Why did Othello Murder Desdemona?

[brianwalker]

Othello is widely held as one of Shakespeare's great tragedies and a great work of art. However, today I read Graham Bradshaw's "Dramatic Intent in Othello" in Harold Bloom's Shakespeare Modern Critical Edition (http://books.google.com/books?id=CSrrkKclA8cC&pg=PR6&dq=harold+bloom+shakespeare+critical+bradshaw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Z-GNT7OeNYKbiAL6n4GMCA&ved=0CEwQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false) which was a devastating refutation of the "double time" theory. [PM me for full text, I have a pdf of the book. and access to jstor, obviously.]

The double time theory holds that a long time passed between the arrival of the gang at Cyprus and Desdemona's murder, while the heterodox theory holds that there was no double time, and everything that happened in Cyprus took in place 36 hours.

The orthodox theory is that Othello and Desdemona married, and then Othello thought that Desdemona cheated on him with Cassio in Cyprus, but this is only possible with the double time theory. Without double time Othello couldn't have possibly suspected that Desdemona cheated on him with Cassio because there literally was no time for that to happen. So little time passes that everything that happens we see.


Throughout this first half of the play the only indeterminate period of time
is that taken up by the voyage to Cyprus, when (it is emphasized) Othello and
Desdemona are in different ships. This carefully managed compression of the
Italian story’s time scheme maximizes tension and the continuity between the
scenes is a theatrically impressive way, but it also ensures—takes pains to
ensure—that the newly married lovers have so little time together. When
Othello leads Desdemona off to bed some hours after their arrival in Cyprus (and
immediately after telling Cassio to report the next morning at his “earliest”
convenience) he confirms that the marriage still has not been consummated:

Come my deere Love,
The purchase made, the fruites are to ensue,
That profit’s yet to come ’tweene me, and you.

The stage direction for Iago’s entrance follows these lines, leaving open the
possibility that he arrives on stage just in time to hear Othello’s words and
perhaps register some malignantly interested response. Be that as it may, his next
words show that Iago is well aware that the marriage still hasn’t been
consummated, and he immediately insinuates, in his busy, tirelessly malicious
way, that Othello is neglecting his official duties:
’tis not yet ten o’th’clocke. Our Generall cast us thus earely for the
love of his Desdemona: Who, let us not therefore blame; he hath not
yet made wanton the night with her. (2.3.13–16)
Learning that the marriage still hasn’t been consummated is, for the audience, a
confirmation rather than a surprise—precisely because Shakespeare’s handling of
time has been both careful and suggestive, constantly bringing home how little
time these lovers are allowed together. In the second scene they were interrupted
by Iago’s warning that Brabantio’s posse is on its way. Then, after Desdemona’s
bold affirmation, in the Senate scene, that she would not be “bereft” of the
“Rites,” it was determined that the newlyweds would leave that night, in different
ships; as Othello tells Desdemona, he has
but an houre

Of Love, of worldly matter, and direction
To spend with thee. We must obey the time.
(1.3.329–31


The heterodox theory, presented here, argues (http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2867955?uid=2&uid=4&sid=56053515093) that, in accordance with single time theory, and agreeing with Bradshaw, that what Othello suspected was that Desdemona had relations with Cassio BEFORE the play, since Othello was with Cassio when Othello wooed Desdemona in secret (remember that they elope and they only get married later).

Bradshaw says that once double-time is thrown out we can conclude definitively that Othello never consummated the marriage since if he consummated it the first night in Cyprus things wouldn't make much sense because he would know from the blood spilled from Desdemona that she was a virgin and that she couldn't have had carnal relations with Cassio before their marriage. Bradshaw writes:


I return to this point later, but advocates of the “double-time” theory are
more concerned that Desdemona hasn’t had time to sleep with Cassio. So, the
“difficulty” that—as the New Arden editor puts it—threatens to make
“nonsense” of the “dramatic action” is that, within the play’s “short time,” there
is no time in which “adultery” could have occurred. Nobody doubts that (as
Frank Kermode assures us in the Riverside edition) Shakespeare “is clearly
aware” of this difficulty.

