‘Othello’: A Tragedy Built on a Comic Structure

Summary

In Professor H. B. Charlton’s Shakespearian Tragedy there is an extremely satisfactory interpretation of Othello in which two main points should be noted: the tragedy issues from the marriage between two people of widely different backgrounds, and Othello is to be accepted, not as the victim of lago but as a fully developed tragic hero who is entirely responsible for the tragedy and its consequences. My own views about the main interpretation of Othello are so similar to those of Charlton that I assume that any staging of the tragedy must, ultimately, create the picture which he achieves through critical analysis. That picture was originally created by Shakespeare through dramatic and theatrical means, and this article is aimed at the clarification of a very specific aspect of the theatrical language which the author used in a work of art which only attains its full significance when it is presented on a stage.