critical essay on othello

The Tragedy of Othello: Critical Analysis — Othello Critical Essay

Introduction, critical analysis, works cited.

The Tragedy of Othello is a powerful piece of art written by William Shakespeare. The tragedy is well-known around the world. If you are assigned to write critical analysis of Othello, check this essay example to learn more about the drama, and its characters.

The stage directions in the Tragedy of Othello are realistic. The drama is based on the three characters namely Othello, Lago, and Desdemona. However, the directions are based on the modest approach to a drama that is located in two diverse worlds known as the Venice and Cyprus.

Given that the play had no subplot, the play directions tend to budge in terms of place, time, and action once the theme is shifted to Cyprus. The stage directions are the realistic forms of domestic tragedy. However, it does not require supernatural instructions to hook the audience.

The language used to give directions to the audience is natural and restrained. The dialogue reflects the reality of a society that is under pressure from the usual hassles of life. The dialogue simply involves a husband, wife, and a scoundrel. This is a short critical analysis examining the play from multiple perspectives. That is, how I experience it as a silent reader and as a text for public performance.

The drama is ahead of its time. The play presents the audience with a tragic hero of color. The dialogue sounds natural and does not involve the provocation of laughter in the audience. The imagination of the audience is captured by the fact that the drama involves interracial marriage that was unfathomable in those days.

Further, the drama involves a bed in which murder is eventually committed. The murder is committed on stage. The dialogue is made very realistic by the presence of the villain who appears to possess more lines than the disastrous hero. All the meetings were bold, contentious, and very modern.

The characters in Othello are acting like normal people pursuing everyday undertakings. Othello becomes the victim of a domestic calamity. He is the victim to an envious monster of jealousy (Langis 61). He finds it hard to adjust to the marital existence having been in the armed forces for long. In fact, he turns out to be a chauvinist and protective. Although he is good in the military, he is bad at home. Othello appears to be an awful husband. The play shows that Othello is always imploring for a brawl. Just like Simpson, he murders the wife after being informed that she has been cheating on him.

Typically, this would be the reaction of a husband convinced that the wife has been cheating on him. Such incidents have been happening in the society. Thus, this appears as the main theme of incompatibility in the armed forces of heroism and love in the drama. That s, it involves the risk of isolation. The killing of Desdemona is an evidence of the frustration that Othello is going through after being cheated and convinced by Lago to trust that his wife was cheating on him.

Lago cannot convince the audience in whatever he says given that the audiences have insight into his character though it is not evident to the actors. He pretends to be morally upright so that his intention of ensuring the downfall of Othello is well covered. By planting the handkerchief in Casio’s house, it is an indication of conspiracy between him and the wife (Lankey 6).

The stage businesses are illustrations of what take place in real life. The visual plainness displayed on the stage according to the stage directions focuses directly on the actors and a fascinating account of retaliation, gullibility, and jealousy. The catastrophic downfall of the noble warrior is a common phenomenon in many societies plagued by jealousy and vengeance. Lago at times hilariously expresses his intentions for the murderous abhorrence of Othello.

By acting as a director and producer in charge of staging the tragedy of the Othello, I would ensure the actors bring out the rhetoric of the drama. However, before the action of the drama, Brabantion had been kind to the Moor (Horman 112). He allowed Othello and his daughter to discuss more about him since he was mesmerized by his slave stories. Upon the revelation that the Desdemona had eloped with Othello, his feeling altered abruptly.

He started wondering where he would find and arrest him. However, the rhetoric does not come out clearly even when he is called a thief in the street. Instead, Othello is accused of abusing Desdemona. In deep rhetoric, Brabantio states that his house is not a grange. This meant that he does not keep horses. In fact, this is founded on the fact that the daughter had eloped with a man of color. I would insist that the actors should bring out the rhetoric clearly to sensitize the audience about racism.

Numerous elements would probably catch my attention as a critic of the play. The geographical symbolism represented by the two locations of the play would be important. For instance, Venice is represented by Lago while Cyprus represented by Desdemona. Othello represents the third location called Turks.

This emerged upon considering that the location was only mentioned as a war zone with the other two characters. Venice was at the time of writing the play one of the most influential and cosmopolitan European cities. Indeed, it is symbolic of the white Christian European morals.

The Senate and the Duke ran the city. These were symbols of power and order. On the contrary, Cyprus is very unpredictable and natural. It was isolated from the colonial government. Besides, it is an armed forces premeditated target for both Turks and Venetians. The island is very symbolic of Desdemona. There is struggle to dominate her between Othello and Lago.

Othello involves a variety of actors. In fact, actors such as Othello, Lago and Desdemona dominate the play. In the play, the setting incorporates jealousy and gullibility while such traits rule the society. The short critical analysis examines the play from multiple perspectives. That is, how I experience it as a silent reader, and how I experience it as a text for public performance.

Horman, Sidney . When the Theater Turns to Itself: The Aesthetic Metaphor in Shakespeare, Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1981. Print.

Langis, Park. Passion, Prudence, and Virtue in Shakespeare Drama, West Newton: Continuum, 2007. Print.

