Othello

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Character Profile – At a Glance

• Role: The Moorish general of Venice, husband of Desdemona, and the play’s tragic hero – a celebrated outsider destroyed by the officer he trusts most.
• Key Traits: Commanding, eloquent, dignified, and deeply in love – and, once Iago works on him, catastrophically insecure beneath the authority.
• The Core Conflict: A successful outsider who has won everything by self-possession and reputation, persuaded by Iago to destroy the one thing – Desdemona’s love – that had proved he belonged.
• Key Actions: Defends his marriage before the Venetian Senate in A1S3; takes command at Cyprus; is poisoned against Desdemona by Iago in the temptation scene of A3S3; strikes her in public in A4S1; smothers her in A5S2; learns the truth and kills himself.
• Famous Quote:
  "Of one that loved not wisely but too well…"
  (Act 5, Scene 2)
• The Outcome: Learns from the dying Emilia that Desdemona was innocent, delivers a last speech asking to be remembered truthfully, and kills himself with a hidden blade, falling on the bed to die beside the wife he has murdered.

The General Venice Cannot Spare

Othello’s first appearance answers the slander of the opening scene. Where Iago has painted him as a lustful "old black ram," the man who walks on in A1S2 is calm, courteous, and entirely in command. Confronted in the street by Brabantio’s armed search party, he does not draw; he defuses.

Original
Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.
Good signior, you shall more command with years
Than with your weapons.
(Act 1, Scene 2)

Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Put down your swords; the dew will make them rusty.
Good sir, your wisdom is more powerful than
Your weapons are.

The line is the measure of the man Iago will spend the play unmaking. Othello quiets a drawn-sword confrontation with a joke about rust and a compliment to an older man’s authority – the self-possession of a soldier who has never needed to raise his voice to be obeyed. Venice agrees: within the same act the Senate sends for him in the middle of the night, because the threat to Cyprus is real and he is the one general they trust to meet it. The tragedy depends on this opening picture. The further Othello falls, the more we measure the fall against the unshakable composure of the man who first told a mob to put up their swords.

Won by a Story

Hauled before the Senate and accused of bewitching Desdemona, Othello defends his marriage not with rank but with narrative. He describes how Brabantio himself invited him home, how Desdemona listened to his tales of battle and danger, and how love grew out of the listening.

Original
She loved me for the dangers I had passed,
And I loved her that she did pity them.
(Act 1, Scene 3)

Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
She loved me for the dangers I had faced,
And I loved her for pitying my plight.

It is the play’s most generous account of the marriage, and also a quiet warning. The love is real, but it is built on a story – on Othello as the hero of his own dangers and Desdemona as the listener who pities them. A bond founded on a narrative is a bond that can be re-narrated, and Iago’s genius will be to tell Othello a different story about the same wife. The Senate is convinced; Brabantio is defeated; and Othello sails for Cyprus having proved, in open court, that he belongs. The proof will not hold, because the man who can be persuaded of his worth by a story can also be persuaded out of it.

Farewell the Tranquil Mind

By the centre of A3S3, Iago has done his work. A handkerchief, a few withheld words, and a warning against jealousy have turned the calm general into a man who can no longer think. The speech in which Othello feels his old self going is one of the most desolate in Shakespeare.

Original
Farewell the tranquil mind! Farewell content!
Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars,
That make ambition virtue! O, farewell!
(Act 3, Scene 3)

Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Goodbye my tranquil mind! And goodbye peace!
Goodbye my troops in uniform, and wars that
Fulfilled all my ambitions! Oh, goodbye!

What Othello mourns here is not Desdemona but himself. The "tranquil mind," the soldier’s pride, the whole identity built on war and command – he feels all of it draining away, and he is right that it is going. The cruelty of the scene is that Iago has not given Othello any proof; he has only given him a doubt, and the doubt is enough to dismantle a self that took a lifetime to build. By the end of the speech Othello has demanded "the ocular proof," but the demand is already hopeless: a man this unmade will accept a handkerchief as a substitute for evidence, because what he needs is not truth but an end to the unbearable not-knowing.

