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OTHELLO

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4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(3)

 

 

As a play, "Othello" encompasses many things but more than anything else it is a study of pure evil. Although Othello is an accomplished professional soldier and a hero of sorts, he is also a minority and an outcast in many ways. As a Black man and a Moor (which means he's a Moslem), Othello has at least two qualities, which make him stand out in the Elizabethan world. He is also married to a Caucasian woman named Desdemona, which creates an undercurrent of hostility as evidenced by the derogatory remark "the ram hath topped the ewe".

Othello's problems begin when he promotes one of his soldiers, Michael Cassio as his lieutenant. This arouses the jealousy and hatred of one of his other soldiers, Iago who hatches a plot to destroy Othello and Michael Cassio. When Cassio injures an opponent in a fight he is rebuked, punished, and subsequently ignored by Othello who must discipline him and teach him a lesson. Iago convinces Desdemona to intervene on Cassio's behalf and then begins to convince Othello that Desdemona is in love with Cassio.

This is actually one of the most difficult Shakespeare plays to watch because the audience sees the plot begin to unfold and is tormented by Othello's gradual decent into Iago's trap. As with other Shakespeare plays, the critical components of this one are revealed by language. When Othello is eventually convinced of Cassio's treachery, he condemns him and promotes Iago in his place. When Othello tells Iago that he has made him his lieutenant, Iago responds with the chilling line, "I am thine forever". To Othello this is a simple affirmation of loyalty, but to the audience, this phrase contains a double meaning. With these words, Iago indicates that the promotion does not provide him with sufficient satisfaction and that he will continue to torment and destroy Othello. It is his murderous intentions, not his loyal service that will be with Othello forever.

Iago's promotion provides him with closer proximity to Othello and provides him with more of his victim's trust. From here Iago is easily able to persuade Othello of Desdemona's purported infidelity. Soon Othello begins to confront Desdemona who naturally protests her innocence. In another revealing statement, Othello demands that Desdemona give him "the ocular proof". Like Iago's earlier statement, this one contains a double meaning that is not apparent to the recipient but that is very clear to the audience who understands the true origin of Othello's jealousy. Othello's jealousy is an invisible enemy and it is also based on events that never took place. How can Desdemona give Othello visual evidence of her innocence if her guilt is predicated on accusations that have no true shape or form? She can't. Othello is asking Desdemona to do the impossible, which means that her subsequent murder is only a matter of course.

I know that to a lot of young people this play must seem dreadfully boring and meaningless. One thing you can keep in mind is that the audience in Shakespeare's time did not have the benefit of cool things such as movies, and videos. The downside of this is that Shakespeare's plays are not visually stimulating to an audience accustomed to today's entertainment media. But the upside is that since Shakespeare had to tell a complex story with simple tools, he relied heavily on an imaginative use of language and symbols. Think of what it meant to an all White audience in a very prejudiced time to have a Black man at the center of a play. That character really stood out-almost like an island. He was vulnerable and exposed to attitudes that he could not perceive directly but which he must have sensed in some way.

Shakespeare set this play in two locations, Italy and Cypress. To an Elizabethan audience, Italy represented an exotic place that was the crossroads of many different civilizations. It was the one place where a Black man could conceivably hold a position of authority. Remember that Othello is a mercenary leader. He doesn't command a standing army and doesn't belong to any country. He is referred to as "the Moor" which means he could be from any part of the Arab world from Southern Spain to Indonesia. He has no institutional or national identity but is almost referred to as a phenomenon. (For all the criticism he has received in this department, Shakespeare was extrordinarlily attuned to racism and in this sense he was well ahead of his time.) Othello's subsequent commission as the Military Governor of Cypress dispatches him to an even more remote and isolated location. The man who stands out like an island is sent to an island. His exposure and vulnerability are doubled just as a jealous and murderous psychopath decides to destroy him.

