Extract

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy! It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.

A general who has won the love of a Venetian noblewoman through the sheer power of his story finds that story turned against him by a man who speaks the language of reason and smells of nothing but honesty. Shakespeare staged this tragedy around 1604, and its engine is Iago, whose motivelessness is the play's deepest terror, a malignity needing no cause beyond the pleasure of destruction. Othello is magnificent and vulnerable, a man whose self-knowledge depends on the gaze of others, and when that gaze is poisoned, his world curdles. The handkerchief is absurdly small to bear such weight, and that is the point. Love lives in the particular and is destroyed there too, in the intimate space where trust and suspicion share a bed.