Desdemona

Abstract

If an overpowering Iago makes a shambles of the play that Shakespeare wrote, so does a feckless Desdemona. Altogether too many productions focus on the Othello-Iago rather than on the more significant Othello-Desdemona relationship, which is, after all, at the heart of the tragedy. Othello assumes at first that with ‘proof of Desdemona’s infidelity, ‘there is no more but this: / Away at once with love or jealousy!’ [iii iii 189–90].