Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Please explain to me the wordplay of this sentence and dramatic purposes served by the imagery in Othello, Act 4, Scene 1:You did wish that I...

Othello's reference to "goats and monkeys" in
Shakespeare's play is a sign that his mind is beginning to break down - he is treating
his own wife, a girl that he has no reason to think is not totally pure, as a fallen
woman - Iago's constant pressure is beginning to pay off. Different animals had
different connotations in Shakespeare's time and monkeys had been referred to as "hot"
or, in our terms, being morally "loose" and full of licenscious animal drives and
passions.Othello, it seems, has little experience with women and is very black and white
when it comes to categorizing them. This is because armies were an all-male preserve for
a lot of the time, and travelled away a lot. Men were more like likely to believe an old
comrade in arms than a girl they had just met, simply through the life-saving
attachments they had built up.

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