Detailed Notes on Act 5 of Othello including summaries of each act, key quotes, analysis of language and form and key contexts. At an A* A-level standard.
SUMMARY:
Roderigo attacks Cassio under the cover of darkness as he leaves Bianca’s house.
In the fight that follows, both men are wounded.
Iago slyly stabs Roderigo and then, in front of Lodovico and Gratiano accuses
Bianca of being involved in the attack on Cassio.
SHAKESPEARE CREATES HIGH DRAMA
This scene provides a direct juxtaposition to the somber lull of the previous, as in the
case of many of Shakespeare’s most chaotic scenes it is set at night. The play’s structure
also appears to come full circle as the audience once again enter the action in media
res, listening to a discussion between Iago and Roderigo, just as in Act 1, Scene 1.
Iago makes clear his malevolent nature as he concludes that whatever happens now
between Roderigo and Iago ‘whether he kill Cassio, or Cassio him or each do kill the
other’, he will ‘gain’ from the outcome. For Iago it is also very evidently still to do with
status, class and nobility as his reasoning for Cassio needing to die is that he is noble ‘a
daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly’ in which the contrasted concepts of
‘beauty’ and ‘ugly’ do not refer to physical appearances but rather good nature.
Use of stage direction is also critical in this scene as there is much on-stage action as
the audience would witness not only Roderigo and Cassio’s fight, but also Iago’s
wounding of Cassio in an act that could be viewed as cowardly as he attacks him from
behind, never facing him. This is ironic considering the very intimate death he tells
Othello to give Desdemona.
Aside from the action, a use of rhyming couplet establishes Othello’s final intent to kill
Desdemona ‘Forth my heart those charms, thine eyes, are blotted: / Thy bed, lust-
stained, shall with lust’s blood spotted!’, in this case Shakespeare appears to cross over
into the genre of Revenge tragedy as the semantic field of revenge, such as a lust for
‘blood’ indicates that perhaps this is a domestic tragedy turned revenge tragedy.
Like many of the other characters, Roderigo notices only after it is too late that he has
been set up by Iago as he exclaims ‘O damned Iago!- O inhuman dog!’
JUDGEMENT OF BIANCA
Bianca arguably parallels Desdemona in the sense that both can be considered collateral
damage of Iago’s plot for revenge, and both lose their reputations. The difference
between the two however is that Desdemona had a previously white reputation, wears
Bianca is much easier to pin blame on being that she is a courtesan.
Desdemona and Bianca are two characters who allows to consider perhaps whether
love makes women helpless victims.
As a male an a man of a higher status, Iago is automatically believed in his statement
that Bianca (using the derogatory insult ‘trash’) was ‘party in this injury’
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