Changing Places in Othello

Summary

But when you come to love, there the soil alters;

Y'are in another Country.

Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women

… in nature things move violently to their place, and calmly in their place.

Francis Bacon, 'Of Great Place'

Othello is a tragedy of displacement, a drama of jealousy and resentment which traces the destructive symbiosis of two men, each of whom is tormented by a sense of intolerable usurpation. As its very subtitle (‘The Moor of Venice’) suggests, it is concerned with belonging and estrangement, with occupation and dispossession; and it explores the psychological connection between the various ideas of place’ with which this central pair are obsessed. Of course there is a sense in which ‘place’, in its physical sense, is important in all of Shakespeare’s tragedies - to the point where the character of each play can seem to be registered in its particular idea of place. The cold prison of Elsinore with its waiting graveyard, Macbeth’s hell-castle, the imperial panorama of Antony and Cleopatra - each substantially defines the imaginative world of its play. Place may be employed in a loosely suggestive, symbolic fashion, as it is in King Lear; or it may be realized with the densely social particularity of Romeo and Juliet; but it is always closely bound up with the metaphoric structure of the work. Othello is no exception: an essentially domestic tragedy is elevated to heroic dignity partly by the boldness of its geographic scale. Like Antony and Cleopatra it straddles the Mediterranean; but there the resemblance ends. The action of the later play is characterized by a continual advance and retreat, which matches the psychological vacillation of its protagonist, the flux of his political fortunes, and the corresponding ebb and flow of the audience’s sympathies.