Othello: Shakespeare's Best-Known Tragedy on Jealousy and Deception

“O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-ey'd monster, which doth mock
The meat it feeds on. That cuckold lives in bliss,
Who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger:
But O, what damnèd minutes tells he o'er
Who dotes, yet doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves!”
- William Shakespeare, Othello

Othello is one of Shakespeare’s five best-known and widely studied tragedies, along with Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and Romeo and Juliet. But as is so often with a well-known text, we don’t know this one nearly as well as we think we do: Othello has more in it than jealousy, the ‘green-eyed monster’, and (implied) racial hatred.

The name Othello originates from the Shakespeare play of the same name, most likely due to the conflict between the dark-skinned Moor and the lighter-skinned European present in the play being an analogy to dark versus light pieces in the game. Othello is most popular drama across the world.
The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare around 1603. Set in Venice and Cyprus, the play depicts the Moorish military commander Othello as he is manipulated by his ensign, Iago, into suspecting his wife Desdemona of infidelity.

Othello” is a cautionary tale. It prompts us to check our reflexive feelings and to be fairer and more generous toward those whom we might dismiss or pigeonhole. It also encourages us to be more forgiving of others' trespasses.

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 successfully 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 teach 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.

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.

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.

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. As scholar Edward Pechter has argued, “During the past 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.”

 “A cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked jealousy and the
destructive power of manipulation. People must be careful not
believe everything they hear, and to question the motives of those
who seek to deceive and manipulate.” – Shakespeare

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 by intense activity, but it is the activity of concentration rather than dilation.


Anwar A. Khan is a freedom fighter
who writes on politics, international
issues and literature.