Women, race and reputation

Question 1

Cox on the necessity of female virginity

Answer 1

‘Men wished to marry virgins…this made reputation an essential commodity for social life’

Question 2

Cox on male fear of female treachery

Answer 2

The men in the play ‘reveal a deep-seated fear of women deceiving them’

Question 3

Ania Loomba on the women of ‘Othello’

Answer 3

‘Bianca, who is treated like a whore, Desdemona, who is repeatedly accused of being one, and Emilia, who is dismissed as her “bawd”’

Question 4

Briggs on blackness

Answer 4

‘Blackness was associated with the devil, evil-doing and death’

Question 5

Cowhig on Othello’s otherness

Answer 5

‘black villain in a white society’

Question 6

Ania Loomba on women and blacks

Answer 6

‘women and black exist as the other’

Question 7

Ania Loomba on Shakespeare’s creation of racial tensions

Answer 7

Racial tensions during Shakespeare’s time would have been mostly driven by religious tensions, but Shakespeare takes pains to show Othello as a Christian convert who keeps referring to his soul, which places the emphasis on racial and cultural differences between Desdemona and Othello

Question 8

Karen Newman on miscegenation

Answer 8

Argues that the marriage of a white woman to a black Moor is unthinkable to the other characters

Question 9

Cox

Answer 9

‘Death was preferable to dishonour’