The Kiss and the Knife

The final scene gives Othello back his eloquence and takes back everything else. He smothers Desdemona believing he is an agent of justice, learns moments later that she was innocent, and turns the violence on himself. His last act is to fold the murder and a kiss into a single couplet.

Original
I kissed thee ere I killed thee: no way but this;
Killing myself, to die upon a kiss.
(Act 5, Scene 2)

Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I kissed you, then I killed you: this is why
I’ll kill myself and kiss you as I die.

The couplet is unbearable precisely because it is beautiful. Othello reaches, at the last, for the old music – the balanced phrasing, the rhyme, the image of a kiss – to make sense of an act that cannot be made sensible. There is something in it of the self-dramatist, staging his own death as a final scene, and something of genuine grief, a man who can only express love now that he has destroyed its object. The play lets both readings stand. What it does not let him have is forgiveness: the kiss does not undo the killing, and the couplet’s neat symmetry cannot close the gap between the man who quieted a mob with a joke and the man who smothered his innocent wife in her bed.

"Othello is, in one sense of the word, by far the most romantic figure among Shakespeare's heroes."

— A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 1904

Key Quotes

Quote 1

As hell’s from heaven! If it were now to die,
’Twere now to be most happy; for, I fear,
My soul hath her content so absolute…
(Act 2, Scene 1)

Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Into the depths of hell! If I just died now,
I’d die completely happy; and I fear
That I’m so comprehensively content…

Quote Analysis: Reunited with Desdemona at Cyprus, Othello says he could die now and be perfectly happy, because no future joy could match this one. It is the emotional peak of the play and a piece of terrible foreshadowing. The fear he names – that such absolute contentment cannot last – is the crack Iago will widen: a man who believes his happiness is too complete to survive is already half-prepared to lose it. The height of his joy is the exact measure of how far he has to fall.

Quote 2

To pray at fortune. Haply, for I am black
And have not those soft parts of conversation
That chamberers have, or for I am declined…
(Act 3, Scene 3)

Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
To test her luck. Perhaps, because I’m black
And don’t speak in a soft and poncey accent
That courtiers have, or maybe as I’m aging…

Quote Analysis: Left alone after Iago’s first assault, Othello begins to supply his own reasons for being betrayed: his colour, his bluntness of speech, his age. This is the moment the play’s racism stops being something done to Othello and becomes something he does to himself. Iago did not have to argue that a black outsider could not hold a young Venetian wife; he only had to leave a silence, and Othello filled it with the prejudice of the world around him. The tragedy turns here, inward, as Othello adopts the verdict Venice has always been ready to pass on him.

Quote 3

Put out the light, and then put out the light…
(Act 5, Scene 2)

Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I’ll put this candle out, then put her lights out…

Quote Analysis: Standing over the sleeping Desdemona, Othello plays on a single phrase: he will put out the candle, and then put out her life. The repetition turns murder into a slow, almost liturgical act – he has convinced himself this is a sacrifice, not a crime, and the measured language is how he holds the horror at arm’s length. The line also exposes the difference between the two "lights": a candle can be relit, a life cannot, and Othello knows it. The whole speech is the sound of a man performing justice to avoid feeling murder.

Quote 4

Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought
Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand,…
(Act 5, Scene 2)

Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
A reckless lover, though I loved intensely;
Not quickly jealous, though each time I was,
It drove me to distraction; someone who,…

Quote Analysis: In his last speech Othello composes the version of himself he wants remembered: a man who loved too much, not too suspiciously, and was "wrought" upon by another. It is half true and half self-defence. He was not "easily jealous" – Iago had to work hard – but the speech quietly omits how readily he abandoned his wife for a handkerchief. This is the passage at the centre of the play’s oldest critical argument: is this the dignity of a noble man facing his crime, or the last performance of a man who dramatises himself even at the point of death?

