A Tragic Story Of Racism In Othello Play

William Shakespeare knows as the most famous playwriter and poet in the twentieth century. Also, he is the most important and greatest writer of the European Renaissance. He wrote a lot of great plays in his life, and he made a great change in literary criticism in history. He is still the most famous playwriter today, and his play is all over the world. 'Shakespeare is the most translated author ever. His work is read in at least 80 languages, including Chinese, Italian, Armenian, Bengali, Tagalog, Uzbek and Krio' (William Shakespeare was,).

William Shakespeare admires the noble sentiments, so his play's theme always includes sacrifice and revenge. We can also find out those themes in one of his one of the four tragedies, which called Othello.

Othello was written by William Shakespeare in about 1603, and it first performed in 1604 in London. There are three themes in this play, which are revenge, racism, and colonialism. 'Othello is one of William Shakespeare's most powerful achievements, a spellbinding study of how jealousy and paranoia bring about the downfall of a great leader' (Portman).

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When William Shakespeare was writing this play, he spent a lot of work to focus on the main character Othello, and it makes him become the most outstanding character in the entire play. Othello keeps changing his emotions in the play, and that is the most attractive place. The reason is William Shakespeare shows us how to turn a man from being tenderest love and great trust to being jealous and crazy hatred.

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Once the vengeance breaks into Othello's head and occupies his mind, it never leaves his head till the end of the play. His vengeance even becomes more and more intense during the play. 'I argue that Shakespeare's Othello began its textual and dramatic life as a thoroughly typical revenge plot', '…, Othello goes a step further by obscuring the structure of the revenge plot and by giving vengeance its origins in quotidian injuries' (Cressler). He used to be the man who owned the happiest in the play, then he became the evilest and the most miserable person by his vengeance in the story. This tragedy all cause by Iago, a man who has a faithful in appearance and treacherous in the heart. 'G. B. Harrison asserted that Iago acts out of simple revenge at being passed over for promotion by Othello' (Hampton). In other words, their vengeance is one of the reasons that lead to this tragedy happened.

The other reason that leads to the play becomes a tragic story is a racism. The loss of Othello's nature is linked to racism. Because of secular racism in that time and Iago's treacherous, Othello begins to lose the confidence of pursuit of Desdemona's love gradually. He even totals denial of Desdemona's love at the end. He trusts Desdemona at the beginning, then he starts to doubt her, and he ends up with denials her love and murders her. 'on pretty flimsy 'evidence,' Iago persuades Othello that Desdemona (Alejandra Escalante) has betrayed him with his lieutenant, Cassio (Derek Garza)' (Aucoin). Whenever Othello 'noticed' Desdemona is misconduct, it's all planed by Iago, and it led to a tragedy of that he strangles his beloved wife. Their vengeance leads to this ending, and their vengeance is caused by racism.

William Shakespeare shows us the disadvantage in his society at that time by description the failure of Othello's characters successfully. He used a lot of binary opposition in this play to make the feeling of tragedy and the social criticism stronger. Such as the comparison between love and hate, integrity and treacherous, mainstream and marginal culture, assimilation and alienation. 'The tragedy here is not just domestic but societal as' (Aucoin). Moreover, the relationship between the Noblewoman of Venice and the son of the leader of the African Moorish tribe can symbol as culture wrestling between the Afro-descendant culture and the European mainstream culture. That is a struggle between the lower and the upper society in that era. The whole story is a continuing of p political depiction.

William Shakespeare made the play feels like a narrative of colonial by putting some identity contradiction into it. For example, Othello is a Moors and a black man who converted to Christianity, but he still allegiance to the Duke of Venice. Although he seems to like to get respect from the Venetian nobility, it is just superficial respect and recognition, and it will not stay very long. Moreover, many people know that this play is based on a fiction called Moors in Venice, which was written by an Italian writer Giovanni Battista Giraldi. Other than the original story, William Shakespeare changed a lot of the story to make it seems more like a humanitarian. For example, the original leading man is very barbarous. He killed her wife deliberately, then he tried to escape the blame and not suicide. This humanitarian rewrite reduced the barbarism of character in the story clearly, and it shows us the hidden orientalism. That is a reasonable rewrite during the renaissance. Moreover, the central character in William Shakespeare's Othello is Iago, because Othello is only a reference to set off the protagonist. The ignorance from Othello to believe what Iago says and killed his wife in the play makes Iago look cleverer. This is one of the main techniques of how does the western takes over the eastern. The eastern made into feminization, silence, lewd and easy to get angry, then the western made into masculine, rational and having an open mind.

In the play Othello, it has two very outstanding main characters to make this tragedy play, who are Iago and Othello. They have very different personalities, and they have different dressing styles and colors in the play. The audience can even notice their personalities without imagining their actions and emotions. Most of the tragedy comes from the conflict between their personality. Iago is label as evil in the story. He is a smart perpetrator, and he doesn't have to need a reason for being evil, because evil is his nature. He was polite on the surface, and he is very filthy deep inside his heart. He will not let any detail go when he is planning to make a tragedy happened. He is good at the fool and controls the kind person like Othello. Iago is a representative of self-interest. On the other hand, Othello is brave, honest and adventurous, and he has the simplest and pure love for Desdemona at the beginning. He loses his mind at the end because he has a deep love for Desdemona, and he cannot aspect any defect, such as jealousy. A deep love leads to jealousy, and a devil's whisper from Iago makes Othello loses his mind, and kill his lover.

William Shakespeare's play Othello is one of the most famous tragedy play in the world. 'Othello (1604) is a text that forces us to consider the nature and problem of evil, as well as the difficulty of acknowledging our own destructiveness' (Schapiro). The whole work covers by a gloomy and desolate atmosphere, and it even helps to study the evil power in the world.

Work Cited

  1. 'William Shakespeare was, Many ...: [FINAL Edition].' The Washington Post, Feb 07, 2007. ProQuest, http://pclmc.ctc.edu:2048/docview/410180539?accountid=1039.
  2. Cressler, Loren. 'Malcontented Iago and Revenge Tragedy Conventions in Othello.' Studies in Philology, vol. 116, no. 1, 2019, pp. 73-100. ProQuest, http://pclmc.ctc.edu:2048/docview/2174566758?accountid=1039
  3. HAMPTON, WILBORN. 'Review/Theater; A Minimalist 'Othello' Focuses on the Play: [Review].' New York Times, Jan 17, 1990. ProQuest, http://pclmc.ctc.edu:2048/docview/427526236?accountid=1039.
  4. Aucoin, Don. 'Portrait of Pride, Prejudice in ART's 'Othello'.' Boston Globe, Jan 20, 2019. ProQuest, http://pclmc.ctc.edu:2048/docview/2168574744?accountid=1039.
  5. Portman, Jamie. 'Kenneth Branagh Tackles Shakespeare's Evil Schemer Iago Othello: [Final Edition].' Calgary Herald, Jan 17, 1996. ProQuest, http://pclmc.ctc.edu:2048/docview/244436661?accountid=1039.
  6. Schapiro, Barbara A. 'Psychoanalysis and the Problem of Evil: Debating Othello in the Classroom.' American Imago, vol. 60, no. 4, 2003, pp. 481-499. ProQuest, http://pclmc.ctc.edu:2048/docview/197191314?accountid=1039.
Updated: Feb 02, 2024
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A Tragic Story Of Racism In Othello Play. (2024, Feb 06). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/a-tragic-story-of-racism-in-othello-play-essay

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