Othello

Othello is William Shakespeare‘s most claustrophobic tragedy and his most painful study of love destroyed. Othello, a Moor — a Black African general — who has risen to command the armies of the Venetian republic, has secretly married Desdemona, the young daughter of a Venetian senator. His ensign (ancient) Iago, passed over for promotion in favour of the young Michael Cassio and filled with a hatred he gives many reasons for and never wholly explains, sets out to destroy him. With a few insinuations, a stolen handkerchief and a staged conversation, Iago convinces Othello that Desdemona is having an affair with Cassio. Othello, consumed by jealousy, strangles his innocent wife in their bed. When the truth is revealed, he kills himself.

It is the most domestic of the great tragedies — no kingdoms fall, no ghosts or witches appear — and the most relentless: its central action is a single long conversation in which one man poisons another’s mind. It is also the first great drama in English with a Black hero, and its treatment of race has made it one of the most debated plays of our time.

At a glance

Written	c. 1603–04; first recorded performance at court, 1 November 1604
First printed	Quarto 1622; First Folio 1623 (texts differ: the Folio has 160 extra lines, including the Willow Song)
Setting	Venice, then Cyprus, during a war with the Ottoman Turks (16th century)
Source	A story in Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi (1565), in which an unnamed Moor and his ensign beat Desdemona to death with a sandbag
Length	About 3,300 lines

The story

At night in a Venetian street, Iago talks with Roderigo, a rich, foolish gentleman who has been paying Iago to help him win Desdemona. Iago explains his grievance: the Moor, Othello, has made Michael Cassio — “a great arithmetician”, a Florentine who “never set a squadron in the field” — his lieutenant, and left Iago merely his “ancient”. Iago serves Othello only to serve himself: “I am not what I am.” They wake Desdemona’s father, the senator Brabantio, with obscene shouts that his daughter has run off with the Moor — “an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe”; “your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs.” Brabantio, finding her gone, raises a search party.

Iago hurries to Othello and pretends loyalty. Othello is calm and dignified: “My parts, my title, and my perfect soul / Shall manifest me rightly.” Cassio arrives with a summons from the Duke: the Turkish fleet is sailing against Cyprus, a Venetian possession, and Othello is needed. Brabantio confronts Othello with drawn swords — “Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them,” says Othello — and accuses him of bewitching his daughter with drugs and charms, since she would never otherwise have run “to the sooty bosom / Of such a thing as thou”.

Before the Duke and Senate, Othello defends himself in his great speech. Brabantio, he says, loved him and often invited him to tell his life story — of battles, sieges, shipwrecks, slavery and escape, of “antres vast and deserts idle”, of cannibals “and men whose heads / Do grow beneath their shoulders” — and Desdemona would come again and again to devour his discourse with a greedy ear, and at the end gave him “a world of sighs”. “She loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them. / This only is the witchcraft I have used.” Desdemona, called in, confirms that she owes duty now to her husband. The Duke tells Brabantio, “If virtue no delighted beauty lack, / Your son-in-law is far more fair than black.” Othello must leave for Cyprus at once; Desdemona asks to go with him and is entrusted to the care of Iago and his wife Emilia. Brabantio warns: “Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see: / She has deceived her father, and may thee.”

Alone, Iago tells Roderigo to “put money in thy purse” and follow to Cyprus; Desdemona will soon tire of the Moor. Then, in soliloquy, he reveals his plan: “I hate the Moor; / And it is thought abroad, that ‘twixt my sheets / He has done my office: I know not if’t be true; / But I, for mere suspicion in that kind, / Will do as if for surety.” He will make Othello believe that Cassio is too familiar with his wife. “The Moor is of a free and open nature, / That thinks men honest that but seem to be so, / And will as tenderly be led by th’ nose / As asses are.” “I have’t. It is engendered. Hell and night / Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light.”

In Cyprus, a storm has destroyed the Turkish fleet; the war is over before it begins. The lovers are reunited in ecstasy: “If it were now to die, / ‘Twere now to be most happy.” Iago watches Cassio take Desdemona’s hand in courtesy: “With as little a web as this will I ensnare as great a fly as Cassio.” That night, at a celebration, Iago gets Cassio — who has “very poor and unhappy brains for drinking” — drunk, and sets Roderigo to provoke him. Cassio brawls, wounds the governor Montano, and is dismissed by Othello: “Cassio, I love thee; / But never more be officer of mine.” Cassio laments: “Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial.” Iago advises him to ask Desdemona to plead for him — and plans to use her pleading as proof of an affair: “So will I turn her virtue into pitch, / And out of her own goodness make the net / That shall enmesh them all.”

