Othello Essays

College

Othello

Othello’s final speech explores his guilt over murdering Desdemona, as well as Othello’s own struggle with identity as a black Muslim in Venice. Before delivering his speech, Othello becomes convinced by Iago that Desdemona has been unfaithful to...

12th Grade

Othello

Throughout ‘Othello’, Shakespeare deliberately engineers male-female relationships to show an imbalance of power. Be it Bianca, who has no power as a courtesan in a patriarchal society, a mere “bauble” with which to play; Emilia, a woman weakened...

Othello

In both the tragedies of King Lear and Othello, the plot is affected by one character's malicious actions, which exacerbate any tensions that are already inherent in the relationships between the characters. Iago in Othello and Edmund in King Lear...

Othello

Separating qualities common to one 'set' or 'type' of Shakespeare's plays which are not common to the plays as a whole is a difficult task: it would no doubt be possible to find evidence of any feature uniting 'the Tragedies' within any of...

Othello

In Greek tragedy, inevitability plays an important role, portraying the protagonists as pawns of the fates, whose roles in the tragedy are distributed arbitrarily and without justice. The outcomes of these roles are decided before the play even...

Othello

Choose one non-dramatic text offered on the module, (an extract from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Literary Remains,) and show how it might help us understand Othello.

The extract presents a sustained attack by Coleridge on Shakespeare for his lack of...

Othello

In Shakespeare's play, Othello, the men hunt the women, as a human hunts animals in the wild. The man exerts dominance and expects the woman to accept her submissive role in relation to his dominance. The central couples involved in showing this...

Othello

Speech in Shakespeare's "Othello" possesses a power beyond that of deeds'. It is Othello's fantastical storytelling that won him Desdemona at the start, Iago's poisonous suggestion that leads the general to murder his own wife, Emilia's testimony...

Othello

"IAGO: Stand you a while apart.

Confine yourself but in a patient list.

Whilst you were here, o'erwhelmèd with your grief -

A passion most unsuiting such a man -

Cassio came hither. I shifted him away,

And laid good 'scuse upon your ecstasy,

Bade him...

Othello

As William Shakespeare's only truly Aristotelian tragedy, Othello has no subplot or comic relief, and, when originally performed, had little spectacle in the way of the set or action. The absence of these distractions leave the themes of the play...

Othello

Othello is, among other things, a play about words. Each character's essence is expressed by a distinct idiom, and each character succeeds or fails, at least to an extent, because of language. A passage in the temptation scene, 3.3.191-222,...

Othello

John Dexter saw Othello as 'a man essentially narcissistic and self-dramatising... a pompous, word-spinning arrogant black general'. However, Helen Gardner believed him to be 'a man of action and heroic in his deeds'. Using these views of Othello...

Othello

According to the great English essayist and scholar William Hazlitt, the character of Iago from William Shakespeare's masterpiece Othello "is one of the supererogations of Shakespeare's genius," due the fact that Iago's "villainy is without a...

Othello

"Is this the promised end?" Analyse the final scene of Othello.

"Iago, you have done well that men must lay their murders on your neck" [5:2 line 166, p.157]. This ironic tone is akin to that of "Is this the promised end?" Can it be anything but...

Othello

Othello is a tragedy. But what qualities does it possess to qualify it as such? The key difference between comedy and tragedy is the ability to reconcile and tolerate the inevitable foibles of the human condition. In Othello nothing is tolerated,...

Othello

The name Iago comes from Latin, "Iacobus," meaning "one who trips up another and takes his place." This name also belongs to the most important character in Shakespeare's Othello and one of the most wonderfully evil characters of all time. The...