Hello all,
Considering that all Y13s have now completed their drama A-level this last Wednesday, I thought it would be apt to upload my own notes on Othello. Although I never completed this set of notes, I hope that they’ll serve useful to anyone hoping to decipher the play.
These notes make up an eclectic mix of language and structural analysis, essential contextual points, and some critical quotes that one can employ in essays.
Since the Year 12s will be beginning to write essays on the Poems of the Decade unit, I thought I’d upload my the first essay plan I produced at the start of the A-level. The following might provide a few ideas for essays or AO2 analysis. It’s important to highlight that you’d only need to mention one or two language or structural techniques within the poem. It’s key that you write in depth about their effects, rather than simply listing what techniques the poets employ.
Main Argument
Relationships are presented in both poems as a perpetual imbalance of power between the masculine and the feminine that progresses towards a shift in the scale towards either female dominance over the masculine or the continuation of the subjugation of the feminine.
Sub-Argument 1:
The course of relationships demonstrates a shift in the power imbalance between genders — the Gun and Eat Me diverge in the methods and success of the power of the feminine. Still, is the speaker of Eat Me more liberated than the speaker of the Gun? Extent of the liberation from the masculine? Extent of the original power imbalance?
Progression of time phrases:
Eat Me: ‘When I hit thirty,’ ‘Then,’ ‘The day I hit thirty-nine,’ ‘Soon you’ll be forty,’ A morbid counting of weight, ostensibly years, acts as a progressive impetus for a feminine increase of power.
The Gun: ‘At first,’ ‘Then,’ ‘Soon’ charts a destructive process of regaining masculine primitive power.
Shift of the male pronoun and reinstatement of the female — Autonomy:
Eat Me = ‘He asked me,’ ‘He’d say,’ ‘His pleasure,’ ‘He whispered,’ ‘I allowed him,’
The Gun = ‘Your hands reek,’ ‘You trample,’ ‘I join in the cooking,’ Second person address to a male persona. No defined person, involving the reader in the masculine. Pervasion of power and how that draws people?
Authorial ambiguity over the final consequences of a gender power shift:
Eat Me: ‘His eyes bulging with greed. There was nothing left in the house to eat.’ Ambiguity between cannibalism and murder that provokes a strong sense of repulsion in the reader. Confrontation of reader’s morality? Societal consequences of her liberation? Involved sexual pleasure for the male partner in ‘greed?’ Fulfillment of male desire? Thus, has she satisfied her role as the female partner? Societal victim = male, emotionally = female – open to interpretation? ‘Dying sentence,’ fateful societal consequences – replication of male violence to which she has been conditioned.
The Gun: ‘I join in the cooking,’ ‘King of Death has arrived to feast,’ Uncertainty in the level of female complicity in whether the female partner joins in a return to male power over nature. Intoxication allure over the power of death and her equally participating in that violence, ‘jointing and slicing,’ – coupled actions – and the couple are unified in their relationship with death with the willing participation of the feminine. ‘Sprouting golden crocuses’ to mean the unification of life and death – male and female.
Subjugated to the male partner who has become and wields the power of the ‘King of Death’ – masculine domination over the female nature. They are separated by defined domestic roles – cooking and hunting. ‘Sprouting golden crocuses,’ to mean the entrapment of natural beauty and life. Interpretation of first flower to break the snow?
Sub-Argument 2:
The power of the inanimate over living relationships and their influence as a third party, e.g., the gun or food, in charting the direction of the relationship. Acting as a third hand or tool of exerting power for the masculine. How does the female partner react to this object? What does the object symbolise?
Tripart Relationship
Eat Me: Tripart relationship represented in tercets of man, woman and food.
The Gun: Opening line of ‘Bringing a gun into a house changes it.’ Involvement of the house (domesticity = feminine), male partner in the action of bringing, and the gun (symbol of traditional masculine power).
Intrusion of the inanimate in power dynamics:
‘Stretched out like something dead itself,’ Physical intrusion into the relationship, emphasised by the reflexive pronoun, end stopped, to emphasise how the gun both bears and causes death. ‘Grainy polished wood stock,’ Long metal barrel,’ cyclical element of gothic destruction of nature. Is nature being destroyed or recrafted by man’s influence? ‘I join in,’ = involvement of the feminine
‘My only pleasure the rush of fast food, his pleasure to watch me swell like forbidden fruit.’ Ostensibly irony, but the fast food becomes interlinked with their sexual pleasure shared between them. The contrast between his and her pleasures to emphasise how her sexual desire stems from his – dependence. Further linked by the assonance between ‘food’ and ‘fruit.’ Similarity and interweaving – intermingling of sexual desires. Can we exonerate only her?
