Othello – the universal appealFor 400 years audiences have found William Shakespeare's tragedy Othello relevant to their lives and tastes. Why? What lasting qualities does the work possess to ensure its continued success? Does the reason lie in the great heterogeneity of the characters, scenes and actions within the work? Robert B. Heilman in “The Role We Give Shakespeare” links the universality of Shakespeare to the “innumerability of the parts”: But the completeness of Shakespeare appears graspable and possessable to many men at odds with each other, because of the innumerability of the parts: we can consider these parts incompletenesses, partial perspectives, and as such they correspond to the imperfect (but not necessarily invalid) ways of seeing and understanding practiced by imperfect (but not necessarily wrong) interpreters and theorists of different fields. Each interpreter sees a part of the whole which, so to speak, mirrors him, and then proceeds to magnify the mirror until it becomes the work as a whole (10). The reader finds, in fact, a great variety of "parts". from the beginning to the end of Othello. This can be seen from the fact that around 20 characters have speaking roles; and in the variety of their occupations, from the duke to the clown; and in the numerous scene changes; and in the differentiation in the language, in the actions, in the ways of each individual character. Is characterization another cause of the playwright's wide popularity? Harry Levin in the General Introduction to The Riverside Shakespeare finds other reasons for its appeal: Universal as its attraction has been, it is best understood through particulars. However – to our advantage… half of the paper… Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1996. Reprinted from Shakespeare: The Pattern in His Carpet. Np: np, 1970.Frye, Northrop. “Nature and nothing”. Essays on Shakespeare. Ed. Gerald Chapmann. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965.Heilman, Robert B. “The Role We Give to Shakespeare.” Essays on Shakespeare. Ed. Gerald Chapmann. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965. Levin, Harry. General introduction. The bank of the Shakespeare River. Ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974.Shakespeare, William. Othello. In Electric Shakespeare. Princeton University. 1996. http://www.eiu.edu/~multilit/studyabroad/othello/othello_all.html No lines nos.Wilkie, Brian and James Hurt. “Shakespeare”. Literature of the Western world. Ed. Brian Wilkie and James Hurt. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1992.