I came to Othello late in my Shakespearean education, meaning after I’d graduated with an English degree and moved to New York and started work and sank into a pit of intellectual ferment and general post-collegiate malaise. Othello had somehow eluded me; in eight years of high school and undergraduate English classes, I’d read Lear twice and Macbeth twice and Hamlet more times than I cared to remember and all the other tragedies at least once, but never Othello.
I downloaded an ebook version of the play, riddled with typos and strange formatting errors that made certain scenes read like an e.e. cummings poem, so I could it read on my commute to and from work. I read Act 5, Scene II—The One With All the Deaths—on my phone while riding the F train, and when I finished, I looked around at my fellow subway riders in astonishment. How had no one ever told me about Emilia, who, in only a couple of lines, brings down one of the most conniving, merciless villains in all of Western literature? How had no one told me about this fantastic female character who defies not one but two sword-wielding men in order to make sure Desdemona, her mistress and friend, receives justice? I wanted to rip up my diploma. I wanted to start over as a freshman and devote my entire undergraduate career to the Gospel of Emilia.
Later, I discovered that A. C. Bradley felt much the same in 1904 when he was lecturing on Shakespeare at Oxford. “Till close to the end [of the play] she frequently sets ones teeth on edge,” he writes of Emilia, “and at the end, one is ready to worship her.”
Part of Emilia’s appeal is her sheer familiarity. Unlike many of Shakespeare’s characters, she needs little translation to come alive to the 21st-century reader. In a modern rom-com, Emilia would be The Best Friend: salty, of good heart but questionable advice, chatty, kind of a mess — but an endearing mess. When Desdemona asks heaven to pardon the hypothetical man who is turning her husband against her, Emilia wastes no time shutting that down: “A halter pardon him! and hell gnaw his bones!” In our modern rom-com, she would be standing on a chair in a bar, egging on the heroine while smashing beer bottles on the floor.
But it’s not just Emilia’s guff that makes her a fascinating character. What allows her to transcend what Thomas Rymer sarcastically calls “The Tragedy of the Handkerchief” is her confrontation and dismissal of the malice of male violence, even if she can’t escape from it. Emilia is threatened not once but twice in her final scene — once with Othello’s sword, and once with her husband’s. But even in the face of this brutality, she is a rebuke to the idea of female silence. Iago, sensing that she’s about to expose him, tells her to shut up and go home. She responds with a speech that puts the rest of the characters of the play to shame:
No, I will speak as liberal as the north:
Let heaven and men and devils, let them all,
All, all, cry shame against me, yet I’ll speak.
Emilia demonstrates the potency of female rage in the face of violence. The injustice of Desdemona’s death almost chokes her, yet she still manages to speak. Once she realizes what he’s done, she exposes Iago’s plot to turn Othello against Desdemona, separating herself from her husband and aligning herself with her female friend—a rare move in classic literature. At the same time, she pays the price for this realignment: Before Iago is apprehended (alive, which is in and of itself a rarity in Shakespeare), he stabs and kills Emilia, silencing her by force when he couldn’t do so by threats.
Coleridge may have argued, in praising the docility of Desdemona’s death, that Shakespeare knew it was the perfection of a woman to be characterless, but Shakespeare himself contradicts this assertion in his depiction of Emilia. In fact, the strength of Emilia’s rage loomed so large in the Victorian imagination that her part was severely cut in most productions, for fear she would overshadow the title character in the last act of the play.
I was considering Emilia when my mother called me a couple of weeks ago. The campus of SUNY Geneseo, forty-five minutes from where I grew up, had been shell-shocked by a double murder-suicide; this was my mother’s alma mater, and the alma mater of several of my closest friends from high school. I’d slept on the floor of the dorms in a sleeping bag more than once, on visits as a teenager; I had sunny, happy memories there. Details had begun to emerge about the murder-suicide when my mother called: A former student had apparently killed his ex-girlfriend, as well as another classmate, in her bed while they slept. The details were gruesome, and yet somehow not surprising. Almost every woman I know has at least one story about being threatened with or experiencing violence at the hands of men.
“It’s all so awful,” my mother said, and then added, as if she couldn’t think of any other advice: “Just stay away from men.” I assured her that, due to a variety of factors, I was already doing a stellar job on that front, but it made me think: Emilia and Desdemona weren’t killed for being unfaithful or foolish or too trusting or too weak—they were killed because they hung around too many damn men.
