Malignity and Motive in William Shakespeare's Othello
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JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REVIEWS ISSN- 2394-5125 VOL 7, ISSUE 19, 2020 MALIGNITY AND MOTIVE IN WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S OTHELLO Dr. Vivek Mehrotra Assistant Professor, Department of English, GLA University, Mathura ABSTRACT: The enigma of Shakespeare artistic purpose is nowhere more resplendent in its ambiguity than in the play “Othello”. In this play Shakespeare created the mastery artifact in the character of Iago. This is a character in which the idea of villain reaches such an unprecedented height of precision that he still today considered a benchmark for the art of villainy. Besides him the characters of Othello and Desdemona are also well rounded. Othello being predominantly a man of action and Desdemona a lady that passively suffers the ravages of time and fate. It is so destined that tragedy falls upon all these characters. The tragedy in the play is not “an act of God” rather the tragic events as the entire drama is lacerated with malign motives contesting and succeeding against benign motives. Motives and malignity are the two poles on which swing the trail of action and plot in the play. Keeping in view the imperative importance of these two phenomenon‟s it is viable and required to undertake a study juxtaposing and analyzing them. To fulfill this purpose, I in this paper will analyze the chief characters of the play namely those of Iago, Othello and Desdemona in the light of the causes and effects of their motives and the malignity, if any, in their motives. The research method applied in the study shall be textual and discourse analysis along with circumstantial references to psychoanalytic and other approaches to literary criticism. For the purpose of our study we shall refer to the text of the drama “Othello” by William Shakespeare and to selected works on the play by notable literary critics as well as to the opinion of literary theoreticians on the play. KEYWORDS -Motives, malignity, William Shakespeare “Othello”, Character analysis, Literary criticism. I. INTRODUCTION One of the mature dramas and famous tragedies of William Shakespeare is Othello. It forms the quartet of the ideal great tragedies composed by William Shakespeare. The drama is a masterpiece on many counts, among them is the treatment of the sinister workings of the brain. Like A C Bradley says in Shakespeare character is destiny. It‟s true in the case of Othello the drama and Othello the character. In the play Othello we see that the tragedy that befalls the protagonist of the play is not the doing of god almighty or some celestial being rather it‟s the fruit of his own misdemeanors over a long period of time. He is doomed to suffer the consequences in the germination of whom he has richly contributed. Now the question arises; had he desired to suffer like he did? The answer to this has to be an equivocal no, because he is a mentally healthy man, he is a man of middle age which means he should be level headed and prudent in his actions and thought and he is a man of proven mettle in times of crisis after all he is a successful leader of men. So this leaves us in jinx as to what actions caused the sorrow Othello suffered, since he had no motive to undergo the anguish of tragedy in the first place. Here in this research paper we shall be examining the motives of the protagonist of the play as well as the motives of some of the leading characters of the play parallel to the unfolding of events with an objective to locate the birth and developmental trajectory of malignity. We aim to sight and show the movement of malignity parallel to the movement of motives in the play. The objective of the study is pertinent because tragedy on its own is rarely accidental it most often takes up a course of its development and the consequent digression of the situation to its subjects ultimately becoming the eminent unavoidable outcome. The reason of its development is the maligning content in participating individuals thoughts later transformed into action. So its malignity of the human mind that is the reason behind the phenomenon of tragedy that afflicts all of human beings as individuals and also collectively as societies. Here we must point out that when we talk of tragedy in the context of this research paper we confine the import of the term to our area of study. Thus we here do not refer to tragedy arising out of natural calamities and acts of god. However we shall in process of analysis allude to different ingredients of tragic fate. For the purpose of our study we shall implement the research method of textual study and discourse analysis. The basic referential text of this research paper is the text of the drama “Othello” composed by William Shakespeare. Apart from this we shall be referring to a number of critical interventions in the interpretation of the play, these works will be cataloged in the end of the research paper. 345 JOURNAL OF CRITICAL REVIEWS ISSN- 2394-5125 VOL 7, ISSUE 19, 2020 We herewith begin our study with a brief outline sketch of our view of the quality of “malignity”, since it shall form a part of the bulwark of our research paper. Malignity is normally understood as the tendency in a person to harm another person, or see another person suffer, without the expectancy of any veritable gain to himself from such harm or suffering. Malice and spitefulness are also defects of character that are generally associated with the property of malignancy. Along with the general perceptions, in addition to them here in Shakespeare the term malignancy takes upon itself a cloak of an altogether different shade of meanings rendered to it by the dramatic genius of the bard of Avon as we shall see in the following lines. II. AN OVERVIEW OF TRAGEDY AND TRAGIC DRAMA The birth of the phenomenon of tragedy is shrouded in deep in the undergrowth of man‟s origin as a species. But the recorded history of tragedy begins approximately in the year 533 in city state Athens with the actor Thepsis. The origin of the word tragedy in the social context of 5th century BC Athens was a new kind of categorization of sensations. Novelty ensued not in the substance but the treatment of the ingredients of tragedy and ever since the tragic muse has not looked behind. The word tragedy is nowadays demoted considerably in the estimation of the common audience; people often use it without realizing the full import of the term, thereby diluting the meaning to some extent. So tragedy is no longer the same as it used to be in the days of yore to the general audience. But to the connoisseur of literature it still holds a pedestal of importance in the echelon of artistic pursuits. Tragedy here is a word used to ennoble suffering and pain and to engulf misfortune in an aura of dignity. It is the claim of tragedy that this loss, grief, or catastrophe is exceptional. What are the connections between our idea of the tragedy and the idea of tragedy in the Grecian world? How do we connect with the hero of Sophocles and are we able to understand the tragic pain of the Grecian protagonist? Is it just a particular kind of drama, an artificiality, that‟s now redundant and understandable to us in the twentieth century? The movement of tragedy from drama to other forms of literature and social institutions. We come across the word tragedy every now and then in our day today life. There is a continuous streaming of events tragic in nature with a categorization in the head of tragedy. But are these descriptions of tragedy similar to the gargantuan structure of Greek Tragedy. Our treatment of tragedy is so mundane on instances that it seems revolting to a faithful student of literature. It‟s but an altogether different feeling for the seventeenth century English poet John Milton. Sometime let gorgeous Tragedy In sceptred pall come sweeping by, Presenting Thebes, or Pelops‟ line, Or the tale of Troy divine. Or what (though rare) of later age, Ennobled hath the buskined stage. John Milton- Penseroso. Such elated has been the stature of the tragic muse in the middle ages. The divine like caricature of the classical heroes in Greek drama is way different from the mention of the word tragedy in our newspapers. It seems in the estimate of Milton tragedy is an episode of rare incidences that happens in the frame of a peculiar singular subset of time. III. SHAKESPEARE'S ART OF THE TRAGIC Now the substantiality of Shakespearean tragedy is way different from the idea of the Grecian tragedy. Shakespeare was a libertine so far as the Aristotelian rules of tragedy are concerned. He has only once in the composing of the drama tempest adhered to the Aristotelian rules of the unities of time place and action. The structure of his tragedies are also different in Shakespeare from that in Sophocles, as the latter leaves a considerable leverage of space to the forces of divinity in his plays. So we cannot forthrightly apply the rules of criticism developed in ancient Greek to Shakespearean tragedy. In the play Othello the characters Iago Othello and Desdemona are developed on different lines from either the characters of Sophocles drama or the characters of Thomas Kyd or Christopher Marlowe or John Webster or for that matter any of the dramatists contemporaneous to William Shakespeare. This was the uniqueness of Shakespeare.