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2005 Ronk
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Science,
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Martha

martha ronk

Desdemonas Self-Presentation
ne aspect of early modern subjectivity can be found on the surface
of a literary representation by examining how a characterin this
case Desdemonapresents herself to us in a highly theatrical and visual
wayin the willow scene. One approach to the question of how to
locate and describe a subjectivity lost to history might be by means of
attention to character, particularly to the imagistic and artificial aspects of
character which offer the possibilities of examining the body and mind
or the inside and outside in variously complex and overlapping ways. In
those moments in the plays in which a character stands apart from herself
as a dramatic persona, offering a visual allegory for herself, she provides one
means by which to read her, not by attending to some hidden aspect
of identity, but by attending to her objectificationoften to pictorial
surface: Viola as Patience or Desdemona as Willow. This sort of reading
also asks that literary techniquehere the adoption of allegorybe taken
as meaningful in and of itself and read as both dense and revelatory.
How much interiority can be claimed for early modern persons and
for characters presumably based on such persons? Reactions to psychological descriptions of various Shakespearean characters have produced
work that seriously problematizes the humanist subject, and both
Catherine Belsey and Francis Barker have written persuasively about the
absence of interiority. At the center of the mystery of Hamlet, Barker
writes, there is nothing. 1 Other critics, by contrast, have pointed

1. At the centre of Hamlet, in the interior of his mystery, there is, in short, nothing. The
promised essence remains beyond the scope of the texts signification: or rather, signals the limit
of the signification of this world by marking out the site of an absence it cannot fill. Francis
Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays in Subjection (London, 1984), p. 37. Other critics have
focused on the early modern subject as shifting, unfixed, artificially constructed. Catherine Belsey
takes issue especially with the idea of the unified humanist subject; Alan Sinfield, writing about
Desdemona specifically, describes her as without unity at all. See Catherine Belsey, The Subject of
Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (New York, 1985). Cf. Alan Sinfield, Faultlines,
Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading, (Berkeley, 1992), p. 54. Recent feminist and

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to evidence of inwardness by looking at legal or medical documents. In

Inwardness and the Theater in the English Renaissance, Katharine Maus examines
shared paradigms for inward truth in both theatrical and extratheatrical
manifestations, arguing that Iago encourages Othello to put adultery into
the category of essentially invisible crimes such as treason or witchcraft:
In this scheme, Othellos apparently unexceptionable demand for
ocular proof comes to represent an impossible aspiration to the absolute
knowledge of another person.2
In taking up the question of interiority again, I want to shift the
ground by focusing on a characters presentation of self as an objectified
and projected thing, and by viewing interior and exterior selves as mutually informing one another. Unlike Maus who sees inwardness displayed
in the theater as an inwardness that has ceased to exist (p. 32), my reading
of the early modern theater posits the objective, material, and external
that which one experiences in the theateras the site of the subject. 3 A
characters attention to himself or herself as character not only confirms
the artificiality of Shakespeares presentational theater; it also renders
that character as a clearly limited and made thing, more available to
interpretation precisely because it is offered up as a figure to be interpreted.
I take an important cue from Harry Bergers work on Renaissance
portraits in which he argues that the effects of subjectivity are produced
by a careful reading of the painted face, the fiction of the pose, created
by sitter and painter alike. The aim of such representation may offer
insight not into the psychology of the sitter, but into the psychology of
queer theorists have set out to question binaries, using various strategies and frequently turning to
sex and the body as clearly destabilizing forces. As Bruce R. Smith states: Unlike Puritan objectors to early modern theatre, who are interested in affirming binaries, practitioners of queer theory
set out to destabilize binaries, to expose their arbitrariness and challenge their political authority.
(L[o]cating the sexual subject, Alternative Shakespeares 2, ed. Terence Hawkes [New York,
1996], p. 97). In Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture, Emerging Subjects, the editors suggest that
it is less that the modern subject came into being in the early modern period than that the terms
of the subjects intelligibility were reconfigured during two hundred years of economic, political,
epistemological, and social upheaval. The emphasis falls here on the ever-changing nature of the
subject and on the constraints of culture. See Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging
Subjects, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge, Eng.,
1996), p. 2.
2. Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago, 1995),
p. 120.
3. Cf. Phillipa Berry, Shakespeares Feminine Endings (New York, 1999), p. 12. Although Berry
is working in a different arena, she too emphasizes the materiality of Renaissance culture and its
influence on our understanding of both subjectivity and gender.
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self-representation and visual encounter. The effects of subjectivity

are created, Berger argues, by alluding to a set of conventions for objectifying subjects, conventions that are moriferous, because they turn
sitters into icons: The subject in the paintings exchanges his merely
natural and sullied flesh for a glorified body of paint, has passed through
the looking glass into the pure ideality of an icon. He is as an icon, an
other (not a self ), that he gives himself to be observed, admired, commemorated, and venerated.4 If one examines Desdemonas efforts to
represent herself, what does one see or know? In the moment in which
she describes herself, arranges herself, calls up her past, addresses her own
agency, what does she suggest? And what does this constructed and
iconic character tell us, if anything, about early modern subjectivity? If
one posits that the subject is an illusory and artificial construction, might
not an examination of character as character tell us something about that
very process? Earlier in the play Desdemona appears as dramatically and
linguistically accomplished, expressing herself with wit, passion, energy
and daring. But because the scene with Emilia in her bedroom in 4.2
focuses on Desdemona rather than Othello, and is at once female,
emblematic, lyric, and hallucinated, it commands attention. Why does
the play shift into this other mode?
At this moment just prior to her murder, Desdemona is clearly different
from what she has been before. Desdemona is represented and represents
herself as visually allegorical rather than dramatic. She is a picture rather
than a woman of verbal wit. Although it is often easier for us as critics
to think about Renaissance subjectivity by means of post-Freudian
psychology, I propose to examine the representations of interiority by
means of the modes readily available at the time, to examine allegorical
modes often inserted at moments of greatest tension in the plays, to read
the historically prominent codes as significant and revealing.5 Questions
4. Harry Berger, Jr., Fictions of the Pose: Facing the Gaze of Early Modern Portraiture,
Representations 46 (1994), 91, 106.
5. Huston Diehl, Iconography and Characterization in Elizabethan Tragedy, 15851642,
Drama in the Renaissance , ed. Clifford Davidson, et al. (New York, 1986). For a balanced
discussion of the use of psychoanalytic method, see Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia
(Ithaca, 1992), p. 25. I agree with Belseys attention to the repressed discontinuities of the
allegorical tradition in Renaissance drama manifest in Marlowes Faustus by the different
aspects of the character, including good and bad angels. However, she sees these as creating gaps
between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the utterance, and I would read such
allegories as projections to be read as fully and completely as possible. See The Subject of Tragedy,
pp. 44, 48.
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of self-definition in Othello, as in the culture, play out in the realm of

