Friday, June 22, 2018

Does Othello feel any remorse or regret for what he did?

Othello feels regret the moment he learns Desdemona remained true to him to the end of her life, but even before that, he is reluctant to go through with murdering her, or at the very least, sorry that he must carry out his idea of justice. He kisses her as she sleeps, almost tempted not to go through with his bloody deed. Unfortunately he does and learns too late his wife was not the adulteress he believed. Othello weeps and cries out several times, realizing what he has lost.
Othello ends up committing suicide after this. He will likely be executed by the state for murder anyway, but his suicide is more motivated by that same sense of honor and justice that made him murder Desdemona in the first place. Thus, he kills his wife's murderer, both from remorse and from his sense of honor that proved both his greatest virtue and his final undoing.
http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/othello/examqo/othellosuicide.html


Othello feels regret as soon as he discovers from Emilia that Iago has been plotting against him. Emilia tells Othello, who has just killed his wife, that Iago asked her to get the handkerchief—a gift from Othello to Desdemona—for him. Iago then used it to convince Othello that his wife was having an affair with Michael Cassio. Othello is overcome with rage and grief, chasing Iago from the room and launching into a heartrending speech in which he imagines that Desdemona's look alone will "hurl my soul from heaven." He is filled with remorse and begs to know why Iago has "ensnared [his] soul and body." After another long speech in which he begs his comrades to remember him not as an evil murderer but as a man who had loved with too much passion, he kills himself. So Othello, an overly proud and hotheaded man, is forced at the end of the play to come to terms with the fact that Iago has skillfully and diabolically played on his emotions to bring Othello's marriage to a tragic end.

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