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*AO3: Demonstrate understanding of the significance and influence of the contexts in which literary texts are written and received.The main action of the play is set in Cyprus, away from the known, civilised world of Venice, where capitalism thrives.? Venice in the seventeenth century was a republic, controlled by the wealthy merchant classes who bought power, employing mercenary soldiers (like Othello) to protect their colonial exploits. The setting of Cyprus allows Shakespeare to place his characters in a world without the boundaries that would be imposed upon them by an established city state. E.g. Philip Brockbank, Introduction to Volpone (1997): ‘Venice was famed for its mercentile prosperity, its proud resources of gold and treasure, the splendour of its architecture and exuberance of its art, the intensity and ceremony of public life (...) its reputation makes it a probable setting for luxurious living and extravagant fancy: but (...) it is a city of commercial know-how where money can be made by ruthless exploitation.’ Cyprus is a fortified outpost of civilisation, on the edge of Christian territory, a barrier between Christian values and the infidels, the enemies of the true faith. Cyprus is less controlled, a stronghold of male power where Desdemona, alone and isolated from her Venetian support system, is vulnerable to the scheming of the manipulator Iago. This is a savage, warlike location (despite its association with Aphrodite and love) where Venetian soldiers have gone to fight, but because the invading Turks have all been drowned there is no war. As a result the soldiers in their claustrophobic confines have time to turn on each other without the controlling order of Venice. In the first Act which is set in Venice, Shakespeare establishes an ordered world in which Iago's attempts at disruption are easily thwarted. The movement to Cyprus and the re-location of the characters there allows Iago to work more successfully, ensnaring all in the weaving of his plot.???The senate in Act 1, Scene 3, foreshadows the crimes that will be enacted by the end of the play. In this scene Othello is also having to ‘defend’ his marriage.Contemporary Attitudes to RaceRobert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (1616): ‘southern men are more hot, lascivious and jealous, than such as live in the North: they can hardly contain themselves in those hotter climes, but are the most subject to prodigious lusts. Leo Afer telleth incredible things almost of the lust and jealousy of his Countrymen of Africa and especially such as live about Carthage, and so doth every Geographer of them in Asia, Turkey, Spain, Italy, Germany hath not so many drunkards, England Tobacconists, France Dancers, Holland Mariners, as Italy alone hath jealous husbands.’Contemporary Attitudes to WomenSir Thomas Elyot, The Book Named the Governor, (1531): ‘a man in his natural perfection is fierce, strong in opinion, covetous of glory, desirous of knowledge, appetiting by generation to bring forth his semblable. The good nature of a woman is to be mild, timorous, tractable, benign, of sure remembrance and shamefast. Divers other qualities of each of them might be found out, but these be most apparent and for this time sufficient.’John Knox, First Blast of Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, (1558): ‘weak, frail, impatient, feeble and foolish: and experience hath declared them to be unconstant, variable, cruel and lacking the spirit of counsel and regiment.’Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (1616): ‘wives are slippery, often unfaithful to their husbands but to old men most treacherous.’ Cornelius a Lapide, Omnes divi pauli Epistolas Commentaria, (1638): ‘woman is an excellent ornament of men since she is granted to man not only to procreate children, and administer the family, but also in possession and, as it were, in dominion, over which man may exercise his jurisdiction and authority. For the authority of man extends not only to inanimate things and brute beasts, but also to reasonable creatures, that is, women and wives.’*AO4: Explore connections across literary texts.AQA’s specification outlines the following tragic aspects – so look out for these! ? The type of the tragic text itself, whether it is classical and about public figures, like Lear, or domestic and about representations of ordinary people, like Tess? The settings for the tragedy, both places and times ? The journey towards death of the protagonists, their flaws, pride and folly, their blindness and insight, their discovery and learning, their being a mix of good and evil? The role of the tragic villain or opponent, who directly affects the fortune of the hero, who engages in a contest of power and is partly responsible for the hero’s demise ? The presence of fate, how the hero’s end is inevitable? How the behaviour of the hero affects the world around