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Othello was no ordinary wife-killer. Usually a murderous husband will slaughter his mate in a blind and inarticulate rage. Yet there is nothing inarticulate in that great and terrible scene in Shakespeare's play where Othello strangles his wife Desdemona after being wrongly convinced that she was unfaithful to him. To be sure, by this point in the play Othello's mind has already been warped and poisoned by the machinations of his underling Iago, yet even in his mental fog Othello remains supremely eloquent, a man who uses words to understand and shape experience.
As he enters Desdemona's chambers, where she lies sleeping, Othello sees a burning light. This sets him off on a beautiful soliloquy, full of tortured doubt, on the difference between blowing out a light (an act easy to reverse) and extinguishing a human soul (an irrevocable deed). When Desdemona awakens, husband and wife talk at length, although at cross-purposes, about guilt and judgment (both human and divine). Only after these agonizing moments of discourse and dialogue is Desdemona killed.
Living in a visual culture, we are struck by the fact that the death of Desdemona is very slow and talky. Any Hollywood hack could draft a scene that moves more quickly—perhaps with tight close-ups on Othello's hands and Desdemona's neck. Yet for Othello, no less than his creator Shakespeare, death without speechmaking is almost unthinkable.
As the literary critic Hugh Kenner once noted, Othello, like all of Shakespeare's heroes, was imbued with a gift highly prized by Renaissance gentlemen: copiousness, the ability to take command over language even in moments of crisis and pain. To be sure, most Shakespearean characters have the gift of tongue, but the great heroes (notably Hamlet and Lear) are particularly distinguished by their powers of oratory. They are never at a loss for words and always find phrases to embody their perceptions and feelings.
Shakespeare lived in a deeply oral culture, although one in which print technology was encroaching. Of course he went to school where he learned to read, as well as picking up his little Latin and less Greek. "Shakespeare and his contemporaries were trained in writing … but what they wrote consisted largely if not indeed entirely of bits of pieces of things designed to be incorporated into orations," noted the late Walter Ong, who was among other achievements a great scholar of the Renaissance. "Humanists patterned even letters quite commonly on combative oratorical models. The universities remained even more oral, filled with disputation and declamation."
Shakespeare rarely spelled his name the same way twice, since letters were not yet firmly tied to words. And the world around him was a din of spoken words: from street-corner preachers to courtiers quick to flatter, everyone around Shakespeare was talking all the time. In this world, personal eloquence, possessing the "winged words" that Homer sang of, was a mark of distinction. For himself, Shakespeare rebuilt his family's dwindling fortune by becoming a lord of the living language.
We inhabit a very different world. Our leaders tend to halt and stammer unless they have a speechwriter's text (often on a teleprompter) in front of them. Humanity has gone through a long journey from the purely oral universe of Homer (who lived before the written word was invented) to the mixed oral and print world of Shakespeare to the heavily textual environment of James Joyce to our own multimedia carnival.
To understand how we got from there to here, and what the journey has meant, the best guide is the work of Father Ong, the great Jesuit scholar who died last year at age ninety. With remarkable erudition and sweeping scholarship, Ong illuminated not merely the history of communication but also what he called "the evolution of consciousness." Explicating everything from Renaissance textbooks to subway graffiti, sometime focusing tightly on a single poem while on other occasions briskly leaping through centuries, Ong was one of the great intellectuals of the last century. Much cherished by specialists, he deserves a larger audience among general readers.
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