good morning and welcome to this series on a fellow by Shakespeare this is the first video in the series where I'll be taking you through an introduction to the play and then in subsequent videos we're going to look at a range of different topics including the key characters and we'll also be doing scene-by-scene analysis if you haven't watched one of these videos before I really recommend that you take some notes as you're watching so you can remember the key ideas and I've got an example of a really useful note-taking format here on the side of the screen this is called the Cornell note-taking method and the first thing you do is dried in your book so pause the video draw it--and then continue and step one is the tip bullet point notes as you're watching the video so key ideas words quotations step two is for after you've watched the video so go back through your notes and extract just the key words so you'd maybe be reducing a pH of notes to about 10 to 15 words and then step three again after the video possibly the next day is to use those key words to write a summary of the topic and this method really helps to embed your learning in your long-term memory and it also helps you to focus on what's really important so as I said we're going to be looking at the key concepts today and I've taken six ideas from the play that we're going to talk about and in the next video we're going to talk a little bit more about the plot and what actually happens in the text I do warn you there are spoilers so if you don't want to know what happens at the end then don't watch this go and watch the film version first or read it first and but it is a tragedy so I think we all know what the conclusion of it is going to be so the first key concept then one of the most important is the idea of para instability versus powerlessness and instability no I'm sure during your GCSEs lots of you will have looked at the context of Shakespeare's plays and some of you will know that Shakespeare staged a fellow during the early 1600s like this was deuce after the death of Queen Elizabeth the first in 1603 and it was during the early reign of King James the first seem straightforward doesn't it but Queen Elizabeth the first ruled until her death in 1603 and she was known as the Virgin Queen so she wasn't married and she didn't have any children and because of that her Ian was troubled by questions of Parr so firstly could a woman rule as well as a man you know coulda an emotional em woman with different biological needs and all of that rule as well as a man that's going to some ridiculous to us today because of course they can of course we can and but at the time it was a question that was much discussed you know would a woman be able to make a rational decision in a moment of stress and the second question that was discussed at the time was who will inherit the throne and this was perhaps more important I suppose for the stability of the state because Elizabeth didn't have any children that then meant that there was no obvious person who was going to inherit from her so that would lead potentially to different people a range of different people claiming the throne that could then lead to civil war civil unrest and conflict or perhaps even England being broken up into different sections and different sections being ruled by different people so for the stability in the unity of the country of England it was really important that Elizabeth was able to have a clear heir to the throne and obviously we know from history that that was James the first who had been king of Scotland and then he brought Scotland and England together and he became king and we didn't have that civil unrest and but it was still a question that was very much in the air at the time and I'm looking at a fellow and high up links to this a fellow opens in the city Venice at the time that the play was set Venice was an Italian Republic which means it was ruled by a Senate rather than a king or a queen and it was known for its grandeur its wealth as cosmopolitanism it was a seafaring city were strong military power night that might sound kind of familiar England was a seafaring nation and it was militarily strong at the time in some senses it was very wealthy in relation to some other countries and it was becoming increasingly cosmopolitan as well so there's quite a lot of parallels between Venice and between England on the other hand Venice was positioned on the fringes of Europe it was in a precarious position because of that and at the start of a thorough Venice's Paris threatened by the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and Cyprus was a Venetian I post like England as well Venice was a a colonizing nation it was sending people I'd to take control of other countries and Cyprus was one of those like post Venice had so one of the concerns and the plays opening scenes is who will lead the Venetian fleet in a battle against the Turkish forces you know that question who's going to be the leader seems kind of familiar to the English population who thought at the death of Queen Elizabeth who's going to be our next leader so there's a lot of connections here between the context that the original audience would have been living in between the scene that we have at the very start of hello in many ways and the this kind of prompts the question is the state of Venice or the state of England secure against other nations and who should hold power and what's the morality of the person who holds that power and what is their responsibility is their responsibility primarily to themself to gain more power as we've seen happens in Macbeth with the tragic hero there or is the responsibility towards securing the future of the people I'm not giving any answers of these questions I'm just suggesting things that Shakespeare was considering and exploring in his place the second key concept then and that's clear from the very start of the play is the idea of races now there's a lot of things that are said in a fellow which are absolutely abhorrent and I just want to make that clear from the very start a character called Iago also would me go and provide to you say some deeply offensive deeply offensive comments about the main character Othello unlike many of Shakespeare's tragedies the eponymous hero a fellow does not appear on stage in the opening scene so we've seen in Macbeth for example and Macbeth is described in the opening two scenes but he doesn't appear on