Key Takeaways

• The Noble Outsider: Othello begins as Venice’s most trusted general, a model of self-command whose composure is the measure of how far he later falls.
• Love Built on a Story: His marriage is founded on narrative – he wins Desdemona by his tales – which is exactly why Iago’s rival story can unmake it.
• Race Turned Inward: The play’s racism becomes fatal when Othello adopts it himself, supplying his colour and age as reasons he could be betrayed.
• Noble Hero or Self-Dramatist: His final speech sits at the centre of a two-century critical debate – Bradley’s tragic dignity against Leavis’s self-deceiving performer.

Study Questions and Analysis

Is Othello a noble hero or a self-dramatising egotist?

This is the oldest and most productive argument about the play. A. C. Bradley’s 1904 Shakespearean Tragedy gives the noble reading: Othello is "the most romantic figure among Shakespeare’s heroes," a great-souled man undone by a villain of exceptional cunning, and his fall is the fall of genuine nobility rather than the exposure of a flaw. Against this, F. R. Leavis’s 1937 essay "Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero" argues that Othello’s collapse is far too quick to blame on Iago alone – that the readiness to believe the worst was always in him, and that his final speech is an act of self-dramatising self-approval rather than self-knowledge.

The final speech is where the two readings collide.

Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate…
(Act 5, Scene 2)

Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Describe me well, without exaggeration…

Bradley hears dignity here: a man asking to be judged truthfully, neither softened nor slandered. Leavis hears evasion: a man "extenuating" his crime in the very act of asking that nothing be extenuated, reaching for the old grandeur to avoid the squalor of what he has done. The play, characteristically, supplies evidence for both and settles neither. The most useful answer is that Othello is genuinely noble and genuinely a self-dramatist, and that the tragedy lies in the fact that the second quality survives into the moment when only the first would redeem him.

Why does Othello believe Iago so quickly?

The speed is the play’s hardest problem, and Shakespeare gives several overlapping answers. The first is Iago’s reputation: everyone calls him "honest Iago," and Othello has no reason to doubt the officer he has known for years. The second is method – Iago never makes an accusation he can be held to; he insinuates, withholds, and lets Othello’s imagination do the work. The third is Othello himself: a man who has won his place by reputation is unusually vulnerable to the fear of being secretly laughed at.

Be sure of it; give me the ocular proof…
(Act 3, Scene 3)

Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Make sure of it; show proof that I can witness…

The demand for "the ocular proof" looks like resistance, but it is really surrender: a man genuinely confident in his wife would not need proof of her innocence, and once Othello is asking for evidence of guilt, Iago has already won. Coleridge’s famous description of Iago’s "motive-hunting of motiveless malignity" is usually applied to the villain, but it cuts at Othello too – a plot this groundless should have been easy to dismiss, and the fact that it was not tells us how shallow the ground beneath Othello’s confidence always was.

How does Othello’s race function in the play?

Othello is a black African commanding a white European state, and the play never lets that fact rest. The opening scene defines him through racist slander before he appears; the Senate values his generalship while Brabantio cannot accept him as a son-in-law; and Iago’s whole strategy depends on a cultural assumption already in the air – that a marriage across this line is unnatural and cannot last. Crucially, Othello does not stay outside that assumption. By A3S3 he is supplying it himself, naming his colour as a reason Desdemona might tire of him.

Modern criticism has been precise about how this works. Karen Newman’s 1987 essay "‘And wash the Ethiop white’" reads the play as staging Elizabethan anxieties about black masculinity and white female desire, and Ania Loomba’s 1989 Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama places Othello at the intersection of racial and sexual prejudice – admired for his service yet never permitted to belong. The deeper point is structural: the racism that destroys Othello is not Iago’s invention but the water the whole play swims in. Iago activates it; Brabantio supplies it; Othello, fatally, internalises it. The catastrophe needs all three.

