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Essays on Othello

🎭💔✍️ othello essay: dive into the drama.

Othello, the magnificent Shakespearean tragedy, is like a rollercoaster ride of emotions! 😱💔 Exploring this timeless masterpiece in an essay can unlock a world of insights and ignite your imagination 🔥. By delving into the depths of Othello's themes, characters, and plot twists, you can unravel the complexities of human nature and society. It's an opportunity to showcase your analytical skills and showcase your love for literature. So, buckle up and embark on an Othello essay adventure!

Othello Essay Topics 📝

Othello argumentative essay 🤔💬.

An argumentative essay on Othello requires you to take a stance and defend it with solid evidence from the play. Some intriguing topics to consider:

• Is Othello a victim of racism or his own insecurities?
• Did Iago's evil nature drive Othello to his tragic downfall?
• Should Desdemona be held responsible for her fate?

Othello Cause and Effect Essay 🌪️🤯

In a cause and effect essay, you'll explore the ripple effects of certain actions or events in Othello. Here are some captivating topics to ponder:

• The consequences of Iago's manipulation on Othello's relationships.
• How jealousy leads to destruction in Othello's world.
• The impact of societal norms on Othello's tragic fate.

Othello Opinion Essay 🗣️😮

Opinion essays allow you to express your personal viewpoint on specific aspects of Othello. Here are some thought-provoking topics to spark your imagination:

• Is Othello's jealousy justified or exaggerated?
• Should Othello have trusted Desdemona despite the rumors?
• What role does gender play in the tragedy of Othello?

Othello Informative Essay 📚📖

Informative essays aim to educate readers about various aspects of Othello. Here are some enlightening topics to enlighten your audience:

• The historical context of Othello: Shakespeare's portrayal of race and society.
• The symbolism of the handkerchief in Othello and its significance.
• The evolution of Othello's character throughout the play.

Othello Essay Example 📑

Othello thesis statement examples 📜💡.

Here are a few thesis statement examples to inspire your Othello essay:

• Thesis: Othello's tragic downfall is a result of his vulnerability to manipulation by Iago due to his insecurities about his race and age.
• Thesis: The handkerchief symbolizes trust, fidelity, and betrayal in Othello, highlighting the fragility of relationships.
• Thesis: Othello's jealousy is fueled by societal expectations and gender roles, leading to the tragedy that unfolds.

Othello Essay Introduction Examples 🌟

Here are some introduction paragraph examples for your Othello essay:

• Introduction: Othello, a play filled with love, deception, and revenge...
• Introduction: In the realm of Shakespearean tragedies, Othello stands as a poignant exploration of love, jealousy, and the destructive power of manipulation. As we venture into the depths of this timeless masterpiece, we are transported to a world where trust is fragile, and motives are concealed. Othello's journey, from a celebrated Moorish general to a tragic figure consumed by jealousy, invites us to contemplate the complexities of human emotion and the consequences of unchecked suspicion.
• Introduction: Othello, the Moor of Venice, is a character whose name echoes through the annals of literary history. In our exploration of Othello's tragic tale, we confront issues of race, trust, and the corrosive force of jealousy. As we delve into this gripping narrative, we are challenged to dissect the motives of its characters and the underlying themes that continue to resonate in today's society.

Othello Essay Conclusion Examples 🔚📝

Here are some conclusion paragraph examples for your Othello essay:

• Conclusion: As we bid farewell to the tragic world of Othello, we are left with a profound exploration of human nature, jealousy, and the consequences of deceit. Shakespeare's timeless masterpiece continues to captivate and haunt our hearts, reminding us of the enduring power of storytelling.
• Conclusion: In the final act of Othello, we witness the devastating aftermath of jealousy and manipulation. The tragic downfall of Othello, Desdemona, and others serves as a cautionary tale, reminding us of the destructive potential of unchecked emotions. As we bid farewell to this tale of love and betrayal, let us carry forward the lessons learned from the characters' fates, recognizing the enduring relevance of Shakespeare's exploration of the human condition.
• Conclusion: Othello, a masterpiece of tragedy, leaves an indelible mark on our understanding of human nature. Through the twists and turns of its plot, we are confronted with the consequences of jealousy and deceit. As our journey through this timeless work comes to a close, let us reflect on the enduring power of literature to illuminate the complexities of the human soul and the fragility of trust.

Homosexuality in Othello

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Theme of Deception in Shakespeare's Othello

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Othello: Desdemona as a Representation of Power and Possession

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The Power of Jealousy in Shakespeare’s Othello

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1603, William Shakespeare

Play; Tragedy

Othello, Desdemona, Iago, Michael Cassio, Emilia, Roderigo, Bianca, Brabanzio, Duke of Venice, Montano, Lodovico, Graziano, Clown

The play is primarily based on a story from an Italian novella called "Un Capitano Moro" by Cinthio. Shakespeare took inspiration from this source material and adapted it into his own version, adding depth and complexity to the characters and exploring themes of jealousy, betrayal, and manipulation.

In the tragic play "Othello" by William Shakespeare , the story follows the powerful and respected Moorish general, Othello. Othello secretly marries Desdemona, a Venetian woman, despite objections from her father, Brabantio. Othello's ensign, Iago, harboring deep resentment and jealousy, manipulates events to destroy Othello's life. Iago plants seeds of doubt in Othello's mind, insinuating that Desdemona has been unfaithful to him with his lieutenant, Cassio. Consumed by jealousy, Othello becomes increasingly suspicious and tormented by his thoughts. Iago's cunning manipulations lead Othello to believe in the alleged affair, pushing him into a spiral of rage and despair. Othello's doubts intensify, leading him to confront Desdemona and ultimately strangle her in a fit of madness. Upon discovering the truth and Iago's treachery, Othello takes his own life in a moment of devastating realization. The play concludes with Iago's exposure and punishment for his deceitful actions.

The play "Othello" by William Shakespeare is set in the late 16th century, primarily in the city of Venice and later on the island of Cyprus. Venice, a vibrant and cosmopolitan city, serves as the initial backdrop for the story. Its opulent palaces, canals, and bustling streets create an atmosphere of grandeur and sophistication. The Venetian setting reflects the cultural diversity of the time, with characters from various backgrounds and ethnicities. As the plot progresses, the setting shifts to the island of Cyprus, where Othello is stationed with his troops. Cyprus offers a contrasting environment to Venice, characterized by its remote and isolated nature. The island's rugged landscape and military camp create a tense and confined atmosphere, amplifying the dramatic events that unfold. Both settings play a significant role in the play's themes and conflicts. Venice represents the veneer of civilization and societal expectations, while Cyprus represents the raw emotions, passions, and darker aspects of human nature. The contrasting settings highlight the clash between appearances and reality, order and chaos, and ultimately contribute to the tragedy that unfolds in "Othello."

1. Jealousy and Betrayal: The theme of jealousy lies at the heart of the play, as Iago manipulates Othello's trust and fuels his insecurities, leading to tragic consequences. Betrayal is also explored as characters deceive one another for personal gain, highlighting the destructive power of envy and deceit. 2. Racism and Prejudice: Othello, a Moorish general, faces discrimination and racial prejudice throughout the play. Shakespeare examines the destructive effects of racism, as Othello's character is systematically undermined and ultimately destroyed by the racist assumptions and stereotypes held by others. 3. Appearance versus Reality: The theme of appearance versus reality is prevalent as characters wear masks of virtue and honesty while concealing their true intentions. Othello's tragic downfall is a result of his inability to discern truth from falsehood, emphasizing the dangers of misjudgment and manipulation. 4. Love and Obsession: The play explores various forms of love, from passionate romance to obsessive possessiveness. The intense love between Othello and Desdemona is contrasted with Iago's twisted obsession with destroying their happiness, shedding light on the complexities of human relationships. 5. Gender and Power: Shakespeare examines gender dynamics and the societal expectations placed upon women. Desdemona's character challenges traditional gender roles, while Emilia, Iago's wife, highlights the subjugation of women and the consequences of male dominance.

1. Imagery: Shakespeare skillfully uses vivid imagery to create powerful visual and sensory impressions. For example, in Act 1, Scene 1, Iago describes Othello and Desdemona's elopement as "an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe," employing the contrasting images of a black ram and a white ewe to convey the scandalous nature of their relationship. 2. Soliloquy: Soliloquies allow characters to express their inner thoughts and feelings to the audience. One notable example is Othello's soliloquy in Act 5, Scene 2, where he reflects on his decision to kill Desdemona, saying, "It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul," revealing his internal struggle and justifying his actions. 3. Foreshadowing: Shakespeare employs foreshadowing to hint at future events and build tension. In Act 3, Scene 3, Desdemona tells Othello, "The heavens forbid / But that our loves and comforts should increase / Even as our days do grow," foreshadowing the impending tragedy and the deterioration of their relationship. 4. Irony: Irony is used to create a contrast between what is expected and what actually occurs. For instance, when Iago says, "I am not what I am," in Act 1, Scene 1, it is an ironic statement, as he presents himself as trustworthy while plotting Othello's downfall. 5. Symbolism: Shakespeare employs symbolism to convey deeper meanings. The handkerchief, a symbol of fidelity, becomes a significant object in the play. Its loss and subsequent manipulation by Iago symbolize the erosion of trust and the unraveling of Othello's marriage.

In 1995, director Oliver Parker released a film adaptation of "Othello" starring Laurence Fishburne as the titular character. Fishburne's portrayal emphasized Othello's dignity and inner conflict, earning critical acclaim. Another notable film adaptation is Orson Welles' 1952 version, where Welles himself took on the role of Othello, showcasing his powerful presence on screen. "Othello" continues to be performed on stage worldwide. Notable theatrical productions include the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2015 production, featuring Hugh Quarshie as Othello, and the 2007 Broadway revival, with Chiwetel Ejiofor in the lead role, receiving critical acclaim for their compelling interpretations. Othello's character has also been explored in literary adaptations and reimaginings. For example, in 2001, author Sena Jeter Naslund wrote the novel "Ahab's Wife," where she includes a fictional encounter between Othello and the protagonist. These adaptations offer different perspectives and delve into the complexity of Othello's character. Othello's story has inspired numerous musical compositions. One notable example is the opera "Otello" by Giuseppe Verdi, which premiered in 1887. Verdi's powerful music captures the intense emotions of the characters and brings Othello's tragic tale to life.

1. Literary Influence: "Othello" has had a profound influence on subsequent works of literature. Its exploration of themes such as jealousy, betrayal, and the destructive power of manipulation has inspired countless writers. For example, Toni Morrison's novel "A Mercy" draws parallels to "Othello" in its exploration of race and power dynamics. The play's tragic elements and psychological depth have also influenced works like James Joyce's "Ulysses" and D.H. Lawrence's "Women in Love." 2. Psychological Exploration: Othello's tragic descent into jealousy and manipulation has made the play a subject of psychological analysis. The character's inner conflict and the manipulation he falls victim to offer rich material for the study of human psychology, particularly in relation to themes of trust, self-doubt, and the destructive nature of unchecked emotions. 3. Social Commentary: "Othello" addresses issues of race, identity, and prejudice, making it a powerful tool for social commentary. The play's examination of racial stereotypes and the destructive consequences of discrimination still resonate today. Othello's position as a black man in a predominantly white society has been explored and analyzed in the context of race relations, colonialism, and social injustice. 4. Performance and Theater: "Othello" has had a lasting impact on the world of theater and performance. The character of Othello presents a unique and complex role for actors, requiring both physical presence and emotional depth. The play's themes and dramatic tension continue to captivate audiences, leading to numerous adaptations, productions, and reinterpretations on stage. 5. Language and Imagery: Shakespeare's masterful use of language and vivid imagery in "Othello" has had a lasting impact on the English language. Phrases like "green-eyed monster" and "the beast with two backs" have become part of the cultural lexicon. The play's powerful speeches and soliloquies have been studied, quoted, and admired for their beauty and poetic expression.

1. "Othello" is believed to have been first performed around 1604. While the exact date is unknown, it is widely believed to have premiered at the Court of King James I in London. The play was met with great success and has since become one of Shakespeare's most acclaimed tragedies. 2. "Othello" has contributed several phrases and expressions to the English language. One notable example is the term "the green-eyed monster," used to describe jealousy. This phrase has become a popular way to convey the destructive nature of envy. Additionally, the phrase "wear my heart upon my sleeve" originates from the play, referring to openly displaying one's emotions. 3. Traditionally, the character of Othello has been played by a white actor in blackface makeup. This casting practice has faced criticism and controversy over the years, as it perpetuates racial stereotypes and limits opportunities for actors of color. In recent times, there has been a growing movement towards authentic casting, with actors of African descent portraying the role to offer a more nuanced and authentic representation of Othello's racial identity.

