Othello Notes

What is the play about?
Othello themes include: * Jealousy (the sexual jealousy of Othello, and Iago’s professional envy of Cassio * Appearance versus reality (including honesty/dishonesty, loyalty/disloyalty) * Reputation * Public versus private concerns * Racism (including notions of alienation and belonging)
Cultural materialist – Argues the play offers a subversive critique of the social and political beliefs of Shakespeare’s time e.g. racism and sexism seen as inherent in the way early (and late) capitalist society is structured
Feminist – Emphasises the importance of the three women characters and explores the way limits are imposed on their freedom to act.
New historicist – Places the play firmly in its historical context
Performance criticism - Explores Othello as theatre; analysis of productions and past and present
Post-colonial criticism – exposes colonial European notions of race and difference
Post-modernist – the focus is on the text itself, rather than on its context
Psychoanalytical – Focuses on sub-currents of desire, and repressed sexuality e.g. Iago’s attitudes to sex and women offer a productive starting point for analysis
Characters
* Traditional criticism focus on Othello as a tragic hero * Othello’s flaw is jealousy, but a different reading argues that it is egotism
It’s a man’s world! The representation of women * There are only three woman in the play * Each female character is bound up in a relationship with a man (only one survives)
How Othello develops * The play Othello changes from the ‘noble Moor’ to a ‘devil’ and a ‘murderous coxcomb’
Iago – a fantasy profile * He puts on the outward appearance of the bluff, honest soldier but behind that false exterior he lies to, mentally tortures and betrays Othello

The language of Othello
Dramatic language * Shakespeare theatre conditions were different from today: open-air stages, no electic light; little in the way of scenery, few props. * Stage directions * Setting the scene * Voicing a character’s ‘thoughts’
Verse and prose * Verse – traditionally spoken by high-status characters * Othello’s early speech are in iambic pentameters (lines with a five-beat rhythm) * Lines are often run on enjambement (one line of verse into the next line without a pause) * Iago’s speeches are often end-stopped or with mid-line pause (helps to suggest he is a plain-speaking man) * Prose - traditionally used by comic or low-status characters * Iago use of prose give the impression of informal talk, taking others into his confidence
Imagery
Animals * Used by Iago e.g. an old black ram * Othello comes under Iago’s influence, he echoes Iago’s choice of imagine e.g. I had rather be a toad * Exposed as a villain, Iago is called ‘inhuman dog or ‘viper’
Poison and disease * Iago’s words act as poison in the play: ‘poison his delight’ * Othello’s jealousy acts like poison: ‘if there be cord or knives’ * Othello asks Iago for real poison: ‘Get me some poison, Iago, this night’
Hell and the devil * Iago to Brabantio: ‘the devil will make a gransire of you’ * Brabantio to Othello: ‘Damned as thou art, thou hast enchanted her’ * Iago about himself: ‘Divinity of hell! /When devils will the blackest sins put on,/they do suggest at first with heavenly shows/ as I do now.’ * Othello on vengeance: ‘Arise, black vengeance, from thuy hollow cell’ * Othello on Desdemonda: ‘the fair devil’ * Emilia to Othello: ‘thou art a devil’ * Iago is realved to be ‘tat demi-devil’
Images: Othello avoiding reality * Othello cannot face the reality of his own role, the living woman before him and his intended act

Is Othello a racist play? * Mentally unstable * Physically aggressive * Sensual * Insanely jealous * Highly gullible * His main action in the play is to strangle a white woman. He is black.
A clear example of offensive racial stereotyping * Travel writers portrayed the natives of Africa as barbarous, lawless and ‘a people of beastly lyvinge’
What the critics say * Seventeenth-century: ‘With us a Blackamoor might rise to be a trumpeter… With us a Moor might marry some little drab, or Small-coal Wench… certynly never was any Play fraught like this of Othello with improbabilities’ * A century later,Samuel Taylor Coleridge expresses a similar view: ‘It would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Ventrian girl falling in love with a veritable negro’ * Twentieth-century writers on Othello concentrated on debating Othello would have been Arabic in appearance
‘Far more fair than black’ * Recognise the blatant and intentional racist abuse in much of Iago’s and Roderigo’s dialogue (‘the thick-lips’ or ‘an old black ram’)
Portrayals
* The conventional image of hell Is a place of evil, torture and darkness * Early church paintings devil were always portrayed as black. This portrayal is very evident in Emilia’s raging at Othello for killing Desdemona
Black and white imagery * At the heart of the play is the marriage of a black man and a white woman, seen by many of the play’s characters to be ‘against all rules of nature’. * In the cultural and historical context of the play black and white can be equated with dark and light, hell and heaven, good and bad * The contrast between black and white is further intensified by Shakespeare’s use of antithesis * Othello is black-skinned and often referred to by his colour or ethnicity (‘the Moor’) * White-skinned Iago who turns out to be the devil and who immerses himself in images of hell and night * Desdemona’s fairness is emphasised and even at the end of the play * Othello refers to her as a ‘pearl’ and as ‘light’ * Othello is corrupted by iago and his relationship with Desdemona is ‘blackened’ by lies * Othello becomes more conscious of himself as black and begins to conform to prevailing racist stereotypes
Othello in performance * Othello was essentially noble and was brought down by Iago’s villainy * In contrast, Othello is self-centred and self-dramatising, all too ready to believe Iago’s hints and lies
Openings
* Shakespeare knew he had to catch the interest of his audience right at the start of each play * Most plays we often find vigorous dialogue, intriguing situations and conflict
Casting: traditions of ‘blacking-up’ * Othello has been played on stage by white actors ‘blacked-up’ * Olivier portrayed Othello as a sensuous and barely civilised egotist * Othello was portrayed by black American actor, nowadays, most audiences expect to see a black actor playing Othello