Question:Examine the role of love and betrayal in the play?
Othello is one of the many brilliant plays, which capture hearts of a wide audience, written by the great author William Shakespeare. This play is considered to be one of Shakespeare’s excellent pieces of writing based on tragedies, up to date. The play unfolds with themes such as romance, love which eventually ends in betrayal, tragedy, agony, which makes the Othello a wonderful play to discuss. What is love? How Shakespeare illustrates delicately the qualities of love as tolerance, compassion, kindness, sensitiveness, happiness and sadness within different characters in the play. What is betrayal? How Shakespeare portrays the theme of betrayal by changing the love into mistrust and misunderstanding which finally leads to hatred and untimely death of compassionate lovers. It is interesting to know how both themes together create a brilliant play of tragedy.
With in all the themes blended in the play “Othello”, Love is a theme that is very much evident to the wide audience of Shakespeare …show more content…
One other relationship of love and friendship is seen between Emilia and Desdemona. Emilia stands up for Desdemona, her innocent mistress, to prove her innocence by bringing her husband’s bad deeds to the sight of Othello. Even though Emilia steals her mistress’s handkerchief because of her love towards her husband, she ends up standing up for her loving mistress. Iago uses love as a source of advantage to gain success in revenge. He fakes love as a friend to Cassio, Rodrigo, as a husband to Emilia for his own benefit. Iago’s idea of love is control. “It is merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will.” (763). He uses people’s affections towards love as a weapon to create a friction between characters which eventually leads to