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Chapter 2
William Shakespeare, Othello honesty and
difference, men and women
Aims:
1) The study of Othello as a play text through discussion of
the themes of love and death and their dramatic
embodiment in a selection of key scenes or moments
2) Introduce you to some of the most influential critical
debates about the play.
3) Develop further the discussion of 'difference' in terms of
race and gender
4) Discuss the genre of the play.
___________________________________________
Introduction
What is a 'theme'?
Love: how this theme is introduced in terms of characters'
different views of it:
Othello and Desdemona: High-minded and romantic,
Iago and Roderigo: physical cynically reductive.
Roderigo comes across more as the desperate young suitor
willing to be led, Cassio as the courtly lieutenant, while Iago is
the source of the most basic, even obscene version of this
human passion.
 The word 'love' itself is used and reflected upon differently
by different characters, adding to the richness of the text
and its meanings in performance.
 The theme becomes almost an independent part of what is
happening, to the extent that it becomes a system of
connected meanings.
YOU HAVE TO FOCUS ON:
1) The development of theme as an aspect of character,
plot and language, and the dramatic techniques
Shakespeare uses to achieve his ends.
2) The significant critical debates the play has stimulated.
___________________________________________
Act 2: a soldier's (love) life?
 Move in geographical setting from a place symbolic of
order and control, to a place of confusion and uncertainty.
 Iago's soliloquy that concludes Act 1 reminds us of the
continuing threat of disorder. As he exclaims in his last
words as he departs the stage: 'Hell and Night' will soon
bring the dark, 'monstrous' idea he has engendered into
'the world's light' (1.3.392—3).
 In Cyprus, there is a movement beyond the civilised and
civilising sway of Venice, to a place where the forces of
nature are less controlled, and therefore where Iago's
sinister plotting has more scope.
 If one of the main things that defines Othello is being good
at waging war, then the arrival in Cyprus with the news that
war has been averted suggests that, like the other soldiers,
he is left with nothing to do -perhaps a dangerous thing for
any soldier.
 Even more important in the context of this play, the trust
and loyalty or honour developed between soldiers in the
field becomes a potential weakness, which may be
exploited by a character like Iago.
___________________________________________
Activity 1
Discussion
 Othello, Desdemona and lago arrive safely in Cyprus and,
once again, lago ensnares Roderigo in a plot against
Othello - but this time through discrediting Cassio, whose
gallantry towards Desdemona has suggested to lago how
he can use him.
 Desdemona arrives before Othello, and while they wait for
him she distracts herself through a bantering, bawdy
exchange with lago about the nature of women.
Desdemona cleverly matches his suggestiveness without
descending to his level.
 The storm with which Act 2 opens represents a
premonition as well as a sign: of the instability of the
world the characters now inhabit.
 For the Venetians, as for the English at the time, the sea
was both the source of power and of danger. As if to
confirm this, there is a current of sea imagery running
through the language of the play
___________________________________________
The differences between Othello's and Iago's views of love
become more sharply evident as Act 2 proceeds. For Othello,
'If it were now to die, / 'Twere now to be most happy'
(2.1.184-5), and he pratdes happily to Desdemona in
anticipation of the delayed consummation of their marriage.
Married love, however, is far from Iago's thoughts as he once
more poisons the concept with his insinuations — not only to
Roderigo (2.1.209—76) but, crucially for the development of
the plot, to Cassio (2.3.12—43).
It is easy to be so absorbed by Iago's performance in Act 2
that one loses sight of Othello, the object of his hatred and
envy.
___________________________________________
Activity 2
A simple fact about Act 2 is that for much of the time Othello is
absent from the stage. Do you therefore feel the balance of
the play at this point is shifting towards Iago? Look especially
at Act 2, Scene 3, comparing and contrasting Othello's and
Iago's speeches, and looking out for key words and phrases
that seem to suggest how we are to understand their
characters.
Discussion
 The balance is shifting towards Iago, despite the
references to Othello in his absence.
 For here is where we see Iago's technique of exploiting the
weaknesses of those to whom he pretends loyalty coming
into its own, as he uses Cassio's drunken rage to destroy
the man's position and reputation.
