Gone With Common Wisdom, In With Inebriated Falsity In the Shakespearean tragedy Othello, the eventual downfall of the main protagonist is from his lack of wisdom and flawed knowledge. However, although being vitally important to the play, these two factors were not driving reason towards his eventual death; they were just catalysts to a separate set of components perpetuated by the antagonist. Through other characters who seem just as easily manipulated due to their ignorance (up until the very end), lago used every facet of their weaknesses to achieve his goals of revenge and monetary gain.
Thus, as a result, with Othello’s wisdom lied primarily on the battlefield rather in Venetian and social customs, this bred an open door for lago to nefariously take advantage of by injecting false knowledge to further his plans. One important part of Othello’s downfall was his wisdom being overridden by his angst and jealousy from false knowledge. In Othello, one particular trait that stood out was the persistence and cunning mindset of the main antagonist. The plot of Othello resembles those of Shakespearean plays in that it is based upon misrecognition and jealousy.
Throughout the play, lago’s villainy and was portrayed like a dedicated and hard working farmer, just the way a gardener plants certain seeds in certain soils so that they may be most fruitful. lago plants his seeds of doubt to Othello and other characters with reason across the stage, and tends to their growth by taking advantage of the situations presented. He meticulously sowed the seeds of doubt into Othello’s mind and narrowly reaped the full crop at the end of the play.
Armed with a zealous attitude to further his plans, he perpetuated false knowledge, such as in Act IV where lago informs the audience of is actual intentions after telling Othello to hide – in reality he jokes with Cassio about the prostitute Bianca, causing Cassio to laugh as he tells the story of Bianca’s pursuit of him. He hopes that Othello will be driven mad, thinking that Cassio is joking with lago about Desdemona. In reality, he has sown his seeds of false knowledge into the midst of the lies.
Othello has trouble linking his wife’s delicacy, class, beauty, and allure with her accused adulterous actions, and for a very good reason. This, in a sense, was Othello’s wisdom talking – something that he hould have trusted throughout the entire play rather than the spewing lies of the main antagonist lago. As we progress into Act IV, there is an exponential increase in evidence to show that Othello is overridden with a mix of emotions -whether it be angst, jealousy, or just outright thirst for “revenge”.
With these factors added together, lago need not put much effort into his villainous plot – Othello takes it up to his own hands and suggests that he will poison his wife, but lago advises him to strangle her in the same bed in which Desdemona committed his adultery for true symbolic justice. Up until this point, there till was no way for Othello to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that Desdemona was unfaithful. However it was too late. Othello’s mind had been precipitated with the full blossoms of the plant lago had grown, and no amount of knowledge could stop Othello’s belief.
Even with the most compelling evidence presented to him, he could not reverse his false knowledge – Othello explains away any evidence in Desdemona’s favor, by imagining Emilia and Desdemona to be sophisticated liars with an underlying intention. Moreover, Othello exaggerates her infidelities out of all proportion to reality or human possibility, omparing her copulation to the breeding of “summer flies and foul toads” (Act V). With such a shaped mind, Othello, once a patient and cunning gentlemen, was reduced to alike what people would call Europe’s most savage people – a “Turk”.
Only at the end of the play does Othello finally come to his senses and applies his practical wisdom towards the whole ordeal – as the truth of lago’s villainy begins to come out through Emilia’s accusations, Othello comes to all of his senses, and falls weeping upon the bed that contains the body of his dead wife. Nevertheless, this was too late. ago’s false knowledge and cunning exploitation of Othello’s weakened wisdom worked in favour for lago.
Throughout the play Othello, we come to see Othello from the beginning as a noble soldier, to an easily manipulated coward with savagery as his main motivating factor. This suggests that Othello was wise perhaps on the battlefield, but less so in the context of Venetian and social customs. Perhaps there was an origin to this? In the early folds of the play, Othello explicitly states that he is naive with the real world, coming from a poor and wicked life, transforming it into a oble and great one.
But one must think, maybe he still retained some of those traits? In Act I, Othello says “Their dearest action in the tented field, and little of this great world can I speak, more than pertains to feats of broils and battle, and therefore little shall I grace my cause in speaking for myself. ” (Oth. I. ii. 88-92). Othello essentially says “I don’t know much about the world apart from fighting. So I won’t do myself much good by speaking in my own defense. (In the context of being interrogated by Brabantio, Desdemona’s father)” Essentially,
Othello accidentally implies in his underlying message that he is fit for war, perhaps not fit for the world itself(in the context of social workings). He further suggests that he is naive and innocent to the world of love, and that Desdemona only loved him for “the struggles that I have passed”. This points to what people who increasingly call a superficial relationship, which can easily work out, but could also easily go wrong. Othello’s mind has been twisted from childhood about the facets of war and injustice – his world and his worldview has been maimed and shaped into a different perspective.
What says this? In the early beginning of the play, he reveals to the audience what lago would take as his greatest weakness. “From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes, that I have passed. I ran it through, even from my boyish days, to th’ very moment that he bade me tell it, wherein I spoke of most disastrous chances, of moving accidents by flood and field, of hair-breadth ‘scapes i’ th’ imminent deadly breach, of being taken by the insolent foe and sold to slavery, of my redemption thence and portance in my traveler’s history. (Oth. I. ii. 132-143) he says: “. bout my life and all the battles I’ve fought.
I told him everything, from my boyhood up until the time when I was talking to him. I told him about unfortunate disasters, hair-raising adventures on sea and on land, and near-catastrophes and dangerous adventures I’ve been through. I told him how I was captured and sold as a slave, how I bought my freedom, and how I wandered through caves and deserts. He’s essentially been scarred and traumatized by these various events, pointing to how is worldview might have been changed and hints of an underlying hidden mental instability. Much like how in the modern world people with troubled and violent pasts often get diagnosed with PTSD, perhaps Othello was possibly mentally unstable enough for PTSD to strike any time and reduce him to an uncontrollable animal.
With such a mindset, Othello’s personality could be extrapolated out and one can assume that he, being a person shaped by war, could accidentally shape other facets in life like how war shaped him – brutally and with much incessant doubt. What we finally see with Othello was various combinations of flawed characteristics that lead to his downfall. Othello’s mind as also been twisted from childhood about the facets of war and injustice – his world and his worldview has been maimed and shaped into a different perspective.
Othello explicitly states that he is naive with the real world, coming from a poor and wicked life, transforming it into a noble and great one. One important part of Othello’s downfall was his wisdom being overridden by his angst and jealousy from false knowledge. However, what I believe to be the most important moral to this story in relation to my metaphysical topic is that a slight lack of wisdom, coupled with seemingly true knowledge, can bring one f the greatest soldiers of Venice down onto his knees and down into a savage and cruel personality.
An important moral to take out of this is that you must retain your wisdom, even through hardship and a cruel world, one must not be inebriated on knowledge – wisdom must be gained through prior experience and applied thoughtfully. With all of these factors, we see that with Othello’s wisdom lied primarily on the battlefield rather in Venetian and social customs, this bred an open door for lago to nefariously take advantage of by injecting false knowledge to further his plans.