For a long time we have been obsessed with one most tangible feature of Shakespeare's Othello: the hero's color. This we have done with good reason, for Othello's skin color is explicitly mentioned in the text from the very beginning. The fact that this tragic hero is black (when Shakespeare's other heroes are white) is so intriguing that we seek to make sense of it. Writing in 1811, Charles Lamb insists that Othello is essentially unstageable, for there is “something extremely revolting in the courtship and wedded caresses of Othello and Desdemona” (221), earlier describing Othello as “a coal-black Moor” (221), his italics showing his disgust at the thought. Samuel Taylor Coleridge only a few years later asked if Shakespeare could be “so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth—at a time, too, when negroes were not known except as slaves” (231), and concludes that “Othello must not be conceived as a negro” (232). Nearly two hundred years later, Michael D. Bristol claims that, because Othello would have been originally played by a white man in blackface, his character hearkens back to “a kind of blackface clown” (355), used in a type of farcical skit known as charivari. The 2001 movie O, which took the play's plot and set it at an exclusive American private school, emphasizes Othello's color further. O (Othello's counterpart) is the only black student in a white school, and his final words—“When you all are [. . .] sitting around talking about that nigger who lost it back in high school—you make sure you tell them the truth”—paraphrase Othello's final speech in a way that brings the racial question to the forefront. Really, there is little doubt that Othello's blackness is important.
The danger with emphasi...
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Othello is one of Shakespeare’s four pillars of great tragedies. Othello is unique in comparison to the others in that it focuses on the private lives of its primary characters. When researching the subject of Othello being an Aristotelian tragedy, there is debate among some critics and readers. Some claim that Shakespeare did not hold true to Aristotle’s model of tragedy, according to his definition in “Poetics,” which categorized Othello as a classic tragedy as opposed to traditional tragedy. Readers in the twenty-first century would regard Othello a psychological thriller; it definitely keeps you on the edge of your seat creating the emotions of terror, heart break, and sympathy. This paper will focus on what Shakespeare actually intended regarding “Othello” and its Aristotelian influences.
F. R. Leavis discusses the breakdown of sympathy for Othello, arguing that ‘Othello is too stupid to be regarded as a tragic hero’. Other critics also argue that Shakespeare ‘fully exploits the unique cultural opportunity to develop a more complex and sympathetic representation of black experience’ [The Noble Moor – Othello and Race in Elizabethan London, Roger Lees], implying that the sympathy that a contemporary audience would have felt for Othello was based oncultural context, given that the audience were predominantly white. However, it could be argued that it cannot just be the cultural context to Shakespeare’s audiences that has allowed Othello to become one of his most renowned tragedies; if this were the case, the play would have lost all critical interest by the 18th Century. It is Shakespeare’s use of the conventions of tragedy in attributing Othello with hubris that, although making it hard to empathise with at times, in the...
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Jones, Eldred. "Othello- An Interpretation" Critical Essays on Shakespeare's Othello. Ed. Anthony G. Barthelemy Pub. Macmillan New York, NY 1994.
The color imagery of Othello influences many characters; some are influenced to hate or love Othello because of “black” and “white,” while Othello himself is driven to murder, particularly with red imagery. While each color plays its own role throughout the text, they all greatly contribute to the characters' behaviors and actions … leading to the play's tragic end.