Emelia

Question 1

Act 2: Iago insulting Emelia: her responce

Answer 1

• has little speech; mostly silent
• “You have little cause to say so.” - formal response to being insulted
• “You shall not write my praise.” - accepting of his response

Question 2

Act 2: Emilia echoes Desdemona and Othello - serves as a messenger whilst shes talking to Cassio

Answer 2

“He might not but refuse you. But he protests he loves you”
- at this point just a plot device?
- means to get to D

Question 3

3:3 After Desdemona has dropped her handkerchief Emelia picks it up:
- indicates towards the importance of it

Answer 3

“(picks up the handkerchief)”
“This was her first remembrance from the Moor.
“What he will do with it
Heaven knows, not I.
I nothing but to please his fantasy.”
- Emilia must bear some responsibility to the lady she serves!
- Morally wrong to steal. ‘Nothing but to please his fantasy’ reminiscent of D’s ‘be as your fancies teach you’ - feminist view of women as secondary to their husbands

Question 4

3:3 Giving Iago the handkerchief

Answer 4

• he insults her
• “The handkerchief” repeated
• has a rare power, echoes him
• “Give ’t me again. Poor lady, she’ll run mad
  When she shall lack it.”
• Emilia realises that it will cause Desdemona grief - so why does she take it?
• another domestic drama between this couple too.

Question 5

3:4 Emelia and D - Questions O’s potential jealous nature - more experienced with men

Answer 5

“Is he not jealous?” - D before suggests he is not jealous
- later repeats after their argument over Othello wanting the handkerchief “The handkerchief!”
“Is not this man jealous?”
- a sort of ‘I told you so’ - Emilia is older and a wife, suggestion she has known Othello longer; accompanied Iago + Othello in past military campaigns

Question 6

3:4 Emelia talks about men’s appetites

Answer 6

“They are all but stomachs, and we all but food.
To eat us hungerly, and when they are full,
They belch us.”
- Emilia has a rather cynical attitude towards men and their appetites - that they consume women as commodities

Question 7

3:4 Emelia’s line which can be compared to othello’s line in Act 5: “it is the cause”

Answer 7

“They are not ever jealous for the cause,
But jealous for they’re jealous. It is a monster
Begot upon itself, born on itself.”
- unnatural, like a monster hatching

Question 8

4:2 Emelia defends Desdemona to othello

Answer 8

“Never.”
- quick straight to point answers, not like Iago
“Lay down my soul at stake.” - swears on it, forshadowing
“Remove your thought, it doth abuse your bosom. If any wretch have put this in your head” - dramatic irony
“with the serpent’s curse” - iago likened to serpent cursed by god

Question 9

4:2 Emelia has a strong sense of empathy for D

Answer 9

“Hath she forsook so many noble matches,
Her father and her country, and her friends,
To be called “whore”?”
- unnatural marriage led her to give up lots

Question 10

4:2 Dramtic irony - Emelia is close to the truth

Answer 10

“I will be hanged, if some eternal villain …
devised this slander. I will be hanged else!”
- dramatic irony, almost comic, anticipation, foreshadowing

Question 11

4:2 Emelia funnily mirrors Iago’s language but as a force of good and justice; questions Othello’s character and jealousy as a vice

Answer 11

“hell gnaw his bones!”
“Why should he call her “whore?” Who keeps her company? / What place? What time? What form? What likelihood?”
- Desdemona is forgiving, Emelia is aggressive and vengeful
“made you to suspect me with the Moor.” - ironic because he does suspect this - I responds “you are a fool” - cyclical

Question 12

4:3 Emelia humours Desdemona - she asks her would she cheat?

Answer 12

“Nor I neither, by this heavenly light.
I might do ’t as well i’ th’ dark.”
- humour
“The world’s a huge thing. It is a great price for a
small vice.”

Question 13

4:3 Emilia revealed to be more mature than D in her attitudes to morality - D naiveity and innocence highlighted

Answer 13

“Why, who would not make her husband a
cuckold to make him a monarch?”
D: “Beshrew me, if I would do such a wrong
For the whole world.”
- like Iago she is pragmatic in her morality, where D is idealistic, maybe naive. Her youth and inexperience of the world are highlighted

Question 14

4:3 Emelia’s big speech her language changes?

Answer 14

• switches from prose to iambic pentameter for important speech
• on the point that women are equal to men in desires, emotions and weaknesses - complex, unlike society’s portrayal of them at that time as either pure and virtuous or immoral temptresses

Question 15

4:3 Emelia speech - says husbands fault if wife cheats

Answer 15

“But I do think it is their husbands’ faults
If wives do fall.”
- could it imply an affair with Othello, perhaps to help Iago gain favour with him, or because Iago was himself unfaithful or jealous?

