The correlation of the fate of the hero with the development of society, which is the main distinguishing feature of the genre of tragedy, can take on a variety of artistic forms. It can be folk-historical tragedy, bringing to the stage the broad masses of people set in motion by social cataclysms. At the same time, it is a tragedy, in which the plot is based on a conflict that captures a relatively small number of characters (Boorman, 2021). Even with the most cursory acquaintance with most of the mature Shakespearean tragedies, it is easy to see the center of the playwright’s attention. These are the relationship between the fate of the characters and the course of the development of society. Shakespeare’s great tragedies most often develop the theme of the death of the best people and their internal discord. Such is the tragedy of Othello, where the author describes the internal struggle of people whose honor has been tarnished.
In Shakespeare’s play Othello, the main characters kill their wives to protect and restore their honor. During the play, women must obey their husbands to show real honor. Iago and Othello reflect this attitude towards their wives: they give them a reason to feel faithful by killing their women. Iago kills Emilia because she dishonors him by revealing his manipulation of Othello and Cassio. Othello strangles Desdemona because of the false infidelity that his assistant Iago imposed on him. As can be understood from the play, both characters have their idea of what honor is and how it is manifested. Nevertheless, both Othello and Iago kill close women to protect themselves, their honor.
The only deliverance for Othello from this doubt that relentlessly settled in his house and his soul is the solution to which he comes ‒ the murder of Desdemona. However, having accomplished it, Othello learns that Desdemona is innocent, that both are victims of that monstrous intrigue that Iago wove so skillfully. Othello calls himself an honest killer:
“Why, anything:
An honorable murderer, if you will;
For naught, I did in hate, but all in honour.” (Shakespeare, 1975, 5.2.345)
These words are the key to the murder he committed: a man for whom honor is above all, he could not exist next to vice and could not allow dishonesty to go unpunished. Realizing the horror of what he had done, he kills himself – cuts his throat with a dagger.
Faith in man is broken – this becomes the cause of Othello’s despair and, at the same time, the source of his loneliness. Because of this, a person decides that his whole past life and the attitude of those close to him were an illusion. It seems to Othello that nothing is lasting, honest, moral in the world; everything in a person is unsteady, chaotic, impermanent. Having understood the laws of this world, Othello fights it in every possible way in the name of the humanistic ideal of a beautiful, real, honest person. In the play, the hero goes to extreme measures to kill his wife, who, in his opinion, dishonored him. It becomes a metaphor and a message to an ordinary person that one must fight for confidence in life and people. It is necessary to eradicate everything that can negatively affect the further development of the individual. At the same time, in the last scene, Shakespeare reminds the ordinary people not to lose their minds in the struggle for honor, no matter how important it may seem.
The advantage of Shakespeare’s tragic soil is that he is still able to show how this or that passion grows out of the fullness of a naive human consciousness under certain conditions. At the same time, it is a normal human passion unlike the writers of a more mature bourgeois society (Carr, 2020). Therefore, the Renaissance image of Othello speaks much more directly to the feeling of every person – both to the jealous and one who has never known jealousy. The potential energy of normal, natural human nature in Othello becomes the energy of affect.
References
Boorman, S. C. (2021). Human conflict in Shakespeare. Routledge.
Carr, D. (2020). From (apparently) feeling to being grateful. The Journal of Value Inquiry, 55(1), 145–154.
Shakespeare, W. (1975). Othello. Oxford: Clarendon Press.