Othello

1
Othello

• Imagery as a defining element in the play.

2
The two uses of imagery

• To communicate a vivid and immediate effect.
• To weave a pattern, drawing together the
  strands of the dramatic action into a coherent
  design.

3
Language and Imagery

• Each Shakespearean play exhibits a characteristic
  patterning of images, recurring words and
  phrases, which reinforce the overall design and
  subtly comment on it.
• While it is difficult to assess the impact of all
  verbal elements it is possible to identify
  dominant threads of imagery and some of the ways
  they relate to the play as a whole.

4
Responding to the imagery

• On a linguistic level we respond to the play in
  two distinguishable ways
• As a complete dramatic action,
• As a dramatic play.
• In the first case the words are the dramatic
  medium, in the second they are everything.
• Much of the interest and the difficulty of
  Shakespeares work is that the two cannot be
  separated.

5
Metaphorical Imagery

• The dominant feature of the language in Othello
  is its metaphoric quality.
• Metaphor is not merely the comparison of two
  different things with each other but their close
  identification.
• When Iago says Thus do I ever make my fool my
  purse (I, iii, 381), he is not only saying that
  he profits financially from the others
  foolishness he is making an equation between
  human qualities and material ones that says
  something about both.
• Metaphor has this highly suggestive and ambiguous
  quality, which is especially important to
  Othello, a play in which familiar words and ideas
  are constantly presented in unlikely new guises.

6
Honest imagery

• The surface level of the irony with which this
  word is used is obvious Othello constantly
  refers to Iago as an honest man when we know that
  he is in fact the opposite.
• But the words role in the play is far more
  complex than at first appears. Iago frequently
  uses the word to describe himself. When he says
  to Cassio, As I am an honest man (II, iii,
  258), he is sharing a joke with the audience and
  the joke is on Cassio, who agrees with him.
• Iago enjoys these word games.

7

• When Iago sneers at honest knaves, (II, iii,
  258) he is using the word in its proper sense to
  condemn those who foolishly put virtue and truth
  before self-interest, using the word as a term of
  contempt.
• The word takes on a complex significance through
  constant repetition.
• The irony with which Iago employs the word
  spreads throughout the play.
• Desdemona refers to Cassios honest face even
  though he deceives her and Othello about Bianca,
  and even contributes unknowingly to her
  destruction.

8

• Desdemona hopes that my noble lord esteems me
  honest (IV, ii, 65) even as Othello is preparing
  her doom and when Emilia insists her mistress is
  indeed honest Othello refuses to believe it.
• The two poles of vice and virtue in the play are
  Iago and Desdemona Iago is consistently praised
  for his honesty Desdemona is consistently
  suspected for her dishonesty.
• Othellos confusion about the word reaches a
  climax in Act III when he concludes I think my
  wife be honest, and think she is not (line 384).
• The word honest at this point also has
  complexity by definition it can mean not only
  truthful, but also sexually chaste.
• Besides these meanings it also has a patronising
  sense, referring to social inferiors as a term of
  praise.

9

• Iago uses it in all three senses, and plays on
  them.
• We only have a sense of the word honest because
  we have the concept of dishonesty.
• The various uses of the word encourage us to
  think about the different notions of honesty
  explored in the play and their relevance for the
  different characters.
• Emilias notion of honesty, for example, is very
  different to that of Desdemona Emilia has lower
  standards and a more relaxed attitude to morality.

10
Appearance versus Reality

• The word honest is also linked to words and
  images associated with the theme of Appearance
  versus Reality.
• The images associated with this theme have
  recurring ideas seeming, looking, concealing,
  disguise, frankness, misunderstanding and
  deception.
• The distinction between being and seeming is a
  major theme. Othello several times proclaims
  himself as one who is what he appears. Iago, on
  the other hand, exults in concealing his true
  nature
• I am not what I am (I, i, 65).

11
Truth Deception

• There are two poles of truth and deception,
  between which the play moves, though neither is
  what it seems.
• Othello is wrong to think that everything in our
  natures can be simply manifested.
• Iago is wrong to believe that we can completely
  conceal our true intentions.
• Both reveal aspects of their nature that they
  themselves do not understand
• Othello is seduced by his jealous frenzy,
• Iago is carried away by the exhiliration of his
  plotting and scheming.
• All ways of seeming are shown up for what they
  are by the light of truth at the end of the play.

12
Developing the theme

• At the end of the play, the revelation of Iagos
  deception drives the villain himself into
  silence his tongue, the main instrument of
  deception, is no longer of any use.
• Yet until this moment, the theme of appearance
  and reality is developed even at the height of
  the heros crisis, through the language he uses.
• Deceived by appearances, Othello is finally
  stricken with the sight of his dead wife.
• This final appearance is irreversible reality
  she is dead, despite the appearance of life when
  Emilia enters.

13
Emotive imagery

• The text is filled with images of darkness,
  confusion, uncertainty and perplexity.
• It is also full of violent oppositions love and
  hate heaven and hell light and dark life and
  death black and white blood and stars cruelty
  and kindness guilt and innocence.
• The conflicts of the play reflect the larger
  oppositions of life itself.

14
Othello in opposition

• In Othellos soliloquy at the beginning of Act V,
  Scene ii, he is in a state of painful excitement
  a man used to killing, but only in war.
• He is still passionately in love with his wife
  and acutely conscious of her physically, yet
  consumed with jealous doubts.
• Through the act of murder, Othello makes sure
  of his wife. Once dead she cannot betray him any
  more.
• Yet to kill her is to lose the very thing he
  values most.
• To satisfy his doubts he must part with his most
  valued object.

15

• This is the plays most emotionally charged
  moment. The involved syntax of Othellos speech
  reflects the tormented twisting and turning of
  his mind as he moves between pity and
  determination, love and hate, desire and
  jealousy, all too aware of the finality of the
  deed he proposes to commit.
• The speech is full of those violent oppositions
  noted previously.
• Othello represents the human condition, when on
  the brink of an inevitable and disastrous act
  which he knows to be irreversible. He is drawn
  irresistably to destroy his own happiness, driven
  to the final act of murder by unbearable
  conflict.

16
Imagery through Oxymoron

• Fatal sweetness, cruel tears, heavenly sorrow,
  murderous love these are all examples of
  oxymoron, a figure of speech popular in
  16th-century poetry, combining contradictory
  terms.
• Shakespeare explicitly uses this type of figure
  of speech to attempt to reconcile or synthesise
  opposites. This is especially noticeable in the
  speech of Iago.
• It is in this spirit of contradiction that Iago
  infects Othello and turns the generals reality
  on its head.
• Thus, in the middle of the play Othello begins to
  employ the animal and vermin imagery previously
  reserved for Iago.
• Oxymoron is appropriate to a play full of
  contradictions, but it is one of the most subtle
  linguistic patterns in Othello.

17
Verbal echoes repetitions in imagery

• Verbal echoes and repetitions are used to enforce
  the plays many interlocked themes.
• Images of poisoning, the marriage bed, wealth,
  buying and selling, the devil, eyes and looks,
  the army, sexuality and the fickleness of women,
  and of animals abound.
• Sometimes they are associated with one character
  the devil with Iago purity and its opposite with
  Desdemona the monster of jealousy with Othello.
• In this sense the imagery enforces the dramatic
  outline.
• The imagery in Othello depends upon the
  ambivalent nature of language as a medium on the
  one hand common to all speakers, and on the other
  used by individuals for their own purposes.