Viola B.

I chose to dig deep into the Shakespearian tragedy named "Othello", and in particular I chose to analyse the play and find a topical issue.

“She’s gone, and I’ve been cheated on. I have no choice but to hate her. Oh what a curse marriage is!”

This quote taken from the third Act of the play, introduces the current issue, which is “domestic abuse”. The relationship between Othello, the main character, and his wife Desdemona is clearly an episode of domestic abuse. Indeed Desdemona is victim of numerous verbal and physical abuses. At the end of the tragedy Othello kills his wife, convinced she was cheating on him. This issue unfortunately is extremely topical: the cases of domestic abuse have highly increased during the lockdown, caused by Covid-19, the number of victims was extremely high, owing to the obligation they had to stay at home with their abuser.

During my research work I’ve focused more on the issue Shakespeare tried to underline, rather than on the play itself. In order to grasp the main issue I read the plot and compared the situation of the play with the modern society. I found out that this tragedy deals with many other issues that are still a problem today, such as racism. After I had chosen on what to dig deeper, I did some data research to prove what I claimed in the introduction of my speech: that domestic abuse was an issue during Shakespeare’s time as well as nowadays.

The reasons why I chose Othello’s play are three: firstly owing to the fact that the main character is round and changes his personality during the play, as well as it happens in our society, secondly because of the numerous hidden topics, such as manipulation, racism and jealousy, and thirdly because of the impact this play could have had on the audience of the time.

Concluding, I’m glad I had the opportunity to analyse this tragedy. I understood that peaces of literature written centuries ago, could still be considered modern thanks to the topic they deal with, that after all, society has only slightly changed: most of the values and personalities have stayed the same, furthermore the issues of the 17 th century are the ones of the modern society as well.