images; what is there to be examined is the self-representation of the
subjectDesdemonain the rhetoric and images of the play. 6 Although
she has primarily shared scenes with other, often more insistent characters, she dominates the willow scene and represents herself vividly by
gesture, speech, and most decisively, by emblem. Visual allegory was not,
as the studies of Renaissance iconography make clear, a mere decorative
tool for authors and artists, although here it adds to the scenes high drama
since Dedemona knows and the audience knows she is about to die. 7
Rather, as she makes herself into an objectified figure, she also takes on an
assertive presence and projected subjectivity she has not exhibited before.
II

The visual image had a potency derived from the eye which many
believed could both attract and seduce, and the impact and meaning of
Desdemonas singular scene are dependent on the attention to the visual
in early modern culture. The eye was also a political tool for those in
high positions of power, who used it to dazzle, to consolidate power,
and to urge a particular way of being seen. Using the emblem of the
pelican on her gown, Elizabeth signaled that she would endure great
personal sacrifice to succor her people. Henry VIII had the iconography
of his portrait designed so as to present himself as Reformation king.
Appropriating a Latin text formerly used for the papal claim of succession
6. The question is especially significant because the severing of image from essence produced
tragedy and skepticism in the culture and in the play itself. Cf. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason:
Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford, 1979), pp. 481, 48296.
7. In formulating a definition of self by means of visual imagery, Desdemona is acting in a
manner consistent with what occurs in other literary productions of the period. Destruction and
death seem to be the instruments by which a certain form of insight or subjectivity is born;
meditations on death and loss of the self appear in various ways throughout the period in
inward-turning sonnet sequences, individual portraits, monologues, religious diaries of the souls
progress, and emblematic self-portraits. In Shakespearean criticism, subjectivity has often been
linked to subjection. Yet such subjection is not only subjection to royal power or the prerogatives
of race, class, and gender, but also to suffering; in Donnes Holy Sonnets, Stephen Greenblatt
argues, identity is achieved in moments of chastisement, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago,
1980), p. 125. Subjectivity, Linda Gregerson argues, following the work of Foucault, depends on
subjection: the sixteenth-century subject was not conceived as the locus of interiority but as a
thing of radical and functional contingency. See Specularity and the Tudor State, Criticism
35.1 (1993), 7. See also Peter Stallybrass, Shakespeare, the Individual, and the Text, Cultural
Studies, ed. Larry Grossberg, et al. (New York, 1992), pp. 593612, and Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity (Chicago, 1991).
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from Christ, Henry became the papal replacement. 8 It was assumed that
the visual manifested substance and that substance had to be made visually manifest. As Jonas Barish recounts, Henry Peacham found heraldry
valuable because it provided outward ensignes and badges of Vertue
so that the world could distinguish the merit that might remain hidden
and unguessed at.9 Thus the eye was a conduit between the inside and
outside and a contested site for the reciprocities between them. Visual
allegory was a psychological tool as well in masques, tapestries, or in The
Faerie Queene, a work which in particular demonstrates a way of seeing
available to audiences both of poems and of plays. As Isabel MacCaffrey
comments, when Guyon meets Shamefastnesse in the House of Alma,
he meets a visual embodiment of his most interior quality: Guyon is
introduced to an aspect of himself, or rather to the source of self in him,
the essence to which his life gives existential being . . . [Allegorical]
figures like these are recognizably related to analogues in the visual arts,
and in masques, and masque-like representations in literature, there are
similarly embodied concepts whose attributes point towards conceptual
analysis.10 The emblematic provides a way of seeing, and a way of suggesting complex and even contradictory aspects of the given figure. One
of the most unusual emblems appearing in the popular emblem books of
the period pictures an eye at the center of a heart balanced in a landscape,
the piercing eye, according to the accompanying poem, urging one to
contemplate spiritual matters.
With Othellos insistence on ocular proof, the eyes often seem the
only sense that counts, no matter that the play simultaneously demonstrates their tragic tendency toward error. Othello is seen as wildly fearful
or attractive as both soldier and husband because of how he looks to the
eye: because he is black. This is clearly true for Brabantio, but it is also
true for Desdemona, who approaches what she lacks and desires by first
conflating inside and outside by means of the visual: I saw Othellos
8. Cf. John N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography (Princeton, 1989), pp. 6263. On royal iconography see Roy Strong, The Elizabethan Image: Painting in England 15401562 (London, 1969); and
Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display (New York, 1986). See George R. Kernodle, From Art
to Theater (Chicago, 1944) on the significance of tableaux vivants and emblems in the Renaissance.
9. Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley, 1981), p. 175. See also the comments of
Peter M. Daly in Literature in the Light of the Emblem (Toronto, 1979): The ravished and
mutilated Lavinia, whose hands were cut off and tongue cut out, stands silently on stage through
several scenes. Incapable of utterance, she is an eloquent monument to the crimes committed, an
emblem of ravished nature (pp. 14546).
10. Isabel MacCaffrey, Spensers Allegory: The Anatomy of Imagination (Princeton, 1976),
pp. 8283.
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visage in his mind (1.3.253). 11 In Othello the conflations between

