Othello, one of Shakespeare’s most renowned tragedies, is made rich in its characterisation and themes such as alienation (racial or otherwise) and moral instability. It might be daunting at first view, but for a Year 11 Module B Critical Study of Literature, it’s really all about showing an appreciation for the text’s distinctive qualities through an informed, personal response. In order to get this done, we’ll have to start by breaking down key characters, themes, and the text’s context in order to eventually express your own critical analysis.

Before we start though, it might be useful to go over the plot. The quickest synopsis I can give you is that it is about Othello, a Moorish general, who is gradually driven to madness by the manipulation of his ensign Iago.  

Context 

Context can refer to the historical events at the time the text was written, the time the text was set, and the general ideas that were circulating around these times. It can also look at the critical reception of this text.

Othello, first performed in 1604, was written during Shakespeare’s great tragic period. However, the text itself plays out mostly in the foreign setting of Cyprus, during the wars between Turkey and Venice that took place near the end of the 1500s. This lends well to a ‘Postcolonial reading’ of Othello, which basically looks at the play’s various conflicts as representative of the real-life conflict between Europe’s unified Christian powers and the ‘oriental’ Islamic Ottoman Empire. At the time of its composition, English writers often demonised the Ottoman Empire as barbarians and uncivilised, even as they admired their might. Shakespeare references this Western and Eastern dichotomy but then subverts it by making his protagonist, ‘black Othello’, a racial outsider, whilst the great antagonist Iago is a Venetian. This is commonly reinforced throughout by references to Othello, a Moor (practitioner of Islam), as ‘black Othello’, or ‘his Moorship’. 

In addition, the way Shakespeare gender roles at the time of the early 1600s are often highlighted in criticism, seen as Desdemona (Othello’s wife) and Emelia (Iago’s wife), constantly defer to their husbands, or are critiqued for rejecting a man’s authority. Infidelity was the ultimate marital crime in early modern England, and thus, it makes sense why the thought of this led to Othello’s downfall.

Themes

Race, ‘othering’, and alienation

A real tension is created in Othello’s constant struggle as an outsider. His flawed assimilation, despite moral uprightness and military prowess is telling of how he cannot fit in the Venetian renaissance period where race has become, and remains today, a key signifier. The way that other characters perceive – and then reduce Othello’s character are represented through Orientalism in the play. Shakespeare uses this as a paradigm that confines the Orient to a stage of Western learning, for example when Iago claims that ‘these Moors are changeable in their wills,’ and that Othello is like ‘a barbary horse.’ Similar to how we mentioned previously that English writers were constantly demonising Eastern people, these assertions diminish Othello, ‘the Other,’ to seem simple and volatile to the point of being animalistic.  

Femininity

Feminist critics often highlight the ways Shakespeare portrays, comments on, and subverts gendered expectations. In Othello, we examine this mostly through the lens of Desdemona and Emilia. Throughout the play, it can be said that Desdemona’s attitude toward her chastity represents what Renaissance males wanted and expected of women, and it is certainly what Othello wants from his wife. She sees it as an absolute value. Conversely, Emilia sees it as relative, as she is trying to justify it through universal experience of women in the world.

Men and women both have rich interiority of experience and desire, and the dimension Shakespeare creates elucidates that women are more than utilitarian and more than the historic ‘virgin-whore’ dichotomy.

Shakespeare constructs Desdemona as a one-dimensional female figure in the play to allude to the gender dynamics that were constructed at the time. Whereas Emilia is more layered, so that Shakespeare can tease out the one-dimensional framing of women to a more realistic female characterization.

Characters 

Othello

Othello is at first presented as a noble general who defies his lowly origins as ‘a Moor’, but throughout the play, we witness his tragic fall. Despite being well-respected, a man of integrity, and powerful in status, he is gradually made vulnerable to his insecurities (race, wife, etc.). He is transparent and honest, and thinks others should act with the same honour that he does. To this end, his hamartia (a word meaning his ‘fatal flaw’) seems to be his naivete, as he believes all appearances to be reality. This ‘free and open nature’ is what Iago uses to twist his pure love for Desdemona into a destructive jealousy, a ‘green-eyed monster’. Eventually, he is manipulated by Iago to the point that even he equates his Moorish origins with evil (‘arise, black vengeance, from the hollow hell’).

Iago

Iago is characterised as an intellectual, amoral ‘foil’ to Othello’s naïve, but noble character.  A foil is a character who acts almost as an opposite force to another in order to accentuate their flaws or certain traits. He is Shakespeare’s prototypical Machiavellian villain: cunning, selfish, politically driven, and absolutely indifferent to good or evil. I think that it is this moral ambivalence that eventually seeps into Othello’s initially grounded conscience, leading to his downfall and highlighting his flaws. Iago’s role as a moral rogue is made evident with quotes like ‘I am not what I am’, which in this case, directly invert Saint Paul’s assertion that ‘by the grace of God I am what I am.’ His scheming narcissism, and freedom from any moral boundaries, directly subverts society’s expectations of people who work for the greater good of the community, and triggers the ensuing chaos. Iago’s deception, and championing of appearances vs reality, drive tension and instability throughout the play, and is most evidently seen in his tragic manipulation of Othello.

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