Hamlet is supposed to be the post-modern play, the play of our historical moment (the Romantics had Lear; Shakespeare’s own generation, uneasy about the inevitable death of heirless Elizabeth, enjoyed tormenting themselves with Henry IV, Part I and Richard III), but the situation Desdemona and Emilia face—damned if you do, damned if you don’t, damned if someone says you did, damned if you misplace your handkerchief—resonates with me far more than Hamlet’s more generalized angst. At its heart Othello is not a play about sexual jealousy; Othello is a play about control, and what happens to women who resist or subvert that control. Othello is the play of UC Santa Barbara and George Sodini’s LA Fitness and the Milford, Connecticut high school where Maren Sanchez was stabbed before her prom. In that sense, Othello is also a play for every woman who has ever been told to “just stay away from men.”
Bradley gives Emilia credit for speaking “for us the violent common emotions which we feel, together with those more tragic emotions which she does not comprehend” following Desdemona’s death. “From the moment of her appearance after the murder to the moment of her death she is transfigured,” he writes, “and yet she remains perfectly true to herself, and we would not have her one atom less herself.” But Emilia isn’t only a mouthpiece for the despair of the viewer; she is a witness to the violence committed against her friend, and an active agent in her own fate. “I care not for thy sword,” Emilia says to Othello, when she discovers what he’s done. “I’ll make thee known, though I lost twenty lives.”
In the end, though, she only had the one life. She gave it. She spoke.
References:
Bradley, A. C. Shakespearean Tragedy; Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth. London: Macmillan, 1905.
Grennan, Eamon. “The Women’s Voices in Othello: Speech, Song, Silence,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38.3 (1987): 27-92.
Petcher, Edward. “Too Much Violence: Murdering Wives in Othello.” Othello. New York: Morton, 2004. 366-87.
Dang. This is FLAWLESS.
I also studied Shakespeare in college and I also never read Othello. You’ve persuaded me to change that, and stat.
This is the reason why Othello was always my favorite Shakespeare play. There’s just so much intersectionality to it, which gives it a depth lacking in the other tragedies (For the record, I never considered Hamlet a play that had much to say to the present day).
#Notallwomen
#Moorlivesmatter
Also why Emilia is my favorite female character in Shakespeare. I was so pissed as an undergraduate that she didn’t get a rhyming couplet at her death scene that I wrote her a series of syllabics and an essay.
She catalyze X a lot of things for me– not least that it can be easier to name abuse in someone else’s family life than in one’s own. I grew up with a volatile and sometimes violent father, but didn’t use the word “abuse” to describe my family for nearly two decades, even as I was hypersensitive to male displays of malice and aggression elsewhere.
I wept for Emilia because she wept for Desdemona– how fucked up and wasteful her death was.
Like Emilia, I didn’t know the half of why I was crying.
I didn’t know how to cry for myself.
I want to tattoo those Emilia lines on my body I mean…
No, I will speak as liberal as the north:
Let heaven and men and devils, let them all,
All, all, cry shame against me, yet I’ll speak.
Or maybe just put them in my twitter bio BUT STILL.
Yes. Definitely adding “All cry shame against me, yet I’ll speak” to my list of tattoos-I-will-never-get. *sigh*
all,/ All, all!
Sometimes I think I’ll just get a tattoo of “No” but now I am thinking what if its “no,” with the comma after?
no,
, yes
I mean there’s already Molly Bloom for the “yes” tattoo but sometimes there’s nothing more poetical than no.
Oh I know! I was just saying you should. [no,] I mean. Trying to be clever-ish, not revising your plan.
No worries! I gotcha.
Hey you know what. I looked up the “yes” tattoo line to make sure I was remembering it right, and found this gem:
The episode both begins and ends with “yes,” a word that Joyce described as “the female word” and that he said indicated “acquiescence, self-abandon, relaxation, the end of all resistance.”
So guess what FUCK YOU JAMES JOYCE.
Also, “Perchance, Iago, I shall ne’er go home.”
YESSSS.
I mean, I obvs wish she’d had a chance to leave, apologize to Bianca for the slut-shaming, mourn Desdemona, and have a fabulous life having nothing to do with Mr. Motiveless Malignity.
But given that the hand she was. dealt involved dying at the hand of a murderous misogynist shithead, I am glad she at least got in a sick burn on the way out.
I LOVE her noncompliance.
“All, all, cry shame against me, yet I’ll speak” sounds like the experience of being a woman doing something on the internet, especially if it involves politics or video games.
This is a great piece! Emilia is a fascinating character. Along with her importance at the end of the play, she also gives a great speech in which she explicitly states that women are the equals of men (in faults as well as virtues). But she also does give Iago Desdemona’s handkerchief; even if she didn’t know what her husband would do with it, she knew it wouldn’t be something Desdemona would have been comfortable with.
She’s a messy, complicated person who buys into sexist power plays sometimes, but she is constantly assured of her own worth and agency, and when it matters most, she exercises that agency. In a play whose characters act on very simple drives (Iago is evil. Desdemona is innocent. Othello is jealous.), she stands out in the best possible way.
