othello essay on race

Race and Ontological Alienation in Othello by Romaissaa Benzizoune

Race and ontological alienation in othello.

Whenever an author lays claim to what it means to be Black, a site of disruption is created, wherein a Black audience member is expected to identify with or see as “truth” a representation of himself that cannot be.

Othello , like the few other Shakespearean plays that address the specter of race, remains controversial in scholarly analysis. The play and its protagonist (or, if Iago is interpreted as protagonist, its namesake) have both been hailed as progressive and attacked as problematic. Shakespeare’s efforts in the play have been celebrated by some critics and repudiated by others; Mika Nyoni goes so far as to describe Shakespeare as a writer who may have “influenced or helped to perpetuate racism and religious bigotry which was evident in The Slave Trade, Colonialism, and the persecution of Jews in Germany.” 1 Although many critics of the play have identified the site of contestation as either the racism of Iago or the violence of Othello, few have focused on the character Othello himself. Ultimately, the way that Shakespeare falsely inhabits the Black psyche in his representation of Othello is foreign and debilitating. By othering Othello from his very self, Shakespeare presents to us an (anti-Black) Black character that is more of a caricature that a tragic hero.

Regardless of Shakespeare’s inadequate portrayal of the Black character at the center of the play, Othello is useful as a window onto perceptions of race in England in the early modern period. The play features a cast with a variety of racial outlooks, ranging from outright racists (like Iago) to those who are more sympathetic (like the Duke of Venice) to those who are the most accepting of Blackness (Desdemona, and presumably, Othello). This range is perhaps a reflection of some of the attitudes prevalent in Shakespeare’s time, and while the views of these fictional characters cannot be taken as reflective of Shakespeare’s own views, it is clear that they are rooted in reality. Othello is an Other in every way, and one who is defined in the eyes of almost every character, including himself, by his Otherness. The prefix of “Moor” or “black” is often attached to his name, which in and of itself is never explained (was Othello really the name that he was born with in North Africa?). Othello does not have a name or a nation when he is “the Moor” (more than fifty times), “the dull Moor,” “the cruel Moor,” or even “the noble Moor.” 2 Of course, Iago showcases the potential of early-modern racists in a way that far surpasses Othering; all of the inventive slurs aside, he most shockingly compares Othello to a horse, suggesting that Desdemona’s relationship with a black man would be bestiality. 3 However, Iago’s antiblackness is not problematic, especially seeing that he is the villain of the play. It is the anti-Blackness that the supposed hero exhibits toward himself (vis-a-vis Shakespeare’s imagining of a Black man) that is far more concerning.

There is something disturbing in the way that Othello talks about himself—or more accurately, the way that Shakespeare imagines Othello would talk about himself. It is clear, especially by the end of the play, that his Blackness is only ever a site for insecurity and emasculation. In act 3, scene 3, Othello reflects on his skin color sadly: “Haply, for I am black/ And have not those soft parts of conversation/ That chamberers have.” 4 The way Othello objectively announces his blackness feels stiff and unnatural ( Haply, for I am black! ). Despite his status as a military general and his clear capacity for anger and resistance, Othello suspiciously never seems to question or resist racism: The effect renders him sympathetic to the white viewer at the cost of his very Blackness. (Othello reminds me of pandering, sympathetic “Mammy” figures in American cinema.) In the same conversation with Iago, he even bizarrely refers to himself as a slave: “O, that the slave had forty thousand lives.” 5 Most offensively, when lamenting Desdemona to Iago, Othello says: “Her name, that was as fresh/ As Dian’s visage, is now begrimed and black/ As mine own face.” 6 That a Black person would compare their own blackness to physical dirt is only as comical as it is offensive. When someone lives their whole life as a Black person, they psychologically understand the color of their own skin, and would never even think to think of themselves as “begrimed.” Just as a white character would not ever describe themselves as raw or undercooked, a black character would not describe themselves as dirty or covered in soot. However, historically, white or lighter-skinned people have seen black skin as dirty, sometimes due to a direct misunderstanding of what Black skin is. In the 1986 Iranian film Bashu, The Little Stranger, light skinned Iranians try to “wash” the black off the film’s protagonist, an Afro-Iranian from the country’s more secluded south.

Othello’s self-hatred and anti-Blackness not only feels ontologically inaccurate, but historically inaccurate as well. While it is obvious that a white man would make a big deal out of a North African Moor’s Blackness, it does not make sense that a North African Moor would primarily identify with the construct of “race” as opposed to that of homeland, tribe, religion, or other ethnic configuration. (Even today, North Africans will much sooner identify with nationality or religion rather than race; part of this is because many see themselves as Arab rather than Black.) To me, Othello reads exactly like a white man’s envisioning of a Black man; he is oddly obsessed with the aspects of himself that a white man would be obsessed with, and devoid entirely of other aspects that would situate him in a more believable identity. The way Othello would’ve been performed at the time—a white production for a white audience, featuring a white Othello in blackface—only reinforces for me the idea of Othello as white spectacle, featuring a creative rendition of a Moor that has little to do with reality. 7 When Shakespeare tries to make the Other knowable without really knowing him in the first place (and without grounding him in a clear historical background, preferring to shroud him in ambiguity and mystery) he is perhaps doing the Other an ultimate disservice.

Although this paper is not personal, race is often a personal experience felt and lived rather than neatly intellectualized. When Shakespeare writes an Othello who essentially hates himself for being Black, his intentions may have been pure. In painting Othello as a tragic figure worthy of sympathy, a victim of his own Blackness and societal perceptions of it, Shakespeare could have been attempting something radical. However, to me, Shakespeare’s imagining of Othello is vaguely insulting. It evokes for me a passage from Black Skin, White Masks in which Fanon criticizes Sartre’s work Orphée Noir : “Help had been sought from a friend of the colored peoples, and that friend had found no better response than to point out the relativity of what they were doing.” 8 In this ever-memorable passage, Fanon expresses eloquently what it feels like to be misrepresented as Black for all of posterity. Although Sartre was a well-intentioned “ally,” his interpretation of the experience of being Black (which is entangled in a transcendent argument for humanism, and that is where the “relativity” comes in) was twice damaging. 9 It was first of all inaccurate, because a white French man could never know anything of the black lived experience, but more than that, it took up a vital space for Black self-definition. As Fanon puts it, “And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me.” 10 Fanon’s critique is most powerful in the context of existential philosophy, of course, but Othello , just like Orphée Noir , serves as a white “intellectualization of the experience of being black.” 11 In both texts, a white male author—canonical, foundational, intellectual authority—makes grand assumptions about the Black psyche; in both works, that same white male author seems to position himself as a positive, savior force. Whenever a white person lays claim to what it means to be Black, a site of disruption is created, wherein a Black audience member is expected to identify with or see as “truth” a representation of himself that cannot be , and certainly does not feel, accurate. The real violence of the play occurs upon this very site. In the wake of Othello, just as in the wake of Orphée Noir , the black audience member finds themselves unmoored, robbed of self-representation, told about themselves.

Throughout my four years at NYU, and unsurprisingly, Othello is the only North African protagonist that I have been presented with. Within the play, he is the character that ends up being the most anti-Black, and his self-destruction enriches the plot in a way that is useful for climatic flair but not for authentic representation. While Othello is an insightful text in a variety of ways, a rereading of the play, with a postcolonial, Black studies lens, can only be so generous. The stunted depiction of Othello as a simple, sympathetic “Moor” is ultimately problematic in its illegibility, and any discourse about the play should leave room for this interpretation. In regards to this text and other canonical works I have encountered during my time at NYU, another line from Black Skin , White Masks comes to mind: “The dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself.” 12

• Mika Nyoni, “The Culture of Othering: An Interrogation of Shakespeare’s Handling of Race and Ethnicity in The Merchant of Venice and Othello ,” Theory and Practice in Language Studies 2, no. 4 (January 2012): 680.
• William Shakespeare, Othello , (The Pelican Shakespeare, Penguin Books, 2001), 5.2.266; 5.2.299; 2.3.144.
• Shakespeare, Othello , 1.1.125.
• Shakespeare, Othello , 3.3.304-306.
• Shakespeare, Othello , 3.3.502.
• Shakespeare, Othello , 3.3.441-443.
• Peter Holland, Shakespeare and Religions (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 300).
• Frantz Fanon , Black Skin, White Masks (Penguin Classics, 2020), 102.
• Sartre though that Negritude was only useful as a transitory phase on the way to a post-racial reality.
• Fanon , Black Skin, White Masks , 102.
• Fanon , Black Skin, White Masks , 134.
• Frantz Fanon , Black Skin, White Masks (Penguin Classics, 2020), 103.

Romaissaa Benzizoune (‘BA 20, @romaissaa_b ) originally wrote “Race and Ontological Alienation in Othello ” in Professor Bella Mirabella’s Interdisciplinary Seminar “ Shakespeare and the London Theatre ,” in Spring 2020.

Thumbnail image: Othello and Desdemona (19th century) by Daniel Maclise, via Wikimedia Commons.

William Shakespeare

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The most prominent form of prejudice on display in Othello is racial prejudice. In the very first scene, Roderigo and Iago disparage Othello in explicitly racial terms, calling him, among other things, "Barbary horse" and "thick lips." In nearly every case, the prejudiced characters use terms that describe Othello as an animal or beast. In other words, they use racist language to try to define Othello not only as an outsider to white Venetian society, but as being less human and therefore less deserving of respect. Othello himself seems to have internalized this prejudice. On a number of occasions he describes himself in similarly unflattering racial terms. And when he believes that he has lost his honor and manhood through Desdemona's supposed unfaithfulness, he quickly becomes the kind of un-rational animal or monster that the white Venetians accuse him of being.