Iago is probably the only one of Shakespeare's villains who is evil in a clinical sense rather than a human one. In Kind Lear, Edmund the bastard hatches a murderous plot out of jealousy that is similar to Iago's. But unlike Iago, he expresses remorse and attempts some form of restitution at the end of the play. In the Histories, characters like Richard III behave in a murderous fashion, but within the extreme, political environment in which they operate, we can understand their motives even if we don't agree with them. Iago, however, is a different animal. His motives are understandable up to the point in which he destroys Michael Cassio but then they spin off into an inexplicable orbit of their own. Some have suggested that Iago is sexually attracted to Othello, which (if its true) adds another meaning to the phrase "I am thine forever". But even if we buy the argument that Iago is a murderous homosexual, this still doesn't explain why he must destroy Othello. Oscar Wilde once wrote very beautifully of the destructive impact a person can willfully or unwittingly have on a lover ("for each man kills the things he loves") but this is not born out in the play. Instead, Shakespeare introduces us to a new literary character-a person motivated by inexplicable evil that is an entity in itself. One of the great ironies of this play is that Othello is a character of tragically visible proportions while Iago is one with lethally invisible ones.

Othello is by without a doubt my favorite of the plethora of Shakespeare's tragedies. Although Othello himself is quite an intricate character, it was funny and almost ironic how the character that grabbed my observance the most was the villain Iago. Iago, being perhaps Shakespeare's most consummate villain, directly or indirectly seemed to control the minds and hearts of almost everyone he interacted with. Bravery, loyalty, ambition, honesty, and chivalry are all issues addressed within the play, and when combined with a great deal of power struggles, they can create an intense whirlwind of emotions and confusion running high. Othello, even being a powerful and bold general, is easily deceived by Iago as well as are many of the other characters who soon come to find out what it means to be struck by Iago's wrath. All of these things considered, one can easily find themselves engulfed with all sorts of emotions, and be filled with empathy and rage toward the diverse array of characters, maybe even find a little piece of themselves in each one of them. The play can be compared to many of Shakespeare's plays, both comedy and tragedy, in different ways. If you enjoyed the plot of Much Ado About Nothing, or Romeo and Juliet, then you can not go wrong by reading this play. Also, if you like strong women roles and always find yourself identifying easily with those characters in Shakespeare's plays, one of the female characters in Othello, Emelia will be quite a delight. For me, by the last page and last quote of this play, I was literally holding back the tears, and that impact is no exaggeration. If you have yet to read Othello, don't wait another second. Go right now to the nearest bookshelf, dust it off and I promise the pages will just seem to simply turn themselves. Enjoy!

I agree with the critics on this one. I feel that `Coriolanus' doesn't get enough credit as a play; I think `King Lear' receives far too much credit; but I think `Othello' rightly deserves to be considered one of Shakespeare's greatest Tragedies. I even consider `Othello' to be among Shakespeare's greatest plays even when all the Comedies, Tragedies, and Histories are judged together. This is a very powerful play and shows how a good, honest, successful man can destroy his life by having his fatal flaw of insane jealousy manipulated against him by his enemy.

The one thing that bothers me about this play is my contention that the entire mess could have been averted if Othello simply sat down with his wife and simply had a real and honest conversation with her. If Othello communicated properly with his wife there could have been a very happy ending and Shakespeare could have called this play `Much Ado About Nothing II'.

I very highly recommend this play and I consider this to be Shakespeare's third greatest Tragedy right behind `Coriolanus' and `Hamlet', respectively.

The theme of jealousy dominates this play, in which the conniving Iago attempts to get revenge on Othello by causing him to believe that his wife, Desdemona, is betraying him. Othello is a tragic hero with the flaw of jealousy, and Shakespeare's poetic words bring life and emotion to the center of the play.

