William Shakespeare’s Othello

Shakespeare’s Othello (1604) is a tour de force. It speaks presciently (ahead of its time) to questions of race and otherness that have come to the foreground today.

One can read it as:

Shakespeare exploiting the exotic stereotype of the African ‘savage’ for his London audiences. An othering move still found in Eurocentric narratives of immigrants today…

The playwright presenting the (white) English
spectator with the opportunity to empathise with what it is to be a black man in a white man’s world.
To be the ‘object’ of the Eurocentric gaze.

And then again, perhaps he’s doing both…..

Drag the CONSTELLATION to change your POV – you can reset it at any point, and vary the speed too!
Zoom in, zoom out… get close up on the scenes that make up an ‘act’. Each of the 5 acts are colour coded.
Choose one of the 13 nodes to drill down into the dynamics of the scene – check out the scene cards.
For another approach, click a ‘lens’ to see how the theme is threaded across different scenes

What’s a Character Arc?

We call the slow-burning transformation of the main character their ‘character arc’

Characters can have negative, positive or flat arcs (i.e. no substantial change)
The tragic hero is a protagonist who, through a fatal flaw, follows a negative trajectory towards a bad outcome – often death. Othello, the character, is a tragic protagonist, who in the words of Lajos Egri, acts out the play’s central ‘premise’:

“Jealousy destroys itself, and the object of its love”

Egri’s ‘thenatic premise’ for Othello

We know his final move…

But wait – wasn’t it just the cards he was dealt?