Question 16

4:3 Emelia’s speech: refers to abusive coercive relationship

Answer 16

“Or else break out in peevish jealousies,
Throwing restraint upon us.
“Or say they strike us,”
- abusive, coercive relationships referred to
- there are reasons for cheating not black and white

Question 17

4:3 Emelia’s speech - basically saying men and women equal

Answer 17

“Their wives have sense like them. They see and smell
And have their palates both for sweet and sour,
As husbands have.”
- this is reminiscent of Shylock’s speech - jews

Question 18

4:3 emelia’s speech: discussing why men cheat

Answer 18

“What is it that they do
When they change us for others? Is it sport?
I think it is.”
- The argument is shaped with rhetorical devices - parallel syntax, rhetorical questions, balanced clauses using conjunctions
- says do women not have these same desires

Question 19

4:3 Emelia speech: highlighting double standard of adultery - men should lead by example

Answer 19

“Then let them use us well, else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.”
- women have the right to do as men do - contrasting the common double standard over adultery

Question 20

5:2 Emelia finds out O killed D responce?

Answer 20

“Oh, the more angel she,
And you the blacker devil!”
- here begins a long sequence of antithesis, starting with this Christian imagery of moral absolutes, which also brings in O’s blackness
parallel syntax where O accuses D and E accuses O

Question 21

5:2 Emelia and O parallel syntax

Answer 21

• O: “she was a whore”
• “thou art a devil”
• “false as water”
• “thou art rash as fire”

Question 22

5:2 shock at reveal of her husband

Answer 22

“my husband?” - says three times

Question 23

5:2 Emelia says if it is her husbands - she wants him to suffer

Answer 23

“may his pernicious soul
Rot half a grain a day! He lies to th’ heart.
She was too fond of her most filthy bargain.”
- his deep evil/malice is cursed by Emilia here
- filthy here has racist connotations, enhanced by the alliterative ‘fond ‘ and ‘filthy’

Question 24

5:2 Emelia is threatened by Othello with a sword her responce

Answer 24

“Do thy worst.
This deed of thine is no more worthy heaven
Than thou wast worthy her.”
- Emilia’s unforgiving verdict

Question 25

5:2 Emelia as strong figure of justice - does not show fear

Answer 25

“Thou hast not half that power to do me harm
As I have to be hurt.”
“As ignorant as dirt!”
“I care not for thy sword, I’ll make thee known
Though I lost twenty lives.—”
“The Moor hath killed my mistress! Murder, murder!”
- Her sense of righteousness gives her much strength here.
- defy him despite lower status; racist remark
- role of truth teller

Question 26

5:2 sort of aragnorisis for Emelia

Answer 26

“You told a lie, an odious, damnèd lie.”
- Very heightened dramatic language with the four-fold repetition of ‘lie’.
- religious imagery enhances the sense of his demonic wickedness
Iago tells her to shut up: “charm your tongue”
- “I am bound to speak” - mirrors Iago earlier - circular

Question 27

5:2 Emelia repeats villainy

Answer 27

“Villainy, villainy, villainy!” I think I smell ’t, Oh, villainy!”
I thought so then, I’ll kill myself for grief.
Oh, villainy, villainy!”
- Emilia continues her strong accusation of Iago now as a villain.
note ‘smell’t’ - suggesting something rotting or corrupt
- i thought so then?

Question 28

5:2 Emelia’s responce to O’s “Oh! Oh! Oh!”

Answer 28

“Nay, lay thee down and roar,
For thou hast killed the sweetest innocent”
- animalistic compares to innocent

Question 29

5:2 Emelia (just before her death) says how she will speak the honest truth

Answer 29

“No, I will speak as liberal as the north.
Let heaven and men and devils, let them all,
All, all cry shame against me, yet I’ll speak.”
- again her role as a truth teller or oracle figure
- ‘draws his sword’
- she reveals the truth
“iago stabs emelia”

Question 30

5:2 Emelia asks to be laid with D

Answer 30

“Ay, ay. Oh, lay me by my mistress’ side.”
- the women together in death

Question 31

5:2 E still not dead; one more dramatic moment;

Answer 31

“I will play the swan.
And die in music.
( singing) Willow, willow, willow —”
- referring to swans who sing in death.
She gives a final verdict - chaste/creul on D and O, then states that she has honestly told her thoughts and so will go to heaven ‘soul to bliss’. This is a contrast to Iago who says in Act 3 he is not bound to tell his thoughts and in Act 5 that he will never more ‘speak word’. Telling the truth is linked to heaven/deception to hell.