"Othello" remains a timeless and significant work in literature, making it an important subject for essays and academic discussions. Shakespeare's masterful exploration of themes such as jealousy, deception, race, and power continues to resonate with audiences across generations. The character of Othello, a Moorish general in a predominantly white society, raises critical questions about racism, discrimination, and the manipulation of prejudices. Additionally, the play delves into the destructive nature of jealousy and how it can lead to tragic consequences. Writing an essay about "Othello" allows scholars to analyze the complexity of characters like Iago, whose malevolent machinations drive the plot. It offers opportunities to discuss the portrayal of women in the play and the theme of women's agency in a patriarchal society. Furthermore, exploring the play's language, literary devices, and poetic techniques showcases Shakespeare's genius as a playwright. By grappling with the moral dilemmas and psychological depth of the characters, an essay on "Othello" opens doors to deeper insights into human nature, society, and the enduring power of Shakespeare's storytelling.

"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." "I kissed thee ere I killed thee — no way but this, killing myself to die upon a kiss" "Reputation, reputation, reputation! Oh, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial" "Men in rage strike those that wish them best" "But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve for daws to peck at: I am not what I am"

1. Chandler, M. (1987). The Othello effect. Human development, 30(3), 137-159. (https://www.karger.com/article/Abstract/273174) 2. Shakespeare, W. (2019). othello. In One-Hour Shakespeare (pp. 231-302). Routledge. (https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780429262715-11/othello-william-shakespeare) 3. Neill, M. (1989). Unproper beds: Race, adultery, and the hideous in Othello. Shakespeare Quarterly, 40(4), 383-412. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2870608) 4 . Neely, C. T. (1977). Women and Men in" Othello";" what should such a fool/Do with so good a woman?". Shakespeare Studies, 10, 133. (https://www.proquest.com/openview/91053b700d876bd2b3be478cb40742b1/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=1819311) 5. Cipriani, G., Vedovello, M., Nuti, A., & Di Fiorino, A. (2012). Dangerous passion: Othello syndrome and dementia. Psychiatry and clinical neurosciences, 66(6), 467-473. (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1440-1819.2012.02386.x) 6. Siegel, P. N. (1953). The Damnation of Othello. PMLA, 68(5), 1068-1078. (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/abs/damnation-of-othello/F3193C55450F83F4EFACB0DDF5983B0E) 7. Poulson, C., Duncan, J., & Massie, M. (2005). “I Am Not What I Am”–Destructive Emotions in an Organizational Hierarchy: The Case of Othello and Iago. In The Effect of Affect in Organizational Settings (Vol. 1, pp. 211-240). Emerald Group Publishing Limited. (https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1016/S1746-9791(05)01109-0/full/html) 8. Bristol, M. D. (1990). Charivari and the Comedy of Abjection in" Othello". Renaissance Drama, 21, 3-21. (https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/rd.21.41917258?journalCode=rd) 9. Nowottny, W. (1954). Justice and love in Othello. University of Toronto Quarterly, 21(4), 330-344. (https://www.utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/utq.21.4.330) 10. Braden, W. S. (1990). The Properties of" Othello,". Philosophy and Literature, 14(1), 186-187. (https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/417219/summary)

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About this text.

• Title : Othello: Introduction
• Author : Jessica Slights

ISBN: 978-1-55058-466-0

• Edition: Othello
• Introduction
• A Survey of Criticism
• A History of Performance
• Textual Introduction
• Bibliography
• Othello, Modern
• Othello, Quarto 1, 1622 (Old-spelling transcription)
• Othello, Folio 1, 1623 (Old-spelling transcription)
• The Battle of Alcazar (Selection)
• Cinthio's Tale
• A Godly Form of Household Government
• A Table of Human Passions
• Coryat's Crudities
• Counsel to the Husband
• Letters Permitting Deportation of Blackamoors from England
• Certain Tragical Discourses
• The Passions of the Mind
• Boston Public Library
• British Library
• Brandeis University
• New South Wales
• Second Folio
• Third Folio
• Fourth Folio
• Works Rowe, Vol.5
• Works Theobald, Vol.7

1 Othello is perhaps Shakespeare's most unsettling play. The story it recounts is a fairly simple one about a general who undertakes a tour of duty abroad accompanied by his military and domestic entourage, and who then falls under the influence of a malevolent subordinate who encourages in him a violent sexual jealousy that results in his killing his wife Desdemona. This is no murder mystery. The general's standard bearer, Iago, announces his perfidy almost immediately to the audience, who and the audience watches with growing horror as he enacts a plot to destroy the loving relationship between Othello and Desdemona. Finally, in the play's brutal closing scene, the audience act as silent witnesses to Desdemona's murder and its bloody aftermath. Although other Shakespeare plays offer higher body counts, more gore, and more plentiful scenes of heartbreak, Othello packs an unusually powerful affective punch, stunning us with its depiction of the swiftness and thoroughness with which love can be converted to hatred, and forcing us to confront our complicity with social and political institutions that can put all of us--but especially the most vulnerable among us--at risk.

2 Othello 's emotional power derives in part from its disconcerting insistence on both the participation and the impotence of its audience. Although we observe the play's most secret moments--the Venetian Duke's emergency meeting about the Turkish military threat, the unpinning of Desdemona's dress at bedtime, Cassio's confession that he has no head for alcohol--as well as its public ones, we are often uncertain about what we have seen and what we should make of it. Rather than displaying clearly and methodically the events it depicts, Othello creates the persistent illusion that we are peering nearsightedly at its action from around dark corners or through half-closed doors. We stumble into the play's opening scene, coming upon Roderigo and Iago muttering together as though we have almost bumped into them as we scurry ourselves through the night-darkened streets of Venice. The play keeps us off balance as we struggle to determine who these men are, to decipher the nature of their relationship, and to make sense of their oblique references to the unnamed Moorish general who seems to engender such hatred in them. Theatrical convention teaches us to expect the elaboration of plans for political rebellion or perhaps even murder from these conspirators, but in this too we are surprised as we overhear only gossip and the bitter whining of thwarted ambition. Our initial confusion is soon mirrored by the frantic response of Desdemona's father, Brabantio, as he is startled from sleep and riled by Roderigo and Iago into a bitter fury even as the circumstances of his daughter's departure from home and subsequent marriage remain unclear.

3 The impression that, like Brabantio, we are being called upon to participate in events about which we never know quite enough persists throughout the play. We watch as the Venetian Senate receives conflicting reports about the movements of a Turkish fleet in the Mediterranean, and we ready ourselves for battle as Othello and his forces depart for Cyprus prepared to defend the island from the Ottoman armada. Then we too are suddenly pulled up short--"beleed and calmed" as the play would have it--as we learn with the Venetians that they have arrived on the fortified island with no opposing force to battle because the weather has already defeated the Turkish threat. Nor are we allowed to settle into complacency when the focus shifts back from the potential of foreign quarrels to the domestic broils on which the play opened. Instead, we are repeatedly unsettled by Iago's malign confidences as he soliloquizes with delighted precision his plans to destroy Othello and Desdemona.

4 Confirming his place as one of literature's most compelling villains, Iago fascinates us with his single-minded focus on converting Othello's rapturous love for Desdemona into murderous jealousy, and he disarms us with the apparent frankness with which he discloses his plans. For all his confidences, however, Iago's motives remain at best indeterminate, seeming sometimes insufficient (surely even intense professional envy cannot adequately account for his extreme cruelty), and in other moments oddly abundant (if he truly believes that Emilia and Othello have had an affair, why does it take him so long to mention this?). Iago's means and aims are never in doubt, however: he tells us precisely how he hopes to exploit and to ruin those around him, and, by confiding his treachery, he enlists us as tacit accessories to his crimes. More than helpless spectators of his manipulations of Othello, we become in Act 3's central temptation scene, with its erotic echoes of both the serpent's seduction of Eve and the ritualized exchange of vows at the heart of the Christian marriage service, unwilling acolytes of Iago's ritual destruction of his superior. A sense of inevitability gradually displaces the surprises and confusions of the play's earlier scenes, and a gothic tension builds with the increasing likelihood that Iago's horrific devices will succeed. We are left to watch with increasing revulsion a relentless progress toward Desdemona's murder.

5 The inevitability of Desdemona's death at her husband's hand appears to slow the play's progress, and Othello 's final scene is one of the most tortuously protracted in Shakespeare. The murder itself, when it finally comes, is agonizingly prolonged, and not until the discovery of Desdemona's body does the pace of the action increase as the characters begin to gather onstage for the tragic finale. Even in its closing minutes Othello disrupts expectations, as Desdemona's death prompts not the murderous retribution of grief-stricken and maddened relatives familiar both from the Cinthio source text and from the revenge dramas so popular in the period, but instead a second murder of a wife by her husband, a bloody suicide, and a silent survival as shocking in its way as the deaths by which it is preceded.

6 If the shape and pace of Othello 's narrative create profoundly unsettling effects for readers and audiences, the play's subject matter and thematic preoccupations are another source of productive discomfort. This is a play that forces encounters with the destructive consequences of institutionalized sexism and racism and thereby challenges us to analyze how gender and race inflect the operations of power within our households and our states, an analysis as vital now as it was in Shakespeare day. But while Othello raises tough questions about such disturbing subjects as the causes of violence against women and the mutually reinforcing character of stereotypes based on gender and race, the play also refuses easy answers to these questions. A disruptive doubleness operates, for instance, in the play's depiction of its central female characters, whose moments of defiance of patriarchal authority are key to their appealing liveliness but whose violent deaths have been read by some as the necessary consequence of their resistance and by others as the corollary of a sociopolitical system that devalues women's lives.

7 In its portrayal of Desdemona's elopement, her defiant determination to accompany her new husband into battle, and the buoyant wit she exhibits as she banters with his subordinates, Othello offers a strong female character prepared to defy convention and to her assert herself in a world governed by men. Similarly, the figure of Emilia, with her clear-eyed analysis in Act 4, scene 3 of an institutionalized double standard that grants men the right to play away from home while requiring of women an incorruptible chastity, complicates the notion that all early modern women were always rendered silent and obedient by patriarchal stricture. At same time, Othello troubles attempts to construct its female characters as proto-feminist icons. Emilia's authority as a social critic is undermined when her position as a plain-speaking truth-teller is compromised by her participation in Iago's scheme to steal Desdemona's handkerchief. And even Desdemona, unquestionably a victim of Iago's malicious scheming and then of her husband's murderous brutality, is not an entirely sympathetic character for many modern readers, who find in her commitment to marriage and her meekness in the face of violence signs of weakness rather than virtue.

8 The sense that Desdemona is a disappointment despite, or even because of, her loyalty gets strong structural support in her death scene. In a move that exploits a sensationalism more often associated with nineteenth-century melodrama, Shakespeare stages the apparently permanent stifling of Desdemona's breath only to revive her almost immediately. Here is the opportunity denied readers and audiences of Romeo and Juliet 's closing scene: a resurrection, a wife awakened from near-death before her husband's suicide, and, alive with her, the possibility that the play's litany of failure, violence, and misery--in short, its tragedy--will be converted to comedy. But of course Desdemona frustrates this hope when she fails to revive fully, encouraging in viewers a resentment that wanders odiously close to blaming the victim for her own death. And even as she thwarts the conversion of tragedy to comedy, Desdemona impedes the ostensible consolations of justice and of revenge. She asserts her victimization and her innocence on her deathbed--"Oh, falsely, falsely murdered. . . . A guiltless death I die"--but refuses to name her murderer. Instead, she takes responsibility for her own death and asserts Othello's "kindness" to the end. "Oh, who hath done this deed?" asks the distraught Emilia, to which Desdemona replies with her final breath, "Nobody--I myself. Farewell--Commend me to my kind lord--Oh, farewell."

9 While Othello 's final scene problematizes Desdemona's quiescence, the play's insistence on the cultural embeddedness of its characters finally suggests that both her murder and her reaction to the abuse she experiences at her husband's hands are the product of a deeply masculinist culture. Initially, Venice appears responsive to the needs of its female citizens as the Duke calls upon Desdemona to testify in the matter of her elopement and hears her plea to be allowed to accompany Othello to Cyprus. However, the well-being of women is soon dismissed as a matter best "privately determine[d]," as the Senate turns to the primary "business of the state": the protection of its commercial and political interests in the Mediterranean. The Venetian institution of marriage proves similarly problematic for women. Although marriage looks at first like a way for Desdemona to secure both her passionate love for Othello and a measure of independence from her father, the play is clear that she is exchanging obligation to her father for duty to her husband.

