Newest Literature Essays

The world of Milton's Paradise Lost is a world of discourse, full of divine as well as human speech. When God creates Christ, he calls him "thou my Word, begotten son, by thee/ This I perform" (VII. 165-6). Indeed, the concept of the "Word" (Greek...

In Milton's Paradise Lost, angels and men are arranged in a divinely established hierarchy based on their relative proximity to God. Through the course of the epic, characters develop different and often conflicting conceptions of the spiritual...

In Paradise Lost, Milton plays with the preconceived notions of his readers by presenting perspectives perhaps never before imagined. God is not strictly the protagonist and Satan is not strictly the antagonist, on the contrary Satan is presented...

Perhaps the most seductive method of interpreting existence is through the bifocal lenses of morality. Whether in a religious or non-religious sense, almost every civilization, institution, and human has had its own demarcation of Good and Evil....

"...[F]rom what state

I fell, how glorious once above [the Sun's] sphere;

Till pride and worse ambition threw me down

Warring in Heav'n against Heav'n's matchless King:

Ah wherefore! He deserved no such return

From me, whom he created what I was

In that...

In Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost, God's only two commandments to his newest creations, the humans Adam and Eve, contradict each other. This is because God incorporates the contradictory notions of both faith and reason into the law by which he...

Nabokov's "Pale Fire" fractures the traditional doppelganger story (as do other novels of his, such as "Despair," "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight," and "Lolita"), which often relies on clear black-and-white doubles (Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyl and...

Ovid and Horace, Roman poets in the age of Augustus, collectively captured a very broad range of sentiments and atmosphere in the empire at this time. Horace wrote odes, satires, and epistles that glorify Augustus himself and his reforms and...

"I must weep, / But they are cruel tears," says Othello near the end of his soliloquy in Act Five, Scene Two, right before killing Desdemona. Traditional Shakespearean murderers do not shed tears prior to killing their victim; in Shakespeare's...

Shakespeare's Othello (Shakespeare, 1604) is a tragedy that unfolds based on the actions and language of one character: Iago. As a result, the plot is linear, yet the play manages to maintain a multidimensional effect. Shakespeare uses the...

In William Shakespeare's Othello, the deceptive Iago weaves an intricate web of lies with which he enmeshes Othello alongside his many other victims. His manipulation of other characters, machinations that serve as the driving force behind the...

In "Portrait D'une Femme", Ezra Pound contrasts the female inclination towards fragmentation, inertia and subservience with the corresponding male characteristics of spontaneity, wholeness, and dominance in an effort to underscore the threat posed...

The name Iago comes from Latin, "Iacobus," meaning "one who trips up another and takes his place." This name also belongs to the most important character in Shakespeare's Othello and one of the most wonderfully evil characters of all time. The...

Shakespeare's Othello is a tragedy unlike others of it's time. Othello is a play concerned with domestic fidelity more than royal usurpations. It is a play in which ocular proof comes from a mystical strawberry handkerchief rather than a ghost of...

Othello is a tragedy. But what qualities does it possess to qualify it as such? The key difference between comedy and tragedy is the ability to reconcile and tolerate the inevitable foibles of the human condition. In Othello nothing is tolerated,...

It has been suggested by many scholars and critics that William Shakespeare (1564-1616) "borrowed" the plotlines in his plays from various sources, such as the tragic works of the ancient Greeks and Romans and from other European writers that...

"Is this the promised end?" Analyse the final scene of Othello.

"Iago, you have done well that men must lay their murders on your neck" [5:2 line 166, p.157]. This ironic tone is akin to that of "Is this the promised end?" Can it be anything but...

According to the great English essayist and scholar William Hazlitt, the character of Iago from William Shakespeare's masterpiece Othello "is one of the supererogations of Shakespeare's genius," due the fact that Iago's "villainy is without a...

John Dexter saw Othello as 'a man essentially narcissistic and self-dramatising... a pompous, word-spinning arrogant black general'. However, Helen Gardner believed him to be 'a man of action and heroic in his deeds'. Using these views of Othello...

Othello is, among other things, a play about words. Each character's essence is expressed by a distinct idiom, and each character succeeds or fails, at least to an extent, because of language. A passage in the temptation scene, 3.3.191-222,...

As William Shakespeare's only truly Aristotelian tragedy, Othello has no subplot or comic relief, and, when originally performed, had little spectacle in the way of the set or action. The absence of these distractions leave the themes of the play...

Othello is a man of action. Hamlet is a man of inaction. If Hamlet were placed in Othello's world and vice versa one could assume that both would function well in those circumstances. Othello is a man of action in a play that demands his...

"IAGO: Stand you a while apart.

Confine yourself but in a patient list.

Whilst you were here, o'erwhelmèd with your grief -

A passion most unsuiting such a man -

Cassio came hither. I shifted him away,

And laid good 'scuse upon your ecstasy,

Bade him...

Speech in Shakespeare's "Othello" possesses a power beyond that of deeds'. It is Othello's fantastical storytelling that won him Desdemona at the start, Iago's poisonous suggestion that leads the general to murder his own wife, Emilia's testimony...