him, creating chaos and affecting the lives of others? The significance of violence and revenge, humour and moments of happiness? The structural pattern of the text as it moves through complication to catastrophe, from order to disorder, through climax to resolution, from the prosperity and happiness of the hero to the tragic end.? The use of plots and sub-plots? The way that language is used to heighten the tragedy? Ultimately how the tragedy affects the audience, acting as a commentary on the real Greek Tragedy and AristotleAristotle, the Greek writer and philosopher (384-322BC), identified the aspects he believed were central to tragedy in The Poetics. For centuries, European playwrights like Shakespeare tried to write plays that would match the ideals of Aristotle’s model. The Greeks believed that tragedy was the highest form of drama.‘Tragedy is a representation of an action, which is serious, complete in itself, and of a certain length; it is expressed in speech made beautiful in different ways in different parts of the play; it is acted, not narrated and by exciting pity or fear it gives a healthy relief (catharsis) to emotions [...] a man not pre-eminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice [...] but by some error of judgement [...]. The Perfect Plot [...] must have a single, and not (as some tell us) a double issue; the change in the hero’s fortune must not be from misery to happiness, but on the contrary from happiness to misery [...] Tragedy endeavours to keep as far as possible within a single circuit of the sun, or something near that [...].’ Aristotle, The Poetics (5th century BC).Aristotle has relatively less to say about the tragic hero because the incidents of tragedy are often beyond the hero's control or not closely related to his personality. The plot is intended to illustrate matters of cosmic rather than individual significance and the protagonist is viewed primarily as the character who experiences the changes that take place. This stress placed by the Greek tragedians on the development of plot and action at the expense of character, and their general lack of interest in exploring psychological motivation, is one of the major differences between ancient and modern drama.Since the aim of a tragedy is to arouse pity and fear through an alteration in the status of the central character, he must be a figure with whom the audience can identify and whose fate can trigger these emotions. Aristotle says that "pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves." He surveys various possible types of characters on the basis of these premises, then defines the ideal protagonist as: “. . . a man who is highly renowned and prosperous, but one who is not pre-eminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by vice or depravity but by some error of judgment or frailty.”More on the Tragic Hero according to AristotleAn Aristotelian tragic hero must possess specific characteristics such as: 1) Flaw or error of judgment (hamartia) - note the role of justice and/or revenge in the judgments. 2) A reversal of fortune (peripeteia) brought about because of the hero's error in judgment. 3) The discovery or recognition that the reversal was brought about by the hero's own actions (anagnorisis) 4) Excessive Pride (hubris) 5) The character's fate must be greater than deserved. Initially, the tragic hero should be neither better or worse morally than normal people, in order to allow the audience to identify with them. This also introduces pity, which is crucial in tragedy, as if the hero was perfect we would be outraged with their fate or not care especially because of their ideological superiority. If the hero was imperfect or evil, then the audience would feel that he had gotten what he deserved. It is important to strike a balance in the hero's character. Eventually the Aristotelian tragic hero dies a tragic death, having fallen from great heights and having made an irreversible mistake. The hero must courageously accept their death with honour. More on the plot according to AristotleAristotle felt that the action of the play (its plot) was the most important element.He said, “All human happiness or misery takes the form of action... .Character gives us qualities, but it is in ouractions--what we do--that we are happy or miserable.”Peripety is the change from one state of things at the beginning of the play to the exact opposite state by the end of the play. This could be something like the change from being rich to being poor, or from being powerful to being powerless. The change that takes place in a tragedy should take the main character (and possibly other characters) from a state of happiness to a state of misery.Discovery is a change from ignorance to knowledge. This often happens to the tragic hero who starts out“clueless” and slowly learns how he himself created the mess he ends up in at the end of the play.