Marilyn Simon in The Hedgehog Review:
In general, we view sexual jealousy as bad. Jealousy creates distrust and destroys harmony. It does not always cause the kind of outright physical violence it does in Othello, but it certainly does violence to one’s peace of mind and to one’s sense of security and comfort. Sexual jealousy can cause an otherwise dignified individual to become a snooping, creeping, paranoid obsessive. Jealous souls, as Shakespeare writes, “are not ever jealous for the cause, / But jealous for they’re jealous. It is a monster / Begot upon itself, born on itself.” It can lead to hatred, manipulation, control, and cruelty. In Othello, it leads directly to despair and to death. And yet its absence and the void it has left behind herald something more sinister and colder than the terror and grandeur produced by the hot-blooded, violent stirring of the human heart. Instead of a thunderstorm that frightens and awes, we are left with the dreariness of a gray drizzle that chills to the bone. Sexual jealousy is the proof of sexual love. It is the evidence of a love for another that is so total that to imagine another enjoying even a part of one’s beloved drives one to a crisis of meaning that turns toward rage and despair.
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