Initiation Ritual In Othello Essay

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The general pattern of initiation rituals can be seen in Othello, which may perhaps be already clear from the beginning at the play. Othello and Desdemona are away from Venice as they go to the land of adventure, Cyprus, and are initiated by Iago on the truths, which they are to believe. If they had returned to Venice with their problems solved, the play could have been qualified as a comedy, but in a tragedy that ritual does not work. In the case of Othello, the second stage of the normal initiation ritual, namely transition, breaks down because Iago did not teach the truth. Where the application of an initiation ritual to Othello to reveal only this basic dramatic pattern, it would still be worth pointing out because even at this preliminary level of observation we see that the initiation ritual provides a context, which partly explains why Othello and his entourage leave Venice to go to Cyprus. Still, the initiation ritual is a valid structural approach to Othello as it tells the audience more about …show more content…

Previous his plays had been comedy, but from Hamlet and onwards it changed to tragedy. The play is alive with such romance impossibilities. They are the stuff of childhood dreaming and wish fulfillment; in a more sinister form they supply the fantasies we see in adult males who refuse to grow out of controlling everyone and knowing everything. Shakespeare leads us from the obsession and self-infantilizing in this (Leontes’ condition) into the biggest of Renaissance philosophical questions. The play is a drama and because of this is the psychological state known in the Renaissance as ‘wonder’ by which the mind, according to philosophers and critics, understood what was around it. The function of wonder in art, and in Shakespeare’s reflections on his own dramatic art, is considered in general terms in “rules and types in drama” and more specifically in “disguising” (The Winter’s

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