10 Venice's martial ethos also proves especially dangerous for women. Othello is evidently enamored of Desdemona, but he is also a leader in a military community that understands the effects of love as potentially destructive for men. Thus when he is determined to prove his professional commitment to his political masters, Othello declares himself invulnerable to an erotic love he figures as blindness and associates with a loss of masculine control:

when light-winged toys Of feathered Cupid seel with wanton dullness My speculative and officed instruments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Let housewives make a skillet of my helm.

Offering the Senate a comic image of a proud military man charging into battle with a frying pan on his head, Othello implies that falling in love with women makes men vulnerable to domestic coups that put both their physical safety and their dignity at risk. In seeking to distance himself from the ostensibly endangering effects of domesticity, the general gives voice to his culture's anxiety that rather than affirming masculine dominance, heterosexual love enables the effeminization of men and exposes them to ridicule.

11 The idea that love for women exposes men to mockery appears consistently throughout the play: in Brabantio's public prediction that Desdemona will be unfaithful to her new husband, in Roderigo's conviction that Desdemona will abandon Othello and take up with him, in Cassio's care not to let his general "see [him] womaned" in Bianca's company, and in the pernicious stereotypes about women's self-indulgence, lustfulness, and disloyalty consistently served up by Iago. Nor is resistance to such constructions of femininity much of an option for Othello 's female characters. When Emilia eventually figures out the role Iago has played in Desdemona's death, she refuses to obey his commands that she remain quiet: "No, I will speak as liberal as the north," she announces, "Let heaven and men and devils, let them all, / All, all cry shame against me, yet I'll speak." While her brave words offer a momentary model of resistance to patriarchal control, the terms of Emilia's refusal remind us that hers is a culture that silences women by shaming those who speak out of turn. That the play's liveliest representatives of womanliness are brutally murdered by their husbands, that the institution of marriage fails rather than protects them, and that the Venetian state is either unable or unwilling to stop the violence are fictional realities at the heart of the tragedy of Othello ; that they continue to find analogues in the lives of real women and men reinforces the importance of the difficult conversations they prompt.

12 Even as it asks readers and audiences to consider challenging questions about gender and power, Othello also demands a focus on complex matters of racialized and religious difference. Its setting in the Mediterranean basin locates the play at a key intersection among the continents and cultures of Africa, Asia, and Europe. This physical positioning signals the play's participation in a set of intricate economic, political, and social relationships informed by race, region, and religion, and variations of these relationships have long animated responses to Othello . The play's engagement with place and ethnicity as markers of identity is signaled in its full title: Othello, the Moor of Venice . For all its apparent specificity, however, the epithet "Moor of Venice" provides little precise detail about the play's titular protagonist, and the rest of the text does little to resolve the ambiguities it raises. Othello announces in the first act that he comes from "men of royal siege" and he later refers to himself as black, but these are the only specific references he makes to his origins and appearance.

13 Evidence from history offers some valuable context for discussions of race and ethnicity in Othello , but provides no definite racial identity for Othello. The term "Moor" was an elastic one in the early modern period, used variously as a marker of race, geography, nationality, religion, or some combination of these. The term is associated in texts of the period with light-skinned Arabs from north-Africa, with dark-skinned sub-Saharan Africans, with Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula, and with the smaller number of men and women of color who lived in England, some as slaves and others as paid workers. For example, in the chronicle of the Wars of the Roses on which Shakespeare leans heavily in his history plays, sixteenth-century historian Edward Hall refers to "the Moores or Mawritane nacion, being infidels & unchristened people" (xxiiii). For Hall, "Moors" clearly operates as a geopolitical identifier synonymous with "inhabitants of Mauritania," a region of North Africa sometimes called "Barbary" and comprised of much of modern-day Morocco and northwestern Algeria. At the same time, for Hall as for many early modern writers, "Moor" also serves as a religious identifier, a way of naming non-Christian "infidels"--that is, Muslims. Such usage suggests that early modern readers and audiences may have understood in Othello's designation as a Moor a connection to the powerful Islamic Ottoman Empire that vied with the Christian forces of Western Europe for military and commercial control of the Mediterranean from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries--the same Ottoman Empire established in the play's first act as Venice's principal enemy.

14 Like Hall, physician and travel writer Andrew Boorde, whose First Book of the Introduction of Knowledge (1547) describes the customs of various Mediterranean peoples, uses the term "Moor" to identify the racially varied residents of Barbary and to indicate their uniform religious difference from his own Christianity: "Barbary is a great countrey, and plentyfull of frute, wine, & corne. The inhabytours be Called the Mores: ther be white mores and black moors; they be Infydels and unchristened" (212). As Boorde's description continues, it becomes clear that the word "Moor" was also linked in the period with a specific set of physical features and behavioral characteristics as well as with the practice of slavery:

There be manye Moores brought into Christendome, in to great cytes & townes, to be sold; and Christenmen do by them, and they wilbe diligent, and wyll do al maner of service; but thei be set most comonli to vile thynges. . . . they have gret lyppes, and nottyd heare, black and curled; there skyn is soft; and ther is nothing white but their teth and the white of the eye. (212)

The slippage in his account as he moves easily from a description of economic resources such as fruit and corn to a description of human beings emphasizes that from the perspective of the white Christian European Boorde Barbary's inhabitants existed primarily as commodities to be bought and sold. A parallel slip occurs in Boorde's description of the characteristics of "Moores," as he veers without comment or change of tone from physical description--noting details about hair and skin texture, for instance--to hasty generalization about morality and behavior: "thei be set most comonli to vile thynges."

15 In the early modern English theater, too, the term "Moor" was most often connected with blackness and with Islam, and many of the significant number of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century plays that feature Moorish characters depend on similar stereotypes of lustfulness, untrustworthiness, and savagery. The subset of dramas sometimes called the "Turk plays," for instance, took advantage of strong popular interest in and anxiety about the challenge to the military and economic dominance of Europe presented by the Ottoman Empire by offering London theatergoers depictions of Muslim characters and of Turkish history as violent, tyrannical, and treacherous. Robert Greene's Selimus (1594), for example, stages the rise to power of Selim I, emphasizing his excessive ambition, his greed, and the glee with which he celebrates his vicious betrayals as he murders his brothers in order to become Sultan (see Contextual Materials: Selimus ). Shakespeare draws on this theatrical tradition for the character of the Prince of Morocco, a suitor for the wealthy orphan Portia of Belmont in The Merchant of Venice (c.1596-98). Morocco is not violent, but he is dismissed by Portia before she has even met him for having the "complexion of a devil," and his performance in the casket test designed to determine whom she will marry marks him as conceited, status-conscious, and materialistic. Aaron, of the revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus (1594), is another Shakespearean Moor informed by early modern stereotypes yoking dark skin and moral corruption. A secret lover of the Goth queen who becomes Empress of Rome, Aaron engineers the rape and mutilation of a newly married woman, talks her battle-hardened father into chopping off his own hand, confesses to having done "a thousand dreadful things / As willingly as one would kill a fly," and faces public execution repenting only the possibility that he may have done "one good deed" in his life (see Contextual Materials: Titus Andronicus . Even as he embodies an almost hyperbolic amorality, however, Aaron is a perversely attractive figure whose two most appealing features--his wit and his powerful love for his infant son--work together to humanize him and to expose the racism of the Goths and the Romans among whom he lives.

16 We cannot know exactly how Shakespeare imagined Othello would look or precisely which geopolitical, religious, or moral associations his Moorishness might have evoked for the play's first readers and audiences. We can, though, note that a version of the offhand racism that contaminates Boorde's assessment of the inhabitants of Barbary, Portia's reaction to Morocco's suit, and Rome's response to Aaron certainly echoes in the bigoted descriptions of Othello offered by Iago and Roderigo. Roderigo's reference to Othello as "the thick-lips" may suggest that the general is a black man; the epithet certainly signals the beginning of a string of racist slurs that link his ethnicity with other characters' efforts to discredit him. Iago picks up where Roderigo leaves off, figuring Othello variously as "an old black ram," "a Barbary horse," and "the devil." By systematically associating Othello's racialized difference with the non-human--even the inhuman--Iago effects a rhetorical dehumanization of his commander. In a move later aped by Brabantio, Iago also avoids naming Othello, referring to him throughout the opening scene of the play only as "the Moor" and, with ironic reverence, "his Moorship." By replacing Othello's name with the indeterminate sobriquet "Moor," the general's opponents deny his individuality and insist instead on his role as a potentially threatening outsider.

17 The ambiguities that inform Othello 's explorations of the operations of gender and power are, then, also at work as the play engages issues of race. Although its most unpleasant characters introduce an overtly racist discourse that identifies Othello as a "stranger," others emphasize his role as a consummate insider. His enemies foreground his difference and seek to deploy it as a weapon against him, but Othello's supporters appear unthreatened by his ethnicity. The Duke of Venice and the Governor of Cyprus, the two primary representatives of state authority in the play, acknowledge Othello's racial difference, but neither man seems concerned by it. Montanto, whom Othello replaces as Venice's highest ranking representative in Cyprus, uses the epithet "the Moor," but he also refers to Othello by name, and his descriptions of his replacement emphasize Othello's effectiveness as a military commander. The Duke too accentuates Othello's courage and expertise, treating him not as a dangerous outsider but as a trusted leader who can be relied upon to defend Venice's claims against the "general enemy Ottoman." It is worth noting too that while the Duke seems primarily concerned to reconcile Brabantio to Desdemona's marriage because their domestic upheaval risks disrupting state business, his response to the news of the lovers' elopement also suggests that he sees Othello as a reasonable match for a Venetian Senator's daughter.

18 Othello's supportive reception by the state authorities reminds us, then, that he is at once "the Moor" and "of Venice." Indeed, the prepositional force of the play's title emphasizes Othello's belonging in and to Venice, a site best known to Shakespeare's first audiences as a wealthy hub of mercantile activity, a multiethnic international port city whose stable republican government, high military spending, and strategic location at the top of a narrow estuary enabled its role as a powerful commercial and cultural nexus linking east and west. Venice also had a reputation in the period as a center for sex tourism, thanks in part to the popularity of travel literature published by English adventurers like Thomas Coryate. Coryate's 1611 account of a trip through continental Europe purports to offer an eyewitness account of Venice's glamorous courtesans, juxtaposing the ostensible wealth and freedom of their lifestyles with the drab existence of ordinary Venetian wives who are depicted as jealously over-managed by watchful husbands (see Contextual Materials: Coryat's Crudities ). Thus the Venice of which Othello is a part provides not only an evocative physical starting point for the play's action, but is emblematic of its insistence that its characters are the product of the complexly intertwined discourses of race, religion, commerce, militarism, and gender upon which modern civil society is constructed.

19 The interconnections among Othello 's broad preoccupations are elaborated not simply through setting, structure, characterization, and plot, but also stylistically, at the levels of the word, the sentence, and the image. Indeed, much of the play's affective intensity is generated through its richly textured language and heightened by its depiction of the power of language to shape human experience. The play's preoccupation with duplicity, for instance, is neatly supported by its surfeit of puns. Predictably, wordplay as a marker of the instability of language is often associated with Iago, for whom multiplicity of meaning and ambiguity of interpretation represent disruptive opportunity. When he first lands in Cyprus with Desdemona and Emilia, for example, Iago answers the elaborate gallantry of Cassio's greeting by locating in its ritual language and gestures a licentious undercurrent of which its speaker is apparently unaware. Kissing Emilia in welcome, Cassio speaks politely, if rather pompously, to her husband:

Let it not gall your patience, good Iago, That I extend my manners. 'Tis my breeding That gives me this bold show of courtesy.

Iago's punning comeback--"Sir, would she give you so much of her lips / As of her tongue she oft bestows on me, / You'd have enough"-- deliberately elides erotic kissing with scolding, and comes at the expense of both Emilia and Cassio, setting a pattern for the Iago's more elaborate and equally self-serving deceptions later in the play.

