I had
barely hit the “Send” button on my previous post about Darcy and Iago as both
being 28 year old deceivers, when I realized that there was a whole nother
aspect of Darcy’s Iago-esque scheming in P&P that I had failed to recall,
one which would be right up Iago’s alley. Of course, I refer to Darcy’s interference
in the Bingley-Jane courtship, interference which was not rectified for months,
until Darcy decided to undo his interference, by giving Bingley his blessing to
renew his attentions to Jane. It took me
five minutes more to identify the keyword which JA used to tag Darcy’s
interference back to its literary allusive source—‘triumph’, which, as you’ll
see, is uttered twice in Act 4, Scene 1 of Othello!
In
that scene, we watch in horrified fascination as Iago carries to fruition his
nefarious plot to destroy Desdemona’s reputation in Othello’s eyes, by staging
a performance for an audience of one (Othello), starring Iago, with the key
supporting role of the unwitting Cassio. As Iago helpfully explains to the
audience, he smears Desdemona’s chastity by speaking with Cassio about Bianca, while
telling Othello he’s speaking with
Cassio about Desdemona. This is almost exactly the same trick
Borachio and Don John use to accomplish the same goal vis a vis Hero in Much Ado.
With
that brief intro, here’s the scene. Keep an eye out for the ALL CAPS verbiage
which JA picks up on in P&P, as I will show immediately thereafter:
IAGO Work on, My medicine, work! Thus credulous fools are caught; AND MANY WORTHY AND CHASTE DAMES EVEN THUS, ALL GUILTLESS, MEET REPROACH. What, ho! my lord!
My lord, I say! Othello!
My lord, I say! Othello!
IAGO No, forbear; The lethargy must have his quiet course: If not, he foams at mouth and by and by
Breaks out to savage madness. Look he stirs: Do you withdraw yourself a little while, He will recover straight: when he is gone, I would on great occasion speak with you.
Breaks out to savage madness. Look he stirs: Do you withdraw yourself a little while, He will recover straight: when he is gone, I would on great occasion speak with you.
Exit
CASSIO
IAGO Good sir, be a man; Think every bearded fellow that's but yoked May draw with you: there's millions now alive That nightly lie in those unproper beds Which they dare swear peculiar: your case is
better. O, 'tis the spite of hell, the
fiend's arch-mock, To lip a
wanton in a secure couch,
And to suppose her chaste! No, let me know;
And knowing what I am, I know what she shall be.
IAGO
Stand you awhile apart; Confine
yourself but in a patient list. Whilst you were here
o'erwhelmed with your grief-- A passion most unsuiting such
a man-- Cassio came hither: I shifted him away, And laid good 'scuse upon your ecstasy, Bade
him anon return and here speak with me; The which he
promised. Do but encave yourself, And mark the fleers, the
gibes, and notable scorns, That dwell in every region of his
face; For I will make him tell the tale anew, Where, how, how oft, how long ago, and when He
hath, and is again to cope your wife: I say, but mark his
gesture. Marry, patience; Or I shall say you are all in all
in spleen, And nothing of a man.
OTHELLO Dost thou hear, Iago? I will be found most cunning in my patience; But--dost thou hear?--most bloody.
OTHELLO
retires
Now
will I question Cassio of Bianca,
A housewife that by selling her desires
Buys herself bread and clothes: it is a creature
That dotes on Cassio; as 'tis the strumpet's plague To beguile many and be beguiled by one: He, when he hears of her, cannot refrain From the excess of laughter. Here he comes:
Re-enter
CASSIO
As
he shall smile, Othello shall go mad;
And his unbookish jealousy must construe
Poor Cassio's smiles, gestures and light behavior, Quite in the wrong. How do you now, lieutenant?
CASSIO I
marry her! what? a customer! Prithee, bear some
charity to my wit: do not think it so unwholesome. Ha, ha, ha!
CASSIO This
is the monkey's own giving out: she is
persuaded I will marry her, out of her own love and
flattery, not out of my promise.
flattery, not out of my promise.
CASSIO She
was here even now; she haunts me in every place.
