ACT 3, SCENE 4

“but my noble Moor is true of mind, and made of no such baseness As jealous creatures are.”

• AO2: creatures → reference to the motif of monsters

• AO2: knows he’s not a jealous man but acknowledges he is jealous now

“That is a fault. That handkerchief did an Egyptian to my mother give, she was a charmer”

• AO2: minor issues are escalated

• AO2: he tries to scare her with direct, curt language and dramatic emphasis

• AO3: witchcraft reference plays into the stereotype of the Moor which is ironic due to the denial of this stereotype from othello in act 1

“The handkerchief”

• AO2: repetition shows the obsession and how his jealousy has overtaken his rationality

• AO2: othello falls in his language → this is where we start to see a breakdown in communication

“They are all but stomachs, and we all but food; they eat us hungerly, and when they are full, they belch us.”

• AO2: highlights how Emelia is cynical whereas Desdemona is the ideal wife

• AO2: metaphor for men and how they cannot be trusted

• AO2: metaphor of eating and devouring has predatiorial and parasitic connotations which echoes the monster motif

• AO3: Emelia is a symbol of fained feminism before feminism was a thing

Bianca as a character

• AO3: she’s a courtesan which is typically associated with Venice

• appears that Cassio has known her for weeks when in reality its only been 2 days, this is classic Shakespeare

• a part of the comic/ minor plot

• Cassio isn’t very polite to her which contrasts his mannerisms towards Desdemona → he speaks more directly to Bianca because of her status