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The Theme of Betrayal in Othello

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Othello Tragedy, Betrayal, and the Complexities of Human Nature

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• Betrayal in Shakespeare’s Othello

Iago is Othello’s ensign; also he is the villain of the play. He betrays almost everyone. The fundamental reason is Othello’s promotion of Cassio to the post of lieutenant, who with no experience had been leading men in battle. Therefore, Iago makes a terrible plan and he is going to take revenge on everyone-Othello, Desdemona, Cassio, Roderigo, and even Emilia, his wife.

At the beginning of the play, Iago talks to Roderigo that he hates Othello because of his promotion of Cassio to the post of lieutenant. In spite of “three great men in the city” recommending him that Iago is upon Cassio for the position, Othello still chooses to give the position to a man with no experience.

He is angry and he says “there are others/ who putting on a good show of duty/ are really looking put for their own interest” (1,1 50-52). This quote demonstrates that Iago waits for an opportunity to give revenge; he only pretends to serve Othello.

Furthermore, Iago lies to Othello that Cassio has told him he has lain with Desdemona in order to infuriate Othello. As he says, “my medicine, keep working! This is how gullible fools are caught/ and how many worthy and chaste women/ all guiltless, wind up accused” (4, 1 51-54). Obviously, he betrays Othello.

In Act 5, after Desdemona dies, Othello talks to Emilia saying that Iago has found Desdemona’s falsehood. Emilia is anguished and she says, “Oh, my lady, a    villain has toyed with your love/ My husband said she was unfaithful” (5, 2 181-182). As we all know, Desdemona is loyal to Othello.

She puts her marriage into a high position in her life. However, Iago forges lies of Othello which caused Desdemona to be misunderstood by Othello who thinks that she is having an affair with Cassio. Thus, Iago betrays Desdemona.

Cassio is a young and inexperienced soldier, whose high position is much resented by Iago. Iago is smart and he is good at understanding and manipulating others.

He knows Cassio’s weakness when he says “if I can get him to drink just one more cup/ on top of what he’s had to drink tonight already/ he’ll be as quarrelsome and disagreeable/ as my young lady’s dog” (2, 3 43-46). Iago leads Cassio into committing an action that will disgrace him. Consequently, Iago betrays Cassio.

Roderigo loves Desdemona, and he gives all of his money to Iago because Iago promises him he will help Roderigo win Desdemona’s heart. However, Iago uses all the money for himself; Roderigo is just a tool to help him accomplish his revenge.

When Iago’s plan is nearly complete, he thinks about “ if Roderigo lives/ he’ll expect me to give back all the gold and jewels I swindled him out of/ as gifts to Desdemona/ That must not happen” (5, 1 14-17). This demonstrates that he is about to kill Roderigo. Afterward, he stabs Roderigo without hesitation, and he pushes all the charges on him. Hence Iago betrays Roderigo.

Emilia is Iago’s wife, but Iago doesn’t care about her. Emilia is just another tool. He asks Emilia to steal Desdemona’s handkerchief. At the end of the play, when Emilia accuses Iago of villainy, Iago no longer certain he can keep his trick hidden so he stabs Emilia in the commotion. Therefore, Iago betrays Emilia.

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Join get revising, already a member, betrayal in othello.

• Created by: kelliedickson
• Created on: 09-06-17 10:46
• Betrayal is key to the plot of Othello because the most immediate effect of the betrayal of trust is in the emotional impact on the person betrayed, this emotional impact is the death of Desdemona, and victimised protagonist Othello whose weakness is that he makes abrupt and eager decisions and then acts upon them based on his military experience which fortifies the tragedy.
• John Knox’s (1558) interpretation of women being ‘weak, frail, impatient, feeble and foolish: and experience hath declared them to be unconstant, variable, cruel and lacking the spirit of counsel and regiment’ immediately refers to women being disobedient which evidently was considered as a form of betrayal at this time especially towards the ascendant male gender. (DESDEMONA DECLARING LOVE FOR OTHELLO TO BRABANTIO).
• As women were emblems of Catholic Morality, Desdemona’s disobedience could have set a foundation for betrayal at the beginning, or maybe foreshadowed it as this key element of the tragedy becomes more frequent throughout the play. And so, you could argue her rebellious act encouraged further betrayal of the characters in Othello such as Iago’s constant machiavellianism towards several other characters all due to his hatred towards Othello.
• Women were instructed and expected to become devoted mothers, and to rear and raise their children as proper Christians (this however, may be an indication of Desdemona’s betrayal, her abstruse marriage to Othello could suggest that it would have been improper to raise mixed raced children as ‘proper Christians’ due to Iago referring to Othello as a “Barbary horse”, possibly then referring to the famous horses of the Arab world, but also playing on the associations of ‘barbarian’ with paganism and savagery ).
• Strong religious morals were aimed at preserving chastity until matrimony …
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Betrayal in Othello Essay