Sub-Argument 3:
The core of relationships in being sexual agreement in the alignment of sexual desires between partners. Power in the sexual that each partner offers. The reason that female partner agrees to the desire of the masculine. What is the course of action when the female partner does not agree sexually to the male proclivities?
Tonal shifts to reflect a realisation of sexual desire
The Gun: coinciding & separation: Eat Me
‘Your eyes gleam like when sex was fresh.’ The gun and the destruction of life meshes a refound sexuality and virility with the masculine persona – a new ‘spring’ that revives their ‘shadow’ of a relationship. By the sexual fulfilment of the male partner, the female speaker is equally enthralled by his reclamation of sexual potency in it ‘brings a house alive.’ Her role as a sexual partner is in turn replaced by the role of the gun. Unified desires of ‘excited as if the King of Death had arrived to feast,’ invoke a bright, celebratory mood.
Alternative reading: subjugated by her replacement with the gun and reverts to a further passive role as homemaker. Tacit compliance? Threat of violence in the ‘stalking?’
Reader must consider the compliance between male and female partner in gender roles, as well as the source of power within the relationship.
‘I allowed him to stroke my globe of a cheek.’ Growth in autonomy and imposing her own power within intercourse. Here, she actively searches for pleasure within their relationship of co-dependency in acknowledging the man’s desire of her fatness – she is the ‘globe’ to him.
‘His flesh, my flesh flowed.’ Intertwining of selves.
Role of free verse to show the shifting female perspective
Eat Me: Granted access to the female psyche, imitating the pattern of concealment and reveal, contributing to that purposeful ambiguity. Reader’s empathetical understanding of her emotional abuse helps to blur the line at her final act of violence.
The Gun: Unstructured and conversational feel to the free verse that evolves along with the speaker’s thoughts to demonstrate the shift within the relationship and psyche.
Role of rhyme in connecting ideas with power and desire
The Gun: Fricatives (‘Fridge fills,’ and ‘Fur and feathers.’) and sibilance (‘Stirring,’ ‘slicing,’ ‘stalking,’) similar to serpentine hissing, much like the snake in the Garden of Eden – seductive allure of power and control over life itself.
Eat Me: Use of assonance in the underlying emphasis on food and fatness as well as uncertainty and vagueness, such as ‘Open wide, poured olive oil down my throat,’ to create the sound of choking.
Conclusion
Vicki Feaver = A requestioning of the female role within modern domesticity, juxtaposed by the harsh violence of masculinity and reverting to traditional role against the threat or allure of power over death.
Patience Agbabi = Prompt a rethinking of the female victim as well as the methods, or lackof, in which the feminine can react to the sexual proclivities of the masculine – outlet for pleasure. To place the reader on tribunal under the difficulty of exonerating either of the partners.
In ‘Eat Me’ and ‘The Gun,’ Relationships are presented as built upon a perilous state of tacit complicity between male and female partners in which the feminine will be subjected to the greater will of the masculine, often to violent and destructive effect.
‘Been a long time. Shouldn’t have left you without some dope posts to learn from. To learn from!‘ If you get the reference, you’re amazing and God’s favorite.
Anyways, because I have been really busy this week I haven’t been able to do my scheduled Monday post. But as Elisha has said about our Word Wednesdays/ Sometimes Word Thursdays… Better late than never. In my revision and panicked preparation for my test this week, I made a lot of notes about literary techniques that could be useful for essays or just for storage in your wheelhouse of knowledge. I hope you enjoy this resource and forgive me for my tardiness… Year 13 didn’t come to play no games! Lawd, have mercy.
Conflict in Literature
This is a literary device that is trademarked by a struggle between two opposing forces. It provides crucial tension and helps drive the narrative forward. Also, it is used to reveal a deeper meaning and highlight character’s motivations, values, weaknesses, strengths and hopefully our own.
Internal Conflict: When a character grapples and is torn between their own opposing desires or beliefs. This is a surefire way to develop a character whether they are a protagonist or antagonist or even an anti-hero.
External Conflict: This sets a character against someone or something beyond their control. External forces stand in the way of a character’s motivations and creates interesting tension as the character tries to reach their dreams or goals.
Conflict in detail
Character Vs Self: This may entail a struggle to discern what is right and wrong. It may also encompass mental health struggles.
Character(s) Vs Character(s): Character’s needs and desires are at odds with another. A non complementary relationship where the elevation of one character means the downfall or misfortune of the other character. Can be depicted through violence or an intricate ongoing struggle for dominance.
