SOURCE: Snow, Edward A. “Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Things in Othello.” English Literary Renaissance 10 (1980): 384-412.

In the following essay, Snow links Othello's jealousy to his psychologically and culturally conditioned feelings of sexual guilt and anxiety.

We see the ground whereon these woes do lie, But the true ground of all these piteous woes We cannot without circumstance descry. 

(Romeo and Juliet, V. iii. 179-81)¹

What puzzles the watchman of Romeo and Juliet might doubly confound the audience of Othello. In perhaps no other of Shakespeare play is there such a sense of discrepancy between the visible and the true ground of things. By the end of the play even the language of cause, motive, and reason has become suspect. “It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul; / Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars, / It is the cause” (V. ii...