SHAKESPEARE`S

`OTHELLO`

Linguistic features & literary

devices
Shakespeare's use of language – useful terms:
•blank verse
•prose
•imagery
•simile
•personification
•alliteration
•assonance
•metaphor
•onomatopoeia
•word play
•puns
•slang
•hyperbole
•oxymoron
•anaphora
•biblical references
•classical references
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGEDY ''OTHELLO'' FOLLOWS THE STORY
OF OTHELLO, A MOOR WHO SECRETLY MARRIES DESDEMONA. THEIR
SECRET MARRIAGE IS DISCOVERED AND TERRIBLE EVENTS TAKE
PLACE. IN THIS PRESENTATION, WE WILL LOOK AT THE LITERARY
DEVICES AND LINGUISTIC FEATURES USED TO DEVELOP THIS
TRAGEDY.
ALLUSION
 Allusion is a popular literary device used in Othello. Allusion is a literary device in
which the character, narrator, or author refers to another work of literature or
piece of writing. For example, Othello alludes to Greek mythology and religious
ideology found in the Bible. For example, Othello makes an allusion to the Bible in
Act IV, scene ll when he says, 'You, mistress, / That have the office opposite to Saint
Peter…'
 Othello is referring to Desdemona, his wife. Othello is saying that after her death,
Desdemona will be guarding the gates of hell. St. Peter is the guardian of the gates
of heaven. Othello exclaims that Desdemona is going to hell because Iago has
tricked him into thinking she is having an affair with Cassio. Moreover, by referring
to Desdemona as the keeper of all things in hell, he is saying that she is the worst
of the sinners. The allusion helps to advance the plot by creating a further divide in
the trust between Desdemona and Othello. Othello is outraged, but his
accusations are misplaced.
SIMILE
 A simile is a literary device in which one thing is compared to another thing.
In Othello, Iago, the play's antagonist says, 'The food that to him now is as luscious
as locusts...' This is a simile because Iago is comparing the deliciousness of the
food to that of the lusciousness of the locusts.
METAPHOR
 Dangerous conceits are, in their natures, poisons,
Which at the first are scarce found to distaste,
But, with a little act upon the blood,
Burn like the mines of sulphur.
    — Iago
 They [men] are all but stomachs, and we all but food:
They eat us hungerly, and when they are full,
They belch us.
    — Emilia
IMAGERY
 I see sir, you are eaten up with passion.
— Iago (3.3.391)
 I think the sun where he was born
Drew all such humours from him.
    — Desdemona (3.4.30–31)
UNFAMILIAR WORDS
 There are lots of unfamiliar old words , which we no longer use. In the opening scene
of Othello, for example, you will find the words certes (i.e., certainly), affined (i.e.,
bound, obliged), producted (i.e., produced), as well as expressions like forsooth, God
bless the mark, and Zounds (i.e., by Christ’s wounds). Words and expressions of this
kind become familiar the more of Shakespeare’s plays you read.
 In Othello, as in all of Shakespeare’s writing, the more problematic are the words that
are still in use but that now have different meanings. In the first scene of Othello we
find, for example, the words circumstance (meaning
“circumlocution”), spinster (meaning “one who spins”), propose (meaning
“converse”), peculiar (meaning “personal”), owe (meaning “own”), and bravery (meaning
“impertinence, defiance”). Such words, too, become familiar as you continue to read
Shakespeare’s language.
 Some words are strange not because of the “static” introduced by changes in
language over the past centuries but because these are words that Shakespeare is
using to build a dramatic world that has its own geography, history, and background
mythology. In Othello, three such worlds are built. First is the world of Venice and its
surrounding territory, created through references to gondoliers and “togèd consuls,”
to “the magnifico,” to Florentines, to Janus, to the Venetian signiory, to “carracks”
and “prizes.” These “local” references build the Venice that Othello and Desdemona,
Iago, Cassio, and Brabantio inhabit for the first act of the play. Second is the world
from which Othello has come, a world of “antres vast and deserts idle,” of
Anthropophogi, of the tented field and the imminent deadly breach. In the opening
scenes of Act 2, the language that has built the worlds of Venice and of Othello’s
“extravagant” past is replaced with language that creates the Mediterranean island
of Cyprus, to which the action moves—references to “high wrought floods,” to
“barks” (i.e., ships), to “shots of courtesy,” to the “guttered rocks” and “congregated
sands” of the ocean, to “the citadel” and the “court of guard.” Such local references
will soon become a familiar part of your reading of the play.
SHAKESPEARE`S SENTENCE
 In an English sentence, meaning is quite dependent on the place given each word.
“The dog bit the boy” and “The boy bit the dog” mean very different things, even
though the individual words are the same. Because English places such