When jealous is implanted in an individual’s heart, it grows like a seed. It breads evil, creates bad emotions, feeling of revenge and betrayal, and more often than not, it results in the destruction of that person having it, or others. In the Play, “Othello” by William Shakespeare, the theme of jealousy is clearly demonstrated through the two main characters, Othello and Lago. Throughout the play, jealous is brewed through lies and finally lead to tragedy. Othello’s jealous is implanted by Lago. Out of jealousy, the matrimony of Othello and Desdemona is destroyed by Lago. Out of Jealous, Lago plans how to manipulate his friend Othello by making him believe that his lover, Desdemona cheats on him by being unfaithful. Lago is not happy with his friend’s relationship with Desdemona, who is a beautiful lady. Lago is so skillful at deceit and trickery such that he triggers Othello’s weakest emotion, that of jealousy. To accomplish this mission, Lago crafts a story of betrayal to Othello by his lover, Desdemona. He does it so skillfully to arouse his jealousy for being cheated by Desdemona, and more so by her being unfaithful with Cassio, his right-hand man. Lago provides several proofs to enrage Othello. Desdemona and Cassio are just normal friends. Lago takes this opportunity to make Othello believe that there is a love affair between the two.

Lago’s words burn into Othello’s heart and his jealous for love mounts up becoming more and more suspicious. When he is deeply upset about the situation, Lago comes in and presents more “proofs”. Lago tells Othello that on one of the nights while sleeping with Cassio side by side, he heard him of talking in his sleep of his love for Desdemona, and claiming that he made a mistake of marrying, Moor. Lago goes further in his deceitful mission by planting a handkerchief in Cassio’s room, which belonged to Desdemona, and of which was given to her by Othello as a gift. Lago then tells Othello that he saw such a handkerchief with Cassio. This heightens Othello’s jealousy to such high levels that his thoughts start to grow more dangerous. The last “bullet” that Lago uses to translate Othello’s mind into a burning pit of hell, is to tell him that Cassio told him that he had sex with Desdemona. At this point, Othello becomes so consumed with jealousy, leading him to kill Desdemona.

Lago is not only jealous of Othello’s and Desdemona’s matrimony, but he is also jealous of Cassio’s rank, which he is shown to have been craving for throughout the play. To remove him from the rank, and possibly occupy it, is the reason behind dragging him to those untruthful stories. This case represents a real-world situation where some people, out of jealous can do anything, including killing to realize their dreams. For instance, people have murdered their political competitors in order to retain or take their positions. There are cases where people have killed their business competitors in order to do away with competition so that they can be rich.

All the “proofs” provided by Lago are nothing else but lies. They have no credibility, but how Lago put them to appear, they seem truthful in every sense, especially when received from a close friend. This play teaches that it is important to authenticate the information that we receive, even from our closest friends and relations. Some people are just jealous of one’s achievements in life and can do everything to bring them down. Note that these people are friends, close relations, so they will not use a weapon. Instead, they will use tricks to hurt your weakest points. They know you well since you have been close, possibly for years. They understand where your weakest points are, so when they want to destroy you, they will straight attack that point, and if you are not careful, you fall victim of their evil mind. Lago understood his friend, Othello. He knew that he loved his lover, Desdemona very much. He knew that attacking his trust for Desdemona, with associating her with infidelity, will arouse anger on him. Othello, is, however, not quick to realize the trick, ending up murdering Desdemona, regret coming later.

