Othello is Shakespeares most complete tragedy. It is filled, in my opinion, with some of the strongest characters in all of Shakespeares plays. Othello, the plays main character, is a cultured Moor, nevertheless insecure and hiding behind a facade of Venetian values and customs. He manages to assimilate into Western European society by denying his background and winning the hearts of the masses (and their daughters) with his tales of victory and strife. He is even appointed as General of the army, the pinnacle of respectability, as he is a skilled soldier and the Venetians are in dire need of his assistance.
According to the tradition of tragedy as stated by Aristotle in his Poetics, the tragic hero must not be an entirely good man, or one who is completely evil, but, rather, a man who on the whole is good but contributes to his own destruction by some moral weakness (the “fatal flaw”). The reason for this, as Aristotle sees it, lies in the emotions that tragedy is meant to excite in the audience. They are “pity” and “fear. ” If an entirely good man is destroyed, we do not feel pity but indignation with the universe.
If an evil man comes to an evil end, we have no feelings in the matter whatever. We think that he got his “just deserts. ” But we pity the man who, having contributed in some way to his disaster, meets with a punishment out of all proportion to what he has done. “Fear” arises from our anxiety for the character as the play unfolds. We hope against hope that he will succeed in getting out of his difficulty. And, after the disaster is final, we fear for ourselves. For if an Othello, with all his great qualities and achievements, receives such a blow, what might the rest of us expect from life?
Critics have searched for a tragic flaw in Othello, something to justify his iserable end, on the theory that to present the fall of an innocent man is, as Aristotle holds, incapable of arousing and purifying the emotions of pity and fear. Pity is uppermost in this tragedy, all the more because, humanly speaking, Othello is blameless. He is, in his first appearances, as noble and calm. In his dying speech he describes himself as ‘one not easily jealous,’ and that is clearly the expression that Shakespeare wishes to leave.
Othello is a normal man, and the play is not a study of the passion of jealousy. Why, then, does the hero fail so wretchedly? This critics takes the view that it is Othello’s business in this play to be deceived, and leaves it more or less at that. Consequently, he finds the play more pathetic than tragic. Othello extends the concept of tragic flaw much more widely than does Aristotle. In effect, the concept becomes to be human is to have a tragic flaw. Othello is one of the finest, one of the noblest of men.
But his tragic flaw is that he has human failings. Othello is a tense, play, with an increasing emotional sweep. Othello, emphasizes a noble but relatively uncomplicated personality who is yet, an eccentric even in his own time. One ritic states that “a great tragedy depends upon the artist’s ability to express the moral sense representing the universal experience of man. ”
To quote G. B. Harrison in Shakespeare’s Tragedies, “True tragedy exists only when it produces in the spectator a definite emotional reaction. . . The first gift essential to the tragic dramatist is a profound moral sense, for unless he has his own instinctive sense of joy and sorrow, of pity and terror, of right and wrong, good and evil, he is incapable of being moved and moving. ” Othello, more than any other of Shakespeare’s plays, produces that tragic pity which the Greeks thought essential to tragedy. A. C. Bradley declares, “Of all Shakespeare’s tragedies, not even excepting King Lear, Othello is the most painfully exciting and the most terrible.
From the moment when the temptation 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. ” A predominant hero normally characterizes Shakespeares tragedies. The dominance of Othello is somewhat obscured at first, because it is Iago who initiates the course of tragic action, but, in terms of moral stature, ultimate ecision, and emotional crisis, Othello himself is at the center of the picture. Othello is the chief person in such a sense that the tragedy may be said to be Othello’s character in action.
The dominance of the tragic hero correlates with a dominant theme in a tragedy. The tragedy of Othello lies in the fact that his whole nature was indisposed to jealousy, and yet was such that he was unusually open to deception, and, likely to act with little reflection, with no delays and in the most decisive manner conceivable. From a close study of Othello’s character, one could easily see hat Othello was not basically jealous; yet to state that his openness to deception was his tragic flaw. Othello is deceived by appearances, and judges Iago to be honest and Desdemona false.
He feels that his is administering justice when actually he is murdering an innocent, spotless woman. Theodore Spencer has pointed out that Iago not only exemplifies the concept of the difference between outer show and inner fact, but also the concept of the evil man as the incomplete man, a man who represents the Renaissance type of the man “whose reason controls his assions and yet he is wholly bad. ” Iago has no lust to link him with animals, and he has no capacity for seeing himself in relation to state or the universal order of things.
He is an unscrupulous individualist possessed by mysterious drives. “Virtue! A fig! ‘Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus. ” Othello, concentrates on the systematic immolation of one man. Iago attaches himself to his general with the single-mindedness of a lamprey. Even at the very end when the truth is finally revealed, Iago can’t resist stoking his victim’s pain with frustrating silence: Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth I never will speak word. At some deep level, Shakespeare seemed to recognize that torture is essential to the play because jealously is a very sado-masochistic emotion. Iago is constantly at Othello’ s side, unsettling him with his hints and barbs. Even after the general has resolved to kill his wife, his tormentor can’t resist the coy flippancy of describing Cassio lying “with her, on her; what you will, ” as if Desdemona’s infidelity has been so broad as to cover any specific. The overall language of the play is nusually coarse, both in its racial slurs and salacious euphemisms, which adds to the general discomfort.
The audience partakes of this masochistic dynamic as if it is helplessly watching some protracted nature special that shows a lion killing a water buffalo for hours. Like Shakespeares other notable tragic heroes, such as Hamlet and Macbeth, Othello is driven to ruin not by external forces, but, by the insufficiency of his own character. Hamlet is something close to a manic-depressive whose melancholy moods deepen into self-contempt. Macbeths tragic flaw is that his ambition is stronger than his conscience. He chooses between his honor and the crown, between salvation in the next world and material gain in this one.
Othello, on the other hand, fails to merge his two selves into a better being, a “better and truer self,” and seeds his own destruction. Othello is a Moor, a black man from a foreign land. But, Othello is more than a man of a different color. Everything about him is different, whether his speech, his military bearing, or, his social conduct. Shakespeare builds the initial impression that Othellos difference could, possibly, make him a better man, one to be revered. What happens, in act, is the opposite, the tragedy.
His tactical knowledge could save the day on the battlefield, but, his code of honor costs him his wife. He has a mastery of the English language which should help him command respect and communicate better, but, it ends up alienating him further. Everything that should have been good and true for Othello turned out perverse. Othello fails to take advantage of his good fortune and merge his two selves into a “truer and better self”; on the cusp of being a hero to his people, and of nurturing his cherished love, Othello succumbs to prejudice, but, the true evil is within.