 But when Othello first comes in, we notice how forceful and
commanding he is, shaming his brawling men by
exclaiming 'Are we turned Turks' (2.3.161) - ironic,
considering he is accused in the play of being a heathen.
 'Silence that dreadful bell' he orders (2.3.166), to prevent
further disturbance. To locate those responsible, Othello
quite naturally turns to 'Honest lago' for a report (2.3.168).
This is, of course, deeply ironic: that he should turn to the
very man whom we in the audience know is behind it all.
 Perhaps not even the most balanced judgement could
withstand lago's account of the preceding events, as he
expresses regret and appears to try to excuse Cassio while
omitting entirely his own role.
 lago's ascendancy is confirmed by the exchanges with
Cassio that follow, in which the idea arrives in his head that
he should prompt the disgraced soldier to approach
Desdemona to plead to Othello on his behalf.
___________________________________________
 We can see from this section of the play that lago, the bluff
and confident soldier, is shown also to be a consummate
actor, devious and controlling towards us, his audience, as
well as towards the other characters.
 Othello is becoming his victim, although we cannot yet see
how the hero's love for Desdemona is going to bring him
down and, crucially, our sympathies are being moved
towards Othello and then away from him by what we hear
and see.
___________________________________________
Act 3: temptation
 Othello is a domestic tragedy, in the sense that while
matters of state, such as the war with the Turks, are
present, especially in the first act, they are marginal to the
play's central concern with love, and the deaths which
overtake it towards the end.
 Moreover, the play has a relatively simple plot, and no
sub-plot; that is to say, no shift of attention away from the
central characters, and hardly any 'comic relief.
 The drinking sequence in Act 2 can be and often is played
as comedy, but it has a dark undercurrent, as we know all
along that it is part of Iago's plan to undermine Cassio.
 Iago lets us know what he is up to, which only makes us
more concerned with what is about to happen to the
principal characters, the lovers.
 Othello is so intensely focused on Othello and Desdemona
and Iago's plot to deceive and entrap them.
How we understand the characterisation of Othello
and Desdemona, and how we judge their actions.
F.R. Leavis:
 Othello's love for Desdemona may well seem to be the
centre of the play, as he himself is.
 The importance of the Leavis view is that it challenges us
to think about how we understand the role of Othello and
the play as a tragedy: in particular, how far what happens
is the product of the hero's nobility being brought low by
the devilish machinations of lago (which shifts the focus
somewhat onto lago), and how far he is himself
unwittingly responsible for the tragedy.
 According to Leavis the tragedy is 'the undoing of the
noble Moor by the devilish cunning of lago'.
 it was 'external evil, the malice of the demi-devil, that
turned a happy story of romantic love — of romantic
lovers who were qualified to live happily ever after, so to
speak — into a tragedy'.
 For Leavis, this is to 'sentimentalise Shakespeare's tragedy
and to displace its centre' (the balance between Othello
and lago in Act 2 is an issue for debate.)
 Too much attention, according to Leavis, tends to be paid
to the character of lago and his 'diabolic intellect'.
 'The plain fact is that in Shakespeare's tragedy of Othello
Othello is the chief personage — the chief personage in
such a sense that the tragedy may fairly be said to be
Othello's character in action. lago is subordinate and
merely ancillary'
 Leavis suggestS that Wilson Knight's view should be
understood in a more critical way, as an indication of 'a
habit of self-approving self-dramatization' that is 'an
essential element in Othello's make-up, and remains so at
the very end'.
 Iago's 'prompt success' in persuading Othello of
Desdemona's alleged treachery is not so much the result of
Iago's 'diabolic intellect' as of 'Othello's readiness to
respond'. This is central to the Leavis argument:
 lago is simply 'a mechanism necessary for precipitating
tragedy in a dramatic action'
___________________________________________
Act 3, Scene 3: the temptation scene
Activity 3
What or who is the bait with which lago catches Othello?
Notice lago's aside in line 33: what does it indicate is
happening onstage?
Othello's own suspicious fantasies and insecurities, which
eventually allow something as trifling as the handkerchief to
become firm proof of Desdemona's alleged deceit, as lago
points out (3.3.323-6).
