Othello

Basic Plot and Central Characters

The full title of the play is Othello, the Moor of Venice: the extended title emphasizes Othello's position as commander of Venetian forces against the Turks and his race, both clues to the understanding of his tragedy. Othello is highly valued by the Venetians for his military prowess, but he is not a member of Venetian society; he is first and last a soldier, a member of a military community, trusting and trusted by his brother officers (Potter, pp.45). Consequently it is as astonishing to him when Desdemona, a conventional Venetian aristocratic girl, leaves her home to marry him, as it is outrageous to her indignant father, Brabantio. Venice urgently needs Othello to defend Cyprus against the Turks, so Brabantio is forced to accept the match; however he warns Othello that a girl who has behaved so unpredictably once may prove as unreliable a wife as she has been a daughter. Othello is in rapture; his bliss is the greater for its incredibility, so that he naïvely imagines himself transported into a heaven on earth. But his junior officer, Iago, has motives of resentment against him; the most concrete of these is that the Florentine, Cassio, has been promoted over his head (Shakespeare, pp.37). Moreover, he is himself a cynic who has a low opinion of human nature and of the scope for genuine happiness. Partly as a double revenge against Othello and Cassio, partly as a cynical game the object of which is to bring Othello down to his own level of reality, he contrives first to disgrace Cassio temporarily, and then to insinuate into Othello's mind the suspicion, mounting by degrees to certainty, that Cassio and Desdemona are conducting a secret love affair. In Othello's mind the circumstances make this affair more than plausible: he has the habit of trusting Iago as his confidential officer; Desdemona has come to him out of a foreign society; Cassio is the sort of man who would have been considered an eligible husband for her. Until their marriage, Othello had had a single-minded dedication to his military vocation. The marriage has enriched this dedication, since it was Desdemona's admiration for him as a soldier that attracted her to him, but he now finds that his jealousy has divided his single-mindedness and is destroying his integrity. Accordingly he murders her, in the belief that heavenly justice is on his side. ...