Othello: Writer's Methods and Techniques (OCR A Level English Literature): Revision Note

Writer's Methods and Techniques

The most successful responses discuss the importance of the language, form and structure techniques that William Shakespeare uses to create meaning. Both the extract and essay question will reward detailed discussion of technical features, and the essay question requires you to take a “whole-text” approach by drawing on evidence from across the play.

Remember to refer to evidence from the text for every point that you make, and explain how the use of specific techniques affects the audience.

There are a number of methods and techniques used in Shakespeare’s Othello, including:

• Form: Greek tragedy, and Shakespeare’s source

• Structure: the play’s handling of time, and the order in which it reveals things

• Language: symbolism, speech styles, and Iago’s rhetoric

All quotations here follow the Alexander text, which is the edition OCR prints in the exam paper.

Form

Greek tragedy

• In its form and structure, Othello follows some of the patterns of a classical Greek tragedy, particularly in its representation of Othello:

  • The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle defined “tragedy” as a story in which the action moves towards catastrophe

  • It involves a sudden reversal of the hero’s fortunes from happiness to misery, culminating almost invariably in his death

• A tragic hero, according to Aristotle, is neither pre-eminently virtuous nor completely evil: the reversal of his fortune is brought about by some tragic “flaw” in his character or “error of judgement”:

  • His (and classical tragic heroes were always a “he”) nature and social position leads audiences to identify with his plight

  • The hero is ultimately brought to some measure of self-knowledge: often on the very brink of death he will see his situation as it really is

  • The play finally arouses in an audience pathos en route to a feeling of catharsis

• Othello, the play’s protagonist, is therefore modelled after the tragic hero archetype, and possesses all of the required characteristics:

  • Hamartia: a flaw or error in judgement (Othello’s trust in Iago)

  • Peripeteia: a reversal of fortune brought about because of the hero’s error in judgement (Othello’s descent into madness beginning in Act 3, Scene 3)

  • Anagnorisis: the discovery or recognition that the reversal was brought about by the hero’s own actions (demonstrated in Othello’s final speech in Act 5, Scene 2)

  • Hubris: excessive pride (demonstrated in several ways, including his elopement with Desdemona, his defence of the marriage and his insistence on how he is to be remembered in his final speech)

• Shakespeare’s Jacobean audience would have been well acquainted with the tragic genre and the character type of the tragic hero:

  • This means that the audience watching Othello in 1604 would likely have expected the play to conform to the conventions of tragedy

  • At important moments in the play, this leads to foreshadowing and dramatic irony: in Act 1, Scene 3, Othello proclaims his trust in Desdemona’s chastity: “My life upon her faith!”

  • Shakespeare’s audience would have recognised the irony of a tragic hero swearing on his life

  • This line tells the story of the tragedy in microcosm: Othello forfeits his life on the issue of Desdemona’s faith

• However, Shakespeare also departs from the classical model:

  • No kingdom is at stake, and there is no supernatural machinery

  • The action narrows from the Venetian Senate in Act 1 to a single bedroom in Act 5

  • Critics often call this “domestic tragedy”

Shakespeare's source

• Shakespeare took the plot from a prose tale by Giraldi Cinthio, the seventh story of the third decade of Gli Hecatommithi (1565)

• Comparing the two is a great way to evaluate Shakespeare’s choices, because he changed a great deal:

  • Cinthio names only the wife character, as Disdemona. The Moor, the Ensign and the Captain are unnamed

  • In Cinthio, the Ensign beats Disdemona to death while the Moor watches, and the two fake an accident. Shakespeare gives the killing to Othello alone

  • In Cinthio, the Moor is later killed by his wife’s relatives. Shakespeare gives him a suicide and a final speech

• Each change makes Othello more responsible for what happens, which is useful when a question invites you to treat him as Iago’s victim

Structure

The five-part tragic structure

Many of Shakespeare’s tragedies follow the same five-part structure. Knowing it gives you a shape to hang a whole-play argument on, which is what the essay question asks for.

