Othella As a Tragic Hero

Othella As a Tragic Hero

In the matter of Othello and Iago, it cannot fairly be maintained that Iago was the sole cause of the calamities that befell Othello. In general it must be said that there is no Shakespearean tragedy in which the responsibility for the deed of the hero and the subsequent tragedy can be shifted from him to another person of the play. Shakespeare no doubt did not have the conception of the influence of social forces that some modern dramatists display, for that is a conception belonging to the nineteenth century. Professor Stoll may be correct when he says that "In no case does Shakespeare represent men as overwhelmed by anything so vague and neutral as social forces," but he is surely incorrect when he adds, "or as devoured by their own passions alone."1

It is this very conception of the consuming and destructive power of passion that marks the superiority of Shakespeare's conceptions over that of his contemporaries. This "fatalism of overmastering passion," as it has been called by Professor Corson,2 is the distinguishing feature of Shakespeare's conception of man's relation to the world, and marks the culmination of the Elizabethan drama, and its superiority to the classical drama where men are overcome by external fate. In the case of Othello, as ,of all the other tragedies, it is the passion of the hero that is the mainspring of all the action of the play that finally and certainly destroys the hero. There are two or three types of such passion in Shakespeare, according to their moral character, but all alike give rise to the action of the play and lead the hero to his fate.

Beginning, then, with this passion, it is the art of Shakespeare to place his characters under those conditions that will show the true nature of their passion and develop it to its fullness and to its fated end. It is one of Shakespeare's supreme excellences that he realized that "every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lusts and enticed," and that every man's...