27 But we are to suppose that, having taken such pains to
get into it, Shakespeare “resolved” it not by a real extension, or loosening, of the
stage time, like that in the second half of The Merchant of Venice, but by what the
New Arden editor, M. R. Ridley, describes as a craftily engineered “trick”: “What
Shakespeare is doing is to present, before our eyes, an unbroken series of events
happening in ‘short time’, but to present them against a background, of events
not presented but implied, which gives the needed impression of ‘long time’”
(lxx). Instead of feeling uneasy about a play that must resort to a trick “to make
the whole progress of the plot credible” (lxix), the excited Ridley affirms that this
“throws light on Shakespeare’s astonishing skill and judgment as a practical
craftsman.... He knew to a fraction of an inch how far he could go in playing a
trick upon his audience, and the measure of his success is precisely the
unawareness of the audience in the theatre that any trick is being played” (lxx).
Dover Wilson similarly invites us to discover and marvel over “yet another piece
of dramatic legerdemain, the most audacious in the whole canon, which has
come to be known as Double Time.”

If the double-time theory is false, then Othello had no reason to suspect that Desdemona did anything after their marriage.



But now we can observe what is most strange about that basic assumption
on which the “double-time” theory rests. It is always taken for granted that there
is a “difficulty” that, as Dover Wilson proudly observes, “might well have seemed
insuperable to any ordinary dramatist”: “For, if Othello and Desdemona
consummated their marriage during the first night in Cyprus, when could she
have committed the adultery that Iago charges her with?” (Preface, New
Shakespeare Othello, xxxii). This is true only if we are using the word “adultery”
in a strict, legalistic sense, but what warrant does the play provide for supposing
that Othello is concerned only with what might have happened after his
marriage? The answer is, none.

Another theory is that Othello want insane and was poisoned, but this drains all meaning from the play since the "he was crazy" excuse explains away any and all contradictions and thus has to be rejected; "character X was crazy" "explains" everything and explains nothing.

[brianwalker]

Bradshaw explains why the anti-double-time timeline of the play makes more sense and coheres with Iago's timidity.

In exploiting what Desdemona revealed, Iago must tread very carefully: if the
marriage was consummated hours before, Othello is likely to know whether his
wife was a virgin. Throughout this first stage of the assault, what is in question is
not the absurd suggestion that Desdemona has committed adultery with Cassio
since her wedding, in what would indeed be “stolen hours”; Iago’s insinuation, as
he feels his way forward, is that something took place before the wedding,
something that can be expected to continue and that would explain Desdemona’s
passionate concern to have Cassio reinstated—and we see the “Monster”
emerging in Othello’s own mind as he begins to discern what is in question.
Similarly, when Iago later promises Othello that he will persuade Cassio to “tell
the Tale anew; / Where, how, how oft, how long ago, and when / He hath, and
is againe to tope your wife” (4.1.85–86), this is not another “indication” of “long
time,” as editors tell us: Iago is once again conjuring up that nightmare of a


Now we get into semantics about what "cuckold" and "adultery" means.

To dismiss this horribly long-lived idea that the play depends upon a trick
to make its action credible is a critical relief, but it is historically disquieting—
unless we can also see why the theory has had so long a life. Here, rather than
simply dismiss it as groundless, we should notice how it is grounded on that
willingness to generalize about the audience as a monolithic entity which has
now resurfaced in the “new” historicism and on a corresponding interpretative
assumption about Jacobean attitudes which emerges very clearly in Dover
Wilson’s New Shakespeare edition: “An accusation of premarital incontinence
would not have served either [Iago’s] purpose or Shakespeare’s, since adultery was
required to make Othello a cuckold, and it is the dishonourable stigma of
cuckoldry that maddens Othello once his confidence has gone and, we may add,
greatly increased the excitement for a Jacobean audience” (xxxii). This of course
raises fundamental questions about what Shakespeare’s play is “about,” but Dover Wilson tells us: in “its simplest terms, ... the tragedy of Othello represents
the destruction of a sublime love between two noble spirits through the intrigues
of a villain devilish in his cunning and unscrupulousness” (***). These terms are
indeed “simple,” not least because they preserve the Coleridgean assumption
that murdering Desdemona would have been all right, or at least compatible with
being very noble, if only she had committed adultery.
“We must obey the time,” Othello tells his bride: the “rites” she so eagerly
awaits must wait. But here, too, critics who are obedient to the myth of “double
time” get into further difficulties. As I observed earlier, there is nothing in 2.3 to
tell us—and the accelerated time makes it more than ever difficult to guess—
whether the marriage is consummated before the riot, or after it, or not at all.
The established assumption is that it is consummated, and some readings—like
Stephen Greenblatt’s in his immensely influential Renaissance Self-Fashioning—
fall apart if we think that it isn’t


Back in Jacobean times a woman's chastity was considered sacred and the plinth of her "worth", so to speak. In many cultures if a bride is presented as a virgin but really isn't a virgin, horrible punishment ensues, thus the demand for "proof of virginity". Arthur Mcgee shows how this makes sense in the context of the use of language in Shakespeare's other works of the same time period.

