ABSTRACT
Othello is defined not by jealousy but by substitutions. The conundrum for playwrights after Hamlet was that a hero who understood the patterns of the causal plot could not continue to act against his own interests. Shakespeare's tactic in Othello was to split the idea of the hero into two manifestations: one, in Othello, who was “heroic” but destined to suffer, and the other, Iago, who understood and orchestrated action but was in no way “heroic.” In doing so, Shakespeare set a paradigm for later plays in which the nominal heroes all had capacities diminished in some way and other characters had greater knowledge. Those plays set a “tragic” paradigm nearly matching the plot structure of New Comedy, a conundrum later resolved by Shakespeare in the analogous structures of romance. Othello also offered a kind of metacommentary: Desdemona functioned as an image of a kind of purity that the hero no longer possessed, an ideal to be killed by that hero, newly depreciated. Like tragedy itself, she was resuscitated in order to be killed once more.
