Othello and Desdemona pietosaWilliam Shakespeare's tragic drama Othello sees the destruction of two beautiful people due to the sinister intervention of a third. The fairest of all is the beautiful and faultless Desdemona. Let us consider his character in this essay. In his book Everybody's Shakespeare: Reflections Chiefly on the Tragedies, Maynard Mack comments on the heroine's final song: Desdemona, preparing for bed on the night that will be her last, remembers her mother's maid "called Barbaresca": She was in love , and the one she loved proved mad and abandoned her. It had a “Willow” song; it was an old thing; but he expressed his fortune, and died singing it. That song won't pass my mind tonight. (4.3.25) Here the present time, in which Desdemona speaks and sings, and the future time, in which we know that she (like Barbary) will have to die out of absolute fidelity to her intuition of what love is and means, they drift away even as we look into a lost time, when Desdemona had a mother and all the suffering and complexities of love could be understood in a song. (132)In Act 1 Scene 1, Iago persuades Desdemona's rejected suitor, Roderigo, to accompany him to the home of Brabantio, Desdemona's father, in the middle of the night. Once there the two wake him with loud cries about his daughter's escape with Othello. In response to Iago's vulgar descriptions of Desdemona's involvement with the general, Brabantio gets out of bed and, with Roderigo's help, assembles a search party to go find Desdemona and bring her home. Once Brabantio has located Othello, the father files a public complaint to have Desdemona returned:...... half of the sheet ...... from Shakespeare: The design of his carpet. Np: np, 1970.Mack, Maynard. Everyone is Shakespeare: reflections especially on tragedies. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Pitt, Angela. "Women in Shakespeare's Tragedies." Readings on tragedies. Ed. Clarice Swisher. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1996. Reprinted from Shakespeare's Women. Np: np, 1981.Shakespeare, William. Othello. In Electric Shakespeare. Princeton University. 1996. http://www.eiu.edu/~multilit/studyabroad/othello/othello_all.html No line n. Wright, Louis B. and Virginia A. LaMar. “The Engaging Qualities of Othello.” Readings on tragedies. Ed. Clarice Swisher. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1996. Reprint from the Introduction to the Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice by William Shakespeare. NP: Simon and Schuster, Inc., 1957.