Yet racial prejudice is not the only prejudice on display in Othello . Many characters in the play also exhibit misogyny, or hatred of women, primarily focused on women's honesty or dishonesty about their sexuality. Several times, Othello's age is also a reason for insulting him. In all of these cases, the characters displaying prejudice seek to control and define another person or group who frighten them. In other words, prejudice works as a kind of strategy to identify outsiders and insiders and to place yourself within the dominant group. And Othello himself seems to understand this—he concludes his suicide speech by boasting that he, a Christian, once killed a Muslim Turk, a "circumcised dog" (5.2.355) who had murdered a Venetian citizen. Othello tries to use religious prejudice against Muslims to cement his place within mainstream Christian Venetian society.

Prejudice ThemeTracker

Prejudice Quotes in Othello

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American Moor: Othello, Race, and the Conversations Here and Now

Marjorie Rubright and Amy Rodgers

[print edition page number: 469] In their 2019 MLA essay in Profession , “BlacKKKShakespearean: A Call to Action for Medieval and Early Modern Studies,” Kimberly Anne Coles, Kim F. Hall, and Ayanna Thompson provide five axioms for expanding our reach in what we teach and why, to whom we teach, and how we diversify the pipeline of students entering early modern studies. [1] Starting with the acknowledgement that “our fields of study are not politically neutral,” Coles, Hall, and Thompson propose that the work of attracting a multiplicity of students to pre- and early modern fields will require that we: Start Early; Provide Mentors; Create Inclusive Events; Support Professional Training Across Institutions; and Cite Scholars of Color. While this crystalizing call to action was published after the American Moor Five College residency that we discuss in this chapter, this artistic and scholarly project pursued similar goals, and, we hope, offers an interdisciplinary, performance-forward model for meeting them.

The brainchild of stage and television actor Keith Hamilton Cobb, American Moor explores the legacy of William Shakespeare’s Othello via the perspective of a Black American actor auditioning for the eponymous lead role. [2] At the request of the “director” character (typed as a young, white man fresh out of an MFA program), Cobb performs only one monologue from the play — Othello’s Act I address to the Venetian senate, the governing body of white, European aristocrats who call Othello to appear before them to answer, simultaneously, their call to lead the Venetian fleet against the advancing Ottoman force and the charge that he has [470] “abducted,” and married, one of their most prominent citizen’s only daughter. From here, American Moor diverges sharply from Othello in content while following some similar, and transhistorically relevant, thematic avenues. If Cobb’s narrative takes us on journey of the African American actor’s relationship to one of the two Shakespeare roles that he is “destined” to play (the other being Aaron the Moor from Titus Andronicus ), both plays explore the profound consequences of what W.E.B. Du Bois called double-consciousness: the reality of living as a Black subject in a hegemonically white world. As Du Bois claims, “After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this American world — a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.” [3] That the twenty-first century African American actor’s journey should intersect with a fictional seventeenth-century Black, Venetian general’s seemed sufficiently extraordinary (and yet painfully unsurprising) to create an interdisciplinary, multi-campus event dedicated to exploring the histories of (and cross-currents between) these two stories separated by more than three centuries and yet still traveling hand-in-hand through our own contemporary racial moment.

Playwright Keith Hamilton Cobb is probably most well-known for his extensive television work on ABC’s daytime drama All My Children and the Syfy original series Andromeda ; however, he is also a classically trained actor with an extensive theater resume. [4] According to Cobb, American Moor “was born out of a perpetual state of disquiet with the experience of African American manhood. Othello , the role, and the play, and the real [471] estate that both have occupied in my life are intrinsic to that experience.” [5] In her introduction to the 2020 publication of American Moor , Kim F. Hall, one of the leading figures in premodern critical race studies, describes the play as following: “a veteran Black actor auditioning to play Shakespeare’s Othello for an unseasoned, white director. It is the story of how his blackness and his love of Shakespeare collide with the largely white Shakespeare industry — the teachers, acting coaches, agents, directors (and scholars?) — who subtly maintain ownership over Shakespeare while at the same time insisting that Shakespeare is a universal public good.” [6]

The American Moor residency began on Friday, November 2, 2018, and ran for just under three weeks with events transpiring across three campuses. Western Massachusetts is home to the Five College Consortium, consisting of four liberal arts colleges (Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith) and the flagship state university of Massachusetts (University of Massachusetts – Amherst). [7] Once the four-show, sold-out run ended at Mount Holyoke, Cobb spent a further week at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst, and a day at Amherst College. Structurally, the residency was organized so that most of the Mount Holyoke events took place prior to the performances and the University of Massachusetts – Amherst and Amherst College events took place in the days immediately [472] following the run. The arc of events followed a sine curve, in which the performances and conference (discussed below) formed the peak activity, and the individual campus events formed the slopes.

The American Moor residency endeavored to create an affective and intellectual network — a community — that came together around a series of events dedicated to the topic of Shakespeare, race, and America. Of equal significance were the key questions that this community raised and returned to over the residency’s sixteen-day span, and that the conversations inspired by these questions diversified not only who was included but who shaped them. It invested students as creators and leaders of the conversation from the start, empowering them to become advocates, teachers, and community ambassadors. At this essay’s conclusion, we return to the call to action with which the chapter opens to propose a sixth axiom that proved crucial to our collaborative pursuits in 2018: foster local community that extends beyond the university.

The residency began with a simple impulse: Amy Rodgers, a faculty member at Mount Holyoke College, saw the show at Boston’s O.W.I theater, found it deeply moving, and wanted her students to see it as well. [8] In particular, she felt that the play contained a unique ability to vocalize the affective, intellectual, and discursive aphasia around American race relations. Like many college campuses, Mount Holyoke consistently seeks new methods for engaging community discourse around diversity, equity, and inclusion; however, the performing arts had been surprisingly absent from these college-wide conversations.

Initially, Rodgers aimed to bring American Moor to the Mount Holyoke campus as a contribution to the institution’s evolving diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives; in conversing with Marjorie Rubright, a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst, about bringing the play to the Connecticut River Valley area, a more ambitious [473] and wide-ranging set of programming and conversational opportunities emerged. Our shared goal was to generate a robust series of integrated, creative, public-facing, and scholarly programming across multiple campuses that put race squarely at the discussion’s center. We oriented our energies around two open questions: how do Othello’s legacies speak to urgent questions about race in America today; and how might the performing arts serve as a centerpiece for both pedagogical innovation and enriched scholarly and creative cross-pollination between our campus communities, particularly around matters of race and racism?

After ten months of planning, programming, and significant fundraising efforts at both Mount Holyoke and the University of Massachusetts – Amherst (UMass), the American Moor residency came to fruition. Our aim here in chronicling and reflecting on this endeavor is to articulate how it succeeded in meeting a number of college, university, consortium, and community goals, as well as the ways in which we gained greater insight into how to engage diverse students, faculty, and the larger community in wide-ranging, multi-campus, events-based residencies, particularly those that feature a performance event as the centerpiece. The 2018 American Moor residency was a robust — and scalable — residency. In outlining its contours, we offer one model from which readers might pluck selectively or build upon in an effort to design future cross-institutional collaborations that center conversations about race.

The Embodied Residency: Voices, Questions, and Conversations

“What do we do when they laugh, but I want to cry?” With a voice tremulous with both courage and apprehension, an African American English major ventured his question from the back of the theater, breaking the silence that hung among us following Keith Hamilton Cobb’s performance of American Moor . In the still-darkened Mount Holyoke College Rooke theater, filled with undergraduate students from various humanities departments across multiple campuses, this was but the first of many powerful questions that arose in the weeks of the Five College residency. Responding intuitively, intellectually, and emotionally, Cobb extended both his gaze and arms out into the audience in response, as if [474] drawing this student into the orbit of his confidence: “I hear the silences, too, you know?” Elaborating, he explained that sadness, pain, and rage registers in an audience’s silence — inside that particular student’s feeling of wanting to cry when others laugh — and that this makes its way to the actor’s ears, too. “Not everyone is laughing, and I hear that.” The larger question — “What do we do”? — was met with Cobb’s explicit, intimate, and immediate answer, “we cry — you and I cry — we should !” and with a more implicit answer that forecasted conversations to come in the days ahead: “we must listen to one another — and we’re not really doing that yet, are we?” Cobb thus began a conversation that did more than transform how students in one corner of New England think about race in America today. Through his performances and conversations with students across multiple campuses, Cobb transformed the nature of the questions that students feel they can ask, and who feels welcome to ask them.

The audience on that particular afternoon had spent the weeks running up to the performance studying the racial and racist logics circulating in Shakespeare’s Othello with Amy Rodgers (a white, cisgendered woman) and Marjorie Rubright (a white, queer, feminist and director of the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies at UMass Amherst). Together, we asked our students to embark on various ventures in understanding early modern systems of power and epistemologies of race and to consider their on-going legacies today: they’d written analyses of singular words from Shakespeare’s play (Barbary, Moor, tupping, etc.) for how language gestates and produces race-thinking in the period; they explored the interconnections between ethnic and racial representations of human kinds on the stage and representations of human difference on the pages of early modern world maps; [9] they anatomized entire speeches for how Othello seems to master the threatening discourses of Othering in the play; they wrote reviews of various film adaptations of Othello with [475] an eye toward the implicit biases of casting, cutting, and the direction of mise-en-scene; they wrote their own twenty-first-century versions of a single scene of Othello , illuminating or deliberately rejecting the legacies of early modern race-thinking alive in Shakespeare’s play; they read and discussed Kim F. Hall’s introductory chapters on race and cultural geography in her Bedford Othello in preparation for discussions they would have with her upon her visit to campus . [10] Students also wrote labels for a Mount Holyoke Art Museum exhibit featuring Curlee Raven Holton’s etchings of Othello completed during a Venice residency in 2012. They crafted teaching plans for the play and visited various first-year seminars that were working with Shakespeare’s Othello . Students also met regularly at the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, where, using the rare book collection on site, they helped to curate an exhibit of books: “ Othello in Context, Then and Now . ” Finally, mentored work-study and internships offered Mount Holyoke and UMass Amherst students opportunities to work together over the course of the residency as “ American Moor Ambassadors.” Designing outreach across the campuses, developing pop-up events, and organizing with other student groups on our campuses, the Ambassadors put students’ investments and questions at the forefront of the residency. Simply put, our students were thick into Othello before American Moor came to town.

