Othello, the Image Machine Essay -- Othello essays

Othello, the Image Machine Shakespe bes drama Othello presents a full panoply of diverse imagery that cannot be described briefly. Lets spend whatever attention on this subject which has so many examples in the play. Alvin Kernans Othello an Introduction explains how the symbolic geography imagery of the play create a concomitant image of space and time We can begin to see this pattern in the symbolic geography of the play. Every play, or work of art, creates its own picky image of space and time, its own symbolic world. The outer limits of the world of Othello are defined by the Turks the infidels, the unbelievers, the general enemy as the play c boths them who, just everyplace the horizon, sail back and forth trying to confuse and trick the Christians in order to invade their dominions and destroy them. Out beyond the horizon, reported but unseen, are also those anters vast and deserts idle of which Othello speaks. Out there is a land of rough quarries, rocks and hills w hose heads touch heaven inhabited by cannibals that each otherwise eat and monstrous forms of men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders. (76-77) There is no shortage of imagery in the play this is for certain. Critic Caroline Spurgeon in Shakespeares Imagery and What it Tells Us sorts finished the plethora of imagery in the play The main image in Othello is that of animals in action, preying upon one another, mischievous, lascivious, cruel or suffering, and through these, the general sense of pain and unpleasantness is much increased and kept constantly before us. More than half the animal images in the play are Iagos, and all these are contemptuous or repellent a plague of flies, a qua... ...ore Evans. Boston, MA Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974. Kernan, Alvin. Othello and Introduction. Shakespeare The Tragedies. Ed. Alfred Harbage. Englewood Cliffs, NJ Prentice-Hall Inc., 1964. Mack, Maynard. Everybodys Shakespeare Reflections Chiefly on the Tragedies. Lincoln, NB University o f Nebraska Press, 1993. Muir, Kenneth. Introduction. William Shakespeare Othello. impudently York Penguin Books, 1968. Shakespeare, William. Othello. In The Electric Shakespeare. Princeton University. 1996. http//www.eiu.edu/multilit/studyabroad/othello/othello_all.html No line nos. Spurgeon, Caroline. Shakespeares Imagery and What it Tells Us. Shakespearean Tragedy. Ed. D. F. Bratchell. New York Routledge, 1990. Wilson, H. S. On the Design of Shakespearean Tragedy. Canada University of Toronto Press, 1957.