Literary Insights

Every year, when I begin teaching the genre of Othello, I watch my students expect a simple love story. I […]

One afternoon in class, while we were reading Othello, a student paused and asked, “Sir, why does Shakespeare suddenly talk

Motifs in Othello are not decorative extras. They are the quiet echoes that make the tragedy inevitable. Every year, when

Every year when I teach Othello, I ask my students, “Who here trusts Iago?” A few hands go up. I

Figurative language means words that say more than they literally mean. In Shakespeare, images don’t decorate emotion. They create it.

If I ask my students what destroys Othello, they usually say, “Jealousy.” I smile and say, “Yes, but jealousy needs

When I teach Othello, I tell my students this: monologues are Shakespeare’s X-rays. They let us see what the characters

When I teach soliloquies in Othello, I tell my students to imagine Shakespeare dimming the classroom lights and handing a

When I teach Othello, I always pause and ask my students a simple question: What if we watched this tragedy

In Othello, four major characters die: Roderigo, Desdemona, Emilia, and Othello. Most deaths happen in Act 5, and Othello ends