Critic Analysis – Women & Men In Othello

Resource Description

“Women and Men in Othello”

Critic: Carol Thomas Neely
Source: William Shakespeare’s Othello, edited by Harold Bloom, pp. 79-104. New
York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.
Criticism about: Othello

[(essay date 1985) In the following essay, originally published in 1985, Neely contends that the central theme of Othello is marital love and that its primary conflict is between men and women.]
What should such a fool
Do with so good a woman?

Relations between love, sexuality, and marriage are under scrutiny in Othello, as in the comedies, problem plays, and Hamlet. In more extreme form than in the problem plays, we see here the idealization and degradation of sexuality, the disintegration of male authority and the loss of female power, the isolation of men and women, and the association of sexual consummation with death. The festive comedies conclude with the anticipation of fertile marriage beds. The problem comedies achieve their resolutions with the help of midpoint bed tricks. The marriage bed is at the very heart of the tragedy of Othello; offstage but dramatically the centre of attention in the first scene and again in the first scene of the second act, it is literally and symbolically at the centre of the last scene and is explicitly hidden from sight at the conclusion. Whether the marriage is consummated, when it is consummated, and what the significance of this consummation is for Othello and Desdemona have all been an important source of debate about the play.