The Orphan Book

I have always admired this play as Shakespeare's most theatrical tragedy, but I also feel that it often veers too close to melodrama. Shaw remarked that Othello is written "in the style of Italian opera," and it shares with Verdi and Donizetti the same big emotions, the same clear demarcation of good and evil, that give Lucia and Trovatore their emotional intensity--and their lack of essential seriousness too. During this reading, however, I began to realize that Othello is much more than the greatest of melodramas, and that the key to appreciating its depth lies in the concept of the public mask.

Othello is a man who always wears a mask in public: the mask of the thoroughly professional military leader who is far too noble to be moved by emotions which might cause others to be petty or untrustworthy. Iago wears a similar mask: the mask of the thoroughly professional military subordinate who is frank and blunt and incapable of dishonesty.

Othello's mask hides a snake's nest of fears, fears bred from the insecurity of being a black man in an alien white society. Iago's mask hides the fact that he is a sociopath motivated by jealousy and rage.

Othello cannot see the reality of the evil beneath a mask that in some ways is similar to his own, and instead misinterprets each frank gesture of his devoted wife as proof of the diabolical mask of an accomplished adulteress. This is Othello's fatal error, and Desdemona--and Othello himself--pay dearly for it.