Character Vs Nature: This struggle can entail being in conflict with weather, wilderness or a natural disaster. This tests a character’s resilience and can pique reader’s interests as we are invested in the high stakes. This interest is only possible once a compelling character with clear or perhaps intriguingly ambiguous motivations (Not too sure. The jury is still out on that one.), clear idiosyncrasies (unique and distinguishing characteristics), flaws and strengths is established.
Character Vs Supernatural: Positioning characters against phenomena like ghosts, gods or monsters raises the stakes of the conflict by creating an unequal playing field. This creates fellow feeling, sympathy and pity for the character who is against insurmountable odds, provided they’re not completely morally repugnant. The fond feelings aren’t derived from aspiration but from the fact we can identify with them and resonate with their struggles, imagining what we do if we were in their shoes.
Character Vs Technology: Involves going against technology or development. Involves the battle of nostalgia and innovation. Relics of the past trying to find a way in a whole New and Unfamiliar world.
Character vs Society: Against society, government, or cultural tradition or perhaps an unjust societally constructed norm. Common in dystopias (Orwell, Attwood and Wells say hi). Characters may be motivated to take action against their society for survival, a moral sense of right and wrong or a desire for happiness, freedom, justice or simply altruistic/agapeic love.
You’re So Conceited! (A little something on Conceit)
It is a figure of speech in which two significantly different objects are likened together with the assistance of similes and metaphors (the ones of the extended variety). Conceit develops a comparison which is extremely unlikely but is always intellectually imaginative. A comparison transforms into a conceit when the writer tries to make us see a similarity between two things whose unlikeness is glaringly obvious. For this reason, conceits are mostly surprising. They are unlike the conventional comparisons made in similes and metaphors.
Example of Conceits
Her goodly eyes like sapphires shining bright,
Her forehead ivory white
Her cheeks like apples which the sun hath rudded,
Her lips like cherries charming men to bite
The term conceit usually brings to mind certain examples from metaphysical poets of the 17th century. Of these, John Donne stands out as the best exponent of the use of metaphysical conceits. John Donne, in his poem A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, says:
“If they be two, they are two so As stiff
Twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fix’d foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’ other do.And though it in the center sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.”
Out of this world (A little ditty on metaphysical conceits)
Metaphysical conceit, associated with the Metaphysical poets of 17th century, is a more intricate and intellectual literary device. It usually sets up an analogy between an entity’s spiritual qualities and an object in the physical/ tangible world and sometimes controls the structure of a whole section, dramatic monologue or poem. An example can be found in Patience Agbabi’s ‘Eat me’ (word to Year 12 English Lit. Nostalgia and all that.)
Metaphysical conceit Example
Macbeth does murder sleep’, the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast,–
For more on Conceit and its history you can visit this page
https://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-conceit-in-literature.html
Here’s an essay that I wrote during the beginning of year 12 – I hope that it might come in useful just to refresh your memory on one of our plays: ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’. It received an A*3.
‘Blanch is a tragic figure. Her belief in magic is her fatal flaw’
Throughout the play, Williams presents the central conflict of reality against fantasy through the vessels of Blanche, representative of the Old South the Williams writes ‘out of a love of’, and Stanley, symbolic of the new, industrial world. Williams’ portrayal of Blanche as a decaying Southern Belle, a trope used in Southern Gothic literature, spirals into the audience’s understanding that Blanche has a loose hold on reality and truth, shown in her clutching for magic, and therefore cannot survive in the contemporary world. Ultimately, she is a decadent relic of the Antebellum era.
Like in many Tragic plays, Williams used Aristotelian Foreshadowing in the form of an Epigram to emphasise that Blanche’s eventual fall in the last scene is destined because of her belief in magic. Though written about another character from Hart Crane’s ‘The Broken Tower’, it is clear that Williams uses it as a depiction of Blanche. ‘And so’, Crane writes, ‘it was I entered the broken world’. The definite article ‘the’ suggests that Williams feels that Blanche was elsewhere beforehand, and did not picture herself as being part of the world. This links to Blanche’s loosening grip on fantasy, and her being forced into the foreign world of Elysian Fields. The Epigram also suggests that the character has been forced to accept the reality of brokenness – why else would they enter this ‘broken world’? This sense of claustrophobia and Blanche’s inability to leave Elysian Fields throughout the play links to William’s use of Unity of Place, another Aristotelian technique, meaning that all the action takes place in one setting: the flat – all adding to a sense of helplessness, perhaps suggesting that Blanche’s fatal flaw is that she is uncomfortable with reality, wants to leave, but cannot. Williams also presents Blanche as a character trapped between ‘desire’ and ‘cemeteries’, the duelling tracks beside Elysian Fields. Linking to Freudian Psychology, the two names seem to suggest Blanche’s imbalance of destructive and constructive tendencies. She wants to survive, donning the ‘white gloves and hat’ of a Southern Belle, suggesting this sense of inner fragility and how delicate she can be. This description in Scene 1 also presents her as someone who wants to seem attractive, linking back to her incongruity to the setting and comfort-finding in anti-truth that leads ultimately to her mental destruction, unable to cope with the harshness of reality.