inside and outside define the parameters of ways in which subjectivity is
conceived and represented. The efforts to probe oneself and another, to
prove that oneself and the other exist, are worked out in terms of visual
images. The word visage becomes a way by which Desdemona states
what she knows of Othello. It is a clear image of what she sees: his face.
At the same time the image is projected within (the word indicates
temperament as well as face, OED #3), so that she creates subjectivity by
means of the image relocated: passing from surface to interior, or, perhaps more accurately, by passing between the two, one not knowable
without the other. As the character who conjoins exterior and interior for
her husband, Desdemonas influence is strongly beneficent, and the breaking apart of eyes and mind in the play, as in the culture, has profound
consequences.12
In Reformation culture arguments concerning the relation of the
visible and invisible focus on the Eucharist and on statues of holy figures;
prior to the reforms, Christ and the bread of the Eucharist are one, and
ideally the statue of the Virgin and the Virgin are one, joined by eye and
mind. Afterwards, as in the play, the break between image and internal
reality creates, as Margaret Aston argues in Englands Iconoclasts, upheaval,
iconoclasm, loss of certitude, and entirely new ways of thinking. 13
11. Citations to Othello are from the Arden edition, ed. E. A. Honigmann (Walton-onThames, 1997).
12. Katherine Maus presents a legal basis for subjectivity in the play which comes to a conclusion not unlike mine: Desdemona, protesting that she has not offended Othello either in
discourse of thought or actual deed (4.2.185), invokes the standard of guilt applied to thoughtcrimes like treason or witchcraft, in order to deny the validity of the charge. Complexities in the
way her virtue is defined, however, leave her vulnerable. For a discrepancy between surface and
interior is one of the hallmarks of female modesty: Iago himself praises the woman who could
think and neer disclose her mind (2.1.157) (pp. 12223). Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge
(Cambridge, Eng., 1987) writes, That the integrity of my (human, finite) existence may depend
on the fact and on the idea of another beings existence, and on the possibility of proving that
existence, an existence conceived from my very dependence and incompleteness, hence conceived as perfect, and conceived as producing me in some sense, in [its] own imagethese are
thoughts that take me to a study of Othello (pp. 12728).
13. Margaret Aston, Englands Iconoclasts: Laws Against Images (Oxford, 1988), pp. 1516. Cf.
James Siemon, Shakespearean Iconoclasm (Berkeley, 1985); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars
(New Haven, 1992); and Michael OConnell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm, Anti-Theatricalism,
and the Image of the Elizabethan Theater, ELH 52.2 (1985), 279 310. On iconoclasm directed
at Elizabeth, see Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen (New York, 1995), pp. 21113. Cf.
Stephen Greenblatt also on the conjunction of gross physicality and pure, abstracted spirituality
in the eucharist, Remnants of the sacred in Early Modern England, Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta De Grazia, et al. (Cambridge, Eng., 1996), pp. 33748.
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Images become suspect and dangerous. In the play the break (Othellos
belief that Desdemonas lovely exterior hides a whorish interior) tragically turns him into a skeptic and a murderer. For Othello, Desdemona
is no longer the semi-divine creature she appears to be, and therefore he
believes he is justified in destroying her.14
The controversy over images that pits reformers against Catholics,
reformers against reformers, and playwrights against Puritans thus
permeates not only religious debates, but works of literature as well. As
Ernest Gilman states, The scene of such writing is set at the crossroads
where a lively tradition of image-making confronts a militantly logocentric theology armed . . . with an overt hostility to images. 15 Rather
than linking specific dated instances of iconoclasm with the desire to
break or destroy women or with Othello in particular, this essay means
rather to suggest a broad cultural anxiety over the visual which is both
extreme and recurrent.16
III

At the outset of the play Othellos reconception of himself as a result of

marriage comes from seeing his military identity through his visual
image of Desdemona, a process which works well because he sees her
as an ideal image of himself, O my fair warrior (2.1.180). When his
exterior (her) and interior (his noble parts of civility, loyalty, duty) are
perfectly conjoined, all is well. Yet all disintegrates when he sees his face
14. To state this too baldly: in the play as in the culture, the virgin is gone, images have shifted
meaning or are suspect altogether, and belief and its manifestations are questioned on all sides:
what do the bread and wine mean, contain, imply, symbolize, become? Without words to interpret them, images are seen by reformers as beguiling and dangerous (and one notes that in Othello
conversation between Othello and Desdemona about the central events is missing).
15. Ernest Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation (Chicago, 1986), p. 11. In
Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage (Ithaca, 1997), Huston Diehl states: For reformers like Calvin,
the Roman Mass is deeply flawed not because it is theatrical but because it features a particular
kind of theatricalityone that privileges spectacle unaccompanied by the interpreting word, traffics in stage illusions, and uses artifice to beguile the eyes of its worshipers, p. 105.
16. The impulse to destruction was encouraged by sermons, advice pamphlets, anatomy
books, and caricatures of women. Moreover, Reformation pressures and policies were in flux
and often determined in response to specific events; Calvin, e.g., revised The Institutes several
times, Elizabeth changed her mind about the display of the crucifix depending on political
expediency, and individual parishes alternately rejected and embraced policies of revision. In the
literature of the period, there remains an anxiety over the visual. Cf. Duffy, The Stripping of the
Altars.
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mirrored back in the face of her sexual ardornot then a man removed
from sexual heat, but embroiled in it. Although he argues to the Venetian senate that all sexual desires in him are defunct (1.3.265), consummation undoes such a self-created and idealizing portrait. For Othello,
the virginal Desdemona is a mirror for what he wants to see in himself,
and the crucial scene in which he doubts her comes again in the form of
images. Again, the exterior image is projected internally, as if her visage
at the moment of passion changes her very being, making them both
animals, and her a whore. He no longer sees herand therefore himselfas chaste and removed from desire, the visage of Dian, but rather
as bestial. His face is no longer virginal, but a face that looks shockingly, as
he testifies, like his own face. As witness to her desire, he becomes consequently witness to his own, and is horrified:
Ill have some proof: my name, that was as fresh
As Dians visage, is now begrimd, and black
As mine own face: if there be cords, or knives,
Poison, or fire, or suffocating streams,
Ill not endure it: would I were satisfied! (3.3.389 93)16

Iago responds, Would you, the supervisor, grossly gape on, / Behold
her toppd? (398 99). Iago forces Othello to picture himself watching
himself in the act of copulation; as voyeur, Othello sees his own lust in
his mirror, Desdemona.17 The outside is projected inside. In an ugly and
apt pun, he becomes the supervisor who watches from his position
above, not the divine Desdemona of his own devising, but one topped.
What is horrifying to Othello is not the image of adultery onto which he
has displaced his anxiety, but rather the more potent image of his own
sexuality as bestialan echo and corroboration of the racist image Iago
has projected of him in the very first scene of the play, and one he has
devoted his entire career to revising. Iagos images of the black ram and
the two-backed beast are of such grotesque and hallucinated potency

