AO5

Question 1

Desdemona

Answer 1

“Defined by man, but she challenges this identity of the ‘pure angel’” - Rokison- Woodall​

“She is a prize, a spoil of war” - Caryl Phillips​

“possible to see her as the strongest, most heroic person in the play” - Honigmann​

“Othello is a victim of racial beliefs precisely because he becomes an agent of misogynistic ones” - Loomba​

“D accepts her culture’s dictum that she must be obedient to males” “self-denying in the extreme” when she is murdered- Marilyn French ​

D is punished for being “too knowing, too independent” - Lisa Jardine.

Question 2

Iago

Answer 2

“Motiveless malignity”- Coleridge​

“Malice is motiveless…secret of it’s power and it’s horror…why it’s revelation always shocks” - Helen Gardner​

“He wants to make Othello’s deeds ‘fit in with the prejudice that his face excited’” “intention is to prove black men are evil” - Hunter.​

“Iago’s manipulating was artfully natural” - Samuel Johnson.​

“Iago and Othello in “sexual competition”” - Dominic West.​

“Christianity can be worn as a mask- consciously by Iago and perhaps unconsciously by Othello” - Honigmann

Question 3

Othello

Answer 3

New Historicist- Frances Dolan- murdering one’s spouse was considered a threat to social order. ‘Traitor inside’ reflected anxieties about ‘spectres of disorder’​

“Othello dies belonging to the world of action in which his true part lay” - Leavis​

“Driven by moral indignation and regret that Desdemona’s virtue has been destroyed” - Coleridge.​

“Life is a game in which he does not know the rules” - Caryl Phillips​

“Othello’s love of Desdemona is the love of a possession” - Caryl Phillips​

“Othello becomes a tragedy of the loss of faith” G.K Hunter​

Marxist political theme: Conflict between Christians and Muslims contribute to destruction – Iago able to take advantage of political tension to destabilise O’s marriage.​

O has a split consciousness “near schizophrenic hero… becomes simultaneously the keeper of the state and its opponent- Loomba.​

Question 4

Emilia

Answer 4

“the mouthpiece of repressed femininity” - Bayley​

“Her handing over of the napkin was stupidity and nothing worse”- Bradley​

“Emilia’s love (of Desdemona) is Iago’s undoing” - Honigmann​

“Either Shakespeare wants us to consider Emilia incredibly dimwitted or he made her too afraid of Iago to challenge him until it’s too late” - Honigmann.​

Question 5

Cassio

Answer 5

“Bianca is like Othello and Cassio, an outsider” - Simpson.​

“One wonders whether the men are capable of unselfish love” - Honigmann​

“He is brave benevolent and honest”- Dr Johnson​

Question 6

Brabantio

Answer 6

Karen Newman- assumptions that “the black man had the power to subjugate his partner’s whiteness” - fears of mixed marriages in Renaissance culture that Brabantio explicitly references.

Question 7

Bianca

Answer 7

“Bianca is like Othello and Cassio, an outsider” - Simpson.​

“good women in Renaissance tragedy are often represented as long suffering martyrs” - Lisa Jardine.​

Question 8

Tragedy

Answer 8

Kastan

Shakespeare being inspired by medieval tragedy, such as Chaucer, whose definition “in its very simplicity… calls attention to tragedy’s power, marking it as universal and inexplicable”

King Lear: “Why should… a rat have life/ And thou no breath at all?” “No answer is forthcoming, though it lies in the incalculable murderousness of the world”

“characters struggle unsuccessfully to reconstruct a coherent worldview from the ruins of the old” CP- post colonial view, prejudices collectively impacting Othello (Loomba)

“the genre of uncompensated suffering”