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Module 5 - Part
2: Explorations and Exercises
Other parts of this module include:
Index |
Part 1: Overview |
Part 3: Texts and Contexts |
Part 4: Web Resources
Uncertain Identity in a Changing World
To respond to these exercises, it helps to have some appreciation
of the social and political circumstances explored in them.
Click on Web Resources for further
insights into the way Shakespeare and his audience might have
responded to the range of associations alluded to in Othello
and other Renaissance texts.
These questions are arranged into three color-coded categories:
Level A invites you to look closely
at some specific aspects of individual texts. Answering these
questions shows that you have read carefully and understand
the significance of important words and ideas as they appear
in context.
Level B asks you to think more
deeply about the implications of some of the details that
you have isolated.
Level C allows you to build on
the findings of the first two categories to theorize broadly
about the relationship of the text to social and historical
forces beyond the work itself.
Topics in this module's Exploration and Exercises section include:
Focus on Shakespeare's Othello
as a reflection of geographical relationships and international
events
Level A
- One of Shakespeare's familiar techniques
for examining multiple definitions is to repeat a word
in a number of different contexts. Here, for example,
are three
words that are used to define our understanding of
the character of Othello, but that are applied as well
to other characters: Turk; Slave; Venetian.
Examine the recurrent uses of any one of
these words to see how complicated a figure Othello himself
is, while you also gain an appreciation of the impact of
the external world on the self in Othello. Note
who is speaking in each instance of the word and try to
explain the connotations of the term for the speaker and
his audience.
- TURK(S): 1.3.21; 23; 28; 209; 220; 2.1.21;
117; 198; 2.3.151
- (BOND)SLAVE(RY): 1.2.100; 1.3.137; 3.3.140;
163; 447; 4.2.136; 5.1.63; 5.2.250; 283; 298; 341
- VENETIAN: 1.3.343; 4.1.127; 5.2.346; 363
Level B
- Conclude with two or three paragraphs explaining
how the term's use changes in the course of the
play and offering your personal evaluation of the
significance
of the multiple identities that the term calls to
mind.
- Othello tells the Venetian Senate that he wooed Desdemona
by telling her of his "pilgrimage" (1.3.152).
Trace the journeys of Othello, from his boyhood in Africa
to his battles in Aleppo to his peaceful sojourn in Venice.
How is this a geographical representation of his internal
changes?
- Choose any one of the three questions listed below
to examine further the motif of travel in Shakespeare's Othello.
Level C
- Weave your response to all of these points
together in an extended essay.
- How might Shakespeare's audience have connected
the different elements in his personality to the
different
cultural meanings they assigned to places like
Africa, Aleppo, Venice, and Cyprus?
- Can you think of any sense in which Othello
has been a pilgrim, or has he merely traveled a
great deal from
place to place?
- Contrast the self-image projected by Othello
in his testimony before the Venetian Senate in
1.3 and in his
final speech (5.2.347–65) as the play
comes to its conclusion.
- Iago is the Spanish form of James. In the
beginning of the play, when Iago insists to Roderigo
that he hates
Othello, he speaks of his own identity in a curious
and riddling line: "Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago"
(1.1.57). It is possible that Shakespeare took the name
Iago from the Spanish name given to Saint James the Great,
one of the disciples of Jesus who was supposed to have come
to Spain and whose bones are enshrined in the great pilgrimage
site, the Cathedral of Compostela. How would this complicate
our understanding of Iago and suggest how daring was Shakespeare's
conception of Othello as a tragic hero?
- Shakespeare's audience in 1604 knew that the effort
of the Venetians to keep the Turks from taking over Cyprus,
land previously owned by Christian Europe, had failed. How
might that knowledge have affected their understanding of
the play's ending? How might the loss of Cyprus parallel
Othello's experience in the course of Othello?
Compare Shakespeare's Othello
to other texts in Norton Anthology of
World Literature, 2e
Level A
- Othello was enslaved at an early age, but
the play gives no details about this experience. There are
at least two possible situations in which a young African
might have been taken into slavery and then released.
- Read Birago Diop's Mother Crocodile (Volume
F) and explain how the events described there might
have involved the young Othello. What would be
his religious origins, springing "from men of royal
siege" (1.2.22)? How many religious conversions
would Othello have undergone by the time the
play begins?
- If Othello came from a culture like that described
in the Epic of Son-Jara, what would his
native religion be? How might the first story he
tells about
the handkerchief be consistent with the ideas
about women's roles in this epic?
Level B
- Compare the attitudes toward Moors in several
of the texts in the anthology, including Othello;
Lope de Vega, Fuente Ovejuna; and the Song
of Roland. For the Islamic view of the Christian world,
see the Story of Sheikh Sam'an from The
Conference ofthe Birds. To what extent are
questions of personal psychology pertinent to the religious
identification of the figures involved in the non-Shakespearean
texts?
- What ideas about Italy are important in Shakespeare's Othello?
- Elsewhere in Shakespearean and Elizabethan
drama in general, one encounters the term "Machiavel"
for plotters like Iago. Consider why the English should
have been so fascinated by this figure. Read the selections
from Machiavelli's The Prince in
Volume C, and comment on the way Iago's modus operandi relates
to "In What Way Faith Should Be Kept by
Princes."
- Why is it significant that Cassio is from
Florence? What kind of behavior does Iago implicitly
associate
with the culture of that city? Compare the
treatment of Italy by two of the great writers
of the Florentine
Renaissance elsewhere in the anthology: Dante,
the
Divine Comedy and Machiavelli, The Prince.
Focus on Texts and Contexts
Level C
- Shakespeare changed his source, Cinthio's Hecatommithi,
in many ways, not the least of which is his assigning
of proper names to the characters always
referred to as The Ensign and The Moor in the Italian
novella. Write a paper discussing the differences between
Cinthio's
and Shakespeare's treatment of the same material.
How important are the questions of identity that we
have been
reviewing in Othello in the original Italian novella?
- Compare the complex attitudes toward Venice in Shakespeare's
play with the nostalgic view taken by Wordsworth in his
sonnet "On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic," and
discuss the choice of the central image of the city
as a maiden one.
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