Blanche’s lapsing back from reality is also presented in how the character is haunted by the ghosts of her past, ghosts being another trop of Southern Gothic literature. Throughout ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, Blanche is haunted by the ‘Versouviana’, music we know to have played whilst her late husband, Alan, killed himself. This revelation in Scene 6 is dramatised by Blanche telling Mitch that her love for Alan ‘suddenly turned a blinding light on’ that was ‘turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that’s stronger’. Linking back to the epigram, perhaps Williams in trying to show that Blanche is living in the past and feels that Alan’s death took part of herself away. The motif of light also seems to be symbolic of truth in the play, suggesting that Blanche can no-longer be looked upon by truth, but must hide away in fantasy. In Scene 9, we find out that this music is playing solely in Blanche’s mind, yet the audience can still hear it, suggesting that Blanche’s circumvention of not just light by reality allows her to break the “fourth wall”, granting the audience to engage with her mentality. Crucially, Mitch is unable to hear this music, implicating that Blanche has entered a world where people cannot understand her, and even accuse her of insanity (‘Are you boxed out of your mind?’), all adding to the tragedy of her story. This only affirms Blanche’s quasi-transcendence and how other she is. This, of course, ultimately dooms her, is her hamartia, as it makes her so unbelievable and distrustful form the perspective of Williams’ other characters. Perhaps Williams is longing to educate his audience on how Southern Belles and those who yearn for this unforgotten world will be excommunicated by society. Williams seems to blame this on a lack of understanding, shown no more clearly that in Mitch’s inability to hear the music.
Finally, Williams also explores how aware Blanche is of her flaws. Earlier on in Scene 9, Williams zooms in on Blanche ‘hiding the bottle in a closet’ as Mitch knocks on the door. Here, Williams gives the audience insight on what Blanche is like when she is alone. An alcoholic, using the substance perhaps to escape from the burden of reality. This is where Blanche’s façade begins to unravel, calling into question how aware she is of her own multifacetedness. On the one hand, when Mitch attempts to turn on the light, she screams ‘Don’t turn on the light!’ Through his use of Plastic Theatre, this is one of the only times that Williams allows us to see Blanche at her base, at her core, as she used imperative speech, suggesting how truly fearful she is of letting her façade slip, implying that she is fully away of her hamartia of the belief in magic. Yet, like so many other characters in literature’s tragedies (Othella, for example), Williams does not allow Blanche an epiphany, which ultimately could have saved her, showing a sort of mental death as opposed to the death of many characters at the anagnorisis of Aristotelian tragedies. Perhaps Williams felt that a character such as Blanche is beyond redemption? Or perhaps he uses Blanche to show how much more we ought to understand each other?
To conclude, Blanche’s belief in magic (and society’s dismal attempt to understand her) is her fatal flaw. The idea of Greek Myth’s Elysian Fields (“a resting place”) and the warning of the Epigram and first scene (‘must avoid a strong light’), all implicate that Blanche’s fall was inescapable because of how little Blanche is able to adapt – unlike her sister Stella, who makes an easy climatisation into modernity through marrying the very emblem of 1940s America, and Blanche’s failure to wed Mitch. Fantastical Antebellum dreams could not survive in the bleak, post-war climate of the late 1940s.
In a broad sense, a personalised argument is what you feel about a poem, in relation to the question posed.A key to this is model verbs – the poet might… Could Wordsworth…? Blake may be arguing that… Model verbs are a way of building nuance into your personal analysis.
Because the Romantics mark scheme requires you to Explore the poems, rather than Compare, you must access an entirely different vocabulary to transition between the two poems. Here are a few phrases to use:
‘This view is enforced by…’
‘The is strengthened by…’
‘This gives greater insight into…’
‘This is shown more deeply in (the other poem)’
Another centre of a personalised response is a clear argument. Knowing where your argument will lead is essential for a high-marking essay – so always write down your thesis in your plan so that you can constantly refer to it.
How is Nature presented in Wordsworth?
“a thousand blended notes”
‘Lines Written in Early Spring’, Wordsworth
The following essay scored 25/30 marks (A*2). The parts in orange signify improvements made since receiving a mark.
