Extreme Jealousy in Shakespeare's Othello, the Moor of Venice

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Extreme Jealousy in Othello, the Moor of Venice

Aristotle's Poetics laid out the definition of tragedy: unlike comedy, the purpose of tragedy is not merely to instruct and delight an audience. Rather, its aim is to allow a cathartic release as a result of the heightened emotional state caused by the events of the tragedy. This idea assumes that the average person can experience these intense emotions vicariously. In Psyche and Symbol in Shakespeare , Alex Aronson contends that the characters in Shakespearean tragedy have the power to affect us because they tap what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious , the "omnipresent, unchanging, and everywhere identical condition or substratum of the psyche per se" (14). Othello, the Moor of Venice, attempts to achieve the requisite level of harrowing emotion by treating the audience to a spectacle of passionate delusional jealousy and the murder that follows. The playwright, according to Rolf Soellner, framed his Moorish general?s fall in terms of Passion warring with Patience (both 'the will' and rationality of action) -- drawing on the prevalent Senecan and Stoic conventions of the baroque period in which he was writing (239-58). Unfortunately, the modern tendency to 'psychoanalyze' the words and actions presented in Othello reduces the audience?s experience from cathartic to metaphoric. In either case, the Moor?s over-reaction can be viewed as a lesson counseling against indulgence in the excesses of emotion without a balancing leaven of self-control.

As most of Othello ?s fictional characters have been psychoanalyzed in absentia , I hoped to find a reasonable psychological explanation for Othello?s breakdown. The journal American Imago (co-founded by Freud) has publ...

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...as truly such a destructive force.

Works Cited and Consulted

Aronson, Alex. Psyche and Symbol in Shakespeare . Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1972.

Bell, Millicent. ?Othello?s Jealousy.? Yale Review 85 (April 1997): 120-136.

Driscoll, James P. Identity in Shakespearean Drama . East Brunswick, NJ: Assoc. UP, 1983.

Faber, M. D. ?Othello: Symbolic Action, Ritual and Myth.? American Imago 31 (Summer 1974): 159-205.

Holland, Norman N. Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare . New York: McGraw, 1966.

Kovel, Joel. ?Othello.? American Imago 35 (Spring-Summer 1978): 113-119.

Reid, Stephen. ?Othello?s Jealousy.? American Imago 25 ( Fall 1968): 274-293.

Shakespeare, William. Complete Works of Shakespeare . Ed. David Bevington. 4th ed. NY: Longman, 1997.

Soellner, Rolf. Shakespeare?s Patterns of Self-Knowledge . N.p.: Ohio State UP, 1972.

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