ABSTRACT
Othello, it will be very generally granted, is of all Shakespeare's great tragedies the simplest that the theme is limited and sharply defined, and the play, everyone agrees, is a brilliantly successful piece of workmanship. According to the version of Othello elaborated by Bradley the tragedy is the undoing of the noble Moor by the devilish cunning of Iago. Othello are to see as a nearly faultless hero whose strength and virtue are turned against him. Othello and Desdemona, so far as their fate depended on their characters and untampered with mutual relations, had every ground for expecting the happiness that romantic courtship had promised. This is the traditional version of Othello and has, moreover, the support of Coleridge that is to sentimentalize Shakespeare's tragedy and to displace its centre. The tragedy is inherent in the Othello and Desdemona relation, and Iago is a mechanism necessary for precipitating tragedy in a dramatic action.
