AO2 - Analysis of A3 S3

‘If my heart were in your hand’

• Conditional ‘if’ - hints to the audience that this is part of his manipulation

• Contrasting personal pronouns hint at a close relationship

• ‘heart’ - love, openness, emotions, soul - given to Othello’s hand

  • Symbolic of the female

  • ‘I am your own, forever’

• ‘hand’ symbolising control, dictation, violence - using the language of what Othello is most comfortable with to get him to trust him

  • Symbolic of the male

  • Iago is giving Desdemona to Othello’s killing hands - strangles her with his hands in the end

• ‘Hand’ - reference to marriage sacrament - giving away the heart of the bride through the transfer of hands

‘Who dotes yet doubts, suspects yet fondly loves./O misery!’

• dual repeated sentence structure with juxtaposing emotional verbs forces the tension in the split in Othello’s emotions

• ‘fondly’ - only adverb → emphasising

  • depth of Desdemona’s supposed infidelity

  • injustice of how much he loves her and she cheats

• Exclamatory - proof of this crisis

  • Forcing the primal ‘black vengeance’ to overshadow the reasoning that would undo Iago’s manipulation

• Shakespeare famous for his contrasting, paradoxical language

• Stagecraft - the language is the drama

  • The paradoxes in the emotions outlined by Iago (narrator) remind the audience of the issue at hand

  • Reducing Othello to these emotions remind the audience of his type and his role as the tragic hero

Exclamations like ‘O misery!’

• Construction of Othello’s speech in A3 S3

  • Imperatives and direction

  • Exclamations - deteriorating mental state

  • Monologue and reversion to Othello Music

• fluctuations show the paradoxes working within Othello and the gaps in his identity becoming his downfall

• AO5 - Othello is still fighting back by trying to find strength in his oratory abilities

  • ‘give me the ocular proof’

  • ‘thou thinks’t I’d make a life of jealousy’

Iago - parodying of Othello’s speech style

• Convergence of language

• Free verse to manipulate Othello then shift into iambic pentameter after noticing the change in Othello’s temperature

• Making him seem like he’s on Othello’s side when Othello is most vulnerable

• Direct result of him noticing his ‘poison’ is working

• Calculated plan, knows where to go next with his manipulation

‘To be once in doubt is once to be resolved’

• parallel syntax and juxtaposing verbs

• typical of the Othello music

• awareness of the brevity of his decisions still - ‘once’ repeated, emphasises how easy it is to lose faith and how permanent it is

‘She did deceive her father, marrying you,/And when she seemed to shake, and fear your looks,/She loved them most.’

• ‘your looks’ - according to Iago, it is Othello’s looks that make him the outsider

  • Unlike Cassio - handsome, white, well-loved despite being a Florentine

  • The outsider that overcame this label

  • Referring to his success shakes Othello’s insecurity in his outside status

• verb ‘seemed’ alludes to the motif of appearance vs reality

  • ‘I am not what I am’

  • ‘Men should be what they seem.’

  • Iago projecting his dishonesty onto others - R.A Foakes → Iago is not acting from personal jealousy… but from a much more general stance of simple hatred for what is good

• Juxtaposition of ‘fear’ and ‘love’ - Iago parodying Othello’s metaphorical, paradoxical language, turning his strengths against him

‘My Lord, I see you’re moved’

• ‘I see’ - Iago’s chronic role

• Elizabethan theatre - dramatic emotions and actions dictated by Iago to flag to the audience what is going on with characters

• Iago as the intermediary - makes the audience complicit in his scheming

  • Linking to dramatic monologues, dramatic irony, apron stage

• Points out to the audience that if Othello claims to be unmoved, he is lying

• Also undermines how he is advocating for Desdemona’s faith - showing that he has once ‘doubted’ and is therefore ‘resolved’

  • turning point in Othello’s tragedy

  • Peripeteia scene, chooses to mistrust Desdemona

• Just as Iago is parodying Othello’s language, Othello is parodying Iago’s dishonesty

