Othello

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1. 01

   Jealousy is not merely a suffering but an emotion that manufactures its own evidence and devours the one who carries it.

   Othello · 1603

   Jealousy doesn't wait for proof: it fabricates its own, then devours the host that feeds it.

   Shakespeare shows the mechanism of a false conviction that feeds itself: Othello receives no real proof, only a handkerchief and hints, and his mind assembles them into a complete story. The emotion precedes the facts and selects the ones that confirm it. Iago lies only at the margins; the rest is manufactured by the victim himself. The tragedy is a manual on how a suspicion, once planted, builds its own architecture — and consumes precisely the one who sustains it.

   “O, beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock The meat it feeds on.”

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