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2867955?uid=2&uid=4&sid=56053515093


Thus a man whose fiancee was unfaithful would consider himself a "cuckold".
Furnivall records such a case where the fiance makes a claim on his "wife's"
property yet is unwilling to marry her "biecause she hath plaid the hoore, &
committed adultery; and therefore I may iustly refuse her by the order of the
Lawe"'.8 Two other cases of this kind of adultery are quoted by Furnivall (p.
xlv and pp. 59-6i). A similar situation occurs in Measure for Measure, where
Angelo is supposed to have deflowered Isabella while betrothed to Mariana and
is accused of being an "adulterous thief" (V. i. 40) .

There are traces also of "cuckold" being used to describe a man who married
a woman who had been promiscuous. For example, in the last act of Measure for
Measure Lucio's fear of marrying a ***** is greater than his fear of being
whipped and hanged:

I beseech your highness, do not marry me to a *****. Your highness said
even now, I made you a duke: good my lord, do not recompense me in
making me a cuckold. (V. i. 5i6)

In Dekker's The Honest ***** we find Matheo in a similar predicament: the
Duke compels him to marry Bellafront whom~i Matheo robbed of her virginity
and who then turned *****; and so Matheo considers himself a cuckold.19 The
word "cuckoo" is used in the same way in The Witch of Edmonton.20
There are therefore good grounds for believing that the words used in Othello
to describe Desdemona's supposed adultery-"cuckold", "horned man", "false",
"false to wedlock"-refer to adultery committed before marriage, i.e. to sleeping
with Cassio in Venice. And when Othello says: "But if I give my wife a
handkerchief" (IV. i. io) we should read this to mean "But if I give my fiancee
a handkerchief".

Desdemona and became engaged to her either according to the de futuro or,
more likely, the de praesenti form; in either event he would have considered
Desdemona to be his wife from then onwards. A Shakespearian audience would
have expected a betrothal to precede marriage, for betrothal was a ritual, how-
ever privately performed, that everyone observed. If in modern times engage-
ments are dispensed with on occasion, and marriage is entered into without
preamble, in Shakespeare's time the reverse was the custom-marriage in church
might be delayed or avoided but betrothal was of great importance. Shakespeare
himself, we should remember, probably entered wedlock with Anne Hathaway
by becoming engaged to her.

Thus in the "Temptation scenes" Iago insinuates that Cassio and Desdemona
have been lovers in Venice, the final proof being that Cassio possesses the hand-
kerchief-the symbol of Desdemona's infidelity during betrothal. It follows
also that the indications of Long Time-notably Bianca's not having seen
Cassio for a week, and Jago's lie that he has heard Cassio talk in his sleep about
Desdemona-refer to Venice. Furthermore, Bianca, as she is a known *****
who has been Cassio's mistress in Venice, represents for the audience the
Desdemona of Othello's poisoned imagination-
. . . that cunning ***** of Venice
That married with Othello. (IV. ii. 88-89)
I suggest therefore that the plot of Othello to which we have become ac-
customed is not Shakespeare's, and that the "problem" of the time-relations is in
fact the symptom of this misinterpretation. It is wildly improbable that Shake-
speare provided time indications which to a contemporary audience suggested
infidelity in Venice if he intended them to believe that Othello suspected
Desdemona of adultery in Cyprus. The audience, for instance, who saw the play
in I613 at the wedding festivities of the Princess Elizabeth could not have in-
terpreted the play in the modern manner when only three months earlier at
the royal betrothal the couple had become "husband" and "wife"

On these grounds I suggest that a new assessment of Othello is required.
The change from adultery to infidelity in Venice alters Othello's motive for the
murder, besides being the most important time indication in the play. Shake-
speare was undoubtedly careless of time except when it was important dramat-
ically, but in presenting Othello to a contemporary audience he was just as care-
ful to have Desdemona murdered on the second night in Cyprus as he was to
ensure that his Caesar was murdered on the Ides of March

Mcgee ascribes the historical misunderstanding to the fact that a scrupulous, scholarly treatment of Shakespeare didn't happen until the 19th century, and that when Thomas Rymer wrote his critique of Shakespeare even Rymer misunderstood Shakespeare because there were no exhaustive scholarly resources and people simply didn't care that much about Shakespeare, and that Rymer mistook that Othello for having consummated the marriage on the first night, which would make things impossible since Othello would know from Desdemona's blood that she never cheated on him with Cassio and the timeline of the plot makes it impossible for Desdemona to have had sex with Cassio.

