His everyday life, the wooing of Desdemona, his rise through the ranks of the Venetian military, and the self-perpetuating fiction surrounding his Moorish background, all represent a skillfully and carefully created ‘presentation of self’ constructed for his own personal gain.
It is worth exploring to what extent Othello presents portrays himself to the rest of the world in an idealized sense. Othello offers the most interesting perspective on the roles of romance, as the Moor of Venice frequently displays his skill with the rhetoric of Venice. Goldberg writes that Romantic ideas around love, “the impassioned, the arduous, the intense, the sentimental,” are “not characteristics of the Renaissance in general, or of Shakespeare as he is visible through the sonnets and through the other plays.” Viewed through the lens of Goffman’s theories of performance, Shakespeare’s portrayal of love in Othello, Romeo and Juliet and Sonnet 138 remains firmly planted as part of Theatrum Mundi. “On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed,” (Sonnet 138, 8 ) and the selected scenes from Othello and Romeo and Juliet show how Shakespeare uses the stage of the Globe to explore the everyday theatre of romance. Sonnet 138 shows that Shakespeare understands that in love, many lies are told, and roles are assumed.
Romeo’s courtship of Juliet, and Othello’s courtship of Desdemona show that Shakespeare is familiar with the necessity of assumed roles in the functioning of society both men assume the role required to woo their beloveds. Shakespeare perhaps even punned on the sentiment in naming his theatre “The Globe.” Forker highlights that the theatrical metaphors frequently occur in the plays “in instances which range from very literal or technical significations to highly figurative and symbolic ones.” Clearly Macbeth ‘struts and frets’ through life, the ‘hours’ ticking away, the ‘walking shadow’ of life a bleak perspective on a futile existence. Nevertheless, it is clear from the dramatic texts that Shakespeare was highly aware of the predominating weltanschauung, and perhaps combined it with his extensive knowledge of the theatrical conventions of the time to explore his view of human existence. Most famously soliloquized by the melancholy Jacques in As You Like It, the sentiment behind Theatrum Mundi was not invented by Shakespeare there are accounts of Henry V possessing a tapestry depicting the seven ages of man, and in 1544 German artist Hans Baldung painted Die sieben Lebensalter des Weibes (The Seven Ages of Women). There are common patterns that exist between the plays, reflecting the audiences preconceptions about the plot in the tragedies, we expect the leads to die by the end of the play, and the cross-dressing shenanigans of the comedies will no doubt end up with some happy marriage come the final act. In many of his plays, characters are shunted about the stage (of the Globe theatre) by external forces, unable to exert control over their own lives. The idea of the Theatrum Mundi (literally the world stage) is an apt metaphor for Shakespeare’s world-view.
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