Othello Act 1 Flashcards
“Thou didst hold him in thy hate.”
Roderigo, motivation
“mere prattle without practice”
Cassio
Ideas without real practice/execution
“Preferment goes by letter and affection,/ And not by old gradation.”
Iago
Organizing the world. The specialty of rule?
“Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago.”
Iago, self/other
“I am not what I am.”
Iago
Truth/lies=subjectivity
“thick lips”
Roderigo: racist representation
“Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul,/ Even now, now very now, an old black ram/ Is tupping your white ewe…Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you.”
Iago to Brabantio
“I must show out a flag and sign of love,? Which is indeed but a sign.”
Iago, interiority
“O treason of the blood”
Brabantio, nature + legitimate hiearchy
“My parts, my title, and my perfect soul/Shall manifest me rightly.”
Othello: the megalopsychia, Othello = the great Man
“Keep up your bright swords or the dew will rust them”
Othello
FIRST
“I follow him to serve my turn about him. We cannot all be masters, nor all masters cannot be truly followed.”
Iago, Motivation.
“arts inhibited and out of warrant”
Brabantio - his racist accusation that Othello practices this
How do you explain something illogical, which is to say beyond your ideology?
“Were it my cue to fight, I should have known it/Without a prompter.”
Othello
“There’s no composition in this news/ That gives them credit.”
Duke - The crux of the play.
How do we “know” the truth? Anything?
“For nature so prepost’rously to err/…Sans witchcraft could not.”
Brabantio
“To fall in love with what she feared to look on…Against all rules of nature”
Brabantio, racist ideologies
Who explains the wooing of Desdemona; it is narrative?
Othello
Is language the witchcraft?
“But words are words. I never did hear/That the bruised heart was pierced through the ear.”
Brabantio
“I saw Othello’s visage in his mind.”
Duke
Seeing with better eyes? Or reinscribing racism?
“Honest Iago.”
Othello
Why “honest”?
“If virtue no delighted beauty lack,/ Your son-in-law is far more fair than black.”
Duke
Reinscribing racism. Ideology is accepted by Othello later in the play, believes that he not a proper fit + is jealous because of belief that he bad because he’s Black
“We must obey the time”
Othello
Foreshadow
“I never found a man that knew how to love himself.”
Iago
How should a man love himself?
