Desdemona and Cordelia’s real transgressions may be more subtly subversive than a mere defection of allegiances. Brabantio’s ranting assertions that the Moor has enchanted his daughter, signify he can only fathom that ‘spells and medicines’ (I.iii.61) can constitute any conceivable interpretation of his daughter’s uncharacteristically excessive behaviour (e.g. causing a ‘nature so preposterously to err’ I.iii.62). Brabantio has constructed his daughter as a prodigy of virtue,
A maiden never bold
Of spirit so still and quiet that her motion,
Blush’d at herself. (I.iii.94-6)
and thus the baffled ‘how got she out?’ (I.i.168) is less directed at her literal escape, than how she managed to abscond his definition of her. Cordelia’s truest betrayal is perhaps her manner of speech, which threatens to expose how the laws of human kindness operate in the service of property and power relations.
The central difficulty of terming women as property is that, unlike most other inanimate capital, the woman has the potential to bring dishonour upon her owner even as he possesses her. The patriarch’s position of absolute control was not one to bask complacently in as it inferred responsibility for those under the sphere of his influence. The actions and behaviour of the wife or daughter formed a reflection upon the reputation of the patriarchal figure, and the integrity of his instruction and authority. As Dod and Cleaver postulate, if a woman errs ‘it is for the most part though the fault, and want of discretion, and lack of government in the husband’.
Lear’s repugnance from Goneril suggests that his daughter not only shames and humiliates him, but also brings a sense of corruption that inwardly gnaws his very being:
But yet thou art yet my flesh, my blood, my daughter –
Or rather a disease that’s in my flesh,
Which I needs must call mine. (II.iv.220-2)
Lear recognises a common identity with his daughter, but her malignity can only manifest the association as a contaminating infestation. Lear attempts to define himself against Goneril, disassociating himself from her as a disease of the flesh, ‘a plague-sore, or embossed carbuncle’ (II.iv.223), yet he cannot miss the rankling reality that the vitiated being has also issued from his own flesh and blood. His projected loathing and disgust towards his daughter mutates into a deep and deranging self-hatred.
Othello exhibits the problematic of the patriarchal system that both asserts possession, and finds possession always dangerously uncertain in his desperate lament,
O curse of marriage,
That we can call these creatures ours,
And not their appetites! (III.ii.272-4)
In Othello’s acquisition of his prized ‘land carrack’ (I.ii.50), he has been remarkably successful, prevailing over more favoured matches of ‘her own clime, complexion, and degree’ (III.iii.234) with his warrior-like exoticism. However, as owner or possessor Othello is constantly burdened by the imminent fear of loss. Othello’s tormented sense that Desdemona is his, and yet not consummately his own, is mirrored in their relationship to the handkerchief. The handkerchief is an emblem of Othello’s genealogy and family honour, of which Desdemona, on receipt of the token, is ‘protectress’ (III.iv.16). However, ownership of the handkerchief is ambiguous. Iago insinuates ‘’Tis hers’ (III.iv.12) i.e. to dispose of at her pleasure, whilst only lines later Othello jealously reasserts possession (‘he had my handkerchief’ III.iv.22 (italics mine)). It is indeed through this love trifle that Iago contrives the ‘ocular proof’ (III.iii.364) of Desdemona’s breach of faith Othello so avidly demands. Thus, the handkerchief ‘is and is not his, just as Desdemona is and is not his.’
Othello’s resolve to murder his wife posits Desdemona as some sacrificial victim whose death will neutralise the anxieties of the entire male race. He acts not merely out of personal vengeance, but commits the execution out of a profound duty to all men (‘she must die, else she betray more men’ V.ii.3-6). Desdemona has seemingly betrayed Brabantio for himself, only to then become cuckold to Cassio, and Othello must thus purge the sphere of the ‘super-subtle’ (I.iii.356) female agency:
The stability of the male world – its certainties, its prerogatives, and its precious sense of honour – depends on the suppression of what has emerged in and through Desdemona.