Throughout ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ (‘Early Spring’) and ‘Composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ (‘Tintern Abbey’), Wordsworth urges his reader to return to nature due to its restorative capabilities, whilst conceding that the natural world is under threat. Paying homage to the folk tradition of ‘The Romance’, Wordsworth’s poetry rejuvenates the sentiment that, ultimately, the natural world is the home of purity and the natural home of humanity.
Firstly, Wordsworth portrays the natural world as rejuvenation and the original and natural dwelling of humanity. In ‘Tintern Abbey’ from ‘The Lyrical Ballads’, Wordsworth muses on the image of the secluded Hermit ‘where by his fire The Hermit sits alone’. This warm and isolated image could be idealising the solitary lifestyle that Wordsworth uncovers earlier on in the poem, when he longs to be ‘secluded’. The ‘Hermit’, here, becomes a natural progression of Wordsworth’s thought, underpinning how natural and true the poem is to Wordsworth’s ideology, unaltered and completely in line with Wordsworth’s emotions whilst in nature. The idealistic idea of the retreat into nature, epitomised by the Hermit, crafts Wordsworth’s Romantic concept of the rejuvenation that nature can produce. The noun ‘fire’ also seems to allude to the primordial past of man, where we gathered by campfires and lived among nature, not above it. Could Wordsworth be compelling his audience to return to nature from the industrialising world that he found himself in? Wordsworth might also be playing with the idea of the proverbial ‘fire’, in which mankind has gained its connection to the natural world and surrendered its chains to technology.
The Hermit, Wordsworth’s caricature of Romanticism, also seems to be entirely at peace, because of the passive and accepting verb ‘sits’. This Hermit no longer plays a part in the ‘human soul’ (‘Lines Written in Early Spring’), nit instead had dismissed the arbitrary life of the contemporary man, something that has ultimately set him at peace.
This line falls at the end of the first verse paragraph in ‘Tintern Abbey’. The half-line ‘The Hermit sits alone’ concludes Wordsworth’s introduction to his autobiographical poem, leaving the reader with a sense of mysticism, as the isolation of the Hermit must have seemed otherworldly to the structured and meaningless lives burdened under Industrialisation.
Here, Wordsworth might be showing his reader his disillusionment with the human world, a disillusionment that is informed by ‘Early Spring’, where Wordsworth critiques ‘the human soul that through me ran’. This could suggest that Wordsworth, much like the Hermit, has dismissed his own humanity as he has realised how destructive it can become. Whilst the iambic tetrameter could be mimicking the heartbeat of his humanity, it could even be referencing the heartbeat, or communal soul, of nature, one that he has been accepted into and longs to be a part of. This links to the Romantic concept of Pantheism which, again, links to the Romance of the Middle Ages. This revolutionary idea argues that mature and all who lived upon it are connected to an all-including deity. Here, Wordsworth surrenders his own humanity and might be urging his reader to do the same in order to end the chains of man’s woe and his encroaching on the natural world.
The verb ‘ran’ could be linked to the verb ‘sits’ in ‘Tintern Abbey’, and Wordsworth might be further perpetuating the metaphor of the busy and monotonous lives of those hooked to Industrialising Europe, arguing that these lives are ultimately arbitrary compared to that of The Hermit, who seeks to realign himself with nature, perhaps mimicking Wordsworth’s retreat to Dove House in the Lake District, a place once governed by nature, just as in the life of the Hermit. His rejection of humanity and longing to return to nature could also be seen as a product of the mass change in the everyday that Wordsworth witnessed in his lifetime. The turning of a simple life, relatively unchanged since the Elizabethan Age, one in tune and in flow with the natural life, to one governed and dominated by humanity’s corruption.
The spontaneity of Wordsworth’s art in ‘Tintern Abbey’, without stable line or meter, could reflect on his uncontrollable need and yearning to return “home”, back to the natural world. The idea of no longer belonging within humanity’s malignantly built world links back to the Romantic Notion of the revolutionary. Wordsworth himself praised the French and Haitian Revolutions (1791), likely because he encouraged those around him to exercise their own freedom so as to not be caught into the cycle of draining monotony that became the enthroned idol of Industrialisation. Wordsworth’s Romanticism, however, more deeply urges his reader to break free from not just the tyranny of those around us, but the torture of what man has created in industry (pollution, greed and the popularity of prostitution in the late 18th century).
Interestingly, ‘Early Spring’ enforces the dangers of the Industrial Revolution as perhaps having the power to corrupt man, but not nature. In ‘Early Spring’, Wordsworth laments of ‘what man has made of man’ in the framing of ‘a thousand blended notes’. Whilst he continues to be saddened by the anguish of humanity, he is still completely surrounded by the incomprehensible beauty of nature, a beauty that continued and a splendour that cannot be destroyed or muted no matter the torment that persists within it. This awe-inspiring beauty connects with the trope of the divine in Romantic literature when our poet is completely overcome by the unutterable beauty around him, whilst also connecting with the Sublime, mirroring the dual aspects of wrath and beauty found in both God and the pantheistic god in Nature.
