How Shakespeare presents Iago, and how the character develops across the text: Othello's ensign, passed over for promotion, who plays the honest friend to everyone while plotting their ruin, and falls silent when he is exposed.
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: 'In following him, I follow but myself', 'Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago', 'Thus do I ever make my fool my purse', 'I hate the Moor', 'For that I do suspect the lusty Moor / Hath leap'd into my seat', 'And nothing can or shall content my soul / Till I am even'd with him, wife for wife', 'Or failing so, yet that I put the Moor / At least into a jealousy so strong / That judgment cannot cure', 'Knavery's plain face is never seen till us'd', 'I humbly do beseech you of your pardon / For too much loving you', 'He hath a daily beauty in his life / That makes me ugly', 'Wear thy good rapier bare, and put it home', 'I bleed, sir; but not kill'd'.
His soliloquies and asides, which make the audience his confidants, his prose with Roderigo and verse with Othello, and the hints, questions and pretended reluctance he uses to manipulate.
Context that helps a reading: the Vice of the old morality plays and the scheming villain of Renaissance tragedy, the many motives he gives and the debate over whether any explains him, and the word honest attached to him throughout.
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.
