Othello’s Suicide

Abstract

Othello’s suicide engages a knotty complex of social, political and cultural issues. Far from resolving the political and cultural dilemmas of the drama, it exacerbates them and raises more questions than it answers. In that extended moment, his dagger poised to strike himself, Othello drags into the play a memory buried deep in his pre-play past that is of such brutality and hate-filled violence as to link this so-called ‘restored’ Othello with the crude, tortured brute who struck his wife in Act IV, scene 1 rather than with the noble Roman he exhorts his audience to remember.

Soft you, a word or two: I have done the state some service, and they know’t; No more of that: I pray you in your letters, When you shall these unlucky deeds relate, Speak of them as they are; nothing extenuate, Nor set down aught in malice; then must you speak Of one that lov’d not wisely, but too well: Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought, Perplex’d in the extreme; of one whose hand, Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away, Richer than all his tribe: of one whose subdued eyes, Albeit unused to the melting mood, Drops tears as fast as the Arabian trees Their medicinal gum; set you down this, And say besides that in Aleppo once, Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk Beat a Venetian, and traduc’d the state, I took by the throat the circumcised dog, And smote him thus.

(V, ii, 339–57)