ao3

Question 1

Context of:

The Venetian Republic and Turkish threat (3)

Answer 1

The Venetian Republic and Turkish threat:

• Venice - diverse, Renaissance
• Christian World (Europe, North America..) began to b threatened by Islam
• Ottoman Turks and Europeans tension over Cyprus - fear of Islam settling into Europe (like much of the globe)

Question 2

Context of:

Moors and Muslims (3)

Answer 2

Moors and Muslims:

• ‘moor’ - used in Elizabethan england to indicate muslims/those of dark skin
• Queen Elizabeth had numerous murdered
• Black people - savage, foreign, exotic

Question 3

The importance of timing in Shakespeare: (2)

Answer 3

• Common throughout his plays
• Act 5 - Emilia just too late, D and O reveals her thorough innocence too late - link to tragic climax and ‘black flag’ performance

Question 4

Act 5: Bertens quote

Answer 4

Bertens - ‘the power acts that we usually think of as completely private turn out to be an extension of the public sphere’

Question 5

The obsession of sight: (5)

Answer 5

• scopophilia - on the rise in the 17th century
• running thread throughout the play
• app vs reality
• eye to the soul
• focus on sight esp in Act 5 - parallel between Iago and Othello who ‘enter with a light’

Question 6

How did Keats describe Shakespeare’s plays?

Answer 6

‘negative capability’

Question 7

Importance of Act 5 - black man in a white woman’s bedroom (2)

Answer 7

• reoccurring image - reverting back to stereotypes of the time
• the rape of Lucrece poem - deeply emotive

Question 8

According to Jordan, the pre-sixteenth century Oxford English Dictionary associated the word black with…

Answer 8

…meanings such as ‘deeply stained with dirt… having deadly purposes… horrible, wicked’.

Question 9

Jordan said the word black was a…

Answer 9

…“symbol of baseness and evil, a sign of danger and repulsion”.