How does lago tempt or manipulate Othello so as to enrage
him against Cassio and Desdemona? Having thought about
your answers to 1 and 2, try responding to this question:
By his pretended perplexity at and poisonous interpretation
of Cassio's and Desdemona's innocent behaviour, lago
insinuates the idea into Othello's mind that they are cheating
or, in the language of the time, cuckolding him.
Is lago just a dramatic 'mechanism', as Leavis suggests,
whereby Othello's deeper fantasies are brought out? Or is
Othello really noble, while lacking the necessary defences
against the diabolic mind that defeats him here?
___________________________________________
It has been suggested by the critic Marjorie Garber that:
 One of the ways lago manages or tempts Othello is by
being an 'echo', turning the meaning of his words against
themselves.
 lago's apparently innocent repetition of Othello's
'indeed', 'honest' and 'think' is typical of his technique,
of pretending to avoid speaking the awful truth so as to
protect his master from it, while at the same time
ensuring it filters into Othello's mind.
 Why is Othello so ready to accept Iago's insinuations?
Shakespeare suggests that it is Othello's own insecurity
that gives Iago the opportunity to work on his feelings.
 Why should the protagonist be insecure? He is the
outsider, the 'extravagant and wheeling stranger'
(1.1.135) in this community of Venetians, and, as one
critic put it, 'portrayed as forever homeless, uprooted,
and on the move, incapable — or at least so his enemies
contend — of ever being naturalized' (Fiedler, 1973, p.
146).
And he is ethnically different, too.
 In Act 1, Scene 1, Iago, Roderigo and Brabantio take it for
granted that the marriage between a black African and a
white Venetian woman is deeply unnatural
 These are the humiliating charges that Othello has to
defend himself and his marriage against in Act 1, Scene
3.
 This climate of racism the fact that Othello is a middleaged soldier accustomed to the exclusively male world
of military life and quite unaccustomed to the company
of women, then it is not hard to see why he seems
predisposed to believe his ensign over his wife.
 Othello shows himself to be all too susceptible to such
ideas, his insecurities about his race and age and lack of
experience with women intensifying a tendency to
expect the worst of the opposite sex.
 Othello does appear to some extent as the victim of
lago's cunning. But Shakespeare also makes it clear how
much the hero resembles lago and the other male
Venetians in his masculine pride and suspicious distrust
of women.
 Understand Othello by the aspect of his 'character in
action'. It becomes 'action' in the way he behaves
towards Desdemona, leading him to the point when, in
the opening scene of Act 4, he strikes her (4.1.232).
 Moment after moment in this play, we sense the
downward slide into violence and death.
 The other side of Othello's grand self-image is
represented by Iago's lust for destruction.
___________________________________________
Act 4: men and women
A 'new theory' emerged which generated a whole new
language of Shakespeare criticism underestimated the power
of historical and cultural processes to shape literary texts.
- This new theoretical movement advocated seeing early
modern culture as less stable and more contradictory
than hitherto, renegotiating the relationship between
text and context.
- These thoughts are prompted by noting that in F.R.
Leavis's attack on the interpretation of Othello as a
heroic figure, rather than a flawed and egotistical one.
In Act 4, the handkerchief she is supposed to have given
Cassio becomes a symbol of guilt and betrayal, as Othello's
half-crazed condition leads him further and further into
incoherence and rage under the masterful direction of Iago
Just as Iago earlier on in the play was eavesdropping on Cassio
and Desdemona, so Othello is now reduced to doing the same
thing, secretly watching Iago and Cassio and misinterpreting
what he sees, and going on to will himself into believing the
worst of Desdemona.
___________________________________________
Act 4, Scene 3: the 'willow song'
Activity 4
IMPORTANT ABOUT GENDER
Act 4, Scene 3 does not seem to propel the action forward,
and so what do you think might be its point, or dramatic
function? Does it look ahead to the end? What does it depict?
Discussion
 Act 4, Scene 3 is the melancholy scene in which Emilia,
lago's wife and Desdemona's maidservant, helps
Desdemona prepare for bed.
