The play “Othello” was written by William Shakespeare in the year 1604. Othello is a prominent general who at first seems successful until his jealous friend Iago causes his downfall. In the play, William Shakespeare makes use of symbolism extensively and one of the symbols widely used is the handkerchief. The handkerchief has different meanings to different characters in the play. As such, the paper will discuss the importance of the handkerchief to Othello, Desdemona and Iago and how it brings to the fall of Othello’s marriage to Desdemona.
Othello presents two contradicting views regarding the handkerchief as seen when he tells Desdemona that it contained magic charms and that he had been given by his mother who had obtained it from an Egyptian. Othello insists to Desdemona that the handkerchief was made from silk obtained from worms and dyed from extracts of virgins that had been mummified. In the second view, Othello tells Gratiano that the handkerchief was a token his mother had received from his father. The first account of the history was the handkerchief told to Desdemona seems more convincing because Othello insists that the handkerchief enabled the mother to keep his father under a charm. Upon her death, Othello’s mother gave him the handkerchief till the day he would get a wife (Othello, 317). As such, Othello giving Desdemona the handkerchief was a sign of his love and he believed that so long as she possessed it, there was love between them.