Hamlet the scholar is happy to be presented with an intellectual puzzle, but unsure how to proceed when presented with a demand to kill. Othello the courageous soldier, by contrast, relishes decisive action but is insecure among “the wealthy curlèd darlings” of the Venetian state. Imagine Othello in Hamlet’s situation. He would have needed no second prompting. On hearing the ghost’s story about his father’s murder, he would have gone straight down from the battlements and throttled King Claudius with his bare hands. There would have been no tragedy. Now imagine Hamlet in Othello’s situation. He would have questioned every witness, arranged for Desdemona to see a play about adultery and watched for a guilty reaction. Her innocence would have become obvious and, again, there would be no tragedy. The tragedy comes not from some inherent flaw but from the mismatch of character and situation.

The audience’s sense of the reckless speed of Othello’s action is heightened by the play’s clever “double-time” scheme. Looked at from one point of view, the action is highly compressed. The first act takes place in a single night in Venice, as the Senate sits in emergency session upon hearing the news of the Turkish fleet’s sailing toward Cyprus. There is then an imagined lapse of time to cover the sea voyage. The second act begins with the arrival in Cyprus and proceeds to the evening’s celebration of the evaporation of the Turkish threat, during which Cassio gets disastrously drunk. Othello and Desdemona have their second interrupted night in the marital bedroom. The third and fourth acts, during which Cassio intercedes with Desdemona and Iago persuades Othello of his wife’s infidelity, occupy another day, and then the fifth act brings the catastrophe on the third and last night. But looked at from another point of view, the action must take much longer: there has to be opportunity for the supposed adultery, for the business of the handkerchief, and for Lodovico’s sea voyage from Venice. The audience watching a strong production in the theater does not, however, notice the inconsistency implied by this double-time scheme, such is their intense absorption in the rapid unfolding of the plot.

In an essay called “Shakespeare and Stoicism of Seneca,” published in 1927, the poet and critic T. S. Eliot took a very different view of Othello from A. C. Bradley’s:

I have always felt that I have never read a more terrible exposure of human weakness—of universal human weakness—than the last great speech of Othello… What Othello seems to me to be doing in this speech is cheering himself up. He is endeavouring to escape reality, he has ceased to think of Desdemona, and is thinking about himself. Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of oneself. Othello succeeds in turning himself into a pathetic figure, by adopting an aesthetic rather than a moral attitude, dramatising himself against his environment. He takes in the spectator, but the human motive is primarily to take in himself.

In the classical tragedy of ancient Greece and Rome, the hero often reaches a state of supreme self-awareness just before the moment of his death. Aristotle called this anagnorisis, recognition. This final clarity brings a strange and unworldly sense of satisfaction to the protagonist as he or she faces the end. For Eliot, Othello by contrast remains deluded. His self-dramatization is an evasion that substitutes for the recognition that he has in fact been all too “easily jealous.”

According to this view, Othello is the victim of the very linguistic facility that has won him Desdemona.