RACIAL DIFFERENCE – CULTURAL DIFFERENCE – MULTICULTURALISM

To end this chapter, it will be useful to reconsider the relationship of the individual to the social in the context of race and ideas about tragedy. Notwithstanding contemporary criticism’s disdain for char- acter criticism and character-centred theatre production, there are intelligent actors and directors who hold character to be the central concern of drama and yet do not fall for traditional criticism’s privileging of the individual. The Ghanaian actor Hugh Quarshie

argued in  that black actors should not play Othello, or at least not without major reworking of the play, because the role is essen- tially a white racist caricature of the supposedly typical personality of an African man. Moreover, of all Shakespeare’s heroes, he is the weakest:

It is his credulity which diminishes Othello as a tragic hero and therefore diminishes the tragic effect. Of all the tragic flaws in Shakespeare’s characters – pride, procrastination, ambition, among others – credulity is the least likely to engage sympathetic understanding. It is Othello’s credulity which alienates him from our sympathy, as his colour alienates him from Venetian society. And Shakespeare seems to suggest that his colour and his race explain his credulity, his jealousy and his violence.

In referring to a tragic flaw, Quarshie invokes Aristotle’s notion of hamartia (from the Greek for the verb ‘to err’), meaning the literally fatal shortcoming in a hero who is in every other respect above all others in personal attributes. Aristotle’s idea was that such a figure is essentially good and admirable, but this one weakness, brought to the surface and made to matter in some way, produces dispropor- tionate misery. Clearly, we are here in the same interpretative realm as Hamlet in his reference to the ‘vicious mole of nature’ that destroys all the goodness that a person otherwise displays.

Although Bradley disclaims Shakespeare’s adherence to any codi fied poetical theory, such as Aristotle’s,the terms in which he discusses tragedy are much the same as Aristotle’s:

In the circumstances where we see the hero placed, his tragic trait, which is also his greatness, is fatal to him. To meet these circumstances something is required which a smaller man might have given, but which the hero cannot give. He errs, by action or omission; and his error, joining with other causes, brings on him ruin.

This, then, is the individualist model of tragedy: the fault is in the person.

Quarshie accepted that in Bradley’s understanding of Shakespeare, Othello is not simply ‘a black savage who has acquired a veneer of sophistication, which simply has to be scratched off by Iago for the savagery to be revealed’.But then Bradley spoiled his contrast between the stereotypical childlike African and the alto- gether more complex character that Shakespeare created by appar- ently accepting that for most Africans the stereotype is broadly correct, that ‘wogs [do] begin at Calais’,which prejudice is shown by Bradley’s writing:

If the reader has ever chanced to see an African violently excited, he may have been startled to observe how completely at a loss he was to interpret those bodily expressions of passion which in a fellow-countryman he understands at once, and in a European foreigner with somewhat less certainty. The effect of difference in blood in increasing Othello’s bewilderment regarding his wife is not sufficiently realised. The same effect has to be remembered in regard to Desdemona’s mistakes in dealing with Othello in his anger.

For Quarshie this confirms Bradley’s bigotry: ‘. . . for this author- itative commentator, Othello behaves as he does because he is black’.

Quarshie’s conclusion is unfair. Bradley undeniably is Anglocentric in assuming that his reader is British, but he also assumes that the reader is male and elsewhere assumes that the reader is heterosexual and these are typical foibles of his age. But the thrust of his argument at this point is that what we would call cultural difference is apt to cause mutual misunderstanding. Describing Iago’s power to deceive Othello, Bradley is here not concerned with inherent flaws but the difficulties of being an out- sider in a racist society: ‘. . . there comes now [from Iago] . . . the suggestions that he is not an Italian, not even a European; that he is totally ignorant of the thoughts and customary morality of Venetian women . . .’.Bradley’s point is that Othello cannot rely on having known Desdemona long, and cannot rely on his ability to read her motivations by her demeanour since, as Othello has been made aware, he is a foreigner. Whereas there is ‘instinctive interpretation

of character . . . between persons of the same race’, between races there is possibility of misreading and hence, Iago is able to convince him, Othello should not rely on his own reading of Desdemona’s innocence.

If we substitute ‘culture’ for ‘race’ in Bradley’s assertions, nothing he says differs from what one might hear in a Diversity Awareness training session in any modern corporation or public institution: in different cultures the norms of gesture, personal space, emotional demonstrativeness, and linguistic codings of politeness or aggression are all different. Othello’s awareness of his own status as ‘other’ within Venetian society, Bradley argued, is precisely what Iago exploits, and to make this point Bradley asked the reader to imagine or recall being baffled by the behaviour of something from another culture. Bradley explicitly described this as mutual misunderstanding – he was mocking the racially ‘other’ – by insisting on not only ‘Othello’s bewilderment regarding his wife’ but equally ‘Desdemona’s mistakes in dealing with Othello’.

An important question in criticism is whether it is right to assert that the effects of cultural differences between people are more important than the common humanity that binds them together. But Bradley is no more guilty here than the poststructuralist critics who assert that, because language structures consciousness, people thinking in different languages have thoughts that cannot be directly mapped from one to another.There are good reasons to suppose that underlying the seeming differences between languages are common structures and that likewise we have non-verbal systems of communication (especially facial expressions) that are effectively transcultural and ahistorical.

