Shakespeare uses the cultural assumptions, connotations and a discourse of power in his play Othello, and manipulates it as a didactic tool by challenging Elizabethan ideological structure. He does so through the characters of Othello, Desdemona and Iago.

In the context of the Elizabethan period, power was of extreme social and cultural significance as it was in direct association to the status and structure of society. Elizabethan world view played an important part in Shakespeare's text, and the Elizabethan people credited it's involvement in his plays.

Shakespeare's Othello is used as an instrument for creating flux in the great chain of being, an ideological belief of the Elizabethan Period. Othello exhibits an emotional personality, a very feminine characteristic. 'But I do love thee; and when I love thee not, Chaos is come Again' (3:1, 91-92). Elizabethan dominant social ideology was a predominately patriarchal society and exhibiting a female quality...