Othello

Othello

Venice prizes Othello for the wars he wins, yet the senate's trust and Desdemona's love rest on a man whose foreignness is never forgotten. He is eloquent, generous, and utterly unguarded in his affections — a soldier who has known little of courts and less of jealousy. When Cyprus calls him to govern, his private happiness becomes the stage on which his public honor will be tested.

Iago

Passed over for lieutenant in favor of a bookish Florentine, Iago professes loyalty while declaring to Roderigo that he follows the Moor only to serve himself. He reads people with unnerving precision — their appetites, their insecurities, their need to be reassured — and treats trust as a tool. His cheerful asides and crude jokes give the play its engine: a mind that turns every virtue it encounters into a weapon.

Desdemona

Desdemona defied Brabantio to marry Othello, and in Cyprus she moves easily among soldiers, governors, and her husband's officers. Her goodness is active rather than passive: she pleads for Cassio, teases Iago, and refuses to believe her husband capable of jealousy. That very openness — the frank hand, the unguarded word — is what the play's darker machinery will exploit.

Michael Cassio

Cassio won the lieutenancy Iago coveted, and his polished courtesy — kissing Emilia in greeting, praising Desdemona as 'our great captain's captain' — marks him as a man of the drawing room as much as the field. He loves Othello genuinely and serves as the go-between of the Moor's courtship, which makes his fall from favor so painful. His disgrace in Cyprus sets in motion the very reconciliation Desdemona will plead for.

Emilia

Emilia has learned to absorb Iago's public jabs about women's tongues with a shrug, and she serves Desdemona with a practicality her mistress lacks. She is the one who finds the dropped handkerchief, and the one who watches her lady's marriage curdle without knowing her own hand in it. Her presence in the bedroom and the courtyard makes her the play's quiet witness — and eventually its most dangerous one.

Roderigo

Roderigo opens the play furious that Desdemona has married the Moor, and Iago immediately redirects that fury into a street-side alarm at Brabantio's door. He is a fool in the technical sense — a man whose purse and desires are both open to anyone with a plan — but his persistence gives Iago a ready instrument. Every scheme Iago hatches needs a dupe, and Roderigo volunteers.