Argument Agree or Disagree

¶ … Pechter's

"Too Much Violence: Murdering Wives in Othello"

The Author's Argument

Othello according to the author is the renaissance play where the most heinous act of violence against women occurs. He says "of all the acts of violence against women represented on the English Renaissance stage…Othello's murder of Desdemona, followed quickly by Iago's murder of Emilia, is the most appalling" (366). Throughout the piece the author gives accounts of writers, critics and reviewers who do not seem to believe this, instead stating in one case that it is a shame that "the exigencies of the stage require the omission of the exquisite scene. Pechter sees the violence as a product of the times, but cannot excuse the fact that people not only want to see the scene, and believe that the scene is essential to the workings of the play. He is making the argument for the reader, but he may have some problems convincing people who want to see the Shakespearean works as they were written. The main argument is that the original scene is too violent mainly because it seems to relegate women to a secondary status, but also that it is wrong for reviewers to lament the fact that such an appalling scene is tampered with.

Main Points of Support

The author uses several excerpts from reviews to make his argument about the play and he also quotes noted critics. Pechter uses an argument from a 1610 review of the play to make his main argument. The reviewer said that the scene was beautiful and that it should remain because it was tradition, and "tradition was right" (367). Pechter responds to this by saying "Tradition, the nightmare of history registered in the weight of previous theatrical and critical response to Othello, does not solve the problem of too much violence: it reproduces and thus perpetuates it" (367). He later points to the final scene in which Othello is seen as a sympathetic character, dead on a pallet next to Desdemona and Emilia. He states that producers in the nineteenth century productions omitted this scene because people were more enlightened as to violence against women at that time. He then quotes Coleridge as saying that "Shakespeare, who knew man and woman much better, saw that it, in fact, was the perfection of woman to be characterless" (373). His main points center on the proposition that women are treated as features, props, in Renaissance plays, and that leads to the violence they are shown and the ho-hum attitude people seem to take about it.

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