Neil Bowen on
‘Othello is the stupidest of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes. Discuss’. Stupid is probably being too cruel to quite an unusual Shakespearean tragic hero. Compared to Macbeth, Hamlet and Lear, Othello is surely the one who is most an outsider but looking to his specific hamartia or character flaw he may be one of the hardest to forgive. Whereas Hamlet’s procrastination may be forgiven due to his grieving father-worship and Lear’s pompous pride tempered by his senility, Macbeth's ruthless ambition and Othello’s gullible jealousy are harder to accept. The first African-American actor to win an Oscar, Sidney Poitier, refused to play Othello claiming that ‘I cannot go on stage and give audiences a black man who is a dupe.’ Now while this points clearly to the racial aspect of Othello’s character it also points equally to his gullibility. Certainly, Othello’s jealousy and gullibility are infuriating and hard to forgive when Shakespeare makes us watch him destroy a complete innocent.
So, why is it so important to measure Othello’s, let’s call it, naivety, rather than stupidity? The audience needs the wriggle-room in which we can garner some sort of sympathy for him. If we cannot, we will condemn him as stupid; if we can sympathise with him, we will feel the pain of what it’s like to be fooled by a wilier foe. Iago relishes Othello’s (and everyone else’s, come to think of it) suffering and the cruelty with which he torments Othello is despicable. Othello’s torture is one that can only be pitied and through tis pity Shakespeare offersus an avenue of forgiveness. The shame and humiliation that Othello feels at the play’s end happens to us all, so it is a very recognisable pain. If we know this pain, or at least can understand it, we can forgive him, or at least try to, rather than condemn him outright.
Luckily, Shakespeare allows us the potential to forgive because as Othello complains in Act V, he was ‘being wrought, perplexed in the extreme’ by a masterful manipulator (more of that later). While it’s virtually impossible to forgive his murder of his completely innocent wife, we can at least understand what drove him to such desperate action, despite how despicable its consequences are. All tragic heroes suffer greatly and Othello is no different. His fall from respected general to pitied and despised outcast, from happy husband to maddened murderer involves tremendous emotional pain and the fact that it happens in such a compressed time frame, basically three nights, results in a tragedy of immense power. His fall is so swift, his transformation so sudden that if the audience did not see it happen before their very eyes it would seem nigh on ridiculous. You cannot just hear this story, you have to watch it. What must be agonising for Othello, compared to the other notable tragic heroes, is that his life journey moves from lowly slave to ‘valiant’ commander to self-damned soul. His ascent is as steep as his descent, whereas with Hamlet, Macbeth and Lear they are all part of the higher echelons of their societies to begin with. But like all these men, he is in some way responsible for his own downfall.