20 The connection between punning and deceitfulness is perhaps most clearly displayed in the opening lines of Act 3, scene 4, a comic exchange between Desdemona and the Clown that turns on multiple meanings of the word "lie." Desdemona's simple inquiry about Cassio's whereabouts--"Do you know, sirrah, where Lieutenant Cassio lies?"--elicits from the Clown a circuitous response that plays on various definitions of the verb "to lie": to tell a falsehood, to occupy a dwelling place, to recline in bed. None of this brings Desdemona any closer to locating Cassio, but it does construct a powerful verbal chain linking both characters to deceit and to the bedroom. This is, of course, the linguistic chain to which Othello will, in the following scene, add a fatal final link when he recognizes that "lying" is also a euphemism for "having sex." In an earnest echo of Desdemona's query about Cassio, Othello tries to extract information about the lieutenant from Iago, who proves, like the Clown before him, more interested in diversion and duplicity than in providing a clear response:

OTHELLO. What hath he said? IAGO. Faith, that he did--I know not what he did. OTHELLO. What? What? IAGO. Lie. OTHELLO. With her? IAGO. With her, on her--what you will. OTHELLO. Lie with her? Lie on her? We say "lie on her" when they belie her. Lie with her? Zounds, that's fulsome!

With Iago's subtle encouragement, Othello extends the interpretive chain linking Desdemona and Cassio all the way to adultery, exchanging his usual confident declarative rhetorical mode for a series of increasingly frantic questions and betraying the extent to which he buys into stereotypes about women's inconstancy by the speed with which he carves his way through multiple meanings of "lie" to the image of Cassio and Desdemona in bed together.

21 Of course, Iago's machinations exploit not only the instabilities of language but also the limits of sense perception as he stage-manages for Othello dramatic encounters with Cassio and then between Cassio and Bianca. Inviting Othello to "withdraw" to a position that limits his capacity to hear and see the scene before him, Iago ensures that the general overhears only misleading snippets of conversation between the drama's unsuspecting actors. In effect, Iago creates for Othello an interpretive space within which the gestures and objects he spies confirm his worst fears about his wife's alleged infidelity. Iago's theatrical turn is so devastatingly effective because it appears to provide for Othello precisely the "ocular proof" of Desdemona's betrayal that he has demanded. The dramatic irony produced by the gap between Othello's certainty that he has now seen his wife's treachery for himself and the reader's knowledge that he has instead witnessed Bianca's anger over what she has mistaken for a sign of Cassio's unfaithfulness reinforces an uncomfortable connection between the effects of the play's action on its characters and on its readers. By tracing the shattering effects of Iago's counterfeit dumbshow, the play offers a metatheatrical reminder of our own readerly vulnerability, since, like Othello, we must rely on a language whose multiplicities have been associated with the potential for deception and on a set of five senses that have been exposed repeatedly as dangerously unreliable.

22 These intellectually and emotionally destabilizing linguistic and visual effects are magnified by Othello 's often bizarre and eerie imagery. Animals feature prominently in the play's figurative landscape, usually in disturbing contexts, and images of monstrousness and cannibalism haunt the characters' speech. Iago initiates this grotesque metaphorics just moments into the play when he announces to Roderigo: "I will wear my heart upon my sleeve / For daws to peck at." Although we now recognize as proverbial the phrase "to wear one's heart upon one's sleeve," meaning "to show openly how one feels," the Oxford English Dictionary records Iago's as the first occurrence of this expression. For the play's earliest readers the horrific image of an excised heart displayed outside the body and thus vulnerable to predation by carrion eaters--an image not yet blunted by familiarity--must have been particularly disturbing. These first readers may also have been attuned to the disruptive politics of Iago's metonymic image with its substitution of the heart--the organ most closely linked in the period with private desire--for the livery badge customarily displayed on the sleeve of the household servant as a sign of his submission to the will of a wealthy master. This association of the heart as a signifier of the self with domestic labor supports Iago's attack on the traditional model of service that he blames for Cassio's promotion at his expense. However, it also unleashes a series of animal images that are part of his wider project of dehumanizing both Othello and Desdemona. "An old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe," proclaims Iago to Brabantio, "your daughter and the Moor are making the beast with two backs."

23 The connection between the play's language of bestiality and monstrosity and the racist and sexist stereotyping of Moors and of women as lustful, untrustworthy, and nonhuman spreads throughout the play, eventually contaminating Emilia's account of the birth of jealousy--"It is a monster / Begot upon itself, born on itself"--and Othello's account of his marriage to Desdemona, which he likens to the relationship between the hunter and the bird of prey tamed to do his bidding. The play's monstrous imagery is particularly evident as Othello's terror of cuckoldry corrupts the image of the fairytale frog prince by reimagining it as a horrific toad that thrives on poisonous fumes: "I had rather be a toad / And live upon the vapor of a dungeon," the general announces, "Than keep a corner in the thing I love / For others' uses." Othello figuratively dehumanizes not only himself but also Desdemona, leaving her unnamed, a "thing"--a mere possession of her husband, like all married women under early modern English law--and reifying her imagined role as adulteress by transforming her into a room or a building whose dark corners house illicit behavior inadvertently "kept," that is, maintained, by Othello. Iago's habit of lacing his language with innuendo has also infected Othello's speech by this point in the play, and sexual slang--"corner" = vagina; "thing" = whore; "use" = sexual employment--lends his image a particular gothic horror.

24 Othello associates such doubling linguistic effects as punning and innuendo with emotional treachery and ultimately with physical violence. However, it also insists that plurality of meaning and the limits to knowing imposed by ambiguity are endemic to language and to human experience. Most of the play's major characters are duplicitous in one way or another, and their duplicity is presented as inextricably tied to the complexities of social self-construction. Iago's famous self-denial "I am not what I am" identifies him early as the play's primary deceiver, a man prepared to misrepresent himself to the world and thus a threat to social cohesion. Then, as Iago's influence over his commander grows, Othello announces his own public deception, claiming "I will be found most cunning in my patience." But even as it tracks the contagious nature and destructive force of Iago's strategy of misrepresentation, the play recognizes that deceit can be a tool for social cohesion. After all, it is not Iago but Desdemona who announces "I do beguile / The thing I am by seeming otherwise." Recognizing a social obligation to trick those around her into believing that she is cheerful even as she worries that her husband has been lost at sea in a storm, Desdemona falsifies herself self-presentation not in order to weaken communal bonds but instead to strengthen them. Indeed, in its ironic assigning to its Janus-faced antagonist Iago the dictum that "Men should be what they seem," the play emphasizes that closing the gap between being and seeming may be neither possible nor desirable in the social realm.

25 In his final speech, Othello pleads to be remembered as "one that loved not wisely, but too well." His lines are poignant not simply for their heartrending recognition that in killing Desdemona he has destroyed the thing he most loved, but for their naïve insistence that an unambiguous account of his "deeds" can exist:

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; of one whose subdued eyes, Albeit unused to the melting mood, Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees Their medicinable gum. Set you down this, And say besides that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took by th'throat the circumcisèd dog And smote him--thus. [ Othello stabs himself. ]

Even as he acts to end his life, Othello tries to manage his legacy by wrenching control of his narrative from those to whom it will fall to tell his story after his death. Like his titular designation "the Moor of Venice," Othello's closing images link his life and person--his deeds, his hand, his eyes, his tears--both to Venice and to the non-Christian, non-white world beyond its boundaries. "Speak of me as I am," Othello begs, but as the play that bears his name insists from its opening moments in a dark Venetian alley, our ability to know others is necessarily limited and narrative control is always contingent.

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A Summary and Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Othello

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

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.

These themes are central to the play’s power, but one of the triumphs of Othello , as the analysis below attempts to demonstrate, is how well Shakespeare weaves different themes and elements together at once. Before we analyse some of these themes, it might be worth recapping the plot of this great tragedy which has inspired everything from opera (Verdi’s Otello ) to a rock musical ( Catch My Soul , from the 1960s).

Othello : plot summary

The main action of the play takes place in Venice, as the play’s subtitle, The Moor of Venice , makes clear. Iago is ensign or flag-bearer to the great military general, Othello, who is a Moor (i.e. a north African Muslim). Iago expects to be promoted to the rank of lieutenant, but instead Othello passes him over in favour of Cassio. For this reason (at least he claims), Iago declares that he hates Othello and will wreak vengeance on both Othello and Cassio.

His first plot is to try to prevent Othello’s marriage to Desdemona, the beautiful daughter of Brabantio, by telling Brabantio that Othello and Desdemona have already slept together even though they are not married. Brabantio summons Othello before the court, but Othello convinces him that he and Desdemona have not yet lain together, and the two of them are married.

Next, in Cyprus on a military campaign, Iago gets Cassio drunk and arranges a brawl, which he makes sure Othello witnesses; Othello has to strip the recently promoted Cassio of his commission. Iago then sets about convincing Othello that Cassio is having an affair with Desdemona; he tells Cassio to ask Desdemona to put in a good word for him with Othello so he might get his commission back (but with the result that Othello questions why his wife would want to plead for Cassio).

Iago, having got hold of a handkerchief of Desdemona’s, which she’d lost (a gift from Othello), hatches a plan to make Othello think his wife has been sleeping with Cassio. He hides the handkerchief in Cassio’s bedchamber and then tells Othello that Cassio has it.

When Othello asks Desdemona where her handkerchief is, she confesses that she has lost it; meanwhile, Cassio gives it to Bianca, his mistress, little realising that the handkerchief is part of Iago’s grand plan to implicate him in an imaginary affair.

Iago’s plan works, and Othello is convinced that there is something going on between Cassio and Desdemona. He tells Iago to kill Cassio, and he publicly strikes Desdemona, accusing her in front of everyone. Iago then tells Roderigo to kill Cassio, but Roderigo fails, so Iago kills him so nobody will find out about the plan.

Othello, consumed with jealousy, smothers Desdemona to death with a pillow, Emilia (Iago’s wife and Desdemona’s maid) tells Othello that she was the one who found the handkerchief and gave it to her husband; Iago kills her for revealing this, and Othello wounds Iago. Realising he has thrown away the life of an innocent woman he loved dearly, Othello kills himself publicly, Cassio is made governor of Cyprus, and Iago is taken off for punishment.

Othello : analysis

Othello is a play about sexual jealousy, and how one man can convince another man, who loves his wife dearly, that she has been unfaithful to him when she hasn’t. But Shakespeare does several very interesting, and artistically quite bold, things with this basic plot, and the characters he uses to tell the story.

First, he makes his hero noble, but unusually flawed. All heroes have a tragic flaw, of course: Macbeth’s is his ‘vaulting ambition’ , Hamlet’s is his habit of delaying or over-analysing (although the extent to which he actually delays can be questioned ), and so on. But Othello’s tragic flaw, his pride, is not simply noble or military pride concerned with doing the right thing (as a great military man might be expected to have), but a rather self-serving and self-regarding kind – indeed, self-regarding to the point of being self-destructive.

He is willing to believe his innocent wife has been unfaithful to him even though he is, to all intents and purposes, devoted to her. This makes him a more interesting tragic hero, in some ways, because he isn’t a spotless hero with one major blind spot: his blind spot is, in a sense, everyone else but himself.

Second, Shakespeare doesn’t make Iago, the villain, someone whose motives we can understand. Indeed, he goes out of his way to make Iago as inscrutable as possible. If the first rule of creative writing class is ‘show don’t tell’, the second or third rule may well be ‘make your characters’ motivations clear’.

Yet Shakespeare puts into Iago’s mouth several plausible ‘motives’ for wreaking the confusion and chaos that causes Othello’s downfall and Desdemona’s death, and in providing multiple motives, Iago emerges as ‘motiveless’, to use Coleridge’s famous description (Coleridge described Iago as being possessed of ‘ motiveless malignity ’). We cannot be sure why he is doing what he is doing.

But this does not mean that he is not being driven by anything. In Shakespeare’s source material for the play, a novella by the Italian author Cinthio, Iago is straightforwardly evil and devilish, intent on destroying Othello’s life, and with a clear motive. But Shakespeare’s Iago is more dangerous still: a human, with clearly human attributes and intellect, who nevertheless derives great pleasure from causing harm to others purely because … well, because it gives him pleasure.

Part of the genius of Shakespeare’s characterisation of Iago is that he makes him a convincing ensign to Othello, a loyal servant to the Moorish warrior, even while he is plotting Othello’s downfall. He is a villain, but a charming two-faced one. In Harold Goddard’s fine phrase, he is ‘a moral pyromaniac setting fire to all of reality’ (this phrase is quoted enthusiastically by Harold Bloom in his Shakespeare: The Invention Of The Human ).

Othello is also unlike many of Shakespeare’s other great tragedies, with the possible exception of Romeo and Juliet , in that its plot could easily have been co-opted for a comedy rather than a tragedy, where the confusion created by Iago’s plotting is resolved, the villain is punished, and the hero and heroine are reconciled to live happily ever after.

Compare, in this connection, Iago’s role in Othello with that of the villainous Don John in the earlier comedy, Much Ado about Nothing (a play we have analysed here ). Like Iago, Don John wants to wreck the (upcoming) marriage between Claudio and Hero, and sets about convincing Claudio that his bride-to-be cannot be trusted.

