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Othello – Activity 2: Acts III–V

For each question, the passage cited is your starting point, not your only evidence. Go back through the play and find at least one further passage to support or complicate your argument. Take notes and mark specific lines throughout.

  1. Track the handkerchief from Act 3, Scene 3 to the end of the play. Othello gives Desdemona one account of its origin in Act 3, Scene 4 and a different one in Act 5, Scene 2. Why does he change the story, and what does the change reveal about him? What does Emilia's attitude toward the handkerchief — before and after she discovers what it has cost — tell us about her own position in the play?

  2. Othello demands "ocular proof" of Desdemona's adultery in Act 3, Scene 3. What he actually receives is hearsay, a reported dream, and a handkerchief. Consider: "Trifles light as air / Are to the jealous confirmations strong / As proofs of holy writ" (Act 3, Scene 3). What does this gap between what Othello demands and what he accepts reveal about what jealousy actually requires in order to be satisfied? Find at least one earlier moment in the play — before Act 3 — where Othello shows a similar (or strikingly different) standard of proof.

  3. Desdemona, Emilia, and Bianca each respond differently to jealousy and the question of female fidelity — in Act 3 Scene 4, Act 4 Scene 3, and across Act 5. Map those differences. What does Shakespeare gain by distributing this question across three women rather than leaving it with Desdemona alone? Support your reading with specific lines from each character.

  4. "It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul" (Act 5, Scene 2) and "Put out the light, and then put out the light". In both lines Othello repeats a phrase with a shift in meaning. What is "the cause," and why won't he name it? What are the two kinds of light — and what do these repetitions tell us about how Othello is constructing what he is about to do? Find at least one other moment in the play where Othello uses language this way to reframe something he cannot face directly.

  5. In his final speech, Othello describes a moment in Aleppo when he killed a Turk who had insulted Venice — and then immediately turns the knife on himself. Offer at least two different interpretations of what he is doing by ending his story this way. Then look back at how Othello has told stories about himself elsewhere in the play — particularly in Act 1, Scene 3 — and consider what those earlier moments add to your reading of this one.