stage until act 1 scene 3 and what this allows she expiry date is to establish the context within which the hero will operate so for Macbeth that context is one of em hyper-masculinity and Macbeth has built up as this great military leader this hero who's able to splay hundreds of people on the battlefield and whose courageous who's brave and but also he's maybe a little bit too violent who maybe gets carried away by the bloodlust and for a fellow what she explained uses the opening scene to show is the racism of Venetian society so the first characters who come on stage are a I go under Roderigo my Iago is a fellows ensign his servant in the army and he speaks very derogatory about his leader he dehumanizes him and he complains about Othello's we managed to Desdemona and what we learned very quickly in this opening scene is that Yaga's problem with the marriage is that Othello is black and Desdemona is white and they believed together and Iago discusses this with his kind of sidekick his jib Roderigo and they go together to the heist where Desdemona lived previously before she eloped with her fellow and they waken up her father Brabantio and they tell him about the marriage and Brabantio responds and kind of similarly racist and tones so the scene is very difficult to watch as a kind of modern pure but what Shakespeare's doing is he's trying to establish the racism that a fellow was up against in the play but when a fellow enters in scene two he's presented completely differently so he's presented as rational as vulnerable as articulate and this is a far cry from their BS character that we heard a Yahoo speaker by in scene one so she experienced scene one is setting up a racist stereotype and then in scene - he's demolishing it allowing the audience to question here goes honesty from the outset and in a wider sense she experienced his Renaissance audience to question their own preconceptions the audience who would have been watching this would have been very familiar with the idea that Queen Elizabeth had written in law that she wanted and people who were black to be and take a knight of England she didn't want them to live in England and so the audience himself would have had a lot of racist beliefs and ideas and and that ideology would have been very much in circulation at the time and so in scene two when we see a fellow come on the stage and we hear him speak he the first thing that we hear him say is he's telling ya go to count dying not to kill someone just to you know take things rationally rather than being carried away by emotion and that might have been quite surprising to the audience at the time and so one of the things we can to be it when we're studying the play is war Shakespeare opposing racism and certainly in these opening scenes it does seem that he does do that however later in the play a fellow internalized this needs reassess beliefs so he's told so many times that he should behave in a certain way and he should have a certain kind of character that he almost starts acting that kind of character right and possibly here's a spoiler we could ask is that why he murders that has the moment in the end does he commit this act because he's come to believe what others say about him and so if we go along that line of discussion it could be positive that she experienced exploring the detrimental impact of racism on its victims and so society is the true villain of the piece and Iago is the mouthpiece of society in voicing those who assess ideas another key concepts that we need to consider is that of gender rules in the play and I've already mentioned Queen Elizabeth the first night she I suppose at the time symbolized these ideas a bright power and authority that women should have so she represented this idea that a woman could be the most colorful person in England but on the other hand there was an idea that actually men and women should inhabit different spheres and that biologically they were created to have different rules and this is very much supported by religious concepts at the time that men have come the political understanding intellectual thought economic thought and that they should go out and do the work and that they should be making their decisions and and that within this patriarchal society and women are somehow less and they're less able to understand intellectual discussions now there's a bit the first absolutely destroyed that idea but I suppose the discussion that time was very much you know Elizabeth the first it's been chosen by God to be the defined right of kings and she's somehow special she's different from other woman therefore she can be the queen but maybe other woman don't quite have that ability so these stereotypes were kind of almost shifting almost changing but at the same time there was a reaction against that as well and in a fellow we see female characters as being depicted as having differing amounts of power and agency and this changes through either play depending on their relationships with the male characters so initially Desdemona is made a tournament she's confident she's articulate she comes on stage in act 1 scene 3 defying her father she speaks in front of a whole Senate of people who are in charge of fairness and says that she's going to stay married to a fellow and then when it becomes clear that Othello was going to go with the fleet to fight the Turkish army Desdemona says that she's going to go to you know very courageous for a woman at the time both socially in terms of speaking in an entirely male environment and also saying that she's going to join the army in this however she gradually loses power as the player progresses and the audience is left wondering if the silencing a woman is inevitable or if this Desdemona's death there's some kind of punishment for being so outspoken that beginning play another key concept to consider when you're looking at the play is the part of the language night it might be surprising that in a play with so many soldiers that the main battle cry doesn't involve weapons it's not a battle and it's not a play really about political power and explicitly like political power rather they're low as a play in which the language is used to impose par in to maintain control over others in quite a personal way so when at one scene one the Iago who have already spoken about uses language to manipulate his jib Roderigo and to poison bourbon to use mind and then in that one scenes two and three if their