But in Much Ado , Hero’s fidelity is proved and Don John’s villainy is exposed, and we have a comedy. Much of Othello proceeds like a comedy that takes a very dark turn at the end, when it becomes apparent that Othello will not be reconciled with Desdemona, and that the sexual jealousy and suspicion he has been made to feel are too deep-rooted to be wiped out.

The whole thing is really, of course, Iago’s play, as many critics have observed: if Othello is the tragic lead in the drama, Iago is the stage-manager, director, and dramatist all wrapped up in one. Writers from Dickens to George R. R. Martin have often sorrowfully or gleefully talked of ‘killing off’ their own characters for the amusement of others; Iago wishes to ruin Othello’s marriage for his own amusement or, in Hazlitt’s phrase, ‘stabs men in the dark to prevent ennui ’.

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2 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Othello”

The racial issue is of paramount importance in this play. The only characters whose view of Othello is not distorted by racial stereotyping are Desdemona and Cassio. Desdemona’s dying words are an attempt to exculpate her husband, and Cassio’s first reaction on learning that he has been crippled thanks to Othello’s jealous suspicions is to exclaim “Dear General, I never gave you cause!” I find no evidence that Othello is a Muslim. We’re told that he was sold into slavery in his childhood; presumably he was raised as a Christian. The “Colour” issue would have been evident in the original performances, since the Moor would certainly have been played in blackface.

I had the great good fortune to see the 2007 production of Othello put on at the Donmar Warehouse with Chiwetel Ejiofor in the title role. It was a wonderful experience…

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William Shakespeare

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Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on William Shakespeare's Othello . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Othello: Introduction

Othello: plot summary, othello: detailed summary & analysis, othello: themes, othello: quotes, othello: characters, othello: symbols, othello: literary devices, othello: quizzes, othello: theme wheel, brief biography of william shakespeare.

Historical Context of Othello

Other books related to othello.

• Full Title: The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice
• When Written: c. 1603
• Where Written: England
• When Published: 1622
• Literary Period: The Renaissance
• Genre: Tragedy
• Setting: Venice and Cyprus
• Climax: The murder of Desdemona, by Othello
• Antagonist: Iago

Extra Credit for Othello

Moor or less? In Elizabethan England, the term "Moor" could be used to refer to a wide range of non-European persons, including black Africans, North Africans, Arabs, and even Indians. References to Othello's origins throughout the play are contradictory and ambiguous Iago calls Othello a "Barbary horse" (1.1.110); Barbary was an area in Africa between Egypt and the Atlantic Ocean. Roderigo , however, calls him "thick-lips" (1.1.65-6), suggesting that he may come from further south on the African continent. Brabantio calls him "sooty" (1.2.70); Othello, along with numerous other characters, refers to himself as "black." It is impossible to know now exactly what Shakespeare or his audience would have thought a "Moor" is.

Master Shakespeare's Othello using Absolute Shakespeare's Othello essay, plot summary, quotes and characters study guides.

Plot Summary : A quick review of the plot of Othello including every important action in the play. An ideal introduction before reading the original text.

Commentary : Detailed description of each act with translations and explanations for all important quotes. The next best thing to an modern English translation.

Characters : Review of each character's role in the play including defining quotes and character motivations for all major characters.

Characters Analysis : Critical essay by influential Shakespeare scholar and commentator William Hazlitt, discussing all you need to know on the characters of Othello.

Othello Essay : Samuel Taylor Coleridge's famous essay on Othello based on his legendary and influential lectures and notes on Shakespeare.

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An Introduction to This Text: Othello

By Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine Editors of the Folger Shakespeare Library Editions

The play we call Othello was printed in two different versions in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. In 1622 appeared The Tragœdy of Othello, The Moore of Venice. As it hath beene diuerse times acted at the Globe, and at the Black-Friers, by his Maiesties Seruants. Written by VVilliam Shakespeare, a quarto or pocket-size book that provides a somewhat shorter version of the play than the one most readers know. The second version to be printed is found in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, published in 1623. Entitled simply The Tragedie of Othello, the Moore of Venice, the Folio play has about 160 lines that do not appear in the Quarto. Some of these cluster together in quite extensive passages. The Folio also lacks a scattering of about a dozen lines or part-lines that are to be found in the Quarto. These two versions also differ from each other in their readings of hundreds of words.

Usually twentieth-century editors of Shakespeare made the decision about which version of a play to prefer according to their theories about the origins of the early printed texts. In the case of Othello, however, there has emerged no consensus among editors about what kind of manuscripts can be imagined to lie behind the two early printed texts. Therefore almost all recent editors have relied, for the basis of their editions, upon what they regard as the more accurate text, namely, the Folio’s. (Following a recent fashion in Shakespeare editing, some editors have speculated that there were once two distinct Shakespearean versions of the play. According to this view, the Quarto offers Shakespeare’s unrevised version, the Folio his revised version. Since these editors are led by their hypothesis to prefer the Folio, their speculations have made little difference to the kind of editions they have produced.)

For the present edition we have reexamined these early printed texts. This edition is based directly on the Folio printing of Othello rather than on any modern edition. 1 But our text offers an edition of the Folio because it prints such Quarto readings and such later editorial emendations as are, in our judgment, necessary to repair what may be errors and deficiencies in the Folio. The present edition also offers its readers the lines and part-lines and many of the words that are to be found only in the Quarto, marking them as such (see below).

Quarto words are added when their omission would seem to leave a gap in our text. For example, in the first scene of the play, a half-line found in the Quarto, “And in conclusion,” seems to have been dropped from the Folio between the lines “Horribly stuffed with epithets of war” and “Nonsuits my mediators”; we have added that needed half-line. We also add Quarto words when they are oaths or interjections (“O God,” “Zounds,” etc.) that may be missing from the Folio through censorship. When the Folio lacks Quarto words that appear to add nothing of significance, we do not add these words to our text. For example, the Quarto’s “O, then” in the line “If she be false, ⟨ O, then ⟩ heaven mocks itself” ( 3.3.319 ) and the Quarto’s “did” in the line “That I ⟨ did ⟩ love the Moor to live with him” ( 1.3.283 ) seems only to regularize the meter without adding anything of significance. Both of these lines can be read without the Quarto additions as potent iambic pentameter lines. We have therefore chosen not to alter the Folio reading.

Occasionally Quarto readings are substituted for Folio words when a word in the Folio is unintelligible (i.e., is not a word) or is incorrect according to the standards of that time for acceptable grammar, rhetoric, idiom, or usage, and the Quarto provides an intelligible and acceptable word. (Examples of such substitutions are the Quarto’s “pains” for the Folio’s “apines” [ 1.1.171 ], Q’s “sometimes” for F’s “sometime” [ 1.2.4 ], and Q’s “these” for F’s “this” in the line “There’s no composition in ⟨ these ⟩ news” [ 1.3.1 ].) We recognize that our understanding of what was acceptable in Shakespeare’s time is to some extent inevitably based on reading others’ editions of Othello, but it is also based on reading other writing from the period and on historical dictionaries and studies of Shakespeare’s grammar.

We also prefer the Quarto reading to the Folio’s when a word in the Folio seems to be the result of censorship or “damping down” of an oath or solemn interjection, and the Quarto provides a stronger oath or interjection (for example, when the Quarto reads “God” in place of the Folio’s “Heaven” or Q reads “By the Mass” in place of F’s “in troth”). And, finally, we print a word from the Quarto rather than the Folio when a word in the Folio seems at odds with the story that the play tells and the Quarto supplies a word that coheres with the story. (For example, the Folio has Othello report that Desdemona gave him “a world of kisses” before he had declared his love and they had discussed marriage, while the Quarto has him refer to a “world of sighs” [ 1.3.183 ]. Like almost all modern editions, we here adopt the Quarto reading.)

In order to enable its readers to tell the difference between the Folio and Quarto versions, the present edition uses a variety of signals:

(1) All the words in this edition that are printed in the Quarto version but not in the Folio appear in pointed brackets ( ⟨ ⟩ ).

(2) All full lines that are found in the Folio and not in the Quarto are printed in square brackets ( [ ] ).

(3) Sometimes neither the Folio nor the Quarto seems to offer a satisfactory reading, and it is necessary to print a word different from what is offered by either. Such words (called “emendations” by editors) are printed within half square brackets ( ⌜ ⌝ ).

By observing these signals and by referring to the textual notes , a reader can use this edition to read the play as it was printed in the Folio, or as it was printed in the Quarto, or as it has been presented in the editorial tradition, which has combined Folio and Quarto. (This tradition can be traced back, ultimately, to the anonymous editor of the Second Quarto of 1630.)

In this edition whenever we change the wording of the Folio or add anything to its stage directions, we mark the change. We want our readers to be immediately aware when we have intervened. (Only when we correct an obvious typographical error in the Quarto or Folio does the change not get marked.) Whenever we change the wording of the Folio or Quarto, or change the punctuation so as to affect meaning, we list the change in the textual notes. Those who wish to find the Quarto’s alternatives to the Folio’s readings will be able to find these also in the textual notes.

For the convenience of the reader, we have modernized the punctuation and the spelling of both the Folio and the Quarto. Sometimes we go so far as to modernize certain old forms of words; for example, when a means “he,” we change it to he; we change mo to more and ye to you. But it is not our practice in editing any of the plays to modernize words that sound distinctly different from modern forms. For example, when the early printed texts read sith or apricocks or porpentine, we have not modernized to since, apricots, porcupine. When the forms an, and, or and if appear instead of the modern form if, we have reduced and to an but have not changed any of these forms to their modern equivalent, if. We also modernize and, where necessary, correct passages in foreign languages, unless an error in the early printed text can be reasonably explained as a joke.

We correct or regularize a number of the proper names, as is the usual practice in editions of the play. For example, the Folio’s spelling “Rodorigo” is changed to “Roderigo,” and there are a number of other comparable adjustments in the names. We expand the often severely abbreviated forms of names used as speech headings in early printed texts into the full names of the characters. We also regularize the speakers’ names in speech headings, using only a single designation for each character, even though the early printed texts sometimes use a variety of designations. Variations in the speech headings of the early printed texts are recorded in the textual notes.

This edition differs from many earlier ones in its efforts to aid the reader in imagining the play as a performance. Thus stage directions are written with reference to the stage. For example, the stage direction for Brabantio’s first entrance is based on the Folio, “Enter Brabantio above” rather than on the Quarto, “Enter Brabantio at a window.” While in the fiction of the play we are no doubt to imagine the old man appearing at a window in the upper story of his house, there is little evidence that there were windows in the gallery of early-seventeenth-century theaters. We reproduce the stage direction more likely to have reference to the stage rather than to the story. Whenever it is reasonably certain, in our view, that a speech is accompanied by a particular action, we provide a stage direction describing the action. (Occasional exceptions to this rule occur when the action is so obvious that to add a stage direction would insult the reader.) Stage directions for the entrance of characters in mid-scene are, with rare exceptions, placed so that they immediately precede the characters’ participation in the scene, even though these entrances may appear somewhat earlier in the early printed texts. Whenever we move a stage direction, we record this change in the textual notes. Latin stage directions (e.g., Exeunt ) are translated into English (e.g., They exit ).

In the present edition, as well, we mark with a dash any change of address within a speech, unless a stage direction intervenes. When the -ed ending of a word is to be pronounced, we mark it with an accent. Like editors for the past two centuries, we display metrically linked lines in the following way:

However, when there are a number of short verse-lines that can be linked in more than one way, we do not, with rare exceptions, indent any of them.

• We have also consulted the computerized text of the First Folio provided by the Text Archive of the Oxford University Computing Centre, to which we are grateful.

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Literary English

Brief Introduction to Othello by William Shakespeare

Introduction to othello by shakespeare.

Othello is one of the most famous plays among Shakespearean tragedies. It has a verity of themes: Love, jealousy, racism, prejudice, appearance and reality, possessiveness, intrigue, betrayal, etc. Unlike other Shakespearean tragedies, King Lea, Macbeth, and Hamlet, Othello is a pure domestic tragedy as it deals with domestic issues of a married couple: the husband’s jealousy and the wife’s ignorance that lead to demise and bloodshed at the end.

Othello is simplest in its form with well-structured and single unified plot. It has limited numbers of characters with equal involvement and everyone is performing his own individual role, which increase its comprehensibility. Othello has often been described as a “tragedy of character” and that is why it is a domestic tragedy.

