Rereading Othello, or How I’ve come to realise that Othello is not really about jealousy

It took me a while, but now I can see that the central theme of Othello is not jealousy, but the ensnaring and damnation of the human soul. 

“OTHELLO […] Perdition catch my soul 

But I do love thee! And when I love thee not, 

Chaos is come again.” 

(Act 3 scene 3) 

Othello has known chaos; in Desdemona, he sees a glimpse of heaven, a glimpse of salvation—“My life upon her faith.” 

Marjorie Garber doesn’t write at length about it in Shakespeare After All, but she also mentions “the struggle between two forces, a “good angel” and a “bad angel,” for a man’s soul. […] in Othello a very similar contest pits Iago on one side and Desdemona on the other, the two contending for the possession, in the sense of property or ownership and also that of magical or demonic enchantment, of Othello.” 

The word “soul” (or “souls”) appears 40 times in the play, and when Othello in the end realises what he has done, he asks: 

“OTHELLO […] Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil 

Why he hath thus ensnared my soul and body?” 

(Act 5 scene 2) 

Beauty, goodness, love, faith, salvation—Iago may not know what it is, but he knows he lacks something, and he must destroy it—“He hath a daily beauty in his life/ That makes me ugly.” And he succeeds. The saintly Desdemona forgives Othello seemingly from beyond death, but Othello knows his soul is damned and he cannot accept her forgiveness: 

“OTHELLO […] Where should Othello go? 

Now, how dost thou look now? O ill-starred wench! 

Pale as thy smock! When we shall meet at compt, 

This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven, 

And fiends will snatch at it. Cold, cold, my girl?

Even like thy chastity; 

O cursèd, cursèd slave! Whip me, ye devils, 

From the possession of this heavenly sight! 

Blow me about in winds! roast me in sulfur! 

Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire! 

O Desdemon! Dead Desdemon; dead. O! O!” 

(ibid.) 

The one thing Iago hasn’t predicted is the love and strength that his wife is capable of—she exposes him—“Let heaven and men and devils, let them all/ All, all, cry shame against me, yet I’ll speak.” (ibid.) But if I in my previous reading only paid attention to the tragedy of Desdemona and of Emilia, I can now see the tragedy of Othello. Shakespeare’s play is not simply a play about manipulation and jealousy and an honour killing, it is so much more. It took me a couple of years, 4 performances, numerous essays, discussions, and a rereading, but now I see Othello in a different light. 

I’m going to quote Himadri (Argumentative Old Git): 

“If I am on the right track on this, the tragedy lies not in Othello’s fall from a great height, but in his failure to reach that height in the first place. That height may be but vaguely glimpsed, but Othello, unlike Iago, is capable of glimpsing it, however vaguely, and the entire play seems suffused with a terror of that chaos that lies just under the surface of our lives – a chaos that prevents us from attaining those vaguely glimpsed heights, and which instead hurls our very souls from heaven.” 

What a magnificent work of art. 

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I’ve also picked up Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare After All and read the Othello essay. It is a long book as she wrote about all of Shakespeare’s plays—like Tony Tanner’s Prefaces to Shakespeare—so I’ll probably go through it slowly rather than read it all at once. The Othello essay is excellent though.