Following his anatomizing of the painfully introspective intellectual Hamlet, Shakespeare, at the height of his ability to probe human nature and to dramatize it in action and language, treats Hamlet’s temperamental opposite-the man of action. If Hamlet is a tragedy about youth, and Lear concerns old age, Othello is a family or domestic tragedy of a middle-aged man in which the fate of kingdoms and the cosmos that hangs in the balance in Hamlet and Lear contracts to the private world of a marriage’s destruction. Othello is a train wreck that the audience horrifyingly witnesses, helpless to prevent or look away. His imagination is excited to intense activity, but it is the activity of concentration rather than dilation.īetween William Shakespeare’s most expansive and philosophical tragedies- Hamletand King Lear-is Othello, his most constricted and heart-breaking play. He seems to breathe an atmosphere as fateful as that of King Lear, but more confined and oppressive, the darkness not of night but of a close-shut murderous room. He sees it, in itself almost irresistible, aided at every step by fortunate accidents and the innocent mistakes of its victims. Evil is displayed before him, not indeed with the profusion found in King Lear, but forming, as it were, the soul of a single character, and united with an intellectual superiority so great that he watches its advance fascinated and appalled. From the moment when the temptation of the hero begins, the reader’s heart and mind are held in a vice, experiencing the extremes of pity and fear, sympathy and repulsion, sickening hope and dreadful expectation.
Othello is the most painfully exciting and the most terrible.
Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Othello
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