The Purpose of this Blog

Your task on this blog is to write a brief summary of what we learned in class today. Include enough detail so that someone who was ill or missed the lesson can catch up with what they missed. Over the course of the term, these 'class scribe' posts will grow to be a guide book for the course, written by students for students.

With each post ask yourself the following questions:
1) Is this good enough for our guide book?
2) Will your post enable someone who wasn't here to catch up?
3) Would a graphic/video/link help to illustrate what we have learned?


Friday 30 September 2011

Othello

On thursday, in groups we discussed our own interpretation of how the play- Othello should be started. We had to include what time of day it was, what actions takes place. In addition we had to create a 4 line of Iambic Pentameter summarising what Othello would say. The group I was in came up with an idea of Othello being at the centre of the stage saying;




"Judge me not by the colour of my skin,




As colour does not show what lies within,




but I shall hope to impress my lady,


...


We then started reading , the play actually starts off at a street in night in a midst of an argument between two characters- Iago and Roderigo. The conflict is about Roderigo getting a promotion when he had never fought in war: this decision is made by the leader Othello, making him look like a bad leader. This angers Iago, therfore he goes to the street outside Desdemona's (Othello's secret wife) fathers' (Brabanzio) house and shouts out accusations about his daughter having sex with a black man by saying "beast with two back". Although Iago doesn't reveal Othello's identification, he uses animalistic and bestial language to describe Othello's identification. For example; "an old black ram", kinesthetic and visual imagery is created, this proves the stereotype of black people as sexual predators because of Othello's age. This manipulates Brabantio who is still in denial that his daughter being married, let alone being married to a black man.


To summarise, so far we can tell that Iago's character is very bitter and boastfull who will not consider others feelings by the things he says. However, Othello can only be seen as a bad leader.


Lisa(:

5 comments:

  1. Nice work Lisa! I love how you added our groups Iambic Pentameters :D
    Yeah, this blog sums up what we did pretty well. Oh by the way, it wasn't Roderigo who got the promotion, it was a guy called Michael Cassio. You know, the inexperienced guy with the 'fair' wife :)

    Mumtas

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  2. This is a really good blog Lisa. Just to add to your blog we also created a table where we had to find descriptions of Othello and his marriage to Desdemona. We had to find the imagery, who had said it and then the effect is showed. When we found these it helped us see that Iago thought he was superior to Othello.

    Rebecca.

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  3. This blog is really useful. To add to the ideas surrounding the personality of Iago, he also came across as only abiding by Othello's rules and leadership tactics so that he would be able to take Othello's place when he was gone.
    Jessica

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  4. very useful summary of what we did, and great way to include many of the meanings behind what the characters say. i was very confused about a lot of iago's speech and perhaps it might have been helpful to include some annotations of it to help people that werent in, but still great blog

    Raydog

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  5. Very well written Lisa :) it was really useful for refreshing my memory on what we covered in this lesson

    Samiha

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