Lankey, Julie. Othello , Cambridge City, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.Print.

• Play’s Plot Explored
• Act 1 Scene 1
• Act 1 Scene 2
• Act 1 Scene 3
• Act 2 Scenes 1-2
• Act 2 Scene 3
• Act‌ ‌3‌ ‌Scenes‌ ‌1-2
• Act‌ ‌3‌ ‌Scene‌ ‌3
• Act 3 Scene 4
• Act‌ ‌4‌ ‌Scene‌ ‌1
• Act 4 Scene 2
• Act‌ ‌4‌ ‌Scene‌ ‌3
• Act‌ ‌5‌ ‌Scene‌ ‌1
• Act 5 Scene 2
• Characters Analysis
• Important Quotes
• Essay Samples
• Topics‌ for‌ ‌Essay‌
• William Shakespeare
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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Bibliography

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Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Othello

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Othello

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on July 25, 2020 • ( 0 )

Of all Shakespeare’s tragedies . . . Othello is the most painfully exciting and the most terrible. From the moment when the temptation of the hero begins, the reader’s heart and mind are held in a vice, experiencing the extremes of pity and fear, sympathy and repulsion, sickening hope and dreadful expectation. Evil is displayed before him, not indeed with the profusion found in King Lear, but forming, as it were, the soul of a single character, and united with an intellectual superiority so great that he watches its advance fascinated and appalled. He sees it, in itself almost irresistible, aided at every step by fortunate accidents and the innocent mistakes of its victims. He seems to breathe an atmosphere as fateful as that of King Lear , but more confined and oppressive, the darkness not of night but of a close-shut murderous room. His imagination is excited to intense activity, but it is the activity of concentration rather than dilation.

—A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy

Between William Shakespeare’s most expansive and philosophical tragedies— Hamlet and King Lear —is Othello, his most constricted and heart-breaking play. Othello is a train wreck that the audience horrifyingly witnesses, helpless to prevent or look away. If Hamlet is a tragedy about youth, and Lear concerns old age, Othello is a family or domestic tragedy of a middle-aged man in which the fate of kingdoms and the cosmos that hangs in the balance in Hamlet and Lear contracts to the private world of a marriage’s destruction. Following his anatomizing of the painfully introspective intellectual Hamlet, Shakespeare, at the height of his ability to probe human nature and to dramatize it in action and language, treats Hamlet’s temperamental opposite—the man of action. Othello is decisive, confident, and secure in his identity, duty, and place in the world. By the end of the play, he has brought down his world around him with the relentless force that made him a great general turned inward, destroying both what he loved best in another and in himself. That such a man should fall so far and so fast gives the play an almost unbearable momentum. That such a man should unravel so completely, ushered by jealousy and hatred into a bestial worldview that cancels any claims of human virtue and self-less devotion, shocks and horrifies. Othello is generally regarded as Shakespeare’s greatest stage play, the closest he would ever come to conforming to the constrained rules of Aristotelian tragedy. The intensity  and  focus  of  Othello   is  unalleviated  by  subplots,  comic  relief,  or  any  mitigation  or  consolation  for  the  deterioration  of  the  “noble  Moor”  and  his  collapse into murder and suicide. At the center of the play’s intrigue is Shakespeare’s most sinister and formidable conceptions of evil in Iago, whose motives and the wellspring of his villainy continue to haunt audiences and critics alike. Indeed, the psychological resonances of the drama, along with its provocative racial and gender themes, have caused Othello, perhaps more than any other of Shakespeare’s plays, to reverberate the loudest with current audiences and commentators. As scholar Edward Pechter has argued, “During the past twenty-five years or so, Othello has become the Shakespearean tragedy of choice, replacing King Lear in the way Lear had earlier replaced Hamlet as the play that speaks most directly and powerfully to current interests.”

Shakespeare derived his plot from Giraldi Cinthio’s “Tale of the Moor,” in the story collection Hecatommithi (1565), reshaping Cinthio’s sensational tale of jealousy, intrigue, and murder in several key ways. In Cinthio’s story, Alfiero, the scheming ensign, lusts after the Moor’s wife, named Disdemona, and after she spurns his advances, Alfiero seeks vengeance by accusing her of adultery with Cassio,  the  Moor’s  lieutenant.  Alfiero,  like  Iago,  similarly  arouses  the  Moor’s  suspicions by stealing Disdemona’s handkerchief and planting it in Cassio’s bed-room. However, the Moor and Alfiero join forces to kill Disdemona, beating her  to  death  with  a  stocking  filled  with  sand  before  pulling  down  the  ceiling  on her dead body to conceal the crime as an accident. The Moor is eventually captured,  tortured,  and  slain  by  Disdemona’s  relatives,  while  the  ensign  dies  during torture for another crime. What is striking about Shakespeare’s alteration of Cinthio’s grisly tale of murder and villainy is the shift of emphasis to the provocation for the murder, the ennobling of Othello as a figure of great stature and dignity to underscore his self-destruction, and the complication of motive for  the  ensign’s  actions.  Cinthio’s  version  of  Iago  is  conventionally  driven  by  jealousy  of  a  superior  and  lust  for  his  wife.  Iago’s  motivation  is  anything  but  explainable in conventional terms. Dramatically, Shakespeare turns the focus of the play from the shocking crime to its causes and psychic significance, trans-forming Cinthio’s intrigue story of vile murder into one of the greatest dramatic meditations on the nature of love and its destruction.