This was the first Shakespeare play I read and i've got to tell you that this play is great. Sure, the language takes some getting use to, but the whole plot makes up for this fault. This play is a true tragedy, and this edition helps you really understand what's happening. This is a brilliant play with helpful footnotes

When I rate this at four stars, I'm rating it against other Shakespearean plays; against the general run of literary work, it would certainly rate five. I dock it one star simply because I find the concept, which seems to be accepted as a given in the play, that if a man finds that the woman he loves is cheating on him, it's okay to kill her, and that it's only a bad idea because he might be mistaken, to be, shall we say, a less than enthralling idea which I hate to see perpetuated.

Some other random comments on the work, in no particular order:

1) The racial angle is exaggerated. Yes, Othello is black, and there are a few racial epithets thrown around by his detractors, but really, there is less sign of racism inherent in the characters of this play than one might expect in your average modern person. The main point to making Othello black was to make him an outsider; the play could as easily have been set in England, and Othello made French. (But then, since the target audience was English, they'd have been more likely to get defensive about the portrayal of their prejudices as unreasonable.)

2) The main point of the play is not the evils of racism, but the evils of jealousy.

3) Iago is unquestionably the "best" villain in all of Shakespeare, and one of the best in all of literature, in terms of being a well-portrayed "subtle" villain. It's rare to see a portrayal of a lying, manipulative scoundrel that is actually plausible and successful; usually, the audience finds itself having a hard time believing that the manipulator's victims could possibly be so dumb as to not see through him; certainly, there's a large dollop of that sentiment in "Richard III". But in this play, Iago's lies are remarkably plausible, and it is very easy to see how he is successful in his plan; his machinations were excellently managed.

Yes, I had to read this book for my honors english class at school. I go to San Marcos High and I'm a sophomore. My teacher assigned us this book and I thought it was going to be another boring book to screw around with and get a bad grade like usual. Well, I ended up loving this book and It's great reading for those who aren't much of Shakespeare readers because this book has the meanings of words and phrases on the opposite page! It's awesome and I never thought I'd be saying that after reading a school assinged book!

Jealousy is perhaps the ugliest of emotions, an acid that corrodes the heart, a poison with which man harms his fellow man. Fortunately for us, Shakespeare specializes in ugly emotions, writing plays that exhibit man at his most shameful so we can elevate ourselves above the depths of human folly and watch the carnage with pleasure and awe.

In "Othello," the "green-eyed monster" has afflicted Iago, a Venetian military officer, and the grand irony of the play is that he intentionally infects his commanding general, Othello, with it precisely by warning him against it (Act 3, Scene 3). Iago has two grievances against Othello: He was passed over for promotion to lieutenant in favor of the inexperienced Cassio, and he can't understand why the Senator's lily-white daughter Desdemona would fall for the black Moor. Not one to roll with the punches, he decides to take revenge, using his obsequious sidekick Roderigo and his ingenuous wife Emilia as gears in his transmission of hatred.

The scheme Iago develops is clever in its design to destroy Othello and Cassio and cruel in its inclusion of the innocent Desdemona. He arranges (the normally temperate) Cassio to be caught by Othello in a drunken brawl and discharged from his office, and using a handkerchief that Othello had given Desdemona as a gift, he creates the incriminating illusion that she and Cassio are having an affair. Othello falls for it all, and the tragedy of the play is not that he acts on his jealous impulses but that he discovers his error after it's too late.

It is a characteristic of Shakespeare that his villains are much more interesting and entertaining than his heroes; Iago is proof of this. He's the only character in the play who does any real thinking; the others are practically his puppets, responding unknowingly but obediently to his every little pull of a string. In this respect, this is Iago's play, but Othello claims the title because he -- his nobility -- is the target.

Despite his Machiavellian and snakelike nature, Iago strangely and inexplicably endears himself as the most likeable villain in all of Shakespeare. It can be argued that Iago was unduly wronged in that the noble & educated, yet untested Cassio achieved the promotion of lieutenant over the common & uneducated, yet more battle-proven Iago. Iago also asserts that his blunt and disrespectful wife Emilia has slept around and made a cuckold of him with Othello. Although there is no proof as to the latter charge, Iago is nothing short of the embodiment of a veritable myriad of rage, fury, jealousy, and a relentless and all-encompassing passion for vengeance on The Moor.

