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Othello
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Othello is a tale of love, passion, anger, envy, jealousy, and revenge. When youthful and naive Desdemona hears the dark warrior Othello’s tales of adventure she becomes infatuated with the man. In response to her attentions, Othello finds himself faced with an unexpected foe—love. As the love between them grows to a passionate fervor they are unaware of the jealousy brewing in Othello’s man, Iago. Unhappy with his own marriage and suspicious of others, Iago sees Othello’s growing happiness envies him. Already seething with anger over being passed over for a promotion, this new jealousy moves Iago to seek revenge on the very man he had always known as a friend. Once set upon his path, nothing can deter Iago and the consequences are tragic for all.
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This negative imagery of Othello and his new wife is demonstrated before a viewer sees or hears Othello or his bride. Yet, this kind of injustice and racism, whether hidden or public, is what Othello must deal with constantly. Later, Brabantio proclaims to Othello and the senate, " A maiden never bold/…. / To fall in love with what she feared to look on!" (act 1.3 lines 94 and 99). Such harsh words from Brabantio, Othello’s father-in-law, no doubt damages Othello’s pride and feelings. Yet, he must encounter them with the utmost respect and honor.
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Many presentations of Othello have represented Iago as some sort of devil incarnate; ... to do so is a mistake. Iago is passionless and motiveless. He is referred to as “honest Iago” in the play over fifty times! Iago is a devil insofar as he is devoted to evil in the same way that Othello is devoted to justice. But there is something clean-cut and direct about pure Satanism which Iago lacks. He possesses an abnormal concentration of foulness and depravity that would seem to indicate that his mind is unhealthy rather than that his soul is sold.
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Summary of Act 5, Scene 2: Looking at the sleeping Desdemona, Othello has a hard time trying to talk himself into killing her. She awakes and defends herself against his accusations. He smothers her....Hearing Emilia call at the door, Othello finishes off Desdemona, then lets in Emilia. Emilia tells him that Roderigo is dead and Cassio is wounded. Desdemona cries out that she has been murdered, clears Othello of the guilt, and dies. Othello declares that he killed her because she was a whore.
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In the tragedy Othello, Shakespeare creates a mood that challenges the way a person sees his or her self and the world. Subjects like racism, sexism, love, hate, jealously, pride, and trickery are thoroughly developed in the play of Othello to enable the audience to view the characters and ... themselves. The Shakespearean tragedy of Othello was written in a time of great racial tensions in England. According to Eldred Jones, in 1600 just three years before Othello was written, Queen Elizabeth proclaimed an Edict for the Transportation of all "negars and blackmoores" out of the country ("Othello- An Interpretation" Critical Essays 39). It is in this atmosphere that Shakespeare began the masterpiece of Othello, a drama about a noble black Arab general, Othello, who falls in love with and marries, Desdemona, a young white daughter of a senator. From the above knowledge one may conclude that Shakespeare wrote Othello to express that all people, of all ethnicity, are basically the same in human nature.
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November 4, 1604, is the first recorded date of a performance of William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, although most scholars believe that is was first performed in 1600 or 1601. All records indicate that the play was an immediate success, and interest in the story continued unabated for four hundred years. The story of Othello the Moor, his lovely wife Desdemona, and the dastardly villain Iago was enacted countless times on stage, reworked as an opera, choreographed as a ballet, filmed multiple times, and transformed into television shows, novels, and movies. The title role of Othello became the quintessential Shakespearean role for black actors, although many white actors acted the part as well, and the villainy of Iago remained one of the most complicated and contested issues of contemporary Shakespeare scholarship. For Americans, historic issues of slavery and race made Othello an especially troubling and problematic play. Likewise, issues of gender, post-colonialism, diversity, and global perspective continued to generate a lively critical debate on the play.
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Othello