The Hero in the Bedroom: Epic Displacement and Tragic Tension in Othello (class notes)

 

Othello can be read as an epic figure who steps out of his own heroic world—one filled with wars and monsters—into a completely different setting: the world of the Italian bedroom comedy. In his epic world, his bed is his battlefield, his couch his helmet. But when he enters this new world, everything revolves around the domestic: the house, the bedroom, the relationship between husband and wife. This shift represents the values of a new culture and civilization, one that privileges the interior, the domestic, the private sphere.

Othello is placed in a typical dramatic situation drawn from Italian bedroom comedy—the theme of adultery and betrayal. In those comedies, the betrayed husband is a comic figure: by the end, he wears horns and becomes the object of laughter. Yet when an epic hero like Othello is projected into this role, the result is tragic rather than comic. He cannot bear humiliation, nor can he endure being domesticated. This is the central tension that drives his downfall.

Whenever there is movement—whether between worlds, values, or ways of seeing—there is tension. Ultimately, these transitions create the strain that leads to Othello’s tragedy.

But what are the roots of this tragedy? The roots, like the sources of life, are buried and unseen. They sustain what grows above but remain invisible. The true cause of tragedy in Othello is not immediately apparent. One might be tempted to claim that Iago is its explicit cause, and indeed, he appears to be. Yet Shakespeare warns us not to trust what seems explicit or visible. In Act I, Scene II, when Othello says, “The Turks are making for Rhodes” and then corrects himself—“No, this cannot be, by no assay of reason”—Shakespeare hints that appearances can deceive. What we see may only be a “pageant,” a spectacle designed to keep us gazing in the wrong direction.

This moment provides a key to understanding the play, its tragedy, and the larger intellectual crisis of the Renaissance. A “pageant” is a show—something meant for the eyes—but Othello’s statement that “reason refuses sight” suggests a deeper conflict. The Renaissance was marked by two competing ways of knowing: through sight (the gaze, perception, appearance) and through reason (rational thought, intellect). These two modes of cognition offered different truths and led to a fundamental cultural crisis—the opposition between the magical and the rational. The Renaissance, at its core, is this very tension: the struggle between seeing and reasoning, between faith in appearances and faith in the mind.