Othello

Grade Levels

Excerpt

Through dialogue, playwrights reveal a character’s motivations, personality traits, and relationships with other characters. Diction (word choice) plays an essential role in writing dialogue because it creates mood, develops characters, and establishes events in the play. The following activity will help students analyze passages of dialogue and determine how they inform scenes in the play.

In The Tragedy of Othello, Shakespeare creates a tragic hero who is destroyed by fatal flaws in his own character. Driving Othello’s tragedy is his pride and personal insecurity, qualities that make him vulnerable to jealousy and suspicion. A valiant and respected general in service to the duke of Venice, Othello is led to believe that his wife, Desdemona, has betrayed him by carrying on an adulterous affair with Michael Cassio, one of his lieutenants. Sick with jealousy and rage, Othello eventually smothers Desdemona with a pillow as she begs for her life, and he subsequently kills himself when he learns that she had been innocent. The villain orchestrating the drama is Iago, Othello’s ensign, who seeks revenge for Othello’s promoting Cassio over him. Iago’s secret and malignant intentions are established immediately in act 1, and the plot unfolds as he carries them out. In act 3, scene 3, Iago manipulates Othello to ingratiate himself, condemn Cassio, and destroy Othello’s peace and happiness by convincing him that Desdemona is unfaithful. Also appearing in the scene are Desdemona; Iago’s wife, Emilia; and Cassio.

Skills: character analysis, drawing inferences from text, interpreting diction for connotative meaning

Learning Objectives:
In completing this activity, students will

• analyze passages of dialogue to identify the speaker’s character traits, conflicts, and motivations;
• examine the diction in passages of dialogue to interpret the connotations of key words and explain how they create mood in the scene;
• determine from passages of dialogue characteristics of the speaker’s relationship with another character in the play.

About

Our eNotes Classroom Activities give students opportunities to practice developing a variety of skills. Whether analyzing literary devices or interpreting connotative language, students will work directly with the text. The main components of our classroom activities include the following:

• A handout defining the literary elements under discussion, complete with examples
• A step-by-step guide to activity procedure
• An answer key or selected examples for reference, depending on the activity

In completing these classroom activities, students will be able to classify and analyze different literary elements, thereby developing close-reading skills and drawing deeper inferences from the text.