Oh, perfection.
“Othello” is one of those plays that are hard to watch because Desdemona *thinks* she’s in the Love Story of the Century and she’s actually in an abusive and controlling relationship and that’s…close to home. She and Emilia both deserve so very much better.
It’s even harder to watch when Othello is in blackface, trust!
(It was the opera. I don’t think anyone would try that with straight theatre, but opera can take even longer to get there.)
Oh no. I assure you. They will try that with straight theatre too.
shuddering at the memory of when we went to the theater to see the movie version with Placido Domingo as Otello. STILL shuddering, 30 years later!
Saw placido in 2 different productions. He made very clear what charmed Desdemona, unlike too many Othellos and Otellos. This is a character who is near impossible to “sell” to the audience. It works for me through the music, rarely through the original.
Huh, I never thought about it that way. I never had any doubt that Othello was wonderful and charming (and fascinating) to Desdemona. I also felt like they would have been a perfect couple forever if it hadn’t been for Iago. Plus his men like him too, apart from Iago. And he’s so happy and unruffled for quite a while, and it really does take Iago a lot of work to persuade him to start being jealous. But maybe it just depends on how the actor plays him.
I’ve never seen it, but I’m sure some have. Sigh.
TELL me about it. Did the Met do its first non-blackface “Otello” what, three years ago?
Also, friends share “Sassy Gay Friend: Othello Edition” with friends. “Stop saying ‘Otello’; it sounds pretentious.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKttq6EUqbE
Haha, I had forgotten how funny those are! Though the other day I did come in and say to my cat “What are you doing? What, what, what are you doing!” (I don’t remember what he was doing, but clearly he needed to be called out on it.)
Well, opera expects the audience to suspend disbelief for the visuals much more than theater or film do, as long as the voice sounds right.
(Edit: But I think Othello should be a baritone – or even a bass! Is there ever a bass protagonist? – and Iago with his sneaky charm should be the tenor. Cassio could be the baritone because baritones are the best. But I kind of dislike Verdi because I hate the I-love-my-rapist theme in Rigoletto. UGHHHH.)
(Edit again! Then we could have Willard White as Othello! Yes yes yes.)
(EDIT AGAIN I just found this video clip! Of Willard White in the regular non-opera play.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KIqgWZvwE8
So they don’t need blackface at all. Let the singers sing: a blond Othello, an Asian Desdemona, a black Iago, whatever, why can’t we see that?
That would be fine with me.
Ha, totally. I’m from a straight theatre background, so “looking the part” has always been important (and one of the reasons I never tried to be an actor after theatre school – I’mnot funny enough to be a fat lady actor.) My partner is from opera and the first time she took me (Rusalka) I was all “WAIT – this gorgeous young mermaid is supposed to fall in love, on sight, no conversation, with that fat old guy?” (Please excuse the fat-shaming in there, but you get my drift – not what I was used to seeing onstage!) And she was like “It’s all about the music, listen to their voices!”
But of course even she was horrified by the black face (she loves Verdi, for the music, although she knows how problematic the content obviously is – she went to Rigoletto once and there were children in the audience!) Because if it is all about the music, the singer’s voice, then there’s no need for black-imitating makeup! If it doesn’t matter what they look like just let the white guy sing Othello!
Ah, Rigoletto. So problematic, yet so much to work with.
I think it would be drastically improved by reimagining the Duke as a Barney Stinson “thinks he’s in a lighthearted comedy so would never do anything actually despicable” character, and making Rigoletto the villain.
After all, Rigoletto is the one who slut-shames his own daughter when she tells him what happened in Act 2–“Now the altar is cast down” indeed. He is the one who brings premodern morality to the plot, not to mention murder, kicking people when they’re down, and fanatical jealous rage.
Alternatively, it would be improved by having Gilda try to warn the Duke in Act 3 instead of just dying for him. That scene is actually fairly impressively feminist as operas go, as Sparafucile not only takes Maddalena’s arguments seriously but is eventually convinced by her.
I AM HERE FOR THE “DAMMIT, ‘RIGOLETTO'” CONVERSATION.
Like, don’t keep your daughters locked in your houses and never let them go anywhere because their “purity” (grrrrrrrrrrrr) is the only valuable thing about them, guys. Gilda should have warned the Duke and then taken the money and men’s clothes and the horse and gone back to the convent where they were kind to her. Or everyone at the corrupt court (except for the little page boy) could have keeled over dead earlier that day because Monterone’s daughter had poisoned them for standing by while the Duke raped her and had her father executed.