Desdemona’s death is seen as a right of purification, re-establishing the chastity of a woman who threatened to become an actively desiring subject as opposed to a passive object. Indeed, the inert imagery of the dead Desdemona (she is ‘monumental alabaster…one entire and perfect chrystolite’ V.ii.5; 147), revivifies Brabantio’s desire for stasis and quiescence in his paternal fantasy of a daughter ‘So still and quiet, that her motion / Blushed at herself’ (I.iii.95-6). Even at Othello’s apparent insight into his gross misjudgement as he repents his irreplaceable loss, analogising himself to the ‘base Indian’ who ‘threw a pearl away / Richer than all his tribe’ (V.ii.360-1), his vision is not radically redeemed. Although the opulent imagery of Othello’s eulogy is intended solely as praise, it still obstinately defines Desdemona as an object, even if a valuable one negligently cast away.
Patriarchal misogyny also demanded emphatic silence of its female subjects, as a crucial mechanism to uphold the uneven power distribution across the sexes. In the Renaissance there was an acute association between linguistic profusion and wantonness in the female. Silence was a key indicator of the chaste woman, with the closed mouth representing another facet of female containment, homogeneous to their enclosure within the home. Indeed, in Samuel Rowland’s succinct reprimand of ‘Salomons Harlot’, he neatly summarises the marks of the whore as a clamorous tongue, and the liability to frequent public places. She,
Is noted to be full of words,
And doth the streets frequent,
Not qualified as Sara was,
To keepe within the tent.
Rowland’s objections appear to mirror precisely what Cassio discerns as distasteful in Bianca. The impropriety of a woman roving the streets is evident in Cassio’s reproachful greeting, ‘What make you from home?’ (III.iv.171). The stigma of the unconfined woman can be seen in Cassio’s nervousness about being found ‘woman’d’ (III.iv.196) in the streets. However, Cassio is compelled to follow the scurrilous Bianca as ‘she’ll rail i’the street else’ (IV.i.159) in an embarrassing public spectacle.
At the close of the play Iago attempts to assert the prerogatives of patriarchal marriage to silence and dismiss his increasingly recalcitrant wife, as she attempts to assert his villainy. Iago’s complacency in patriarchal imperatives has seemingly unforeseen any conceivable possibility of his wife’s insurrection. Emillia’s defiance is measured by her escalating articulation, as Iago’s effort to quash her speech (‘charm your tongue’ V.ii.186) is overlaid by a more determined vocal assertion, ‘I will not charm my tongue; I am bound to speak’ (V.ii.187). Emillia will not be banished to her home but respectfully requests that her voice be heard,
…let me have leave to speak.
’Tis proper I obey him, but not know.
Perchance, Iago, I will ne’er go home. (V.ii.198-200)
However, such undutiful behaviour cannot go so undisguised without a cost. Emillia is eventually silenced, terminally, as Iago ‘sends her to her home in the play’s second uroxide’.
In Lear, female silence is rendered increasingly problematic. When required to articulate the degree of devotion they hold for their father, Lear reads only a surging profession of love in Goneril and Regan’s speeches as they cover their hypocrisy in florid words. However, Cordelia’s reticence, which signifies a ‘ponderous’ (I.i.77) probity and carefully worked response, exemplifies the dangers of female speech, even when the utterance is an attempt to avoid it, in her evasive, ‘Nothing, my lord’ (I.i.86). As Dusinberre points out,
To the refusal of convention, Cordelia’s refusal to speak salutes a rule of femininity in a context which gives her bluntness a masculine strength.
Cordelia’s desire to remain silent finds its literal accession within the text, as Lear’s banishment expels her presence from the action, with Cordelia only periodically resurrected as a spectral animation in the Fool’s laments for her.
In patriarchal discourse, woman can be seen as ‘shifting subject’, either fantasised or denigrated, absent or present on the stage. Cassio can be seen to invest in this splintered vision of femininity, idolising the ‘divine Desdemona’ (II.i.73) whilst his casually derogatory labels for the woman he sleeps with (‘customer’, ‘monkey’, ‘bauble’, ‘fitchew’) set Bianca in a separate category of women he reserves for whores and courtesans. Othello becomes confused by this cultural opposition between the virtuous woman he believes he has wed, and the generalising misogynistic terminology that groups women as the inherently afflicted daughters of Eve. This is complicated by Iago’s inference of his ignorance of regional mores,
I know our country disposition well:
In Venice they do let see God see the pranks
They dare not show their husbands (III.iii.205-7)
Othello’s inability to resolve the dialectic between the contrary constructions of his wife is evident in his ‘reading’ of Desdemona’s hand.
