ABSTRACT
Othello is both a tragedy of judgment and an occasion for judgments. Its world turns on the ways in which people, presented with unwelcome facts or suspicions, will inquire into and infer each other's motives, weigh one another's deserts and demerits, accuse each other and defend themselves, and convict and finally punish each other for perceived transgressions. Its audience also faces challenges to judge and to discriminate, as readers may gather from the critics' disparate verdicts on Othello as a moral agent. Ultimately it even provokes us to judge the value of tragic art itself, or at least to decide the criteria of success and failure in the form. The author of the play's most notorious condemnation, Thomas Rymer, asked us to doubt whether an egregiously unjust event like Desdemona's murder can make for good tragedy at all, or just for a bad experience—one without redeeming artistic value, a crime against the order of “poetic justice.” 2 These aspects of Othello and our responses to it have been under scrutiny for decades, and at one time we may have felt that the play's saturation with judicial episodes, language and implications was a theme too familiar to need reemphasizing. At the moment, however, it is one with a special and novel claim to our attention. During the mid-1990s, the tragedy's concern with justice was brought home to us by a living, politically urgent instance of courtroom drama: O. J. Simpson's murder trial. 3
