ABSTRACT
This essay contests the certainty with which many recent critics of Shakespeare’s Othello maintain that Desdemona never commits the crime of adultery. It proceeds on dually feminist and skeptical grounds, querying the connection between chastity and female virtue reified in critical accounts of Othello’s jealousy and Desdemona’s victimhood, and arguing that many apologies for Desdemona selectively define chastity in order to exonerate her. Before advancing on such polemical territory, however, it is first worth recalling that for several centuries the case of Desdemona’s chastity was hardly s o clear. In the play’s long critical history, Desdemona has been tried and found wanting for sins that include elopement, elopement with a Moor, joking about women’s virtue with Iago, advocating on Cassio’s behalf, advocating adamantly on Cassio’s behalf, lying to Othello about the loss of the handkerchief, talking about adultery with Emilia, taking the blame for her own murder, and, in at least one wildly speculative instance, sleeping with Cassio before the play begins. 1 These denunciations begin, at least in the critical archive, with Othello’s first critic, Thomas Rymer. In his 1693 Short View of Tragedy, Rymer includes among his many objections to Othello that Shakespeare takes “a Venetian Lady to be the Fool.” Rymer justifies Othello’s suspicion of his wife, declaiming Desdemona’s audacity in running off with the Moor, “Bed[ding]” him on their wedding night, and then, the very next day, “importuning and teizing him for a young smock-fac’d Lieutenant.” 2 Roughly a century later, US President John Quincy Adams echoes Rymer when he proclaims Desdemona to be “little less than a wanton.” 3 W. H. Auden only slightly more graciously suspects, still another century later, that had Desdemona lived, and spent more time with the likes of Emilia, she might soon “have taken a lover.” 4 As late as 1974, Jan Kott hedges that “Desdemona is faithful, but must have something of a slut in her. Not in actu, but in potentia.” 5
