Going Back to the Well

I was really into Othello and was waiting for some unexpected turns in the final act.  Unfortunately, instead of coming up with something new and exciting, Shakespeare went back to the well again and re-told his ending from Romeo and Juliet.  Our lovers end up dead together with one of them a suicide victim just like in his famous play about Verona's young lovers.  Was originality dead?  Did Shakespeare have so little respect for his audience that he simply repeated something he has already used hoping that nobody had seen the original?

I am actually kind of a fan of Shakespeare's plays, but I was not real familiar with Othello.  This story was really working for me right up until the final act.  But the repetition from previous works just killed it for me.  I probably need to see this play performed to really understand how it is being presented.  I thought the final scenes played like a comedy.  Othello smothers Desdemona not once, but twice, and despite that, she still has lines to recite in the play after having the life choked out of her.  The same thing happens with Emilia.  We are told that Iago has killed her, but then she is able to summon up the strength to get out a final song.  I just couldn't belive what I was reading.

I also have trouble figuring out exactly what Shakespeare wanted to say about Othello.  In the beginning of the play, Shakespeare goes out of his way to make the audience sympathetic towards Othello.  He makes Iago a true villain and stresses that Iago is plotting against Othello.  As an audience, we have very little choice to do anything other than root for Othello to figure out Iago's plans and put a stop to them.  This is what our hero should be able to do and anything else is bound to make him less heroic.  I don't think I am alone in thinking this is the natural course for our play to take.  But, Shakespeare doesn't do that.  Instead, he take all that sympathy that he has solicited on Othello's behalf and then pulls the rug out on us.  Othello ends up being a pretty mean guy who deserves what he gets.

I'm not sure how much of this is tied up with the racism present in the play.  It seems like Shakespeare is trying to say that Othello is just reverting back to his savage behavior.  It is almost like the audience should expect Moors to be savages and if they were anything else it would be surprising.  Othello transforms from the stable leader who had complete command over the room in Venice into the complete opposite in just a couple of days.  Othello is basically chasing shadows from the time they arrive on Cyprus.  He may be the protagonist of the story, but he is certainly no hero.  I'm not sure if there is any historic element to the Othello story or if this is a complete work of fiction, but either way, the ending was a complete let down for me.  This is just not the outcome I was expecting.  Pretty much anybody we even had a remote interest in during the play is dead or going on trial.  The only people who benefit from the events in the play are the minor characters who will be promoted to take the place of our main characters.  I knew it was going to be a tragedy, but I don't think it was unreasonable for me to expect something good to come out of these events somewhere.  Unfortunately, it just never happened.