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

Introduction

• Shakespeare presents Othello and Desdemona as an atypical relationship, destabilised by threats from external pressures

• Their relationship is permeated with Elizabethan surrounding the role of women and male anxieties, emphasising…

• through imagery and wider metaphors, Shakespeare explores the consequences of subverting societal expectations

An romantic union that subverts typicality

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

• ‘i do perceive here a divided duty’

• ‘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’

• ‘the devil will make a grandsire of you’

• ‘nephew neigh to you, courses for cousins and jennets for germans’

• ‘your daughter and the Moor and now making a beast with two backs’

• ‘tying her beauty, wit, and fortunes in an extravagant and wheeling stranger of here and everywhere’

• ‘your daughter […] hath made a gross revolt’

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

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• antithesis to the culturally acceptable relationship of desdemona and cassio

• metaphor

• oxymoron

• bestial imagery

• racial rhetoric

• wider metaphor

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• race

• dramatic context

• women and marriage

• archetypes of femininity

• christianity and islam

• witchcraft

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• 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

• 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"  

• ‘Othello is both a fantast of interracial love and social tolerance and a nightmare of racial hatred and male violence’ - Ania Loomb

• Actor Hugh Quashire (who played Othello in the RSC 2015 production) went on to say that the stereotype of the Elizabethan stage was that ‘whenever a Moor appeared, that usually signaled something menacing, or a threat to the social, moral, and sexual order of society’

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• race

• dramatic context

  • the general dramatic convention wad that Moors were menaces intent on destruction

  • when they appeared on stage it was a threat to the moral, social and political order

  • this can be seen in the character of Aaron, a Moor in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus

• women and marriage = transaction, role of women

• archetypes of femininity = the whore

• christianity and islam

• witchcraft

Undermined through manipulation

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• ‘she has deceived her father and may thee’ - prophetic

• ‘a frail vow betixt an erring Barbarian and supersubtle venetian’

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

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

• ‘pour this pestilence into his ear’

• ‘abuse Othello’s ear’

• symbolism of the handkerchief as “ocular proof”

• ‘it is a common thing […] to have a foolish wife’

• ‘to be naked with her friend in bed, an hour or more, not meaning any harm?’

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• suggestive language

• metaphors

• symbolism

• rhetorical question

• foreshadowing

• unity of place = venice and cyprus

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• venetian women

• jealousy

• handkerchief

• duplicity of women

• femme fatale

• cuckoldry

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

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

• Newman’s point that Iago’s manipulation of Othello ‘depends on the Moor’s own prejudices against his blackness and belief that the fair Desdemona would prefer the white Cassio’

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• jealousy

  • in accordance with the Chain of Being, the ability to think rationally was what separated humans from animals

  • a failure of reason was the cause of the fall of man: reducing you to the animalistic state of being, defined by appetite and instinct

• duplicity of women = the archetypal femme fatale: a woman who lures men towards villainy or their own deaths using her own ‘feminine wiles’.

  • earliest femme fatale, arguably, was Eve, who convinced Adam to eat the forbidden fruit and doomed all of humanity to sin

  • Fornicating women were blamed for leading men astray, destroying male honour - for a husband was held accountable if a woman ‘fell’ in society’s standings - and shaming their families.

  • Furthermore, women were descended from Eve and so could be seduced as easily as they seduced others, betraying mankind in the process

Succumbs to societal pressures and corrupted by jealousy and manipulation

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

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

• ‘lie with her? lie on her? we say lie on her when they belie her! lie with her, zounds, that’s fulsome! - handkerchief! confessions! handkerchief!

• ‘I will chop her into messes! cuckold me!’

• ‘i think the sun where he was born drew all such humours from him’

• “whore of Venice” "perjured women” “strumpet” “the cunning whore of Venice” “devil” “subtle whore”

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

• ‘thou dost stone my heart

• ‘rash and most unfortunate man’

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• fragmented syntax

• rhetorical questions

• metaphors

• juxtaposition

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• cuckoldry

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

• interracial marriage

• repuatation

• porduction history

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• ‘Othello is both a fantast of interracial love and social tolerance and a nightmare of racial hatred and male violence’ - Ania Loomba

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• cuckoldry

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

• interracial marriage

• repuatation

• porduction history = French novelist Stendhal who reports that at the Baltimore Theatre in 1822 a soldier interrupted the performance just before Desdemona's murder, shouting, "It will never be said that in my presence a confounded Negro has killed a white woman!" The soldier fired his gun, breaking the arm of the actor playing Othello.