What  makes  Othello  so  unique  structurally  (and  painful  to  witness)  is  that  it  is  a  tragedy  built  on  a  comic  foundation.  The  first  two  acts  of  the  play  enact  the  standard  pattern  of  Shakespeare’s  romantic  comedies.  The  young Venetian noblewoman, Desdemona, has eloped with the middle-aged Othello, the military commander of the armed forces of Venice. Their union is opposed by Desdemona’s father, Brabantio, and by a rival for Desdemona, Roderigo,  who  in  the  play’s  opening  scenes  are  both  provoked  against Othello  by  Iago.  Desdemona  and  Othello,  therefore,  face  the  usual  challenges of the lovers in a Shakespearean comedy who must contend with the forces of authority, custom, and circumstances allied against their union. The romantic climax comes in the trial scene of act 1, in which Othello success-fully defends himself before the Venetian senate against Brabantio’s charge that  Othello  has  beguiled  his  daughter,  “stol’n  from  me,  and  corrupted  /  By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks.” Calmly and courteously Othello recounts how, despite the differences of age, race, and background, he won Desdemona’s heart by recounting the stories of his exotic life and adventures: “She loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them.” Wonder at Othello’s heroic adventures and compassion for her sympathy have brought the two opposites together—the young, inexperienced  Venetian  woman  and  the  brave,  experienced  outsider.  Desdemona finally, dramatically appears before the senate to support Othello’s account of their courtship and to balance her obligation to her father and now to her husband based on the claims of love:

My noble father, I do perceive here a divided duty: To you I am bound for life and education; My life and education both do learn me How to respect you; you are the lord of duty; I am hitherto your daughter. But here’s my husband; And so much duty as my mother show’d To you, preferring you before her father, So much I challenge that I may profess Due to the Moor, my lord.

Both Desdemona and Othello defy by their words and gestures the calumnies heaped upon them by Roderigo and Brabantio and vindicate the imperatives of the heart over parental authority and custom. As in a typical Shakespearean comedy, love, tested, triumphs over all opposition.

Vindicated by the duke of Venice and the senate, Othello, accompanied by Desdemona, takes up his military duties in the face of a threatened Turkish invasion, and the lovers are given a triumphal wedding-like procession and marriage ceremony when they disembark on Cyprus. The storm that divides the Venetian fleet also disperses the Turkish threat and clears the way for the lovers’ happy  reunion  and  peaceful  enjoyment  of  their  married  state.  First  Cassio lands to deliver the news of Othello’s marriage and, like the best man, supplies glowing praise for the groom and his bride; next Desdemona, accompanied by Iago and his wife, Emilia, enters but must await news of the fate of Othello’s ship. Finally, Othello arrives giving him the opportunity to renew his marriage vows to Desdemona:

It gives me wonder great as my content To see you here before me. O my soul’s joy, If after every tempest come such calms, May the wind blow till they have wakened death, And let the labouring barque climb hills of seas Olympus-high, and duck again as low As hell’s from heaven. If it were now to die ’Twere now to be most happy, for I fear My soul hath content so absolute That not another comfort like to this Succeeds in unknown fate.

The scene crowns love triumphant. The formerly self-sufficient Othello has now  staked  his  life  to  his  faith  in  Desdemona  and  their  union,  and  she  has  done the same. The fulfillment of the wedding night that should come at the climax of the comedy is relocated to act 2, with the aftermath of the courtship and the wedding now taking  center  stage.  Having triumphantly bested  the  social and natural forces aligned against them, having staked all to the devotion of the other, Desdemona and Othello will not be left to live happily ever after, and the tragedy will grow out of the conditions that made the comedy. Othello, unlike the other Shakespearean comedies, adds three more acts to the romantic drama, shifting from comic affirmation to tragic negation.

Iago  reviews  Othello’s  performance  as  a  lover  by  stating,  “O,  you  are  well tuned now, / But I’ll set down the pegs that make this music.” Iago will now orchestrate discord and disharmony based on a life philosophy totally opposed to the ennobling and selfless concept of love demonstrated by the newlyweds. As Iago asserts to Roderigo, “Virtue? A fig!” Self-interest is all that  matters,  and  love  is  “merely  a lust  of  the  blood  and  a  permission  of  the will.” Othello and Desdemona cannot possibly remain devoted to each other, and, as Iago concludes, “If sanctimony and a frail vow betwixt an err-ing barbarian and a super-subtle Venetian be not too hard for my wits, and all the tribe of hell, thou shalt enjoy her.” The problem of Iago’s motivation to destroy Othello and Desdemona is not that he has too few motives but too many. He offers throughout the play multiple justifi cations for his intrigue: He has been passed over in favor of Cassio; he suspects the Moor and Cassio with his wife, Emilia; he is envious of Cassio’s open nature; and he is desirous of Desdemona himself. No single motive is relied on for long, and the gap  between  cause  and  effect,  between  the  pettiness  of  Iago’s  grudges  and  the monstrousness of his behavior, prompted Samuel Taylor Coleridge in a memorable phrase to characterize Iago’s “motiveless malignity.” There is in Iago a zest for villainy and a delight in destruction, driven more by his hatred and  contempt  for  any  who  oppose  his  conception  of  jungle  law  than  by  a  conventional  naturalistic  explanation  based  on  jealousy  or  envy.  Moreover, Shakespeare, by deliberately clouding the issue of Iago’s motive, finds ever more sinister threats in such a character’s apparently bottomless and unmerited hatred and capacity for evil.