Chronicling the Residency

The residency opened with a gallery exhibition entitled “Othello Reimagined in Sepia,” displayed in the Anne Greer and Frederic B. Garonzik Family Gallery, Mount Holyoke College. The brainchild of Rodgers and Ellen Alvord, Associate Director of Education and Weatherbie Curator of Academic Programs at Mount Holyoke, the Museum event brought together Cobb’s performance with an exhibit featuring the founding director of Lafayette College’s Experimental Printmaking Institute, Curlee Raven Holton’s series of prints entitled “Othello Reimagined in Sepia”. [477]

Created during a 2012 residency at the Venice Printmaking Studio, Holton’s images chart new terrain into Othello’s inner life — his affective past and psychic present — as a means of offering an alternative (or perhaps supplemental) narrative to Shakespeare’s play. Professor, painter, and master print maker Curlee Raven Holton engaged in public conversation with Cobb on “African American Perspectives on Othello,” with Rodgers as facilitator.

During their time at Mount Holyoke, the American Moor team (Cobb, director Kim Weild, actor Josh Tyson, and stage manager Caleb Spivey) were in tech for six days preceding the play’s four-day public run; Cobb and Weild also visited twelve Mount Holyoke classes and attended two community events (the Holton event at the art museum and another for the Students of Color Committee on the topic of “Engaging Race through the Arts”). In addition, Caleb Spivey, American Moor’s stage manager, ran a workshop for theater students interested in stage management, and Cobb, Weild, and Spivey were available for less-formal student meetings and conversations.

The scholarly programming was inaugurated earlier in the fall with the Normand Berlin Lecture, delivered by Professor Mazen Naous (Dept. of English, UMass Amherst) who spoke on Diana Abu-Jaber’s Arab-American novel Crescent , thereby launching a Five College-wide discussion of Othello ’s global afterlives. [11] These conversations flowed into the curriculum across the campuses where Shakespeare’s Othello was a shared text. During the American Moor residency, Kim F. Hall (Lucyle Hook Professor of English and Professor of Africana Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University) delivered a historically wide-ranging keynote at the UMass Amherst Fine Arts Center, “‘Othello Was My Grandfather’: Shakespeare and Race in the African Diaspora.” A preeminent scholar of Black feminist studies, critical race theory, slavery studies, and early modern literature and culture, Hall is also the editor of the influential Bedford edition of Othello , which Keith Hamilton Cobb holds in his hands throughout American Moor and our students studied from throughout the semester . Her [478] talk explored connections between Shakespeare and freedom dreams in the African Diaspora, outlining a tension between the ways that Shakespeare and blackness have been valued in the 400 years since Shakespeare’s birth. It opened onto the ways that Black writers and actors in the early twentieth century used Shakespeare when grappling with constructions of blackness and race in the United States.

Our conversations bridged research and the creative arts by way of an afternoon conference, loosely based on the concept of the Ovation Network’s series “Inside the Actors Studio,” facilitated by the Trinidad and Tobago-born actor, movement artist, teacher, and director, Jude Sandy. Currently a Resident Artist at the Trinity Repertory Company, Sandy has performed numerous roles on, off-, and off-off-Broadway, including two years in the Tony Award-winning War Horse at Lincoln Center Theater. Together, Weild, Cobb, Hall, and Sandy engaged our academic and public communities in urgent conversations about Shakespeare, race, and America  [479] today, conversations in which the humanities’ role in excavating new avenues of discourse and forms of political action featured prominently, particularly around the potency of narrative and performance to communicate across difference.

Following this event, UMass Amherst students returned to the classroom with tremendous enthusiasm for the kinds of questions these artists and academics were asking. In her recent essay, “Why Black Lives Matter in the Humanities,” Felice Blake, a professor of English at the University of Santa Barbara, admonishes: “It isn’t enough to include texts by historically aggrieved populations in the curriculum and classroom without producing new approaches to reading” (309). [12] On its face, Cobb’s dramatized audition for the role of Othello is just that: a heart-wrenching appeal for new approaches to reading which can only be activated by deepened capacities for listening to the presence of the past in our present moment. Hall’s talk engendered significant interest from students of color for how, throughout, she claimed not only to relate to stories of the African Diaspora but be related to that history. She offered our students a new approach to reading. “It was personal while also being scholarly,” one student remarked. “I think more often we’re taught that we’re supposed to stand outside history, looking back at it like an object in a museum, untouchable” another offered. When asked if they felt there were similarities between Hall’s scholarly keynote and the conversation that followed between Hall and the actors and director, a white theater-studies student remarked that “history felt present.” Her Black friend nodded, then reshaped the formulation: “I felt present in that history of black oppression and resistance. I mean, I could feel it . . . in me and in the room.” “I think that’s what American Moor does in a different way,” another student added. “Isn’t Keith’s audition all about who does and doesn’t feel history as present ‘in the room’?” [480]

Following his residency at Mount Holyoke, Cobb spent a week in residence at the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst, holding workshops and roundtables with students from the departments of English, history, theater, Afro-American studies, and women, gender, and sexuality studies. He also participated in classroom conversations with students. During Cobb’s visit to Rubright’s introductory Shakespeare course (a large lecture course of sixty students), as well as to a more intimate masters-level theater seminar, students asked the author/actor questions ranging from his “decision to use the N-word in the play and how we should think about that,” to whether “it’s different to say that word aloud to a NYC audience than in Western Mass,” which is predominately white. They also ventured questions more personal and biographical: “when did you know you were a writer and an actor and did your family support those choices?” At the conclusion of Cobb’s week-long residency, the Shakespeare students were invited to write a private letter to Cobb reflecting on their experience of American Moor, their conversations with him over his week in residence, and/or on the feelings his residency sparked in them. This epistolary extension of the conversation was private, not to be shared with Rubright or other students. In this way, students continued the conversation off stage, and many reported that writing their letter was “harder than anything” they’d written before. As one student elaborated in a class review, “Cobb was so honest and open with us, I felt I needed to find the words to be as honest” in return.

At Mount Holyoke, Cobb visited Rodgers’ “Activist Shakespeare” class the Monday following the conclusion of American Moor’s run. Students and Cobb together debriefed on the experience of being in the audience (students) and performing the play (Cobb) in Western Massachusetts (and in front of what was a predominantly white audience). As one student of color said to Cobb, “So often I feel like no one sees me here. How do you deal with that, especially since you are putting yourself and your story out there for everyone to see?” Cobb responded with understanding and empathy: “Even if people don’t see exactly what I want them to see, they are seeing me and listening to what I have to say. And they see you. I see you!” This moment of genuine vulnerability was deeply felt by the class community as a whole (many were in tears), and marks precisely the coordinates [481] that demarcate a place where actual change, at the level of heart and head, can occur. [13]

Reflections on the Residency

Despite the consortium structure of the Five Colleges, engaging community across different campuses presents numerous challenges even when institutions co-sponsor high-profile speakers and artists. [14] Event saturation permeates individual campuses, a fact that compounds across the consortium. The American Moor residency occurred in the final third of the semester, when demands on students and faculty are at their height. Even so, the residency managed to gain considerable interest and momentum, evinced by the four sold-out shows, the packed house at UMass’s American Moor Actors Studio and Keynote events, and the fact that Mount Holyoke’s president, dean of faculty (provost), vice-president of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and vice-president of student life all attended the performances — an unprecedented turnout for Mount Holyoke’s officers at a performance-based event, even one at their own campus. [482]

Student response to the residency was highly positive. During their exit interviews, a number of theater majors stated that American Moor provided an experiential zenith in their college experience. One student, from Rodgers’ Activist Shakespeare course, stated “Getting to work with Keith Hamilton Cobb on his Othello adaptation was one of the highlights of my time at Mount Holyoke. During the class he visited, students laughed, cried, and had the most open conversation about race that I’ve had during my three and a half years here.” Elizabeth Young, Carl and Elsie A. Small Professor of English at Mount Holyoke, shared that “[t]he visit by Keith Hamilton Cobb was an excellent experience for students in my course English 199, Introduction to the Study of Literature. It was one of several extraordinary activities for these students related to Shakespeare’s Othello , which also included attending Mr. Cobb’s play American Moor ; visiting the exhibition at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum of ‘Othello Reimaged in Sepia,’ by artist Curlee Raven Holton; and attending the conversation between Mr. Holton and Mr. Cobb at the Museum. Discussions about race in the play, and about Black responses to it, that might otherwise have been abstract or speculative were concrete, vivid, and dynamic, ranging across two media (theater and visual art) and emerging from in-person conversation with an actor/playwright.” Indeed, one of the residency’s more successful tactics was its consistent and multidisciplinary imbrication of different artistic and scholarly approaches to Othello and its many artistic and cultural legacies. So too, involving students from the start in the planning and organization of the residency — and doing so with a group of cross-campus Ambassadors who had time to work together, face-to-face, and develop trust with one another — was essential to the groundwork upon which the residency was built.

