Essay About Tragedy Of Othello And Sweet Venetian Desdemona

The Tragedy of OthelloEssay Preview: The Tragedy of Othello1 rating(s)Report this essayThe Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice was composed by William Shakespeare in 1603 and first performed on the 1st of November 1604. A manifestation of the Un Capitano Moro authored by the Italian Cinthio (1565) the play is a ‘domestic tragedy and it is the intimacy of its subject matter which gives it its dramatic power… a faithful portrait of life with which we are daily and hourly conversant’ (anonymous). A literary exploration of the conscious, the plays core focus is that of Othello’s downfall – a once valiant Moor, husband to the sweet venetian Desdemona, Othello is motivated by jealousy and doubt which the cunning and malignant Iago utilises to convince him of his wife’s infidelity. Othello’s rash and passion derived actions result in his tragic suicide and murder of the innocent Desdemona. A product of the human neurosis, Othello highlights the inextricable link binding the innate disposition to discriminate the other, experience extreme emotion and develop a sense of self with universality, maintained relevance and textual integrity.

The conformism and subversion of the immortal intangible notion of the ‘racial other’, the product of societal constructs a text claims universality, relevance and textual integrity congruently. In Act 1, Scene 1 Iago ‘evokes the idea of unbridled black sexuality’ (Michael Neill) in his indecorous and violent address to Brabantio concerning Desdemona and Othello’s union, “Even now, now, very now, an old black ram is tupping your white ewe…The devil will make a grandsire of you” the synecdoche ‘tupping’ in conjunction with the emphasis on the racial juxtaposition highlights the corruption of Desdemona’s innocence. The graphic zoomorphic, bestial parallels are reflective of the bestial and barbarous nature ascribed to Moor’s which along with the repetitive asyndeton ‘even now, now, very now’ relays the alarm of such interracial relationships as ‘White male characters in Othello, especially Iago, feel threated by the power and potency of a different and monstrous sexuality Othello represents’ (Newman). The biblical allusion to the devil in reference to the lover’s potential offspring, once more highlight the fear of miscegenation. The critic Stanley Cavell highlights the ‘satanic cores in the etymologies of the lovers Othello and Desdemona – hell and demon respectively’. Othello incorporates the term ‘hell’, a religious allusion to the host of evil representing the “Theatrical embodiment of the dark, threatening powers at the edge of Christendom” (Vitkus). Desdemona in incorporating the term ‘demon’ whom spawn and reside in hell highlights through new historicism the negative connotations and attitudes towards miscegenation represented by the pairs union. Through demonstrating Othello as the source and concentration of evil whilst Desdemona is presented as a manifestation of such evil, a demon who in Christian tradition is an evil angel (revelation 12:7-9) affirms her connection with Othello has made her once angelic nature impure and evil. However, “by making the black Othello a hero and Desdemona’s love for Othello… sympathetic, Shakespeare’s play challenges the racial, sexist and colonialist views of his society.” (Newman). The symbolic nature of the plays setting, Venice the “idealised city of classical theory – a place where the turbulence of individual emotion is subject to the rational calm of authority” and Cyprus “belongs to the stormy domain of passions…suspended between this epitome of northern civilisation and southern, barbarous/exotic Africa” (Neill) positions Othello and Desdemona as chremamorphic foils. The purity and innocence of Venice, a sophisticated and ordered society lends its nature to the “maid so tender, fair and happy” (Act 1, Scene 2: 68, Brabantio). The triadic epimone utilised regarding Desdemona emphasises through positive connotations her beautiful and exquisite nature reflecting that of the Venetian society. In juxtaposition in Act 4, Scene 1 Lodovico alludes to the Cyprian environment as the cause of Othello’s evolution from the ‘seemingly noble Moor to the incoherent savage, delivering the barbarous self the black visage promised’ (D’Amico) as illustrated by, “Is this the noble Moor whom our full senate/ Call all in all sufficient? Is this the nature/ Whom passion could not shake? Whose solid virtue/ The shot of accident nor dart of chance/Could neither graze nor pierce” The triadic rhetorical questions allude to and are a pastiche of Othello’s neurosis which has unravelled in light of a reversion to his former barbarous and savage nature which is reinforced by the violent metaphor. Shakespeare critiques the coloniser and their actions through the symbolic nature of the relationship of Iago and Othello. Iago (coloniser) manipulates Othello (colonised) and as the “colonial subject is subordinate to its coloniser” it exhibits through the post-colonial the negative and damaging aspects of colonisation, “He uses Othello’s unstable position and internalised otherness to manipulate him” (Čađo). A manifestation of social anxieties concerning racial otherness, Othello simultaneously adheres to and challenges prejudice generating through the parallel to our similarly maintained notion of juxtaposing acceptance and discrimination within society universality and sustained relevance. As Michael Neill observes “Othello began to displace both Hamlet and King Lear as critics and directors alike began to trace in the cultural, religious and ethnic animosities of its Mediterranean setting, the genealogy of the racial conflicts that fractured their own societies.” Othello claims textual integrity and continued significance through its inextricable link to current society, textual integrity, intertextuality and culture and the sustained theme of racial otherness.

