Eliot identified Othello’s flair for self-dramatisation in this speech: he is trying to ‘escape reality’, as Eliot puts it, by taking refuge in his glorious past and tearing his mind from his horrendous crime (the killing of his innocent wife). In his 1927 essay ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’, T. Othello’s ‘I kiss’d thee ere I kill’d thee’ speech is one of his most famous, and one of the most celebrated dying speeches in all of Shakespeare. Second, of course, although kissing and killing are so markedly different as to be almost opposites, their sounds sync up here, thanks to the alliteration of kiss’d and kill’d.īut finally, if indeed Shakespeare meant ‘Judean’ rather than ‘Indian’ in that earlier speech (‘of one whose hand, / Like the base Judean, threw a pearl away / Richer than all his tribe’), the idea of kissing Desdemona before killing her mirrors Judas’ kiss, whereby Judas betrayed Jesus to the Romans by identifying him in public by kissing him, leading to Jesus’ arrest and execution. First, it contrasts what Freud would call Eros with Thanatos, love with murder, life with death, sex and the creative urge with killing and the destructive urge. ‘I kiss’d thee ere I kill’d thee’: the line is memorable for a number of reasons. And now I kill myself, dying as I kiss you again.’ (Although it isn’t included in the stage directions, the implication is that Othello kisses Desdemona right before he dies.) In other words: ‘I kissed you before I killed you, just like this. In his dying words, Othello addresses the dead Desdemona. I kiss’d thee ere I kill’d thee: no way but this
Lodovico and Gratiano react in shock to what they have seen and heard: Othello’s death (‘period’ means ‘end’ here, i.e., the conclusion or end of a journey) and everything Othello has said to them (‘marr’d’ is ‘bad’ or ‘awful’).