• The arc and the turning point are two different things:

  • Act 3, Scene 3 is where the reversal begins, and Othello falls under Iago’s spell

  • The climax of the arc is the murder itself, in Act 5, Scene 2

  • Everything between them is the rising action, which is why the play feels so fast in its second half

Act 3, Scene 3 as the turning point

• Act 3, Scene 3 is by far the longest scene in the play, and Shakespeare uses its length to draw out Iago’s torture of Othello:

  • The longer the scene continues, the more the audience sympathise with the Moor

  • It is also the turning point of the entire play: the point at which Othello falls under Iago’s spell, and begins his tragic downfall

  • You might also comment on the use of any particularly long (or short) scenes elsewhere in the play

• To discuss structure in the play, you might find it helpful to write about times when characters’ lines run into one another, as Othello’s and Iago’s do in Act 3, Scene 3:

  • Exchanges such as “You would be satisfied?” / “Would! Nay, and I will” demonstrate Iago’s growing influence on Othello by having the pair complete each other’s iambic pentameter verse

The handkerchief sequence

• Shakespeare creates dramatic irony by presenting events in a certain order, such as the sequence in which the handkerchief is stolen, thought lost and then witnessed in Bianca’s hands:

  • Emilia picks it up and gives it to Iago in Act 3, Scene 3, so the audience knows it is innocent before Othello knows it is missing

  • Othello gives it significance only afterwards, in Act 3, Scene 4

  • He never sees Cassio holding it. He sees Bianca holding it, and supplies the rest himself

• Othello demands “ocular proof”, and the proof he gets works because of the order the audience has watched, not because of anything said

The double time scheme

• The play runs on two contradictory time-frames at once:

  • Short time: the events in Cyprus seem to happen over a day or two, which gives the second half its speed

  • Long time: characters refer to an affair carried on over weeks, which the staged action never allows for

• On short time, Desdemona has no opportunity to be unfaithful at all. She is never out of sight for long enough

• John Wilson, writing as “Christopher North” in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1849–50, was the first to set this out, and the term double time comes from that discussion:

  • An audience in the theatre does not notice. The short time supplies the pressure and the long time supplies the plausibility

  • This is useful for AO5, because critics disagree about whether it is a fault or a technique

Language

Symbolism

Shakespeare’s tragedy is full of powerful symbolism, with many of the symbols falling into one of three categories: the magical, the religious, and the animalistic. These symbols tend to represent the conflicts of identity and morality that underline the play’s themes.

• Shakespeare introduces ideas of magic and witchcraft early in the tragedy to prepare the audience for their eventual role in the tragic denouement:

  • In Act 1, Scene 3, Brabantio accuses Othello of bewitching Desdemona

  • Witchcraft was a real fear in early modern Europe and punishable by death

  • Brabantio’s insinuation seems to spring from racist stereotypes of the un-Christian, black outsider

  • Unbeknownst to Brabantio, his suggestion of black magic is given some credence later in the play when Othello establishes the importance of Desdemona’s handkerchief

• In Act 3, Scene 4 Othello talks about the enchanted handkerchief that he gifted to Desdemona:

  • He claims that it was sewn by a 200-year-old “sibyl” and dyed in “mummy” made from maidens’ hearts

  • According to Othello, a “charmer” gave the handkerchief to his mother and told her that “while she kept it / ’Twould make her amiable, and subdue my father”

  • The audience never see any direct evidence of the love token’s alleged powers, but it is important enough to Othello that he interprets Desdemona losing the item as “ocular proof” of her infidelity

• Characters in Othello frequently raise religious ideas of sin and forgiveness, often tying these concepts to images of light and dark, white and black:

  • Iago is associated with images of hell and the devil from the very start of the play: in Act 1, Scene 3, he describes his plot against Othello as a “monstrous birth” of “Hell and night”

  • In Act 2, Scene 3, he speaks proudly of his ability to disguise his “blackest sins” with the oxymoronic “Divinity of hell!”

• Shakespeare emphasises Desdemona’s innocence and purity by having characters describe her in glowingly religious terms:

  • In Act 2, Scene 1 Cassio terms her the “divine Desdemona”

  • Emilia calls her “heavenly true” in Act 5, Scene 2

  • Othello initially describes Desdemona’s chastity via a religious metaphor: “If she be false, O, then heaven mocks itself” (Act 3, Scene 3)

  • Desdemona later protests her innocence using the same allusion: “By heaven, you do me wrong” (Act 4, Scene 2)

  • Desdemona’s last act in Act 5, Scene 2 is to forgive Othello, cementing her status as a paragon of Christian virtue

• Several descriptions of Othello’s character juxtapose religious concepts with references to his blackness:

  • In Act 1, Scene 3 the Duke of Venice describes Othello as “far more fair than black”, referring to both his skin colour and Christian morality

  • After he murders Desdemona, Emilia draws a direct comparison between the two: she calls Othello “the blacker devil” and Desdemona “the more angel”

  • The Devil was often imagined in medieval and early modern art as a malevolent black figure

• Animal images are used throughout the tragedy to signify immorality and promiscuity, and also as racially charged attacks intended to dehumanise Othello:

