information:extraction, information:highlighting
The handkerchief

The over-reliance of the plot of Othello upon a trivial prop, the handkerchief, was noted in the play's earliest criticism. The same Thomas Rymer quoted above, in his 1693 A Short View of Tragedy, suggested that the play should better have been called "The Tragedy of the Handkerchief", arguing "the handkerchief is so remote a trifle, no booby on this side Mauritania could make any consequence from it."

In spite of Othello's protestations in the first act that no magic was used in his wooing of Desdemona, he later claims magical properties for the handkerchief, his first gift to her. A question which has interested critics is whether he himself believes these stories or is using them to pressure or test Desdemona. There is certainly a contradiction between Othello's assertion – linked to its supposed magical properties – that his mother received the handkerchief from an Egyptian charmer in Act 3 Scene 4, and his later assertion that his father gave it to his mother, made in Act 4 Scene 2. Are we, the audience, intended to believe in the handkerchief's magical properties?

The handkerchief provides many examples of how chance operates in support of Iago's plots: Desdemona loses it just when Iago is in need of evidence of the invented affair; Cassio fails to recognise that it is hers; Cassio gives it to Bianca to copy, who throws it back at him at the very moment when Othello is eavesdropping.

Symbolically the handkerchief represents the bond between Othello and Desdemona, and its loss the breaking of that bond: Othello blames Desdemona for its loss when in fact he casts it aside while she is trying to use it to help him. The whiteness of the handkerchief is often taken to represent Desdemona's purity; and the red strawberries blood from her hymen symbolising her virgin marriage. In contrast, professor Ian Smith argues that a handkerchief "dyed in mummy" would not be white but black, and therefore symbolic of Othello.

In a 1997 production at the Royal National Theatre, the handkerchief fell to the ground immediately before the interval and remained onstage throughout it, as if – as the reviewer Richard Butler put it – "challenging one of us to pick it up and prevent a tragedy."