Hot, hot, and moist…
…For here’s a sweating devil here
That commonly rebels. ’Tis a good hand,
A frank one. (III.iv.39-44)
Othello sees Desdemona’s hand as ‘frank’ and ‘liberal’ (III.iv.43), indeed it is the open and generous hand that lovingly ‘gave away’ (III.iv.42) her heart to him. Yet Othello fearfully ruminates whether his wife’s giving nature is exclusively reserved to himself, and begins to interpret the hand as wanton. Othello’s estimation of Desdemona thus collapses into a rash diagnosis conditioned by a whole set of pre-given expectations of female lust. Othello employs the traditional misogynistic association which conflates heat and moisture with proof of her lechery, sanctimoniously prescribing moral exertion to cure her ailment (‘fasting, and prayer, / Much castigation, exercise devout’ III.iv.37-8).
In Lear, the polarisation of women into the idealised and the denigrated, is literally mapped out upon the female anatomy,
Down from the waist they are centaurs
Though women all above (IV.vi.124-5)
In categorising women as ‘centaurs’, Lear ventures to deny them even their humanity, locating them nearer the realm of beast. Albany also begins to envisage Goneril in demoniac and supernatural, as opposed to human, terms. She is the embodiment of evil masquerading in the female form (‘thou art a fiend / A woman’s shape doth shield thee’ IV.ii.66-7), her ‘self-covered’ (IV.ii.62) duplicity characteristic of dissembling feminine wiliness. The plague of the devil is seen as less grotesque than Goneril’s moral abnormalities,
Proper deformity shows not in the fiend
So horrid as in the woman. (IV.ii.59-60)
Indeed, the devil habitually displays such malignity. It is when detected within the woman that such foulness mutates to such an unsavoury extent.
Although Othello and Lear progress several misogynistic stereotypes, the inconsistency of the portrayal of female characters, especially Desdemona, highlights the difficulties of such reductive naming. In the space of the first act, Desdemona is presented in radically unstable terms, metamorphosing with apparent ease from a perfect, to a despised and deceptive daughter. Desdemona herself exhibits quite contradictory facets of her character, indulging in worldly wise banter (with Iago in II.i) and musing disbelief upon the concept of betrayal (‘Beshrew me if I would do such a wrong for all the world’ Iv.iii.78-9). It is perhaps not the task of the audience to reconcile this array of discontinuous Desdemonas, but more expedient to view her as ‘an artfully created embodiment of female behaviour and feminine responses, in all the variety and ambiguity perceived by men.’ Desdemona characterises the paradox of misogynistic discourse that is designed to fix women, and yet which relentlessly ‘fixes’ them as capricious and changeable.
Female sexuality is that which is most feared and targeted by the misogynist. As Callaghan notes,
Voracious female sexual desire was posited as the most conspicuous sign of gender difference and was treated both as a disease and a monstrous abnormality.
Even as Othello defends his and Desdemona’s courtship before the Senate, his words unconsciously betray a masculine trepidation of a cultural femininity envisioned as some insatiable appetite that can never be glutted. Evidently aroused by Othello’s narratives of adventure and peril, Desdemona ‘Devour(s)’ his discourses, digesting them hungrily with a ‘a greedy ear’ (I.iii.148). Othello’s synthesis of both the aural and the oral in Desdemona’s fervent responses suggests a misogynistic association between female orifices (ear, mouth, genitals) and the female’s apparently unappeasable sexual urges. In Act IV when Othello recklessly strikes his wife and Lodovico entreats that he should call her back, Othello becomes engrossed in his ability to arouse and manipulate Desdemona’s sexual appetite, reminding Lodovico of his influence, ‘Ay you did wish that I would make her turn’ (IV.i.249). Desdemona’s dogged obedience to Othello’s direction becomes an ironic signifier of her promiscuity,
Sir, she can turn, and turn; and yet go on
And turn again. (IV.i.250-1)
Othello bitterly dwells upon the fear that Desdemona’s sexuality is something which cannot be controlled or harnessed, but which outstrips his capacity, an endless ever ‘yet’ which he must always strive to satisfy. Indeed,
Turning becomes a figure for her inconstancy: as she can turn to him, she can also lie to him or turn to the arms of another man.