I first became acquainted with that opera via the Ingvar Wixell/Pavarotti/Gruberova laser disc at the age of nine. I was reading a lot of Greek myths and just enjoyed drama and blood and thunder without really thinking about the implications, but now… And Verdi is so good at conveying people’s meanings that it’s not like you can pretend they’re singing about something else.
I just can’t deal with it! I don’t like Don Giovanni either.
“We’re watching a feminist opera tonight!”
“So we’re watching ‘Le Nozze di Figaro’?”
“Yes.”
“Good!”
I suppose the Strauss/Von Hofmannsthal canon are also included. And “L’Elisir D’Amore” and some of Rossini’s spirited ladies.
Oddly enough, Tannhauser can be read as quite feminist. At the end of Act 2, Elizabeth tells a whole room full of Germans with swords drawn to shove it, and they (mostly) do.
Elizabeth would not have stood for any of the crap that the Rigoletto men try to pull.
Of course, Tannhauser has different issues. The whole room full of Germans drawing swords and trying to kill a man just because he is involuntarily connected with the wrong religion…foreshadows some other stuff.
Well Wagner also wrote Brunhilde and the Valkyries (even though he didn’t invent them). And the Rhine maidens WIN! Even Isolde takes her fate into her own hands. Maybe he liked strong women. I can’t picture a Wagnerian soprano being a frail little Gilda.
I don’t think of Gilda as frail. She’s mischievous and emo, but not frail. Even though her “I’ll die for him anyway” settles oddly on her character, it’s still a fairly impressive choice, in line with the defying her father at every turn she’s done already.
For a frail, passive Verdi heroine, I’d nominate Violetta Valery from La Traviata. She just sort of dies while not standing up to her lover’s father or bothering to even drop him a little hint as to what’s going on.
Oh, I’m Team Violetta. She is dealt a losing hand (tuberculosis, being cast out of bourgeois society, financially precarious position) and plays the Hell out of it- she is so unselfish she lets Alfredo go eventually, but she schools his stupid father with lines like “G-d forgives the fallen woman but Man does not.” (Alfredo’s sister should write to Captain Awkward about “my fiance’s family is pressuring him to break off our engagement because they don’t like my brother’s girlfriend- do you have any scripts for this situation?”) At the end of Act Two her goodness is so strong that she’s persuaded everyone, including the Germonts, of how shitty their behavior is. It’s hard to unpack the trope where the choice a woman makes is a) the morally right choice; b) the choice that guarantees her death, because there’s so much other stuff in there as well.
Also, Violetta gives the best parties!
I thought Gilda was a wimp till I saw Diana Damrau (on a DVD this time- tech marches on!) and I agree that she stands up for herself as much as she can.
Tosca is pretty badass. Sure she dies in the end, but she at least gets to kill her enemy. And Carmen could be a cautionary tale about “some men just are not ready for a strong woman who makes her own choices. Stay away from them. And men, if you can’t handle a woman like that, don’t try to change her or it will end badly for both of you. Go home and marry your original sweetheart, jerk.”
Britten is my favorite opera composer, and I love the women’s quartet in Peter Grimes (Ellen, Auntie and the nieces) when they sing about caring for the men who use them and leave them (and slut shame them). Those women know it’s not how things should be. But sadly, none of the men are there to hear them sing it.
I do think Rigoletto really loved his daughter for who she was, and it wasn’t their fault that in society an unmarried girl’s purity really was the highest bargaining chip. And he kept her locked away because he knew what men like the Duke were like, and that they were on the prowl, and that they never would have left her alone if they had known about her (and he was right).
Yet another case of a girl lacking a mother!!! Where are the mothers??? Mothers would never stand for this nonsense.
Yes. But he could have *told* her that was why he was doing it. She needed her mom. And I hate it that when she’s dying he talks past what she’s saying and goes on about “poor little me, I’ll be alone without you!”
(My Horrible Headcanon is that Mrs Rigoletto was seduced and abandoned by someone else and married Rigoletto because she was pregnant. And then she left him after the baby came, and he made up this whole story to make Gilda feel better.)
This is also a case of “don’t hang around men.”
I have an Awesome Headcanon for an alternate (comedy) version of Rigoletto with a similar jumping off point. Are you interested in geeking out over opera via email?
Love to! My Toast burner email is siddonspackard at gmail dot com!
Come to think of it, it is based off a Victor Hugo play, and it does kind of echo how Jean Valjean raised Cosette – but he was a good man, and she ends up with another good man.
Have you seen the Daniel Handler film Rick, based on Rigoletto? I need to watch it again, because I am blanking on details, but Evil Bill Pullman as Rick O’Lette (yeah) and Sandra Oh cursing him (yessss). But I remember it being much more evil Rick and the Duke being more gross and frattish.