*AO5: Explore literary texts informed by different interpretations.Setting:Anita Loomba, Othello, Race and Colonialism (2002): ‘Venice was repeatedly pictured as a city full of whores, and it was often personified as one.’Desdemona:Thomas Rymer, Othello: A Bloody Farce (1693): ‘he had chosen a Souldier for his Knave: And a Venetian Lady is to be the Fool…This Senators Daughter runs away to (a Carriers Inn) the Sagittary, with a Black-amoor: is no sooner wedded to him, but the very night she Beds him, is importuning and teizing him for a young smock-fac'd Lieutenant, Cassio. And tho' she perceives the Moor Jealous of?Cassio, yet will she not forbear, but still rings Cassio, Cassio in both his Ears.’In his preface to the play, Dr Johnson (1765) wrote: ‘the soft simplicity of Desdemona, confident of merit, and conscious of innocence, her artless perseverance in her suit, and her slowness to suspect that she can be suspected.’William Hazlett, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817): ‘her romantic turn is only a consequence of the domestic and practical part of her disposition...Her resignation and angelic sweetness of temper do not desert her at the last. The scenes in which she laments and tries to account for Othello's estrangement from her are exquisitely beautiful.’In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s series of lectures on ‘Othello’ (1818) he claims: ‘an English audience was disposed in the beginning of the seventeenth century, it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro. It would argue a disproportionateness, a want of balance, in Desdemona, which Shakespeare does not appear to have in the least contemplated.’A.C Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904): ‘ Desdemona is helplessly passive. She can do nothing whatever. She cannot retaliate even in speech; no, not even in silent feeling. And the chief reason of her helplessness only makes the sight of her suffering more exquisitely painful. She is helpless because her nature is infinitely sweet and her love absolute. I would not challenge Mr. Swinburne's statement that we pity Othello even more than Desdemona; but we watch Desdemona with more unmitigated distress.’Algernon Swinburne, Four Plays.?The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne. (1926): ‘The sacrificial murder of Desdemona is no butchery, but tragedy—terrible as ever tragedy may be.’Phillip C Kolin, ‘Othello’ New Critical Essays (2002): ‘Desdemona’s fractious naysayers have assailed her for a host of wrongdoings, including disobeying her father; backchatting with Iago in act 2.1; lying to Othello about the hankercheifl; pressing Cassio’s suit with unflatering ardour; admiring Lodovico as a ‘proper man’ in act 4.1 and absolving Othello of her death in act 5.2. Several critics cite Desdemona for violating Elizabtehan/Jacobean law and propriety by denying her father and running off with the Moor.’ Caryl Phillips: Othello’s love of Desdemona ‘is the love of possession. She is a prize. The spoil of war.’Othello:Thomas Rymer, Othello: A Bloody Farce (1693): ‘his Love and his Jealousie are no part of a Souldiers Character, unless for Comedy.In his preface to the play, Dr Johnson (1765) wrote: ‘The fiery openness of Othello, magnanimous, artless, and credulous, boundless in his confidence, ardent in his affection, inflexible in his resolution, and obdurate in his revenge.’A.C Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904): ‘Othello is, in one sense of the word, by far the most romantic figure among Shakespeare's heroes; and he is so partly from the strange life of war and adventure which he has lived from childhood. He does not belong to our world, and he seems to enter it we know not whence--almost as if from wonderland. There is something mysterious in his descent from men of royal siege; in his wanderings in vast deserts and among marvellous peoples; in his tales of magic handkerchiefs and prophetic Sibyls; in the sudden vague glimpses we get of numberless battles and sieges in which he has played the hero and has borne a charmed life; even in chance references to his baptism, his being sold to slavery, his sojourn in Aleppo…. So he comes before us, dark and grand, with a light upon him from the sun where he was born; but no longer young, and now grave, self-controlled, steeled by the experience of countless perils, hardships and vicissitudes, at once simple and stately in bearing and in speech, a great man naturally modest but fully conscious of his worth, proud of his services to the state, unawed by dignitaries and unrelated by honours, secure, it would seem, against all dangers from without and all rebellion from within. And he comes to have his life crowned with the final glory of love, a love as strange, adventurous and romantic as any passage of his eventful history, filling his heart with tenderness and his imagination with ecstasy. For there is no love, not that of Romeo in his youth, more steeped in imagination