A Note for Future Queries on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116is it a Condensed Explanatory résumé of Othello’s Mistakes?

Resumo

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 –“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”– has always been read as an attempt a) to define love’s constancy in a world of change, b) to describe an unaltered and unalterable ideal of true love, or even c) to set up a rhetorical rebuttal of the very concept of everlasting love. Be as it may, a given reading is always debatable, incomplete and equally defendable if well exposed. In my case, every time I read this sonnet I have always remembered, perhaps unconsciously, Othello, the persona, and the mistakes he commits all along the play. I think Sonnet 116 is setting out something like an abridged “grammar” of Othello’s mistakes by describing what he believes in at the beginning and betrays as the plot unfolds. If Othello had followed the maxims given by Sonnet 116 as a sort of guide for true lovers, he would have changed his tragic final fate, a direct result of their breaking. It is my aim in this note to determine how those maxims found in Sonnet 116 work and how the main character in Othello keeps on breaking them to reach thus to the fatal ending. This is another interpretation we could add to the previous list of readings of Sonnet 116.