Shakespeare's Othello

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Recommended: The character of iago

In everyones life there is always the one person who you think you can trust, and later come to find that they have been playing you all along. This is the exact case for Othello. Iago, whom Othello thought was a person he could trust, betrayed him in many horrific ways.As you read the famous Shakespearian play, Othello, the Moor of VeniceI, you come to realise pretty quickly that Iago is the evil charecter in this play. The readers do not actually get to see a good side of Iago, if there is any, because he is constantly using and playing people. Readers will also come to learn that no matter how evil Iago may be perceived as that he is very much a coward, using other people to do most of his dirty work for him.

The story of Othello begins in Venice when Roderigo and Iago having a discussion. Before the discussion with Iago, Roderigo finds that Desdemona has already been married off, to a Othello, a moor, none the less. Iago is enraged by this news, he decides that he now has more than one reason to hate Othello. Othello has not only taken the woman that Iago so desperately longs for, but he had just recently surpassed him over for the position of lieutenant for Michael Cassio, who is not as experienced as Iago. Iago and Roderigo go to the house of Brabantio, the father of Desdemona, to tell him that his dearly beloved daughter has been kidnapped and has married a moor. They tell him to go and check on his daughter to see if she is in the house, when Brabantio goes to check his daughter's room he indeed realizes that she is missing and he quickly sends out some of his officers to find Othello. These events show that Iago will take any chance that he can to take a stab at Othello, no matter what the risks may be, if the king...

... middle of paper ...

... as expected he runs away from the problem at hand.

In the end Othello kills Desdemona, and then realises that she was telling the truth all along, unable to deal with this he kills himself. Iago ends up murdering Emilia and tries to flee, but he is stopped by Lodovico and Montano. After that he is sentenced to death.

There are many, many ways that a reader can observe and analyse Iago, but most can agree that he is not a very good or nice person by any means whatsoever. He is a conniving coward who is a very jealous person and wants to have all of the power that he can get his hands on, no matter what the cost, unless the cost is his own life of course.

Works Cited

Shakespeare. Othello, the Moor of Venice. Literature and the Writing Process. Ed. Elizabeth

McMahan, Susan X Day, and Robert Funk. 8th ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice, 2008.

951-1038. Print.

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