SEA CHANGE in SHAKESPEARE's OTHELLO Ruth Stevenson

SEA CHANGE IN SHAKESPEARE’S OTHELLO

Ruth Stevenson

Shakespeare’s oceans and especially his seas do not, as Renaissance lore affi rmed, merely parallel the fl ora and fauna on earth, but, as the seventeenth-century poet Andrew Marvell has further explained, the ocean of the mind also “creates, transcending these,/Far other worlds and other seas.”1 Such mental waterways ebb and fl ow throughout Shakespeare’s plays, creating poem-dramas with extensive ranges of metaphorical investigation by means of seas that are “fl uent,”2 that develop “liquid surge,”3 or become “an enraged, foamy mouth.”4 Shakespeare’s seas coalesce into “eyes”5 or sink into “a stomach o’er charged with gold.”6 They produce “a rapture,”7 and they can create the transfi guration into “coral” and “pearls” of The Tempest’s explicit “sea-change.”8 In Othello,9 the sea’s liquidity suggests the associative plasticity of Shakespeare’s use of words, while its unfathomable depths and susceptibility to lunar transformation emphasize his interest in psychological probing and emotional change. In the following essay, I shall expose the water references that cumulatively become defi nitive parts of the play’s overall verbal network, clarify the “poetry of the words,” as Wallace Stevens calls it, that constructs this network, explain the pertinence of a particular fi gure of speech, synecdoche, that oper- ates within it, and, fi nally, point out the work’s metamorphic fusion in the incandescent phrasing of Act 5. In doing so, I will investigate the

1 Andrew Marvell, “The Garden,” Seventeenth-Century Verse and Prose, Vol. 1: 1600–1660, ed., Helen C. White, Ruth C. Wallerstein, Ricardo Quintana (NY: 1966), ll. 41–46. 2 William Shakespeare, Henry V, 3.7.33 in The Riverside Shakespeare, textual ed., G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: 1974). The following six references are also from The Riverside Shakespeare. 3 Timon of Athens, 4.3.439. 4 Twelfth Night, 5.1.78. 5 Romeo and Juliet, 3.5.132. 6 Pericles, 3.2.54 7 Ibid., 2.1.155. 8 The Tempest, 1.2.398; 399; 401. 9 William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. M.R. Ridley (NY: 1967), the text for all subse- quent references to the play. 454 ruth stevenson working of Othello’s mind, his verbal revisions, and his ﬁ nal complex identity.

The Verbal Network and its Principal Figure of Speech

Sea references grow slowly in the play and are fi rst located outside of Othello’s consciousness in the nautical words of Iago and Roderigo about boats. Early in the fi rst scene, Iago calls himself “beleed and calmed” (1.1.30) as though he were a ship cut off from the wind. Roderigo refers to the “gondolier” (1.1.125) who transported Desde- mona to Othello, and Desdemona, herself, in Iago’s words, is a “carrack” (1.2.50), which Othello has boarded. Her father wants to know where they have “stowed my daughter” (1.2.62), as though she were cargo in a ship’s hold. The movement from words about such surface structures of the water to those that circulate within the depths of the Moor’s mind become a unique linguistic narrative within Othello. Wallace Stevens called such a formation “the poem of the words.” “Every poem,” he says, “is a poem within a poem: the poem of the idea and the poem of the words.”10 In the latter, “the primary relation of each word . . . is to the other words, not to the things or actions they describe.11 That is, “between and among these words,” as Helen Vendler explains, “there grows a “network [. . .], a referentiality that does not so much extend outward to some putative real world as horizontally to the inwardly-extensive world of terms or images.”12 The sea network in Othello, which started with the surface gondola, carrack, and cargo-car- rier, gradually extends horizontally to other vessels in naval formations, notably the Venetian fl eet, settles on a single part of rigging, the sail, for its fi gurative usefulness, and thereafter descends into the sub-aquatic network of the play at large. Shakespeare uses the sail as a conspicuous, clearly isolated image when the people of Cyprus cry, “A sail, a sail, a sail” (2.1.51) and then again shout, “A sail” (54) when they see Iago’s ship. They repeat their cry, “A sail!” twice more (92) as they hail Othello’s vessel (2.1.92), thus emphatically drawing our attention not only to the motif of the sea, but

10 Wallace Stevens, quoted by Helen Vendler in On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems (Cambridge, MA: 1969), p. 1. 11 Wallace Stevens, The Practical Imagination (NY: 1983), p. 9. 12 Vendler, Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire (Knoxville: 1984), p. 54.