Romance and Tragedy, two themes which are one and which complement each other deliciously. In many romantic tragedies there is a past theme, which is exposed in such a way that the fall is always due to an excess of love or passion and the couples are doomed because of an obstacle. I will examine the inevitability of the couple in two romantic tragedies, Shakespeare's Othello and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Researchers have long assumed that the couple's fatality was due to the era in which the story takes place. For example, a prominent scholar, Martin Orkin, hypothesized in “Othello and the “Plain Face” of Racism,” his seminal work. work on Race in Othello, which states that there is ample evidence of the existence of color prejudice in the England of Shakespeare's time, as Jordan himself puts it, "a dark atmosphere of tension and control in Elizabethan culture” (quoted in Orkin 167). Another prominent critic, Ornstein, argued that in Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, "from the shift of opportunity from the West to Wall Street, Fitzgerald creates an American fable that redeems and explains romantic failure" (Ornstein 35). Regarding the question of the inevitability of couples, in both works, the basic hypothesis was that love played the most important role in the inevitability of couples. A new body of research shows that there are many factors that contribute to marital inevitability. of the couple, I argue that the couple's inevitability in both works is simply based on the themes exposed in the play and the story because, ultimately, the obstacles that cause the tragic downfall of their relationships are jealousy, love and race. Looking closer, I will use these themes as a means...... middle of paper ......66Lake, James H. "Othello and the Comforts of Love." American Imago 45.3 (1988): 327. Morgan, Elizabeth. “Gatsby in the Garden: Courtly Love and Irony.” CollegeLiterature11.2 (1984): 163-77. JSTOR. Internet. March 19, 2014. Orkin, Martin. "Othello and the 'full face' of racism." Shakespeare Quarterly 38, No. 2 (Summer 1987): 166-88. Ornstein, Robert. “Scott Fitzgerald's Fable of East and West,” in K. Eble, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald (Mcgraw-Hill Paperbacks, 1973) p. 66Schreier, Benjamin. “Second act of desire: “Race” and “The Great Gatsby’s”: cynical Americanism. Twentieth Century Literature 53.2 (2007): 153-81.Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice. Ed. TuckerBrooke and Lawrence Mason. New Haven: Yale UP, 1947. Print. Slater, Peter Gregg. “Ethnicity in The Great Gatsby.” 20th century literature 19.1(1973)