Explore Shakespeare’s presentation of the relationship between Othello and Desdemona

Introduction

• Thesis = Shakespeare presents Othello and Desdemona’s relationship as a fragile union, initially characterised by mutual admiration but fatally undermined by societal prejudice

• Through language and shifting power dynamics, Shakespeare explores how love is destabalised by the threats of external pressures and manipulation

An idealised romantic union (alternatively subverts typicality)

AO1 + AO2

• ‘she loved me for the dangers I passed, I loved her that she did pity them’ = sentence parallels itself to emphasise reciprocal + iambic pentameter enhancing poetic quality and harmony

• ‘devour my speech with greedy ear’ = consumption imagery + personification

• ‘I saw Othello’s visage in his mind’ = metaphor - understanding

• “may heart’s subdued even to the very quality of my lord” = metaphor - her emotions and will are entirely conquered or calmed by her love for Othello + internalised patriarchal ideology

• alternatively

  • ‘my fair warrior’ ‘my dear Othello’ ‘our great captains captain’

  • ‘an old black ram is tupping your white ewe’

  • ‘you’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary Horse’

  • ‘to love what she feared to look upon’

AO3

• Honour and reputation meant a lot and attracted people

• Modern critical view = built on mutual respect, love and maturity, whereas a Jacobean critical perspective = an typical relationship, Jacobean relationships emphasised the admiration and respect for the man

AO4 + AO5

Undermined by Patriarchal control and racial anxiety

AO1 + AO2

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

• ‘an old black ram is tupping your white ewe’ = sexually and racially charged image insinuates Othello’s sexual deviances are corrupting Desdemona

• “Barbary horse” “nephew neigh” = language used provokes the fear of miscegenation and exogamy

• ‘gross revolt’ = their love is undermined by ideas of race

• “thou has enchanted her” “chains of magic”

AO3

• Venetian women, much like Jacobean women, were expected to be submissive and obedient

• Venice was though of as a city famous for the freedoms and the liberality it offered its inhabitants, and as a result of this repuation it was thought of as a place of sexual freedom  

• In early modern Europe, Moors were viewed through the lens of exoticism, danger and otherness

• during the renaissance, the institution of marriage was considered a public affair between two families due to reputstion

AO5

• Ania Loomba claims that the conflict in the play is "between the racism of a white patriarchy and the threat posed to it by both a black man and a white woman"  

• meaning that institutions that are controlled and policed by a white culture amplify his outsider status 

Succumbs to societal pressures and corrupted by jealousy and manipulation

AO1 + AO2

• ‘pour this pestilence into his ear’

• ‘she must die, else she’ll betray more men’

• ‘jealousy: it is the green eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on’

• ‘look to your wife; observe her with with Cassio’

• symbolism of the handkerchief as “ocular proof”

• “o curse of marriage that we call these delicate creatures ours and not their appetites”

• “her name that was as fresh as visage is now begrimed and black” = juxtaposition

AO3

• handkerchiefs in this era had different functions in the public and private sphere - they were used as gifts or proof of commitment during marriage and courtship

• Geohumoralism argued that those from warmer climates are more prone to be aggressive or jealous if provoked

AO4 + AO5

• Coleridge argued that Othello didn’t ‘kill Desdemona in jealousy’ but that it was forced upon him by the ‘almost superhuman art of Iago’