Emilia is alluded to before she appears on-stage. In his soliloquy at the end of the first act, Iago says,
I hate the Moor: And it is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets He has done my office: I know not if’t be true, But I, for mere suspicion in that kind, Will do as if for surety. (I. iii. 375–79)
This is the speech Coleridge described as ‘the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity’. Do you believe in the rumour Iago has heard?
In the next scene Iago witnesses Cassio kiss Emilia – ‘’tis my breeding / That gives me this bold show of courtesy’ (II. i. 109–10) – and responds,
Sir, would she give you so much of her lips
As of her tongue she oft bestows on me,
You would have enough. (II. i. 111–13)
Her ‘tongue’ here could connote kissing, but more overtly suggests that she talks too much. When Desdemona defends Emilia (‘Alas, she has no speech’ [II. i. 114]), Iago goes on:
Marry, before your ladyship, I grant,
She puts her tongue a little in her heart
And chides with thinking. (II. i. 117–19)
He claims – to use the phrase he coined in the first scene of the play – that sometimes she does not wear her heart upon her sleeve. Iago goes on with his sexist comedy about women being ‘pictures out of doors, bells in your parlours’ etc. (II. i. 121–). In this scene it is sort of true that Emilia ‘chides with thinking’, in that she says little in response to her husband’s provocations. Then again, what she does say is to disagree and contradict him: ‘You have little cause to say so’; ‘You shall not write my praise’; ‘How if fair and foolish?’ (II. i. 120, 127, 147).
In Act 3, Scene 1 Emilia unwittingly(?) aids Iago’s plans by helping to arrange for Cassio to speak privately to Desdemona. Then in Act 3, Scene 3 she knowingly gives Iago the handkerchief. Having said that, he doesn’t have much choice in the matter – stage directions in most editions say that he takes/snatches it.
In Act 3, Scene 4 we find that in her cynicism about men Emilia somewhat resembles her husband: ‘They are all but stomachs, and we all but food’ (III. iv. 108). There’s a parallel between this and Act 2, Scene 1, where Iago says what he thinks women are like. Emilia also uses that resonant J-word:
jealous souls will not be answered so; They are not ever jealous for the cause, But jealous for they’re jealous: it is a monster Begot upon itself, born on itself. (III. iv. 166–69)
She is referring, in effect, to motiveless jealousy. John Vyvyan has a good line on this: he says, ‘Iago is jealousy, and jealousy is the flaw in Othello’s character.’ But is there something self-fulfilling about Iago’s and Emilia’s cynical expectations that the other (sex) will be cynical? More evidence relating to this comes in Act 4.
In Act 4, Scene 2, Emilia defends Desdemona’s reputation to Othello, then Iago:
I will be hanged if some eternal villain,
Some busy and insinuating rogue,
Some cogging, cozening slave, to get some office,
Have not devised this slander[.] (IV. ii. 146–49)
The slander that Desdemona is a whore, that is. This exchange is obviously heavy with dramatic irony, since the villain, her husband, is standing right next to her. In each production the actress playing Emilia, and the director, can decide whether to imply that she already suspects Iago.
Then we see a contrast between the two women. Desdemona says, ‘If any such there be, heaven pardon him!’, while Emilia responds, ‘A halter pardon him!’ (IV. ii. 151–52), i.e. a hangman’s noose. Mercy and justice; forgiveness and revenge; ‘an eye for an eye’ and ‘turn the other cheek’ (see Matthew 5: 38–39).
Act 4 ends with Emilia’s longest speech, but the build-up is important too. The scene begins with Othello ordering Desdemona to ‘Dismiss your attendant’ (IV. iii. 7–8), which she never does, so the entire scene (including the tender ‘willow song’) is a kind of transgression of the feminine against the masculine. Martin L. Wine:
The so-called willow or bedchamber scene between Desdemona and Emilia [iv iii] is, as Carol Thomas Neely points out, the only scene of genuine friendship in the entire play and is sadly and ironically ‘sandwiched between two exchanges of Iago and Roderigo’[.]
Even if Emilia sometimes ‘puts her tongue a little in her heart’, this scene does not show her doing so with Desdemona, as Iago alleged. She says forthrightly, ‘I wish you had never seen him [Othello]’ (IV. iii. 18).
Some rare frustration breaks out of Desdemona – ‘O, these men, these men!’ – and she asks Emilia a question: ‘Dost thou in conscience think […] That there be women do abuse [deceive] their husbands[?]’ (IV. iii. 63–65). This introduces a fascinating dialogue for understanding Emilia:
ᴇᴍɪʟɪᴀ There be some such, no question.
ᴅᴇsᴅᴇᴍᴏɴᴀ Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?
ᴇᴍɪʟɪᴀ Why, would not you?
ᴅᴇsᴅᴇᴍᴏɴᴀ No, by this heavenly light!