17. Cf. Janet Adelmans Suffocating Mothers, Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeares Plays
(New York, 1992): The whole exchange with Desdemona demonstrates Othellos terrible conflict between his intense desire for fusion with the woman he idealizes as the nurturant source of
his being and his equally intense conviction that her participation in sexuality has contaminated
her and thus contaminated the perfection that he has vested in her (pp. 66 67). Cf. Gayle
Greene, This That You Call Love: Sexual and Social Tragedy in Othello, Shakespeare and
Gender, A History, ed. Deborah E. Barker and Ivo Kamps (New York, 1995), pp. 47 62.
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that they hang over the rest of the action like a nightmare, as Brabantio
confesses, that will not let go its hold.18
Othello wants ocular proof that Desdemona has been unfaithful to him,
and his own jealousy turns false glimpses into that proof; he comes to see
a betrayal that cannot be seen because it does not exist. The visual image
which haunts him and which he never sees in the course of the play is the
handkerchief spotted red with strawberries: symbolic corroboration of the
visual proof of her rampant sexuality in the bed sheets. As the handkerchief
circulates from hand to hand in the course of the play, it becomes an
emblem that signals the collapse of any relationship in the marriage between
external and internal, between image and meaning, between what is seen
and what interpretation might be given of what is seen by one able to believe.19
Like a statue or piece of bread stripped of miracle, it is merely an object.
However, the visual, and particularly visual allegory, not only provides a way of limiting, but also a way of deepening character. Othello
may use imagery to objectify and betray Desdemona (especially when he
conflates her with Bianca), but it is an entirely different matter when
Desdemona objectifies herself in a scene so artificially framed and potent
as to stand apart on its own as a play within a play. 20 As critics, we may
18. As Ania Loomba states in Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama (Delhi, 1992), In the first 125
lines of the play, racist images of Othellos blackness aboundhe is thick lips, old black ram,
a Barbary horse, devil and a lascivious Moor. It is significant that . . . these images are evoked
almost exclusively in the context of his contact with a white woman, which transforms the
latent racism of Venetian society into Brabantios virulent anger and Iagos disgust (p. 49). See
also Emily C. Bartels, Making More of the Moor: Aaron, Othello, and Renaissance Refashionings of Race, Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1975), 36074.
19. On the handkerchief, see Carol Neely, Circumscriptions and Unhousedness: Othello in
the Borderlands, Shakespeare and Gender, ed. Deborah E. Barker and Ivo Kamps (New York, 1995);
Karen Newman, And wash the Ethiop white: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello, Shakespeare Reproduced, ed. Jean Howard and Marion OConnor (London, 1987); Lynda Boose, Othellos
Handkerchief: the Recognizance and Pledge of Love, English Literary Renaissance 5 (1975), 360
74; and Peter Stallybrass, Patriarchal Territories, Rewriting the Renaissance, ed. Margaret
Ferguson, et al. (Chicago, 1986). In Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage, Huston Diehl argues that the
handkerchief is a contested site because it is both nothing and a magical thing of wonder (p. 147).
20. Voyeurism, which again severs image from meaning, dominates the play not only at the
horrific moment in which Iago drags Othello back into a re-imaging of the moment of intercourse, but also in scenes such as the one in which Othello hides and watches Cassio speak, so he
thinks, of Desdemona: She [Bianca, not Desdemona] was here even now, she haunts me in every
place. I was tother day talking on the sea-bank, with certain Venetians, and thither comes this bauble;
by this hand, she falls thus about my neck (4.1.13235). This play within the play seems to
Othello an image of truth, but he sees only images projected out from his own jealous mind. Othello
is a play ruled by images so primitive and raw as to pull its spectators into realms of prejudice,
fearfulness, and dreams. The struggle between various forces is conducted by means of images: black
vs. white, Venice vs. Cyprus, male vs. female, soldier vs. citizen, Christian vs. Turk, virgin vs. whore.
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have a post-romantic idea that reification is always limiting and reductive, but for the audiences of Shakespeares time, the emblematic could
also be tropic and expansive. Reformation anxiety over the potency of
statues and pictures of holy figures was proportionate to their assumed
power. As Steven Ozment states: From this perspective the outburst of
iconoclasm at the inception of the Reformation may rather indicate the
reaction of people who . . . had in fact believed all too deeply (my emphasis).21 Or as Huston Diehl states, to many in early modern England
sacred images were neither objects to be possessed for their material
value nor things of beauty to be admired for their aesthetic value; they
were mysterious, marvelous and efficacious objects which they held
in awe (Staging Reform, pp. 1516). In the play Desdemona is almost
immediately reified as whore or adored idol of love (there, where
I have garnerd up my heart), an idolatry specifically forbidden by religious commandments.22 Othello seems ever prone to idolatry, to expect
magic from the handkerchief and miracle from Desdemona: Excellent
wretch, perdition catch my soul, / But I do love thee, and when I love
thee not, / Chaos is come again (3.3.90 92). Her only recourse seems
to be to define herself by offering an equally potent image.
IV

By the time of the willow scene, the witty and assured daughter and
wife whom we see at the outset of the play has been replaced. In the
midst of such obvious loss, what might also have been gained? Desdemona performs her character here in another mode, in ways which seem
similar to those in which other characters in other plays embrace performance in order to meet specific challenges and to signal a shift in
their characters. The most obvious example is Hamlets theatrical effort
to act the part of the enraged Laertes in order to act out his own revenge,
but women in the comedies also perform different aspects of their character in male garb. Desdemonas scene is also theatrical, performative,
artificiala play within a play, slowed and curtained off from the rest
21. Steven E. Ozment, The Reformation in the Cities (New Haven, 1975), p. 44.
22. Margaret Aston, pp. 46667: Idolatry became a household word in the sixteenth century,
and the perils of this sin, so ingrained in everyones consciousness, left marks in contemporary
literature. . . . The ease with which poets found lovers doting in mad idolatry shows how
effectively the reformers, whose terminology was thus drafted into amorous service, had done
their work.
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of the action at least for the time being. In several ways she creates
herself as an objectified character, a self asking to be observed differently. Desdemona remakes her character most noticeably by a turn to
the visual, asking the audience to examine her and the images which
represent her.
Critics such as Murray Krieger, W. J. T. Mitchell, and Stephen Orgel
remind us that iconology should be read seriously and complexly and
that the differences between images and words are not merely formal
matters. They are, Mitchell argues, linked to things like the difference between the (speaking) self and the (seen) other. 23 In the willow
scene we are asked to look at Dedemona as she stands before us, as she is
momentarily isolated from the plot, and as she projects a variety of allegorical images. Moreover, as image, she is able, as Stephen Orgel argues
in Gendering the Crown, to suggest something ineffable: The image,
unlike the word, that is, also represents what does not signify, the unexplained, the unspeakableall those meanings we reject because we
believe nobody in the Renaissance could have believed them. 24 To
read iconography might appear to be impossible in a play moving quickly
toward its tragic conclusion; yet such reading occurs whether we know
it or not during the time we witness the scene, as we partake of the
intensity of Desdemonas singing, breathing, bending, undressing, and
projecting.
Like Viola, who describes herself most intimately by means of an
allegorical stand-in, a sister who sat like Patience on a monument,
Desdemona describes herself in this scene by picturing her mothers maid,
Barbary, who pictures herself in song and associates herself with trees, a
sycamore and a willow.25

23. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago, 1994), p. 5.

24. Stephen Orgel, Gendering the Crown, Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed.
Margreta De Grazia, et al. (Cambridge, Eng., 1996), p. 149.
25. Arden n. 39 on sycamore: It was not traditionally associated with the forsaken in love
(except perhaps by the punning sick-amour); but it is in a grove of sycamore that the love-sick
Romeo is found wandering by Benvolio. The Arden edition also notes that ll. 2952 are not in
Q. I am working with the Arden text which includes these lines. Karen Newman argues that the
plays focus is miscegenation and that in naming the maid Barbary (a name which indicates
blackness), Desdemona identifies with Othello: The union of Desdemona and Othello represents a sympathetic identification between femininity and the monstrous that offers a potentially
subversive recognition of sexual and racial difference, in And wash the Ethiop white, pp. 151
52.
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The poor soul sat sighing, by a sycamore tree,

Sing all a green willow:
Her hand on her bosom her head on her knee,
Sing willow, willow, willow.
The fresh streams ran by her, and murmurd her moans,
Sing willow, willow, willow. (4.3.3944)

The figures in the song are allegorical, the means by which Desdemona
projects herself into a visual image and thereby manages to reveal her
sadness, betrayal, and isolation. She uses high artifice to make visible her
psychic sufferings. First she projects a statue-like figure, her hand on her
bosom her head on her knee, that contains in its radical gesture of
bending Desdemonas innermost thoughts: it is the objectified trajectory
of subjectivity.26 Moreover, although the men in the play see Desdemona
as an emblematic virgin or whore, Desdemona chooses an emblem of
nature. By means of the trees, she projects an allegory of herself, designedly, self-consciously. Subjectivity is represented, then, by the use of a
poetic device, allegory, which demands interpretation and forces
self-contemplation on character and audience alike. In Spensers Allegory,
Isabel MacCaffrey describes allegory as an analytic mode in which a poet
explicitly indicates the relationship of images to examples: Every successful literary work teaches us the rules by which it is to be understood.
The allegorist does this in a particularly self-conscious and thoroughgoing way; explicitly has the force of designedly, self consciously. In an allegory
the process of explication and self-contemplation becomes part of the
metaphorical fiction (p. 37).
In Desdemonas allegorical moment she becomes hypervisual and
framed, set off from the rest of the action. The particular finesse of
prosopopoeia is, according to Denis Donoghue, that it achieves the
uncanny effect of making the invisible appear to be visible; it produces
an hallucination, or rather an hallucinatory effect. 27 The shift of this
scene into another mode renders Desdemona peculiarly tropic. Moreover,
26. I am influenced in my reading here by Merleau-Pontys comments on what gesture
reveals in his essay, Cezannes Doubt, Sense and Non-Sense (Evanston, Ill., 1964), pp. 925.
27. Denis Donoghue, Murray Krieger versus Paul De Man, Revenge of the Aesthetic, ed.
Michael P. Clark (Berkeley, 2000), p. 110. In preferring allegory over metaphor and symbol, Paul
de Man recognizes that its appeal is a calligraphy rather that a mimesis, a technical device to
insure that the emblems will be correctly identified and decoded, not an appeal to the pagan
pleasures of imitation . . . The difficulty of allegory is . . . that this emphatic clarity of representation does not stand in the service of something that can be represented. Paul de Man, Pascals
Allegory of Persuasion, Allegory and Representation (Baltimore, 1981), p. 1.
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as a mode of doubling, visual allegory is used to make manifest that