Iago will direct the remainder of the play, constructing Othello’s down-fall out of the flimsiest evidence and playing on the strengths and weaknesses of Othello’s nature and the doubts that erode Othello’s faith in Desdemona. Act 3, one of the wonders of the stage, anatomizes Othello’s psychic descent from  perfect  contentment  in  his  new  wife  to  complete  loathing,  from  a  worldview  in  which  everything  is  as  it  appears  to  one  in  which  nothing  is  as it seems. Iago leads Othello to suspect that love and devotion are shams disguising the basest of animalistic  instincts.  Misled  by  the  handkerchief,  his  love  token  to  Desdemona,  that  Iago  has  planted  in  Cassio’s  room  and  by a partially overheard conversation between Iago and Cassio, Othello, by the end of act 3, forsakes his wife and engages himself in a perverse version of the marriage ceremony of act 2 to Iago. As the pair kneels together, they exchange vows:

Iago: Witness you ever-burning lights above, You elements that clip us round about, Witness that here Iago doth give up The execution of his wit, hands, heart To wronged Othello’s service. Let him command, And to obey shall be in me remorse, What bloody business ever.

Othello: I greet thy love, Not with vain thanks, but with acceptance bounteous, And will upon the instant put thee to’t. Within these three days let me hear thee say That Cassio’s not alive.

Iago: My friend is dead. ’Tis done at your request; but let her live.

Othello: Damn her, lewd minx! O, damn her, damn her! Come, go with me apart. I will withdraw To furnish me with some swift means of death For the fair devil. Now art thou my lieutenant.

Iago: I am your own for ever.

This scene has suggested to some critics that Iago’s true motivation for destroying the marriage of Desdemona and Othello is a repressed homosexual love for Othello. An equal case can be made that Iago here completes his role as Vice, borrowed from the medieval morality plays, sealing the Faustian bargain for Othello’s soul in this mock or black marriage scene.

The play moves relentlessly from here to catastrophe as Othello delivers justice to those he is convinced have wronged him. As he attempts to carry out  his  execution  of  Desdemona,  she  for  the  first  time  realizes  his  charges  against her and his utter delusion. Ignoring her appeals for mercy and avowals of innocence, Othello smothers her moments before Emilia arrives with the proof of  Desdemona’s  innocence  and  Iago’s  villainy.  Othello  must  now  face  the  realization  of  what  he  has  done.  He turns  to  Iago,  who  has  been  brought before him to know the reason for his actions. Iago replies: “Demand me  nothing;  what  you  know,  you  know:  /  From  this  time  forth  I  never  will  speak  word.”  By  Iago’s  exiting  the  stage,  closing  access  to  his  motives,  the  focus remains firmly on Othello, not as Iago’s victim, but as his own. His final speech mixes together the acknowledgment of what he was and what he has become, who he is and how he would like to be remembered:

I have done the state some service, and they know’t. No more of that. I pray you, in your letters, When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate, Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak Of one that loved not wisely but too well, Of one not easily jealous but, being wrought, Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand, Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe.

Consistent with his role as guardian of order in the state, Othello carries out his own execution, by analogy judging his act as a violation reflected by Venice’s savage enemy:

And say besides, that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk Beat a Venetian and tradu’d the state, I took by th’ throat the circumcisèd dog, And smote him—thus.

Othello, likewise, has “tradu’d the state” and has changed from noble and valiant Othello to a beast, with the passion that ennobled him shown as corrosive and demeaning. He carries out his own execution for a violation that threatens social and psychic order. For the onlookers on stage, the final tableau of the dead Desdemona and Othello “poisons sight” and provokes the command to “Let it be hid.” The witnesses on stage cannot compute rationally what has occurred nor why, but the audience has been given a privileged view of the battle between good and evil worked out in the private recesses of a bedroom and a human soul.

Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Plays

Othello Oxford Lecture by Emma Smith

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Further Reading: Othello

Altman, Joel B. “ ‘Preposterous Conclusions’: Eros, Enargeia, and the Composition of Othello.” Representations 18 (1987): 129–57.

Shakespeare’s inquiry into the nature of probability and improbability provides the focus of Altman’s essay. While Othello may be “fraught . . . with improbabilities,” in the words of seventeenth-century critic Thomas Rymer, the very process of understanding that makes it seem so is, in Altman’s estimation, the subject of Shakespeare’s questioning throughout the canon. Shakespeare resists the seventeenth century’s tendency to ground both thought and action in a “scientific or moral or aesthetic certainty.” It is in Othello, however, where Shakespeare most strenuously attempts to reveal that the “probable is really nothing more than the contingent.”

