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Alfiero, like Iago, similarly arouses the Moor’s suspicions by stealing Disdemona’s handkerchief and planting it in Cassio’s bed-room. In Cinthio’s story, Alfiero, the scheming ensign, lusts after the Moor’s wife, named Disdemona, and after she spurns his advances, Alfiero seeks vengeance by accusing her of adultery with Cassio, the Moor’s lieutenant. Shakespeare derived his plot from Giraldi Cinthio’s “Tale of the Moor,” in the story collection Hecatommithi (1565), reshaping Cinthio’s sensational tale of jealousy, intrigue, and murder in several key ways. As scholar Edward Pechter has argued, “During the past twenty-five 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.” Indeed, the psychological resonances of the drama, along with its provocative racial and gender themes, have caused Othello, perhaps more than any other of Shakespeare’s plays, to reverberate the loudest with current audiences and commentators. At the center of the play’s intrigue is Shakespeare’s most sinister and formidable conceptions of evil in Iago, whose motives and the wellspring of his villainy continue to haunt audiences and critics alike. The intensity and focus of Othello is unalleviated by subplots, comic relief, or any mitigation or consolation for the deterioration of the “noble Moor” and his collapse into murder and suicide. 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. That such a man should unravel so completely, ushered by jealousy and hatred into a bestial worldview that cancels any claims of human virtue and self-less devotion, shocks and horrifies. That such a man should fall so far and so fast gives the play an almost unbearable momentum. 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. Othello is decisive, confident, and secure in his identity, duty, and place in the world. 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. 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. Othello is a train wreck that the audience horrifyingly witnesses, helpless to prevent or look away. His imagination is excited to intense activity, but it is the activity of concentration rather than dilation.īetween William Shakespeare’s most expansive and philosophical tragedies- Hamletand King Lear-is Othello, his most constricted and heart-breaking play. 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. He sees it, in itself almost irresistible, aided at every step by fortunate accidents and the innocent mistakes of its victims.
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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. 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. Othello is the most painfully exciting and the most terrible. Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Othello