Rigoletto makes me want to set everything on fire.
I know right! I never studied Othello so my first experience of it was the black face opera at Sydney opera house. It was awful and made me hate it.
One of my proudest moments was seeing some soppy love quote of Desdemona’s on my mom’s best friend’s daughter’s instagram and saying “girl – never be a Desdemona when you can be an Emilia.” And she AGREED and told me she would make that her mantra.
Excellent post. Emilia is awesome. I think if anything you’re actually giving Coleridge’s reading of the play too much credit; Desdemona is hardly characterless. In 1.3 her father describes her as “A maiden never bold;/Of spirit so still and quiet, that her motion/Blush’d at herself” and that might be a fair description of the dead Desdemona but it certainly isn’t of the live one, who stands up to her father and is pretty clear what she wants out of her marriage: “if I be left behind,/A moth of peace, and he go to the war,/The rites for which I love him are bereft me.” Then when we see her next in 2.1 she’s bantering with Iago. Unfortunately, her arc is basically the opposite of Emilia’s; Emilia ends strongly, and Desdemona ends weakly (“Nobody; I myself. Farewell/Commend me to my kind lord: O, farewell!”) but don’t let some 18th-century know-it-all tell you either of them is characterless.
I never really thought about it before, but why are there so many missing mothers in Shakespeare?
Who knows? But there sure are a lot of them. It’s a real problem.
I thought of it in response to your comments about her father seeming to misjudge or misunderstand her character. I bet a mother would have known. I bet a mother would have managed to save Desdemona too.
Same as Disney. A strong, intelligent, fullgrown woman would make short work of the plot.
I was actually once guilty of writing a whole book full of characters without mothers, and ultimately that was my conscious reason: one fully functional mom would put a stop to the foolishness hundreds of pages earlier.
Ha, good point!
Dang, I knew that was a problem in modern stories and pop culture, I didn’t realize it went back to Shakespeare.
These are ones I can think of with father figures but no mothers:
Desdemona (Othello)
Miranda (Tempest)
Ophelia (Hamlet)
Hero and Beatrice (Much Ado About Nothing)
Cordelia & sisters (King Lear)
Hermia (Midsummer Night’s Dream)
Lavinia (Titus Andronicus)
Kate, Bianca (Taming of the Shrew)
Maybe it’s because Shakespeare himself had two daughters? His son died young, so maybe being a father to daughters was something close to his heart?
Girls with mothers:
Juliet
You’re selling the late plays short. Girls with mothers include Perdita and Marina, though both have to grow up without their mothers before being reunited with them.
I haven’t read those. Which plays are they in? I was just listing ones I could think of.
Perdita is in A Winter’s Tale and Marina is in Pericles.
The Winter’s Tale has a mother and daughter, although they are separated.
Rosalind and Celia both also have fathers and no mothers.
Because so many women died in childbirth?
I thought of that. But surely it wouldn’t be THAT many! Maybe he just didn’t have enough good male actors who could play women, so he had to limit their numbers.
eeeeeeee! i wrote my final paper for my shakespeare class in college about emilia. i remember feeling like my professor (100% wonderful) just could not GET what was so spectacular about her. i love her forever, oh my word. (oh man, i just remembered that i lost that paper! whyyyy didn’t i back up my files?)
email your professor and see if they still have a copy bouncing around in the aether somewhere?
I love this so, so much. Time to revisit Othello! (I haven’t read it in ages, but watched a Bollywood version a while back that was decent. I definitely didn’t pay enough attention to the Emilia character, though.) This is why I love The Toast.
I too love this. Also, Emilia is my younger daughter’s middle name.
Yes, this is spot on! Emilia in Act 5 is so amazing. I teach a college course on Women and Power in Shakespearean Drama, and Othello is such an interesting play in the context of that topic. I don’t think I had quite recognized how interesting Emilia as a character until I saw her through my students’ eyes– the first time I taught the play, I noticed that they were obsessed with her– at least half of them wanted to write their final papers on her. She and Emilia are interesting in relation to one another in so many ways– both in how they speak (or don’t speak) at various parts of the play in relation to male power, and in terms of how they, in their scenes together, hint at a private space for female speech and intimacy, one that Iago and Othello suggest a deep anxiety and eventually anger about…. another way in which this play, and this character, speak to our current cultural moment!
I saw a production in high school that was very Fried Green Tomatoes in some ways– act 3 had a lot of barely submerged longing in it.
I don’t think one needs to supply queer subtext in order to make sense of the devotion between D and E, but it is available.
I would like to take that course, please!
yes yes yes, Emilia is my all time fave! Great article.
I loved this article, though I think not addressing the racial elements of the play misses some of its complexities.
