “I have been teaching that play for fifty years, René, and you have just explained it to me.” The room broke into palpable approval, and René was later to say that it was what he discovered in writing this essay that opened the door for him to reading Shakespeare’s work more generally.4 I spell out these details for a number of reasons. First, because I have been asked to talk about the genesis of this book and this anecdote is part of that history. As one of René’s students at Buffalo—there were not that many—and...