Analysis Of The Othello By Shakespeare - Essay Example

Analysis Of The Othello By Shakespeare The progressive preparation for the catastrophe is wonderfully managed from the Moor's first gallant recital of the story of his love, of "the spells and witchcraft he had used," from his unlooked-for and romantic success, the fond satisfaction with which he dotes on his own happiness, the unreserved tenderness of Desdemona and her innocent importunities in favour of Cassio, irritating the suspicions instilled into her husband's mind by the perfidy of Iago, and rankling there to poison, till he loses all command of himself, and his rage can only be appeased by blood. She is introduced, just before Iago begins to put his scheme in practice, pleading for Cassio with all the thoughtless gaiety of friendship and winning confidence in the love of Othello. But shortly after, on brooding over his suspicions alone, and yielding to his apprehensions of the worst, his smothered jealousy breaks out into open fury, and he returns to demand satisfaction of Iago like a wild beast stung with the envenomed shaft of the hunters. Iago, by false aspersions, and by presenting the most revolting images to his mind, easily turns the storm of passion from himself against Desdemona, and works him up into a trembling agony of doubt and fear, in which he abandons all his love and hopes in a breath. From here on, his raging thoughts "never look back, ne'er ebb to humble love," till his revenge is satiated, the painful regrets and involuntary recollections of past circumstances which cross his mind amidst the dim traces of passion, aggravating the sense of his wrongs, but not shaking his purpose. In his conversations with Desdemona, the persuasion of her guilt and the immediate proofs of her duplicity seem to irritate his resentment and aversion to her; but in the scene immediately preceding her death, the recollection of his love haunts him in all its tenderness and force; and after her death, he all at once forgets his wrongs in the sudden and irreparable sense of his loss. This happens before he is assured of her innocence but later his remorse is as dreadful as his revenge has been, and yields only to fixed and death-like despair. His farewell speech, before he kills himself, in which he conveys his reasons to the senate for the murder of his wife, is equal to the first speech in which he gave them an account of his courtship of her, and "his whole course of love.": "I kissed thee ere I killed thee. No way but this, Killing myself, to die upon a kiss" (V, ii, line 359-60). He then laid down on the bed and died with dignity” (Stauffer 173). Such an ending was alone worthy of such a commencement. The fate of Othello is ultimately the result of Iago's skillful manipulation of rhetorical skills. Iago's convincing rhetoric clearly reveals what a powerful-and dangerous-tool language can be, especially when used by the eloquent, but unscrupulous, individual. A puppeteer of the psyche, Iago pulls the strings of those who should know better with a battery of verbal weapons. In his soliloquies and dialogues he reveals himself to the audience to be a master of connotative and metaphoric language, inflammatory imagery, emotional appeals, well-placed silences, dubious hesitations, leading questions, meaningful repetition, and sly hints. At the end of the play Iago discovers that even his verbal sparring cannot save him, he resorts to silence. It is his silence that elicits Othello's tragic recognition of his crime and of what he has become. Indeed, in terms of eloquence, Othello-not Iago—has the final word. The 'puritanical' English resistance to the blending of the fleshly and the spiritual, the sexual and the devotional, and by the fact that Shakespeare appealed to popular audiences more than the court. On the contrary, Othello is set in Venice, so encouraging a European baroque interpretation of the play; the fleshly and the spiritual are clear centres of tension in the drama, between Iago's allegations about Cassio, and Othello's love for Desdemona; the play focuses on the subjective, and the conflict between appearance and reality, which are unlikely to appeal to a popular audience. The characteristics of unreality and fantasy, changeableness, inconstancy of mind and character, shifting boundaries between the real and unreal; confusion of emotional states, blendings of tragic and comic; 'ostentation,' a liking for extravagance in expression and themes; elaboration of detail; surprising juxtapositions. All these typical themes can be found in Othello. Even the elaborate detail in Othello's account of the handkerchief may be regarded as a baroque extravagance. The account of the "Othello music" with its "enamelled" and "theatrical" imagery in Othello's speech, beside the ugly evasiveness of Iago's language, remains a marvellous insight by Wilson Knight; in his remarkable essay, he also refers to "[t]he pervading religious tonal significance relating to infidelity" and "the necessity of an intellectual interpretation" in the play, as well as the ostentation of Othello's language. ("The Othello Music," Chap. V, 97-119, [115, 119]. There is a radical, innovative fashionableness of Othello's speech, its ostentation as early English Baroque, and the dangerous insecurity of this new style, which Shakespeare exploits in the play. But this is early baroque and does not have the rigidity and preciosity of later European forms. The conceited, imagistic forms of baroque in later Spanish literature have not yet appeared. Othello is humiliated by the assumed loss of honour that he thinks has followed from Desdemona's betrayal (3.3.348-60). Shakespeare touches on the theme for a moment only. For this reason, perhaps, the major theme is love and jealousy .Othello is, nevertheless, seriously confused as the play shows, and deceived in the most tragic way. His confusion is both authentic to him and false to the audience, at the same time. He suffers an obviously false, loss of belief in Desdemona that he eventually recovers. The hallmarks of Spanish baroque are: appearance and reality, the impact of scepticism, challenging the mind, forming and performing identity, in the theatre and court, and in general the performative contexts of baroque culture which are clearly developed themes in Othello. For example, D. Farley-Hills, Shakespeare and the Rival Playwrights 1600-1606, London, 1990, 107-121, explores what he calls the "divinity" of Desdemona in the play. But he restricts "symbolic characterisation" (which he rejects in general for the play, but returns to in his discussion of Desdemona and "morality drama" traditions, 109 ff), to conventional notions of essentialist 'good' and 'evil,' without reference to the contemporary popular religious context. There is no sinful pride or improper self-regard in Othello's final speech, but instead a terrible clarity of moral knowledge which he sees necessitates his death. His baroque sense of secular honour requires it. Read More