The play also wants to educate the reader that if one allows himself or herself to be impacted with jealousy by others, he or she ends up harming himself or herself over and above harming others. In the play, we find that when Othello realizes that he killed Desdemona, who was innocent, he chooses to kill himself too. What he lost is just too much for him to bear. Moreover, it is as if Shakespeare wanted to communicate that jealous is the source of all other evils – betrayal, manipulation, lies, revenge, hate and all others. Further, Shakespeare demonstrates that jealous grows like a seed. Just as a seed is planted, germinates and grows into a big plant and bears fruits, so does jealousy. A seed of jealous was planted in Othello. With time, the seed was fed with “nutrients”, that is more lies and trickeries; it grew, and finally bore fruits, that is causing murder.

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Peter Brown, One of the Beatles’ Closest Confidants, Tells All (Again)

At 87, the dapper insider is releasing a new book of interviews conducted in 1980 and 1981 with the band and people nearest to it.

By Ben Sisario

Peter Brown stood in his spacious Central Park West apartment, pointing first at the dining table and then through the window to the park outside, with Strawberry Fields just to the right.

“John sat at that table looking through here,” Brown said, “and he couldn’t take his eyes off the park.”

That’s John as in Lennon. And the story of the former Beatle coveting this living-room view in 1971 — and how Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, eventually got their own place one block down, at the Dakota — is just one of Brown’s countless nuggets of Fab Four lore. In the 1960s he was an assistant to Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, and then an officer at Apple Corps, the band’s company. A key figure in the Beatles’ secretive inner circle, Brown kept a red telephone on his desk whose number was known only to the four members.

And it was Brown who, in 1969, informed Lennon that he and Ono could quickly and quietly wed in a small British territory on the edge of the Mediterranean, a piece of advice immortalized in “The Ballad of John and Yoko”: “Peter Brown called to say, ‘You can make it OK/You can get married in Gibraltar, near Spain.’”

Next week, Brown and the writer Steven Gaines are releasing a book, “All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words,” made up of interviews they conducted in 1980 and 1981 with the band and people close to it, including business representatives, lawyers, wives and ex-wives — the raw material that Brown and Gaines used for their earlier narrative biography of the band, “The Love You Make: An Insider’s Story of the Beatles,” published in 1983.

Now 87, Brown is a polarizing figure in Beatles history. He was a witness to some of the band’s most important moments and was a trusted keeper of its secrets. “The only people left are Paul and Ringo and me,” he said.

On a tour of Brown’s apartment, the spoils of his access were everywhere. In his bedroom, Brown showed off an original image of the cover of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” with background figures (like Gandhi ) that didn’t make the final cut. In the dining room are binders and boxes stuffed with Beatle-related snapshots and correspondence.

But the publication of “The Love You Make” four decades ago also made him a kind of villain. According to Brown, the band agreed to interviews to set the record straight about its history. Yet the book — primarily written by Gaines, a journalist and biographer known for detailed, warts-and-all portraits — was seen as tawdry and sensational, preoccupied with sex lives and internecine conflicts, with music a secondary subject. Excerpts ran in National Enquirer.

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“That book was a shame,” Mark Lewisohn , the pre-eminent Beatles scholar, said in a recent interview.

“It’s almost like there are two different Peter Browns,” Lewisohn added. “There’s the Peter Brown I know, who is this upright, respectable, very successful businessman. And then the one who attached his name to this Steven Gaines book.”

Brown has heard all the criticism before, and waves it off. Sitting in a chair he inherited from Epstein — and dapper as always in a purple button-down shirt and charcoal slacks — Brown said the book stands as an accurate portrayal, and that the Beatles knew full well what they were getting into.

“There was never any effort on my part to make it negative,” Brown said in his unflappably gentle voice, as classical music wafted quietly through his home. “And nobody’s ever questioned that it was true.”

He also rejected McCartney’s version of events. “Paul imagines things,” Brown said. “Everything he does, he has his own way of remembering, and he’s crazy about it.”