“Stay away from men. White men in particular really like fucking things up.”
There are definitely lots more complexities in Othello, but Emilia’s role doesn’t much deal with the racial elements.
I love Emilia and performed this moologue back in high school in theater competitions. She and Helena were my favorite Shakespeare women from the plays I read. (I also liked Goneril, though the details escape me as to why: maybe it was just her name.)
Paulina from Winter’s Tale is also one of my favorites, just for this line alone when the king commands his men to haul her away: “Let he that makes but trifles of his eyes | first hand me!”
ETA: Had to fix all the names, bad English major…
Same about loving Shakespeare but missing out on it in both high school and college. The first time I ever experienced it was last year at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. It was in an outdoor theater, and during the last scene (The One With All the Deaths), it started to rain — like one of those gross, misty rains, and it was cold and awful and PERFECT. Like, it fit the mood of the play so well I can’t imagine seeing it any other way.
All this to say that Othello is so incredibly underrated and I wish I’d learned about it, and I wish I’d appreciated Emilia more in the version I saw. I mostly ended up hating Desdemona (but that’s because the actress playing her chewed so hard on her R’s is made me want to scream). I need to give the play a reread/rewatch.
Othello was the first Shakespeare I read for myself, voluntarily, in high school! I still have a very special love for it. I also saw a really excellent performance of it and, I have to admit, I fell in love with handsome (and I think much under-appreciated) Cassio. Emilia is excellent. All the best people die in that play, ugh. (But still, Iago is the best villain ever. Or at least the father of all really excellent villains.)
Falling in love with Cassio was obligatory if you saw him played, as I was fortunate enough to do, by Tom Hiddleston. In that production, Emilia was played – magnificently – by Michelle Fairley, aka Catelyn Stark. And Othello was Chiwitel Eijofor. Oh my, it was almost *too* good.
Oh wow, I bet! Poor Cassio, he’s such a good guy, the only completely nice guy there. He’s like Horatio in Hamlet. Or even like Banquo. Nobody ever pays attention to the normal nice guys who are just minding their own business and being a supportive friend.
I love this. I played Emilia in a school production and when the teacher rang me to let me know which part I’d got she actually said “I’m afraid it’s Emilia”, like actually *apologising* that I wasn’t Desdemona. Needless to say, no apologies were needed.
The thing I found fascinating – as well as her refusal to be silent – is how much she’s clearly in love with Iago, who just does not love her back. She’s so desperate to get some kind of response from him that she steals the handkerchief even though she suspects nefarious deeds might be afoot. She recognises Desdemona’s situation so clearly because she has her own shitty marriage to contend with – she realises what’s up and by Act 5 she’s fully a paid up member of Team Desdemona, even though she knows it might cost her her life. Her line “Perchance Iago, I will never go home” sends chills every time – whether it’s a threat to leave or a premonition of her own death (a recognition that women are most vulnerable when they try to leave) it cuts through the male bullshit of that scene like vagina dentata through an unwanted dick. She is, I think, one of the most flawed, redeemed, brilliantly realised characters in Shakespeare.
That’s just my reading, of course – but yeah. All hail Emilia.
Lucky you to play her!!! I’m jealous.
I wish I could make love to this wonderful turn-of-phrase: “It cuts through the male bullshit of that scene like vagina dentata through an unwanted dick.”
This article made my eyes turn into HEARTS!!! <3
Ahhhh, I also love Emilia! I wrote an essay about her (and Juliet) in college, though I first read Othello in high school (I’m the opposite of the essay author in this sense, as I almost graduated with my lit degree without reading Hamlet once).
I too was struck by Emilia’s furious rage for her murdered friend, the way she refused to be silent or cowed by the swords around her (oh, men and their phallic weapons).
I really loved this line in your essay: Emilia and Desdemona weren’t killed for being unfaithful or foolish or too trusting or too weak—they were killed because they hung around too many damn men.
I’m going to see a production of Othello this Friday that has a predominantly female cast, and I’m so excited to see how that alters things.
Shakespeare does let women have some pretty great furious rage. Like Beatrice raging for Hero’s sake. “God that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace!” (Claudio is super lucky that any of them ever forgave him. Come to think of it, he easily could have become an Othello and killed Hero. That is what he thought happened, after all, and he only felt remorse once he realized he had been wrong about her faithfulness. Oh, these men, these men!)
Also I was an English major in college and never read Hamlet for assignment either, because professors always assumed we had all studied it already for high school. I had read it for myself during school though, for fun.
Oh yes — my favorite Shakespeare line to quote, which I already did in another thread here, is delivered by Paulina in Winter’s Tale, when the king orders her hauled away: “Let he that makes but trifles of his eyes | first hand me!”