A Brief Story of Othello

Othello, An African Moor, General in Venetian Military Force, married to a Venetian girl Desdemona. Iago, one of the soldiers under Othello’s command, hates Othello for not promoting him to the position of the lieutenant and plans for the downfall of Othello. To achieve his motives, Iago uses his friend Roderigo, who is in love with Desdemona and wants to marry her, to pave his own way. Iago tells Roderigo that Othello preferred Cassio although I deserve for this post.

Iago plans a web to entrap Cassio for demotion by making him drunk and put him on a fight with Roderigo meanwhile Othello appears and ask who is responsible for this fight. Iago blames Cassio and Othello removes him from his position as a punishment. Iago manipulates this situation by asking Cassio to ask for help from Desdemona to get back his position. Meanwhile, Iago creates suspicion in mind of Othello that Cassio is in adulterous relation with his wife, Desdemona. Iago, as a proof, manipulate Cassio’s meeting with Desdemona for getting back his position and Othello suspicion gets fire to see that his wife is in relation with other Venetian and he thinks that he is Black Moor and how a Venetian girl can love him.

Othello plans to remove both to neutralize his jealousy and ask Iago to kill Cassio and he himself take the task to kill Desdemona. Iago uses Roderigo to kill Cassio, but Roderigo fails to kill Cassio who gets wounded only, Iago kills Roderigo. At the same time, Othello kills his wife, Desdemona. Emilia, wife of Iago, who was maid to Desdemona witness death of her mistress and reveals it to all. Othello tell her that he killed her because she was in relation with Cassio. Emilia justifies Desdemona’s true love and says that her husband, Iago, mad you mad in this jealousy by his multiple intrigues. When Othello comes to know what reality is, he stabs himself and dies with his wife. 

115 Othello Essay Topics & Examples

Most Othello essay samples analyze the plot, thesis, and characters of William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice. The tragedy is based on n Cinthio’s story ‘Un Capitano Moro.’

Before you start writing your Othello essay, you must have a clear understanding of who The Moor is. We hope that you already have read the plot or watched the play.

However, some students lack an idea of the object because they have not come across Shakespeare’s masterpiece or any information concerning Othello. This post will help you to ask Othello essay questions and successfully write your paper.

✨ How to Write an Othello Essay?

• 🏆 Best Othello Essay Topics & Essay Examples

👍 Good Ideas for an Essay on Othello

💡 most interesting othello topics to write about, ❓ othello essay questions.

Before you start outlining, you should ask yourself: what or who is Othello? Your answer is significant as it expresses your interest in the subject and, therefore, motivates you to research the chosen topic.

When working on your Othello essay introduction, you should get a clear understanding of The Moor character and its origin.

Your intro should thoroughly explain the subject to your audience. Don’t forget to include a thesis which discloses the central message of your paper. Put it at the end of your intro.

The next step is planning the essay body. Here are some questions you may answer in your Othello character analysis:

• Describe Othello: Who is he? When he lives, his life, occupation, etc.
• Is Othello a good character or bad? Do you identify with Othello?
• Why is Othello famous to date? What makes him popular?
• What is his role in the play? Why is Othello character crucial to the tragedy? Would the story so attractive without Othello?
• Does the play reflect contemporary issues?
• What did you learn from Othello?

Explain the pointers above and provide a better understanding of the Othello character to your readers.

If you need more sample ideas for your Othello essay outline, check them below:

• The role of race in Shakespeare’s tragedy. At the beginning of the plot, Othello’s name is not mentioned, although everyone knows he is dark-skinned and different. Discuss in your essay, how it would impact the play if Othello were white. Argue if the character’s race is matter in the story.
• The role of loyalty. Shakespeare showed how loyalty could have both positive and negative attributes. Othello’s belief in Desdemona’s lack of allegiance caused their destiny. Use it as an example of how devotion can be dangerous if it is used for bad reasons.
• The role of Desdemona. Is she is a passive victim of Othello? Analyze how her character changes when she is not with him. Think of how victim behavior can cause even more violence.
• Relationships between characters in the play. In your essay, you can examine relationships and emotions between Othello and Desdemona, the villainy of Iago’s character, Emilia’s emotions for Iago and Othello, and love of Roderigo for Desdemona.

In your Othello essay conclusion, sum up all the issues you disclosed in the body. Avoid introducing new points. Instead, highlight the thesis statement to show your readers that your essay supports it.

After you’ve finished your essay, don’t forget to proofread it and wipe out grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes.

We hope that the tips above will ease your writing an outstanding paper. Make sure to check our website for more Othello essay topics!

