Othello Quotations

Question 1

Samuel Johnson’s famous 1765 ‘Preface to Shakespeare’

Answer 1

Othello’s “fiery openness” vs. Iago’s “cool malignity”

- Iago is evil, not mad

Question 2

“Falls in a trance”

“an epilepsy”

Answer 2

• the stage directions characterise it objectively as a trance (a lethargy of the body) whereas Iago diagnoses the trance as an ‘epilepsy’ (violent paroxysms)
• as a contemporary audience would know ‘conventions of a mad person’, as superior diagnosticians they would foil Iago

Question 3

“this is his second fit”

Answer 3

• an audience has no reason to believe Iago that this is Othello’s second fit

Question 4

“Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse/ Of sun and moon”

Answer 4

• ## Othello’s madness collapses as fleetingly as the physical geography of anger, seconds after murdering Desdemona he anticlimactically muses

Question 5

“Methinks it should be now a huge eclipse/ Of sun and moon”

Answer 5

• Othello’s madness collapses as fleetingly as the physical geography of anger, seconds after murdering Desdemona this is what he anticlimactically muses
• makes an appeal to the astrological realm which is a self-rebuke grappling with the necessity of astrological reassertion of power where bodily autonomy has descended into imbalance