The role of the hero – Othello and The Winter's Tale.

The Hero is the person who is bereft in the Wilderness ($), who is socialized in the City (S₁), who receives information or advantage in the New Place (S₂), who attains the object of desire in the Garden (a). Though the choice of starting point in this narrative cycle may confer on the Hero the appearance either of agency or passivity, the essence of the Hero is to be involved in a characteristic succession of processes. In many cases, the identity of this character will be obvious; where it is not, by identifying the processes we may identify the Hero and vice versa.

To illustrate this, I am going to consider two plays of Shakespeare's: Othello and The Winter's Tale. Each has the structure S₁> S₂ > a > $, allied to Lacan's discourse of the university, in my terms the sardonic narrative. The key to understanding how this works in Othello is identifying the Garden: the phase in which some character has obtained (though temporarily only, for the Garden is not the terminal phase in this kind of narrative) their object of desire.

Act IV, 2 fits this description – the point in the play by which Iago has convinced Othello of Desdemona's unfaithfulness: the point, in effect, by which Othello has been seduced by Iago. It would seem, then, that Iago must be the Hero, while Othello will play the role of Princess, the immanent genius of the Garden.

How does this work for the rest of the play? Act I begins in the City (Venice); all the characters are introduced; Iago stirs up conflict by revealing to Brabantio Othello's relationship with his daughter. If Iago is to be the Hero, Othello, in terms of narrative role, has to be the Villain – the character with whom the Hero comes into conflict.

In Act II the principal characters have removed to Cyprus - the New Place. Iago  obtains preferment from Othello at the expense of Cassio: Iago therefore is Hero, Othello is King.

Then in V, 2, the Wilderness, Iago is undone by Emillia's revelations. We might expect that Othello would play the role of Donor here, and indeed the handkerchief, which seals Iago's destruction, is a token that Othello originally bestowed.

If we conceive of a 'tragic hero' as the victim of Fate, Othello qualifies for this description to the extent that he inhabits a succession of roles wished on him by the heroic trajectory of Iago; what makes the play so uncomfortable for the audience, it seems to me, is that it is their natural inclination to invest in the success of the Hero, while the Hero's actions in this play make that impossible.

In The Winter's Tale, on the other hand, the same structure is realized in quite a different way. Once again, we begin in the city, here the court of Sicilia, where Hermione falls under the suspicion of her husband Leontes for much the same reason as Othello is first persuaded to distrust Desdemona. There can be little doubt that Leontes is Villain in both the structural and the conventional senses; he is contested by a succession of characters and finally overcome by the words of the Oracle.

Act III, 3 brings us to the New Place, the sea-coast of Bohemia. The New Place is associated with death; here it is introduced by the deaths of Antigonus (pursued by a bear), and of his company in a shipwreck. The dispensing of information by Father Time (IV, 1) suggests that he is playing the role of King.

By IV, 4 we are clearly in the Garden with Florizel and Perdita, and equally clearly Perdita is the Princess, but this idyll is abruptly terminated by Polixenes, and the transition to the Wilderness marked by the journey to Sicilia, where in V, 2 Paulina plays Donor to Leontes by revealing that Hermione is still alive (Hermione revalorizing Leontes here just as the handkerchief revalorized Iago).

Who is the Hero? The role of Father Time, I think is a giveaway, for the target of his information is the audience. It is the audience who are involved in every phase: Antigonus, Paulina and the Oracle are proxies for the audience in resisting the manifest injustice of Leontes, Florizel and Leontes proxies for the audience's desire that Perdita and Hermione should be reinstated (we note that the union of Florizel and Perdita is reported, not enacted: the conclusion of their story plays out far from centre stage). The audience is made the confidant both of Father Time and of Autolycus.

A play, in other words, where the audience will have no difficulty identifying with the Hero, but where, as in Othello, the identity of the Hero is paradoxical. But we might expect that from a sardonic narrative.