Universality in Othello - Essay Example

The Shakespearean play has enjoyed incessant popularity for over 400 years. Several aspects of the play contribute to this popularity and some of these factors have always been hot topics for reviewers and other interested parties of the play. Most important of all the criticisms the play encounters is Shakespeare’s use of “double time”. This is a very topical issue in Othello as most of the play’s critics argue that it is improperly duplicated in a way.
On a positive note, Othello creates a sense of the universality of appeal. The tragedy presents a clear case of the difficulty in finding reality behind the perfect interface of appearance. Othello totally believes in the concept of love with full commitment and nobility. He believes in absolutes. lago subscribes to no particular thought and believes least in human beings. The book’s popularity can also be traced to its modern nature. At the core of intrigue is the very realisation that the play is a matter of a private life affair than the other great tragedies. This impression is supported in a number of ways. Othello is a depiction of modern life as the drama depicts contemporary life. The characters appear very close to the readers than in Hamlet or Lear. Many people will realise that Othello employs a sense of beauty that is not available in most plays of the time.
Of Shakespeare’s plays, Othello stands out in one important respect: beauty. The play employs much steady rhythm, peculiar phrases and a sense of serious imagination which blend together to create a lucid and clear feeling in the mind of the reader. Indeed, this beauty is only evidenced in two other plays i.e. Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra. However, Othello has another form of beauty. Except for the brief trivial section of the clown, everything is much attached to the central issue and nothing requires any solid justification. At best, the drama has a dense intellectual beauty that fulfills the aspiration for order and harmony between the different parts and the whole. At the same time, the book glows with much moral beauty. We see the figure of Desdemona in a love situation that is not affected even in the worst of events.
A sense of incompleteness in the play gives way to innumerable cases of men at odds with one another. Several ‘parts’ exist in the play which creates the wholeness albeit with some incompleteness. lago appears universal because he represents many things in a single instance. His style and temper make him become the villain of the melodrama. He can be comfortably placed between the violent and the angry given such character traits. Worst still, his appropriate place lies among the fraudulent and the malicious deemed as the lowest category of sinners. At the initial appearance of the protagonist, lago is incessantly lying regarding Brabantio and himself and about everything else.
Indeed, across all the generations the book has endured, every age found something special to admire in Shakespeare. Read More