I've mentioned Fintan O'Toole's delightfully iconoclastic book called Shakespeare Is Hard But So Is Life (2002), and its demolishing of the fatal flaw theory, several times before. Well, here I go again. In this case, I'll be discussing his thoughts on the "double-time scheme" that Shakespeare employs to powerful dramatic effect in acts three, four and five of Othello. O'Toole's primary contention in this essay (titled "Othello: Inside Out") and in fact the entire book, is that Shakespeare's major tragic characters are trapped and torn between competing world-views, or time periods and their respective ways of thinking. In this play, Othello and Iago are moving in two historically opposite directions: Othello represents a new sort of man, one who has earned his place via merit and not birth or social standing; Iago stands for an older world-view, where things are done by convention and precedent. When Cassio is given a promotion that, according to this view, should have been his, he requires revenge. And as he pulls Othello into a psychological nightmare, both characters lose touch with the normal day-to-day world (which brings to mind Brutus' comment: "Between the acting of a dreadful thing/ And the first motion, all the interim is/ like a phantasma or a hideous dream..."). And they become, "out of synch with the times, Iago unable to reconcile himself to the new order, Othello ahead of the times as a man who has power but no status. This sense of the two men being out of their time becomes literal. We feel it and experience it as we watch the play - their fast, passionate time at odds with the normal unfolding of history." O'Toole's book is filled with thoughts like this one. I recommend it very highly.