ABSTRACT
When Othello was mounted for Jacobean Oxfordians in 1610, one undergraduate recorded the audience's intense distress at the sight of the dead Desdemona: she “moved us,” “entreat[ing] the pity of the spectators by her very countenance”(Henry Jackson, cited in Hankey, 18). Though a fictional representation, it touched their very being—just as, we can say, the artist's rendition of Troy's fall affected viewers in Virgil's Aeneid, when they succumbed to “tears for human, mortal things.” Indeed, Othello is as effective as the Aeneid or Book of Job in revealing heroic mankind's vulnerability to forces greater than himself—in this case, biology, environment, upbringing, and what he perceives to be fate, stars, demons, and most important, gods. And like the Aeneid or Book of Job, it does not prove what the author's opinions were, let alone the existence of any supernatural dimension in life. But it does keep alive the importance of the choices the self must face courageously and humbly, at least according to Western traditions (cf. West, 342).