 Perhaps the most surprising thing about it is how far it
anticipates the end and Desdemona's death scene. It is
one of many moments of proleptic irony (or









foreshadowing) in the play - a poignant harbinger of
doom.
Dramatically, it is a moment of rest, before the headlong
rush of Act 5 begins.
What it depicts is an intimate moment between women,
contrasting sharply with all the scenes between men, or
of women surrounded by and dominated by men.
That the men are all soldiers, courtiers or senators, that
is, active in public life, makes the contrast between male
and female characters all the stronger.
Yet this is a moment of heightened tension, too, because
of its content. It relates the story of Barbary,
Desdemona's mother's maid whose lover 'proved mad, /
And did forsake her', and who died singing a 'Song of
Willow' (4.3.25-6).
The song expresses female despair and longing, and
passive acceptance towards the lover: 'Let nobody blame
him, his scorn I approve' (4.3.47).
The words and context of the song make us more aware
of Desdemona's own tragic situation, in which her lover
too has gone 'mad', and she has become the apparently
passive victim of his lunacy.
The language of the play has changed once again here,
giving us those extraordinarily evocative, individual
touches – as Desdemona wonders if the wind is someone
knocking and feels her eyes itching, the effect of which is
to bring home her human reality (4.3.48-9, 53-4).
These touches also make her death scene, when it
comes, all the more moving, generating an even stronger
sense of waste.
Emilia's last speech, which is a plea for recognition of
women's equal humanity: It challenges the anti-woman
sentiments expressed by so many of the male
characters.
___________________________________________
IMPORTANT ABOUT GENDER
 The shift in perspective from soldierly honour as a
matter of concern to the subjects of women's fidelity
and attitude to marriage deepens our sense of the moral
richness of the play.
 Emilia's forthright, unromantic view provides a crucial
variation, not only on Desdemona's and Othello's views of
love, but also lago's — she, too, can be blunt and down to
earth, opposing the lovers' naive idealism with her own
realism. However, unlike her husband, she does not envy
or despise them for it.
 Further, Emilia's lengthy defence of the rights of wives
(4.3.81—98) opens up the whole question of how
women were treated at the time and later.
 For example, the critic and historian Lisa Jardine argues
that without Emilia's speech, Desdemona's song of a
lover abandoned 'becomes a stylised, emblematic
representation of female passivity and culpability';
whereas with the inclusion of Emilia's 'assertive
counterpoint' the scene becomes 'one which struggles
with female and male responsibility and its limitations
and negotiations'.
___________________________________________
Act 5: 'It is the cause': death, difference and
tragedy
 In early modern drama, including Shakespeare's plays,
Italians, Jews, Indians and Africans appear as figures
who may be admired, but are more often stigmatised.
 During the preceding (sixteenth) century, improving trade
links and increasing travel meant a general awareness of
the presence of people from continents, races and
religions beyond England, Britain and Europe.
 The critic Ania Loomba argues that as Europeans 'became
increasingly aware of the power, wealth, and learning of
other peoples ... this awareness often only intensified
expressions of European and Christian superiority'.
Questions of difference had long been central to the
literature of the Crusades, and to the encounters
between Christians, Jews and Muslims in Europe.
 [racial attitudes towards Othello] Queen Elizabeth I
herself had 'ordered the deportation of "Negroes and
blackamoors" from England on the grounds that they
were depriving her own "Christian people" of jobs'
 Such intolerance was the product of centuries of
accumulated ideas about racial hierarchy, but it also
overlapped with and was reinforced by ideas of class and
gender difference.
 Loomba emphasises that with regard to class
differences, '[a]ll over Europe, the nobility were often
understood as a "race" distinct from ordinary folk', and
that with regard to gender differences, Europeans
distinguished themselves from other races in terms of
'an inversion or distortion of "normal" gender
difference, men and women roles
 What Loomba concludes is that '[patriarchal domination
and gender inequality provided a model for establishing
racial hierarchies and colonial domination'.
 While we might wrestle with precisely how these various
forms of difference and hierarchy were articulated in
Shakespeare's society, by simply registering that there
were significant racial, class and gender hierarchies, we
are alerted to the need to look at how the language of
Othello expresses racial, class and gender differences.
