An essentially good feature, it is taken to extremes in Othello, which causes his demise. He never stoops to questioning Desdemona. He is so absorbed in what Iago tells him that he never questions the words of the villain. At the time when the vicious Iago weaves his web of conspiracy, gullible Othello greets him with the words:
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I know thou art full of love and honesty.
Therefore, Othello is not merely a victim of malicious circumstances as he might have been if he had, for example, lost a wife had been hit by a lightning or cruelly murdered by robbers. Instead, he incurred his misfortune himself, and his death at the end of the play serves to underscore this idea. At the end of the play he chastises himself with bitterness, confessing that his ruin was brought about by his own failure:
O cursed, cursed slave! Whip me, ye devils,
from the possession of the heavenly sight!
Blow me about the winds! roast me in sulphur!
...O Desdemona, Desdemona Dead! O! O! O!�
Othello as a play also fits Aristotle� description as it contains logical unity and coherence that is a necessary component of tragedy. The play starts from the moment of idyllic honeymooning between Othello and Desdemona and follows Iago�s treacherous plan from inception to its tragic success. Othello�s sufferings in youth and the story of his courtship stay behind the scene, but in Othello�s account they form an logical background for the action observed by the viewer.
Othello evokes in the readers both pity and fear. They are pressured to feel sorry for the man who so sadly loses his wife due to a conspiracy. The pity for Othello even exceeds the feeling for Desdemona who is merely a victim; she does not have to suffer the pangs of conscience for what she has done. At the same time pity is not the only feeling Othello evokes in the readers or viewers.
He also raises fear as a man capable of such a savage revenge, killing a wife on the spot for the alleged adultery. It seems that even at the time of more stringent morality such as mediaeval Italy not every husband would go that far as to kill the adulteress.
This is even less likely in Elizabethan England, and so had to seem even wilder to Shakespeare�s contemporaries. Othello�s reaction demonstrates that he was a man of extremely hot temper and strong emotions, capable of venting his sentiments in a very violent way.
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