ACT 3, SCENE 3

structure

• the “temptation” scene

• Desdemona talks a lot in this scene → she’s excited that she’s going to help her friend, though this will look like she just wants to talk about him. Iago using Desdemona’s personality against her

“I’ll watch him tame and talk him out of patience”

• AO2: her determination seals her fate here (Aristotle ideas)

• AO2: she seems to have some power over Othello here, contrasting patriarchal values → power of love?

• Saying as the wife she’ll annoy Othello into submission → childish?

“Ha! I like not that.”

• AO2: vague and suggestive language

• AO2: “that” being Cassio and Desdemona’s exit → looks suspicious but was actually because Cassio didn’t want Othello to think badly of him

• AO2: suggestive but doesn’t confirm → manipulative, note that Iago hasn’t yet lied at all

“Nothing, my lord; or if - I know not what”

• AO2: caesura → false reluctance to speak

• AO2: “Nothing” symbolically shows how it’s about perspective

• AO2: he continues to lie and have false ignorance

“Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul But I do love thee; and when I love thee not, Chaos is come again”

• AO2: “Excellent wretch!” → exclamatory sentence, oxymoron about Desdemona

• AO2: “perdition” → suggestive of hell/ domination, potentially diabolic

• AO2: “catch my soul” is ambiguous → a negative term of endearment

• AO2: “when I love thee not” → foreboding, exemplifies his fear of falling out with Desdemona

• AO2/3: “chaos” trochaic word, pagon, classical allusion → idea that the universe springs out of chaos

“No further harm” “Why of thy thought, Iago?”

• AO2: “No further harm” vague → Iago is withholding information to make Othello more interested (Machiavellian technique)

• AO2: shared lines → Othello’s line completes Iagos in iambic pentameter which shows he speaks immediately after Iago (an implicit stage direction from Shakespeare)