Jounal 10 the first of Othello

I have started reading Othello and I like it so far. It is a good drama written by Shakespeare. I read a little ahead and read online as well to compare how other people viewed Othello with to my opinion of it so far. I personally like it a lot but I don’t believe it should have been called Othello, although he plays a large role in the story I believe that Iago is easily the main character. He does the most stuff and starts all of the conflict and is responsible for a lot of the dialogue. I did not know until yesterday that Iago has the second most lines in all of Shakespeare’s writing following behimd Hamlot who also has a whole story written about him. You can probably argue that Roderigo is more important than Iago because he’s the one who sets Iago up to do his deeds, but you would lose. Roderigo stays out of the whole situation and doesn’t really get his hands dirty in the story, since he’s rich he can do that. It’s mostly Iago who is the sneaky, suspect character that the audience watches closely in the story for amusement. A lot of Iago’s actions in the story create dramatic irony because we know what is going on but the people he is tricking do not. We know Desdemona never cheated on Othello with Cassio, or anyone for that matter. We know Cassio is well deserving of his rank (at least in Othello’s opinion) and there was no real reason for him to doubt that. We know all the motives behind why Iago does the things he does because he tells us. We know all of these things and, outside of Iago, none of the other characters know all of this info.
I really wish I would have posted this journal entry before the start of last class because it was almost done and we talked about pretty much everything I wrote in class. To add on to the class discussion, nobody brought up the idea I was thinking that I don’t think there is an active hero figure in this story. Nobody does any saving or spectacular non-human like activity, but I do think that Othello could have been considered a hero if he would have held his ground and done things differently. Instead of killing his wife he should have dug deeper into the statements delivered against her. He could have also prevented all of the deaths as well, including Iago’s, the only person who somewhat deserved to be persecuted. I always seem to compare a lot of characters to Gilgamesh, here, I see that he and Othello are the same because they get the glory of the story being named after them without putting any work in. Othello isn’t even the person with the conflict. Roderigo has the problem in the story which is not having Othello’s girl Desdemona. And he uses Iago to try and get her which makes it interesting, but what compounds the situations is that Iago is already upset about the promotion Othello has given to one of peers instead of him. Iago uses that one person, Cassio, to tear down both relationships and I’m going to leave off there so this doesn’t turn into a summary.