Othello
Act I Sc. 1
“A fellow almost damn’d in a fair wife.”
The attempts made to give sense to ‘wife’ here are utterly ridiculous. I cannot see any objection to life, the reading of the sagacious Tyrwhitt. Here, as elsewhere, it may be observed ‘damn’d’ is merely to be damned, i.e. condemned, be odious, as a person of fair regular life must be in the eyes of an Iago, who in fact says of Cassio’s (v. 1) “He hath a daily beauty in his life, That makes me ugly.” If the allusion be to the person of Cassio, we might read face, skin, or some such word, as denoting effeminacy.
“Plague him with flies. Though that his joy be joy.”
Perhaps the second ‘joy’ was suggested by the first instead of high, bright, or some other adjective.
Sc. 2
“Abus’d her youth with drugs or minerals
That weaken motion.”
I read with Hanmer waken, for that was the object of philtres. ‘Motion’ is emotion, desire. In the next scene we have “To cool our raging motions, our carnal stings,” and “mixtures powerful o’er the blood.”
Sc. 3
“As in these cases, where the aim reports,
’Tis oft with difference.”
The 4tos read ‘they aim’; but the reading of the folio gives a more simple sense. ‘The aim’ is conjecture.
“And prays you to believe him.”
It has been proposed to read relieve, which seems to make better sense, and which I adopt.
“Sans witchcraft could not be.”
“I won his daughter with.”
Duke. “To vouch this is no proof,” etc.
The folio makes this part of Brabantio’s speech.
“That I have passed.” * *
We might add with his demands complying.
“The rites for which I lov’d him are denied me.”
Is not this—whether we read ‘rites’ or ‘rights’—rather indelicate coming from the lips of Desdemona?
“Lovers can see to do their amorous rites
By their own beauties.”
Rom. and Jul. iii. 2.
“The great prerogative and rites of love,
Which as your due time claims, he does acknowledge.”
All’s Well, ii. 4.
“And with lascivious petulancy [she] sew’d
For hymeneal dalliance, marriage rights.”
Marston, What You Will, iii. 1.
Juliet might, to herself, speak of the “amorous rites,” but for Desdemona to do so before the Senate of Venice! impossible. Would it not, then, be better to read parts? She had just said that it was “for his honours and his valiant parts” she loved him.
“Not to comply with heat the young affects
In my defunct, and proper satisfaction;”
The reading of Upton, Gifford, Singer, Dyce, etc., is
“Not to comply with heat (the young affects
In me defunct) and proper satisfaction,”
and in proof of the validity of this punctuation Gifford quotes from Massinger:
“And though the youthful heats,
That look no further than your outward form,
Are long since buried in me.”
Bondman, i. 3.
I have no doubt that Massinger had the present passage in view, and understood it in the same way as these critics; and still there might be a printer’s error in it of which he was not aware. (See on Rom. and Jul. iii. 3.) But can any one produce a single instance of Shakespeare’s thus interposing a parenthesis between two substantives connected by a copula, or forming a sentence like that in the parenthesis? and what can be more rugged and disjointed than the whole passage as thus arranged? Would not the following not very violent corrections make the whole more Shakespearian and more harmonious?
“Not to comply with heat of the young affects,
In my distinct and proper satisfaction.”
‘Affects,’ as Johnson rightly observed, is passions, not affections, and Othello styles them ‘young,’ either as they were new in him, and had not been gratified, or as belonging chiefly to youth.
“For herself she’s past
These youthful heats.”
Fletch. Sea Voyage, ii. 2.
‘Distinct and proper’ means separate and peculiar. Distinct, the correction of ‘defunct,’ I regard as nearly certain. Its meaning here is separate.
“Sheds stuff’d with lambs and goats, distinctly kept,
Distinct the biggest, the more mean distinct,
Distinct the youngest.”
Chapman, Odyss. ix. 34.
“He has a person and a smooth dispose
To be suspected.”
I do not clearly see the sense of ‘dispose’ here, perhaps we should read discourse.