loan uses rhetoric to persuade his listeners to agree with his marriage to Desdemona so in the first three scenes we see that language is clearly established as a tool for persuasion it is not neutral and both Iago and Othello use language very effectively to get their way essentially and then as the play progresses language issues for increasingly malignant ends so Iago gradually drip feeds these ideas to fellows suggesting to a fellow that his new wife Desdemona is having an affair and those words that you yell ago users to make those suggestions are incredibly powerful and we see they're very destructive effects at the end of the play I'm lying which is also my barrier between people so with fellow and Desdemona are unable to communicate effectively at one point they have a conversation where a fellow and Desdemona using the same words and handkerchief but they actually mean very very different things and we'll look at the significance of that wired handkerchief in a subsequent video but on the other hand Amelia's use of language towards the end of the play implies that words can be used more positively to argue for woman's rights so language is quite a vexed issue in the play and she experience uses these characters to explore the power of language revealing the fact that language is never a neutral medium but as implied by the speaker to achieve their own ends okay the next idea then in the play is the battle within so the battle within the mind rather than an external physical battle so just as language replaces the battlefield as the main point of conflict in the play so to Dazz a psychological state of the individual characters as Yeager's lies in his dishonest suggestions about Desdemona's alleged affair poison a fellow's mind the tragic heroes former psychological stability to stands into chaos and it's really interesting him to look at high shakespeare depicts the impact of trauma on the mind and what we see is the Bricktown of Othello's language so he stopped being able to speak in full sentences and he's repeating ideas he's obsessing over particular things and he also loses control of his body as well so he has an epileptic fit at one point of the play and all of this is the the impact of the mind on the way he's speaking the way he's interacting but also on his physical existence as well and it shows the extent to which the individual can be pushed and by the language that the others are using and the staging of the gradual unraveling of a theless mind prompts the audience to consider the extent to which irrational thoughts so those emotions of jealousy and anger I'll be able to dominate our rational control of ourselves I think we all know how powerful things like jealousy are you know there's not necessarily any concrete proof or any rational reason to feel jealous of somebody however it can become a little bit overwhelming and finally we're going to look at the concept of the transgression of social boundaries and I suppose this idea can it sums up everything that I've been talking about so if you were to list the binaries in the play the list would almost be endless you've got the separation of a man and women into their separate spheres you've got the separation of Venice in Europe and Cyprus kind of on the border between Europe and Asia you've got discussion about upper-class characters and middle-class characters and who should be in which class you've got and the boundary between morality and immorality you've got different ethnicities and so on and what's really interesting about the play is hi when characters exist that binary points they often become quite bloat so if you look at morality and immorality for example at one point Iago says that nothing he's doing is actually immoral because all he's doing is speaking to a fellow and saying you know your wife might be having an affair you know in the a gross head I suppose what's wrong with that you know it's a reasonable thing to say and so that binds me between morality and immorality becomes blurred and then for a fellow at the end of the play we see that he's so beliefs that Desdemona needs to be punished that he kills her but he believes that killing her is an act of morality as an act of justice so the different groups become quite confused in the play and these boundaries are transgressed and there are varying consequences for the transgression of boundaries as well so there are moments of Hope in the play so that moment when Desdemona insists in front of the Senators that she's going to stay married to a fellow well that moment when Emilia insists that men and women have the same rights and needs both of these are moments of hope in the play where you can look in to think actually we could destroy that binary we could transgress that binary and improve society however the tragic ending of the play seems to suggest that the prize people pay for transgression is their life so both Desdemona and Emilia characters who cross these boundaries both of them end up dead at the end of the play ultimately what she experienced us is a world on the brink of change for the better so Amelia vocalizing the rights of woman you know this presents us with new possibilities for improved world or Desdemona in a fellow's marriage you know presents us with the possibility that different races can live in harmony but what Shakespeare also shows us is that in 1603 a lot is needed to change for such freedoms to be possible and so the play is a real challenge to the audience what type of world do you want to live in do you want to live in a world in which traditional binaries and systems are montañés or one in which transgressing or destroying these boundaries will lead to liberation and not destruction and one of the questions that people always ask me school is why are we studying the writings of someone who's been dead for 400 years and actually when we think about these questions we can see what the value of Shakespeare is you know there's still a challenge for us there what type of world do we want to live in what kind of bindery still exist and haider we want to change those boundaries and destroy that destroy those boundaries so that we can live in a much better society so that's just a little bit of an introduction to the play and in the next video we're going to look at the plot and the characters of the play so that we can start to drill down into the specifics thank you very much for listening and I hope to see you next time