• Iago’s intentions are to force other men to ‘not be what they are’

‘Haply, for I am black/And have not those soft parts of conversation that chamberers have’

• Reasoning as to why Desdemona would leave him

• shows that he is ‘doubting’ and therefore ‘resolved’

  • ‘I’ll not believe’t’: vacillating mindset more of an external effort to convince himself

  • Lack of awareness of his emotions

• ‘Black’ is associated with the stereotypes of ‘not soft’ as black people were stereotypically portrayed as vicious and otherworldly

  • Awareness of his disadvantage in society but not of his domestic feelings

  • The knowledge in one and lack of knowledge in the other together force his ‘split’ personality which can then be exploited

• ‘chamberers’: yet he has spent 7 years in the ‘tented field’ - still associating himself with his soldier identity and cannot come to terms with the fact that he is also a ‘chamberer’ who has adopted his own ‘soft parts of conversation’ through his oratory talent

‘I am declined into the vale of years - yet that’s not much -/ She’s gone’

• Interruptions in his own line of thinking in parentheses

• Monosyllabic from ‘yet’ to ‘gone’ - spondee of ‘she’s gone’

• decline of his mental faculties

• stream of consciousness and the fragmenting of the iambic pentameter with the caesura

• Iago’s ‘thicken other proofs’ - as Othello puts the false connections together himself through his thought process, he will begin to believe the non-’ocular proof’

• Strong will in ‘I’ll not believe’t’, ‘prove my love a whore’, ‘give me the ocular proof’ comes from panic rather than strength in his faith - ‘my life upon her faith’

‘O now, for ever/Farewell the tranquil mind; farewell content;/Farewell the plumed troops… Othello’s occupation gone’

• repetition in the parallel phrasing of ‘farewell’ alongside the dramaticism of the more romantic elements of battle (‘content’ ‘plumed’ ‘tranquil mind’)

• ‘Tranquil’ and ‘content’ he once associated with Desdemona

  • ‘sweet powers’

  • ‘I cannot speak enough of this content’

  • ‘after every tempest come such calms’

• Even though he is using the lexis of battle and grandeur, he is saying goodbye to the feelings associated with love

• Love is an illusion that is confused with the happiness he felt dictating his soldier life to Desdemona

• Never really loved her, only loved the ability to be her general?

  • ‘our general’s wife is now the general’

• confliction of domestic and soldierly spheres is his downfall

• Othello still has the majority of the lines - it is not his occupation gone but his love for Desdemona that he thinks is his occupation

• Domestic tragedy

‘All my fond love do I thus blow to Heaven’

• Soul as something that moved throughout the body and the blood

• ‘Soul’ and ‘Love’ have similar connotations - Marlowe’s Faustus who sold his soul to the devil

  • Blowing his soul away

  • Followed by ‘arise, black vengeance, from the hollow hell’ → black of race now linked with the black of hell and night and the devil - leaning into the expected stereotypes of violent

  • Devil has received Othello’s soul

    • ‘Perdition catch my soul/But I do love thee! And when I love thee not,/Chaos is come again.’

• ‘Chaos’ - against the natural order of things, fate is becoming tangles, usually associated with Hell

• Giving away his love is confirming that he is aligning himself with the devil

• confliction of love and the devil - he calls Desdemona ‘fair devil’

• (in Christian theology) a state of eternal punishment and damnation into which a sinful and unrepentant person passes after death - Catholic/Venician idea

[Kneels] ‘Do not rise yet. [Kneels]

• Act of kneeling - references reverence and submission

• Othello is kneeling to revenge and the Devil who has taken his love

• Iago is kneeling to Othello to parody the marriage sacrament and portray reverence to him

• The emphatic and strong nature of Iago’s apparent love also shows the destructive potential of jealousy and manipulation, as Iago is dealing in strong emotions to bring about Othello’s end

• Othello is united with his enemy in a marriage fashion against who he is allied to in marriage

  • ‘enmeshed’ in the ‘net’ Iago has woven

  • Proven through bond imagery