Context

Question 1

Norman Sanders (Italy and Venice)

Answer 1

Italy had a ‘double image’

Venice as ‘a racial and religious melting pot’.

Question 2

Mario Sanuto (Venice senate member) about Jews

Answer 2

‘Jews are even more necessary to a city than bankers are.’

Question 3

John Pory marketing eNglish translation of ‘A Geographical Historie of Africa’ to Elizabeth I secretary Sir Robert Cecil

Answer 3

‘At this time especially I thought [it] would proove the more acceptable’.

Question 4

Leo, John: The Geographical History of Africa (1600)

Answer 4

‘The qualyties principalley to be associated with black peoples are : courayge, pryde, guilelessness, credulity and passions arouseyed with a sudden flayre.’

Question 5

Leo Africanus example of vice of Africans

Answer 5

‘no nation in the world is so subject to jealousie’

Question 6

Queen Elizabeth I speech

Answer 6

‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too’.

Question 7

The ensign tells the Moor
‘[Disdemona] has come to dislike your blackness’
what line is this similar to in Act 2 of Othello?

Answer 7

‘Her eye must be fed and what delight will she have to look on the devil?’
Iago to Roderigo Act 2 Scene 1

Question 8

Cinthio’s moral message

Answer 8

warn young girls not to marry ‘a man whom Nature, Heaven, and manner of life separate’ from them.

Question 9

God creating a storm to save the righteous, could be related to ideas about the Spanish Armada.

Answer 9

“The Protestant Wind”

‘He blew with His winds, and they were scattered’

Question 10

Elizabeth expulsion of negroes and blackamoors 1596 and 1603

Answer 10

1596: Queen Elizabeth 1st ordered her politicians to have ‘ten blackamoors’ here were ‘of late divers blackmoores brought into this realm, of which kind of people there are already here to manie’.

1601, just a few years before Shakespeare wrote Othello, Queen Elizabeth was ‘discontented at the great numbers of ‘Negroes and blackamoors which are crept into the realm.’

Question 11

The good and the badde - A Virgin

Answer 11

‘Shee is of creatures the Rarest, of Women the Chiefest, of nature the Purest, and of Wisedome the Choysest.’

Question 12

The good and the badde - A Wanton Woman

Answer 12

‘A Wanton Woman is the figure of Imper∣fection, [ 35] in nature, an Ape, in quality, a Wag∣taile, in countenance, a Witch.’

Question 13

The good and the badde - An Vnquiet Woman

Answer 13

‘An Vnquiet Woman is the misery of man.’

Question 14

Description of the Battle of Lepanto in Knolles’s ‘History of the Turks’.

Answer 14

‘It was a right horrible spectacle to see, how in the battell the sea stained with blood.’

Question 15

Othello religious persuasion - Jonathan Bate

Answer 15

‘Othello is located on the east-west frontier between Christianity and Islam, with Othello himself functioning as the tertium quid [third element] that veers between the world’s two dominant religions.’

Question 16

T.S. Eliot essay on revenge tragedy

Answer 16

T.S. Eliot traces the influence in his 1927 essay Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca.

Question 17

Baldesar Castiglione’s ‘The Book of the Courtier’ -

Desdemona and Brabantio

Answer 17

And their beauty is nearly always accompanied by cruelty and ingratitiude towards those who serve them most faithfully… they abandon themselves to the most stupiud and worthless racsals, who despise rather than love them.

Question 18

Baldesar Castiglione’s ‘The Book of the Courtier’ - Emilia (husband fault if wives fall)

Answer 18

‘if a man is to be loved he must himself love and be lovable’.

Question 19

Baldesar Castiglione’s ‘The Book of the Courtier’ - Cassio (reputation)

Answer 19

‘wherever he has to go where he is a stranger, and unknown he is preceded by a good reputation’.

Question 20

Michel De Montaigne’s ‘Essays’ - Lying

Answer 20

‘If we recognised the horror and gravity of an untruth, we should more justifiably punish it with fire than any other crime’

Question 21

Michel De Montaigne’s ‘Essays’ - That our Actions should be Judged by our Intentions (Iago)

Answer 21

‘We cannot be held responsible beyond our strength and means, since the resulting events are quite outside our control and, in fact, we have power over nothing except our will’.

Question 22

Machiavelli ‘The Prince’ - about a ruler

Answer 22

“it is much safer to be feared than loved”.

Question 23

What book might Shakespeare have read about Venice?

Answer 23

A translation of an Italian book about The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, published in 1599.

Question 24

English travel writers, such as Thomas Coryat, were both attracted and repelled by Venice:

Answer 24

“many [women] are esteemed so loose, that they are said to pen their quivers to every arrow”

Question 25

Prosititution - The Whore

Answer 25

“Prostitution was not necessarily a woman’s sole career choice and there are many examples of women who used prostitution to supplement their everyday income” (Fantaesque)

Question 26

The trickster trope - Lisa Perfetti

Answer 26

It “served a conservative function in serving to reassert social norms . . . valued for innate wit, an asset for surviving in any society. They act as a creator and a destroyer, transgressing boundaries but also being defined by them”

Question 27

Greenworld

Answer 27

The Greenworld’s purpose is ‘visualizing the world of desire, not as an escape from “reality,” but as the genuine form of the world that human life tries to imitate’ - Frye

Question 28

Bland - all white male cast

Answer 28

‘the full impact of the homoeroticism will be felt’.