Burke, Kenneth. “Othello: An Essay to Illustrate a Method.” In Othello: Critical Essays, ed. Susan Snyder, pp. 127–68. New York and London: Garland, 1988.

Othello performs a “conspiracy,” to use Burke’s term, in which Desdemona, Othello, and Iago are partners. They represent a trinity of ownership: Othello as the possessor, Desdemona as what he possesses, and Iago as the threat to Othello’s miserliness. The loss of the handkerchief is related to the conspiracy, for it is the privacy of Desdemona made public. In his belief that she has bestowed the handkerchief upon another, Othello feels a sense of “universal loss.” The play reveals that “ownership” projected into realms where there is no unquestionable security invites, ultimately, estrangement and profound loneliness.

Cavell, Stanley. “Othello and the Stake of the Other.” In Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays by Shakespeare, pp. 125–42. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Building on the initial premise that “the pivot of Othello’s interpretation of skepticism is Othello’s placing of a finite woman in the place of God,” Cavell suggests that the tragedy of the play lies in Othello’s refusal to acknowledge Desdemona’s imperfection. Cavell concludes that the consequences of this refusal of knowledge are not only the denial and death of Desdemona but also the failure of Othello’s own capacity to acknowledge, that is, his “imagination of stone.”

Donaldson, Peter. “Liz White’s Othello.” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 482–95.

Liz White’s 1980 film of Othello is entirely the work of African-Americans, both the cast and the technical crew. Othello is played as a young, emotionally sensitive African in the midst of lighter-skinned urban African-Americans. The text’s vivid black/white polarities are muted in the film. Because Othello is ethnically akin to the “Venetians,” the tragedy of the last act is especially viable. In rejecting Othello, “the ‘Venetians’ are rejecting a part of themselves.”

Greenblatt, Stephen. “The Improvisation of Power.” In Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, pp. 222–54. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Greenblatt maintains that, in the sixteenth century, there was an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of a human identity as a manipulable, artful process. In Othello, Greenblatt perceives a pattern of “submission to narrative self-fashioning.” It is Othello’s own subscription to a carefully constructed narrative self that allows his identity to be subverted (if unintentionally) by Desdemona’s submission to it and, in a more sinister vein, by Iago’s role as an improviser in this ceaseless narrative invention.

Grennan, Eamon. “The Women’s Voices in Othello: Speech, Song, Silence.” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 275–92.

For Grennan, Othello is not only a play of voices but also a play about voices. He cites the myriad and diverse voices of the play but focuses specifically on the speech of the women, arguing that an understanding of the play’s “moral experience” follows an understanding of the women’s speech. The women, in their speech, songs, and, finally, silence, provide a “moral measure” as a thematic subtext that illuminates the meaning of the tragic action.

Jones, Eldred. Othello’s Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Jones undertakes a study of the dramatic representation of Africans on the English Renaissance stage. He finds Othello to make a significant departure from the Renaissance’s traditional dramatic treatment of Moors in that Shakespeare endows Othello with noble qualities. For Jones, the racial prejudice of Iago and Brabantio is invoked specifically so that it can be rejected.

Murray, Timothy. “Othello’s Foul Generic Thoughts and Methods.” In Persons in Groups: Social Behavior as Identity Formation in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, ed. Richard C. Trexler, pp. 67–77. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1985.

Murray shows that patriarchal Elizabethan society feared the theater, for, given the prevailing assumption that women were inclined to imitate, dangerous female identities could be forged if women were exposed to staged vice. The lucidity and logical discourse of Desdemona, then, worked to demystify the exclusive authority of men. Desdemona’s ability to read signs and interpret events implies that maxims about women’s inferiority are “impotent and archaic.” Her self-fashioning and sexual frankness, however, open her up to suspicion within the cultural codes of men and ultimately spell her doom.

Neely, Carol Thomas. “Women and Men in Othello: ‘what should such a fool / Do with so good a woman’.” Shakespeare Studies 10 (1977): 133–58.

Refuting the arguments of “Othello critics” and “Iago critics,” Neely reads the central theme in the play as love and the central conflict of the play as between the men and the women. The women inherit their roles from the heroines of Shakespeare’s comedies, yet despite their lack of competitiveness, jealousy, and class consciousness, they are constrained in the tragedies by the male characters from exercising their traditional roles as mediators. Neely argues that it is Emilia, recognizing and responding to this conflict, who most dramatically and symbolically represents the balance of the play.

Neill, Michael. “Unproper Beds: Race, Adultery, and the Hideous in Othello.” Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 383–412.

Neill proposes that Othello’ s most potent theatrical image is the bed. The play repeatedly gestures toward it in its absence and, at the end, the bed becomes the “place” where the action is centered. As such, it becomes the “imaginative center of the play”—the focus of Iago’s fantasies, Othello’s speculations, and the audience’s voyeuristic imagination. Because of the conventional symbolic importance attached to the marriage bed, the emphasis on the bed and on its violation in Othello forms the basis for a whole set of ideas about racial adulteration and sexual transgression.

