New Directions: Othello and His Brothers

Abstract

The Caroline dramatist John Ford engaged so extensively with the plays of Shakespeare that he has some claim to be considered Shakespeare's first literary critic. 'Tis Pity She's a Whore ingeniously rewrites Romeo and Juliet to make its lovers not inappropriately divided by family but inappropriately united by it; The Lover's Melancholy equally creatively combines elements of King Lear and Twelfth Night; and Perkin Warbeck revisits the narrative substance of Richard III in the style of Richard II. Most insistently, though, Ford revisits Othello. There are echoes of it as well as of Romeo and Juliet in 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, in the shape of Soranzo's murderous jealousy, and the debt is unmistakable in two other plays, Love's Sacrifice and The Lady's Trial. In the first of these, both the Italian setting and the basic plot premise of Othello are reprised as Philippo Caraffa, the Duke of Pavia, goaded into suspecting that his wife is having an affair with his closest friend, murders them both. The Iago character, Roderico D'Avolos, has names which echo both the actual name of Roderigo and the supposed diabolism of Iago; the Desdemona character, the Duchess Bianca, has a name which echoes that of the courtesan who loves Cassio. The Duke doubly recalls the language of Othello himself when he says 'I am a monarch of felicity, / Proud in a pair of jewels rich and beautiful', 1 recalling both Othello's initial happiness -'I cannot speak enough of this content' -and his subsequent comparison of Desdemona to a pearl and to a chrysolite; 2 D'Avolos' interpretation of what he takes Bianca and Fernando to be saying recalls Iago's similar glossing of Cassio's alleged dream (2.3.53ff); Fernando clearly shares Cassio's scale of values when he reacts with lightning speed to a perceived threat to his reputation: 'How's that? My reputation? Lay aside / Superfluous ceremony. Speak, what is't?' (I.i.213-4), just as Cassio regards his reputation as 'the immortal part of myself ' (2.3.259 -60). Bianca proposes to intercede for Roseilli (I.2.171-5) and later for Mauruccio (4.1.122-3) as Desdemona does for Cassio (3.3.45-51); and the Abbot of Monaco, who is Bianca's uncle and arrives on a visit, echoes Lodovico. Also as in Othello there are games played with the audience's sense of time: Bianca says at 2.1.141 that this is the third time Fernando has told her he loves her, but it is the first such declaration that we have seen. We also experience as preternaturally short the time elapsing between the revelation of Julia's, Colona's and Morona's pregnancies and their entrance each with a baby in her arms. Ford's final rewriting of Othello comes in his last play, The Lady's Trial, which is also set in Italy (this time in Genoa), and here the parallels are even closer in that the hero Auria first wars against the Turks and is subsequently sent to govern the island of Corsica. Again, too, it is the hero's friend and most trusted counsellor who assures him that his wife is unfaithful, and again the warrior husband is older than his wife.Nor...