Lear’s fear of female sexuality is embedded in the female potential for generativity, which dually invests the woman with power whilst exerting a castrating influence upon their male counterparts. Lear recoils from female genitalia, deeming them merely another instrument in their dissembling armoury where female ‘whiteness’ is merely an affectation of virtue,
Whose face between her forks presages snow,
That minces virtue… (IV.vi.19-20)
Lear defines his daughters as grossly unnatural, and as such, their productivity can only manifest itself in monstrous issue or infertility. Lear inversely invokes ‘Nature’ (I.iv.275), the fertility goddess, to ‘Suspend’ any creative ‘purpose’ (I.iv.276) in Goneril. In his revulsion from the feminine and their fecund abilities, Lear aligns himself with the process of severing ties, divorcing himself not only from the second generation he has shunned, but a third, similarly cutting asunder links with his potential grandchildren,
Into her womb convey sterility,
Dry up her organs of increase. (I.iv.270-1)
Once categorised as a ‘derogate’ (I.iv.272) being, Goneril cannot normatively conceive or become fruitful, but can only ‘teem’ (I.iv.281). Lear’s ambivalent terminology either suggests Goneril may bear prolific offspring, or may empty, lay waste and pour out. Indeed, any ‘reproduction in Goneril would be excretion, emission of waste matter, a monstrous birth’.
After Othello has branded his wife a whore, he correlatively perceives that any natural functions materialising within her must manifest themselves in the foulest result. Her fetid womb is no longer worthy to bear child, being only a sordid abode for the most insalubrious inhabitants, ‘a cestern for foul toads / To knot and gender in’ (Iv.ii.61-2). Desdemona’s infected sexuality is seemingly contagious, spreading her barrenness and aridity to Othello and rendering him impotent,
The fountain from which my current runs
Or else dries up: to be discarded thence! (Iv.ii.59-60)
Desdemona does exert autonomous determinism in love and sexual matters, being ‘half the wooer’ (I.iii.176) as opposed to passively appropriated object. Before the Senate Desdemona defines herself as a fully individualised subject, who abides by the primacy of her independent desires, ‘That I did love the Moor to live with him’ (I.iii.348). However, these traits appear threatening rather than admirable. The explicitly sexual motivation to accompany Othello to Cyprus in order to consummate their marriage (‘The rites for which I love him’ I.iii.257) casts doubt over her character, which Iago later translates as a wilful perversity. Iago construes Desdemona’s exercise of personal volition in shunning the ‘wealthy curled darlings of (her) nation’ (I.ii.68) as something much more sinister,
…a will most rank,
Foul disproportion, thoughts unnatural. (III.iii.236-7)
However, Emillia’s resounding indictment of the male sexual appetite serves to dilute the play’s misogynistic implications,
’Tis not a year or two shows us a man:
They are all but stomachs, and we are all but food;
They eat us hungerly, and when they are full
They belch us. (III.iv.103-6)
Emillia envisages the male libido as gluttonous, gorging itself upon the object of its desire to the limits of consumption, and then vomiting the waste product when sick with repletion. Emillia, however, is not a misandrist, but advocates the similarity of male and female needs (‘And have we not affections, / Desires for sport, and frailty, as men have? IV.iii.98-9). Emillia’s voice sounds a welcome middle-ground amongst the extremes of Desdemona’s nauseating purity and innocence, Othello’s insecurities, and Iago’s bitter hatreds.
The deaths of Desdemona and Cordelia at the end of Othello and Lear make the play’s final statements on misogyny difficult and ambiguous. Gratiano’s lament upon Desdemona’s death-bed,
Poor Desdemona! I am glad thy father’s dead.
Thy match was mortal to him, and pure grief
Shore his old thread atwain. (V.ii.207-9)
subtly draws a connection between her murder and her original insubordination in betraying her father. Such an association raises speculative inferences as to whether this was a cruel and unjust slaughter, or a warranted retribution for a punishable sin. Indeed, Callaghan argues that the female corpse is integral to the denouement of tragedy, constructing a final ocular spectacle that is silent, dead, and female.