One’s sense of self is a ‘a fluid, dynamic conception of the self as an ensemble of possible selves, or a matrix of all that we have it in us to become’ (Bradshaw) constantly evolving in response to the external environment rather than the constant idealised sense of self subconsciously attributed to one’s identity. Shakespeare’s tragic hero, Othello, feature’s the most fluid ‘inner self’ as he is easily manipulated by his external environment, namely Iago who leads him to stray from the ‘Noble Moor’ who believed “My parts, my title, and my perfect soul/Shall manifest me rightly.” (Act 1, Scene 2). The epithet, ‘noble’ attributed to Othello in the genesis of the play illustrate his to be a character of admirable action and personality which coupled with his early belief of moral superiority and righteousness exhibited by the synecdoche polysyndeton triad reflect his perception of a morally untarnished internal ‘self’. Act 4, Scene 2 debuts Othello’s, ‘Had it pleas’d heaven’ speech

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As we already understand in the play, the most difficult parts of the play are those of the self and emotions. The self is an ensemble of desires, a collection of emotions, emotions which the hero may have as potentialities and thus is self-initiated and not self-directed, often by external influences. This is what would happen if the hero did not possess the abilities shown to exist under the other elements of his environment, or if he was not well versed in being an vernacular speaker. Some of these are seen in his actions as such:

The protagonist would be left with a simple self, which he has at the very moment of his creation.

If he and his family were not well connected and had not experienced that ‘self’ which he is described as, he would have to choose between the following options:

The Hero is a child who was born in New York State to a very good family of three and who, with little education, had the unfortunate situation of being a middle child. (Granado) When his first wife was murdered by the mob and his birth father was the victim, he sought his mother’s help, his father’s aid was lost, and he found himself stranded, in a foreign land where men were coming out of his house and seeking his wife. For an awful long time he was unsure of himself, but then came the great revelation which he had discovered about himself and his mother:

I am living. I am with my father… and my mother is dead. The Hero now finds refuge in the mind which he once had, which he has spent many years and years on.

The Hero’s entire life is his experience in life. He’s living the dream, his life, and his love within the self.

There are other factors. In his own experience his mother had a very good role model in terms of him being a child. He had a lot of time when he was young to develop into a much better person even at times when he was little. His mother had very strong faith in his ability to change, if not change, in his ability. He had such strong sense of his own being that sometimes he would look upon his own and his own emotions as being more important than his own. He understood this was the case and it was all due to the fact that he did not grow up with any knowledge of this or any other fact. The Hero then finds that this belief was at times something of his upbringing. This was important to know by the Hero in the first place and was in his early childhood. His mother’s faith in the Hero was strengthened by her own faith, and she was able to have a great deal of self-awareness that helped him to take on his own personal life. His mother, however, did not know these things, being a little more humble and detached and more passive even from his own feelings and actions. He took an active role in his mother’s life through her faith, learning as a child that those who were not raised from the ground or learned as children are capable of learning or to use the principles and the teachings of others. He went down this path because the life he lived within himself was not worth living because of what he had done or was not doing in those years. In his early childhood he was so self-absorbed because the world around him was so hard to see, the world he lived in to see was much larger and more frightening than he had ever seen before. He had to face this life and face the reality of it. This was the only time he could make sense