I was the other day talking on the sea-bank with
certain Venetians; and thither comes the bauble,
and, by this hand, she falls me thus about my neck--
OTHELLO Now
he tells how she plucked him to my chamber. O,
I see that nose of yours, but not that dog I shall throw it to.
Enter
BIANCA
BIANCA Let
the devil and his dam haunt you! What did you
mean by that same handkerchief you gave me even now? I was a fine fool to take it. I must take out the work?--A likely piece of work, that you should find it in your chamber, and not know who left it there! This is some minx's token, and I must take out the work? There; give it your hobby-horse: wheresoever you had it, I'll take out no work on't.
BIANCA An
you'll come to supper to-night, you may; an you
will not, come when you are next prepared for. Exit
Exit
CASSIO
And
now here’s the passage in Pride &
Prejudice which I say JA tags to Othello
via “triumph”, when Colonel Fitzwilliam makes Elizabeth ill (although not
epileptic!) with his casual report of Darcy’s unwarranted interference:
“…some
ladies of my acquaintance, Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley. I think I have heard
you say that you know them."
"I
know them a little. Their brother is a pleasant gentlemanlike man—he is a great
friend of Darcy's."
"Oh!
yes," said Elizabeth drily; "Mr. Darcy is uncommonly kind to Mr.
Bingley, and takes a prodigious deal of care of him."
"Care
of him! Yes, I really believe Darcy does take care of him in
those points where he most wants care. From something that he told me in our
journey hither, I have reason to think Bingley very much indebted to him. But I
ought to beg his pardon, for I have no right to suppose that Bingley was the
person meant. It was all conjecture."
"What
is it you mean?"
"It
is a circumstance which Darcy could not wish to be generally known, because if
it were to get round to the lady's family, it would be an unpleasant
thing."
"You
may depend upon my not mentioning it."
"And
remember that I have not much reason for supposing it to be Bingley. What he
told me was merely this: that he congratulated himself on having lately saved a
friend from the inconveniences of a most imprudent marriage, but without
mentioning names or any other particulars, and I only suspected it to be Bingley
from believing him the kind of young man to get into a scrape of that sort, and
from knowing them to have been together the whole of last summer."
"Did
Mr. Darcy give you reasons for this interference?"
"I
understood that there were some very strong objections against the lady."
"AND
WHAT ARTS DID HE USE TO SEPARATE THEM?"
"He
did not talk to me of his own arts," said Fitzwilliam, smiling. "He
only told me what I have now told you."
Elizabeth
made no answer, and walked on, her heart swelling with indignation. After
watching her a little, Fitzwilliam asked her why she was so thoughtful.
"I
am thinking of what you have been telling me," said she. "Your
cousin's conduct does not suit my feelings. Why was he to be the judge?"
"You
are rather disposed to call his interference officious?"
"I
do not see what right Mr. Darcy had to decide on the propriety of his friend's
inclination, or why, upon his own judgement alone, he was to determine and
direct in what manner his friend was to be happy. But," she continued,
recollecting herself, "as we know none of the particulars, it is not fair
to condemn him. It is not to be supposed that there was much affection in the
case."
"That
is not an unnatural surmise," said Fitzwilliam, "but it is a
lessening of the honour of my cousin's triumph very sadly."
This
was spoken jestingly; but it appeared to her so just a picture of Mr. Darcy,
that she would not trust herself with an answer…That he had been concerned in
the measures taken to separate Bingley and Jane she had never doubted; but she
had always attributed to Miss Bingley the principal design and arrangement of
them. If his own vanity, however, did not mislead him, he was
the cause, his pride and caprice were the cause, of all that Jane had suffered,
and still continued to suffer. He had ruined for a while every hope of
happiness for the most affectionate, generous heart in the world; and no one
could say how lasting an evil he might have inflicted….”
In
posts over the past few years, I’ve opined that Darcy does not merely mean to suggest
to Bingley that the Bennets lack sufficient status and money for Jane to be a
good match—I read Colonel Fitzwilliam’s pointed reference to “very strong
objections against the lady” as much stronger than that- I believe Darcy was referring
to Jane’s having engaged in sexual relations with another man (or men)—i.e.,
that Jane was (as Don John tells Claudio in Much
Ado, and Iago hints to Othello) a common stale, or even a whore.
