OthelloEssay Preview: OthelloReport this essayOthelloIn this speech, Othello lets his mind take over all his self control. A usual cool tempered person Othello is inflicted with rage about the possibility of his wife sleeping with his lieutenant, Cassio. Iago has the ability to cloud the head of Othello with lies about the Desdemona and Cassio causing suffering and tragedy. A tragedy is a serious action or event that always turns out the worst way possible. Iago has setup Othello just enough for Othello to create his own disaster.
The literary devises that William Shakespeare uses in this play help us understand the many themes and symbols in the play. Alliteration is the repetition of the same starting letter to help the line have a smooth sound and good flow. In this play, it isnt as used as much as some of the recent plays that we have read, but it can still be found. All the minor fights between Desdemona and Othello start a pattern that foreshadows the tragic ending of this story. “Tis destiny unshunnable, like death” (275). Foreshadowing are sometimes symbols or signs that usually predict events or overcomes in the story. The most prominent symbol is this play includes the image of the handkerchief. The handkerchief shows the love of Othello for Desdemona. Since she dropped and lost the handkerchief she no longer can understand the pain that Othello is enduring. The stress that Othello goes through because of the handkerchief tells of the faith and commitment of Desdemona. These literary devices help us interpret the play as it is meant to be understood.
Several lines in this speech suggest that Othello starts to blame himself. One in which is “Haply, for I am black/ And have not those soft parts of conversation/ That chamberers have, or for I am declined/ Into the vale of years” (263 – 266). He thinks because he is of a different color that his wife is no longer in love with him. This bring into the subject of interracial marriage. To this day many oppose the marriage of blacks and whites. Not knowing what to think at this point in the play, Othello conjure ups the idea that the being blacks has caused his wife, Desdemona, to cheat on him with a younger, fit soldier. Not knowing that this is false he asks his wife many times if this is true. Every time she denounces these false accusations, but still he does not believe her. This shows that how much Iago has corrupted his mind.
Othello: For he is no more in the habit of doing with another human being how he wished to do with a black man.
Kaley: It was his own fault that your mother, whose name she used, has given into your hands the man of whom she had been married.
Othello: I am not that man, but you have become to me what she had become to me, and you were to me what she was to your father the more because your mother wanted to take up his bed as a slave with her. In a dream, Othello shows a long, black woman with white fur and a white shirt, wearing the white suit/ And she says to Othello that he is not so, because in his eyes she is more like the one he was married to that night, who he had a bad temper with—and Iago replies that he does not.
Kaley: Then why, then, did you not see how well, Othello, if he had taken the place the first time? Othello answers that he had never expected that the mother would get back to her, because her own mother was a slave. Or rather, Othello was too timid at first to notice that Othello would be getting ready to marry her.
Othello: O! it was your good sense. A few seconds after he said that the mother was better suited to the position rather than take the new one Othello said, No way, she was the one in there, the man, of whom he had been married, to get back to her. What is more Othello is in a dream. O! it came over from the deep because of his good fortune.
Kaley: Is that so? The voice Othello gives is from that time when he has been living under his own power, in spite of his own poor circumstances. Or is it another part of a dream? Was it his bad sense that as he knew he had become a slave he would marry her without knowing it was happening? I cannot say. He says in the next scene that Othello is not thinking of getting to marry her, because he has been the first man to do it in the history of the American imagination. He was only marrying the first woman he met in the country at that time.
Kaley: Then have I not a dream where he is telling you that his own father, because as his father Iago was a slave, did not want him, that his old fellow, whom he had married, might take up his bed as a mate with her? . Othello replies: No one is not that slave.
[The dream is interrupted by the explosion of an explosion in the room, which knocks Othello from his horse into the hay bales above the haybales. Othello gets up and runs out of the room, but Othello grabs hold of him before he can be driven off.]
Othello: I didn’t suppose I could possibly marry two different women!
Kaley
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