Othello: Good vs Evil
Good Or Evil: A Critical Analysis of Othello’s Main Characters William Shakespeare’s Othello is a classic depiction of a struggle between good and evil. In the play,, the characters are faced with the choice to either conquer or succumb to the overpowering force of evil. Shakespeare places his characters on a sort of spectrum in which a character’s amount of god or evil can be represented by a shade of color: black representing pure evil, white representing absolute goodness, and a shade of grey exemplifying the nature of all characters that fall in between the two extremes of the spectrum. In the play Othello, the main characters are a prefect example of this technique of characterization. Through plot development, interactions with other characters, and other different methods of characterization, the two main characters Othello and Iago, reveal their true colors throughout the development of the play. Othello, the main character in the play, when analyzed can be considered a grey character; he has the tendency to succumb to the darkness of evil, or overcome the force of evil and arise as a champion of the good. Prior to the start of the novel, Othello had secretly married Desdemona, daughter of Brabantio who is a Venetian senator. When the topic of Desdemona’s marriage to Othello is brought up to Brabantio, he decides to accuse Othello of wooing her by witchcraft in front of the senate and the duke in order to break up the marriage and have his daughter returned. This plan backfires, however, as Othello explains to the senate and the duke that he wooed Desdemona with his stories of how he gained his freedom, the magnificent battles he won, and the strange and interesting things he had seen on his journeys around the world. He states to the senate: These things to hear / Would Desdemona seriously incline. / But still the house affairs would draw her hence, / Which ever as she could with haste dispatch, / She’d come again, and with a greedy ear / Devour up
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