The great temptation scene (Act III, scene 3), the longest scene in Shakespeare, follows. Cassio speaks with Desdemona and leaves as Othello and Iago approach. “Ha! I like not that,” murmurs Iago. Desdemona eagerly pleads for Cassio. When she goes, Iago begins with questions and hesitations — “Did Michael Cassio, when you wooed my lady, / Know of your love?… Indeed!… Honest, my lord?” — echoing Othello’s words, hinting that he has a thought too terrible to speak. Othello, tormented, demands it. Iago warns:

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock The meat it feeds on.

He reminds Othello that Desdemona deceived her father, and that a match with a man “not of her own clime, complexion, and degree” is unnatural; Venetian women are expert deceivers. Othello, left alone, begins to doubt: “Haply, for I am black, / And have not those soft parts of conversation / That chamberers have… she’s gone. I am abused, and my relief / Must be to loathe her.”

Desdemona comes to call him to dinner; he complains of a pain in his forehead; she tries to bind it with her handkerchief — the handkerchief, embroidered with strawberries, that was his first gift to her — and he pushes it away; it falls. Emilia picks it up: her husband has “a hundred times” asked her to steal it. She gives it to Iago, who decides to plant it in Cassio’s lodging: “Trifles light as air / Are to the jealous confirmations strong / As proofs of holy writ.”

Othello returns, already transformed: “Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content! / Farewell the plumèd troop, and the big wars, / That make ambition virtue!… Othello’s occupation’s gone!” He seizes Iago by the throat: “Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore… give me the ocular proof.” Iago says that proof is impossible — he could not see them in the act — but offers two “circumstances”: he once shared a bed with Cassio, who in his sleep cried “Sweet Desdemona… Cursed fate that gave thee to the Moor!” and kissed Iago, thinking him her; and he has seen Cassio “wipe his beard” with Desdemona’s strawberry handkerchief. Othello explodes: “O, blood, blood, blood!” He kneels and vows vengeance; Iago kneels beside him and vows to serve. “Now art thou my lieutenant.” “I am your own for ever.”

Othello asks Desdemona for the handkerchief, telling her it was given to his mother by an Egyptian charmer, its silk spun by hallowed worms and dyed in mummy, and that losing it would bring perdition. She cannot produce it and, frightened, lies that it is not lost — and keeps pleading for Cassio. He storms out. Cassio, meanwhile, has found the handkerchief in his room and given it to his mistress, the courtesan Bianca, to copy.

Iago now drives Othello into a frenzy with obscene suggestions until he falls in an epileptic fit. He then hides Othello where he can watch a conversation between Iago and Cassio — about Bianca, though Othello thinks it is about Desdemona — and sees Cassio laughing; Bianca arrives and throws the handkerchief back at Cassio. Othello is convinced: “How shall I murder him, Iago?” yet he wavers — “But yet the pity of it, Iago! O Iago, the pity of it, Iago!” Iago advises: “Do it not with poison; strangle her in her bed, even the bed she hath contaminated.” “Good, good: the justice of it pleases.”

When Desdemona’s cousin Lodovico arrives from Venice with letters recalling Othello and appointing Cassio governor, Othello strikes Desdemona in public. Lodovico is aghast: “Is this the noble Moor whom our full senate / Call all-in-all sufficient?” Othello interrogates Emilia, who swears her mistress is honest; then he treats Desdemona as a whore in a brothel, calling her “that cunning whore of Venice / That married with Othello”. Desdemona, bewildered and heartbroken, asks Iago how to win her husband back.

That night, as Emilia helps her undress, Desdemona sings the Willow Song, learned from her mother’s maid, Barbary, who died of a broken heart singing it: “Sing all a green willow must be my garland.” She asks Emilia whether there are women who would deceive their husbands. Emilia, worldly and frank, says she would do it for the whole world, and argues that husbands are to blame when wives fall: “Let husbands know / Their wives have sense like them: they see and smell, / And have their palates both for sweet and sour, / As husbands have.” Desdemona cannot believe it.

Iago sets Roderigo to kill Cassio in the dark street; Roderigo wounds Cassio, Iago stabs Cassio in the leg from behind, then “discovers” the wounded men and kills Roderigo to silence him.

In the bedchamber, Othello enters with a candle and looks at the sleeping Desdemona:

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul: Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars! It is the cause. Yet I’ll not shed her blood, Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow… Put out the light, and then put out the light.

He kisses her; she wakes. He tells her to pray, since he would not kill her unprepared soul. He accuses her of giving Cassio the handkerchief; she denies it and begs him to send for Cassio; he tells her Cassio is dead; she weeps for him, and Othello takes her tears as confession. “Kill me tomorrow; let me live tonight!… But half an hour!… But while I say one prayer!” “It is too late.” He smothers her.

Emilia calls at the door with news of the fight. Desdemona revives for a moment: “A guiltless death I die.” Asked who did it, she says: “Nobody; I myself. Farewell: / Commend me to my kind lord.” She dies. “She’s like a liar gone to burning hell,” says Othello: “‘Twas I that killed her.” He tells Emilia that Iago — “honest, honest Iago” — told him of the affair. Emilia, appalled, shouts for help: “O gull! O dolt! / As ignorant as dirt!” When Iago and the others arrive, Othello mentions the handkerchief; Emilia, understanding at last, reveals that she found it and gave it to her husband. Iago stabs her and flees; she dies singing the Willow Song, at her mistress’s side.