To conclude, Wordsworth crafts the natural world as unbeatable, and whilst he might lament, something that continued to strive on. He creates the images of seclusion and the Sublime to argue that nature is the natural home of all mankind, we can become one with its power and all-mighty strength, a strength that to us all delivers contentment.
I hope that this helped – if even a little bit 🙂
Alexander Stephenson
Explore Shakespeare’s presentation of the relationship between Othello and Iago
PLAN – put together by Mrs Borrett’s Year 12 English Literature Class.
“There are Iagos everywhere!”
Prof. John McRae
Key Ideas: Control, Trust, Plotting, Audience’s omniscience (soliloquies), Audience’s helplessness, Abuse of trust, Machiavellian characters everywhere (John McRae), Moorish stereotypes, Comedy becomes tragic, Power, Motive, Truth.
ARGUMENT 1
Trust – The relationship between Othello and Iago is explored through the misuse and abuse of trust.
Quotation: ‘…honest Iago…’ (1.3) – response: Othello’s understanding of Iago is shown in complete contrast to the audience’s understanding of Iago (soliloquy ‘I hate the Moor’ (1.3)). Although the audience is omniscient, they soon become aware of their helplessness to the unfolding of Iago’s plot. Their relationship is one of uncertainty, encapsulated by the audience’s fleeting understanding of the trust shared between them. We, just like all but one of the characters in the play, are left uncertain by Iago’s motive, though we may well understand the gravity of his plotting’s trajectory.
“Motive-hunting of motiveless malignity.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Response: though at certain points in the play Iago does reveal motives, they soon become so convoluted that we grow wary of the truths within them. Our disillusionment with Iago’s soliloquies grows so great by the end of the play that his silence after the death of Desdemona becomes agonising. The only thing we understand is his action, so I would agree that Iago is motiveless, even to the point of his uncertainty about his own motive.
Whether his soliloquies are ‘motive-hunting’, however, as Coleridge writes, is questionable. Iago’s ‘And what’s he then that says I play the villain,’ does not seem to be on-the-spot ‘motive-hunting’, but rather a premeditated lure to draw in the audience to the more comical ideas in the play, to repress the ideas of tragedy, and make them complicit in his plot. This malignant, Machiavellian inconsistency shatters the trust between the audience and Iago as it reinforces Othello’s reliance on his betrayer.
ARGUMENT 2
Power – The relationship between Othello and Iago is explored through the pendulum of power that Shakespeare places between them.
Quotations: ‘I am your own forever’ (3.3). Response: when looking at power, we can explore the shift from Venice to Cyprus as a symbolic entrance into Iago’s world, a world in which the Venetian state holds no authority, and Iago plays the puppet master. Shakespeare offers us the metaphor of tuning instruments throughout the play to explore this dynamic, especially as Iago takes complete hold of the narrative in the Scene of Asides (4.1), capturing Othello’s need for ocular truth by his webbing of fatal misunderstandings, another comedic theme that Shakespeare has taken to the extremes in this play.
Iago is also the lens through which the audience sees the play. His soliloquies open up this world of impending doom to Shakespeare’s public. By the Scene of Asides (4.1), we must also ask ourselves how much of what Iago is presenting to us is in fact truth. To link with the argument on Truth, we will use McEvoy as a critic.
“Audience becomes complicit in Iago’s intention.”
Sean McEvoy
Response: the Othello that the audience understands is a constructed character. Iago is the primary source of information about our tragic hero: his introduction, his trust, his downfall, his language, his passion and his jealously.
I would argue that before 3.3, the audience is complicit in Iago’s plot. In 3.3, however, when we gain the knowledge that Iago now wishes to kill Desdemona, a character who is solely virtuous, the audience, I believe, must turn on Iago.
CONCLUSION
As the play reaches its final lines, Othello kills himself. Who holds power now? Othello is dead, as is his world. Iago, the character who dominates and orchestrates the entirety of the action up until this moment, becomes dormant. He gives no motive for his action. He got what he wanted, or at least what he told the audience he wanted. The audience is never given closure, nor is Othello, only catharsis in the restoration of order from chaos. Shakespeare ultimately burdens his audience with the brutal truth that Iagos are everywhere, and the dangers of naïveté. The play is based, in its simplest form, around the relationship between Othello and Iago. This is a tragedy of misplaced trust and the torment of invisible villains.
Alexander Stephenson
This is a piece contributed by Oliver Campbell. Enjoy!
