Thinking about 'Othello'

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Here are 10 exercises on quotations in Othello. They are designed for pair-work 15-minute sessions in class, but work perfectly well for individuals. You need to know the play well, so these are for revision at a late stage of study. The purpose is to make your mind work hard: retrieving factual details, certainly, about the sequence of the play, individual quotations and so on, but more importantly know making you think and create connections, and have a debate with a partner.

You don’t need to write on the original sheet itself: just take a piece of paper and jot down your responses. When finished find the quotation in context from the text itself, and then fill in any gaps. [Line numbers are from the Signet edition].

Here is a series of 15 exercises on Hamlet in the same format, and 17 on King Lear.

  1. ‘In following him, I follow but myself. / Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty, / But seeming so, for my peculiar end.’ Iago, I i 55-57. Go here.

  2. ‘She loved me for the dangers I had passed, / And I loved her that she did pity them.’

    I iii 167-8. Go here.

  3. ‘The Moor is of a free and open nature / That thinks men honest that but seem to be so.’ I iii 388-9. Go here.

  4. ‘He takes her by the palm. Ay, well said, whisper! With as little a web as this will I ensnare as great a fly as Cassio.’ II I 165-7. Go here.

  5. ‘Now, by heaven, / My blood begins my safer guides to rule, / And passion, having my best judgment collied, / Assays to lead the way.’ II iii 203-6. Go here.

  6. ‘By heaven, thou echoest me, / As if there were some monster in thy thought / Too hideous to be shown.’ III iii 106-8. Go here.

  7. ‘Lie with her? Lie on her? – We say lie on her when they belie her. Lie with her! … Pish! Noses, ears and lips? Is’t possible? Confession – Handkerchief? – O devil!’ IV I 36-7, 43-4. Go here.

  8. ‘Alas, to make me / The fixèd figure for the time of scorn / To point his slow and moving finger at.’ IV ii 52-4. Go here.

  9. ‘Let husbands know / Their wives have sense like them. They see, and smell, / And have their palates both for sweet and sour, / As husbands have.’ IV iii 98-101. Go here.

  10. Then must you speak / Of one that loved not wisely, but too well; / Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought, / Perplexed in the extreme.’ V ii 342-5. Go here.