However, Desdemona’s death can be read in less futile aspect. Desdemona almost refuses to die, resisting the death by constantly talking and pressing Othello to exact his reasons for the murder. Indeed, even in her almost masochistic claim that her death was self-inflicted, she ironically displays a self-assertion and implied mastery over her own death that drives Othello into an enraged fury,
She’s like a liar gone to burning hell,
’Twas I that killed her (V.ii.132-3)
In death, Desdemona’s gaze finally bespeaks her purity as Othello reads his wife’s judgement,
Now – how dost thou look now?
…When we shall meet at the compt,
That look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven. (V.ii.272-4)
Typically the object of male penetrating and voyeuristic inspection, it is now through Desdemona’s dead gape that Othello is compelled to examine himself and conclude that he is damned.
Cordelia’s death by an off-stage strangulation locates her as the definitive passive female victim, her last breaths taken considerately silently, and tidily removed from the central action. Cordelia’s death can be read as somehow redemptive for womankind, however, any final truths are somewhat empty as the three female characters lie dead before us. Cordelia’s death is almost figured as an example of patriarchy restored, the final pacification of male outrage at her unorthodox refusal to comply with her father’s desires.
Dympna Callaghan, Women and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), p.102. Callaghan goes on to delineate woman as both constituting both an excess category (produced from man’s unnecessary appendage) and a category of excess (a superfluity).
The Tudor Edition of William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander (1951; London: Collins, 1964). All references are from this edition and cited within the text.
See Iago’s aside about Othello and Desdemona’s new-found love,
O, but you are well tun’d now!
But I’ll set the pegs that make this music (II.i.198-9)
Although Iago’s tone is bitterly cynical, the ‘now’ suggests Iago has witnessed many blooms and autumns in the cycle of love, and can thus afford to speak with some sceptical authority on their love of ‘now’ and their love of the future.
Callaghan notes this process whereby the audience has the tendency to smile and think ‘ “Ha, ha. There’s some truth in that” ’ (p.125).
The Tudor Edition of William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander (1951; London: Collins, 1964). All references are from this edition and cited within the text
Edmund’s bastard status forces him into the unorthodox male position that cannot view female adultery and sexual rapaciousness as downright damnable, as this would make his self-opinion almost intolerable, himself being the issue of such illicit lust. Edmund is thus the curious attorney to justify and acquit, rather than condemn, female inconstancy. He rationalises that the passion and vitality present in ‘the lusty stealth of nature’ (I.ii.11) should necessary ensue in the birth of an individual of strong and ‘fierce quality’ (12), as opposed to the tribe of listless and apathetic ‘fops’ (14) which are the product of the ‘dull stale tired bed’ (13). However, temptingly persuasive as Edmund’s argument may be, the play does seem to hold up the traditional assumptions that there is a polarised difference between women and that bastards are base.
Lena Cowen Orlin, ‘Desdemona’s Disposition’. In Shakespeare Tragedy and Gender, ed. Shirley Nelson Garner and Madelon Sprengnether (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996) p.178.
Even though Cordelia is not greedily sought (as in Burgundy’s avaricious and self-serving suit) for ‘respect and fortunes’ (I.i.250), the king’s language still figures Cordelia as a jealously guarded object as opposed to an autonomous individual,
Not all the dukes in waterish Burgundy
Can buy this unprized, precious maid of me (I.i.260-1)
Evelyn Gajowski, ‘The Female Perspective in Othello’. In Othello: New Perspectives, eds. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Kent Cartwright (London: Associated University Press, 1991) p.98
Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1984) p.198
This form of property anxiety was a determining factor in the emphatic containment of females within the home in the Renaissance. As Stallybrass notes,
‘ “Covert”, the wife becomes her husband’s symbolic capital, “free”, she is the opening through which that capital disappears’.
In Peter Stallybrass, ‘Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed’. In Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, eds. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986) p.128.
John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Godly Form of Household Government (1598). Taken from Orlin, p.186.