which has no other means of being known.28 As emblematic figures,
both Desdemona and Viola say more than they are otherwise able. As in
many of Shakespeares plays, it is as emblem that a character seems to
come closest to an intimate revelation of self; paradoxically, Desdemona
comes closest to a representation of subjectivity by means of an objectified picture. There is no way for Desdemona to make her chastity and
honor visible (honour is an essence thats not seen, 4.1.16), except by
means of a complex emblem standing for chastity, even as Queen
Elizabeth had the Sieve portrait painted to ally her with Tuccia, the vestal
virgin who carried water without spilling a drop. By means of visual allegory, Desdemona performs her character in another mode and insists
that she is different from what others have fantasized her to be.
It is therefore the conventional and popular nature of emblems that
becomes significant for the argument here since the salience of the picture depends on its familiarity to the culture. Desdemona embodies her
invisible sufferings in the vivid image of the weeping willow, the sort of
tree with which Shakespearean audiences would have been familiar from
emblem books, plays, decorations, and devices. 29 In The History of the
Worthies of England, Thomas Fuller provides a standard meaning for the
willow: A sad Tree, whereof such who have lost their love make their
mourning garlands and we know what Exiles hung up their (Psalm 137.2)
Harps upon such dolefull Supporters.30 In The Art of Making Devises
(1646), Henry Estienne states: The chiefe aime of the Embleme is, to
instruct us, by subjecting the figure to our view, and the sense to our
understanding: therefore they must be something covert, subtile, pleasant,
and figurative. So that if the pictures of it be too common, it ought to
have a mysticall sense.31 The adoption of the mode of visual allegory is a
means of projecting a constructed identity: inventive, tropic, memorable,
and excessive.32
28. Madeleine Doran discusses the representation of internal conflict in external ways in
Shakespeares plays, Endeavors of Art (Madison, 1954), pp. 25455.
29. This is a standard way of reading Spenser (cf. MacCaffrey, p. 112), and of reading dreams
which appear in both Spenser and Shakespeare, but critics of Shakespeare have been less responsive to visual allegory.
30. Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England (1662), p. 144.
31. Henry Estienne, The Art of Making Devises, tr. Tho: Blount (1646), p. 8.
32. As Craig Owens states, Allegory is extravagant, an expenditure of surplus value, it is
always in excess. Croce found it monstrous precisely because it encodes two contents in one
form. See The Allegorical Impulse, Beyond Recognition, ed. Scott Bryson, et al. (Berkeley,
1992), p. 64.
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Yet it may be the technical turn itself that best manages to suggest
Desdemonas knowledge of herselfher subjectivity residing in her articulation of distance from herselfand of her cultural position as opposed
female. It is the structure of allegory which designates subjectivity as
clearly etched and mysterious, and at least to some extent dependent on
the audience (the seers) as well. In his discussion of Renaissance portrait
painting Harry Berger also attends to the art of self-conscious presentationposingas signaling new provinces of the psyche. He adds that
Signs of nervousness, melancholy, and resignation may be intended to
represent reactions to more direct scopic encounter; they may flag the
decision to dramatize new Provinces of the psyche, innovations in
posing jointly arrived at by sitter and painter; they neednt be more than
that. The aim of such representation may be insight not into the psychology of the sitter but into the psychology of self-representation and scopic
encounter; in a word, posing (pp. 9293).
Desdemonas willow scene also differs from the rest of the play by
taking place away from the world of soldiers, in a room designed for
privacy and intimacy, both enclosed and intimate. Whatever sexual or
conversational intimacy that exists between man and wife in this play
occurs off stage. In this intimate enclosure, like Viola on the monument
or Hermione and Cleopatra as statues, Desdemona becomes more obviously a subject than ever before. The audience is able to see her and to
know her inwardly by means of various signs, to know that she is not
what she has been seen to be. Desdemonas definition of self here is not
dependent on father or husband, but on mother, maid, and attendant, a
world evoked in Shakespeares plays when women define themselves in
contradistinction to masculine authority. Even Miranda, for a brief, weak
moment manages to challenge her father with a memory of women,
Had I not / Four or five women once that tended me? (1.2.46 47)33
Similarly, Desdemona remembers her past. In this enclosed world, no
longer collapsed into one another as the category of the female and
other, Desdemona and Emilia have the freedom to set forth their similarities and their differences. They agree in their critique of men (O,
these men, these men!), but disagree sharply on how to react to what
men do. Emilia would give up the sanctity of this inner bedroom world
33. Cf. Martha Ronk, Narration as Usurpation in The Tempest, Assays, ed. Peggy Knapp
(Pittsburgh, 1992).
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to gain the whole world, and would easily engage in sexual intercourse
in order to present the whole world to her husband. Desdemonas
efforts, by contrast, work toward the ideally moral, efforts which set
Desdemona at odds with all the powerful figures in the play and which
intensify the representation of her inwardness. She swears by this heavenly light (l. 64). As the women represent themselves as different from
one another, they further define their subjectivity. Hence their comments, seemingly irrelevant, about Lodovico who is for Desdemona a
proper man, but for Emilia is one so handsome (in this context,
sexy) that I know a lady in Venice would have walkd barefoot to
Palestine for a touch of his nether lip (l. 3738).
Desdemona also represents herself in this scene by means of lineage.
Since the play is so much a battle of images, Desdemonas calling up of
her absent mother and Barbary establishes a point of reference counter to
Othellos mother who has introduced the handkerchief that taints all
who handle it with erotic madness. By naming the maid Barbary, the
same name given to bestial male sexuality when Iago says to Brabantio,
youll have your daughter coverd with a Barbary horse (1.1.109 10),
she rescues and redefines the term. By means of the matrilinear memory, she
represents herself as having a life separate from the male world of the play,
having experienced a loss perhaps even more defining than the loss of
husbandthe loss of mother.34
By using women and the emblem of the willow, Desdemona creates a
self-portrait by objectifying herself both visually and allegorically, and by
gazing at it, she mourns for herself. She becomes the emblem Barbary,
the two linked by mirrored sounds; the maid moans the moan in
Desdemona, and Desdemona repeats her lost moan. Like Barbary and
like the weeping willow, she can hardly keep from hanging her head all
at one side (l. 30). If she is not looking at herself in a mirror (another
indication of the subjective and a plausible prop in this scene as in the
bedroom scene in The Duchess of Malfi), she is at least looking at a mental
mirror in which her gestures and sounds self-consciously mimic those of
Barbary. The reference to Barbary is significant because it is Desdemonas
emblem for her own innocence. Although later Desdemona blames
34. Following Lacan, Juliana Schiesari writes of the primordial loss of the original (lost) object
as being loss of the mother: Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack. Loss,
however, as she argues, is differently inscribed according to gender. What Othello seems to point
to, among so many other things, is the absence of the mother again and the different ways in
which such loss differently affects Othello and Desdemona. The Gendering of Melancholia, p. 28.
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herself, taking on the responsibility for her own death, and although she
interrupts her song here with his scorn I approve (l. 51), she nevertheless creates in her emblematic self-portrait one who is pitiable,
wronged, and, unlike the false lover of the song, innocent and true.
Desdemonas assertion of being someone apart and suffering is, however, an assertion only to Emilia and the theater audience. She impresses
herself not on the man who threatens her, but on the audience which
listens to her private fears and thoughts. In many ways the scene alludes
to the confessional; Desdemona pours out her sorrow while the audience attends in sympathetic silence, suggesting subjectivity in a way that
dialogue in the play does not. This technique in which Desdemona sings
to us, interpreting herself by means of Barbary, seems designed to call
up the subjective, to infuse the scene with audience sympathy and
involvement: As Desdemona is like Barbary, so she is like me and can
be known by my own thoughts and feelings. In imitating the forlorn
Barbary, Desdemona also reveals herself through the melancholy so
often associated with subjectivity in Renaissance literature. Julia Schiesari
argues that it is usually men who attain the stature of the extraordinary
by means of their heightened grief and artistry: In this Renaissance
pathos of grief, there existed a sense of the tragic, a feeling of finitude
whose expression presupposed its reconnection to an exhilarating infinitude, coupled with a heightened awareness of the self as different from
the common vulgus and by virtue of this difference, extraordinary. 35
VI