And
so JA uses Colonel Fitzwilliam’s snide comment about Darcy’s “triumph” in
separating Bingley from Jane as a tag for that above-quoted scene in which Iago
uses Cassio as an unwitting talking puppet in order to raise that very same
innuendo about Desdemona vis a vis Cassio. The only difference is that the triumph is
situated at a different corner of the romantic triangle. I.e., in Othello, the “triumph” is what Iago’s
performance leads Othello to mistakenly imagine Cassio is feeling about
supposedly cuckolding Othello with Desdemona, and then supposedly laughingly
discarding her as if she were trash. Whereas, in P&P, the “triumph” is the
very real feeling that Darcy boasts of to Fitzwilliam, after Darcy has emulated
Iago and successfully blackened Jane’s character to Bingley. Either way, the
echo is unmistakable. Plus, reading how Elizabeth’s heart
swells with indignation upon hearing the Colonel’s report reminds us of Othello’s reaction to Iago’s tale of the
handkerchief: Yield up, O love, thy crown and HEARTED
throne To tyrannous hate! SWELL, bosom, with thy fraught, For 'tis
of aspics' tongues!
I
conclude by connecting the dots from the above to a post of mine last year, in
which I suggested that the “triumph” mentioned by the Colonel was meant to ping
an echo of “The Triumph of the Whale” , Charles Lamb’s savagely satirical poem
about the Prince Regent, which Colleen Sheehan in 2007 established as a primary
source for the “Prince of Whales” answer to the “courtship” charade in Chapter
9 of Emma.
I
still believe that’s a valid interpretation, but now I see that my earlier
catch fits remarkably well with the idea of Darcy as Iago creating the illusion
of Cassio’s cuckolding “triumph” in Othello’s mind. How so? Because we know
from JA’s candid statement in her 1812 letter to trusted friend Martha Lloyd
that she hated the Prince for treating his wife Princess Caroline so
abominably—and the most salient recent portion of that mistreatment was the Prince’s
hypocritical public smearing of his wife as an adulterous wife—hypocitical
because it was his own rejection of his wife over a period of many years,
combined with his notorious history of whoring, gambling, gluttony, and perhaps
a few other deadly sins on the list, that, as JA noted, he had driven his wife
into scandalous actions: “….but if I must give up the Princess, I am resolved at
least always to think that she would have been respectable, if the Prince had
behaved only tolerably by her at first."
In “if
the Prince had behaved only tolerably by her at first”, I now hear the source
of the verbal dart Eliza hurls at Darcy (“had you behaved in a more
gentlemanlike manner”). And since I claim that Darcy’s final repentance….
"…The
recollection of what I then said, of my conduct, my manners, my expressions
during the whole of it, is now, and has been many months, inexpressibly painful
to me. Your reproof, so well applied, I shall never forget: 'had you behaved in
a more gentlemanlike manner.' Those were your words. You know not, you can
scarcely conceive, how they have tortured me;—though it was some time, I
confess, before I was reasonable enough to allow their justice."
…is
Iago-esque in its insincerity, it’s another master stroke of JA to place such
faux-repentance right before his insincere “eight-and-twenty” speech.
Oh—I almost
forgot to explain why Darcy reverses
his interference and allows Bingley and Jane to marry—it’s because Darcy has bigger
fish to fry than his animus toward Jane; which is to trick Elizabeth into
marrying him—not because he loves her, but because, as I’ve also written
before, Elizabeth, when she turns 21, and as the unwitting legitimate daughter
of Mr. and Mrs. Darcy unjustly banished at birth, will be the true heiress of
Pemberley, and therefore Darcy had to marry her to preserve his own ownership----what
a prince!
So
there you have it, Iago, Mr. Darcy, and the Prince Regent---an unholy triad of “triumphant”
deceivers!
For a brief summary of Darcy as Iago, read this post as well:
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2016/04/darcy-as-iago-condensed-summary.html
For a brief summary of Darcy as Iago, read this post as well:
http://sharpelvessociety.blogspot.com/2016/04/darcy-as-iago-condensed-summary.html
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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