Othello: Shakespeare's Realistic Samson

Abstract:The essay studies the significance of the biblical Samson to early modern reformers, artists, and, primarily, Shakespeare. A long allusion in Love's Labor's Lost identifies Samson as a prototypical lover who learns from Delilah's wit and teaches the play's "book-men" that vow-breaking is necessary for love-making. But the focus of the essay is Othello, and the essay shows how Shakespeare used the biblical story to create a hero who struggles to grow beyond his martial occupation and idolatrous proclivities through the marriage covenant he enters with Desdemona that is devastating to his self-willed loneliness but finally enabling. The essay reveals Shakespeare's compositional process. He buries biblical allusions in the dramatic subtexts and uses touchpoints from Samson's story in Judges—the maternal annunciation, "magical" hair, inter-racial marriage, identity riddles, love bonds experienced as bondage, and, finally, self-sacrifice—to create the psychological conflicts and struggles of his titular character. To recognize Samson's saga as a macro-structure for the drama restores dignity to a character viewed as a noble dupe or a racist stereotype. Othello, like Samson, has a project that is also ours: to identify, call out, and root out cultural stereotypes (mental idols) wherever they lie even in one's own heart.