The techniques used by each poet to present the recollection of traumatic memories creates suspicion in the reader as the personas relay fantasies as memories. This conveys the character’s obvious guilt for their actions, though both seem to attempt to excuse their atrocities through justification and ambiguity, in turn attempting to excuse humanities tendencies for violence. The two poets present two guilty characters, in The Lammas Hireling the real events are shrouded in ambiguity, In Giuseppe blame is passed throughout the poem, these attempts to shroud the truth convey a shame for their own memories. Through this reluctance of confession, the reality of the destructive human condition is displayed, and the attempts to conceal their shameful recollections show that, at least, the characters have remorse and guilt for once displaying humanity not at its worst, although not at its best.
In Duhig’s ‘The Lammas Hireling’ and Ford’s ‘Giuseppe’, the two personas are presented to the reader, both utterly enthralled in their guilt, to the extent of rewriting their own memories in an attempt to avoid the reality of their actions. Duhig’s narrator in ‘The Lammas Hireling’ takes the blame for his actions, later proclaiming “I have sinned”, the word “I” conveying a personal hand in a heinous crime, as if he fears divine retribution for his sins. Although the ambiguity of his actions in the poem proves his reluctance for judgement, observed in the quotation “my dear late wife”, inferring the murder of his wife due to the lack of emotion conveyed through Duhig’s writing as the poem immediately moves forward in the story. This could illustrate to the reader that the narrator could be trying to obscure his guilt with lies. In contrast it can be observed in Ford’s ‘Giuseppe’ that the speaker’s uncle is brutal with his recollections of the contents of his memory, including the phrase “But the priest who held her hands while her throat was cut” as an example of the apparent honesty and brutality in which he tells his story, presenting a visceral contrast between the pure image of the “priest who held her hands” sullied by the description “while her throat was cut”. The lack of any figurative language such as metaphors and the existence of only one simile in the poem “she screamed like a woman” at first sight conveys honesty though the uncle does not accept his responsibility for his guilty memories, preferring to pass on the blame “by a doctor, a fish monger, and certain others”, creating suspicion that both characters are reluctant to receive their judgement and neither are experiencing complete remorse, rather shame for their memories and an attempt to justify their brutality.
Through the reluctance to confess their acts found in the recollection of the characters, Ford and Duhig create fantasies to conceal the realities of humanity’s capability for destruction and horror. These fantasies were created to limit guilt undergone by the personas, Ford’s uncle character stating their captive to be a “mermaid” and “was just a fish”, though this fantastical element is a jarring addition to the poem’s realistic and brutal themes of war. Through ‘Giuseppe’ the character clearly attempts to prove the mermaid’s existence, “fish can’t speak” and “ripe golden roe”, though this fantasy begins to break down as the real story of the memory is revealed as the mermaid possesses a “wedding ring”, a disturbing revelation of her humanity and of the character’s inhumanity as after the recollection is concluded he “couldn’t look me in the eye”. Duhig’s speaker also adopts a theme of the fantastical, of a “warlock”. Though Duhig creates a story off horror to mask his wrong doings, and the supernatural “then one night” and “There was no splash” as further justification. Both narrators create fantasy to obscure the reality of their memories with tales to distract the reader from their own grim realities.
These coming additions to the blog will be produced by Elisha Carter, Fiona Hill, Efe Imoyin-Omene, Thea Dawson and Alexander Stephenson.
Every Monday, a new literary critique will grace you, courtesy of the crew, followed by a Friday post of an Author Spotlight, Book Recommendation, or a piece of our own writing.
We hope that you find our commentaries useful.
PLAN
Key Words/Final aim: greater significance (metaphorical or global), small moments, times, the themes of the nautical and the motif of the seas representing times (erosion), style (academic in Journal ‘paraphernalia’, often quite loose in History. Andrew Motion and John Burnside. The beach.
INTRODUCTION
Throughout their poems, John Burnside and Andrew Motion use small moments to symbolise events of great global or societal significance. In ‘History’, Burnside builds the image of a parent watching over his child on a beach within the backdrop of his fear and worry about the 9/11 attacks. In ‘The Journal of a Disappointed Man’ (Journal), however, Motion writes though the conduit of a journaling man, who writes down the proceedings of some men trying to fix a pile to secure the pier. The men are unsuccessful in their quest. Ultimately, both writers draw their poems around the central idea of meaning, and how meaning is often lost to underthinking.
