Archetypal Qualities In Shakespeare's Othello And Claudius
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In life, no two people are exactly alike. In literature, it is about the same. When comparing two pieces of literature, the characters involved in the stories will not match up identically or even nearly at all, but there are often certain character traits shared by similar characters across two works. This is present specifically between Shakespeare’s works Othello and Hamlet with archetypal qualities that are shared between main characters of the stories. Some of these qualities include being deceitful, loyal, or vengeful. However, though both pieces contain references to similar characteristics such as deceit, loyalty and trust, or vengeance, these qualities do not always appear in the same types of characters or in the same form of action in the plot.
Both Iago in Othello and Hamlet and Claudius in Hamlet portray manipulative qualities as they deceive their friends, families, and acquaintances. Iago tricks many people into performing tasks for him so that he can get what he wants or achieve a certain goal. He first convinces Roderigo to get Cassio drunk so that Cassio would lose his position as lieutenant and then beg Desdemona to get Othello to return it to him (Crowther, “No Fear Othello”).…show more content… Desdemona stood firm by the truth that she was not having an affair with Cassio and never really strayed from Othello’s side. At the end of the story when Othello slit her throat, she even tried to claim that it was suicide rather than murder so that she might preserve her husband’s reputation, integrity, and their love. By looking at the loyalty within both these plays it is clear that most characters possess the quality, but just chose to place their trust in the wrong person or chose not to trust the ones who were really telling the truth as was the case with Othello and