One of the greatest of Shakespeare’s tragedies Othello is set in Venice

Othello – Summary

One of the greatest of Shakespeare’s tragedies Othello is set in Venice. This play is also called as the Moor of Venice . This play brings out the human nature of jealously and treachery in its best element . The references to the very quote in Othello , “ beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-ey’d monster, which doth mock The meat it feeds on.” succinctly deals with the entire story of Othello .( Act 3, scene 3, 165–171,William Shakespeare, Othello)

Othello is the story of the pain of jealousy. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, Othello is driven to homicidal rage when the treacherous Iago deceives Othello into believing that his wife is being unfaithful. This treacherous act that Othello believes to be true ends up in the death of his wife Desdemona. Little realising that, he is betrayed by his own friends. The rage that surfaces in Othello forms the entire plot of the story .the elements of word, culture and venetian greed are very cleverly entwined in the whole story along with very strong personality traits of the four main characters.

Othello is the story which differs in several respects from the other tragic stories of Shakespeare. Othello is the story which concerns on a one particular evil. The action in this story concerns with sexual jealousy, and how this jealously lead to the destruction of love.

Othello is a story which is a tragic portrait of a marriage. It is the story which is a portrayal of a battle betweengood and evil which focuses on the allegiance of the protagonist.

Othello has loved Desdemona as an extention of himself, and, in his moments of greatest contentedness, hismarriage is sustained by an idealized vision of himself serving as the object of his exalted romantic passion. Whenhe destroys Desdemona, as he realizes with a terrible clarity,

Othello destroys himself; the act is a prelude to hisactual suicide. Iago’s means of temptation, then, is to persuadeOthello to regard himself with the eyes of Venice, toaccept the view that Othello is himself alien and that anywoman who loves him does so perversely. In Othello’stainted state of mind, Desdemona’s very sexualitybecomes an unbearable threat to him, her warmth anddevotion a “proof” of disloyalty. Othello’s most torturedspeeches reveal the extent to whichhe equates the seemingly betraying woman, whom he hasso depended on for happiness, with his own mother, whowas given a handkerchief by an Egyptian sorceress and was warned that, if she should lose it, she would lose herhusband’s affection. Othello has briefly learned and thenforgotten the precious art of harmonizing erotic passionand spiritual love, and, as these two great aims of love aredriven apart in him, he comes to loathe and fear the sexualitythat puts him so much in mind of his physical frailtyand dependence on woman. The horror and pity of Othello rests, above all, in the spectacle of a love that was once sowhole and noble made filthy by self-hatred. The tragic flawthus lies in Othello’s maleness, in his fear of betrayal by theinnocent woman he loves, and his apparent need todegrade her for the very thing he finds desirable in hera tendency so common among men that Freud, in the earlytwentieth century, could declare it to be “the most prevalentform of degradation in erotic life”

Shakespeare has portrayed Othello as being a different kind of Venetian. Being a person of great valour and very patriotic is it expected that Othello would be considered a great venetian but he is cast in a totally different light when three venetians describe Othello differently from the breed of venetians we generally hear the characterization of Othello in the characteristic traits that he possesses as being jealous, bitter against all people and his comrades and filled with anger over the normal venetians. The playwright has made it very clear that Othello is very different from the venetians which he uses very cleverly. The animal imagery used by Shakespeare to characteristic Othello makes him look like a monster and an old black ram and a Barbary horse. These terms are generally not used for normal people and this could be the reason why Othello was considered an outsider though he was proudly Venetian. “The devil will make a grandsire of you”, “the beast with two backs”, is what is called as Othello’s stark differences. Though Othello was purely Venetian in blood, the comment from Brabantio, Iago and Roderigo make him sound so different. This difference is what makes the trio plot against Othello. The tragedy in the main characters being done to death through deceit stirs the souls of the readers . The deaths of Othello and Desdemona are, intheir separate ways, equally devastating: he is in part thevictim of racism, though he nobly refuses to deny his ownculpability, and she is the victim of sexism, lapsing sadlyinto the stereotypical role of passive and silent suffererthat the Venetian world expects of women.

Despite theloss, however, Othello’s reaffirmation of faith in Desdemona’sgoodness undoes what the devil-like Iago had most hoped to achieve: the separation of Othello from hisloving trust in one who is good. In this important sense,Othello’s self-knowledge is cathartic and a compensationfor the terrible price he has paid. The very existence of aperson as good as Desdemona gives the lie to Iago’s creed that everyone has his or her price. She is the sacrificial victim who must die for Othello’s loss of faith and, by dying,rekindle that faith. She cannot restore him tohimself, for self-hatred has done its ugly work, but she isthe means by which he understands at last the chimericaland wantonly destructive nature of his jealousy. Hisgreatness appears in his acknowledgment of this truthand in the heroic struggle with which he has confrontedan inner darkness we all share.

Othello provesitself to be jarringly relevant to modern concerns aboutracial conflict and about men’s mistreatment of women.

It can be said that Shakespeare opens Othello as a tragedy of love, notwith a direct and sympathetic portrayal of the loversthemselves, but with a motive to show the scene of vicious insinuation about marriage and its sanctity being ridden with evil intent throughout the play.

References:

http://www.shmoop.com/othello/summary.htmlhttp://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/995103-the-tragedy-of-othello-the-moor-of-venice.http://shakespeare.mit.edu/othello/full.html