Students took increasing risks in raising questions — of each other and of American Moor — over the course of the residency. The multi-week timescale of the residency, as well as its traffic through different campus cultures, allowed students time to digest the thoughts of others. Faculty across the disciplines integrated Cobb into their courses: faculty from English, history, Latinx studies, theater, and Africana studies invited Cobb to speak with their students on race, identity, performance, masculinity, and Shakespeare. Students at UMass reported appreciating face-to-face engagements with the performance artist, whom they had opportunities [483] to interview in classroom visits and roundtable events over the course of the week of residency. In particular, students found the combination of interacting with the author/actor both at the intimate level of small class discussion and the public level of the show’s performance and post-show discussions particularly fruitful. Students who initially reported being concerned about “call out culture” — about whether they might ask questions about race in the past and present “without offending” or seeming “not woke,” and others who doubted whether they could tell their own stories about encounters with white supremacy “without getting too emotional” — began to practice, in the more intimate contexts, genuinely searching lines of inquiry that were not stifled by what Black feminist Loretta Ross characterizes as “cancel culture, where people attempt to expunge anyone with whom they do not perfectly agree, rather than remain focused on those who profit from discrimination and injustice.” [15] Cobb’s own style of Q&A in the after show talk backs helped to model the kind of listening these conversations require. Cobb’s interlocutory style encouraged students to raise challenging questions about American Moor itself, which gender-studies students indeed did especially in inquiring about the portrait of Desdemona’s agency in the production: “I wanted more of her voice, her perspective — less her father’s and Othello’s,” one student appealed. Moving from the local (their individual experience of and with race on their campuses) to the national (a performance piece that adapts a canonical Western text to speak to the contemporary experience of a Black American actor seeking validation and expressive agency through the Shakespearean canon within American theater) was an essential part of the exercise and reward of these conversations. Ultimately, it was the saturation of a variety of engagements over the course of the residency that fostered the trust necessary for the challenge of the conversations sparked by American Moor . [484]

In terms of the larger Western Massachusetts community (particularly that outside of the elite Five College milieu), we found that three events drew the most interest: foremost, the performances themselves and the Q&As that followed; secondly, the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum event and related pedagogical opportunities; and third, the Actors Studio at the UMass Fine Arts Center and conversations that it ignited. In addition to the performances, which themselves sparked powerful conversations each evening, these two distinct events share in their endeavor to join public-facing artistic production or public-facing artistic conversations with pedagogical and research investments. Crucially, we discovered that when no one in the room was cast as the ‘expert’ on the topic or the ‘master’ of a craft, everyone joined creatively and more openly in conversation.

The Actors Studio was an occasion to set Keith Hamilton Cobb, Kim Weild, and Professor Kim F. Hall into conversation with one another, thus further dissolving divisions between performance, scholarly research, and the real-world questions about systemic racism at the center of our discussions. What worked especially well was the introduction of a talented intermediary who brought questions to the stage that animated actor, director, and scholar alike. Jude Sandy, an award-winning actor and celebrated teacher, is not part of the American Moor team, though he was familiar with the show. His questions emerged from the position of an informed ‘outsider,’ someone who stood just on the edges of the American Moor project. This bifocal perspective — one foot in the acting world, one foot in the teaching world — made a successful formula for conversation. Students jumped into the Q&A period, as did the community, in large part because Sandy positioned himself — as well as the audience — as possessed of many questions, and few certain answers. What began as a conversation between Cobb, Weild, and Hall soon spilled into a Q&A with an entire auditorium. [485]

‘What’s Past Need Not Be Prologue’

American Moor is as exuberantly hopeful as it is deeply critical. It is a play with uncommon faith in us. As the audience, we are simultaneously the Director, the Venetian Senate, and ourselves: we can stop the racism in the theater and in our lives, if we can make space and time for learning and listening. We don’t have to passively play the roles as others imagine them. What’s past need not be prologue. — Kim F. Hall [16]

Where to go from here? Starting with his generous and generative practice of holding a Q&A following every performance of American Moor , Keith Hamilton Cobb offers one proposal for where to go from here: continue the conversation. The challenge of this straightforward proposal is significant in that it presses those of us teaching race in early modern literature, contemporary theater, and performance studies to ask how we generate these conversations and work to expand the community of interlocutors who shape it. This leads us to suggest a possible sixth axiom in support of Coles, Hall, and Thompson’s call to action: foster local community that extends beyond the university. While Coles, Hall, and Thompson’s five axioms suggest this endeavor tacitly, we believe that making it explicit is imperative, particularly for those who might wish to mount such an initiative at their own institution. As a corollary, colleges and universities must do more to encourage, support, and recognize endeavors like the American Moor residency that arise from the social-justice commitments of faculty, particularly pre-tenure and adjunct faculty. As two mid-career tenured faculty, we encountered skepticism from some professional peers about whether the significant time and work entailed in organizing this residency was “at our own professional peril.” Cues like this can have chilling effects, particularly on early career scholars and faculty in temporary appointments. If we are to continue the conversation, it must not exclude the creative energies of already over-burdened junior faculty of color who may be best suited to continue these conversations [486] around racial injustice but may, nonetheless, feel restricted by the narrowly proscriptive path of publication-toward-tenure. Departments, colleges, and universities must rethink and redesign the evaluative systems of promotion review in an effort to convey the value of this kind of work to adjunct and pre-tenure faculty, and thereby endorse and support it.

Among the residency’s successes was its ability to bring students and faculty from the Five Colleges together to act and imagine themselves as a larger, more wide-ranging force for discussion and (ex)change. Intermingled with those students, staff, and faculty were community members — people who live in the three towns that house the Five Colleges (Amherst, Northampton, and South Hadley). South Hadley (the most working-class of the three) also hosted American Moor’s performances, and Rodgers, with the help of several Mount Holyoke students, publicized it widely to the town, in particular, to the middle and high school. And yet, more could have been done in this area. Holyoke, the city that lies directly south of South Hadley, has a predominantly Latino population (52% according to the United States 2019 Census). [17] Springfield, the third-largest city in Massachusetts, is part of the Connecticut River Valley, and has the largest Black population in the area and the second-largest Latino population. [18] By contrast, Hampshire county where the Five College Consortium is situated is 88% White, 4.3% Black or African American, 5.9% Hispanic or Latino, and 5.7% Asian. [19] Admittedly, little outreach was done in these areas, outside of advertising to postsecondary institutions in the two cities and encouraging UMass students who commute from these communities to bring family and friends. Ideally (and, should such a large-scale performance event occur in the future), we would spend more time [487] and resources toward tracing a larger geographical circumference in terms of outreach and thinking through how such outreach and (hopefully) engagement, might help us begin to break down the silos that separate our communities into taxonomies of race, affluence, and ideology. Perhaps, then, the optimism of American Moor would manifest more fully: “what’s past need not be prologue.”

• Kimberly Anne Coles, Kim F. Hall, and Ayanna Thompson, “BlacKKKShakespearean: A Call to Action for Medieval and Early Modern Studies.” Profession (MLA: 2019) https://profession.mla.org/blackkkshakespearean-a-call-to-action-for-medieval-and-early-modern-studies / ↵
• On American Moor, visit http://keithhamiltoncobb.com/site/american-moor / ↵
• W.E.B Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks. Edited by David W. Blight and Robert Gooding-Williams (Boston: Bedford Books, 1997), 38. ↵
• See, http://www.keithhamiltoncobb.com   ↵
• Ferri, Josh. Interview with Keith Hamilton Cobb. Five Burning Questions with American Moor Playwright and Star Keith Hamilton Cobb. Broadway Box, August 21, 2019. https://www.broadwaybox.com/daily-scoop/five-burning-questions-with-american-moors-keith-hamilton-cobb /. ↵
• Hall, Kim F., “Introduction,” American Moor: A Play by Keith Hamilton Cobb (New York: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), ix. ↵
• Among the consortium’s many advantages are a shared library system, a Five College course exchange, and a rich intellectual and pedagogical matrix. There are a number of Five College interdisciplinary organizations and seminars, as well as the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, which fosters and supports programming with faculty and students across the consortium ( https://www.umass.edu/renaissance ). While collaboration across the institutional entities is widely encouraged, it often proves difficult, as each institution simultaneously exists (and indeed must exist) as a distinct, even unique, higher educational entity. As such, each institution conceptualizes (and to some extent enrolls) a discrete student body, with differing needs, interests, concerns, and hence administrative apparatuses. ↵
• O.W.I (Bureau of Theatre) was part of the Boston Center for the Arts. Named after the Office of War Information, the small, black-box organization programs theater that explicitly engages with issues of racial identity. The company no longer appears among BCA’s theatrical affiliations, and, as O.W.I does not maintain a website; it is difficult to tell whether it still exists in any capacity. ↵
• For a discussion of this assignment, see Rubright, Marjorie, “Charting New Worlds: The Early Modern World Atlas and Electronic Archives.” Teaching Early Modern English Literature from the Archives , edited by Heidi Brayman Hackel and Ian Frederick Moulton (The Modern Language Association of America, 2015), 201–11. ↵
• Shakespeare, William, Othello, The Moor of Venice: Texts and Contexts, edited by Kim F. Hall (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007). ↵
• A fuller version of this talk is published in Naous, Mazen, Poetics of Visibility in the Contemporary Arab American Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020) ↵
• Blake, Felice, “Why Black Lives Matter in the Humanities.” Seeing Race Again: Countering Colorblindness across the Disciplines , edited by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, Daniel Martinez HoSang, and George Lipsitz (Oakland: University of California Press 2019), 307–26. ↵
• This Five College residency drew audiences from all Five Colleges and the broader New England community and gained local and national media attention. Amy Rodgers’ interview with Mount Holyoke College, “Race, Shakespeare and America” is available online ( https://www.mtholyoke.edu/media/race-shakespeare-and-america ). An interview with Cobb and Rubright appeared in The Daily Hampshire Gazette ( https://www.gazettenet.com/American-Moor-21221674 ) and another was printed in The Los Angeles Review of Books ( https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/all-this-life-made-this-play-an-interview-with-keith-hamilton-cobb /). In her op-ed piece, Morgan Reppert, Op-A Ed Editor for The Massachusetts Daily Collegian , lauded the immersive and hands-on learning experiences that American Moor offered to undergraduate students ( https://dailycollegian.com/2018/11/umass-students-should-learn-by-doing /). ↵
• Mount Holyoke College and the Office of the Provost at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst generously partnered to provide full financial support for this programming, whose costs otherwise exceeded the discretionary budgets of single departments, humanities units, and colleges. ↵
• On the toxicity of call-out culture in Western Massachusetts, see Ross, Loretta, “I’m a Black Feminist. I think Call-Out Culture is Toxic.” The New York Times online (August 17, 2019). https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/17/opinion/sunday/cancel-culture-call-out.html ↵
• Kim F. Hall, “Introduction” to American Moor: A Play by Keith Hamilton Cobb (Methuen Drama 2020), xii. ↵
• US Census Bureau. QuickFacts, Holyoke city, Massachusetts, 2019. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/holyokecitymassachusetts . ↵
• US Census Bureau. QuickFacts, The Census Bureau’s 2019 report cites Springfield’s Black population as 20.9% and its Latino population as 44.7%. ↵
• US Census Bureau. QuickFacts, Hampshire county, Massachusetts, 2019 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/hampshirecountymassachusetts/PST045219 . ↵