I read a bunch of Shakespeare plays for fun (starting with MACBETH when I was twelve because I had no idea what I was getting into, and I really didn’t understand anything but I was utterly determined to Read Shakespeare, that’s the nerd I was), then Midsummer Night’s Dream, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet — but for whatever reason I never hit upon Hamlet. (Henry IV Part 1 is kinda my favorite, just because it’s a lot of fun and my college did a great production of it.)
That is a great quote! I haven’t read or seen Winter’s Tale, so I must fix that.
My very first introduction to Shakespeare was Zeffirelli’s Hamlet when I was about 13 or 14, and it amazed me. THAT was what Shakespeare was like? Awesome!!! (Also, Mel Gibson can do Shakespeare? Wow!) Apart from being abridged, it was perfect. So I’ve always really loved Hamlet. But I think Macbeth may have been the first one I read, and the first one I saw as a live performance, and it was amazing too! Love.
And I love the history plays, and the Henry IVs are so good and so sad! It’s so amazing that Prince Hal becomes such an awesome King Harry.
In grad school the Royal Shakespeare Company would come on tour to my city every season, and I would just buy cheap student tickets for all of the plays. I saw so many fantastic performances!
Ahh, I haven’t seen Zeffirelli’s Hamlet! I think I’ve only seen the one with David Tennant. 😛
And you’re so lucky to have the RSC touring to you! I got to study abroad in England and took a theatre class then, which was basically the best decision of my life as I saw so much awesome British theatre, including a trip to the RSC to see Richard II. It’s one of the more obscure history plays, but even so, they did some GREAT things with it. The most awesome use of sand falling in a continuous stream on the king’s head as he gave his last monologue before he was overthrown.
Oh, you should watch it! It’s so beautiful and bleak.
I’m not near the RSC any more, sniff. I went to grad school in England, but now I’m back home in the USA. I’m very happy to be living in my home country again, but I do miss the abundant cultural stuff they have! We have it too, but our country is just bigger and spread around.
Augh, I missed seeing Richard II! They did it with the other histories, but that one got sold out immediately because it had Sam West. (And at the time I said “Who?”) No fair! Everyone else wanted to see Sam West and probably didn’t care anything about the play itself! I did get to see him in Hamlet the next season, and by then I had learned to buy my tickets asap. Lucky you to see it, and to study theater there! So fun!
Henry IV part 1 has my favorite line in all Shakespeare:
GLENDOWER
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
HOTSPUR
Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
That is among the most epic burns, and deflations of egotistical bragging, in all of literature.
Haha, yes! I love that Hotspur.
I also envision the following exchange:
Lucentio: I can call my wife from the sitting room.
Petruchio: Why, so can I, or any married man
But will they come when you do call for them?
Taming is another play that absolutely demands, and responds well to, a modern satirical take.
I love Isabella’s rage in Measure for Measure: “Oh, I will to him, and pluck out his eyes!”
I love how well Shakespeare knew the existence of ANGRY WOMEN who would be heard.
Emilia also GETS it in a way that no character other than Iago does. When Othello starts accusing Desdemona, she says:
I will be hang’d, if some eternal villain,
Some busy and insinuating rogue,
Some cogging, cozening slave, to get some office,
Have not devised this slander; I’ll be hang’d else.
Which is EXACTLY what’s happening; the only piece she’s missing is that it’s her own husband, who’s standing right there and shuts her down immediately. There was a great production a few years ago that was filmed with Ian McKellan as Iago, and Zoë Wanamaker just kills it as Emilia.
oooh, where did you find this awesome etching?
Here you go. http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Theater/collec…
All of this is incredible writing and I need to fix my total lack of Othello immediately
Put me down as another person who this has convinced to read Othello ASAP!
Ahhh! I didn’t see this yesterday and I gave a little scream this morning when I saw the headline. This was essentially the topic of my master’s thesis, plus I also focused on Paulina in The Winter’s Tale, who is also a badass who regularly tells off the king. It’s been a decade since I wrote it, but I remember being amazed in my research by how much Emilia’s role gets cut in productions, and by how little recognition she gets in general. The scene where she and Desdemona sing the willow song is one of the few depictions of female friendship that we get in Shakespeare. (Paulina doesn’t get much recognition either, but neither does The Winter’s Tale, in general). My research was pretty frustrating–there wasn’t too much out there at the time. I remember the Petcher article from my research (and I’m retroactively mad at myself that I never came across the article from Shakespeare Quarterly. I could’ve used that!)
I love dear old Bradley for loving Emilia. That other loyal female friend in Shakespeare, Paulina, has too often been given the old “shut up and go home” treatment by critics…this is, for example, how Cliffnotes describes her character : “A loyal lady-in-waiting to Hermione, she voices the conscience of Leontes in an irritating and scolding tone.”
