Two Parts of a Single Motive: Identification and Recognition in the Tragedy of Othello (original) (raw)
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Iago and the Dramatic Transmission of Renaissance Semiotic Theory in Othello
"Recent studies demonstrate that Iago’s linguistic manipulations of reality in Othello (1622) reflect a wider shift in conceptions of Renaissance signification. Alessandro Serpieri compares Iago’s falsification of dramatic signifiers to simulacra (136), and Àgnes Matuska picks up on this observation to argue that Iago’s personification of linguistic signs encapsulates the “radically new forms of representation made possible by the historical, cultural, and epistemological changes often grouped under the term early modern” (46). Othello thus reflects a rhetorical turn in the conception of how language carries or produces potentially false meaning. By situating these studies within the dramaturgical method proposed by rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke, I elaborate on Matuska’s hypothesis to clarify additional parameters of Renaissance signification. My analysis addresses key classical and Renaissance texts that investigate what I term proto- semiotic theory. These works include Cicero’s De Oratore (55 BCE), Gorgias’s Encomium of Helen (c. 414 BCE), Plato’s Phaedrus (c. 370 BCE), George Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy (1589), and Thomas Wilson’s The Art of Rhetoric (1533). Not only did elite members of Shakespeare’s audience study these texts at grammar school, as Shakespeare did, but Shakespeare’s writing itself transmitted rhetorical theory to a popular audience. Therefore, as what Burke calls a terministic screen—a symbolic system by which an audience hears and interprets something beyond the screen itself—Othello draws on philosophical anxieties from outside the play. When combined with evidence from contemporary rhetorical studies, Burke’s terminology allows me to refine Matuska’s observations. By condemning the harmful aspects of language as embodied in Iago, spectators achieve a psychological release by punishing the villain for acting out universal linguistic transgressions. Renaissance proto-semiotic theory, therefore, as transmitted through Othello, acknowledges that signifiers do not always point to true meaning, without quite accepting that all linguistic terms are always already simulacra."
Othello as a Tragedy of Interpretive Models
This article argues that Othello dramatizes the struggle between two characters to control the interpretive possibilities of their world. These two characters are Othello and Iago. They both try to bring the inherent polysemy of the play under their control. This enables them to control the destiny of the other characters and their actions. The play cannot have two dominant interpreters. This is why the general and his ancient can only vie for supremacy. Each of them is ready to destroy anyone — including himself — to win over the other. To explain their strategies, I will make use of certain terms invented by the Italian semiotician Umberto Eco. Eco’s semiotic categories will help us highlight the way in which Iago and Othello direct the processes whereby the different elements of drama are imbued with signification.
Othello's Conflict: As a Collision of Love and Honour
IJOES, 2022
The current study is a new investigation of The Tragedy of Othello as an honor-killing tragedy that deals with the issues of love and honor under the context of the patriarchal institution of marriage. However, its primary concern is the hero's internal conflict that sets on the collision of love and honor under the influence of the external factor played by Iago, whose role is necessary to bring these two passions into collision and, accordingly, leads to the tragic end. The significance of this study is apparent. It is new. Unlike other various studies, it analyses the issue of love in terms of the (neo) platonic theory of love for the first time. The second place offers new valuable insights into Othello's tragic flaws. It proves the play is a tragedy of character and the hero's ruin is due to neither jealousy nor racism. His drawback is his upholding the absoluteness of these two passions. As a husband, he has failed to prey to his absolute adherence to the patriarchal attitude concerning honor and was unable to recognize the validity of his absolute love for his wife and her innocence.
Othello and the Gaze of the Other
2017
This article reads Othello through the discourse of cultural materialism. To do so, the writer’s discourse therefore, becomes that of the hysterical discourse going against the dominant discourse of the work. Cultural materialism borrows the ideas of many critics in order to study canonical works against the grain. Thus, this article uses cultural materialism in order to read Othello against the grain. To read it so requires resisting or hystericising the dominant discourse and worldview and shifting sympathy. The gaze of Othello signifies how psychologically the white society looked at him and how the white society considered him. Othello is Moorish and hence an Arab in Europe, manifestly calling to mind all the multifaceted confrontations and conflicts of Self/Other in a framework of power struggle. He is a non-western protagonist whose wife, a European equals Othello’s tribe. Othello is an odd-one-out protagonist whose wife, Desdemona, is referred to as a pearl. This pearl calls ...
This chapter presents a new perspective on the means by which Othello falls from his position of high status both within Venetian society and in the eyes of the play's audience. By examining the pertinent critical history of Othello, especially criticism accounting for the effects on Othello of Iago's machinations, this analysis explores the social and ideological relations between Iago and Othello through the lenses of several different critical approaches, including new historicist and cultural materialist. Our aim is to reveal the contradictions and limitations in this critical history that encourage an examination of the play according to a more inclusive approach that we call "transversal theory," which will be explained as the analysis progresses. 1 In doing this, we hope to emancipate the critical history of Othello from the delimiting analytical parameters that have characterized it, and to show the transversal ways in which Iago paradoxically opposes and reifies Venetian state ideology.
The representation of narrative: what happens in Othello
The usual structure of Shakespeare's plays is that after an expository first act, the three central acts -the main body of the play -are given over to dramatic representation of the main body of the narrative action which constitutes the story and the plot, before crisis and resolution are achieved in Act V; thus the central portions of King Lear deal with the progressive degeneration of both the Lear and the Gloucester families, those of Hamlet with the Prince's progress from uncertainty to commitment and the changing fortunes of the Polonius household, and those of Macbeth with the period of Macbeth's unchallenged rule. When it comes to Othello, however, Shakespeare is forced to adopt a rather different method, for the simple reason that the events which provide the nominal mainspring to drive the plot of Othello never in fact take place.