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THE MODERN OTHELLO
By LEO KIRSCHBAUM

Is the Othello of modern critics Shakespeare's Othello? Here are three representative opinions. To Sir Edmund Chambers, Othello is "the simple open-hearted soldier," " a gracious and doomed creature " who is an " easy victim." 1 For Kittredge, he is "an heroic and simple nature, putting full trust in two friends, both of whom betray him, the one in angry malice, the other by weakness and self-seeking." 2 Stoll sees him as a very noble dramatic puppet who evinces no psycho- logical consistency in his passage from love to sudden jealousy and who must fall because of the dramatic device that every one trusts the villain: Jago is Othello's nemesis.3 I do not think that this Othello is Shakespeare's Othello. I do not think that this is the Othello whom the judicious reader or spectator or actor sees. I do not think that this is the Othello whom an Elizabethan audience saw. Theodore Spencer is more cautious: " It is solely because Othello is the kind of man that he is that a man like Jago can destroy him." 4 Yet what kind of man is the Moor? I think that Shakespeare give the answer partially by means of contrast within the play. Consider the following speech of Jago to Roderigo in I, ii, when the latter says that it is not in his power to control his love for Desdemona: 
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Kirschbaum, Leo. “The Modern Othello.” ELH, vol. 11, no. 4, 1944, pp. 283–296. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2871466. Accessed 12 June 2020.