importance on the positions of words in sentences, on the way words are
arranged, unusual arrangements can puzzle a reader. Shakespeare frequently
shifts his sentences away from “normal” English arrangements—often in order to
create the rhythm he seeks, sometimes in order to use a line’s poetic rhythm to
emphasize a particular word, sometimes to give a character his or her own
speech patterns or to allow the character to speak in a special way. When we
attend a good performance of a play, the actors will have worked out the
sentence structures and will articulate the sentences so that the meaning is clear.
In reading the play, we need to do as the actor does: that is, when you become
puzzled by a character’s speech, check to see if words are being presented in an
unusual sequence.
 Look first for the placement of subject and verb. Shakespeare often places the verb before the
subject or places the subject between the two parts of a verb (e.g., instead of “He goes,” we find
“Goes he,” and instead of “He does go,” we find “Does he go”). In the opening scenes
of Othello, when Iago says “such a one do I profess myself” and when Brabantio says “Gone she
is,” they are using constructions that place the subject and verb in unusual positions.
 Such inversions rarely cause much confusion. More problematic is Shakespeare’s frequent
placing of the object before the subject and verb (e.g., instead of “I hit him,” we might find “Him
I hit”). Brabantio’s statement to Roderigo at, “This thou shalt answer,” is an example of such an
inversion. (The normal order would be “Thou shalt answer this.”) Othello uses an inverted
structure when he says “I would not my unhousèd free condition / Put into circumscription and
confine / For the sea’s worth” (where the “normal” structure would be “I would not put my
unhousèd free condition into circumscription . . .”).
 Also Locating and if necessary rearranging words that “belong together” is especially helpful in
passages that separate subjects from verbs and verbs from objects by long delaying or
expanding interruptions. For example, when Iago tells Roderigo about having been passed
over for the lieutenancy, he uses such an interrupted structure:
And I, of whom his eyes had seen the proof
At Rhodes, at Cyprus, and on other grounds
Christened and heathen, must be beleed and calmed
By debitor and creditor.                   
SHAKESPEAREAN WORDPLAY
 Shakespeare plays with language so often and so variously that entire books are written on
the topic. Here I will mention only two kinds of wordplay, puns and metaphors. A pun is a play
on words that sound the same but that have different meanings. In many plays (Romeo and
Juliet is a good example) Shakespeare uses puns frequently. In Othello they are found less
often; when they are used (except in Iago’s “comic” verses), they carry meaningful ambiguity or
complexity. When Brabantio accuses Desdemona of “treason of the blood”, for instance, his
pun on blood allows the phrase to mean both “betrayal of her father and family” and “rebellion
of the passions”; when the word abused appears (it occurs eight times in this play), it often
means both “deluded, deceived” and “violated, injured”; the word erring means both
“wandering” and “sinning”; complexion means both “temperament” and “skin color”;
and period, in Lodovico’s “O bloody period!”, signifies (powerfully) the end of Othello’s speech
(a rhetorical term) and the final point or limit of his life. In this play that focuses so relentlessly
on sexuality, many of the puns are on words like play (meaning “wager,” but carrying a
secondary meaning of “engage in sexual sport”), cope (meaning “meet, encounter,” with a
secondary meaning of “copulate”), and sport (meaning “fun,” but also “amorous play”).
 A metaphor is a play on words in which one object or idea is expressed as if it were
something else, something with which it is said to share common features. For instance,
when Iago says that he has been “beleed and calmed” by Cassio, he is using metaphoric
language: as a way of saying that Cassio has interfered with his military career, he uses
nautical terms, picturing himself and Cassio as sailing ships, with Cassio coming between
Iago and the wind, putting Iago in the lee and thereby stopping his progress. In many of
his more inflammatory metaphors, Iago pictures lovers as mating animals (as in the
famous statement to Brabantio about Othello and Desdemona: “An old black ram is
tupping [mating with] your white ewe”). And, after working out the details of his
entrapment of Desdemona, Cassio, and Othello, Iago sums up his plot in graphical
metaphorical language: “So will I turn her virtue into pitch, / And out of her own
goodness make the net / That shall enmesh them all”—where the qualities of pitch (a
substance that is black, malodorous, and extremely sticky) make it the perfect substance
for Iago to picture as helping him “enmesh” his victims.
THANK YOU FOR ATTENTION!