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In an age of political division, plays like ‘Othello’ and ‘The Merchant of Venice’ offer lessons in understanding difference

The anger and unwillingness of many Americans to listen to those with different opinions is a serious societal problem. But the solution to this toxic state of things must begin on the level of the individual, with the way we listen and speak to relatives, neighbors and colleagues whose views may be diametrically opposed to our own. Lessons for modeling this kind of empathy can be found in literature—above all, in Shakespeare, whose plays are a great antidote to extremism and mean-spiritedness.

The renowned literary critic Harold Bloom asserted that Shakespeare “invented the human,” reflected in the rich interior lives of his characters. But it’s not just that Shakespeare’s characters are recognizably human; it is that the plays are constructed to make us more human. They elicit empathy for people whose backgrounds, situations and bodies are different from our own—characters we might otherwise dismiss, dislike or even abhor.

“The Merchant of Venice,” written in the late 1590s, was Shakespeare’s breakthrough play in this regard. The plot is principally taken from a 14th-century Italian tale, “Il Pecorone” (“The Simpleton”), about a young merchant who borrows money from a Jewish moneylender and offers a pound of his own flesh as security. But in that story the moneylender is an uninflected villain, while Shylock, the equivalent character in Shakespeare’s play, is given psychological depth and pathos. “Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?” Shylock demands with poignant insistence. He explains that he has been made a villain by the Christian society that mistreats him: “The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.”

In “Othello,” Shakespeare extends the same idea into a new context. Othello is a Moorish general in the Venetian army who wins the love of a Venetian noblewoman, Desdemona, with his martial exploits. But Iago, a junior officer, preys on Othello’s insecurity as a Black man in a white society, insinuating that Desdemona’s decision to marry him is “unnatural” in light of her “clime, complexion, and degree.”

What is often missed in this play is how much the scheming, villainous Iago is also a target of prejudice. The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously referred to Iago as being driven by “motiveless malignity,” but Shakespeare offers clues that the character’s malevolence is generated by a deep sense of grievance. Iago, a coarse, lower-class soldier, never has a speech like Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes,” but he explains bitterly in the play’s first scene that he is deeply resentful at having been unfairly passed over for promotion: “’Tis the curse of service,/ Preferment goes by letter and affection, /And not by old gradation.” The man promoted in his place is the inexperienced but more refined Cassio, whom Iago convinces Othello is having an affair with Desdemona.

Othello becomes a murderer because he believes that, as a Black man, his wife cannot love him the way she would someone of her own background. Iago becomes a villain because, as a man without polish or pedigree, he believes he has been disrespected and overlooked: “I know my price, I am worth no worse a place,” he declares. Today, we understand the racial injustice that lies behind Othello’s fate but are likelier to remain blind to the class prejudice that instigates Iago’s behavior.

It’s also worth noting that “Othello” pays attention to the way women can be marginalized, their humanity overlooked. Iago’s wife Emilia has a speech that echoes Shylock’s poignant one: “Let husbands know/Their wives have sense like them: they see, and smell,/And have their palates both for sweet and sour/As husbands have.” In the end, Emilia is another of Iago’s victims, stabbed to death after she reveals her husband’s trickery.

A different kind of marginality is represented in “King Lear,” the monumental tragedy written around 1605, at the height of Shakespeare’s powers. Lear begins the play faced with the diminishment that comes with age, announcing that he will step aside and divide his kingdom among his three daughters. But he is unwilling to accept the loss of power, and this fuels his tyrannical rage at his daughter Cordelia, who—unlike her treacherous sisters—will not flatter her father by telling him what he wants to hear. In the end, Lear and Cordelia both pay with their lives for his lack of self-knowledge.

Lear’s case applies to us all: We are destined to lose power and become marginal figures, if we live long enough. Shakespeare encapsulates this insight in the famous “Seven Ages of Man” speech in “As You Like It,” which proceeds through comic representations of each stage of human life but turns to tragic pathos at the end: “Last scene of all/That ends this strange eventful history/Is second childishness, and mere oblivion,/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”

But Shakespeare’s empathetic imagination is perhaps most fully realized in the character of Caliban in “The Tempest,” the last play he wrote without a co-author, in 1610-11. Caliban is the native of the island occupied by the magician Prospero and his daughter Miranda, and he seeks to do them harm. But though Caliban is described as a monster, Shakespeare shows that he appreciates beauty and has a capacity for lyrical expression. Like Shylock, if he is a villain, it’s because he has been driven to it by persecution, as he tells Prospero: “You taught me language; and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse.”

What may be the most profound of all of Shakespeare’s revelations is that Caliban is not just a slave to Prospero but part of his essential nature. For all his knowledge and seeming beneficence, Prospero can be capricious, controlling and subject to fits of anger, giving resonance to his description of Caliban in the last act: “this thing of darkness/I acknowledge mine.”

The idea that otherness exists within us as well as outside of us gains power and complexity as we move through Shakespeare’s plays. His ability to probe the wellsprings of his characters’ actions, to see beyond the flat moral lessons of his sources, should be a guide for us as citizens. It is easy to react thoughtlessly to people who seem alien; it is much harder to see things from their point of view, to recognize what influences, in which we may be complicit, have formed or deformed their characters. That is the lesson that Shakespeare’s plays teach and that needs to be grasped today more than ever. When we address one another with empathy, disagreements don’t go away, but compromise and unity are easier to reach.