Othello and Macbeth

Abstract

Wherever love of any kind is still-born, frustrated, and criminally terminated, we, the spectators and readers, react with compassion. This emotional coming-to-terms may itself derive from a Christian upbringing. But even Virgil brings the universal tears to the spectacle of suffering humans, and Dido’s fate in particular requires no Christian knowledge of God and the cosmos for the reader to be as moved as was David for Absalom his son. Shakespeare seals our emotional compassion with Christian or more-than-Christian tears as we watch Othello’s progress towards disaster. He wholly unmasks the hollowness of the Brechtian Verfremdung (distancing) ideal of theatre, for without the slightest hint of propaganda his Othello sweeps us into an experience which becomes ours, though it is not ours. We are not in Venice nor in Cyprus, we are not successful generals, and we may not be black and have a young wife who is not black. It is the magic of the verse which confronts us with tragedy so unbearable that we would be spared it, and yet inspires us with a need to see it.