Teaching Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide Copyright © 2023 by Marjorie Rubright and Amy Rodgers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.54027/JTIB6512

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Othello Themes: Racism, Jealousy, & More

Looking for Othello themes? In this article, you’ll find all the necessary information! The key themes in Othello are: jealousy, racism, sexism, appearance vs. reality, & prejudice.

Othello is the most famous literary work that focuses on the theme of jealousy. It runs through an entire text and affects almost all of characters. One might even say that jealousy is the main theme of Othello. However, the exploration of racism, sexism, and deception also is essential to the play.

In this article, our writers elaborate on all the key themes of Othello and explain why Shakespeare included them. Every theme is illustrated by the quotes from the play.

• 🔮 Appearance vs. Reality
• 🗺️ Navigation

🎓 References

🏴 othello themes: racism.

The fact that Shakespeare made Othello black is a crucial thematic element of the play. Many critics argue that Othello’s race does not matter. Nevertheless, it cannot be true. Our relationship with racism is very different from the time Othello was written. Racism in the 16th century was a widespread phenomenon.

Unlike the rest of Europe, Venice was a very cosmopolitan city, a hub in which Europeans, Africans, Asians all lived together in relative peace. However, it does not mean it was a tolerant and inclusive place, and there is a lot of textual evidence of that in Othello .

Othello starts not with Othello himself but with Iago talking negatively about Othello. Only in the second scene, the audience sees Othello and hears the main character speaking for himself. Before that, the audience depends on the descriptions that are coming from Iago, Roderigo, and Barbantio.

The three characters express race prejudice towards Othello and offer a sneak peek of how race relations in Elizabethan England looked like. In these first lines, which produce an immense effect on the audience, Othello is being called “the Moor,” “the thick lips,” “a lascivious Moor,” and “an old black ram.” Iago tells Barbantio:

“an old black ram is tupping your white ewe.”

The Elizabethan audience was not prepared even to imagine an interracial couple, but because Iago is such a malicious character, the audience is on Othello’s side.

This scene, at the very beginning of the play, is penetrated with racial commentaries. Barbantio, Desdemona’s father, is Othello’s long-term friend, but he strongly opposes this marriage. He invites Othello to his house, he respects him as a soldier, but Barbantio can’t imagine Othello as his son-in-law.

He even thinks that Othello used some witchcraft to attract Desdemona because, otherwise, it would be impossible or unnatural for a fine white lady to fall in love with “the Moor.”

Desdemona loves Othello, but she makes some racially insensitive comments as well. She says, “I saw Othello’s visage in his mind.” Here she accepts that her love for him is alienated from his appearance. She has to justify to the audience why and how she was able to overcome Othello’s blackness. She states that she is “color-blind,” which is, in fact, a subtle form of racism.

“Blackness”/ “Whiteness” Opposition

There are other characters that, without an intention to offend, express hidden racism not towards Othello per se but towards black people in general. For instance, the Duke says that Othello is “far more fair than black,” implying that being “fair” is more desirable than being black and that an educated black man loses his blackness and transcends the race.

Throughout the play, Iago purposefully places “blackness” in opposition with “whiteness.” He even influences other characters to approach this matter in a similar manner, including Othello himself.

It is interesting that Iago never questions Othello’s ability as a leader or a soldier. He always targets Othello’s skin color and Othello’s cultural identity. Iago does not mention Othello’s name and calls him “the Moor” to reduce Othello to his skin color. He is the voice of racism in Othello.

When Othello goes to the Senate to defend himself and his marriage in front of the Duke, it is not his love that helps him save the situation but Othello’s important and influential status in Venice.

Othello that the audience sees on the stage for the first time is not the same Othello that kills Desdemona. At the beginning of the play, Othello is confident, and he knows he deserves Desdemona. His reply to Iago is calm and noble:

“Let him do his spite. My services, which I have done the signiory, Shall out-tongue his complaints; ’tis yet to know – I fetch my life and being From men of royal siege, and my demerits May speak unbonneted to as proud a fortune As this that I have reach’d; for know, Iago, But that I love the gentle Desdemona, I would not my unhoused free condition Put into circumscription and confine For the sea’s worth.”

Barbantio’s racial prejudice does not allow him to understand the relationships between Desdemona and Othello, but Othello is not offended by that. It shows the immense self-confidence and self-worth that Othello has. He even says, “haply, for I am black.”

Iago speaks about Othello and Desdemona’s relationships as a form of violence. He also eroticizes Othello even before Othello sets foot on the stage. Othello explains the basis of their love by stating:

“She lov’d me for the dangers I had pass’d, And I lov’d her that she did pity them.”

It is contrasted to the eroticized explanation Iago gives about their marriage. Iago believes that their love is not more than “merely a lust of the blood, and a permission of the will.”

Othello’s Self-Identity

The theme of identity in Othello is present throughout the play. Iago influences Othello’s own perception of himself, which later results in Othello’s insecurity.

Even in the name of the play, Othello’s otherness is highlighted. The Moor of Venice embodies two opposing concepts – alienation and assimilation. Othello will always be an outsider for the Venetians. However, it also implies that Othello lost his “Africanness.”

Othello’s identity is not very clear. His cultural and geographical background is not mentioned in the play as if it is not essential. Othello is rootless and, in a way, it shows a lack of interest and a lack of information Elizabethans had about African nations.

Othello has been a soldier since he was a boy; it is a great part of him. However, when Othello arrives in Cyprus, he learns that the war with the Turks is over before it even started. Without these military achievements and battles, Othello feels insecure about himself and becomes an easy target for Iago.

Several attempts later, the audience realizes that Iago’s manipulations were successful because Othello starts doubting Desdemona’s sincerity and even her love for him.

Iago starts by attacking Othello’s cultural otherness. He reminds Othello that he does not know Venetian women because he is an outsider. Then, he goes on and attacks Othello’s blackness. He says:

“She did deceive her father, marrying you; And when she seem’d to shake and fear your looks, She lov’d them most.”

Here, Iago hints that Othello is inferior to white men.

From now on, the audience will see how Iago accomplishes the dismantling of Othello’s racial identity and forces Othello to see himself through Iago’s racist lens.

“The Noble Moor”

Several characters continuously positively refer to Othello. They call him “the noble Moor,” “brave Othello,” “noble Othello.” The audience itself is very sympathetic to Othello.

By doing that, Shakespeare tries to dismantle a stereotype that the audience has about black people. Othello is one of the noblest characters that Shakespeare ever created. The attitude that Iago, Roderigo, and Barbantio have towards Othello contrasts with the ones who love and respect Othello. The theme of race in Othello centers around this division.

“The Black Devil”

Othello’s last speech is very different from his first one in the Senate. The protagonist, who was once very proud of himself, is now humiliated. He even reduces the significance of his military achievements by saying, “he has done the state some service.”

In his last speech, Othello compares himself with “a circumcised dog,” reducing himself to the lowest of the lowest. It drastically contrasts with the way Othello describes Desdemona in this last speech. He says:

“a pearl away richer than all his tribe.”

Othello also compares himself with a savage who is not able to understand the value of the pearl. He calls himself “Indian” and “The Turk” in the last lines of the play. By doing that, Othello supported and reinforced racial prejudice against others.

💬 Racist Quotes in Othello

“Even now, now, very now, an old black ram Is tupping your white ewe. Arise, arise! Awake the snorting citizens with the bell, Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you. Arise, I say!” – Iago, Act 1 Scene 1

“Ay, there’s the point. As, to be bold with you, Not to affect many proposèd matches Of her own clime, complexion, and degree, Whereto we see in all things nature tends— Foh! One may smell in such a will most rank, Foul disproportion thoughts unnatural— But pardon me—I do not in position Distinctly speak of her, though I may fear Her will, recoiling to her better judgment, May fall to match you with her country forms And happily repent.” – Iago, Act 3 Scene 3

“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 Judean, threw a pearl away Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes, Albeit unused to the melting mood, Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees Their medicinal gum.” – Othello, Act 5 Scene 2

🌱 Jealousy as a Theme in Othello

At the very beginning of the play, readers see two characters that are completely consumed by that feeling. Iago, the actuator of the plot, is jealous and hateful towards Othello because he did not get the position of Lieutenant. Iago cannot stand others being more successful than he is, and that is why he comes up with a plan of revenge. Besides the professional jealousy that Iago has towards Othello, he is also jealous of Cassio, the solder that was promoted ahead of Iago. He claims:

“I know my price. I am worth no worse a place.”