than Othello's.’A.C Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904): ‘Lastly, Othello's nature is all of one piece. His trust, where he trusts, is absolute. Hesitation is almost impossible to him. Now I repeat that any man situated as Othello was would have been disturbed by Iago's communications, and I add that many men would have been made wildly jealous. But up to this point, where Iago is dismissed, Othello, I must maintain, does not show jealousy. His confidence is shaken, he is confused and deeply troubled, he feels even horror; but he is not yet jealous in the proper sense of that word. In his soliloquy (III. iii. 258 ff.) the beginning of this passion may be traced; but it is only after an interval of solitude, when he has had time to dwell on the idea presented to him, and especially after statements of fact, not mere general grounds of suspicion, are offered, that the passion lays hold of him. Even then, however, and indeed to the very end, he is quite unlike the essentially jealous man.’A.C Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904): ‘The Othello of the Fourth Act is Othello in his fall. His fall is never complete, but he is much changed.’F.R. Levis, The Common Pursuit (1958): ‘It is plain that what we should see in Iago’s prompt success is not so much Iago’s diabolic intellect as Othello’s readiness to respond… Othello, in his magnanimous way, is egotistical. He really is, beyond any question, the nobly massive man of action, the captain of men, he sees himself as being, but he does very much see himself: “Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.” In short, a habit of self-approving self-dramatization is an essential element on Othello’s make-up, and remains so at the very end.’F.R. Levis, The Common Pursuit (1958): [at the end of the play] ‘he remains the same Othello, he has discovered his mistake, but there is no tragic self-discovery . . . He is ruined, but he is the same Othello in whose essential make-up the tragedy lay: the tragedy doesn’t involve the idea of the hero’s learning through suffering. The fact that Othello tends to sentimentalize should be the reverse of a reason for our sentimentalizing too . .’Caryl Phillips claimed Othello lacked confidence as a wooer pointing to his comments, ‘It was my hint to speak.’ She says, Othello ‘feels constantly threatened and profoundly insecure’ due to his race. Iago:In his preface to the play, Dr Johnson (1765) wrote: ‘the cool malignity of Iago, silent in his resentment, subtle in his designs, and studious at once of his interest and his vengeance…The gradual progress which Iago makes in the Moor’s conviction, and the circumstances which he employs to inflame him, are so artfully natural, that, though it will perhaps not be said of him as he says of himself, that he is “a man not easily jealous,” yet we cannot but pity him when at last we find him “perplexed in the extreme.” ’William Hazlett, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (1817): ‘Iago is to be sure an extreme instance of the kind; that is to say, of diseased intellectual activity, with an almost perfect indifference to moral good or evil, or rather with a decided preference of the latter, because it falls more readily in with his favourite propensity, gives greater zest to his thoughts and scope to his actions.’In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s series of lectures on ‘Othello’ (1818) he suggests Iago’s behaviour is: ‘the motive-hunting of motiveless malignity’ and claims he is ‘a being close to the devil.’ Coleridge asserts that Iago's only reasons for entrapping Othello were his "keen sense of his intellectual superiority" and his "love of exerting power." Therefore Iago's malignity is "motiveless" because his apparent motives - being passed over for promotion, his suspicion that Othello is having an affair with his wife, and the suspicion that Cassio is also having an affair with Emilia - are merely rationalizations – ways to excuse his hunger for power. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s (1818): ‘Finally, let me repeat that Othello does not kill Desdemona in jealousy, but in a conviction forced upon him by the almost superhuman art of Iago, such a conviction as any man would and must have entertained who had believed Iago's honesty as Othello did… Othello had no life but in Desdemona:—the belief that she, his angel, had fallen from the heaven of her native innocence, wrought a civil war in his heart. She is his counterpart; and, like him, is almost sanctified in our eyes by her absolute unsuspiciousness, and holy entireness of love. As the curtain drops, which do we pity the most?’A.C Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904): ‘evil has no where else been portrayed with such mastery as in the character of Iago.’ A.C Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904): ‘in order to see how this tragedy arises let us now look more closely into Iago's inner man. We find here, in the first place, as has been implied in part, very remarkable powers both of intellect and of will. Iago's insight, within certain limits, into human nature; his ingenuity and address in working upon it; his quickness and versatility in dealing with sudden difficulties and unforeseen opportunities, have probably no parallel among dramatic characters. But what is clear is that Iago is keenly sensitive to anything that touches his pride or self-esteem. It would be most unjust to call him vain, but he has a high opinion of himself and a great contempt for others. He is quite aware of his superiority to them in certain respects; and he either disbelieves in or despises the qualities in which they are superior to him. Whatever disturbs or wounds his sense of superiority irritates him at once; and in that sense he is highly competitive. This is why the appointment of Cassio provokes him. This is why Cassio's scientific attainments provoke him. This is the reason of his jealousy of Emilia. He does not care for his wife; but the fear of another man's getting the better of him, and exposing him to pity or derision as an unfortunate husband, is wormwood to him; and as he is sure that no woman is virtuous at heart, this fear is ever with him.’A.C Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904): ‘Iago's longing to satisfy the sense of power is, I think, the strongest.’ A.C Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904): ‘Iago this egoism and this want are absolute, and that in this sense he is a thing of mere evil. They are frightful, but if they were absolute Iago would be a monster, not a man. The fact is, he tries to make them absolute and cannot succeed; and the traces of conscience, shame and humanity, though faint, are discernible. If his egoism were absolute he would be perfectly indifferent to the opinion of others; and he clearly is not so. His very irritation at goodness, again, is a sign that his faith in his creed is not entirely firm; and it is not entirely firm because he himself has a perception, however dim, of the goodness of goodness. What is the meaning of the last reason he gives himself for killing Cassio:He hath a daily beauty in his life That makes me ugly?Does he mean that he is ugly to others? Then he is not an absolute egoist. Does he mean that he is ugly to himself? Then he makes an open confession of moral sense.’ A.C Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904): ‘is it not significant that, when once his plot has begun to develop, Iago never seeks the presence of Desdemona; that he seems to leave her as quickly as he can (III. iv. 138); and that, when he is fetched by Emilia to see her in her distress (IV. ii. 110 ff.), we fail to catch in his words any sign of the pleasure he shows in Othello's misery, and seem rather to perceive a certain discomfort, and, if one dare say it, a faint touch of shame or remorse? Algernon Swinburne, Four Plays.?The Complete Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne. (1926): ‘Neither envy nor hatred nor jealousy nor resentment, all at work together in festering fusion of conscious and contemplative evil, can quite explain Iago even to himself.’ Frank Kermode in Shakespeare’s Language (2001), suggests that one reason for Iago’s preoccupation with ‘seeing’ is his crude, voyeuristic attitude to sex: ‘It becomes clear, in this masterly dialogue that Iago’s interest in sex is to watch others doing it, or at least to think about them doing it. It was important therefore to develop these ideas of seeing, these incredibly coarse descriptions and conjectures’ [Act 3, Scene 3].Race:Thomas Rymer, Othello: A Bloody Farce (1693): With us a Moor might marry some little drab, or Small-coal Wench: Shake-spear, would?provide him the Daughter and Heir of some great Lord, or Privy-Councellor: And all the Town should reckon it a very suitable match: Yet the English are not bred up with that hatred and aversion to the Moors,? as are the Venetians, who suffer by a perpetual Hostility?from them…Nothing is more odious in Nature than an improbable lye; And, certainly, never was any Play fraught, like this of?Othello, with improbabilities.Thomas Rymer, Othello: A Bloody Farce (1693): ‘one might rather think the novelty, and strangeness of the case prevailed upon them: no, the Senators do not reckon it strange at all. Instead of starting at the Prodigy, every one is familiar with Desdemona, as he were her own natural Father, rejoice in her good?fortune, and wish their own several Daughters as hopefully married. Should the Poet have provided such a Husband for an only Daughter of any noble Peer in England, the Black-amoor must have chang'd?his Skin, to look our House of Lords in the Face.’Phillip C Kolin, ‘Othello’ New Critical Essays (2002): ‘even though Queen Elizabeth issued an order banishing blacks, because “great numbers of Negars and Blackamoors” were taking jobs aways from her citizens the Elizabethan social situation was not indisolvably categorical, black verses white. Some Elizabethans knew about and appreciated Moorish culture.’ [In fact more than 30 black characters can be counted within contemporary plays]. In Othello, Race and Colonialism (2002) Anita Loomba claims that although the Senate is willing to regard Othello as ‘more fair than black,’ for Desdemona’s father, ‘such colour-blindness is not possible. Here we see the tension between the state and the family.’ Anita Loomba, Race and Colonialism (2002): ‘Desdemona’s desire is especially transgressive because its object is black.’Anita Loomba, Race and Colonialism (2002): ‘History and Description of Africa was written in 1526 by a real-life Moorish convert, Al-Hassan Ibn Mohammed Al-Wezaa, Al-Fazi, known to his readers as, Leo Mricanus, or Leo Afer. This book was often reprinted during the sixteenth century. Four years before Othello was written, it was translated into English by John Pory…Africanus's book was widely seen as -an 'insider's' scoop… and it reinforced several stereotypes about the Moors including, that of jealousy: 'No nation in the world is so subject unto jealousy; for they will rather lose their lives, than put up any disgrace in behalf of their women.'’Anita Loomba, Othello, Race and Colonialism (2002): ‘the portrayal of Othello, the 'Moor of Venice' stands at the complicated crux of contemporary beliefs about black people and Muslims. As we have seen, black skinned people were usually typed as godless, bestial, and hideous, fit only to be saved (and in early modern Europe, enslaved) by Christians. On the other hand; commentators such as Henry Blount wondered whether Muslims, with their tightly organized religion and sophisticated empires, were 'absolutely barbarous' or whether they had 'another kind of civility, different from ours'. Both blacks and Muslims were regarded as· given to·unnatural sexual and domestic practices, as highly emotional and even irrational, and prone to anger and jealousy; above all, both existed outside the Christian fold.’Anita Loomba, Othello, Race and Colonialism (2002): his jealousy is rooted-in this fact and in his difference from Desdemona, a difference that lago plays upon in order to persuade Othello that his wife cannot really love him for very long.Anita Loomba, Othello, Race and Colonialism (2002): Othello is both a fantasy of interracial love and social tolerance, and a nightmare of racial hatred and male violence. In this play, a white woman flouts the established social hierarchies of ‘clime, complexion and degree’ to marry a black man, an act that betrays, in the eyes of some beholders, 'Foul disproportions, thoughts unnatural!'( 8.3.235-8). Location, skin colour, and class are seen to add up to 'nature' itself. But the real tragedy of the play lies in the fact that these hierarchies are not external to the pair. Iago's machinations are effective because Othello is predisposed to believing his pronouncements about the inherent duplicity of women, and the necessary fragility of an 'unnatural' relationship' between a young, white, well-born woman and an older black soldier. Ideologies, the play tells us, only work because they are not entirely external to us. Othello is a victim of racial beliefs precisely because he becomes an agent of misogynist ones.Anita Loomba, Othello, Race and Colonialism (2002): ‘the audience knows that she is honest but by evoking thesebeliefs the play also suggests that perhaps Othello can be forgiven for thinking that Desdemona might be straying. This ambiguity is at the heart of the play any sympathy for Othello reinforces the misogynist sentiments mouthed by some, characters, and any sympathy for Desdemona endorses the view that Othello is a 'gull, a dolt, a devil'.’Iago and Othello’s relationship and language:Fintan O’Toole, Shakespeare is Hard, but so is Life (1990): ‘So close are Iago and Othello, indeed, that they start to melt into each other. Not only does Iago take on Othello’s association with blackness, but Othello starts to take on Iago’s characteristic imagery and style of speech. In the early part of the play, Iago and Othello speak differently, not only in the obvious sense that Iago uses much more prose than Othello does, but also in the contrast between Iago’s blunt and often coarse style and Othello’s stately and deliberate poetic speech. But in the last two acts, as the two minds begin to fuse together, as Iago’s words give shape to Othello’s thoughts, so Othello starts to sound more and more like Iago. Like Iago, he starts to turn people into animals in his imagery, conjuring up a world of goats, monkeys, toads, crocodiles, blood-sucking flies and poisonous snakes. Like Iago, he starts to appeal to the devil and fill his speech with diabolic images of Desdemona as ‘fair devil’, ‘false as hell’, ‘double damned’, their bedroom as hell itself. This switching of styles of speech, in