  • Iago uses derogatory animal imagery in Act 1, Scene 1 to describe Othello and inflame Brabantio’s anger: he calls the Moor a “Barbary horse” and tells Brabantio that an “old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe”, an insult that also lewdly dehumanises Desdemona

  • Iago also describes Othello and Desdemona as making “the beast with two backs”, insinuating that their relationship is unnatural

  • In Act 1, Scene 3, Iago claims that Othello will be easily led “as asses are”, a comment that suggests his subservience

• Iago also famously describes jealousy as “the green-ey’d monster which doth mock / The meat it feeds on”:

  • While on the surface this line is a warning to Othello, it also demonstrates Iago’s talent for hiding his evil in plain sight

  • Through dramatic irony, the audience are aware that Iago is in fact mocking Othello even as he abuses his position of trust

• Othello, however, also peppers his speeches with references to animals, particularly as his jealous madness overwhelms his judgement:

  • Iago primes Othello’s jealousy in Act 3, Scene 3 with images of bestial lust, forcing Othello to imagine Cassio and Desdemona “as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys”

  • In Act 4, Scene 1, Othello reaches his lowest point when he strikes Desdemona, departing from the scene by recalling Iago’s words and exclaiming, “Goats and monkeys!”

  • In Act 4, Scene 2, Othello describes how his pure love for Desdemona has become “a cistern for foul toads / To knot and gender in”, a grotesque image indicative of how utterly Iago has poisoned his mind

• Tracing one of these three groups across the whole play is an efficient way to build an essay-question argument. The animal imagery is the clearest, because it starts in Iago’s mouth and ends in Othello’s

Speech styles

• Shakespeare switches frequently between blank verse and prose in Othello, and uses these different speech styles to create effects and reveal information about the characters

• In drama, blank verse is traditionally assigned to characters of noble bearing and/or high status:

  • The iambic pentameter rhythm of blank verse also makes it appropriate for speeches about love: the iamb pattern replicates the sound of a heartbeat

• Othello’s opening speeches in Act 1, Scene 2 and Act 1, Scene 3 make clear that his characteristic spoken style is a dignified, measured blank verse:

  • This is appropriate, given his important status in the play

  • His poetic spoken style also defies prevailing stereotypes of the time of black, animalistic savages

  • The critic G. Wilson Knight named this style the “Othello music” in The Wheel of Fire (1930). Leavis reads the same speeches as self-dramatisation rather than nobility, so the style itself is contested, and that makes it useful for AO5

• As Iago begins to poison Othello’s mind in Act 3, Scene 3, Iago and Othello begin to complete one another’s lines of iambic pentameter:

  • Moments of dialogue such as “You would be satisfied?” / “Would! Nay, and I will” reveal Iago’s growing influence over the Moor

• Prose in Othello also reveals a great deal about various characters, and Shakespeare often uses it to signal a character’s loss of emotional control:

  • Cassio speaks in prose when drunk in Act 2, Scene 3

  • Othello’s speaking style shifts from blank verse to prose in Act 4, Scene 1 as he becomes convinced of Desdemona’s infidelity

  • Iago switches between blank verse and prose more than any other character, indicating the ease with which he uses rhetoric to manipulate and deceive others

Iago's rhetoric

• Iago says very little and lets Othello finish the thought. His methods are consistent enough to list:

  • Repetition: he echoes Othello’s words back as questions, then refuses to explain, so Othello supplies the meaning himself

  • Refusing to speak: when he says he should not tell Othello what he thinks, the unsaid thing does more damage than an accusation would

  • Generalising: he credits his hints to common knowledge, as in “Of her own clime, complexion, and degree, / Whereto we see in all things nature tends”

  • Aphorism: he offers polished general truths that sound disinterested, calling “Good name in man and woman” the “immediate jewel” of their souls

• Iago speaks more lines than Othello. This is the only one of Shakespeare’s four major tragedies where the villain has the largest part, and he has most of the soliloquies too

Sources:

Shakespeare, W. (1951) ‘Othello’, in P. Alexander (ed.) The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: The Alexander Text. London: Collins.

Shakespeare, W. (1986) ‘Othello’, in S. Wells and G. Taylor (eds.) The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Giraldi Cinthio, G.B. (1565) Gli Hecatommithi, Decade 3, Story 7. Mondovì: Lionardo Torrentino. English translation by J.E. Taylor (1855).

Knight, G.W. (1930) ‘The Othello Music’, in The Wheel of Fire. London: Oxford University Press, pp. 107–131.

Leavis, F.R. (1952) ‘Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero’, in The Common Pursuit. London: Chatto & Windus.

Wilson, J. [‘Christopher North’] (1849–50) ‘Dies Boreales’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.