Free College Essays - The Fall of Othello :: GCSE Coursework Shakespeare Othello

The Fall of Othello The Othello of the Fourth Act is Othello in his get down. His fall is never complete, but he is much changed. Towards the close of the Temptation-scene he becomes at times most terrible, but his grandeur remains almost undiminished. point in the following scene (III iv), where he goes to test Desdemona in the effect of the handkerchief, and receives a fatal confirmation of her guilt, our sympathy with him is hardly touched by any feeling of humiliation. But in the Fourth Act topsy-turvydom has come. A slight time interval of time may be admitted here. It is but slight for it was necessary for Iago to hurry on, and terribly dangerous to relegate a chance for a meeting of Cassio with Othello and his insight into Othellos nature taught him that his device was to deliver blow on blow, and never to allow his victim to rec over from the confusion of the first shock. Still there is a slight interval and when Othello reappears we see at a glance that he is a chang ed man. He is physically exhausted, and his mind is dazed. He sees everything blurred through a dapple of blood and tears. He has actually forgotten the incident of the handkerchief, and has to be reminded of it. When Iago, perceiving that he can now risk almost any lie, tells him that Cassio has confessed his guilt, Othello, the hero who has seemed to us only second to Coriolanus in physical power, trembles all over he mutters disjointed words a blackness suddenly intervenes amid his eyes and the world he takes it for the shuddering testimony of nature to the inconsistency he has just heard, Endnote6 and he falls senseless to the ground. When he recovers it is to check over Cassio, as he imagines, laughing over his shame. It is an imposition so gross, and should dedicate been one so perilous, that Iago would never have ventured it before. But he is prophylactic now. The sight only adds to the confusion of intellect the madness of rage and a ravenous thirst for revenge, conten ding with motions of infinite longing and regret, conquers them. The delay till night-fall is aberration to him. His self-control has wholly deserted him, and he strikes his wife in the straw man of the Venetian envoy. He is so lost to all sense of candor that he never asks himself what will follow the deaths of Cassio and his wife.