Gaines, for his part, attributes the notoriety of the original book to his and Brown’s refusal to produce a sanitized hagiography, and their decision instead to publish controversial private details. Among those was a rumor that Lennon once had a sexual encounter with Epstein, which Brown and Gaines reported as fact, based on their research.

“Nobody had put something like that in a book,” Gaines said. That episode, on a trip to Spain in 1963, has been debated for years by Beatles commentators. Lennon denied having sex with Epstein, saying in an interview with Playboy: “It was almost a love affair, but not quite. It was never consummated.”

Brown and Gaines’s new book, “All You Need Is Love,” goes even deeper into Beatle lore than their first. It offers an extended transcript of Ono denying, not too persuasively, that she introduced Lennon to heroin, and includes various firsthand accounts of the threats and chaos the band faced on tour in Manila in 1966. Ron Kass, who led the Beatles’ Apple label, describes the impossibility of running a business with Lennon and McCartney as the bosses. One, he says, wanted the label design to be green, the other white; Kass decided to make each side a different color.

There are also startling comments from McCartney and George Harrison about Lennon, revealing the tension and raw feelings that were still present a decade after the band broke up, in interviews recorded just weeks before Lennon was killed in December 1980. Harrison calls his former bandmate “a piece of [expletive]” and wonders why he had “become so nasty.”

McCartney describes Lennon and Ono as “very suspicious people,” and portrays his relationship with them as a kind of power struggle.

“The way to get their friendship is to do everything the way they require it. To do anything else is how to not get their friendship,” McCartney says in the book. “I know that if I absolutely lie down on the ground and just do everything like they say and laugh at all their jokes and don’t expect my jokes to ever get laughed at,” he adds, “if I’m willing to do all that, then we can be friends.”

Lennon never got a chance to respond, Brown said. “I spoke to John, and said, ‘Listen, I’m coming to New York to do some of the recordings,’” he recalled. “And he said, ‘Yes, fine. Looking forward to it.’ And that was the week before he was murdered.” Ono’s interview was done a few months later, in the spring of 1981.

As with many Beatles histories, there are plenty of contradictions, opposing perspectives and selective memories. Interviews with the manager Allen Klein and the lawyer John L. Eastman offer an icy tit-for-tat on the battle for business control during the band’s last days. And Alexis Mardas, a.k.a. Magic Alex, the supposed inventor who others in the book call a con man, gives his account — with skeptical footnotes added by Brown and Gaines — of the Beatles’ retreat in India in 1968.

When asked about finding the truth amid contrasting accounts in an oral history, Brown turned philosophical. “It depends on where you’re sitting,” he said.

There are even conflicting stories about the genesis of Brown and Gaines’s new book. According to Brown, it began when a New York Times reporter — me — asked him for comment three years ago about “The Beatles: Get Back,” Peter Jackson’s exhaustive look at the band’s stormy recording sessions in early 1969. Brown realized then, he said, that he was one of the last remaining witnesses to important history.

But Gaines said that the origins of the project go back years before, to when he wondered what to do with the original interview tapes, which were languishing in his safe deposit box on Long Island. Gaines said he considered donating or selling them, but Brown demurred. They settled on a book of edited transcriptions, though they still squabble over details like ownership of the tapes. “It’s ‘Rashomon’ with Peter,” Gaines said.

After Brown quit his work with the Beatles on Dec. 31, 1970 — the day that McCartney filed a lawsuit to dissolve the band’s partnership — he came to the United States and worked with Robert Stigwood , the Australian-born entertainment mogul who had huge hits in the 1970s with the Bee Gees and the films “Saturday Night Fever” and “Grease.” Then Brown founded a public relations firm, BLJ Worldwide, which in 2011 came under scrutiny for its work representing the families of Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya and of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Brown declined to speak about that episode on the record.

But he remains most proud of his association with the Beatles, and said he viewed “All You Need Is Love” as a final gesture defining his legacy with the band.

“This is the end of it,” he said. “Hopefully we’re closing the door now.”

Ben Sisario covers the music industry. He has been writing for The Times since 1998. More about Ben Sisario

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