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Updated: June 26, 2025
The other characters in the play may be kept in the dark until the last act, but the audience must know the secret all the time. In fact, any situation which shows a character suffering from a lack of such knowledge as the audience holds secure always produces a telling effect upon the stage. The spectators are aware of Iago's villainy and know of Desdemona's innocence.
One of the main sources of the pathos of human life is the operation of what seems to us to be mere blind chance. Just as the casual dropping of Desdemona's handkerchief gave Iago his opportunity, so the casual allotting of the seven gates brings the two brothers into conflict.
She wept for Desdemona's innocence and hard fate; but she pitied more the far harder fate of Othello, and found the death of both a consolation for the trouble their troubles had stirred up in her.
All that it means rushes then like a torrent on his soul; when Othello falls on the bed, by Desdemona's body, the remorse and love that rend him with their talons are beyond even Shakespeare's power of expression. With groans scarcely uttered, Othello gives the only outlet possible to the blinding, scathing storm of passions within him.
The five figures of the old stage dance attendance; they play around the business of those who have the dignity of mortality; they, poor immortals a clown who does not die, a pantaloon never far from death, who yet does not die, a Columbine who never attains Desdemona's death of innocence or Juliet's death of rectitude and passion flit in the backward places of the stage.
I go back to Shakspeare and his times and I maintain that the manner of Desdemona's murder could only be tolerable in the state of society at the time it was presented. I suspect the very appliances of the modern stage bring the repulsiveness of the incident more prominently forward.
If Othello's speech were omitted, or cut down to half a dozen lines, we should know much less of his character and Desdemona's, but the mere action of the play would remain perfectly comprehensible. King Lear necessarily opens with a great act of state, the partition of the kingdom.
And this sense of superiority does not pall upon us. When Othello comes on the scene, radiant and confident in Desdemona's love, our knowledge of the fate awaiting him makes him a hundred times more interesting than could any mere curiosity as to what was about to happen.
The pair were still talking murder when Desdemona appeared with a relative of Desdemona's father, called Lodovico, who bore a letter for Othello from the Duke of Venice. The letter recalled Othello from Cyprus, and gave the governorship to Cassio. Luckless Desdemona seized this unhappy moment to urge once more the suit of Cassio. "Fire and brimstone!" shouted Othello.
He persuaded Roderigo to arouse Brabantio, and when that senator appeared Iago told him of Desdemona's elopement in the most unpleasant way. Though he was Othello's officer, he termed him a thief and a Barbary horse.
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