Othello

6 Pages 1458 Words

Analysis of Shakespeare’s Othello &
Machiavelli’s The Prince

Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince serves as a guideline to attain and remain successful in power. He explains what obstacles a new “prince” faces when he comes into authority. Machiavelli’s The Prince was seen as a set of instructions inspired by his experiences dealing with war and revolt. His writings are concerned with the principles on which such a state is founded, and with the means by which they can be implemented and maintained. In his most famous work, The Prince, he describes the method by which a prince can acquire and maintain political power.
In his view, a prince should be concerned only with power and be bound only by rules that would lead to success in political actions. Machiavelli believed that these rules could be discovered by deduction from the political practices of the time, as well as from those of earlier periods.
Cocco 2
Shakespeare’s Othello portrays the growth of unjustified jealousy in the protagonist, Othello, a Moor serving as a general in the Venetian army. The innocent object of his jealousy is his wife, Desdemona. In this tragedy, Othello's evil lieutenant Iago draws him into mistaken jealousy in order to
ruin him.
Shakespeare’s Othello demonstrates the usage of imagery to create a vivid account of the characteristics of the persons represented in the play. In act 1 scene 1 of Othello, two men are plotting against Othello because they feel they were deceived.
One participant is a man named Roderigo, who is in love with Desdemona, Othello’s wife. The focus of the scene is Roderigo telling Desdemona’s father, Brabanzio, that she has run off to marry Othello, a moor and valiant general, but not a man of great monetary assets. The visual imagery that Shakespeare uses in this particular speech by Roderigo strongly describes the main character, Othello, as a grotesque, bestial figure who has taken Brabanzio’s d...