which the borders of individual character become completely permeable is at its most dramatic in Act 4, Scene 1 when Othello is finally persuaded by Iago that Desdemona is unfaithful. Othello’s grand verse breaks down into jagged, disordered prose. Iago’s prose becomes triumphant verse.’Frank Kermode Shakespeare’s Language (2001): ‘Before the temptation scene [Act 3, Scene 3] it is impossible to imagine Othello using the vocabulary of Iago; indeed, he rarely uses language appropriate to prose. Later come the anguished repetitions of ‘handkerchief’, the questioning of the sense in which Iago uses the word ‘lie’, the pathetic stress on ‘honesty’, the unaccustomed langue verte [slang] picked up from Iago, and the vile berating of Desdemona, whom he calls a whore, which suits his action of striking her.’Women:Julia Briggs, This Stage-Play World (1983): ‘the question of women’s moral equality was as keenly debated in the Renaissance as their intellectual equality has been in the twentieth century. Collections of misogynist sayings and tales were countered with lists and lives of virutous women from the Bible and the classics. By the sixteenth century, defences had come to outnumber attacks, although the majority of the contributors on both sides were men.’In Reading Shakespeare Historically (1996) the feminist and historical critic, Lisa Jardine, highlights the similarities between the situations in which the three women from different social ranks find themselves: ‘In Othello three women, of three distinct social ranks, figure prominently in the plot. Desdemona is the daughter of one of Venice’s most senior and influential citizens. Bianca is a Venetian courtesan – a woman of substance who supports herself and her household by her liaisons with men of rank (notably Cassio, Othello’s second in command). Emilia is the wife of Othello’s third in command, Iago, and personal maid to Desdemona. As women play active roles within the community the three are occupationally distinct. All three are wrongfully accused of sexual misdemeanour in the course of the play; all three, though unequal in their rank-power, are equally vulnerable to a sexual charge brought against them: although the incidents which provoke the slander may be presumed to be of separate and distinct type (as befits the differing social situations in which the three women find themselves), they yield the identical slur, the identical charge of sexual promiscuity – the most readily available form of assault on a woman’s reputation. Each takes the accusation (once made) extremely seriously; but the ways these accusations are dealt with by the women themselves have very different consequences, and this is crucial.’Anita Loomba, Othello, Race and Colonialism (2002): ‘Desdemona's free banter with Iago and her spirited defence of Cassio, although innocent, 'stages a model of behaviour that was controversial in the culture at large: So does Emilia's outspokenness, even though it is her submission to her husband, and not her defiance, which allows the handkerchief to be used as evidence against Desdemona. It is hard to conclude, whether violence against outspoken or transgressive women on the stages of the time had the effect of reinforcing patriarchal attitudes to women, or of unsettling them.’Jealousy:A.C Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (1904): ‘but jealousy, and especially sexual jealousy, brings with it a sense of shame and humiliation. For this reason it is generally hidden; if we perceive it we ourselves are ashamed and turn our eyes away; and when it is not hidden it commonly stirs contempt as well as pity. Nor is this all. Such jealousy as Othello's converts human nature into chaos, and liberates the beast in man; and it does this in relation to one of the most intense and also the most ideal of human feelings. What spectacle can be more painful than that of this feeling turned into a tortured mixture of longing and loathing.’Further Reading – all found on ‘Google Books’ - Rosenberg, The Masks of Othello (1961):(1961)&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAGoVChMI6tSx6c_5yAIVhlQUCh0t6wuK#v=onepage&q=Marvin%20Rosenberg%09The%20Masks%20of%20Othello%20(1961)&f=falseR.A. Foaks, The Descent of Iago: satire, Ben Jonson, and Shakespeare’s Othello (1986):(1971)&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCMQ6AEwAWoVChMI1ZXmlc35yAIVAbQUCh2KmAb8#v=onepage&q=John%20Wain%20Shakespeare%3A%20Othello%20(1971)&f=falsePhillip C Kolin – ‘Othello’ New Critical Essays (2002): Cowen Orlin (ed.) Othello: Contemporary Critical Essays (2003):(ed.)%09Othello:+Contemporary+Critical+Essays&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CCQQ6AEwAWoVChMIsP3Bts75yAIVitcUCh3BBgFX#v=onepage&q=Lena%20Cowen%20Orlin%20(ed.)%09Othello%3A%20Contemporary%20Critical%20Essays&f=falseKaren Newman, Femininity and the Monstrous in ‘Othello’ (2013): ................
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