The extent to which questions of difference are raised in the
play is part of what makes it both rich and satisfying as a
theatrical experience, as well as leaving in our minds matter
for serious reflection:
 As we have seen, men's perceptions of women, and
women's of men, are as much at issue in this play as
considerations of race or colour, prompted by the
interracial marriage at its centre.
 Discussing questions of gender and race in relation to the
play may seem particularly up to date, but they have been
present for a very long time, if not from the beginning of
the play's performance history.
 This is precisely because Othello as it has come down to
us is so centrally about how such questions affect love
and, in this play, bring about death.
 Rymer saw Othello as little more than a sorry farce, but
he clearly touches on issues of race and gender, as well
as class and genre.
 Desdemona's handkerchief, the apparently trivial object
that becomes the fatal focus of Othello's jealousy.
The view of tragedy:
 According to Aristotle's Poetics, the tragic hero is a great
man who falls from prosperity to misery and death
through an 'error' of judgement (from the Greek
hamartia, often translated as 'flaw').
 if, like Rymer you felt that a 'blackamoor' was an
inappropriate hero, on the grounds of race or class, and
his error of judgement a matter apparently so trivial as
that of misinterpreting the whereabouts of his wife's
handkerchief, then you might indeed have felt neither
pity nor fear at the outcome.
 This is all part of what makes the play a domestic
tragedy; it also touches on the question raised by Leavis
and others of whether Othello is heroic or admirable
enough for his fall to be truly tragic.
Act 5 is the key. Here, the issues of genre as well as of
difference come to fruition, although without being totally
resolved by the deaths that follow.
 A tense and dramatic opening scene, in which Cassio is
wounded by Roderigo, who is stabbed and killed by Iago,
leaves the audience in a state of high expectation.
 It parallels the opening of the play, revealing the mortal
end of the intrigue set in motion then.
 The next and final scene seems at first to move
unbearably slowly, as the climax arrives and the tragedy is
played out in multiple deaths.
 Again, every line of the text bears close consideration, but
let us look at a few moments of this last scene, with issues
of 'difference' primarily in mind.
___________________________________________
Act 5, Scene 2: endings
 He already imagines his wife resembling one of those
marble figures of deceased aristocrats one can see in
churches, anticipating not just her death, but the time
thereafter.
 His stature as tragic hero is at issue here; Othello
addresses a larger world beyond the one in which he is
at the moment, but we might well feel that this is to the
detriment of any remaining sense of the human reality of
his wife.
 Othello is referring to the 'cause' or reason for what he is
about to do, his wife's alleged infidelity.
 That Othello addresses his soul suggests he is referring
his 'case' to a higher authority, a divine court, where he
expects the act he is contemplating to be judged.
 It also implies that he sees his role in relation to his wife
as that of both judge and executioner.
 This highlights once more the paradox of Othello's
character: is he a deluded, self-important fool, or a noble
hero brought down by circumstance?
 The Leavis view leans towards the former interpretation.
For those that accept it, Othello's apparent concern for
justice as the play moves towards the end - what Leavis
calls Othello's 'noble self-bracing to a sacrifice' - appears
as self-deception.
 So his last speech before stabbing himself becomes, as
Leavis suggests, 'unmistakably self-dramatization - selfdramatization as un-self-comprehending as before'.
Do you accept this? Or do you prefer the interpretation that
emphasises his nobility - 'An honourable murderer, if you will,
/ For naught I did in hate, but all in honour' (5.2.292-3), words
that might suggest a level of self-awareness, while
highlighting the central paradox of his character?
For Marjorie Garber:
 Shakespeare's time was one of great historical changes
and social anomalies', including the presence of black
men and women living in London, and women of all
social ranks arguing for greater independence.
 Othello, she argues, 'records and responds to a world in
crisis, a crisis figured in part through emergent categories
like race, class, gender
 This world is represented in the play in terms of a
symbolic geography contrasting the Christian, 'civilised'
and ordered world of the city of Venice, and the
disorderly world of Cyprus, itself a kind of borderland
beyond which may be found the cannibals and sorcerers
Othello refers to in his speeches.