He feels that Othello was unjust for choosing Cassio to be a lieutenant.

The second character who is driven by jealousy is Roderigo. He is in love with Desdemona, and he is upset about her marriage to Othello. He is even ready to pay Iago to have a chance to be with Desdemona. Obviously enough, Roderigo is jealous of Othello as well.

The difference between Iago and Roderigo, which becomes apparent in these first scenes, is that Roderigo’s motifs are based on his love for Desdemona, while Iago’s motifs are coming from the place of hate. Besides, Iago enjoys triggering this emotion in others. His whole plan of revenge is based on the fact that Othello is naturally jealous, Roderigo is naturally foolish, Desdemona is very naive, and Bianca is very liberated.

Iago masterfully creates lies about Desdemona’s unfaithfulness till Othello is convinced that Desdemona has an affair with Cassio. Othello becomes downright furious and blinded by the destructive force of his own emotions. However, Iago is different. Despite having such strong hate, he is able to approach his plan with a cold heart. He is pragmatic, reserved, and able to control his emotions to a great degree.

Nevertheless, Iago and Emilia as well become the victims of Iago’s jealousy. Iago’s reasoning, just like Othello’s, is entirely overtaken by the desire for revenge. His whole life is paranoically centered around this scheme.

In the middle of the play, the audience learns that Iago also has several personal reasons for jealousy. Firstly, Iago suspects that Emilia, his wife, has had an affair with Othello. Secondly, Iago himself may be in love with Desdemona. There is no evidence or any material proof in the play that both of these reasons are true.

Desdemona dies because of Iago’s plan, and he does not tell the audience why he believes Emilia has had an affair. He says, “I hate the Moor,” and it is thought abroad that “twixt my sheets he’s done my office.” The last phrase means that Othello did something that only Iago is allowed to do. There is a great chance, Iago simply tries to manipulate the audience to get them on his side.

Bianca is another peculiar character that serves as an excellent example of the theme of jealousy in literature. She is a secondary character and can be viewed as a parallel to Roderigo. Both are desperately in love with people who do not love them back.

However, Bianca is a mere object in the eyes of men. Cassio does not love her and has no plans to marry her. In his conversation with Iago, he claims:

“Tis the strumpet’s plague To beguile many and be beguiled by one.”

She suspects that Cassio has an affair when she sees the handkerchief but still offers him supper and rushes to help him when he was stubbed. She truly loves him, and her jealousy does not search for revenge. Instead of planning how to hurt her lover in secret, she speaks to him and asks him directly.

“Jealousy Is a Green-Eyed Monster”

In the middle of the play, when the destructive force of jealousy starts to kick in, Iago tells Othello, “O beware, my Lord, of jealousy! It is a green-eyed monster!” This metaphor perfectly describes jealousy as a potent and destructive emotion.

Othello is a jealousy victim himself. At the beginning of the play, Othello is a strong and determined man who is sure that he deserves to be with Desdemona. However, in the second part of the play, Othello doubts himself and feels inferior to others. He says, “haply for I am black, and have not those soft parts of the conversation that chamberers have.” He feels so insecure. He convinces himself that Desdemona is unfaithful to him due to him being black and less eloquent than the Venetians. He does not have any solid proof that Desdemona has an affair with another man. Therefore, he invents it.

Another victim of the “green-eyed monster” is Desdemona. At the beginning of the play, Desdemona is a romantic character, but she becomes a tragic one because of the monstrous effect of jealousy. Some critics, such as Coleridge, argue that it was not Othello’s jealousy that killed Desdemona but Iago’s envy.

Iago keeps personifying jealousy throughout the play by saying that “jealousy is a green-eyed monster.” He also compares jealousy with a plague or a fatal disease. He says that he will put the Moor “into a jealousy so strong that judgment cannot cure.” Emilia, Iago’s wife, also calls jealousy a monster:

“But jealous souls will not be answer’d so; They are not ever jealous for the cause, but jealous for they’re jealous. It is a monster Begot upon itself, born on itself.”

Love and Jealousy

Love and jealousy are deeply intertwined in Shakespearean tragedies. However, more emotions are triggered by Iago’s plan. Envy, hate, passion, desire to restore one’s dignity, a desire for justice create a mix of feelings that turned the protagonist into a monster. Othello breaks when he sees Bianca with the handkerchief he gave to Desdemona as the first gift.

To conclude, Othello is a play that can be seen as a battle between love and jealousy. On the one hand, the audience sees Othello, who is losing his mind due to jealousy. On the other hand, Desdemona continues loving Othello despite everything he has done to her.

The audience sees how possessive and corruptive love could be as Othello’s murderous jealousy becomes stronger than any other emotion. Desdemona’s love is based on trust. It is forgiving; it is Christian-like. Desdemona’s ability to forgive Othello at the end of the play helps the audience forgive Othello.

💬 Jealousy Quotes in Othello

“Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see. She has deceived her father, and may thee.” – Brabantio, Act 1 Scene 3

“I hate the Moor, And it is thought abroad, that ‘twixt my sheets Has done my office. I know not if ‘t be true, But I, for mere suspicion in that kind, Will do as if for surety.” – Iago, Act 1 Scene 3

“O, beware, my lord, of jealousy! It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock The meat it feeds on;” – Iago, Act 3 Scene 3

“But jealous souls will not be answered so. They are not ever jealous for the cause, But jealous for they are jealous. It is a monster Begot upon itself, born on itself.” – Emilia, Act 3 Scene 4

🔮 Appearance vs. Reality in Othello

One of the most fundamental philosophical questions of western philosophy is the question of how things seem to be and the way they are. As one of the greatest thinkers of all time, Shakespeare was preoccupied with this question as well.

Appearance versus reality is a major theme in Othello, the Moor of Venice, because almost every character has two sides to their personality. Iago is the antagonist of the play. Shakespeare demonstrates the difference between certainty and illusion, shadow and substance, stability and fluidity through him. In a way, he is the “literary device” that exposes the contradiction between reality and how it appears.

At the beginning of the play, both the reading and the viewing audience sees some sort of stability. A perfect marriage, which is based upon true love, a noble hero, who is honest, brave, and virtuous. Othello is confident that Desdemona loves him for who he is; he is a military hero who everyone well respects.

This world of order and peace gets distorted by Iago, who does not believe in ideal love, friendship, loyalty, or absolute truth. He believes in the fluidity of all things, and he himself does not have a stable identity of his own.

In Act 1 scene 1, the audience witnesses a multitude of Iago’s personalities. He is a friend to Roderigo and a dark shadow telling Barbantio about Desdemona’s marriage. Yet, he is a loyal servant of Othello. In this scene, Iago presents factual truth to both Barbantio and Othello. However, each character receives a different version of the events. This first scene is an excellent example of the contrast between appearance and reality.

Iago easily adopts a new identity and abandons the old one. He tells Roderigo that he is:

“Trimmed in forms and visages of duty, Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves.”

Iago claims here that he is not the only one who mixes up reality with appearance. He is convinced that people do that to pursue their own agenda all the time. Till this point, the audience can still relate to Iago. He did not lose his humanity in their eyes yet.

He explains the reason why he does not like Othello. He promoted a man named Cassio in front of him. At the end of the same scene, the audience gets to hear two more reasons why Iago is so full of hatred towards Othello.

However, as he continues with his plot, the readers start seeing him for what he actually is:

“For when my outward action doth demonstrate The native act and figure of my heart In compliment extern, ’tis not long after But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve For daws to peck at. I am not what I am.”

Iago is not the only one who mixes appearance with reality. Desdemona is a good example of that.

She falls in love with Othello through the stories about his heroic past. In a way, she falls in love with the representation of Othello and not with Othello himself. She does not know him very well. Therefore she cannot immediately understand what causes this sudden change in Othello’s behavior.

Iago, on the contrary, knows Othello really well. He is also a great manipulator and psychologist. Like a good manipulator, Iago understands that he needs to remain patient. He tells Roderigo:

“How poor are they who have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees.”

Iago waits for an opportunity and only then acts.

Iago makes Desdemona appear untrustworthy while Iago seems righteous. It is crucial to note that almost every character in the play calls Iago honest. In total, the word “honest” is applied to Iago more than 50 times throughout the play. For instance, Othello says:

“This fellow’s of exceeding honesty And knows all qualities with a learned spirit Of human dealings.”

Othello has no reason to think Iago is not honest. Nevertheless, he trusts him but does not believe Desdemona.

Othello says about his wife:

“I do not think, but Desdemona is honest.”

He states that he does not believe Desdemona would have an affair. However, the synthetic structure here is fundamental. Othello uses double negation to say that Desdemona is honest, which means that he does not believe in it. Iago brings up another powerful argument by saying:

“She deceived her father by marrying you.”

By reminding Othello that Desdemona was not honest before, he makes him doubt her even more.

When Iago provides “an ocular proof” (the handkerchief), and Desdemona lies about it, Othello will believe anything Iago tells him. The level of trust Othello puts in “honest Iago” is also shown through the scene in which Iago suggests a script for Desdemona’s murder. Othello agrees with him.

Cassio and Roderigo

It is very peculiar to see how Iago manipulates Roderigo and Cassio. He also uses their weakest point.

Iago understands that for Cassio, his reputation plays an essential role and that Cassio truly loves and respects Othello. So he makes sure all of it is being used against Cassio.

With Roderigo, Iago uses a similar technique and exploits his love for Desdemona. He feeds Roderigo with ideas about Desdemona’s immorality to make sure Roderigo believes he has a chance.

