There are three major characters in this tragic play; firstly Othello, the cultural and racial outsider of Venice, who is ironically the noble Christian, and Iago is the ‘Barbary horse’. While Othello is never rude in his speech, he does allow his eloquence to suffer as he is put under increasing strain by Iago’s plots. As the play prolongs, we notice a very distinctive change in Othello, as the thought of Desdemona with Cassio corrupts his love. However, in the final moments of the play, Othello regains his composure and, once again seduces the audience with his words. The speech that precedes his suicide is a tale that could almost woo anyone. It is the tension between Othello’s victimization at the hands of a foreign culture and his own willingness to torment himself that makes him a tragic figure rather than simply one of Iago’s ridiculous puppets.
Desdemona, often described as an angel, begins the play as a supremely independent person, but mid-way through she must struggle against all odds to convince Othello that she is not too independent. The manner in which Desdemona is murdered-smothered by a pillow in a bed covered in her wedding sheets-seems to be rather symbolic: she is literally suffocated beneath the demands put on her fidelity. Moreover in the end, Othello stifles that speech that made Desdemona so powerful.
Possibly the most heinous, motiveless villain in the history of Shakespeare, Iago is in the first scene, claims to be angry at Othello for having passed him over for the position of lieutenant, and then at the end of Act1, scene iii, Iago says he thinks that Othello may have been ‘twixt his sheets’ and ‘done his office’, with Emilia. Again, Iago mentions his suspicion at the end of Act II, scene I, explaining that he lusts for Desdemona in order to get even with Othello, ‘wife for wife’. None of these claims seem to explain Iago’s deep hatred of Othello, and his lack of motivation-or his inability or unwillingness to express his true motivation, make his actions all the more terrifying. He is willing to take revenge on anyone, at the slightest provocation and enjoys the pain and damage he causes. Consequently, Iago is often funny, especially in his scenes with the foolish Roderigo; he almost seems to wink at the audience as he reveals his manipulative abilities. We must admit that Iago is a little lucky in the scenes of manipulation and destruction, but he inspires all of the play’s characters the trait that is most lethal to Othello: trust.
Iago is strangely preoccupied with plants. His speeches to Roderigo in particular make extensive and elaborate use of vegetable metaphors and conceits. Such as: ‘Our bodies are our gardens, to which our wills are gardeners… the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills’, ‘Though other things grow fair against the sun’. The first of these examples best explains Iago's preoccupation with the plant metaphor and how it functions within the play. Characters in this play seem to be the product of certain inevitable, natural forces, which, if left unchecked, will grow wild. Iago understands these natural forces particularly well: he is, according to his own metaphor, a good ‘gardener,’ both of himself and of others.
I, iii is a key scene, being the first of the several ‘trial’ scenes, although no one is actually charged. The scene is a prime example of the Prejudices and superficial judgement which runs throughout the play - and is the ultimate cause of the tragedy in the play. Brabantio accuses Othello of many things, he claims he is an ‘abuser’, ‘corrupted’, ‘conjured’ – ‘by spells and medicine’. All of which generate from ‘honest Iago’ with his use of the ‘black ram’ and ‘tupping’, and not forgetting the fact that he believes Iago because of his own Prejudices.
Before Desdemona even enters the stage, we are presented with conflicting views; on hand that of ‘a maiden never bold’, on the other of a girl bold enough to initiate a courtship and resolute enough to pursue it to the point of elopement. As the audience discover, Brabantio’s misjudgement of his daughter is one of many instances in the play of bad judgement based on appearances and even more on what the person judging wants to be the truth, for the sake of his own self – image and psychological security.
Shakespeare has Iago speak in prose, which helps to lower the emotional temperature, whilst Iago’s bantering wit once more engages the audience. Iago believes that he has discovered the master secret which makes him superior to everyone else, understanding human action, his desire for security and power over others, exploiting those less clear sighted than himself.
By 4, i, Othello has already been convinced of Desdemona’s infidelity, and is in need of some proof. He is a very different man from the noble general we saw in Act 1; his speech is now dis-jointed, unclear and lacks clarity. Instead of the polite, fluent and articulate speaker we used to know, we are presented with a ‘Barbary’ Othello, whose speech is contemptuous, abrupt, and rather like Iago’s. Considering where this scene is set - a room in the castle – a hidden area, which contrast with the setting of Act1, Scene 3 – the council chamber, where Othello is open, honest and has nothing to hide. Othello in Act, scene 3 has many alterations to the new Othello in Act 4, scene 1, such as the amount of entrances and exits, in 1,3 there is lots, indicating panic and pandemonium, however this atmosphere is put to an end with Othello's entry. But in 4, 1 there is also many entrances and exits, but here is a consistent feeling of panic and pandemonium, indicating a change in Othello's character. Iago’s lies have not only misled Othello, they have shifted him from his status of the celebrated defender of Venice to a cultural outsider and a threat to the Venetian society.
After Iago’s lucky conversation of ‘proof’, the corrupted Othello returns from the shadows as a newborn murderer. Now he has proof, Othello plans to kill the ‘pure’ Desdemona. Whilst Iago swiftly introduces the matter of the ‘handkerchief’, which assumes deadly prominence throughout this act. It has become, as Iago has planned, a symbol to Othello of his wife’s honour and therefore of her love for him, that love which had led him to abandon his ‘unhoused free condition’.
By this point in the play, the tension is gripping, the audience would be on the edge of their seats, and apprehensive.
We must take into account the extended metaphor which runs throughout, that of light and dark, pure and evil, heaven and hell. Moreover, the idea of ‘Eden’, as Iago replays the role of the ‘serpent’, whilst ‘poisoning’ the ear of Othello.
In the final scene, where Othello prepares to kill Desdemona, the idea of killing her becomes curiously intertwined, in his mind, with the idea of taking her virginity.
After Desdemona wakes, the scene progresses in a series of wavelike rushes that leave the audience as stunned and disoriented as the characters onstage. Firstly, Desdemona seems to die twice-Othello smoothers her once, then smothers again after mistaking Emilia’s screams from outside, for his wife’s. Astonishingly, Desdemona finds breath again to speak four final lines.
Before he kills himself, Othello invokes his prior services to the state at this point, he is resolved to die, and his concern is with how he will be remembered. When he appeals to his listeners to describe him as he actually is, neither better nor worse, his speech is back to the fluent and articulate style we used to know back in Act 1. As he continues, though, he addresses an important problem: will hi s crime be remembered as the fall from the grace of a Venetian Christian, or an assault on Venice by an ethnic and cultural outsider? He stresses his outsider status in a way that he does not do earlier in the play, comparing himself to a ‘base Indian’ who cast away a pearl worth more than all of his tribe.
Finally, he recalls a time in which he defended Venice by smiting an enemy Turk, and then stabs himself in a re-enactment of his earlier act, thereby casting himself as both insider and outsider, enemy of the state and defender of the state.
Throughout the play Shakespeare cultivates Othello’s ambivalent status as insider and outsider. Othello identifies himself firmly with the Christian culture, yet his belief in fate and the charmed ‘handkerchief’ suggest ties to a pagan heritage.
Among the tragedies of Shakespeare Othello is supreme in one quality: beauty. He is like a hero of the ancient world in that he is not a man recognised as extraordinary. He seems born to do great deeds and live in ledged, with the heroic capacity for passion. But the thing that sets him apart is his solitariness. He is a stranger, a man of alien race, with-out ties of nature or natural duties. He is, in a sense, a ‘self-made man’, the product of a certain kind of life which he has chosen to lead.