Newman, Karen. “ ‘And wash the Ethiop white’: Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello.” In Shakespeare Reproduced, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion O’Connor, pp. 143–62. London: Methuen, 1987.

Newman investigates the production of race and gender difference throughout Othello and examines the way the black man and the desiring woman are linked as representatives of the monstrous. Connecting Othello with other Elizabethan representations of blackness and femininity, Newman reads Othello as contesting the conventional ideologies of race and gender in early modern England. In general Newman urges a resistant reading of Shakespeare that contests the “hegemonic forces the plays at the same time affirm.”

Orkin, Martin. “Othello and the ‘Plain Face’ of Racism.” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 166–88.

Orkin begins by discussing Renaissance attitudes to people of color in Shakespeare’s England. He moves on to detail instances where racist mythologies inscribed critical responses to the play and ends with a focused examination of how, in South Africa, silence about the racist tendencies of some Othello criticism actually lends support to prevailing racist doctrines. For Orkin, in its scrutiny of Iago’s use of racism and its rejection of pigmentation as an indication of human worth, the play “continues to oppose racism.”

Rosenberg, Marvin. The Masks of Othello: The Search for the Identity of Othello, Iago, and Desdemona by Three Centuries of Actors and Critics. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961.

Rosenberg charts the development of character images of Othello, Iago, and Desdemona on the stage and page during the last three centuries, providing an overview of approaches. He further demonstrates how both actors and critics have reshaped the text for performance. He argues against symbolic or skeptical interpretations of the play, claiming its complex humanity can be fully realized only on the stage.

Siemon, James R. “ ‘Nay, that’s not next’: Othello, V.ii in Performance, 1760–1900.” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 38–51.

Focusing on the final scene of the play, Siemon uses annotated promptbooks and performance records to explore how variations in staging and performance in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries suggest “a coherence of interpretation based on particular notions of both tragedy and femininity.” The constant alterations of and deviations from the Quarto and Folio texts reveal how many implicit and explicit directions had to be ignored to make the final scene conform to the “particular tragic mold” favored by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Snyder, Susan. The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.

Snyder proposes that the tragedy of Othello develops from a questioning of comic assumptions about love, nature, and reasoning. By posing Iago against Othello and Desdemona, Shakespeare explores the strains and contradictions within the comic convention and uncovers their deeply tragic implications.

Spivack, Bernard. Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958.

Focusing on popular dramatic conventions that preceded Elizabethan drama, Spivack traces the figure of Iago and other major villains in the “family of Iago” back to late medieval dramatic traditions. Spivack shows Iago to be a descendant of the late morality figure of Vice. Iago’s malignity is curiously without motive because he is not fully human, but an allegorical representation of evil.

Stallybrass, Peter. “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed.” In Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, eds. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, pp. 123–42. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Within the dominant discourse of early modern England, women were formulated under contradictory categories: gender or class. As a gender, they were postulated as a single set. As a class, however, inequalities of wealth and birth divided them into distinct social groups. In this context, Othello’s marriage to Desdemona is significant only when differentiations of class are recognized, for Othello marries “above his station” in terms of class. In “acquiring” Desdemona, Othello is a success, but in possessing her he lives with the fear of imminent loss. The openness of Desdemona that allowed Othello successfully to woo her must be, for him, closed off; after marriage, he linguistically moves her from the category of class to the category of gender, making her a figure of inconstancy. Thus the play constructs two Desdemonas and reveals the “antithetical thinking of the developing Renaissance state.”

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William Shakespeare

• Literature Notes
• Major Symbols and Motifs
• Play Summary
• About Othello
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• Act I: Scene 1
• Act I: Scene 2
• Act I: Scene 3
• Act II: Scene 1
• Act II: Scene 2
• Act II: Scene 3
• Act III: Scene 1
• Act III: Scene 2
• Act III: Scene 3
• Act III: Scene 4
• Act IV: Scene 1
• Act IV: Scene 2
• Act IV: Scene 3
• Act V: Scene 1
• Act V: Scene 2
• Character Analysis
• Character Map
• William Shakespeare Biography
• Critical Essays
• Major Themes
• Character Pairs
• Shakespeare's Tragedy
• Top 5 Quotes Explained
• Film Versions
• Full Glossary
• Essay Questions
• Practice Projects
• Cite this Literature Note

Critical Essays Major Symbols and Motifs

Explore the different symbols within William Shakespeare's tragic play, Othello . Symbols are central to understanding Othello as a play and identifying Shakespeare's social and political commentary.

Handkerchief

The significance of red is love, red strawberries like red hearts on the love token handkerchief, and like the red stains from Othello and Desdemona's first night of love on the marriage sheets. Such red on white is private and dear to the heart of Othello, and he expects it to be similarly dear to his wife. It is the belief that Desdemona gave away his handkerchief, and the sexually implications of the gift, that drives him to kill her.

The candle Othello blows out just before he murders Desdemona symbolizes him extinguishing her life.

