About this deal
even though in that speech, as in his speech in Act III, scene iii, Othello depends on his identity as a soldier to glorify himself in the public’s memory, and to try to make his audience forget his and Desdemona’s disastrous marital experiment. The other, "King Stephen Was a Worthy Peer", is the seventh of the eight stanzas of the existing ballad "Take Thy Old Cloak About Thee". And this urgency is underlined by the text: in particular's Iago's concern that if Othello compares notes with anyone else it will become clear that Iago is playing one character against another. Iago tells Roderigo that he plans to exploit Othello for his own advantage and convinces Roderigo to wake Brabantio and tell him about his daughter's elopement. Iago goads Cassio on to talk about his affair with Bianca, a local courtesan, but whispers her name so quietly that Othello believes the two men are talking about Desdemona.
Gillies, John "Stanislavski, Othello, and the Motives of Eloquence" in Hodgson, Barbara and Worthen, W.
The over-reliance of the plot of Othello upon a trivial prop, the handkerchief, was noted in the play's earliest criticism. Ferraro, Bruno (translator) Gli Hecatommithi - Third Decade, Seventh Novella in Neil, 2006, Appendix C pp. The characters cannot be islands, the play seems to say: self-isolation as an act of self-preservation leads ultimately to self-destruction. And from Leo's own life story Shakespeare took a well-born, educated African finding a place at the height of a white European power. As Iago explains, even the hint of this possibility enrages him: “I know not if’t be true / But I for mere suspicion in that kind / Will do as if for surety” (1.
Brown, John Russell "The Oxford Illustrated History of the Theatre", Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. The duke’s reply to Othello’s speech about how he wooed Desdemona with his tales of adventure is: “I think this tale would win my daughter too” (I.While his ostensible reason for desiring Othello’s demise is that he has been passed over for promotion to lieutenant, Iago’s motivations are never very clearly expressed and seem to originate in an obsessive, almost aesthetic delight in manipulation and destruction. Portrait of Abd el-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun, Moorish ambassador to Queen Elizabeth I in 1600, sometimes suggested as the inspiration for Othello.