Emilia is another character that has a double personality. On the one hand, she is very loyal to Desdemona. On the other hand, she played a crucial role in her husband’s scheme. It makes her the first one to realize that Iago is the one responsible.

Her husband exploited their marriage and her obedience to succeed with his plan. But Emilia eventually saw the whole picture and influenced the outcome, accusing Iago of his crimes and making the reality evident for the others. Furious, Iago stabs her, thus, commits his first murder in plain sight and shows his true self.

Othello’s Farewell Speech Analysis

One of the most important scenes that show appearance vs. reality is Othello’s farewell. In this speech, he asks the audience to see the events with a positive outlook. He tells them to see him not as a villain who just killed his innocent wife but as a husband who loved his wife too much.

There is a lot of contradictions in this speech. For instance, he states that he is “not easily jealous,” and in the following sentence, he adds, “wrought/ perplexed in the extreme.” It shows that Othello actually cannot accept reality. He tells the audience “to speak of me as I am.”

He shows very little emotion about Desdemona’s murder and is very focused on restoring his reputation in the audience’s eyes. One of the ways in which he tries to do it is by speaking beautifully.

Othello uses a lot of metaphors to mask what has happened. He says:

“Indian, a pearl away Richer than all his tribe.”

This metaphor shows that Othello did not understand what a horrible thing he committed. He speaks so poetically and beautifully about killing an innocent person. The audience sees that this speech is an inaccurate narration of the play’s events, and it emphasizes this great disparity between appearance and reality.

💬 Quotes about Appearance vs. Reality

“For, sir, It is as sure as you are Roderigo, Were I the Moor I would not be Iago. In following him, I follow but myself. Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty, But seeming so for my particular end. For when my outward action doth demonstrate The native act and figure of my heart In complement extern, ’tis not long after But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve For daws to peck at. I am not what I am.” – Iago, Act 1 Scene 1

“O heaven! How got she out? O treason of the blood! Fathers, from hence trust not your daughters’ minds By what you see them act. (1.1.)” – Brabantio, Act 1 Scene 1

“So come my soul to bliss, as I speak true. So speaking as I think, alas, I die.” – Emilia, Act 5 Scene 2

♀️ Sexism as a Theme of Othello

In Shakespeare’s time, women did not possess the same type of freedom modern women have. Elizabethan society was extremely patriarchal, meaning that men were considered superior to women in all regards: intellectually, physically, emotionally. Women were born to be objectified by men, serve them, and be treated as their subordinates or, even worse, their possessions. The Bible supported this point of view, and disobedience was seen as a crime against God.

This belief was deeply ingrained into the fabric of Elizabethan society. Not surprisingly, Shakespeare’s plays reflect this belief as well. The question of the gender roles in Othello becomes one of the most important in the entire play.

There are only three female characters in Othello —Desdemona, Emilia, and Bianca. All of them are maltreated by their partners. These three females have different socioeconomic statuses, and it dictates the way male characters approach them and the level of freedom and respect they get.

In the play, men respect the boundaries of married women as they belong to their husbands. However, Iago believes all women are “whores,” and there is no difference between a housewife and a street lady. He claims:

“Come on, come on, you are pictures out of doors, Bells in your parlors, wild-cats in your kitchens, Saints in your injuries, devils being offended, Players in your housewifery, and housewives in … Your beds!”

An analysis of the three women in Othello will allow readers to see that even though all three women in Othello have strong personalities, they have been oppressed by culture and male dominance. This systemic oppression made women content with their secondary status in society and their families. The way Desdemona, Emilia, and Bianca are portrayed in Othello could not be more contrasting. This contrast between them forms the core of the female theme in Othello .

Desdemona is the first female character readers encounter in the play. From the first pages, readers see that she has very little control over her destiny. She tries to resist her father’s authority, but not because she wants to regain her freedom or find her voice. She fights it because she is in love. She wants to marry Othello and live an adventurous life with him.

Desdemona’s first words in the play show the deep respect for her father and his dominant position in her life:

“My noble father, I do perceive here a divided duty. To you, I am bound for life and education. My life and education both do teach me how to respect you. You are the lord of my duty, I am hitherto your daughter. But here’s my husband, and so much duty as my mother showed to you, preferring you before her father, so much I challenge that I may profess due to the Moor my lord.”

This speech shows Desdemona’s intelligence, her emotionality, her eloquence. In fact, she sounds more eloquent than her father or Othello himself. It is also peculiar that the issue of “duty” remains unchallenged by Desdemona. She sees herself as a possession that should be transferred from one man to another. Desdemona cannot imagine herself being alienated from men completely. She thinks that she only exists in relation to them.

After she is approved to get married, she is treated as a possession by her husband, Othello. She has to ask for permission to go to Cyprus with him, but Othello views her as a commodity that needs transportation and protection. A little bit later in the play, the Duke tells Othello to “use her well.” It can be interpreted in two ways: the first one is to take care of Desdemona. Well, the second one is to take advantage of her, to use her literally.

In Elizabethan times, marriages, especially in higher society, were strictly pre-arranged. Desdemona breaks all the societal norms when she chooses her husband. Iago tells her father, “hath made a gross revolt, tying her beauty, wit, and fortunes in an extravagant and wheeling stranger.” As a result of her actions, Barbantio disowns her.

Later in the play, Desdemona realizes her entrapped position, but it is already too late. She suffers abuse in Othello’s hands, and he verbally abuses her by calling her “whore.” She has no place to go back as her father does not want to see her again.

Desdemona realizes it, saying, “this is my wretched fortune.” She accepts her destiny, even if it is to die.

Emilia, another woman in the play, is Desdemona’s only faithful supporter. She explicitly questions the world’s injustice, “Hath she forsook . . . / Her father, and her country, all her friends, / To be called a whore?”

Emilia does realize that the position women have in society is unjust. In their private conversation, she tells Desdemona that all the problems are coming from men. She is the voice of feminism in Othello. However, Emilia speaks her mind only in front of Desdemona. When it comes to speaking for herself or defending herself, she is not able to do that.

Emilia is Iago’s wife. She obeys him and unknowingly helps him in his scheme. However, Iago does not show any love or respect for her. He is jealous and upset with her as he thinks that Emilia and Othello had an affair. Iago claims that Othello:

“Twixt my sheets He’s done my office.”

Iago objectifies his wife and deprives her of humanity by calling her “seat,” “sheets,” or “office.”

The audience does not feel that Iago has any feelings for Emilia. She is merely a possession for him. He kills her without hesitation because she reveals his evil plan and decides to stay loyal to Desdemona. In a way, in this last scene, she behaved unfaithfully to her husband, and therefore she deserves to be killed.

Her death is very spontaneous and symbolic at the same time. Once Emilia finds her voice and speaks up, Iago uses violence to make sure she keeps silent. Most of the women are silenced in Othello.

Men, who are witnessing the argument between Emilia and Iago, are all armed. It would be reasonable to take a stand and defend an unarmed woman. However, no one intervenes, and she has no means to defend herself.

At the beginning of the play, Iago tells the audience that Bianca is a whore. However, there is no evidence in the text that supports this claim. After all, Iago is not the most reliable source of information in the play.

Bianca is a crucial character because she creates a parallel with Othello, a parallel with Desdemona, and a parallel with Emilia. She is not involved in scheming, Iago is not trying to use her in his plot, and she has the authority of her own.

Besides Othello, Bianca is the only other character in the play who gets jealous. How she reacts proves that Othello’s actions could be prevented. Her love for Cassio does not change after she suspects him of having an affair with another woman. She does not want revenge. She just wants to know the truth.

The way Cassio and Bianca communicate does not look like they are in a prostitute and client relationship. Cassio calls her “my most fair Bianca,” “my love.” They address one another so sweetly that it sounds like two people that are in an equal power partnership.

Bianca is judged and accused by other characters for having an intimate relationship outside of marriage. However, Cassio does not get the same type of judgment for having premarital sex. It proves that there are double standards in Othello’s presentation of women.

For many years, critics and the audience were unfair to Bianca as well. However, she is simply a financially and sexually independent woman. Her life belongs to her and not to her husband or her father. She is aware of her sexuality and challenges the norms.

There are a lot of sexist remarks in Othello that penetrate the text. Iago is a misogynist, and throughout the whole play, he keeps calling Bianca names. He calls her – “strumpet,” “trash,” “creature,” and etc. All of this harassment happens behind her back, so she cannot defend her dignity. Only when Emilia calls her “strumpet” in her face, Bianca responds:

“I am no strumpet but of life as honest as you, that thus abuse me.”

Unlike Desdemona and Emilia, she can speak for herself.

Female Sexuality

Alongside the female oppression in Othello and continuous female abuse in Othello , Desdemona has power over her husband due to her sexuality. Desdemona is not afraid to use her sexuality to persuade Othello. For instance, when she decides to talk about Cassio’s case, Desdemona knows how strong her influence on Othello is. Otherwise, she would not agree to talk to Othello about that. She is beautiful, she is young, and Othello desires her.

The sex theme and sexual remarks are present throughout the play. Mainly, Iago is the one who brings these conversations up. However, even Othello himself talks about sex on multiple occasions.

At the beginning of the play, Othello tells Desdemona, “Come, my dear love,/The purchase made, the fruits are to ensue.” This comment shows that Othello views marriage as a “purchase” and “the fruits” as sex. A woman is expected to fulfill the sexual desires of her husband. However, a woman who shows her sexuality is immediately labeled as a “whore.”

Throughout the play, the word “whore” has been used more than ten times and towards all three female characters. However, most of the time, it is being used in regards to Bianca, the third heroine.All women in Othello are innocent and, nevertheless, suffer verbal and physical abuse. The audience sees these women through the prism of masculinity and male judgment, but it is evident that these women have stories of their own. They have minds of their own, feelings of their own, and voices of their own. Those women are not weak or passive, as many critics believe. They are simply oppressed.

