A4 Flashcards
😵💫⁉️
“Lie with her? Lie on her? We say lie on her when they belie her.”
AO1 - Othello / Language
AO2 - Lexis, syntax: shows his descent into madness and paranoia
- Rhetorical questions: insecurity
AO2/3 - Prose: Shakespeare constructed elevated characters to speak in blank verse; Othello is reduced
🙂↔️
“this would not be believed in Venice”
AO1 - Prejudice / Othello
AO2 - Othello’s disassimilation with Venetian society
✝️
“No as I am a Christian.”
“No as I shall be saved.”
AO1 - Desdemona / Religion
AO2 - Anaphora: reiteration of religious beliefs
AO3 - Purity and perfection of an ideal Elizabethan/Jacobean woman/wife
😡🙃
“my lord hath so bewhored her”
“Such as she said my lord did say I was”
AO1 - Femininity / Emilia x Desdemona
AO2 - Characters act as a foil to one another; Emilia explicitly mentions the word ‘whore’ whereas Desdemona is unable to, suggesting difference in innocence and naivety
AO3 - Women on binary opposition
AO5 - Desdemona accepts her culture’s dictum that she must be obedient to males and self-denying in the extreme
🛌🤔
“prithee shroud me / In one of those same sheets.”
AO1 - Death / Desdemona / Marriage
AO2 - Foreshadowing of death; symbol of wedding sheets: Desdemona attempting to repair the marriage
AO3 - Marriage in Elizabethan society required mutual promise and consummation, proven by the stain of blood on the bed sheets
🏩
“She says enough; yet she’s a simple bawd”
AO1 - Femininity
AO2 - Emilia foil to Desdemona, but is deemed complicit in promiscuity, suggesting Desdemona as a prostitute
AO3 - Women’s sexual liberation in Venice
🎧🌳
“She had a song of willow”
“she died singing it”
AO1 - Marriage / Femininity / Justice
AO2 - Motif of the willow song
- Foreshadowing to Desdemona’s death
- Parallel drawn between Desdemona and her mother’s “maid”, suggests the universal theme of male oppression on their female counterparts regardless of time period and/or social class
AO3 - First recording of the Willow Song recorded in 1583, however Shakespeare adapts the subject of the song from a man to a woman, drawing a closer parallel to Desdemona as well as making it clear to the audience of Desdemona’s downfall coming soon
AO5 - Desdemona’s hamartia being her helpless passivity (Bradley)
👀👃👅
“Their wives have sense like them: they see, they smell / And have their palates both for sweet and sour”
AO1 - Emilia x Desdemona / Femininity / Marriage
AO2 - Syndetic listing: Emilia humanises women, contrasting to the imagery used previously by the male characters to restrict their autonomy
AO3 - By doing so, Emilia criticises Jacobean/Elizabethan society’s one dimensional view of women, disproving the binary opposition
