Notesale: Turn your study into money

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Iago's last words:
• 'Demand me nothing; what you know, you know
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• The final assertion of Iago's power: he doesn't confess or repent or do anything at the end that alleviates
the tragedy, alleviates Othello's desperate search for reasons, or answers our own questions
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• Isolation from Venetian society: confirms his separation on account of his storytelling, only he will ever
know the whole truth
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The question of value:
• Cassio describes his good name as being more important than anything; Iago is fleecing Roderigo;
Brabantio and Othello both talk about Desdemona as their valuable property
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How much does setting play into the meaning of the narrative?
• Venice and Cyprus placed the play centrally in contemporary geopolitics - Cyprus was a frontline
between Christendom and the Turks - so the settings really stress a broader political dynamic
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• Cyprus also had associations of love - the isle of Aphrodite - so the plot ironically subverts that
expectation
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The threat is initially externalised, but gradually becomes
internalised
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• Creates an almost inhumane element to Iago's character
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• Source material - Iago and Emilia have a child
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• Lack of respect for women?
The notion of Othello as a discourse:
• Use of initiators, which are used in everyday conversation to engage the listener's attention so that they do
not miss an important point: Iago uses an initiator ('my noble lord') when addressing Othello at the
beginning of the jealousy scene
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Iago's formality towards Othello is maintained, with increasing irony, throughout
his manipulation
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Othello does so in his
speech to the senate, when he lays out that he will 'a round unvarnished tale deliver/of my whole course
of love
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Even his insistence
that he is not a public speaker could be classified as an 'auxesis,' where you used an exaggerated term for
the accurate one
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Turks threatened the civilised world
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• Othello's final speech: claims to be both turk and venetian
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Flaws in Cassio's character:
• Snobbish reference to 'men of quality' and his pride in his new rank ('the lieutenant is to be saved before
the ancient')
• Impatient in asking for Desdemona's help when Emilia has already told him that 'he need no other suitor'
but Othello himself
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Handkerchief:
• Symbolic of the wedding sheets: strawberry spotted recalls the image of blood after losing virginity
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' Othello's obsession with the handkerchief is
therefore symbolic of his obsession with Desdemona's chastity
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This aligns with Leavis' view that Othello's murder of
Desdemona is a result of his 'essential make up
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'
• Final speech seeks to place himself in a noble role by attributing his crimes to the 'demi devil' Iago
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') but his words
gradually become more general (shifting from 'I' to 'we') and eventually he blames wine ('the devil
drunkenness
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Othello's grotesque language (Neill points out that jealousy gives an 'intensely erotic charge' to his
language):
• 'I had been happy if the entire camp, pioneers and all, had tasted her sweet body, so I had nothing known':
objectifies Desdemona's 'sweet' body as something to be 'tasted' (comestible imagery)
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In this sense, Othello regards Desdemona as something
to be tasted and mined
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• 'Occupation's gone': 'occupy' is has sexual connotations
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'Hero who stepped into a house' (Nuttal):
• Othello not used to domesticity, hence his fear of losing his 'unhoused free condition' to marriage
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'Near schizophrenic hero' (Loomba):
• Internalises the racial prejudices that accompany his role as a black man in a white world: ('begrimed and
black', 'nature erring')
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Desdemona's soliloquy:
• Opportunity to have a voice in a patriarchal society, but wasted
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Desdemona's isolation:
• Isolates herself from her father, as he did not want her to marry Othello (physically shown by Brabantio's
death)
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• Ironic that Othello's assertion that he 'loved not wisely, but to well' might perhaps be more readily suited
to Desdemona
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