It is the cause, my soul...

I finally read Othello. And like I expected, I hated the Moor. Yes, Iago was vile and he was an instigator, but it was the basic premise of what Othello thought he had the right to do that had me so mad.

Firstly, Desdemona. I think her doom was set from the beginning because, "virtuous" and "chaste" as she was, she ran away from her father's house to marry the Moor. Ironic, than in thus, departing from custom, she sealed her doom, not only with her father (who died of a broken heart from this treachery) but with her husband, who was cleverly persuaded to remember that Desdemona had been independent enough to deceive her father, when it came to him (Othello).

I think the first seed of doubt that entered the Moor's mind was planted by Brabantio himself, when he found that this daughter, Desdemona, had left of her own accord, not through force or the use of witchcraft. Which meant that she was very different from the girl her father had thought her to be.

I was surprised. Knowing as I did, only the death scene, from repeated viewings of Stage Beauty, I had thought that Desdemona and Othello had been married respectably.

And although throughout the text different people call him "noble", I admit, I didn't see it. If he had been so noble and brave, why did he not ask Brabantio for his daughter's hand in marriage rather than run away with her like that? It was all so small and mean and cowardly, to be honest.

So, yes, I was not disposed to think kindly of him when I started the play and reading it only prejudiced me further. Goodness? I saw no hint of it. Iago may have been vile, but Othello was little less so.

I guess my main grievance was that he thought he owned Desdemona. So much so that he could kill her if she was being unfaithful because her body belonged not to herself but to him.

In previous years, knowing only the bare bones of the story, my obsession was with the fact of accusation and how being accused of a crime, (when the accused is a wife and the crime is transgressing the marriage vows) is as good as being guilty of it. The facts of the matter are irrelevant. As soon as the picture is planted in a husband's head, he must needs torture and kill his wife because even if she is innocent of the crime, he has imagined it and that is all that is necessary.

But lately, I have been thinking and I realise that my indignation is not so much at the false accusation as to what the bloody Moor thought he was entitled to do because of it. So Desdemona, with all her virtue, was punished over and over again for marrying that savage, ignoble and violent and jealous and crass.

And I think she was meant to be a warning to all independent women who decide to take their own way and marry so far beneath them.

The myth of the noble savage is just that. A myth.

There is no such thing.