Upon reading Othello the first time, I found myself empathizing with the honorable, yet naive General Othello, and even moreso with the innocent and untainted Desdemona, whom Othello "loved not wisely, but too well." After reading Othello the 3rd time, I've come to a greater appreciation for the convoluted and diablolical genius that is Iago - and how masterfully Shakespeare constructed this great character and the storyline of Othello with so fewer characters than is typical of his other great plays. It is with fewer characters that the ingenuity of Shakespeare is allowed to shine. With the likes of Iago, The Bard is able to achieve as great and superior characterization in Othello as in any of his other masterpieces. While he may be the last guy on the block you might invite to dinner, you would be a knave to deny the incomparable surreptitious cunning and genius of Iago nonetheless. As far as the many Othello movies go, I must state that Kenneth Branagh is absolutely masterful and convincing as the sinister Iago. I wholeheartedly recommend Othello to any and all readers who have a flair for both wisdom and entertainment achieved as one.

William Shakespeare is perhaps at his most subtle best in _The Tragedy of Othello_. Unlike in many of his other plays, particularly tragedies and certainly histories, Shakespeare writes on a massive scale - about the highly privileged, about royalty, about bloody family feuds and wars. Not only does _Othello_ contain none of that, but it manages to be Shakespeare's most intense play, hitting the audience harder than any other.

Like _Romeo and Juliet_, it involves star-crossed lovers: an older black officer (Othello) and a young white woman (Desdemona). Shakespeare's modernity is particularly shocking. Even in the latter half of the 20th century, audiences were not ready to see a black man with his hands upon a white woman, even if it's a white man in blackface - and yet four hundred years ago, Shakespeare wrote this play. It shatters immense racial barriers, and yet Shakespeare never intended it to be a play about race - and it isn't. Othello's race is, amazingly, highly unimportant in the grand scheme of the play.

_Othello_ hits very close to home. Rather than dealing with things most audiences never have to face, the plot is extremely domestic and straightforward - unlike in Shakespeare's other tragedies, there is no comic relief. There is one plot, one line of thought, and you are forced to deal with every minute of it. You never get a rest from the action. Then there's the domesticity of it - the villainous Iago wants to take revenge upon Othello, and so, in the guise of an honest friend, convinces Othello that Desdemona has been sleeping with fellow officer Cassio. No matter our position in life, we can all empathize with Othello's struggle between trusting his friend and trusting his wife, and the madness that comes from being overtaken by extreme jealousy. Iago's elaborate plot to destroy the lives of Othello, Cassio, and Desdemona is extremely simple to understand, even in iambic pentameter.

This is also one of the only plays where the villain, not the hero, is the one who speaks most to the audience. We learn everything about Iago and his plans, because we as an audience develop a close relationship with him as he talks to us - seeing his charming side and the side that is purely amoral and perhaps even purely evil. Shakespeare, in Iago, has created the first true villain of drama, the ultimate "charming man without a conscience." The only thing we truly -don't- know about him is why he wants to ruin the lives of these people - and perhaps that's for the best. Shakespeare has left scholars and actors to wonder about it for hundreds of years, and come up with all sorts of theories.

_The Tragedy of Othello_ just goes to prove that Shakespeare did not rely on elaborate stories of royalty and war, but could create the most intense dramas revolving around the most intimate and domestic of settings - the bedroom.

If you think you know _Othello_ because you saw the film _O_, you couldn't be more wrong. There's no such thing as a Shakespeare plot without the brilliance of Shakespearean language - and nothing captures the innocence of Desdemona and the near gleeful evil of Iago like the words of Shakespeare, the greatest dramatist to write in the English language.