🏆 Best Othello Topic Ideas & Essay Examples

• Theme of Jealousy in Othello by Shakespeare The jealousy displayed by Othello and the villainous nature of Lago are some of the qualities that impress the readers of the play.
• The Downfall of Othello The properties of Othello are given to Cassio who also assumes position that had been held by Othello The downfall of Othello is evidenced by death of his wife, loss of property and his own […]
• The Relevance of “Othello” by William Shakespeare in the Current Society The paper demonstrates the relevance of Othello to the contemporary audience by highlighting the existence of the major issues Shakespeare addresses in this play.
• The Tragedy of Othello: Critical Analysis — Othello Critical Essay The imagination of the audience is captured by the fact that the drama involves interracial marriage that was unfathomable in those days.
• The Movie Adaptation of the “Othello” by William Shakespeare In its turn, this explains the lessened plausibility of film’s action, as compared to what it is being the case with original tragedy.
• Othello as the Outsider In the play, Othello strives to emphasize that his blackness is insignificant impediment and highlight the advantages of his origin revealing the positive features of his character and behavior.
• Salih’s “Season of Migration to the North” and “Othello” by Shakespeare In his journey through those worst performances on English women leading a few to suicide, he did not consider the situation and emotions of women he met.
• Story, Plot, and Symbolism of “Othello” Film The movie’s point of attack is Othello’s decision to overlook Iago for a promotion to the position of Lieutenant in favor of Cassio.
• Female Characters in Shakespeare’s “Othello”: A Feminist Critique This shows that Desdemona has completely accepted and respected her role as a woman in the society; she is an obedient wife to Othello.
• Minor Characters’ Role in the “Othello” by William Shakespeare In his play Othello, William Shakespeare also accentuates the meaning of minor characters and their actions for the development of the tragedy in Othello’s life.
• Iago the Gardener`s Behavior in “Othello” by Shakespeare In the lead-up to the passage to be analyzed, Iago has tried to turn Brabantio, Desdemona’s father, against Othello by letting him know his daughter is “making the beast with two backs” with the Moor.
• Othello’s Fall From Grace and Redemption at the End of the Play At the end of the play, Othello’s realizes that his naivety and lack of confidences in his wife’ innocence and fidelity.
• Character of Iago in “Othello” by Shakespeare Analysis It is worth mentioning here that it is this attributes that he possessed that made him successful in manipulating other characters painting him to be a strong and compelling character.
• Comparison of “Hamlet”, “King Lear” and “Othello” by Shakespeare Iago’s reports and the loss of the handkerchief appear to Othello reliable proofs of Desdemona’s unfaithfulness, and under the effect of anger the protagonist is both unable and unwilling to do further investigation.
• Othello and Desdemona in “Othello” by Shakespeare This essay will discuss why the relationship between Othello and Desdemona was doomed from the start and how their tragic fate relates to the topic of jealousy.
• Othello’s Tragedy Othello is one of the characters who have features in William Shakespeare’s tragedy titled The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice. It is clear to note that the tragedy that befell Othello was because […]
• Othello: A Tragic Hero Through the Prism of Aristotle’s Definition According to him, the prerequisite of a tragedy revolves around the plot of the play. Othello, who is the main character, is a perfect example of a tragic hero.
• Jealousy in “Othello” by W.Shakespear Othello is not perfect either and the reason he acts the way he acts is that he is jealous; not that Desdemona cannot match his ‘principles’.
• Cultural Diversity in the Play “Othello” It is the role of men to support women in this society, and that is why Desdemona’s father goes to court immediately, he is convinced that his daughter was bewitched by Othello.
• Main Themes in “Othello” and “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” In fact, it appears that this passion is encouraged by the feelings of regret and shame more than by affection to Bayardo.
• Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’ Act 1 Scene 2, Lines 60-82 This passage is in the form of a dialogue between the two characters in the play. The above lines portray Othello as a victim of prejudice.
• The Heroism of Othello He is a tragic hero because of how he fits the mold, with the single difference that instead of pride, Othello is unwise in his placement of loyalties.
• The Tragedy of Othello by William Shakespeare: Bianca’s Innocence The Tragedy of Othello the Moor of Venice is considered one of the most popular works of William Shakespeare. The young courtesan, Bianca, is presented in the play as the mistress of one of the […]
• The Life and Work of William Shakespeare: His Contribution to the Contemporary Theater In addition, the plays and sonnets of William Shakespeare continue to set the standard for the study of the English language in its dramatic context in institutes of higher learning and performance training.
• Symbolism in Shakespeare’s Othello and Pope’s The Rape of the Lock This paper aims to compare the aspects of symbolism in Othello and The Rape of the Lock. The lock in the poem “The Rape of the Lock” is more than just a coiled strand of […]
• Racism in Play “Othello” by William Shakespeare Since Othello is dark-skinned, the society is against his marriage to the daughter of the senator of Venice. In summary, the play Othello is captivating and presents racism as it was.
• “Othello” by William Shakespeare: Summary and Analysis He in this way believes that Iago is an honest man and trusts him to an extent that, he leaves him with his wife and entrusts him to take care of his wife through the […]
• Appearance in “Othello” and “A Raisin in the Sun” The paper under analysis is based on the comparison of Othello by Shakespeare and A Raising in the Sun by Hansberry through the manifesting of the theme of the racial segregation and the nature of […]
• Shakespeare’s “Othello” and Miller’s “The Crucible” The villains in both “Othello” and “The Crucible” are unique in their proficiency in the use of language for manipulating others and their ability to use the current setting for achieving their goals; Abigail is […]
• Racism in Shakespeare’s “Othello” The purpose of this essay is to detect and analyze various traits of racism in Shakespeare’s famous piece Othello and how it relates to the character of Othello.
• Othello and Oedipus Rex Characters’ Traits The two characters had to overcome several obstacles in a manner that led many of their followers to respect and honor them, and their royal positions Othello can be considered to be a black member […]
• Shakespeare’s Othello as a Subaltern Play Othello is considered a subaltern play that illustrates the conflict between the moral voice and silence of female characters and the treacherous voices of male figures.
• Social Issues in Shakespeare’s “The Tragedy of Othello” The social environment of England at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century was characterized by great attention to social class, citizens’ jobs, and their reputation.
• Why “Othello” by William Shakespeare Is a Tragedy To be classified as an Aristotelian tragedy, a film or story must be complex and include a situation in which a respectable person suffers a complete reversal of fortunes due to a fatal mistake and […]
• The Theme of the Tragic Hero “Othello” For Othello, the doubt and suspicion growing in his mind regarding a possible relationship between Cassio and Desdemona were started with Desdemona’s father at the beginning of the play. For Othello, his greatest weakness is […]
• ”Othello” and ”Chronicle of a Death Foretold”: A Difference Between Love and Passion Consequently, I believe that differences between passion and love have a tendency to exist, as passion is the uncontrolled actions to show affection, and love is the act of the understanding of the behavior of […]
• Comparison of Marriage in Elizabethan Times and in “Othello” The man was believed to be the head of the family, and he had the legal right to punish his wife.
• Female Character in the Shakespeare’s Othello It appears that the primary role of women in the play is for them to act as a basis on which men are evaluated.
• Shakespeare’s Othello, the Moor of Venice Iago’s paranoia is tremendous to an extent that his insanity is portrayed when he deludes Othello to kill his own wife.
• Racism in Shakespeare’s “Othello” and Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” The formalist analysis of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep repeats the same mistake, as it focuses on the plot devices and tropes presented in the story.
• The Ultimate Irony: “Othello” by Shakespeare Iago, a jealous man from the beginning of the play, pretends to befriend Othello and speaks to him about the danger of jealousy.
• Machiavelli and Othello’s Leadership Skills It is not that easy to control lots of people, and this is why it is better to define the steps, which will help to take everything under control and not to be kept by […]
• Dramatic Irony in the “Othello” by William Shakespeare Othello, an eloquent and physically fit person is considered as the protagonist and hero of the play; however, in spite of his elevated status, he is nonetheless an easy prey to insecurities due to his […]
• Iago and Othello Relationships With the help of relationships between Iago and Othello, Shakespeare conveyed the idea that good and evil have to coexist for the sake of the world balance.
• “Othello” Through the Lens of Feminist Theory It depicts female characters in a state of submission and obedience and shows the disbalance in the distribution of power between men and women.
• Iago’s Motives in Shakespeare’s Othello Play He does not seek to seize the treasure his intention is only to deprive the possessor of the treasure of pleasure. A cynic to the depths of his brain, he sees only the flipside in […]
• Mind vs. Heart in “Othello” by William Shakespeare The main idea of the William Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello, written in 1604, is the confrontation of the mind and the heart.
• Anti-Racism in Shakespeare’s Othello For Shakespeare, Brabantio’s views are representative of the racial prejudice of the society in general, rather than of his personal feelings towards the protagonist. On the other hand, Othello’s story is cohesive and believable; he […]
• Othello and Desdemona: Emotional Strangers Unaware of what is happening, Desdemona continues to show her fierce devotion to her husband which both blinds her to the truth of Othello’s murderous emotions and feeds them.
• The Character of Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello The greatest evil in the play, the catalyst for the tragedy to unfold, appears to be “the Devil,” the avatar of which can be seen in Iago.
• The Tragedy of Othello They include Othello, who is the lead actor; Desdemona, Othello’s wife; Cassio, Othello’s lieutenant; and Iago a junior officer in the army.
• Shakespeare and His View on Kingship: Macbeth, King Lear and Othello At the same time, it is beyond doubt in the basement Macbeth’s character is clean and as a soldier, he is true to his job and his king.
• Comparison of Oedipus and Othello Cases The essay intends to look at the life of Oedipus who is the main character of the book and how the gods were responsible for his downfall after the struggle he had gone through to […]
• Philosophy of Literature: Shakespearean Tragedy In addition, it is also an indication of the facts that human beings are always nosy and ready to participate in other people’s issues.
• Play Analysis: Shakespeare’s “Othello” and “Twelfth Night” Iago’s persona, which is portrayed as predatory and cynical, is crucial to the tragedy because it disturbs the plot. Shakespeare succeeds in making the play unsettling by utilizing a lot of epithets, metaphors, amplifications, repetitions, […]
• Shakespeare’s Othello: Hero or Villain Review However, it is still possible to view Othello as a hero but a tragic one. He is a tragic hero who suffered from his actions.
• Shakespeare’s Tragedy “Othello” Speaking of racism as a possible motivation for Iago’s behavior, it is worth noting that it is not the primary and only source of its manifestation.
• The Significance of the Handkerchief to Othello The main reason for the discord is that Othello slept with his wife and justifies all the negativity toward Iago. The handkerchief is the best proof that Desdemona has entered into an intimate relationship with […]
• “Le Morte Darthur” by Malory, Thomas and “Othello” by Shakespeare The mistrust grows, culminating in the assassinations of Emilia, Roderigo, and Desdemona, as well as Othello’s death. In truth, Iago’s evilness inspires Roderigo’s jealousy and Othello’s misgivings of his own innocent wife, Desdemona.
• Topics in the Othello Play by Shakespeare I frequently returned to the beginning of the passage or dialogue to remind myself what the topic of the conversation was.
• The Use of Dark Symbolism in “Othello” and “Paradise Lost” Thus, the use of dark imagery in Milton’s work is implemented to heighten the contrast between light and darkness, good and evil.
• Restoring Honor and Confidence in Shakespeare’s Othello The correlation of the fate of the hero with the development of society, which is the main distinguishing feature of the genre of tragedy, can take on a variety of artistic forms.
• Analysis of Acts I and II of Shakespeare’s Othello Play In lines “and what’s he then that says I play the villain,” Iago acknowledges that he seduces his victim, Cassio, by pretending to display good intent.
• Background of Shakespeare’s “Othello” and Sophocles’s “Antigone” Even though Othello is a Moor, he fights for Venice in this war and wins, thus proving his loyalty to the Christian Venice.
• Power in Stories of Oedipus and Othello What woman in that period would not want to marry a high-ranking general and acquire the power that comes with it?
• Lago’s Hatred and Jealousy in the “Othello” by William Shakespeare Othello is a story by William Shakespeare that revolves around four characters, Othello, who is the general in the Venetian Army, Lago, who was Othello’s assistant in the same army, Desdemona, the daughter of a […]
• Critical Analysis of Shakespeare’s, “Othello”, Act V, Scene II Othello, a husband to Desdemona realizes later that Desdemona was a faithful and loving woman. Othello is determined to kill her however her beauty and innocent appearance restrict Othello.
• Exploring Diverse Perspectives on Shakespeare’s Othello: A Comprehensive Analysis He starts by briefly retelling the main events of Othello and proceeds to state that modern critics’ main concern is about the subjects of race and gender in their analyses of the play.
• “Othello” by William Shakespeare: Military Honor and Othello The higher a person’s rank, the more he is expected to honor the code and the harder it is for him to conceive of someone else breaking it.
• Shakespeare’s Othello: A Tragic Hero When Alexander the Great died, Aristotle fled to Chalcis, where he died the following year at the age of about 62 William Shakespeare was a strong adherent of Aristotle in his writings.
• Shakespearean Othello as a Tragic Figure Enraged and hurt, he is mistaken in his judgments about Desdemona, it is anger that he is moved by and not his sound mind. Actually, Othello’s anger is an outcome of his jealousy.
• Othello: The Shakespeare Story Analysis Using the three female characters of Desdemona, Emilia, and Bianca, Shakespeare gives us the common view of women through the eyes of Iago and the view of the nobility through the eyes of Brabantio, Desdemona’s […]
• Speciesism in Shakespeare’s Othello and Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep In Shakespeare’s play, the motif of discrimination is explored in conjunction with Othello’s dark skin color, something that caused the “noble Moore” to be treated with suspicion by other characters throughout the play.
• “Othello”, “A Worn Path” and “Negro” Literature Comparison Although Hughes in his “Negro” discusses race as the main source for the character’s identity and attempts to accentuate the role of the black race for the whole world history, Shakespeare in Othello and Welty […]
• “Othello” a Play by W. Shakespeare Literature Analysis Consequently, Othello seeks to distance himself with the misconstrued stereotypes of a ‘Moor.’ This essay seeks to prove that the main character’s sense of identity leads to his self-destruction.
• Compare and Contrast Shakespeare’s Othello and the Blind Owl by Sedayat On the other hand, in The Blind Owl, the storyteller, a pen-case decorator, falls in love with a naive woman who is virtuous and demonic at the same time. In The Blind Owl, it is […]
• Treatment of Women by Shakespeare and Sophocles Othello disregards the explanation that Desdemona has in regard to the accusation of being unfaithful and kills her.’She’s, like a liar, gone to burning hell, Shakespeare 28.’ After Othello killed Desdemona, he believed more in […]
• What Can Lawyers Learn From ‘Othello’? Shakespeare has employed one of the literature elements by using major characters like, Othello, a hero and the head of armies, Desdemona, Othello’s covert wife, Michael Cassio, Othello’s deputy, Lago, ranked below the lieutenant, among […]
• Humiliation of Iago (Othello) In order to identify the actual reasons for Iago’s hatred to Desdemona and Othello, the author makes use of his own approach in analyzing the play through the prism of motives, plots, themes, and character […]
• William Shakespeare’s Othello Summary | Essay Example Othello leaves Venice in the company of his wife, Iago and Cassio and Desdemona’s attendant known as Emilia. Othello’s love for Desdemona is a major weakness that leads to his downfall.
• The Driving Force of Plot in Medea by Euripides, Othello by William Shakespeare, and the Epic of Gilgamesh Reading Medea by Euripides, Othello by William Shakespeare, and The Epic of Gilgamesh it becomes obvious that the driving force of plot is heroism, however, the nature of that heroism is different that may be […]
• Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Othello: The Words and Actions of Iago To my mind, one of the most complex, captivating, and, at the same time, the most evil characters in Shakespeare’s plays is Iago from The Tragedy of Othello.
• The Issue of Racial Prejudice The significance of Othello’s race and pigmentation work hard to expose racial prejudice in the Elizabethan era. Shakespeare is using the Moor to challenge the ideologies of race, sex and miscegenation in the Elizabethan period.
• Othello and Snow Country: Personal Opinion As aforementioned, it is hard to differentiate between love and passion as they all come in the name of love. Nevertheless, because his ‘love’ for her is based on passion, he smothers her to death; […]
• Why Does Iago Convince Othello of Desdemona’s Infidelity?
• How Are Othello and Blanche Dubois Alienated in Their Societies?
• How Jealousy Leads Towards the Tragedy in “Othello”?
• Why Iago From William Shakespeare’s “Othello” Is a Well-Written Villain?
• Does Othello Meet the Standards of a Tragic Hero?
• How Does Iago Convince Othello That Desdemona and Cassio Must Die?
• What Role Does Race Plays in “Othello”?
• How Does Iago Attempt to Poison Othello Against Desdemona?
• How Do Age, Social Position, and Race Impact the Relationship Between Othello and Desdemona?
• Can Pathos and Ethos Compel “Othello” Out of Logic?
• How Are the Characters Empowered or Disempowered in “Brilliant Lies” and “Othello”?
• Why Isn’t Shakespeare’s “Othello” Called Iago?
• What Are the Qualities “Othello” Possesses Which Make It a Tragedy?
• Does Iago Cause the Tragedy of Othello and Desdemona, or Is He Merely the Catalyst?
• How Does Iago Convince Othello of Desdemona’s Infidelity?
• Why Did Othello Kill Desdemona?
• Why Does Othello Choose to Trust Iago Rather Than Desdemona?
• Does Iago Cause the Tragedy of Othello?
• What Are the Similarities Between “Macbeth” and “Othello”?
• How Far Does the Context of War and Soldiery Contribute to the Tragedy in Shakespeare’s “Othello”?
• Whose Responsibilities for Tragedy Outcome of “Othello”?
• What Are the Contextual Factors Critical to the Study of “Othello”?
• How Did Iago Manipulate Othello?
• What Role Does Incoherent Language Play in “Othello”?
• How Othello’s Personality Evolves in the Tragedy of “Othello” by William Shakespeare?
• What Does Othello’s Speech and Say Tell Us About His Character?
• Did Desdemona and Othello Experience True Love?
• Did Othello Truly Love Desdemona?
• How Does the Ending of “Othello” Relate to the Ideas and Characteristics of the Text?
• Were “Othello” and “The Merchant of Venice” Racist Plays?
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6 (page 55) p. 55 Othello

• Published: April 2017
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Like Romeo and Juliet, Othello is a fictional love tragedy focusing on two private individuals whose lives are not bound up with the fate of nations. The play is based on an Italian tale—a prosaic story of love and jealousy—by Giraldi Cinthio, which Shakespeare romanticizes and dignifies. Compact, fast-moving, tensely dramatic, emotionally compelling, and rising to a riveting tragic conclusion with the murder of Desdemona by Othello followed by his suicide, it is an immensely effective piece of theatre written in dialogue, sometimes racy and conversational, which rises to great heights of eloquence. ‘ Othello ’ describes the key characters Othello, Iago, and Desdemona, and the plot of the play.

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Othello by Shakespeare: Introduction

Othello the play has often been described as a "tragedy of character". The plot of the play Othello is one of Shakespeare's most highly concentrated, tightly constructed tragedies, with no subplots and no humor to relieve the tension.

The main outline of the story of Othello relates to a novel, The Moor of Venice . The novel was written by a Sicilian novelist Giraldi Cinthio. As the date of the first performance of the drama goes to 1604, we can assume that it was written during the same year. To some extent, events and the roles of the characters have been modified. Many events shown in the novel have been omitted and others reformulated. New characters such as Brabantio, Roderigo, Montano and some others have been added to modulate the actions to incite interest in a new way. The plot has been designed in a better way. lago has been presented responsible for Cassio's disgrace, and at the same time lago's wife acts to assist her husband unknowingly forming the intricacy of the plot and also acts to resolve, the intrigue finally. Shakespeare's genius can be highly appreciated after critical evaluation of reformulation of the intensity and smooth flow of actions.

Othello is one of the most frequently enacted plays of Shakespeare, and its popularity is perhaps due to the universality of its theme: love and sexual jealousy, the conflict between love and hatred, and doubt and gullibility. The play exerts a 'relentless emotional grip' on its audience. Shakespeare has examined with great psychological complexity and depth the powerful feelings of love and hatred, jealousy and revenge. The intensity of the drama is heightened because all the minor characters and events are designed to highlight the protagonists and their actions. The play is so spellbinding because of the contradictions and tensions it contains: a black soldier marries the daughter of a white nobleman, an evil ensign corrupts a great soldier, and passionate love is turned to overwhelming jealousy. The play gives equal focus to the two main characters, Othello and Iago, in such a way that it becomes almost difficult to students and critics to determine who is primarily responsible for this great tragedy.