Beginning in Act 1, Scene 1, Iago introduces the animalistic imagery. According to Iago, there is something bestial and animalistic about Othello ("The old black ram"); he's base and beastly, somehow beneath everyone else in Venice because of his North African heritage. The animal imagery permeates the play, often referring to Othello's "otherness."

Shakespeare often uses different locations to represent mindsets. In Othello , Venice represents civilization, while Cyprus symbolizes the wilderness. The idea is that what happened in the Cyprus never would happen in the civilized city of Venice.

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Critical Analysis of The Tragedy Of Othello

Table of Contents

Introduction

Shakespeare possibly wrote The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice in 1603 or 1604, as we know it was first performed on November 1, 1604, at court. Othello, a classic tale of love, jealousy and deceit, is considered one of the greatest dramas of Shakespeare. It tells the tale of Othello, a general from Moorish (North Africa) who marries a Venetian lady and then is cruelly fooled into thinking that his wife is unfaithful.

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The plot itself was drawn from a novella written in 1565 by the Italian writer Giraldi Cinthio. This should not be called plagiarism; it was usual for playwrights in Shakespeare’s day to borrow themes and plots from other plays and then adapt them for the stage.

Moreover, although Shakespeare ‘s plot was not original, his talent for dialogue, characterization , and romantic language and phrasing made the tale into something uniquely his own.

The stage directions in the Tragedy of Othello are realistic. The drama is based on the three characters namely Othello, Iago, and Desdemona. However, the directions are based on the modest approach to a drama that is located in two diverse worlds known as the Venice and Cyprus.

Given that the play had no subplot, the play directions tend to budge in terms of place, time, and action once the theme is shifted to Cyprus. The stage directions are the realistic forms of domestic tragedy. However, it does not require supernatural instructions to hook the audience.

The language used to give directions to the audience is natural and restrained. The dialogue reflects the reality of a society that is under pressure from the usual hassles of life. The dialogue simply involves a husband, wife, and a scoundrel. This is a short critical analysis examining the play from multiple perspectives. That is, how I experience it as a silent reader and as a text for public performance.

Critical Analysis of Othello

The drama is ahead of its time. The play presents the audience with a tragic hero of colour. The dialogue sounds natural and does not involve the provocation of laughter in the audience. The imagination of the audience is captured by the fact that the drama involves interracial marriage that was unfathomable in those days.

Typically, this would be the reaction of a husband convinced that the wife has been cheating on him. Such incidents have been happening in society. Thus, this appears as the main theme of incompatibility in the armed forces of heroism and love in the drama. That s, it involves the risk of isolation. The killing of Desdemona is evidence of the frustration that Othello is going through after being cheated and convinced by Iago to trust that his wife was cheating on him.

Iago cannot convince the audience in whatever he says given that the audiences have insight into his character though it is not evident to the actors. He pretends to be morally upright so that his intention of ensuring the downfall of Othello is well covered. By planting the handkerchief in Casio’s house, it is an indication of a conspiracy between him and the wife (Lankey 6).

The stage businesses are illustrations of what takes place in real life. The visual plainness displayed on the stage according to the stage directions focuses directly on the actors and a fascinating account of retaliation, gullibility, and jealousy. The catastrophic downfall of the noble warrior is a common phenomenon in many societies plagued by jealousy and vengeance. Iago at times hilariously expresses his intentions for the murderous abhorrence of Othello.

By acting as a director and producer in charge of staging the tragedy of the Othello, I would ensure the actors bring out the rhetoric of the drama. However, before the action of the drama, Brabantion had been kind to the Moor (Horman 112). He allowed Othello and his daughter to discuss more about him since he was mesmerized by his slave stories. Upon the revelation that the Desdemona had eloped with Othello, his feeling altered abruptly.

He started wondering where he would find and arrest him. However, the rhetoric does not come out clearly even when he is called a thief in the street. Instead, Othello is accused of abusing Desdemona. In deep rhetoric, Brabantio states that his house is not a grange. This meant that he does not keep horses. In fact, this is founded on the fact that the daughter had eloped with a man of colour. I would insist that the actors should bring out the rhetoric clearly to sensitize the audience about racism. Numerous elements would probably catch my attention as a critic of the play.

The geographical symbolism represented by the two locations of the play would be important. For instance, Venice is represented by Lago while Cyprus represented by Desdemona. Othello represents the third location called Turks.

This emerged upon considering that the location was only mentioned as a war zone with the other two characters. Venice was at the time of writing the play one of the most influential and cosmopolitan European cities. Indeed, it is symbolic of the white Christian European morals.

The Senate and the Duke ran the city. These were symbols of power and order. On the contrary, Cyprus is very unpredictable and natural. It was isolated from the colonial government. Besides, it is an armed forces premeditated target for both Turks and Venetians. The island is very symbolic of Desdemona. There is a struggle to dominate her between Othello and Iago.

Setting: Venice, Cyprus, and the Ottoman Empire

Othello ‘s setting must have appeared very exotic to Shakespeare’s London audience. The play’s first act is set in Venice, a city-state in northern Italy, and the next four acts in Cyprus, an island in the Mediterranean Sea.

