Othello AO5

Question 1

Iago

Answer 1

• Honnigmann: Iago enjoys a “godlike sense of power”
• Bradley: Iago has “supreme intellect” and that makes him dangerous.
• Levis: Iago’s success isn’t due to his diabolical intellect, but due to Othello’s “weakness and hubris”

Question 2

Othello and Desdemona’s relationship

Answer 2

• Leavis: Othello’s love for Desdemona is ‘much more a matter of self-centred and self-regarding satisfactions’

Question 3

Jealousy

Answer 3

• Wilson: Jealousy and revenge is like a disease, and it is so “structurally rampant in the play that its causes and consequences” affects “all agents”’
• Olson: “Jealousy was the fear of losing possession [and] the fear of cuckoldry.”

Question 4

Race

Answer 4

• Traub: “Othello is vulnerable because he internalises Iago’s negative viewpoint of black men.”
• Loomba: the conflict of the play is “between the racism of a white patriarchy and the threat posed to it by both a black man and a white woman.”

Question 5

Gender

Answer 5

• Marilyn French: Women are divided into 2 camps by men, “whores or virgins”; each exist mutually exclusively.
• Lisa Jardine: Desdemona is a “stereotype of female passivity”

* Bevington: Othello is a “stereotype of the anxious male beset by fears of womanly duplicity”

Question 6

Otherness

Answer 6

• Loomba: The play is a nightmare of “racial hatred and male violence”
• Loomba: Women and black people exist as “the other”

Question 7

Identity

Answer 7

• O’Toole: “There is no Othello without Iago.”
• Elliot: “Iago simply exploits a weakness that already existed in Othello’s character.”

Question 8

Hate

Answer 8

• Wayne: “Iago is the presence of misogynist discourse in the Renaissance.”
• Kermode: “Iago is motivated by more than a mere desire for revenge.”