Othello's Nature example essay topic

Othello is, in one sense of the word, by far the most romantic figure among Shakespeare's heroes; and he is so partly from the strange life of war and adventure which he has lived from childhood. He does not belong to our world, and he seems to enter it we know not whence -- almost as if from wonderland. There is something mysterious in his descent from men of royal siege; in his wanderings in vast deserts and among marvellous peoples; in his tales of magic handkerchiefs and prophetic Sibyls; in the sudden vague glimpses we get of numberless battles and sieges in which he has played the hero and has borne a charmed life; even in chance references to his baptism, his being sold to slavery, his sojourn in Aleppo. And he is not a merely romantic figure; his own nature is romantic. He has not, indeed, the meditative or speculative imagination of Hamlet; but in the strictest sense of the word he is more poetic than Hamlet. Indeed, if one recalls Othello's most famous speeches -- those that begin, 'Her father loved me', 'O now for ever', 'Never, Iago', 'Had it pleased Heaven',' It is the cause', 'Behold, I have a weapon', 'Soft you, a word or two before you go' -- and if one places side by side with these speeches an equal number by any other hero, one will not doubt that Othello is the greatest poet of them all.

There is the same poetry in his casual phrases -- like 'These nine moons wasted', 'Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them', 'You chaste stars', 'It is a sword of Spain, the ice-brook's temper', 'It is the very error of the moon' -- and in those brief expressions of intense feeling which ever since have been taken as the absolute expression, like If it were now to die,' There now to be most happy; for, I fear, My soul hath her content so absolute That not another comfort like to this Succeeds in unknown fate, or If she be false, O then Heaven mocks itself, I'll not believe it; or No, my heart is turned to stone; I strike it, and it hurts my hand, or But yet the pity of it, Iago! O Iago, the pity of it, Iago! or O thou weed, Who are so lovely fair and smell " st so sweet That the sense aches at thee, would thou hadst ne " er been born. And this imagination, we feel, has accompanied his whole life. He has watched with a poet's eye the Arabian trees dropping their med " citable gum, and the Indian throwing away his chance-found pearl; and has gazed in a fascinated dream at the Pontic sea rushing, never to return, to the Pro pontic and the Hellespont; and has felt as no other man ever felt (for he speaks of it as none other ever did) the poetry of the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war. So he comes before us, dark and grand, with a light upon him from the sun where he was born; but no longer young, and now grave, self-controlled, steeled by the experience of countless perils, hardships and vicissitudes, at once simple and stately in bearing and in speech, a great man naturally modest but fully conscious of his worth, proud of his services to the state, dignitaries and un elated by honours, secure, it would seem, against all dangers from without and all rebellion from within. And he comes to have his life crowned with the final glory of love, a love as strange, adventurous and romantic as any passage of his eventful history, filling his heart with tenderness and his imagination with ecstasy.

For there is no love, not that of Romeo in his youth, more steeped in imagination than Othello's. The sources of danger in this character are revealed but too clearly by the story. In the first place, Othello's mind, for all its poetry, is very simple. He is not observant.

His nature tends outward. He is quite free from introspection, and is not given to reflection. Emotion excites his imagination, but it confuses and dulls his intellect. On this side he is the very opposite of Hamlet, with whom, however, he shares a great openness and trustfulness of nature.

In addition, he has little experience of the corrupt products of civilised life, and is ignorant of European women. In the second place, for all his dignity and massive calm (and he has greater dignity than any other of Shakespeare's men), his by nature full of the most vehement passion. Shakespeare emphasizes his self-control, not only by the wonderful pictures of the Fist Act, but by references to the past. Ludovico, amazed at his violence, exclaims: Is this the noble Moor whom our full Senate Call all in all sufficient? Is this the nature Whom passion could not shake? whose solid virtue The shot of accident nor dart of chance Could neither graze nor pierce? Iago, who has no motive for lying, asks: Can he be angry?

I have seen the cannon When it hath blown his ranks into the air, And, like the devil, from his very arm Puffed his own brother -- and can he be angry? [Endnote 1] This, and other aspects of his character, are best exhibited by a single line -- one of Shakespeare's miracles -- the words by which Othello silences in a moment the night-brawl between his attendants and those of Brabantia: Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them. And the same self-control is strikingly shown where Othello endeavours to elicit some explanation of the fight between Cassioand Montano. Here, however, there occur ominous words, which make us feel how necessary was this self-control, and make us admire it the more: Now, by heaven, My blood begins my safer guides to rule, And passion, having my best judgment collied, Assays to lead the way. We remember these words later, when the sun of reason is 'collied', blackened and blotted out in total eclipse. Lastly, Othello's nature is all of one piece.

His trust, where he trusts, is absolute. Hesitation is almost impossible to him. He is extremely self-reliant, and decides and acts instantaneously. If stirred to indignation, as 'in Aleppo once', he answers with one lightning stroke. Love, if he loves, must be to him the heaven where either he must leave or bear no life. If such a passion as jealousy seizes him, it will swell into a well-night incontrollable flood.