Today, Venice is a part of modern Italy, but in the 1500s it was a powerful maritime empire ruled by a duke, or doge, and a council of nobles. Seated in a lagoon on the Adriatic Sea, Venice was a large trade port with control over Mediterranean strategic points such as the Crete and Cyprus islands.

The key rivals of the Venetians were the Turks, or Ottomans, who ruled a large empire extending from the eastern Persian Gulf to the western part of Hungary, including Greece and Egypt. The Ottoman Empire and Venice had been in continuous conflict . The target was, of course, power and property, but religion also entered the equation. The Venetians were Christians, and the Muslims were Turks. The Turks were the despised enemy to Venice, and indeed to the England of Shakespeare, whom Christians fought during the crusades. A major theme that runs throughout Othello is this conflict between Christian and Muslim, European and foreign, “civilized” and “barbaric”

I the play, Othello is sent to Cyprus, to fend off the island’s Turkish invasion. This incident is probably inspired by a real battle which occurred in 1571. The Turks have, however, been successful in capturing Cyprus in real life, although they are being held off by a storm in the story. Even though it has a small part in the plot, the battle at sea serves an important role, as it provides a backdrop and mirror for the smaller Iago-Othello conflict brewing. The play asks us to examine which man is the true enemy of civilization, the Christian European Iago or the Muslim-born, ““barbarian”” foreigner Othello. There is no record of Shakespeare travelling to Venice so he probably relied on books to help him construct a clear image of Venetian life. One source he almost certainly used was the Government of the Commonwealth of Venice (De magistratibus et Republica Venetorum), written by Italian author Gasparo Contarini in 1543, and Translated into English in 1599 by Lewis Lewkenor.

The Moors and Race in Othello

The Moors were a Muslim people living on the African northern coast, an area called Barbary by the Europeans. These people had a mixed heritage: they originated from the Berbers (an indigenous Caucasian people). North Africa) and the eastern-born Arabs. The Moors conquered Spain in the eighth century and brought it under Islamic rule, taking their immense knowledge of literature, architecture, medicine to Western Europe; And technology, much of which they had learned from ancient Greeks and Arabs. For several centuries the Moors ruled over different parts of Spain. Moorish architecture and art can be seen throughout Spain today, particularly in the towns of Toledo, Cordoba and, and Seville.

Therefore, when Shakespeare wrote about “The Moor of Venice,” he envisioned a well-educated and uplifted North African man in the Muslim faith (although baptized Christian as an adult). However, it is unclear whether Shakespeare meant that we saw Othello in appearance as a black man or as one more Arab. Compared to Europeans, the Moors of Barbary were dark-skinned people but not black. However, the word Moor was also commonly used in Shakespeare’s day, to refer to any person with dark or black eyes, including black Africans. In the play, some references seem to describe Othello as a black African. But no matter what the exact colour of his face, the crucial point is that Othello was a stranger in Venice, an alien character who, though being respected and appreciated for his military prowess, aroused frequently intrigue, distrust and even hate.

The members of Shakespeare’s audience probably shared these same sentiments toward Africans. Africans were strange and foreign enemies of Christianity to the English of Shakespeare’s time, given to heathen practices such as witchcraft and voodoo. This was usually depicted as heroes in the literature of the time. The Africans who have come to England have been looked at with distrust and animosity. Queen Elizabeth, I issued an edict against these unfortunate foreigners in 1596, reading as follows: “Her Majesty understands that several blackamoors have recently been brought into this realm, of which there are already too many people here. Hence, Her Majesty’s pleasure is that these men should be removed from the country. “Considering this environment, it is very shocking that Shakespeare would have written a play in which the hero was an African and a rather noble character .

The Time Scheme of Othello

As many critics have noted, Othello ‘s time scheme is rather confusing. The events seem to take place in just a few days, but there are references throughout the play which suggest that much more time has passed. Shakespeare may have been divided between two objectives: in the one side, by making the events take place in a brief time period, raising the dramatic suspense, while on the other, requiring ample time to pass such that the storyline can be plausible. Shakespeare was possibly following the pattern of the Greek dramatist Aristotle in using a brief time span, who urged playwrights to keep the action of a tragedy “within one revolution of the sun.” Shakespeare probably realized that his story couldn’t take place in such a short time, but was trying to limit the time span as much as possible.

Unless the actions really took place in either two to three days, Desdemona would not have had enough time to be unfaithful and the result of the play would have been unbelievable. Thus, Shakespeare creates the illusion that more time has passed, even as the group has been in Cyprus only for two days when we examine the scenes. Decide, as you read, if the “double time scheme” of Shakespeare is successful, or whether it can be called fault in the play.

Characters in Othello

Shakespeare was actually moulding Iago, the villain in Othello, after the character of Vice in the medieval morality plays. Vice was a vile stock character who made known his intent . Vice was a villainous stock character , who kept the viewer conscious of his purpose by asides and soliloquies. The role of Sin in playing morality has been to encourage the protagonist to do something that will cause his own damnation. He did only that for his own pleasure and no other reason. As you read, it’s up to you to decide whether Iago, like Vice, is doing evil for his own gratification or whether he has a real reason to want revenge.

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