The form of the willow song also suggests aspects of Desdemona not
seen before. Like Ophelia, she sings, interrupts herself, talks to herself,
repeats herself as if to isolate herself in a world apart, and creates a private
language. Song is often an encoded form of revelation in the plays, a way
in which things that are left out or left over or left unsaid (the rain it
raineth every day) can be brought to attention and yet kept artificially
framed and at some distance from the main story, allowing one to understand differently the depth of loss that this different language allows.
Although Desdemonas scene here is brief, it makes her a figure of tragic
grandeur rather than of mere pathos. Despite its association with unrequited
love and sexual grief, in part because she proffers it and acknowledges the
35. Schiesari, p. 19.
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Fig. 1: Salix, The Willow from the Latin Emblems of Andreas Alciatus,
reprinted by permission of the University of Toronto Press.

full complexity and misery of the web in which she is caught, the willow
seems potent as well. Melancholy accords her a mythic stature and depth.36
Desdemona acquires extraordinary qualities, not only by her association with the willow and by the song, but also by her association with
the image of saint. Even before Othello turns on her, Desdemona
foreshadows the iconoclastic moment by standing forth as objectified,
statue-like and also by announcing her own self-destruction, Nobody,
I myself, farewell: / Commend me to my kind lordO farewell
(5.2.12223). Kenneth Burkes argument is that Desdemona is Christlike,
and that Shakespeare is exploiting a religious pattern as part of his design
36. The willow emblem in Alciati (Emblems, 201) is especially disturbing since the willow tree
is accompanied by a nude supine woman with a burning torch lying at her side. Behind the
woman is a kneeling bearded man reaching between the legs of a second nude woman who leans
back on her knees. The association of misery and sexual assault seems clear both here and in
Othello. See Fig. 1. Cf. Robert Heilman, Wit and Witchcraft, in The Signet Classic Othello
(New York, 1963), p. 258; and Sara Eaton, Defacing the Feminine in Renaissance Tragedy,
The Matter of Difference, ed. Valerie Wayne (Ithaca, 1991).
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upon the audiences sympathies.37 She creates herself as a sort of vanishing

emblem of goodness, andas one recalls the disappearance of images of
saints and crucified images of Christ in Reformation Englandthe actual
removal of a visible and holy thing. Miraculously, she also manages to
speak after she is assumed dead. Othello finishes her suffocation: I would
not have thee linger in thy pain, . . . / So, so (5.2.8788). But Desdemona
rises up to speak her innocence again, and like an angel, as Emilia says,
forgives Othello. Like saints who speak after being killed, she too speaks
eerily from someplace beyond. In Chaucers The Prioresss Tale, the child
whose throat is slit still sings O Alma, proving the miracle of Christianity.38
Another way in which Desdemona represents her own subjectivity,
more problematic than the first, although bound up with it, is as the sign
of nothingness, as one obliterated, as if whatever the representation of
self might be, it must derive from nothingness, from being Nobody
(5.2.12). Desdemona becomes something by becoming the sign of nothing.
Her only available response to threat seems to be to disappear in order to
be: into water, willow, nobody. She moves in this direction in the willow
scene as she asks to be undressed and unpinned. She sheds her social role
in order to represent herself more intimately and revealingly. By changing
to a nightgown, the foreshadowing of death, she announces that she
knows she is to die.39 Moreover, as Desdemona undresses, the undoing
37. Critics have commented on Desdemonas lack of awareness throughout much of the play,
and have ascribed her inability to recognize the danger around her to her position of class privilege: it does not occur to her that she cannot ask for whatever she wants from Othello; or that
her own easy and aristocratic ways might cause Othello anxiety. In her willow scene, however,
Desdemona has lost that self-assurance and bravado, and she is plunged into a self-conscious
examination of herself as if she stands apart from herself, subject and object both. Doubling is
endemic to Shakespeares plays; here, however, the character creates a paradoxical double, like
and not like herself, as Viola is in relation to Patience. At this moment Desdemona announces
the reciprocity between active and passive; although critics have wanted to designate her as either
passive victim or transcendent icon, an embodiment of spiritual wealth, she is rather both in the
emblem she proffers, a rather more complex figure in which agency is born out of utter loss. See
Kenneth Burke, Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method, Othello, Critical Essays, ed. Susan
Snyder (New York, 1988), p. 145.
38. Julia Lupton writes: Yet if the decapitation of the saints figures the simultaneous constitution and cancellation of subjectivity in a moment of symbolic subsumption and summation in
a larger, faceless order, several legends of the martyrs separate out another kind of subjectification
that inheres in the severed head left over from decapitation. When St. Paul speaks after being
decapitated, the voice appears at once disembodied and strangely material, localized in a rejected
body part which, like the head of Orpheus, continues to speak after death. See Afterlives of the
Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature (Stanford, 1996), p. 56.
39. Huston Diehl cites several emblem books in which Icons of a shirt are used to express
the idea of human mortality (fn. 17).
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of her public self is amplified by the undoing of the female disguise. No matter
what one actually sees, the act itself self-consciously dramatizes her undoing.
What is more difficult to articulate about Desdemonas act and statement
here is its connection to a complex of associations around the words nothing and nobody. Cordelia represents her own separate independence
from Lear by using the response nothing. Yet it is also the word which
stands for the female lack, the nothing between her legs which is the
cause of all Othellos jealousy, bafflement, and murderous rage.
Desdemona seems paradoxically to disappear and simultaneously to assert
her (visible) subjectivity as she stands there on stage: I (who am not I) did
it, Nobody. I myself (5.2.122). That the representation of subjectivity is
close to gender ambiguity, as well as to that ambiguous moment between
life and death, is obvious in Shakespeares sonnets as well; the poems reveal
most and seem most intimate because confusions such as those enacted in
the willow scene are manifest. As Joel Fineman suggests, The subject of
Shakespeares sonnets experiences himself as his difference from himself,
and this accounts for the deep personal inter-iority of the sonnets poetic
persona.40 Disintegration and destruction are what call forth representations
of subjectivity; a common trope in the poetry of Sidney and Herbert, for
example, is the authors self-creation out of self-abasement. Desdemonas
agency here too seems to depend on choosing the sheets and the bed and
her own tragic death.41 Othello recreates Desdemona as an object in death,
perfect as a marble statue, and then destroys her, recreating in the imagery
of his speech the consummation which has so terrified him:
It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,
Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars:
It is the cause, yet Ill not shed her blood,
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,
And smooth, as monumental alabaster;
Yet she must die. (5.2.16)

