Othello Context

Question 1

Robert Burton on Moors

Answer 1

1616, Anatomy of Melancholy, ‘hot, lascivious and jealous’

Question 2

Elizabeth I

Answer 2

1596, letters permitting the deportation of Blackamoors

Question 3

Meaning of Othello

Answer 3

Of Hell (racist?)

Question 4

2 types of clowns

Answer 4

Low fool and wise fool

Question 5

Machiavelli

Answer 5

A Florentine, The Prince (1532), said that cruelty was ‘done for all under the necessity of self-preservation’

Question 6

Cassio meaning

Answer 6

Hollow in Italian

Question 7

Robert Burton on Women

Answer 7

1616, Anatomy of Melancholy, ‘can she be fair and honest too?’

Question 8

Elizabeth I Painting

Answer 8

1600, Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud, grandeur, but she needed a Moroccan-Spanish alliance

Question 9

‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore’

Answer 9

1629, John Ford play, except Anabella has her own monologue where Desdemona doesn’t

Question 10

Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man

Answer 10

thou…art the molder and maker of thyself, (like Stephen Greenblatt’s Rennaissance self-fashioning)

Question 11

Cinthio’s take on Othello

Answer 11

He is only a captain, but Shakespeare elevates him to a general

Question 12

Thomas Nashe

Answer 12

1589, among all the ornaments of the arts, rhetoric is to be had in highest reputation

Question 13

Meaning of Iago

Answer 13

Saint Iago: Killer of the Moors

Question 14

Meaning of Desdemona

Answer 14

Demon

Question 15

Cinthio’s storm

Answer 15

‘a sea of utmost tranquility’

Question 16

Wheel of Fire

Answer 16

King Lear, ‘I am bound upon a wheel of fire’, like Othello for believing Iago. Consequences and chain of events which result from a single action

Question 17

Titus Andronicus, 1593

Answer 17

‘Aaron will have his soul black like his own face’ (says Aaron in an aside)