Iago is captured. Othello wounds him: “I look down towards his feet; but that’s a fable. If that thou be’st a devil, I cannot kill thee.” Asked why, Iago answers: “Demand me nothing: what you know, you know: / From this time forth I never will speak word.” Letters in Roderigo’s pocket confirm everything. Othello, disarmed, makes his last speech:

Soft you; a word or two before you go. 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…

He recalls that once in Aleppo he struck down a “malignant and a turbanned Turk” who beat a Venetian — “I took by th’ throat the circumcisèd dog, / And smote him, thus” — and stabs himself. “I kissed thee ere I killed thee: no way but this, / Killing myself, to die upon a kiss.” He dies on the bed beside Desdemona. Lodovico turns to Iago: “Look on the tragic loading of this bed; / This is thy work.” Iago is handed over to Cassio, now governor, for torture.

Iago

Iago is one of the great villains of literature and the play’s driving intelligence; he has more lines than Othello. He gives many reasons for his hatred — he was passed over for promotion; he suspects Othello, and Cassio, of sleeping with his wife; he lusts for Desdemona himself; he hates Cassio’s “daily beauty” — but none seems sufficient, and he contradicts himself. Coleridge famously described his soliloquies as “the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity”. Others see him as a study of envy, of resentment at merit and goodness, of a mind that cannot bear what it cannot possess; Auden called him a “practical joker” of absolute evil; some productions play him as a racist driven by hatred of Othello’s Blackness. He speaks to the audience directly and makes us his accomplices: we watch his plot unfold with appalled fascination. His last words — a refusal to speak — leave his evil a mystery.

Themes

Jealousy. The play is the supreme anatomy of jealousy — “a monster / Begot upon itself, born on itself,” as Emilia says, needing no real cause. Iago works by insinuation, never stating, letting Othello’s imagination do the work. Once doubt enters, everything becomes evidence.

Race. Othello is a “Moor” — in Shakespeare’s time the word could mean a North African Muslim, a Black African, or any dark-skinned non-European; the play stresses his blackness (“thick-lips”, “sooty bosom”). He is a Christian convert, a great general admired by the Senate, and yet an outsider whom Venice uses and despises. Iago and Roderigo speak in vicious racist terms; Brabantio cannot believe his daughter could love a Black man without witchcraft. Is the play racist, or a study of racism? Critics have argued both — and about whether Othello’s jealousy is presented as a racial stereotype or as the product of the insecurity a racist society instils (“Haply, for I am black”). For centuries the role was played by white actors in blackface; Ira Aldridge (1825 onward) and Paul Robeson (1930, 1943) were landmark Black Othellos, and today the role is almost always taken by a Black actor.

Women and marriage. Desdemona’s boldness in choosing her own husband against her father turns, in Iago’s poisoned version, into evidence of deceit. Emilia’s speech on marital equality and her final defiance of her husband give the play a fierce critique of male possessiveness; the three women — Desdemona, Emilia and Bianca — are all wrongly accused or abused by the men.

Seeing and knowing. Othello demands “ocular proof” and gets only words and a handkerchief. The play is about the fragility of knowledge about another person’s inner life, and the ease with which appearances can be manipulated.

Honour and reputation. Cassio’s lament for his lost reputation, Othello’s concern for how he will be remembered, and Iago’s mockery of both (“Reputation is an idle and most false imposition”) run throughout.

Interpretation

Older critics like A. C. Bradley saw Othello as a noble, romantic hero destroyed by a demonic villain. T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis argued that Othello’s final speech is “cheering himself up”, that he is self-dramatising and self-deceived, and that Iago only exploits weaknesses already there. Modern criticism focuses on race, gender and colonialism, and on Shakespeare’s Venice as a society of trade and empire. The play’s “double time scheme” — events seem to happen in a day or two in Cyprus, leaving no time for an affair, yet characters speak as if weeks have passed — is a famous puzzle, perhaps a deliberate device that makes the rush of jealousy feel plausible.

Afterlife

Verdi’s opera Otello (1887), libretto by Arrigo Boito, is often thought greater than the play. Films include Orson Welles’s (1951), Laurence Olivier’s (1965) and Oliver Parker’s with Laurence Fishburne (1995). Toni Morrison’s play Desdemona (2011) gives voice to the women; Tracy Chevalier’s New Boy sets the story in a 1970s schoolyard.

In conversation

• “The green-eyed monster” — jealousy.
• “I am not what I am” — Iago’s creed; any two-faced person.
• “Loved not wisely but too well” — for a love whose intensity destroyed it.