In other words, she defends her horribly wronged friend with magnificent and righteous anger.
I’m sorry, Paulina’s speech is EPICALLY BADASS.
“What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me?
What wheels? racks? fires? what flaying? boiling?
In leads or oils? What old or newer torture must I recieve
Whose every word deserves to taste of thy most worst?”
She does not voice his conscience, she gives him an amazing dressing-down, what the hell is wrong with Cliffnotes?
I am late to this but: next year I am going to start a PhD in English, focusing on Shakespeare, and it has long been my plan to write a lengthy paper about female silence and speech, with Emilia/Paulina/Beatrice as the three central case studies. Three women who all speak up angrily in defense of a female friend, three women who are criticized by the men around them for doing so, three women who are ultimately SUPER RIGHT.
YES! I was saying somewhere above that Hero could have ended up another Desdemona if it hadn’t been a comedy.
Also, I played Margaret in a production of Much Ado, and while there were some scenes of servant-teasing-and-having-fun-conversations-with-mistress like happier times Emilia and Desdemona, Margaret was sadly AWOL in terms of speech when Hero got accused for what Margaret was doing with Borachio in her window. Come on, Margaret! And come on, Shakespeare! If you don’t want Margaret to be a villain, at least let her be confused or apologetic or angry or shocked or something. The director sort of helped by getting me to run off stage in horror like “Oh no, they’re talking about ME, noooo!” so that I was absent during some of the later argument stuff where it would have been impossible for any decent Margaret to keep her silence.
BEATRICE!!! She is my favorite and my best. I want to name a daughter after her.
I WILL EAT HIS HEART IN THE MARKETPLACE.
This was an excellent article. When I read Othello, I focused on Iago–I felt like every other character was subsumed by his personality. But you’ve given me a reason to reconsider Emila in a new light. Thank you.
I saw a performance of Othello when I was. . .14? and Emilia has been one of my favorite Shakespearean women ever since.
It’s interesting to me that, if Othello is based largely on Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi, how fundamental a change giving Emilia that kind of speech is.
Yes.
This reminds me of an excellent article about Iago that Max Gladstone wrote last year, analyzing how Iago’s stance is awfully similar to a lot of MRA-speak:
http://www.tor.com/2015/05/07/what-the-fck-iago/
Wow this is so good! Thanks for linking to it!
“Macbeth tells how the passionate man destroys the world. In Othello, which on the surface might seem to revolve around passion, we see instead the systematic man destroying himself, and the surrounding universe.” Ooooooh.
That’s so awesome.
Oh, I'm Team Violetta. She is dealt a losing hand (tuberculosis, being cast out of bourgeois society, financially precarious position) and plays the Hell out of it- she is so unselfish she lets Alfredo go eventually, but she schools his stupid father with lines like "G-d forgives the fallen woman but Man does not." (Alfredo's sister should write to Captain Awkward about "my fiance's family is pressuring him to break off our engagement because they don't like my brother's girlfriend- do you have any scripts for this situation?") At the end of Act Two her goodness is so strong that she's persuaded everyone, including the Germonts, of how shitty their behavior is. It's hard to unpack the trope where the choice a woman makes is a) the morally right choice; b) the choice that guarantees her death, because there's so much other stuff in there as well.
Also, Violetta gives the best parties!
I thought Gilda was a wimp till I saw Diana Damrau (on a DVD this time- tech marches on!) and I agree that she stands up for herself as much as she can.
BEATRICE!!! She is my favorite and my best. I want to name a daughter after her.
I'm sorry, Paulina's speech is EPICALLY BADASS.
"What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me?
What wheels? racks? fires? what flaying? boiling?
In leads or oils? What old or newer torture must I recieve
Whose every word deserves to taste of thy most worst?"
She does not voice his conscience, she gives him an amazing dressing-down, what the hell is wrong with Cliffnotes?
I WILL EAT HIS HEART IN THE MARKETPLACE.
That's so awesome.
I saw Othello at age 5 — my parents couldn’t get a sitter, and took me along to the production at my dad’s Alma Mater. It blew me away, and is vivid in my mind to this day. It made me a life-long Shakespeare fan, an amateur actor and playwright.
It is a major regret that I never got to play either Emilia or Pauline. There are so few parts for older women in Shakespeare, the competition is fierce.
This is awesome and the comments are awesome too. Thank you Caitlin, thank you Toasties, and thank you Toast!
The one thing I will never forgive Verdi and Boito is that they reduced Emilia’s role to almost nothing. She was damn important in the play, and about the only character who doesn’t trust Iago.