How Shakespeare presents Emilia, and how the character develops across the text: Iago's wife and Desdemona's companion, who gives him the handkerchief, speaks out about how men treat women and exposes him at the cost of her life.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: ''Tis not a year or two shows us a man', 'They are all but stomachs, and we all but food', 'O heaven, that such companions thou'ldst unfold', 'The Moor's abused by some most villanous knave', 'The world's a huge thing', 'Let husbands know / Their wives have sense like them', 'The ills we do, their ills instruct us so', 'Thou hast not half that power to do me harm / As I have to be hurt', 'O gull! O dolt! / As ignorant as dirt!', ''Tis proper I obey him, but not now', 'Let heaven and men and devils, let them all, / All, all, cry shame against me, yet I'll speak', 'So come my soul to bliss, as I speak true'.
From the wife who takes the handkerchief to please Iago, to the frank speaker of Act 4 Scene 3, to the woman who defies her husband to tell the truth in Act 5.
Context that helps a reading: a wife's duty to obey her husband, and her speech on men and women read as a challenge to the double standard.
Eduqas's Shakespeare questions don't mark context: the extract question (15 marks) and the whole-play essay (20 marks, plus 5 for spelling, punctuation, vocabulary and sentence structures) both mark response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2). Use context only in a phrase that supports an interpretation, and say which question each worked paragraph practises.
