OTHELLO AND THE FAIREST OF THEM ALL

 #OthElokuu

[...] the moment when Othello stands over the sleeping Desdemona, intending to kill her and yet admiring her beauty. Othello kisses Desdemona as she sleeps and adds: "Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee / and love thee after (5.2.18-19)." And he does kiss her exquisite corpse: "I kissed thee ere I killed thee; no way but this, / killing myself, to die upon a kiss (5.2.358-59)." His necrophilia is much like that of the prince charming in "Snow White" (and "Sleeping Beauty").

While praise of female beauty as red and white (for Caucasian standards) is of course conventional, Shakespeare may have consistently remembered the "snow white and blood/rose red" formula when writing these scenes of a man admiring an unconscious young woman. Othello compares Desdemona's life to a rose, and says: "Yet I'll not shed her blood /nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow (5.2.13, 3-4).

Othello is a persecuted heroine story, and, like the similar folktales, it is all about jealousy. Jealousy, we see, always tends towards death, making the beloved an unmoving, beautiful, possessable objects. 

These references to the "Snow White" folktales allow Shakespeare to meditate on the single nature of jealousy in all of its guises: jealousy over beauty, over inheritance, over sexual possession, and over political power. In Othello, Iago manifests the connection between different forms of jealousy. He wants the promotion that Othello has bestowed on Cassio. Iago also claims to want Desdemona for himself, and to believe that both Cassio and Othello have slept with his wife. One of his most haunting lies, moreover, returns us to the folktale villainess's competition over beauty (recalling the wicked queen's obsession with being "fairest of them all"). Iago says of Cassio, "He hath a daily beauty in his life / that makes me ugly (5.1.19-20)."