ANALYSIS
Firstly, both poets use a coastal setting and the motifs of the sea and the coast to present a sense of inevitability and universality, even though both poems have unities of place. In History, the narrator writes that he and his son ‘flew the kites… along the beach.’ Here, the noun ‘kites’ may be emblematic of childhood and innocence, just like ‘the beach’. Throughout the poem, the kite motif could suggest this awkward balance between the dueling ideas of freedom and family, yet it is still something that is tethered, that must be held back, or it will be lost. This small moment could imply that we, too, as humans have the misconception of being free, yet are ultimately held down and burdened by both internal burdens and the pressures that exist in the world around us. In some of the final lines of the poem, the narrator later remarks on a ‘kite plugged into the sky’. The speaker’s new understanding of this burden and the misconception of freedom in our lives is epitomised here with this still, unwavering image of the kite being ‘plugged’. The kite-flying has now shifted, even though the narrator is focusing in on the same moment, to a pessimistic experience, and almost a degrading one, in which he has given up on romanticism and even hope for his child’s future.
In both History and Journal, our speakers place us in a coastal area. Just like for the narrator’s changing perspective, the beach may represent change in both poems. In Journal, men group together to replace a ‘pile’ on a pier, and are unsuccessful, leaving ‘the pile in mid-air’. Perhaps this could imply that both the masculinity of the ‘massive’, described as almost neanderthal by the journaling man, and the academic masculinity of the speaker are not the cure to solve the modern crisis of toxicity within masculinity. Motion seems to pin-point that these failures are caused by how ingrained stereotypical roles are hierarchies are within us.
Within moments of analysing the team, the journaling man creates a hierarchy between them. Because he has this literary dominance over the ‘monsters’, he creates this societal microcosm through his observation. Perhaps Motion is educating his reader on the inevitability of these concepts, that this cycle will constantly manifest itself. Even within the short viewing time, the observer already creates these constructs – they are innate within us. This problem, Motion dictates, is irredeemable. It is interesting that Motion picks the beach, the pier, the meeting of land and sea, as the symbol for this place and brokenness. Just like Burnside, Motion could be using the beach as an almost surreal place, adding to the sense of liminality and also the constant of change. The sea weathers away the frail and unstable forms of masculinity, as well as eroding innocence and childhood in History. This all engages with the sense of inevitability. How we will grow old, how we have to accept that men cannot always be strong, cannot always be beacons. The beach is a place where both the speakers do not go, but merely observe ‘on the dune slacks’ or watching from home. In History, the beach seems to represent a place where the adults can never return to, an innocence that they can never access again, even though the speaker may long to be given back those taken pieces of himself that he sacrificed for freedom and adulthood long ago.
Burnside speaks poignantly here about how ‘irredeemable’ our past is, and how we can only open it by pessimistically watching our children flying kites, and reliving the same experience as we have, only to end up one day by themselves watching on the ‘dune slacks’, the larger things in life watching over us in eerie dread as minutiae are lost to history and only the planes crashing into skyscrapers remains, and how surely all meaning and optimism and hope is lost to those things that people decide warrant a larger international stage, though all beauty might be lost. Perhaps Motion’s speaker does not go to the beach because, despite his verbosity, his casual utterance of ‘paraphernalia’ – though all he means is “stuff to do with stuff” –, he himself does not understand even the base levels of the present war on masculinity, so he covers up his inability to comprehend by not helping the men on the beach, by sitting in judgement of what he calls ‘monsters’ with his loquaciousness and academia and by forming his elaborate diacope around them. Ultimately though, he himself, just like the parents ‘on the dune slacks’ is left alone by the men, left ‘disappointed’. ‘That left… me of course.’ are the final words, and how his academic masculinity, just like what he perceives as the brutish masculinity, will be left behind by the turning time and the certainty of tides.
CONCLUSION
To conclude, the minutiae of our lives give greater meaning to our existence, and both poets use the failure or inability to truly understand that as the reason for cynicism, in the forms of pessimism in History and mockery or academic prejudice in The Journal of a Disappointed Man. Burnside and Motion both try to curve the trajectories or their readers into realigning their perspective with truth and the discovery of meaning through the use of the little things that colour our dreams and detail our lives, though, in the end, we must face up to the inevitability that we will all be lost to ‘History’.
Alexander Stephenson
The following files are a detailed, act-by-act analysis. I hope they’re helpful!!
Read More »Poems of the Decades essays require you to compare a poem you know with an Unseen. You don’t have to worry about context or critics because of the unseen element, so the best way to prepare is to make sure you have an adequate understanding of the anthology poems – particularly the key themes and techniques.
The Unseen poem will have been appropriately chosen for the two exam questions, so there will be plenty of obvious similarities as well as some subtle ones for high grade analysis.
There are several things you should address or at least note in these comparison essays:
The following are analyses on the 20 decades poems (courtesy of Mrs R), I hope they’re helpful:
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WymCol English Blog 