___________________________________________
Activity 5
With these ideas and perspectives in mind, reread 5.2.337-54.
What does the speech tell us about Othello and his position as
a black man in white Venetian society?
Discussion
What is perhaps most striking about his last speech is that in it
Othello presents himself as simultaneously a hero and a
villain. How can this be? Because, in effect having internalised
the negative attitudes of those Venetians who see him as
radically different and unchristian, while also having been
honoured by them as noble and Christian, he has become the
place where these contradictions cancel each other out in the
only way possible - through his suicide:
Set you down this;
And say besides that in Aleppo once, Where a
malignant and a turbaned Turk Beat a Venetian
and traduced the state, I took by th' throat the
circumcised dog And smote him - thus.
He stabs himself
(5.2.350-5)
OTHELLO
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
Othello's final gesture means he kills himself just as he
once killed a Muslim on behalf of Venice and
'civilisation'; a profoundly ironic gesture, reminding us of
his outsider status, while dramatising the contradictions
of a society in which identities are shifting and unstable,
and doing so more than any other play of the time
dealing with differences of race and religion.
Thus, the hero's death by suicide, the end towards which
the play has been moving, encapsulates all the
contradictions of his position within Venetian society
which have in large part contributed to his demise.

As he kills the alien within himself, Othello enacts his
role as the outsider striving to belong to a society that
will always exclude him.
___________________________________________
Othello is truly remarkable is in the way it
associates these differences with gender issues as
well.
 The repetition of the 'willow song' in the exchange
between Desdemona and Emilia, contrasting the
former's passive acceptance of her role as the suffering
wife with her maid's forthright insistence on women's
claims to equality.
 Neither of the women will survive, however. The tragic
irony continues: Iago's murder of his wife mirrors
Othello's murder of his, their actions summed up by
Othello's pathetic line 'why should Honour outlive
Honesty?' {that word again), as he gives up all resistance
— 'Let it go all' (5.2.244—5). With these lines, Othello
seems to retain a certain dignity. Or is this still part of his
self-excusing rant — if that is how you see his last lines?
There are further considerations. For all the differences in
class and race as well as behaviour and character between
Othello and lago, their physical closeness can be suggestive.
 lago, of course, may also be thought of as a principal in
the play, although by the final scene his power has gone.
 There is a line of reasoning about Iago's motivation that
detects a hidden homoerotic compulsion, a frustrated
love for his manly superior that he must hide from
himself, and which therefore generates his rage against
the innocent Desdemona, and terrible manipulation of
Othello.
 There is another level on which issues of race, gender
circulate within the play, there remains a residue of
uncertainty about Iago, just as there remains an
uncertainty about the source(s) of evil in the world.
 And this is part of what makes the play an authentic
tragedy: it involves a profound moral conflict which
draws us in, yet leaves us without any certain resolution
to the dilemmas it poses.
As Iago is led off to be tortured at the end, do we feel that
justice is satisfied, at least on the level of Venetian society? I do
not think so - but I leave it to you to decide for yourself.
Conclusion
Focus on Othello:
 The themes of love, death and 'difference', focusing on a
selection of key scenes.
 The most influential critical views, especially those that
focus on Othello as a 'self-dramatiser' (Leavis).
 Recent productions and approaches despite apparently
having been superseded by our more current concerns with
the politics of race and gender (Jardine, Garber, Loomba).
 Calling the play a tragedy means that it should end in the
death of its central figure or figures and so on, but it also
invites us to think about what it means in terms of the kind
of moral vision the play proposes.
‫ما شاء هللا ال قوة إال باهلل‬
‫مع تمنياتي لكم بالتوفيق أختكم لوليتا المبيكا هذا العمل خالص لوجه هللا‬
‫وصدقة جارية على روحي في الحياة والممات فال تنسوني من دعائكمو‬
‫تمت مساعدتي بالحصول على المادة العلمية لعدم توفر الكتب عندي باغي‬
‫االجر اخوكم (برنارد شو) حبا في فعل الخير راجيا منكم الدعاء‬
‫ال أحلل استخدام هذا الملف بأي شكل من األشكال في إعادة النشر أو عمل‬
‫ملخصات‬