Shakespeare and Jealousy

 Trifles light as air / Are to the jealous confirmations strong / As proofs of holy writ.”

Othello, 3.3. 323-325

In Shakespeare’s plays, Characters are often beset by a destructive flaw that overwhelms their minds. For Julius Caesar it is vanity; for Macbeth it is ambition; and for poor Othello is jealousy. In fact, Othello is the iconic example of jealousy’s power to twist the mind into suspicious madness and murderous rage. In his 154 sonnets, Shakespeare occasionally probes the psychology of this pernicious passion in ways that are curiously subtle: Sonnet 61 offers an interesting example:

                               Sonnet 61

Is it thy will thy image should keep open
My heavy eyelids to the weary night?
Dost thy desire my slumbers should be broken
While shadows like to thee do mock my sight?
Is it thy spirit that thou send'st from thee
So far from home into my deeds to pry,
To find out shames and idle hours in me,
The scope and tenor of thy jealousy?
O, no. Thy love, though much, is not so great.
It is my love that keeps mine eye awake,
Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat
To play the watchman ever for thy sake.
  For thee watch I whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,
  From me far off, with others all too near.

This sonnet is arranged in typical Shakespearean structure, with three quatrains, and a couplet. But as you read the sonnet, you might notice a second structural layer of the Petrarchan form of an octave and a sestet. The first quatrain (lines 1-4), poses two questions: “Is it thy will thy image should keep open / My heavy eye lids to weary sight?” and “Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken / While shadows like to thee do mock my sight?” The first question seems merely rhetorical, that the speaker might be so enamored of his beloved that his passion continually raises the beloved’s “image” in his mind, chasing off the heaviness of sleep. It does not appear in any way critical of the beloved.

The second question initially seems more or less similar in tone to the first, but the word “shadows” in the latter part of the question replaces “image,” which alters the tone and when reflected back upon the first question, the quatrain on the whole becomes tinged with something accusatory in the speaker’s voice. The accusation erupts as the fourth line ends with “do mock my sight?” In lines 1-2, the beloved’s image hovers in the speaker’s sight, but in lines 3-4 the beloved’s image darkens ominously and taunts the speaker.

Following the questions of the first four lines, the second quatrain asks a third question which introduces the sonnet’s general subject, “jealousy.” Now, the speaker appears to specify what is haunting his nights. It is his beloved’s jealousy that is torturing him so that sleep and its balm elude him:

 Is it thy spirit that thou send'st from thee
So far from home into my deeds to pry,
To find out shames and idle hours in me,
The scope and tenor of thy jealousy?

But not so fast. The third quatrain and the couplet combine to reverse what we have been told so far, and what we have come to expect from this poem. In doing so, they form a unified part of the sonnet and consequently create a sestet out of the third quatrain and the couplet. These six lines directly respond to the questions asked in the first two quatrains and reveal what is behind the speaker’s insomnia. First, he states that “Thy love, though much, is not so great.” Anxiety about the degree and quality of his beloved’s feelings for him might be what is preventing the speaker’s sleep. Then he acknowledges that “It is my love that keeps mine eyes awake, / Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat…” The speaker’s love is absolute (“true”) while the beloved’s is incomplete (“not so great”). But then drops this curious line: “To play the watchman ever for thy sake.” Why is the speaker “play[ing]" the watchman ever for thy shake?” The answer, both to that question and the diagnosis of the speaker’s insomnia unfolds in the couplet. “For thee watch I whilst thou dost wake elsewhere, / From me far off, with others all too near.”

It is not the “image,” “jealousy,” “true love,” or “watchman” (concern) of or for the beloved that nettles the speaker’s mind and deprives him of sleep. It is his own jealousy and anxiety that keeps him awake as he wonders where his beloved is and with whom.

At the beginning of this post, I used the adjective “poor” to describe Othello. No doubt it is Desdemona who really deserves our sympathy and compassion. Anyone who has read the play understands what I mean. Nevertheless, Othello remains for me also a victim whose innocence was preyed upon by the most cunning and malignant agent of evil Shakespeare ever created.