Imagery in Othello Essays -- Othello essays

Imagery in Othello The vast array of natural vision in Shakespeares tragic drama Othello dazzles the audiences minds. Let us survey in this essay the varieties of imagery referred to by the playwright. The vulgar imagery of Othellos ancient dominates the opening of the play. Francis Ferguson in Two Worldviews Echo each Other describes the types of imagery used by the antagonist when he slips his masquerade aside while awakening Brabantio Iago is letting loose the wicked hotness inside him, as he does from time to time throughout the play, when he slips his mask aside. At such moments he always resorts to this imagery of money-bags, treachery, and fleshly lust and violence. So he expresses his own faithless, envious spirit, and, by the identical token, his vision of the populous city of Venice Iagos world, as it has been called. . . .(132) Standing outdoors the senators home late at night, Iago uses imagery within a lie to arouse the occupant Awake what, ho, Brabantio th ieves thieves thieves / Look to your house, your young lady and your bags When the senator appears at the window, the ancient continues with coarse imagery of animal lust Even now, now, truly now, an old black ram / Is topping your white ewe, and youll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse youll have your nephews neigh to you youll have coursers for cousins and gennets for germans. David Bevington in William Shakespeare Four Tragedies comments that the imagery in the play is quite mundane, and he tells why The interlocking of good and evil is of course cosmic, but in Othello that battle is realized through a taut narrative of jealousy and murder. Its poetical images are accordingly focused t... ...s Desdemona before stabbing himself to death Cold, cold, my young woman Even like thy chastity. O cursed slave Whip me, ye devils, From the stubbornness of this heavenly sight Blow me about in winds roast me in sulphur Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire O D esdemona Desdemona abruptly (5.2) WORKS CITED Bevington, David, ed. William Shakespeare Four Tragedies. New York Bantam Books, 1980. Ferguson, Francis. Two Worldviews Echo each Other. Readings on The Tragedies. Ed. Clarice Swisher. San Diego Greenhaven Press, 1996. Reprint from Shakespeare The Pattern in His Carpet. N.p. n.p., 1970. Shakespeare, William. Othello. In The Electric Shakespeare. Princeton University. 1996. http//www.eiu.edu/multilit/studyabroad/othello/othello_all.html No line nos.