Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

My title alludes, of course, to Iago's jeering middle-of-the-night warning to Brabantio of his daughter Desdemona's elopement with Othello, the Moor of Venice: “Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul; / Even now, now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe” (I.i.87–9). Brabantio's response is at first more taken up with the impropriety of being shouted out of his bed – “This is Venice; / My house is not a grange” (105–6) – than with the news Iago and Roderigo are imparting. But when he gathers his wits, his reaction to learning that his daughter has freely yielded herself “To the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor” (126) is everything Iago and Roderigo could have hoped for. He rouses his household, remarking that he has had a disturbing premonitory dream of just such an event, and asks Roderigo whether he thinks Desdemona and Othello are married, and if it's possible that some kind of sinister “charms” designed to exploit Desdemona's “youth and maidhood” (171, 172) have come into play. This brilliant opening scene works by showing Iago's skillful manipulation of Brabantio's fund of patriarchal and racial anxieties. The facts that Desdemona has both denied her father's authority to choose a husband for her and that she has chosen Othello for herself are otherwise inexplicable to Brabantio except as the possible results of black magic. While he grasps desperately ... log in or subscribe to read full text