Stallybrass, p.138. It is worth noting the significance of the strawberry pattern of the handkerchief, with strawberries signifying a hypocritical value in the Renaissance. A frequently occurring design was the emblem of the strawberry plant with an adder hiding behind it. This notion of doubleness is appropriate here as the handkerchief initially testifies to Desdemona’s virtue and chaste love, but finally represents damning proof of her indiscretions. See Karen Newman, ‘ “And Wash the Ethiop White”: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello’. In Shakespeare, Othello: A Casebook, ed. John Wain (1971: London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1994) p.216-7.
Edward A. Snow, ‘Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Things in Othello’. In English Literary Renaissance, 10 (1980) p.384-411
The connection between the expressively vocal female and the strumpet was common to legal discourse and conduct books. A man charged of slandering a woman as a whore was able to comfortable acquit himself through a slight shift in terminology by litigating he accused her as a whore of the tongue as opposed to the flesh (Stallybrass, p.126).
Cited in Stallybrass, p.127
Emillia’s conflict here can be seen as the collision between the private obligation of a wife and the public duties of a citizen. However, the Puritans were of the belief that a woman’s obedience to her husband rested on the basis of his moral integrity. Indeed, if a husband grossly transgressed the ethical standards that he demanded of his wife, then she was no longer obligated to adhere to his authority. Emillia’s actions, motivated by a revealingly new knowledge of her husband and her machinations, are thus not likely to be read as utterly subversive. As Dusinberre notes, ‘A husband’s villainy annuls his wife’s duty to him’. Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London: The Macmillan Press Ltd, 1975) p.90.
However, despite Cassio’s quite evidently fractured perspective of the female, W. D. Adamson (W. D. Adamson, ‘Unpinned or Undone?: Desdemona’s Critics and the Problem of Sexual Innocence’. In Shakespeare Studies, 13 (1980) p.187-96) advances the argument that his estimation of Desdemona actually offers a favourable compromise to the more extreme viewpoints voiced within the text. Indeed, Cassio does not participate in Iago’s vulgar insinuations as he speculates voyeuristically upon Desdemona’s sexuality,
What an eye she has! Methinks it sounds a
Parley to provocation. (II.i.21)
Cassio neutralises any lewd suggestions by acknowledging Desdemona’s sexuality without debasing it, or tarnishing her character, ‘An inviting eye; and yet right modest’ (II.ii.23). Cassio can admire Desdemona without desexualising idolatry, inviting Othello to ‘make love’s quick pants in Desdemona’s arms’ (II.i.80), a more positive remove from Iago’s monstrous world of bestial copulation (‘your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs’ I.i.117).
The link between female orifices and the voracious nature of the female sexual appetite can be seen in Thomas Bacon’s Catechisme (1564, XX, ii) as he sermonises,
The whore is never satisfied, but is like one that goeth by the way and is thirsty; even does she open her mouth and drink of everye next water, that she may get.
Cited in Newman, p.211
Karen Newman comments that Desdemona’s desire is punished because ‘it threatens a white hegemony in which women cannot be desiring subjects’ (p.211). Newman defines Desdemona’s desire as particularly subversive in the line ‘I saw Othello’s visage in his mind’ (I.iii.252). Although this is an allusion to the prejudices against Othello’s ‘visage’ in some of the play’s characters/Shakespeare’s audiences perceptions, it should be noted that Desdemona ‘saw’ her future husband’s visage through his talks of past adventure. Thus, Desdemona does not wash the Moor white, but substantiates his more primal link with Africa and its legendary monstrous creatures. Furthermore, the fact that Desdemona reacts to Othello’s ‘mind’ constructs her as a rational being as opposed to emotionally irresolute.
Carol Thomas Neely sees Emillia as ‘dramatically and symbolically the play’s fulcrum’ (Carol Thomas Neely, ‘Women and Men in Othello: “what should such a fool / do with so good a woman?”’. In Shakespeare Studies, 10 (1977) p.133-158). Emillia can indeed be seen as the play’s mediator, in her multifaceted attitude towards sexuality. Although Emillia rejects identification with the flagrant courtesan (such as Bianca), she is liberal enough to sympathise with female promiscuity. Furthermore whilst she is occasionally amused and confounded by Desdemona’s naivety, her dying words are the play’s most conclusive testament to her mistress’ chaste honesty.