ᴇᴍɪʟɪᴀ Nor I neither by this heavenly light:
I might do’t as well i’th’dark.
ᴅᴇsᴅᴇᴍᴏɴᴀ Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?
ᴇᴍɪʟɪᴀ The world’s a huge thing: it is a great price
For a small vice.
ᴅᴇsᴅᴇᴍᴏɴᴀ In troth, I think thou wouldst not.
ᴇᴍɪʟɪᴀ In troth, I think I should, and undo’t when I had done. Marry, I would not do such a thing for a joint-ring, nor for measures of lawn, nor for gowns, petticoats, nor caps, nor any petty exhibition: but for all the whole world, why, who would not make her husband a cuckold to make him a monarch? (IV. iii. 67–80)
What was your answer to the earlier question of whether you believed the rumour Iago claims he has heard, that Emilia has slept with Othello? Even if we still do not buy the idea that she has, she says here in terms that she would be willing to cuckold her husband. It is just one example in the play of Iago saying something bad about someone and then – in the Iagoan world of Othello – it turning out to be true: Othello is a threat to Desdemona, Emilia is a would-be cuckold, Cassio is a bit of an arse. My final contrarian take on what Emilia says is that in a way she is being loyal to her Machiavellian (and perhaps sexually weird?) husband. Wouldn’t Iago think it a good deal to be cuckolded if it made him a monarch?
The scene ends with Emilia’s speech. I think of it as being analogous to Shylock’s speech in The Merchant of Venice: ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ etc. (III. i. 40–49). Hath not a woman (wandering) eyes? Hath not a woman a stomach? asks Emilia:
I do think it is their husbands’ faults If wives do fall. Say that they slack their duties And pour our treasures into foreign laps, Or else break out in peevish jealousies, Throwing restraint upon us, or say they strike us, Or scant our former having in despite: Why, we have galls, and though we have some grace, Yet have we some revenge. Let husbands know Their wives have sense like them: they see and smell And have their palates both for sweet and sour, As husbands have. What is it that they do When they change us for others? Is it sport? I think it is. And doth affection [desire] breed it? I think it doth. Is’t frailty that thus errs? It is so too. And have not we affections? Desires for sport? And frailty, as men have? Then let them use us well: else let them know, The ills we do, their ills instruct us so. (IV. iii. 89–106)
If ‘They are all but stomachs’ is a claim of victimisation, this speech is instead a claim of equality. But consider a disturbing thought, namely that in Emilia’s case equality with her husband might be related to complicity in his crimes.
Tony Bromham states,
Emilia’s […] speeches […] suggest that the husband’s treatment of his wife is an encouragement to her to take lovers. […] there is something of Iago’s cynicism about Emilia’s speeches on married life and one can only feel that there is a level of bitterness here which derives from her own experience of being married to him. She believes it is right to respond to hurts done to her by hurting in return[.]
As if Emilia and Iago are locked in a ‘gender war’ of self-fulfilling sexist assumptions.
Emilia experiences ‘a divided duty’, to employ Desdemona’s earlier phrase (I. iii. 197), between Iago and Desdemona. (So often the terms required to analyse Othello are to be found in the play.) When does she definitively shift her loyalty from the former to the latter? In some productions it is in Act 4, Scene 2, during her ‘some eternal villain’ speech, but if not then, it happens unambiguously in the final act. Her bond with her mistress defines her throughout – it is the source of her utility to Iago and ultimately his reason for killing her. In this play only Desdemona deserves her good reputation, hence, as Emilia puts it, it is to ‘belie [slander] her’, as Othello does, to say ‘she was a whore’ (V. ii. 153–54).
Emilia overhears, without quite knowing what she hears, Othello murder Desdemona, and is then told by him, ‘Thy husband knew it all.’ ‘My husband?’, she responds (V. ii. 161–62), and utters these words six times over the course of the scene.
In her last interaction with Iago, like her first, he tells her to be quiet: ‘charm your tongue […] hold your peace’ (V. ii. 209, 248). If Desdemona is something of a sacrifice, Emilia is something of a martyr. For indicting him so vehemently, Iago kills her. ‘O, lay me by my mistress’ side!’, she says, adding to what Lodovico calls ‘the tragic loading of this bed’ (V. ii. 271, 408).
Harold Bloom calls Emilia ‘a figure of intrepid outrage, willing to die for the sake of the murdered Desdemona’s good name.’
Emilia’s heroic victory over Iago is one of Shakespeare’s grandest ironies, and appropriately constitutes the play’s most surprising dramatic moment […] That Emilia should lose her worldly wisdom, and become as free as the north wind, was the only eventuality that Iago could not foresee. And his failure to encompass his wife’s best aspect—her love for and pride in Desdemona—is the one lapse for which he cannot forgive himself.
Emilia truly is Desdemona’s lieutenant and ensign.