He will press for immediate conviction or immediate relief. Convinced, he will act with the authority of a judge and the swiftness of a man in mortal pain. Undeceived, he will do like execution on himself. This character is so noble, Othello's feelings and actions follow so inevitably from it and from the forces brought to bear on it, and his sufferings are so heart-rending, that he stirs, I believe, in most readers a passion of mingled love and pity which they feel for no other hero in Shakespeare, and to which not even Mr Swinburne can do more than justice. Yet there are some critics and not a few readers who cherish a grudge against him. They do not merely think that in the later stages of his temptation he showed a certain obtuseness, and that, to speak pedantically, he acted with unjustifiable precipitance and violence; no one, I suppose, denies that.

But, even when they admit that he was not of a jealous temper, they consider that he was 'easily jealous'; they seem to think that it was inexcusable in him to feel any suspicion of his wife at all; and they blame him for never suspecting Iago or asking him for evidence. I refer to this attitude of mind chiefly in order to draw attention to certain points in the story. It comes partly from inattention (for Othello did suspect Iago and did ask him for evidence); partly from a misconstruction of the text which makes Othello appear jealous long before he really is so; [Endnote 2] and partly from failure to realise certain essential facts. I will begin with these. 1.

Othello, we have seen, was trustful, and thorough in his trust. He put entire confidence in the honesty of Iago, who had not only been his companion in arms, but, as he believed, had just proved his faithfulness in the matter of the marriage. This confidence was misplaced, and we happen to know it; but it was no sign of stupidity in Othello. For his opinion of Iago was the opinion of practically everyone who knew him: and that opinion was that Iago was before all things 'honest', his very faults being those of excess in honesty.

This being so, even if Othello had not been trustful and simple, it would have been quite unnatural in him to be unmoved by the warnings of so honest a friend, warnings offered with extreme reluctance and manifestly from a friend's sense of duty. [Endnote 3] Any husband would have been troubled by them. 2. Iago does not bring these warnings to a husband who had lived with a wife for months and years and knew her like his sister or his bosom-friend. Nor is there any ground in Othello's character for supposing that, if he had been such a man, he would have felt and acted as he does in the play. But he was newly married; in the circumstances he cannot have known much of Desdemona before his marriage; and further he was conscious of being under the spell of a feeling which can give glory to the truth but can also give it to a dream.

3. This consciousness in any imaginative man is enough, in such circumstances, to destroy his confidence in his powers of perception. In Othello's case, after a long and most artful preparation, there now comes, to reinforce its effect, the suggestions that he is not an Italian, nor even a European; that he is totally ignorant of the thoughts and the customary morality of Venetian women; [Endnote 4] that he had himself seen in Desdemona's deception of her father how perfect an actress she could be. Ashe listens in horror, for a moment at least the past is revealed to him in a new and dreadful light, and the ground seems to sink under feet.

These suggestions are followed by a tentative but hideous and humiliating insinuation of what his honest and much-experienced friend fears may be the true explanation of Desdemona's rejection of accepting suitors, and of her strange, and naturally temporary, preference for a black man. Here Iago goes too far. He sees something in Othello's face that frightens him, and he breaks off. Nor does this idea take any hold of Othello's mind.

But it is not surprising that his utter powerlessness to repel it on the ground of knowledge of his wife, or even of that instinctive interpretation of character which is possible between persons of the same race, [Endnote 5] should complete his misery, so that he feels he can bear no more, and abruptly dismisses his friend ( 238). Now I repeat that any man situated as Othello was would have been disturbed by Iago's communications, and I add that many men would have been made wildly jealous. But up to this point, where Iago is dismissed, Othello, I must maintain, does not show jealousy. His confidence is shaken, he is confused and deeply troubled, he even feels horror; but he is not yet jealous in the proper sense of that word. In his soliloquy ( 258 ff.) the beginning of this passion may be traced; but it is only after an interval of solitude, when he has had time to dwell on the idea presented to him, and especially after statements of fact, not mere general grounds of suspicion, are offered, that the passion lays hold of him. Even then, however, and indeed to the very end, he is quite unlike the essentially jealous man, quite unlike Leontes.

No doubt the thought of another man's possessing the woman he loves is intolerable to him; no doubt the sense of insult and the impulse of revenge are at times most violent; and these are the feelings of jealousy proper. But these are not the chief or the deepest source of Othello's suffering. Itis the wreck of his faith and his love. It is the feeling, If she be false, oh then Heaven mocks itself; the feeling, Iago, the pity of it, Iago! the feeling, But there where I have garner'd up my heart, Where either I must live, or bear no life; The fountain from the which my current runs, Or else dries up -- to be discarded thence... You will find nothing like this in Leontes.

Up to this point, it appears to me, there is not a syllable to be said against Othello. But the play is a tragedy, and from this point we may abandon the ungrateful and undramatic task of awarding praise and blame. When Othello, after a brief interval, re-enters ( 330), we see at once that the poison has been at work, and 'burns like the mines of sulphur'.