Stuff Flashcards
Greenblatt
• Othello is concerned with Desdemona’s sexuality because it goes against her “obedience” as a woman
• Othello feels like he has to punish Desdemona for stepping out of bounds and for being sexual
• Desdemona’s sexuality is what makes Othello question his “carefully fashioned identity” and leads to his downfall
• Their relationship is based more on lust than love
Renaissance self fashioning
Valerie Traub
The play shows that Elizabethan women were defined by “their sexual activity’
• The worth of women was decided by their relationship with men
• Shakespeare was concerned by “unregulated female sexuality”
• lago is successful in manipulating Othello because he taps into temporal concerns about women
Dolan (colonial reading)
• “By making his protagonist black, Shakespeare prepares his original audience to question Othello’s authority, to suspect that he might misuse it groundlessly’
Bradley on Tragedy
“A tragedy is a story of exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate … of human actions producing exceptional calamity and ending in the death of such a man”
Three factors:
Abnormal conditions of mind
Othello believes Iago’s manipulation because he is already insecure not because of Iago’s manipulation
Supernatural
Words have power- only Witchcraft I have used / Iago’s use of words then carries this power
“Chance” or “Accident”
Desdemona’s dropping her handkerchief
“We remain confronted with the inexplicable fact, or the no less inexplicable appearance, of a world travailing for perfection, but bringing to birth, together with glorious good, an evil which it is able to overcome only by self-torture and self-waste. “
Aristotle
Exposition
Rising action
Crisis
Climax
Falling action
Denouement
Lack of this structure but rising tension shows the rising and constant torture and manipulation
Aristotle’s idea of place
Venice and Cyprus / political and public then transitions to a single bedroom which creates claustrophobia
Merging of public eventually into private
Caroline Spurgeon - Animalistic imagery
“Dominating” image cluster
Othello:
Animalistic and Hellish
“Black ram and white ewe”
“Goats and monkeys”
“Green Eyed Monster”
“Spider”
-Lack of explanation / no deep meaning it is just in nature
-Suffering is exclusive and isolated
Sea Imagery
Begins with the sense of the grandness through the sea / similar to the setting
“O my soul’s joy! If after every tempest come such calms, may the winds blow till they have waken’d death” - Othello’s emotions refers to grandness of the ocean
Iago gives Othello a narrow minded perspective
“Icy current and compulsive course” - Iago
“Here is my journey’s end, here is my butt and very sea mark of my utmost sail” - ending shows the grandness / self-fashioning himself with the sea
Marian Cox
“Death was preferred to dishonour”
Fintan O’Toole
the ‘borders of individual character become permeable’ as ‘identity’ becomes something seen as fluid and unfixed.