Does Othello truly love Desdemona?

The love is real, but the play asks hard questions about what kind of love it is. At its height, Othello’s feeling is total and almost frightening in its absoluteness.

Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul,
But I do love thee! And when I love thee not,…
(Act 3, Scene 3)

Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
She’s lovely and frustrating! I’ll be damned,
But I do love you! And when I don’t love you,…

The lines continue "Chaos is come again" – love as the only thing holding back collapse. That is the problem: Othello loves Desdemona as the proof that order, meaning, and his own worth are secure, and a love asked to carry that much weight is dangerously brittle. When Iago threatens it, the threat is not just to a marriage but to Othello’s entire sense of reality, which is why he reacts with a violence wildly out of proportion to the "evidence." The love is genuine; it is also bound up with need, pride, and self-image in ways the play treats as part of the catastrophe rather than its cure.

What is the "Othello music," and what happens to it?

The phrase comes from G. Wilson Knight’s 1930 essay "The Othello Music," collected in The Wheel of Fire. Knight noticed that Othello speaks a distinctive verse – grand, sonorous, full of far-off places and large rhythms – quite unlike anyone else in the play, and that the state of this "music" tracks the state of his soul. At the start it is serene and commanding; under Iago’s influence it breaks into broken syntax, repetition, and the coarse animal imagery Iago has fed him; and at the very end it briefly, terribly, returns.

The reading is useful because it makes Othello’s tragedy audible. You can hear the man come apart: the smooth periods of "She loved me for the dangers I had passed" degrade into the stammering "Goats and monkeys!" of his worst moments, and then reassemble into the controlled cadences of the final speech. Whether that final return of the music is dignity (Bradley) or performance (Leavis) is the same debate as before – but Knight’s point is that the music itself is how the play measures the distance Othello travels.

Who is responsible for Desdemona’s death – Othello or Iago?

The play refuses to let either man off. Iago designs the whole machine: the handkerchief, the staged eavesdropping, the lie about Cassio. Without him there is no jealousy and no murder, and his refusal to explain himself at the end leaves the engineering deliberately unaccountable. But Othello, not Iago, smothers Desdemona, and he does it convinced he is performing justice rather than committing a crime – which is, if anything, more disturbing than simple rage.

The honest answer is that the play distributes the guilt rather than assigning it. Iago supplies the poison; Othello chooses, repeatedly, to drink it – demanding proof, then accepting a handkerchief; vowing to be just, then refusing his wife the half-hour she begs for. Leavis presses Othello’s share hard, arguing the speed of the collapse exposes a man always ready to think the worst; Bradley presses Iago’s, treating Othello as a noble nature overwhelmed by exceptional evil. The play’s own position seems to be that great evil and a particular human weakness had to meet for the catastrophe to occur, and that neither alone would have been enough.

How should we read Othello’s suicide?

Othello kills himself the moment he understands what he has done, and the manner of it is pointed. He recalls a time in Aleppo when he killed a "malignant" Turk who had beaten a Venetian – and then stabs himself, casting himself simultaneously as the loyal servant of Venice and the enemy of the state who must be punished. He executes himself for the crime of becoming the outsider Venice always half-feared he was.

Read sympathetically, the suicide is justice: Othello passes on himself the sentence his crime deserves, and dies trying to rejoin, in death, the wife he destroyed – "to die upon a kiss." Read sceptically, it is one last evasion: a grand, self-authored ending that lets him control the story even now, dying as a tragic hero rather than living as a wife-killer to be tried by the law Lodovico represents. Both readings are available, and the play’s greatness is partly that it will not choose. What is certain is that the suicide restores the symmetry Othello craves – the kiss, the blade, the body beside the body – and that the symmetry, however beautiful, changes nothing. Desdemona is still dead, and the order Othello tries to reimpose by dying is one his own act has already broken beyond repair.

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