By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul’: so begins Act 5 Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Othello, with Othello’s speech leading up to his killing of Desdemona. This is the final scene of the play; by the end of it, Othello and Desdemona will both be dead, the tragedy brought to its grisly conclusion.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Soft you, a word or two before you go’: so begins Othello’s last major speech before he stabs himself. His last words, famously, are ‘I kiss’d thee ere I kill’d thee’. But between these two lines are a number of other noteworthy moments which call out for closer textual analysis. Let’s go through Othello’s speech, which can be found in Act 5 Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Othello, and offer a summary and analysis of his language and meaning as we go.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘And what’s he then that says I play the villain?’ is one of a number of major soliloquies spoken by Iago, the villain and chief architect of William Shakespeare’s Othello. We’ve previously analysed Othello here, but now let’s take a closer look at the speech which begins ‘And what’s he then that says I play the villain?’, which is found near the end of Act 2 Scene 3.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Othello is one of Shakespeare’s five best-known and widely studied tragedies, along with Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and Romeo and Juliet. But as is so often with a well-known text, we don’t know this one nearly as well as we think we do: Othello has more in it than jealousy, the ‘green-eyed monster’, and (implied) racial hatred.
Fun facts about Shakespeare’s classic tragedy
1. Othello has given us some very famous phrases. Whether we’re describing jealousy as ‘the green-eyed monster’, talking of sexual intercourse as ‘the beast with two backs’, or wearing our heart on our sleeve, we’re quoting Shakespeare’s Othello when we do so.
2. Quite where the name ‘Othello’ came from remains something of a mystery. Probably derived from the name Otho, the name Othello doesn’t appear in Shakespeare’s source for the play, the short story ‘Un Capitano Moro’ (‘A Moorish Captain’, i.e. Othello; indeed, Desdemona is the only named character in the source text; every other character is referred to by his rank). ‘Othello’ was, then – like, it has been suggested, the name Imogen – a Shakespearean coinage.