It has been an
interesting week regarding emails I got from my readers. Often, the feedback I
get about an essay I wrote is to express the pleasure the readers got from the
lecture. Sometimes however, they share some of their reactions to what I wrote
and ask questions. Needless to say, I am grateful for all reactions readers
share especially from those who stay anonymous. It is part of the mystery I
have cherished in the past two decades since I started my first blog –
somewhere around the globe, somehow, what I had wanted to share became an echo
in someone’s mind or heart.
My last essay was inspired
by an email I received where a reader had found one of my poems published in a
medical journal in the late 1990s. It was about addressing domestic/conjugal
abuse from social and medical spheres of concern.
Soon after I posted that
essay, I received another email about another essay I had written a few years
back about Shakespeare’s Othello where the reader wonders if sometimes in the
arts conjugal abuse is disguised by the artistry of the writer, such as in Shakespeare’s
Othello.
First,
the essay I wrote was about Pietro Calvis’s famous marble bust of Othello, and
not thoughts about the social or medical aspects in interpreting Desdemona’s
death in Shakespeare’s dramatic theater plot. My essay can be read here.(1)
Second, and since I had
not read Othello for many moons, I went back to re-read the final scene lines.
And third, when I
started scribbling a few lines on paper, I realized that my mind was going in a
very different direction than Othello and the violent last scene.
Putting Othello within
the reader’s framework of conjugal abuse was neither difficult nor new. There
is much written, especially in our century that equate Othello’s behaviour and
act to domestic abuse and violence, and intimate partner homicide. This is the
social or societal angle. In addition, there also is a medical recognition of
that very act under the symptomatic definition of “Othello Syndrome” (although not
a syndrome defined as such in the American Association of Psychiatry DSM-5
manual (2)) and is widely use as a psychiatric diagnosis of morbid or delusional jealousy, when a person has an
irrational and fixed belief that their romantic partner is unfaithful, despite
having no actual proof.
The interesting discovery I made re-reading the Act
5, Scene 2 of Othello is
about Desdemona’s maid Emilia who also suffered conjugal homicide from her husband
Lado for protecting Desdemona against Lado’s plot, said just before being
stabbed to death:
"I will play the swan,
And die in music."
This is when my mind left
Shakespeare and Othello to realise that Shakespeare had perpetuated the myth of
the “Swan Song” or the belief that swans are mute and sing only just before
their death.
Of course swans are vocal throughout their lives,
and the origin of the myth goes back to Ancient Greece. The "swan song" is a myth when
believed that they sing just before their death. It is also an idiom for one’s
last grand act and best creativity before death or losing touch with who he
once was.
It is highly poetic and
that belief continues after two millennia.
But the use of the idiom in
Othello seems to have a consequence Shakespeare may not have thought about or
intended in 1603. Indeed more than four centuries after Shakespeare used that
two millennia-old myth, today Othello is considered not only a
domestic/conjugal abuse and violence tragedy focused on the seemingly
inevitable acts of Othello and Lado but also a focus on the victims Desdemona
and Emilia. Both victims, especially Emilia, are seen in today’s focus of abuse
prevention as the voice of those who did not accept complicity with their
abusers and showed defiance albeit they paid the ultimate price. Emilia, early
in the play’s plot steals Desdemona’s handkerchief to please her husband, but
when she realizes that Lado’s lies caused Desdemona’s murder, she refused to
continue her complicity with her husband. In an attitude of loyalty to a fellow
woman she spoke to Venetian authorities, all males, about Lado’s plot. Sadly,
she suffered the same fate as Desdemona at Lado’s hands.
I read Othello when I was
in college. But today, decades later and knowing more about domestic violence
statistics, I realised that Shakespeare may have paved the way in how victims
can be protected and shielded when the “Othello syndrome” or other behaviours
are observed and diagnosed in the abusers, which was unavoidable in 1603.
And, it became clear that
Emilia broke yet another myth of unavoidability – she did not stay mute. She
did sing knowing about her fate may be the same as Desdemona’s.
She became the swan who
advocated for the abuse victim.
Othello remains a very
relevant and pertinent theatrical masterpiece within our changed and changing
social, moral and medical norms 400 years after it was the play’s first
performance in 1604 at Whitehall Palace in London for King James I.
October 8, 2026
© Vahé A. Kazandjian,
2026
(1)
https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2024/08/pietro-calvis-othello-and-memories-of.html
(2)
DSM-5
diagnosis is a standardized mental health evaluation based on
criteria from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA).
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