Appeals to a common human nature are widely feared within the intellectual circles of societies such as Great Britain that bear col- lective shame for past colonial exploitation, because historically the assertion of human sameness was usually a cover for extolling the imposed British culture and denigrating (often, criminalising) the local native culture. By contrast, in countries such as South Africa where dominant colonisers imposed strict separateness under the mask of respecting cultural diversity, to assert that we are all alike was and is to align oneself with politically progressive, enlightened thinking.

With this is mind, we can spot the real problem with Bradley’s mode of character criticism. If, as Bradley would have us, we ascribe Othello’s willingness to believe that he may have misunderstood the character of his new wife to his precarious status as favoured ‘other’ within Venetian society, rather than to racially deter - mined credulity, whither his fatal flaw? Because they consider the tragedies in terms of integration, assimilation, and cultural difference, Bradley’s and Sinfield’s approaches are remarkably similar. Both treat tragedy as essentially a mode of drama that diag- noses flaws not in the individual but in the wider society of which they are, perhaps precariously, a part.

SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS

• Macrocosm–microcosm analogies of the kind described by E. M. W. Tillyard are to be found across the drama.

• Characters’ mental health is recurrently indicated by their responses to narrative fictions with which they are presented within the actions of the plays.

• The core concerns with sex and suicide can be made sense of using modern psychological analyses, but equally make sense when understood within Elizabethan models of how the individ- ual relates to, and is affected by, wider society.

• Theatre and film practitioners and critics may show or omit the wider world of persons not directly concerned with the events of the tragedy. To show and attend to this wider social world tends to reduce the sense of personal hamartia and to enhance the sense that the world itself is sick.

• It is easy to adopt unthinkingly the protagonist’s view of the stories told within a play, but it is better to resist this temptation and try to make sense of the conditions that make certain stories plausible and others implausible.

• Although unfashionable, character criticism – the kind that treats the work not merely as a verbal artefact but also as a tale about personalities – can lead to insights similar to those of the more obvious dissident readings of explicitly political critics.

NOTES

. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto and Windus, ), p. . . Ibid., p. . . Ibid., p. . . Ibid., p. . . Ibid., p. . . Ibid., p. .

. Plato, The Republic, trans. and ed. Francis Macdonald Cornford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), p. .

. John Stockwood, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, STC  (London: Henry Bynneman for George Bishop, ), Jv; Thomas White, A Sermon Preached at Pawles Crosse on Sunday the Thirde of Nouember  in the Time of the Plague, STC  (London: [Henry Bynneman for] Francis Coldock, ), Cr.

. E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage,  vols (Oxford: Clarendon, ), vol. , p. .

. Andrew Gurr, Hamlet and the Distracted Globe (Brighton: Sussex University Press, ), p. .

. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, ), p. .

. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, ), ..–n.

. Melanie Klein, The Selected Works of Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (London: Penguin, ), p. .

. W. J. Lawrence, Speeding Up Shakespeare: Studies of the Bygone Theatre and Drama (London: Argonaut, ), pp. –. . James Hirsh, ‘To Take Arms against a Sea of Anomalies:

Laurence Olivier’s Film Adaptation of Act Three, Scene One of Hamlet’, EnterText, . (), no pagination. Online at http://www.brunel.ac.uk/faculty/arts/EnterText.

. Laurence Olivier, dir. Hamlet, Two Cities Films/Pilgrim, .

. Kay A. Smith, ‘ “Hamlet, Part Eight, The Revenge” ’ or Sampling Shakespeare in a Postmodern World’, College  

Literature, . (), –; Henry Hathaway, dir. Souls at Sea, Paramount Pictures, .

. Olivier, Hamlet.

. Grigori Kosintsev, dir. Hamlet, Lenfilm, .

. W. W. Greg, ‘Hamlet’s Hallucination’, Modern Language Review,  (), –; John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –; Terence Hawkes, That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process (London: Methuen, ), pp.–; Graham Bradshaw, ‘The “Encrusted” Hamlet: Resetting the “Mousetrap” ’, in Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s Hamlet, ed. Bernice W. Kliman (New York: Modern Language Association of America, ), pp.–.

. Franco Zeffirelli, dir. Hamlet, Warner/Le Studio Canal+/ Carolco/Icon/Marquis/Nelson, .

. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, nd edn (th impression) (London: Macmillan, ), p. .

. L. C. Knights, How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? (Cambridge: Gordon Fraser, ).

. Natasha Korda, ‘ “Judicious Oeillades”: Supervising Marital Property in The Merry Wives of Windsor’, in Marxist Shakespeares, ed. Jean Howard and Scott Cutler Shershow (London: Routledge, ), pp. –.

. Jonathan Bate, ‘Shakespeare’s Islands’, in Shakespeare and the Mediterranean: The Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress at Valencia , ed. Tom Clayton, Susan Brock, and Vicente Fores (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, ), pp. –.

. Lisa Jardine, ‘ “Why Should He Call Her Whore”:? Defamation and Desdemona’s Case’, in Addressing Frank Kermode: Essays in Criticism and Interpretation, ed. Margaret Tudeau-Clayton and Martin Warner (London: Macmillan, ), pp. –.

. Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Oxford: Clarendon, ), pp. –. . Ibid., p. .

. Hugh Quarshie, Second Thoughts About Othello, International Shakespeare Association Occasional Papers,  (Chipping Campden: International Shakespeare Association, ), p. . . Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, p. .

. Ibid., p. .

. Quarshie, Second Thoughts About Othello, p. . . Ibid., p. .

. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, p. .

. Quarshie, Second Thoughts About Othello, p. . . Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, p. .

. Gabriel Egan, Shakespeare and Marx (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –.

. Ibid., pp. –.  

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