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What You’ll Love about… Othello by William Shakespeare
Because they make us feel awful, Shakespeare’s tragedies are hard to love. It’s easy to love the comedies — they’re really funny, and the lessons they teach are largely practical ones. The tragedies are impressive because of their skillful construction and their masterful production of awe and dread , but they are harder to love. The lessons they teach aren’t as practical as the comedies, because the passions on display are larger than life. While the number of people who could benefit from the lessons about tolerance and community in plays such as Much Ado About Nothing or The Merry Wives of Windsor is potentially great, the number of people who need to be cautioned against murdering their spouse based on malicious rumors is relatively small.
That isn’t to say that the tragic action of Othello is completely inaccessible. Jealousy and mistrust don’t have to culminate in murder to be incredibly destructive. If you’ve been in the grips of romantic jealousy, you know just how wild and unreasonable you can become under certain circumstances. Othello plays out some of our worst fears on both sides of that situation as a warning to keep our feelings and our actions in proportion to whatever real or imagined injuries we might be experiencing.
While Shakespeare’s comedies tend to present a good balance of exemplary behavior and cautionary examples, the tragedies lean heavily toward cautionary examples. In other words, the comedies try to show people what they should do, at least some of the time, while the tragedies seem to try to show people what not to do or what they need to do better. Even when tragedies depict exemplary behavior, it usually contributes to the tragic sentiment of the play. Desdemona does very little wrong in the play. She abuses her father’s trust, but Brabantio is pretty contemptible, so it’s easy to understand and forgive her. She may not be the ideal daughter, but she is the ideal wife for Shakespeare’s audience: kind, sociable, loving, dutiful, and obedient. On top of that, she is independent and courageous. All of that is going to contribute to her suffering.
Othello needs to communicate better. Or to believe that he can communicate better. “Rude am I in my speech,” he admits to the Venetian Duke and Senators, and at first it seems like it may be a con, since he’s…
