Othello and the Depiction of Women
             Desdemona is a bad portrayal of a women's role in society. She is depicted as the adulterous lover. Othello believes Iago, when he says that Desdemona was caught with Cassio. Desdemona tries to tell Othello that Iago has been lying to him. Othello never gives her the chance to explain. So, Othello kills her and soon learns the truth. He feels awful after the killing but can do nothing.
             Shakespeare is proving that women are mere objects. That when the act inappropriately, they need to be put in their place. Shakespeare proves that women are incapable of being faithful. Shakespeare wrote like this because of the Elizabethan Era. In the Elizabethan Era, women were despised as humans. Typically they were thought of as less than human. Animals were usually a step above women. Othello confirms this stereotype. Often Desdemona is referred as the devil and there are several derogatory terms.
             If we are to assume, as Richard Levin speculates, that women were in the audiences of many Renaissance plays, it is then highly possible that feminine stage images were affected by their presence(Levin 165). Likewise, the issues represented by these images would have been constructed to take these women into account in order to satisfy them as paying customers. Considering that Shakespeare and his contemporaries produced in a period where doctrines such as "An Homily of the State of Matrimony" and Juan Luis Vives' _The Instruction of a Christian Woman_were used to define the nature of women, the chances of art imitating life was very likely.
             "An Homily of the State of Matrimony" presents conventional duties of husbands and wives. Its intent is "...to establish patriarchy, commanded by God and instituted in Paradise, as the foundation of family life"(Klein 13). Husbands are the "heads" of this institution, but should be sensitive to certain faults found in women:" For the women is a weak ...