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They also had tragedies, which they acted with propriety and fitness. In which [tragedies], not only through speaking but also through acting certain things, they moved [the audience] to tears. But truly the celebrated Desdemona, slain in our presence by her husband, although she pleaded her case [causam] very effectively throughout, yet moved [us] more after she was dead, when, lying on her bed, she entreated [implorant] the pity of the spectators by her very countenance.1
When Henry Jackson saw the King's Men perform Othello at Oxford in 1610, it was not only Shakespeare's poetry that moved him and his fellow playgoers, but the image of Desdemona's dead body on the stage. Jackson's response to the play illustrates the difficulty Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights experienced in judging their audiences' tastes. Andrew Gurr has noted that although poets divided playgoers "according to the eye or ear [. . .] they did not always agree over who represented which" (94) .Jackson's response suggests that the playgoers themselves were not always sure where they stood. As Oxford students, Jackson and his schoolmates would naturally have been classified (and would have classified themselves) as learned "auditors," and Jackson actually seems surprised that it is not Desdemona's pleading of her "case" that most impresses him but the sight of her dead body, an image that is non-verbal, but not unrhetorical: "she entreated [implorant] the pity of the spectators by her very countenance." While Jackson's letter testifies to the diverse levels of awareness experienced by individual playgoers and to the tendency of learned playgoers to conceive of dramatic imagery in rhetorical terms, it also raises questions about the dramatic economy of Othello itself-not only because the play uses powerful images on stage to arouse the pity of an audience, but because such images might be related to the play's verbal and rhetorical explorations of pity as well. Jackson's surprise at finding himself to be a "spectator" at the end of the play might be the result not only of the visual power of the play's final scene, but also of the thematic references to pity earlier in the play that may have made it strongly appealing to the mind of a learned "auditor."2
Jackson's use of the legalistic phrase causam...