3/28/2023 0 Comments Othello the moor of veniceHe tempts the audience to invest personally in the success of his plot. He is purely devious and diabolical, his whole personality consumed by a single drive to see his enemies suffer, and all in a way that makes him devilishly interesting. He is certainly a demonstration that self-justifying resentment is not usually proportional to the injury suffered. The single-minded zeal and cunning with which Iago pursues vengeance and destruction have led some to suggest that Shakespeare has created a character of super-human evil. Finally, he considers it just to smother her in the bed of her alleged infidelity. Failing this, he tries to find himself justified in killing her. This external self-justification projects the internal battle for justifications that he is waging and tragically losing throughout the story. As a black man who eloped with a white woman, Othello is forced first to justify himself before his father-in-law in a public forum. The insinuations of Iago compel Othello again and again to justify himself and others, to accuse and excuse, until he can no longer tell truth and justice from deception and malice. Iago’s resentment slow-burns its way through the story until it erupts through Othello’s murderous jealousy. This minor, offstage injury, coupled with the unfounded suspicion that both Othello and Cassio have made a cuckold of him, affords the justification his hatred requires. Iago’s motivations ostensibly lie in the supposedly unjust way in which Othello promoted Cassio to a rank that Iago felt should be his. Iago masterfully gaslights his virtue-minded victim with a series of illusions, half-truths, and disorienting conflicts. This Iago, a low-level officer in an army in which Othello is a general, convinces Othello that his wife is unfaithful to him, that his friend Cassio is betraying him-in short, that the most important pieces of his world have turned against him. Their fault is not in their stars, but in the hearts of Othello and Iago. There is nothing about their world or their love that makes it inevitable that the husband will murder his innocent wife. And unlike Romeo and Juliet, Othello and his Desdemona are no star-crossed lovers. ![]() The only ghosts that haunt the stage are the ones we have all seen and heard in ourselves: suspicion, wrath, jealousy, and naivete. Unlike in Hamlet or Macbeth, there are no supernatural apparitions of the dead and no witches in Othello. ![]() The ego is finally compelled to set the world right by its own standards, and truth and righteousness become the victims of self-justification. It is a drama of minor injuries and great injustices, of small self-deceptions and a grand web of lies. 1603) is a tragedy about truth and righteousness.
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