In my eyes the problem is that with the passage of time people have forgotten what chastity meant to people back in medieval times; when the Vandals sacked Rome and women were raped, the Romans challenged St. Augustine to write why the Christian women didn't commit suicide now that their chastity was gone. Today it is patently absurd, inconceivable that a woman should have to justify why she doesn't commit suicide once raped, just as it's absurd to think that Othello murdered Desdemona because she wasn't a virgin bride, and since he couldn't take her virginity he had to take her life, and spill blood by other means.

Bradshaw concludes.

By now we might feel relieved that the textual evidence of whether the
marriage is or is not consummated in 2.3 is so uncertain. For if we think the
received idea that it is consummated throws out too many problems, we are free
to prefer the alternative reading. Desdemona wants the sheets to be relaid
because she is still a virgin, and still poignantly longs for “such observancie / As
fits the Bridall” (3.4.147–48). When Othello determines that “Thy Bed lust-
stain’d, shall with Lusts blood bee spotted” he is tormenting himself with the
deluded thought of what somebody else has done: as Montaigne might say,
another bed, other sheets. Virginity, like a life, can only be taken once: in
Othello’s diseased, self-tormenting imagination all that remains for him to do—
the only way in which he can “shed her blood”—is bloody murder.

That tragicomic irony is horrible enough, but the final scene then gives it
a still more dreadful visit. Just as Desdemona could not bring herself to say the ord “*****” in 4.2, Othello tells the “chaste Starres” that he cannot “name” the
“Cause,” but will not—after all—“shed her blood” (5.2.2–3): “Yet Ile not shed
her blood.... Yet she must dye.” That tangle of yets shows that what he is talking
about—what he has not changed his mind about—is not whether to kill her, but
how; it also shows how this latest resolution is still insanely ensnarled with his
obsessive sense of what he has never done and thinks he can never do—and what
his still-virginal bride still hopes he will do, as she lies waiting for him on those
relaid, unspotted wedding sheets. The murder is indeed this marriage’s only
consummation, and the ghastly tragicomic parody of an erotic “death.”

Desdemona. And yet I feare you: for you’re fatall then
When your eyes rowle so. Why I should feare, I know not,
Since guiltinesse I know not: But yet I feele I feare.
Othello. Thinke on thy sinnes.
Desdemona. They are Loves I beare to you.
Othello. I, and for that thou dy’st.
Desdemona. That death’s unnaturall, that kils for loving.
Alas, why gnaw you so your nether-lip?
Some bloody passion shakes your very Frame.
(5.2.36–44)

The “Light” is finally “put out”; in that way, but only in that way, Desdemona’s
“Rose” is “pluck’d.” I find myself wanting to ask not only Greenblatt but every
critic who thinks Othello took Desdemona’s virginity not long before, on this
bed and these relaid sheets, how they understood Othello’s wrenching words
when he realizes what he has done and bends over what is now a corpse:

Cold, cold, my Girle?
Even like thy Chastity.

Indeed he has never “shed her blood”: that final sniffing and snuffing has indeed
been his only “possession of this Heavenly sight.” And that culminating
tragicomic irony, perhaps the most horrible in drama, is indeed as “grim as hell.”

Othello murdered Desdemona because he couldn't have her virginity and spill her blood, so t to take complete possession of her bloody murder was the only option.

Here's Rymer on Othello. He took misinterpreted the play and thought that the marriage had been consummated.

Please read the Bradshaw, McGee, and Rymer or else this thread will turn into a version of me quoting more passages from them.

[Charles Darnay]

I have read Bradshaw before, and while I like some of the stuff, the take on Othello really skirts around the play in a flurry of semantics that (while sometimes seem interesting) do nothing.

As far as the timeframe of the play - there is very little evidence supporting a major lapse in time following the arrival on Cyprus: usually Shakespeare hints at a passage of time, not as overtly as in The Winter's Tale but hints nonetheless.

But the main point is that it doesn't matter if you are able to ration it out because the whole thing is irrational. We are placed as an audience both in the pockets of Iago and Desdemona. Iago because he makes us his confidant and we watch him ruin Othello, and Desdemona because we are as certain of her chastity as she is. The accusations made against her absurd and we know it. Where should it matter that it could be explained away with a simple detailing of how time works? We cannot look for logic in Othello's reasoning in the latter half of the play - it defeats the purpose of the tragedy.

As for the consummation of the marriage - there is a hint somewhere in the play (towards the end) that Desdemona died a virgin. Bloom also suggests that Othello was unwilling to have sex with Desdemona because he was too terrified to discover that she might be unfaithful - but this is more psychological speculation than textual evidence - as Bloom is wont to do.

[ennison]

I agree with you Monsieur Darney.