Othello Study Center

Summary of Shakespeare's Othello

Conflict of Male Female Relationship in Othello

Dramatic Irony in Shakespeare's Othello

Othello a Tragic Hero with Hamartia

Incompatibility of Military Heroism and Love in Othello

Othello as a Domestic Play

Poetic Justice in Shakespeare's Othello

Othello as a Renaissance Play

Use of Soliloquy in Othello

The Temptation Scene in Othello

Themes in Shakespeare's Othello

Villainous Role of Iago in Othello

Biography of William Shakespeare

English Studies

This website is dedicated to English Literature, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, English Language and its teaching and learning.

Racism in Othello by Shakespeare

Othello, the most innocent tragedy where deus ex machina does not appear, has become perhaps the most controversial in terms of racial discrimination and prejudice as shown through this analysis about Racism in Othello.

Introduction to Racism in Othello

Table of Contents

Othello, the most innocent tragedy where deus ex machina does not appear, has become perhaps the most controversial in terms of racial discrimination and prejudice as shown through this analysis about racism in Othello. Even the most modern performances and readings of Othello have elicited such responses where race and its associated features are given a prominent place. Writing on the performance of Othello in America, Kevin Young has discussed the question of racial hatred, racial prejudice and the performance of Othello. However, he has used a very pointed argument saying “Othello was a handy sobriquet when white Americans needed a metaphor for b**ck criminal behavior (41). This shows that racial hatred is deep-seated in the very psyche of white people, for Young has listed various newspaper reviews of the performance of Othello to come to the conclusion that, in fact, it is the white supremacy in America that has created this version of meanings regarding Shakespeare and his creation, Othello. In fact, racism in Othello has various dimensions including the Othellophilia and alienation and isolation as its psychological impacts. 

Racism in Othello: Difference

Othello and its modern performances and readings have elicited diverse responses. If compared to two diverse responses, Martin Okrin says that South African and European visions differ regarding racism in Othello. He alleges that this is purely a Eurocentric concept and in the case of Othello, it is even English Eurocentric that Elizabethan audiences in English used to experience racism and attributes b**ckness with “barbarous, treacherous, libidinous, and jealous” (167) behavioral qualities. That is why Iago uses racial slurs against Othello in the early scenes such as “the Moor” (I. i. 57) which is used against the aliens and then “the thick lips” (I.i. 66) which is specifically used against the b**ck men. Both of these terms show barbarity that is associated with Moorish people and then libidinous attribute that is associated with sexual dominance. He even uses “an old b**ck race” (I. i. 88), which shows prejudicial behavior existing in English and English audiences at that time. In other words, Martin Okrin’s point is correct that this is an English Eurocentric view about racism. However, this is specifically associated with the b**ck color, another perspective of Othello that is still prevalent.

Racism in Othello: Color

B**ck color is associated with various bad behavioral traits but first, this b**ckness is considered the foundation of bad behavioral traits as Kader Mutlu has argued in his paper that in Othello, “the portrait of race and being b**ck can be seen more explicitly (136). He is of the view that the hatred in the heart of Iago is due to b**ckness. However, the marriage of Othello to Desdemona, a white woman, further intensifies this hatred, leading him to utter entirely racial slurs as pointed out earlier (136). In other words, he means that this inter-racial marriage that has caused Iago to feel jealousy and hence weaves plots against Othello, leading to his downfall. It means that inter-racial marriage is another perspective of racism in Othello.

Racism in Othello as Othellophilia

A very interesting point has cropped up in the book of Celia Dialeader which she has penned down on racism with reference to Othellophilia or “Othello Myth” saying that it means love or marriage between a b**ck man and b**ck woman. In her review of the book, Christy Desmety has praised Celia Dialeader saying that this is the first time that Celia Dialeader has raised this point with reference to inter-racial marriages (281). She argues that Celia means that such marriages in canonical narratives involve white women with b**ck men. In other words, she states that this inter-racial sexual interest and ensuing social prejudice is less with men than with white women. She has, in fact, singled out white women and their perception of b**ck men and the projection of their sexuality (281). It is very interesting that she has drawn rather a positive point of racial attraction rather than racial prejudice; nevertheless, it is associated with racism. However, the negative point of alienation has been ignored by her.

Impacts of Racism in Othello

Racism and racial hatred or prejudice cause the subject to feel various psychological issues including but not limited to alienation. Alpaslan Toker has termed this as “racial alienation” (33) with reference to Othello after deducing it from various theoretical studies regarding Othello. He has concluded that alienation, in fact, is a “mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien” (33). Commenting on it further, he further says that a person suffering from such alienation often becomes estranged from his own personality (33). In other words, he means that Othello is feeling alienation in the Venetian society which makes him “estranged from himself” (33). However, Toker refers to Roderigo’s words against Othello to prove his argument that his an outsider and is considered of “here and everywhere” (qtd. Toker 33). Touching on the systematic study of the Orient as Orientalism, he concludes that though different interpretations of Othello exist, “the question of race is at the heart of the play” (36). However, he has not concluded that even racism has a multiplicity of perspectives which has made Othello as memorable and controversial as Hamlet is.

Briefly stating, it could be concluded this racism has not been compartmentalized vis-à-vis its associated behavioral traits of the racial victims or the attraction of the white women. Even the modern-day interpretations are so much diverse that they have also the tinge of the same old English Eurocentric vision as Kevin Young has written in his review of Othello in America. Celia Dialeader’s Othellophilia has taken another direction that is about the white women and racism in Othello, a markedly different but significantly positive point. However, the rest of the psychological issues such as alienation and subsequent estrangement of the victim itself point to the strangulation of Desdemona by Othello and his own final suicide. In fact, he wins positivity through marrying Desdemona but could not contain his own self-estrangement which makes him an assassin as well as a murderer. Finally, the prevalent racism in Venice forces him to end his own life.

Works Cited

• Desmet, Christy. “Racism, Misogyny, and the ‘Othello’ Myth: Inter-Racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee.” Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England , vol. 20, Jan. 2007, pp. 281–284. EBSCOhost , url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=26650487&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
• Mutlu, Kader. “Racism in Othello.” Journal of History, Culture and Art Research , vol. 2, no. 2. Jun. 2013. DOI: 10.7596/taksad.v2i2.243.
• Orkin, Martin. “Othello and the ‘Plain Face’ Of Racism.” Shakespeare Quarterly , vol. 38, no. 2, 1987, pp. 166–188. JSTOR , JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2870559.
• Toker, Alpaslan. “Othello: Alien in Venice.” Journal of Academic Studies , vol. 15, no. 60, Feb. 2014, pp. 29–51. EBSCOhost , url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=95380257&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
• Young, Kevin. “Not Just B**ck or White.” Canadian Musician , vol. 39, no. 4, July 2018, pp. 49–56. EBSCOhost , url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=131039605&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Relevant Questions about Racism in Othello

• How does Othello’s experience with racism in the play influence his actions and decisions, and what impact does it have on the unfolding of the plot?
• In what ways does Iago exploit racial stereotypes and prejudice to manipulate characters and advance his schemes in Othello?
• How does Shakespeare’s portrayal of racism in Othello reflect the societal attitudes and biases of the time in which the play was written, and what insights does it offer into the broader issue of racism?

You may read more on Short Essays below:

• The Odyssey and The Iliad: Fundamental Values
• Characters in The Odyssey Symbolizing Western Values
• Common People in The Prince by Machiavelli
• “The Albatross” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

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A* A Level English Literature Othello Essay on Jealousy

Subject: English

Age range: 16+

Resource type: Assessment and revision

Last updated

28 May 2024

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An A Level English Literature (Edexcel) Essay on Jealousy in Othello which achieved an A*, scoring full marks (35/35).

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At The Brink

An Introduction: It’s Time to Protest Nuclear War Again

Kathleen Kingsbury, Opinion Editor

The threat of nuclear war has dangled over humankind for much too long. We have survived so far through luck and brinkmanship. But the old, limited safeguards that kept the Cold War cold are long gone. Nuclear powers are getting more numerous and less cautious. We’ve condemned another generation to live on a planet that is one grave act of hubris or human error away from destruction without demanding any action from our leaders. That must change.

In New York Times Opinion’s latest series, At the Brink, we’re looking at the reality of nuclear weapons today. It’s the culmination of nearly a year of reporting and research. We plan to explore where the present dangers lie in the next arms race and what can be done to make the world safer again.

W.J. Hennigan, the project's lead writer, begins that discussion today by laying out what’s at stake if a single nuclear weapon were used, as well as revealing for the first time details about how close U.S. officials thought the world came to breaking the decades-long nuclear taboo.

Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, threatened in his 2024 annual speech that more direct Western intervention in Ukraine could lead to nuclear conflict. Yet an American intelligence assessment suggests the world may have wandered far closer to the brink of a nuclear launch more than a year earlier, during the first year of Mr. Putin's invasion.

This is the first telling of the Biden administration’s efforts to avoid that fate, and had they failed, how they hoped to contain the catastrophic aftermath. Mr. Hennigan explores what happened during that tense time, what officials were thinking, what they did and how they’re approaching a volatile future.

In the first essay of the series, W.J. Hennigan lays out the risks of the new nuclear era and how we got here. You can listen to an adaptation of the piece here .

Within two years, the last major remaining arms treaty between the United States and Russia is to expire. Yet amid mounting global instability and shifting geopolitics, world leaders aren’t turning to diplomacy. Instead, they have responded by building more technologically advanced weapons. The recent intelligence on Russia’s development of a space-based nuclear weapon is the latest reminder of the enormous power these weapons continue to wield over our lives.

There is no precedent for the complexity of today’s nuclear era. The bipolarity of the Cold War has given way to a great-power competition with far more emerging players. With the possibility of Donald Trump returning as president, Iran advancing its nuclear development and China on track to stock its arsenal with 1,000 warheads by 2030, German and South Korean officials have wondered aloud if they should have their own nuclear weapons, as have important voices in Poland, Japan and Saudi Arabia.

The latest generation of nuclear technology can still inflict unspeakable devastation. Artificial intelligence could someday automate war without human intervention. No one can confidently predict how and if deterrence will work under these dynamics or even what strategic stability will look like. A new commitment to what could be years of diplomatic talks will be needed to establish new terms of engagement.

Over the past several months, I’ve been asked, including by colleagues, why I want to raise awareness on nuclear arms control when the world faces so many other challenges — climate change, rising authoritarianism and economic inequality, as well as the ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.

Part of the answer is that both of those active conflicts would be far more catastrophic if nuclear weapons were introduced into them. Consider Mr. Putin’s threat at the end of February: “We also have weapons that can strike targets on their territory,” the Russian leader said during his annual address. “Do they not understand this?”

The other answer lies in our recent history. When people around the world in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s began to understand the nuclear peril of that era, a vocal constituency demanded — and achieved — change.

Fear of mutual annihilation last century spurred governments to work together to create a set of global agreements to lower the risk. Their efforts helped to end atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, which, in certain cases, had poisoned people and the environment. Adversarial nations started talking to each other and, by doing so, helped avoid accidental use. Stockpiles were reduced. A vast majority of nations agreed to never build these weapons in the first place if the nations that had them worked in good faith toward their abolishment. That promise was not kept.

In 1982 as many as a million people descended on Central Park calling for the elimination of nuclear arms in the world. More recently, some isolated voices have tried to raise the alarm — Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, said last year that “the most serious thing facing mankind is nuclear proliferation” — but mostly such activism is inconceivable now. The once again growing threat of nuclear weapons is simply not part of the public conversation. And the world is less secure.

Today the nuclear safety net is threadbare. The good news is that it can be restitched. American leadership requires that Washington marshal international support for this mission — but it also requires leading by example. There are several actions that the U.S. president could take without buy-in from a Congress unlikely to cooperate.

As a first step, the United States could push to reinvigorate and establish with Russia and China, respectively, joint information and crisis control centers to ensure that misunderstandings and escalation don’t spiral. Such hotlines have all but gone dormant. The United States could also renounce the strategy of launching its nuclear weapons based only on a warning of an adversary’s launch, reducing the chance America could begin a nuclear war because of an accident, a human or mechanical failure or a simple misunderstanding. The United States could insist on robust controls for artificial intelligence in the launch processes of nuclear weapons.

Democracy rarely prevents war, but it can eventually serve as a check on it. Nuclear use has always been the exception: No scenario offers enough time for voters to weigh in on whether to deploy a nuclear weapon. Citizens, therefore, need to exert their influence well before the country finds itself in such a situation.

We should not allow the next generation to inherit a world more dangerous than the one we were given.

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