Using Othello as a Comparative Text: The Cultural Context


of the city, ‘In Venice they do let heaven see the pranks/ They dare not show their husbands’. Roderigo, the disappointed would-be lover of Desdemona, resorts to racist abuse, calling Othello ‘thick-lips’.


But Shakespeare uses the character of Othello to subvert society’s assumptions. He presents him as a man of ‘royal lineage’, an exotic person who enthrals Brabantio and his daughter with fantastic tales of ‘rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven’ and ‘Cannibals that each other eat’. However, he also has some of the expected characteristics of a stereotypical Moor; jealous, superstitious and easily moved to anger.


Othello is a ‘credulous’ man who demands ‘ocular proof’ of Desdemona’s infidelity. He threatens to ‘chop’ his wife ‘into messes’ because he believes she has cuckolded him. But Shakespeare, once again, subverts the norm. The audience is asked to consider Othello as a complex person who is unsure of himself, ‘Rude am I in my speech’ who has become ‘Perplexed in the extreme’ because of Iago’s insinuations. The playwright teaches the audience compassion for the outsider who did the state ‘some service’. It is not the North African outsider, but the manipulative white Venetian, Iago, who is the play’s great villain.


Religion and superstition


The play’s action has an epic backdrop of a fierce conflict between the Christian Republic of Venice and the Muslim Ottoman Empire. Desdemona, the symbol of innocence, is associated with heavenly imagery, the ‘grace of heaven’, ‘full of most blessed condition’. Iago is linked to evil through the imagery of hell and the devil, ‘Hell and night/ Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light’.


Othello comes to regard his malicious ensign as a ‘demi-devil’ and looks ‘down towards his feet’ to see if they are the cloven feet of the devil. Although Othello is a converted Christian, he still harbours the superstition of his country of origin. The handkerchief he gave to Desdemona is ‘dyed in mummy’ from ‘maidens’ hearts’.


The clash of cultures is obvious in Desdemona’s frustrated comment about the love-token, ‘would to God that I had never seen it!’ Othello re-enacts his heroic action for the state when he killed ‘a turbaned Turk’ who had ‘traduced the state’. Interestingly, it is Iago who is the cynical atheist and believes that men are in control of their own fate, ‘’Tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus’. Throughout this tragedy, Shakespeare has sabotaged the accepted norms of society.


Othello


I hold my peace, sir? No!


Emilia Act 5 Scene 2, l.254


235


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