ABSTRACT
The Winter’s Tale articulates the complexity of social time and the hope for compensation and reconciled wholeness. Taken more literally, however, it is the story of an abusive husband who is rewarded with constant love, even though he had intended the death of his wife. In this sense The Winter’s Tale belongs to the history of violence against women. To interpret the play in these terms is not just a contingent ideological appropriation. Just as in the case of The Merchant of Venice, The Winter’s Tale must be read and understood by concrete, situated subjects who are equally aware of anti-Semitism and of the prevalence of domestic violence. The difficult pleasure of reading the great stories contained in these plays comes from the way they express the collective bad conscience of our civilization. The painful difficulty of confronting this bad conscience is even more vividly felt in the case of Othello. Harold Bloom has argued that the comic structure of The Merchant of Venice only makes sense in terms of the ‘ancient Christian slander against the Jews’. The happy ending brought about by Portia’s ingenuity affirms the life of a community that takes satisfaction in the humiliation and exclusion of the Jew. Bloom has argued that an accurate staging of the play would be insupportable for anyone who knows the truth about the Holocaust. Anything less than the full truth of the play’s intentions would be profoundly dishonest. I intend to make a similar argument here for Othello. I read the structure of the play as a comedy of abjection that depends on a background of racial hatred and violence. An honest production of Othello would be just as intolerable as an honest production of The Merchant of Venice. In fact, as I hope to show, many readers and spectators of Othello have indeed refused to tolerate what is expressed so brutally in this play. As with the other plays I have referred to here, we cannot avoid the difficulty by taking refuge in a historicist argument. The abjection of women, of Jews, and of people of color remains a salient and distinctive feature of contemporary experience. How then do viewers of The
Winter’s Tale, The Merchant of Venice, and Othello actually participate in the social experience represented by these works? What does it mean, to borrow a usage from French, to ‘assist’ at a performance of this text?
