Othello Essay

The Jacobean era in which William Shakespe atomic number 18 first wrote Othello, eventually published in 1622, is champion which is rightly remembered as world held to strict, dogmatic codes of evokeuality and sex- causation structures. On the doorsill of Queen Elizabeths crowning, England under queen regnant James continued to be a strictly patriarchal society, with the realms of war and statecraft existence fully impenetrable to wo man provide.Considered the primary quill means to demonstration and execution of power, such venues were perceived to have held sway oer all manner of social order. From a cosmetic vantage, it appears through characters such as Brabantio, Othello and Iago that Shakespeare acknowledges a sociological structure which by and large keeps women beholden to these powers of men. However, through its intricate distort of deception which is continually based on a distortion of the realities between men and women, Shakespeare wily toys with conventional wisdom regarding sex and power, dismantling many of the assumptions pertaining to the topic which were prosodion from the cultural hegemony of his time and place.While the call on is constantly given oer to opportunistic sleights against the cunning malice of the fe manful heart, the flaws of the male characters are ultimately the cause of tragedy. Shakespeares work is marked by a rare propensity for his time, to encourage a reconsideration of the reciprocal relationship intrinsic to the breakdown which occurs between love, lust and commitmentWhile men such as Othello and Brabantio characterize power as being in the hold of the wealthy and physically impressive, Desdemona silently and passively illuminates that sexuality is the legitimate power broker. Even before it is the twinge which weakens his senses, Othello recognizes that all of his fearsome strengths are blunt by his infirmity in the hands of love and lustWhen light-winged toysOf feathered Cupid seel with wanton d ullnessMy speculative and officed instrument,That my disports load and taint my business,Let housewives makes a frypan of my helm. (1.3, 263-267)Fittingly, the conclusion magnifies this irony, consistent with the convolution of gender power and responsibility as it persists throughout. Othello recognizes that it is his indiscretion, not Desdemonas, which has delivered him to incurable suspicion. When he finally succumbs to his misguide jealously, it becomes invariably clear that his physical strengths, those very(prenominal) same which were said to have won him the heart of Desdemona, were not simply make benign by the power of her sexuality.Worse, his powers are turned against him, unleashed from his control and wielded by a fog of lustful rage. In the denouement of the play, Othello is inconsolable of his own guilt. After strangling the life out of his innocent wife, Othello is left-hand(a) powerless. In this is the eventual resolution of Shakespeares treatise on the falseho od in the power dynamic between men and women. Indeed, the power which is shown to be reflected in the woman is one which contradicts traditional assumptions of 16th century womanly gender roles.That the women in this play, and Desdemona in particular, ultimately command such power over the judgment of men is quite copulation of Shakespeares unique perspective. The twisted frustration which marks the conclusion of the play is a strikingly aggressive declaration by the playwright that cultural assumptions regarding the genders are not just too often grossly misunderstood, but consequently also strung-out to terrible repercussions.