It is so too. And have not we affections?
Desires for sport? And frailty, as men have?
Then let them use us well: else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.In Gregory Doran’s 2004 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Emilia appeared to have lived by what she preached. Desdemona describes Lodovico as a “proper” man. The adjective simultaneously suggests handsome, accomplished, and decent; Emilia responds by emphasizing the “handsome” and then says “I know a lady in Venice would have walked barefoot to Palestine for a touch of his nether lip.” In rehearsal for Doran’s production, the actors explored the possibility that the lady is Emilia herself. Could her words here and some part of Iago’s behavior in the play be explained by the hypothesis that she has had an affair with Lodovico?It is a matter of debate as to how seriously we should take Iago’s claims that both Cassio and Othello have cuckolded him. For Samuel Taylor Coleridge, this was “the motive-hunting of motiveless malignity.” But it was the convention in Shakespeare’s theater that characters addressing the audience in soliloquy speak the truth. Iago is no respecter of convention, yet a sense of his own sexual insecurity may well be one of his driving motives. He says of Cassio, “He hath a daily beauty in his life / That makes me ugly.” This is one of the keys to Iago’s character: Cassio’s good nature tortures him because it exposes his own moral and social deficiencies, just as the very beauty of Othello and Desdemona’s love for each other is something that he cannot bear to witness and that he accordingly feels compelled to destroy.His method of doing so is revealed in the linguistic echo chamber of the gripping temptation scene in the third act. “Alas,” says Othello, “thou echo’st me, / As if there were some monster in thy thought / Too hideous to be shown”: in the course of the dialogue, with its pattern of suggestion and repetition, the monster of envy that resides within Iago is transferred into the jealous fit that brings down Othello. It is an extraordinary performance on Iago’s part, in which—A. C. Bradley’s phrase again—“absolute evil [is] united with supreme intellectual power.” Where Othello’s poetry is one of the great embodiments of Shakespeare’s lyrical art, Iago’s prose and his plotting take us straight to his inventor’s supreme intellectual power.
ABOUT THE TEXTShakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).But because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, editors also have to make decisions about the relative authority of the early printed editions. Half of the sum of his plays only appeared posthumously, in the elaborately produced First Folio text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. The other half had appeared in print in his lifetime, in the more compact and cheaper form of “Quarto” editions, some of which reproduced good quality texts, others of which were to a greater or lesser degree garbled and error-strewn. In the case of a few plays there are hundreds of differences between the Quarto and Folio editions, some of them far from trivial.
If wives do fall…
… And have not we affections?
Desires for sport? And frailty, as men have?The introduction of this plea for recognition of female bodily desire and for an end to the double standard over adultery makes an enormous difference to the play. That Shakespeare seems to have written it not in his first draft but in response to theatrical need is most revealing.If you look at printers’ handbooks from the age of Shakespeare, you quickly discover that one of the first rules was that, whenever possible, compositors were recommended to set their type from existing printed books rather than manuscripts. This was the age before mechanical typesetting, where each individual letter had to be picked out by hand from the compositor’s case and placed on a stick (upside down and back to front) before being laid on the press. It was an age of murky rush-light and of manuscripts written in a secretary hand that had dozens of different, hard-to-decipher forms. Printers’ lives were a lot easier when they were reprinting existing books rather than struggling with handwritten copy. Easily the quickest way to have created the First Folio would have been simply to reprint those eighteen plays that had already appeared in Quarto and only work from manuscript on the other eighteen.But that is not what happened. Whenever Quartos were used, playhouse “promptbooks” were also consulted and stage directions copied in from them. And in the case of several major plays where a reasonably well-printed Quarto was available, the Folio printers were instructed to work from an alternative, playhouse-derived manuscript. This meant that the whole process of producing the first complete Shakespeare took months, even years, longer than it might have done. But for the men overseeing the project, John Hemings and Henry Condell, friends and fellow actors who had been remembered in Shakespeare’s will, the additional labor and cost were worth the effort for the sake of producing an edition that was close to the practice of the theater. They wanted all the plays in print so that people could, as they wrote in their prefatory address to the reader, “read him and again and again,” but they also wanted “the great variety of readers” to work from texts that were close to the theater life for which Shakespeare originally intended them. For this reason, the
Lists of Parts are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, one of which is
Locations are provided by the Folio for only two plays. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations. Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes at the foot of the page, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before. We have emphasized broad geographical settings (Venice and Cyprus) rather than specifics of the kind that suggest anachronistically realistic staging. We have therefore avoided such niceties as “another room in the palace.”
Act and Scene Divisions were provided in the Folio in a much more thoroughgoing way than in the Quartos. Sometimes, however, they were erroneous or omitted; corrections and additions supplied by editorial tradition are indicated by square brackets. Five-act division is based on a classical model, and act breaks provided the opportunity to replace the candles in the indoor Blackfriars playhouse which the King’s Men used after 1608, but Shakespeare did not necessarily think in terms of a five-part structure of dramatic composition. The Folio convention is that a scene ends when the stage is empty. Nowadays, partly under the influence of film, we tend to consider a scene to be a dramatic unit that ends with either a change of imaginary location or a significant passage of time within the narrative. Shakespeare’s fluidity of composition accords well with this convention, so in addition to act and scene numbers we provide a
