Othello

Summary

Othello is the tragedy of a Moorish general in the service of Venice who is brought, step by step, to murder the wife who loves him. The play opens at night in a Venetian street, where the ensign Iago, furious that Othello has promoted the Florentine Michael Cassio over him, rouses the senator Brabantio with crude news that his daughter Desdemona has eloped with the Moor. Brabantio accuses Othello before the Duke of winning her with drugs and charms, but Othello answers that he wooed her only by telling the story of his life, his battles, captivity and travels, and Desdemona, called before the council, declares that her duty is now divided and belongs to her husband. A Turkish fleet threatens Cyprus, and Othello is sent to defend it, with Desdemona following. On Cyprus a storm has already wrecked the Turks, and the play becomes a domestic war. Iago, who uses the foolish Roderigo as his purse and tool, gets Cassio drunk on watch, provokes a brawl, and so causes Othello to dismiss him; he then urges Cassio to ask Desdemona to plead for his return. In the long temptation scene of Act 3, Iago turns her generosity into evidence: with hints, hesitations and a warning against jealousy he plants the idea that she and Cassio are lovers. When Desdemona drops the strawberry-spotted handkerchief that was Othello's first gift to her, Emilia, Iago's wife, picks it up and gives it to her husband, who leaves it in Cassio's lodging. Othello demands ocular proof, hears Iago's invented report of Cassio talking in his sleep, and vows revenge. In Act 4 he falls into a fit, eavesdrops on a conversation about Cassio's mistress Bianca that he takes to be about his wife, strikes Desdemona in front of the Venetian envoy Lodovico, and calls her a whore. That night Desdemona sings the old Willow song while Emilia undresses her. In Act 5 Roderigo fails to kill Cassio and is stabbed by Iago, and Othello smothers Desdemona in her bed. She revives long enough to say that nobody but herself did it. Emilia, learning that her husband was the source, exposes the handkerchief plot and is killed by Iago. Othello, seeing what he has done, asks to be remembered as one who loved not wisely but too well, and stabs himself, dying upon a kiss. Iago refuses to explain himself and is led off to torture; Cassio is left to govern Cyprus. Shakespeare took the plot from an Italian novella by Giraldi Cinthio (1565). The play was acted at court in November 1604, printed in quarto in 1622 and in the First Folio of 1623.

Top Lessons

• How suggestion becomes certainty

  Iago almost never states a lie outright in the temptation scene; he echoes Othello's words, hesitates, and warns him against the very jealousy he is planting. Shakespeare shows how a mind can be led to supply its own false proof once it accepts a frame of suspicion.

• Reputation and the self

  Cassio cries that he has lost the immortal part of himself when he loses his reputation, while Iago tells Othello that a good name is the jewel of the soul. Othello's own final speech is an attempt to set his story straight before he dies. The play asks how far a person is what others say of him.

• Faithfulness to the end

  Desdemona, struck and insulted, still pleads for Cassio, refuses to imagine infidelity even for the whole world, and with her last breath shields her husband. Emilia, long compliant, at last tells the truth though it kills her. The play sets their loyalty against Iago's betrayal.

• The outsider and the city

  Venice honours Othello as the general it needs, but Iago, Roderigo and Brabantio speak of him in animal and devilish images. Othello wins Desdemona by telling his history, and he ends by narrating it again, comparing himself to the Turk he once struck down. His dignity and his isolation are both part of the tragedy.

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Medical Lens

Othello is one of Shakespeare's fullest studies of a passion overthrowing reason, and Renaissance readers would have understood jealousy through humoral and moral psychology as a disease of the imagination: Iago himself says that dangerous conceits are in their natures poisons. The play's drug language is concrete: Brabantio accuses Othello of drugs or minerals and medicines bought of mountebanks, and Iago names poppy and mandragora, the standard soporifics of the period, as powerless against a troubled mind. In Act 4 Othello collapses in what Iago calls an epilepsy, his second fit, and Iago describes the expected course of lethargy, foaming and savage madness; whether the earlier fit happened at all rests only on Iago's word, and modern readings of the collapse as a seizure, a syncope or an emotional crisis are interpretations, not diagnoses the play supplies. Cassio's drunkenness and its consequences give a clear early-modern picture of alcohol and loss of self-command. The final scene adds Brabantio's reported death from grief, the smothering of Desdemona, and Othello's suicide.

• Act 1, Scenes 2 and 3

  Brabantio charges that Othello bewitched Desdemona with drugs, minerals and medicines bought of mountebanks; Othello answers that his only witchcraft was his story.

• Act 2, Scene 3

  Cassio, who says he has a poor brain for drinking, is pressed to drink on watch, brawls with Montano, and afterwards laments the loss of his reputation.

• Act 3, Scene 3

  Othello complains of a pain upon his forehead and Desdemona offers to bind it with the handkerchief; later Iago calls jealous fancies poisons and says no poppy or mandragora will bring Othello sleep again.

• Act 4, Scene 1

  Othello falls into a trance or fit after Iago's broken words about Cassio; Iago calls it an epilepsy and tells Cassio the lethargy must have its quiet course.

• Act 5, Scene 2

  Desdemona is smothered and briefly revives; Gratiano reports that grief killed Brabantio; Othello stabs himself.