Beyond the Grave
by Jonathan Hope
As he succumbs to Iago’s suggestion that Desdemona has betrayed him, Othello soliloquizes, falling poetically into one of the misogynist tropes of the Early Modern world, that women’s sexual desires are ungovernable:
O curse of marriage
That we can call these delicate creatures ours
And not their appetites! I had rather be a toad
And live upon the vapour of a dungeon
Than keep a corner in the thing I love
For others’ uses (3.3.272–7)
After the fireworks of his metamorphosis into an imprisoned toad, it is easy to overlook Othello’s real horror: the notion that a part of his wife is reserved for the use of other men. The possessive jealousy that consumes Othello erupts in the alliterative phrase ‘keep a corner’, and while editors have picked-up on the obscene meaning ‘corner’ can have (for example, Honigmann’s note to 3.3.276), no one has considered that Shakespeare might be using a common phrase here.
This was a hunch. ‘Keep a corner’ looked, sounded, to me like a common phrase. Maybe not ‘common’ in the frequency sense, but common in the shared sense — something ‘common’ to speakers of English at the time. We might not be cleverer than previous editors, but we live in an age of better tools; and the existence of EEBO-TCP, and open-access search-engines like Anupam Basu’s Early Print, mean that we can out-do them when it comes to tracing words and phrases through the surviving print from the period.
A search for ‘keep a corner’ in the EEBO-TCP database using Early Print returns four instances before its appearances in the quarto and folio texts of Othello in 1622 and 1623 respectively:
The dates given to texts in EEBO-TCP are those of publication, rather than writing. Shakespeare was six-years dead by 1622, so we should probably date his use of ‘keep a corner’ to around 1604, the first known performance of the play (though some argue for a writing date of 1603 or 1602). We can see this issue in effect again in relation to the fourth hit: Robert Greene’s Alcida was printed in 1617, long after Green’s death in 1592. Although this is the earliest known print edition, the work was entered in the Stationer’s Register in 1588, and most scholars assume that a now-lost edition appeared soon after (I’ll date this instance to 1588 from now on).
What about the uses of the phrase? The first two instances of ‘keep a corner’, from 1542 and 1543, come from retellings of a very similar exemplary tale. A powerful king or lord arrives with his retinue to dine with a loyal, but poverty-stricken, retainer. Realizing the retainer is anxious about feeding everyone, the king/lord tells his followers that the final course of the meal will be spectacularly good, and advises them to ‘keep a corner’ in their stomachs for it (i.e. not eat too much early-on in the meal). This ensures there is enough to go round, and the retainer is not embarrassed.
The general connection in meaning between these uses and the Othello example is clear enough, but there is no sexual implication in either — here, desert really does mean pudding. When the phrase reappears in the print record in 1588 and 1590, however, sexual connotations are explicit, and primary.
Greene’s Alcida (SR 1588), is a Euphuistic prose romance. An unnamed narrator is shipwrecked on an island in the southern ocean, and is taken in by an old woman, Alcida, who tells him tales of her three daughters, and their metamorphoses. Our phrase appears in the second tale, of the daughter Eriphila, who mounts a vigorous defense of a woman’s right to have multiple lovers to her unfortunate suitor, Meribates:
What, lord Meribates, think you to have a woman’s whole heart? no, unless you can procure Venus to make her blind, or some other deity deaf; for if either she see beauty or gold, or hear promises or passions, I think she will keep a corner for a friend, and so will I.
Here we have an overt sexual implication, and an association of the phrase with infidelity. Given our admittedly patchy evidence, it looks as though the phrase has acquired these associations over the course of the century.
The next surviving use of the phrase, in 1590, repeats these associations with sexual infidelity and moves us even closer to Othello. Tarltons newes out of purgatorie is an anonymous collection of tales and anti-Catholic jests, told by the ghost of the recently-deceased comic actor Richard Tarlton. Guided through purgatory by Tarlton, the narrator is presented with three cuckolds, each enthroned beneath a shield of arms and a motto.
The motto of the first cuckold is, ‘One and One’. Tarlton explains: the man’s wife was beautiful, but ‘more full of beauty then of honesty’. Following Eriphila’s tenets, she took a lover — in Tarlton’s words, ‘she… was not such a niggard but shee could keepe a corner for a friend’. Her husband’s reaction is unexpected: ‘he saw it and knew very well, that his wife loued another as well as himselfe: yet hee loued hir so, that he woulde not discontent hir’. Hence his motto: he believed himself to be a cuckold, and indeed he was one.
This situation is a long way from Othello’s, but there are two more cuckolds. The second cuckold believes himself not to be a cuckold, but is sadly mistaken — he ‘thought none in the world to haue a more chast wife, although indeed none had a more lasciuious wanton’. His motto is thus ‘None and One’.
The tale of the third cuckold completes the permutations of belief and reality. His motto is ‘One and None’. His wife is of ‘surpassing beauty’ and honesty — ‘a woman as faire as Helen and as chaste as Lucrece’. But
for al these manifest instances of hir honesty, the eie of hir husband fiered with supition so inflames his hart with iealousie, as there is none looks on his wife, but he thinks he comes to court hir, and she glances hir eie on none but straight shee loues him: if shee smile, it is to thinke how hir loue and shee shall meet; if she lower, it is because she hath not seen him to day: thus liuing doth he lead a hellish life in the labyrinth of Jealousie
Here is the psychological blueprint for Othello — and strikingly, a similar focus on the ocular proof, and confirmation bias, that plague Othello’s attempts to decide what to believe. The mottos of the cuckolds focus on what is going on inside the men’s heads as much as the facts of their situations — and this is most true in the case of the final tale.
Tarltons newes out of purgatorie has been connected to Shakespeare before. The last tale in the collection is a source for The Merry Wives of Windsor. We should add it as a source of Othello: in his voracious reading, Shakespeare’s mind caught the psychological potential of the ‘One and None’ scenario, and brought ‘keep a corner’ along with it.
Jonathan Hope is Professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University. His work is at the intersection of literature and linguistics, with a focus on Shakespeare, and Early Modern texts, and a strong side interest in modern experimental writing. Hope has published widely on Shakespeare’s language and the history of the English language. His current projects mine the EEBO-TCP corpus to track Shakespeare’s reading and influences, and challenge claims that Shakespeare was a notable coiner of words (‘Who invented “gloomy”?’).