In plays and other cultural productions of the period, death and a keen
sense of the subjective rise up together, as in the graveyard scene in Hamlet
40. Joel Fineman, Shakespeares Perjured Eye (Berkeley, 1986), pp. 17980. Rosalie Colie notes
that Othello offers the expansion into tragic action of the psychological plot of a sequence of love
sonnets, in The Resources of Kind, (Berkeley, 1973), pp. 10708.
41. As Valerie Traub and others have argued, Shakespeares plays dramatize the fetishization
of the dead woman, an erotic pleasure in the destruction of women. Dollimore notes that innocent sacrifice restores both patriarchal desire and social order. See Jonathan Dollimore, Othello:
Sexual Difference and Internal Deviation, Sexual Dissidence (Oxford, 1991), p. 163.
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or in the sonnets, or in portraits of contemplative figures fingering the

sockets of skulls. In her climactic scene, Desdemona says I as she says
Nobody. As she is broken, her representations of herself seem also to
become insistently vivid. Is it an accident that some semblance of subjectivity is created at moments of intensity: torture, death, iconoclasm, the
threat of such?42 I would link this destructiveness with what is occurring
in the larger culture as the historical association of Reformation iconoclasm and introspection is replayed on the stage in tragedy in which the
breaking of images, random and isolated as it was, creates a more intense
sense of how the subjective self may be represented.
The murder scene as stand-in for intercourse, a sexual breaking, is thus
also a scene which in the wider historical context is the breaking of statues (lopping off their heads), pictures in stained glass, and crucifixes. Roy
Strong details how from 1538 everything that could be construed as an
image shows the effects of being hacked to pieces. 43 Strict reformers
set out to destroy the visible as a gross caricature of the invisible, as a path
to idolatry, as dangerous to ones piety and soul. In his work on Shakespeare, Stanley Cavell has linked tragedy and skepticism; I would also
posit that Shakespeares tragedy is linked to a period in which profound
shifts in the nature of the image shatter an entire cultures way of seeing
and necessarily influence the ocular themes of Othello. The links between
body and soul, exterior and interior, concrete image and spiritual meaning, are open to radical questioning, and Othello even seems to play with
this confusion in the mode of black comedy: can one see hell in Othello
or the demon in Desdemona? Othello attempts to see chastity (the
handkerchief, the spotted sheets) but cannot. In the world surrounding
the Reformation, one which includes the reinstitution of statuary as well
as its removal, there can be no ocular proof; proof is now in the word,
not in what can be seen. Indeed iconoclasm was on occasion meant not
only to wipe out the visible, but even memory of the visible. Injunction
28 of 1547 commanded clergy and parishioners to take away, utterly
42. In Defacing the Feminine in Renaissance Tragedy, Sara Eaton connects mutilation and
forms of inwardness: Tortured women on the stage are substantiated and acquire presence in a
natural body if we apply Scarrys formulations, because the male characters and the audience see
them hurt (p. 187).
43. These attacks often inspired by anti-Catholic sentiment and conducted by mobs, were
repeated in 1559 and 1560, and resulted in A Proclamation Against breakying or defacing monuments
or antiquities in 1560, which forbade the breaking or defacing of any parcel of any image of Kings,
princes or nobles estates of this realm or any other, according to Sara Eaton, Defacing the Feminine in Renaissance Tragedy, p. 189.
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extinct and destroy all shrines, covering of shrines, all tables, candlesticks,
trindles or rolls of wax, pictures, paintings and all other monuments of
feigned miracles, pilgrimages, idolatry, and superstition; so that there
remain no memory of the same (my emphasis).44 Othello sets out to destroy
Desdemona as an image both of whore and of virgin as he creates her
statue in marble: yet Ill not shed her blood, / Nor scar that whiter skin
of hers than snow, / And smooth as monumental alabaster (5.2.35). 45
His vow that it is the cause has caused problems for many critics; it
must refer to Desdemonas purported infidelity, but is sweepingly vague.
The cause of destruction at the end of the play seems to include all that
is inexplicable, irrational, erotic, and charged about such acts not only
within the play, but without as well: get it out of my sight, destroy all
images of the divine, break anything which is erotic or mesmerizing.
The play captures an historical period of great anxiety in which the
image is both dangerous and revered, both destroyed and articulate,
both removed and (like a hallucination) ever-present in memory. In
the midst of the tragedy Desdemona has wrested her own emblematic
representation of interiority, and has projected it for the audience. She
has performed herself in a play within a play, creating an artificial and
visual projection of self so that she can be known and remembered, a
process a character performs on herself, and a process which may provide
a way of understanding the emerging self of early modern England.
occide ntal college

44. Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Reformation, ed. W. H. Frere and
W. M. Kennedy, 190810, II, 126 quoted by Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars p. 480 n. 5. See also
Margaret Miles, Images as Insight (Boston, 1985); and Margaret Aston, Englands Iconoclasts. As
Frances Yates says, in describing the new arts of memory in the Reformation, the use of images
is gone. It is a kind of inner iconoclasm: No more will places in churches or other buildings
be vividly impressed on the imagination. And, above all, gone . . . are the images, the emotionally striking and stimulating images the use of which had come down through the centuries from
the art of the classical rhetoric. See The Art of Memory (Chicago, 1966), p. 234.
45. In an effort to distinguish himself from the destruction he has caused, Othello has recourse
to another image, the expected one in which he appears as Christian soldier. Cf. David Freeberg:
the iconoclast who destroyed Rembrandts The Nightwatch, maintained that he was Jesus
Christ and that God had commanded him to do the deed, and that he had been called by the Lord
to save the world. The messianic impulse is shared by many attackers of images. The Power of
Images (Chicago, 1989), p. 408.
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