💬 Othello Quotes about Women

“Come on, come on. You are pictures out of door, Bells in your parlors, wild-cats in your kitchens, Saints in your injuries, devils being offended, Players in your housewifery, and hussies in your beds.” – Iago, Act 2 Scene 1

“O curse of marriage, That we can call these delicate creatures ours And not their appetites! I had rather be a toad And live upon the vapor of a dungeon Than keep a corner in the thing I love For others’ uses.” – Othello, Act 3 Scene 3

“But I do think it is their husbands’ faults If wives do fall. Say that they slack their duties, And pour our treasures into foreign laps; Or else break out in peevish jealousies, Throwing restraint upon us. Or say they strike us, Or scant our former having in despite, Why, we have galls, and though we have some grace, Yet have we some revenge. Let husbands know Their wives have sense like them. They see and smell, And have their palates both for sweet and sour, As husbands have. What is it that they do When they change us for others? Is it sport? I think it is. And doth affection breed it? I think it doth. Is ‘t frailty that thus errs? It is so too. And have not we affections, Desires for sport, and frailty, as men have? Then let them use us well. Else let them know, The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.” – Emilia, Act 4 Scene 3

Thank you for reading till the end! Check other articles that explore Othello’s characters and meaning.

• Othello by William Shakespeare: Entire Play — The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Created by Jeremy Hylton
• Racism, Misogyny and ‘Motiveless Malignity’ in Othello — Kiernan Ryan, The British Library
• Othello’s Black Skin — Jeffrey R. Wilson, Harvard College Writing Program
• Desdemona and Emilia: Female Friendship in Shakespeare’s Othello — Elise Walter, Folger Shakespeare Library
• Active Agents or Passive Instruments? Female Characters in William Shakespeare’s “Othello” — Wiebke Pietzonka, GRIN
• Shakespeare’s Othello: Othello’s Jealousy — A. C. Bradley, from Shakespearean Tragedy , Shakespeare Online.com
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IvyPanda. (2023, August 14). Othello Themes: Racism, Jealousy, & More. https://ivypanda.com/lit/othello-study-guide/themes/

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Racial Disgust in Early Modern England: The Case of Othello

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Bradley J Irish, Racial Disgust in Early Modern England: The Case of Othello , Shakespeare Quarterly , Volume 73, Issue 3-4, Fall-Winter 2022, Pages 224–245, https://doi.org/10.1093/sq/quac057

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The ongoing development of Premodern Critical Race Studies (PCRS) is perhaps the most exciting intellectual current in early modern studies today. 1 In this essay, I attempt to put the vital insights of this research into conversation with scholarship from another prominent subfield: the interdisciplinary study of emotion. 2 I do so through a reading of Othello , in which I argue that the circulation of racial meaning in Othello ’s Venice is intimately tied to the circulation of affective meaning—and that the inscription of racial identity onto Othello by the inhabitants of Venice is fundamentally an emotional process. More specifically, I will suggest that the affective mode of disgust plays a central role in how Othello is perceived by others in the play. While few would deny that jealousy is the dominant (and most explicitly articulated) emotion in Othello , I argue that racialized disgust is what more precisely animates Iago’s plot to undo his master, serving both as a personal motivator and as an instrument by which he poisons how Othello is perceived by others.

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by William Shakespeare

Othello essay questions.

How is Othello's race a factor in the play?

Othello ascends to the rank of the Venetian military, a city - much like Elizabethan England when the play was written - rife with racism. A general in the army, Othello holds a distinguished place in the Duke's court due to his victories in battle, but not an equal one. He suffers barbs and preconceived notions, yet Othello is esteemed and wins the love of the daughter of a nobleman. However, Brabantio is enraged by Othello's marriage to Desdemona and claims Othello used magic to compel her to run to his "sooty bosom". Race is a factor in the tragedy both in those who seek to destroy Othello, and the victims of the schemes - Othello and Desdemona. Perhaps the most pernicious form of race as an instrument of division is Othello's own view of himself as an outsider, which makes him more susceptible to Iago's plan.

How does Shakespeare's use of language reveal character?

Often Shakespeare uses verse lines written in iambic pentameter to illustrate nobility. It is illustrative of Iago's duplicitous nature that he tends to speak in verse when he is with Othello and in prose for his soliloquies. One way in which Iago is a master in manipulation is his tendency to use Othello's own words to disguise his active role of instigator and make it seem that any dark thought came not from him but Othello's own mind. Othello's speech is very sophisticated at the beginning of the play, and in his soliloquy at the close of Act V, but when he is consumed with jealous rage, his eloquence falters. Shakespeare uses dialogue to convey the innerworkings of his characters.

Othello is often called a tragic hero. Discuss his heroic qualities as well as his flaws which lead to his demise.

At the beginning of the play Othello is presented as an honorable man of noble stature and high position. In the end it is his misguided attempt to maintain that honor which brings about his, and Desdemona's, demise. However, Othello is not simply the victim of a plot. Iago is able to engineer Othello's downfall in part because of Othello's own insecurities. His pride blinds him to his weaknesses, and he puts his faith in Iago over the word of his love, Desdemona. Othello is obsessed with his reputation, and ends up killing his wife to save face. Only to a flawed man would murder seem like a solution to a problem of reputation. Othello is spurred on by lies and misrepresentations, but he brings about his own undoing.

What motives, stated and implied, does Iago have for taking revenge on Othello?

Iago's stated reason for taking revenge on Othello is that he has been passed over for Cassio's post. But is this enough for him to "hate the Moor"? It is clear that he is jealous of Othello's ascension in the court and successful wooing of Desdemona. Othello's race and status as an outsider also seems to fuel this rage, as well as the rumor that Othello has slept with Iago's wife, Emilia. None of these motivations, however, seem to add up to inspire the violence that unfolds. Iago remains one of the most purely evil of Shakespeare's villains.

Discuss how loyalty is presented as a positive and a negative quality throughout the play.

Othello's lack of loyalty is what incites Iago's plan for revenge. Iago's ability to fool Othello that he is loyal while secretly plotting his demise is what makes his revenge effective. It is Othello's belief in Desdemona's lack of loyalty that seals their fates. In these ways loyalty, when misconstrued, can be dangerous. However Desdemona's loyalty to Othello even in her death and Othello's loyalty to her once his mistake is revealed are seen as ennobling aspects of their characters.

Compare and contrast the jealousy of Othello to that of Iago.

One major theme in Othello is revenge - Iago's revenge on Othello and Othello's revenge on Desdemona. They both believe death will bring justice. Iago's revenge is cooler, plotted out over time where Othello's is an act of heartbroken passion. Iago wears his lack of morals as a badge of honor where it is Othello's moral code that leads to his tragic end.

Although Othello is the title character in what way is Iago the main character?

Often in Shakespeare's plays such as Hamlet or King Lear , the title character is the main character and protagonist. In Othello this is not the case. Iago has almost 20% more lines than Othello, and has more asides with the audience. While it is Othello's decisions and actions that provide the dramatic structure for the play, it is Iago who sets in motion those decisions and spurs him to action. Othello is the tragic figure of the play, along with Desdemona, and it his characteristics that lend itself to most of the themes - jealousy, race, trust. However, Iago is the character who drives the plot.

How does Desdemona's dying assertion that she killed herself effect how you see her character?

From a modern feminist viewpoint Desdemona may be judged harshly for answering Emilia, when she asked who has mortally attacked her, "nobody; I myself. Farewell." Furthermore, she seemed resigned to her fate at the hands of her husband. While contemporary audiences may interpret these actions as unfathomable, they highlight the goodness of her character. Desdemona is described by others in the play with words that symbolize goodness - light, white, fair, delicate, alabaster. By the end of the play, Desdemona begins to symbolize goodness itself, so her reaction to her murder becomes another element in Othello's tragic end. Desdemona still loves Othello, though he is mistaken, and she goes to her death professing her husband's reputation. A modern audience may wish for a response that is less melodramatic, but that is not the world that Shakespeare has created in this play.

In what ways do Othello's suicide strengthen or undermine his heroism?

Though suicide is not usually the chosen end for a heroic figure, it is Othello's only escape from the crimes he has committed. Though the victim of Iago's trickery, Othello is still the author of his own demise. For Desdemona's death to be answered by anything less than his own would have felt false.

Describe how Othello's pride leads to his fall.

At the beginning of the play Othello is proud of himself and his achievements, but when Iago looks to punish Othello for his perceived slight, it is his pride that he preys upon. The belief that Desdemona has tainted his honor ignites Othello's rage, but it is his pride that blinds him to the fact that the evidence of her acts are lies invented not by a loyal friend but an enemy bent on his destruction.

Othello Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Othello is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

what attributers of the green eyed monster jealousy are made painful apparent as the scene progresses

Jealousy is the green-eyed monster in this scene. In Act 3 scene 3 Othello pretty much displays his jealousy,

desdemonas speech here confirms the masterly nature of iagos plot with what words does she assure cassio that she will do her best to get him reinstated

What is your question here?

why does othello ignore the cries for help?

Othello is hurdling towards self-destruction: sadly, by the deaths of people closest to him. Like tragic heroes such as Macbeth, Othello's senses are dull to tragedy and screams of terror. Roderigo and Cassio fight, and both are injured; Othello...

Study Guide for Othello

Othello study guide contains a biography of William Shakespeare, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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Essays for Othello

Othello essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Othello by William Shakespeare.

• Iago and Edmund: The Silence and Complexity of Evil
• Unity in Shakespeare's Tragedies
• Inevitability and the Nature of Shakespeare's Tragedies
• Witchy Women: Female Magic and Otherness in Western Literature
• Racism in Othello

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