Interpreting Shakespeare's Language

Objective

To construct a persuasive argument about the meaning of a passage from William Shakespeare's play Othello.

Procedure

1. Choose a passage of 10-20 lines from Othello that call attention to itself in some way.

2. Take notes including specific details in the passage, details that explain its meaning and significance. Such details include rhyme, meter, word choice, comparison/contrast, punctuation, context within the play and related texts, and anything else Shakespeare has used to make his meaning clear to the audience. (It may not be possible to find an example of each of these elements.)

3. Formulate a thesis statement summing up the meaning and significance of the passage. This thesis will undoubtedly change as you write your paper. Coming up with a tentative one now will give you a starting point. Remember that a good thesis is arguable rather than obvious: reasonable readers may at first disagree with you and need some persuasion.

4. Write a draft of your argument. Refer to specific words and phrases to support the points in your argument. You may also refer to quotations in other parts of Othello, as long as you maintain your focus on the passage in question. You may also refer to critical works on Othello in the Norton Critical Edition, but this is not a requirement.

5. Share a word-processed, correctly formatted draft of this paper with your peer-editing group as a Google Doc on 13 October 2025. On this draft (and on the final draft), write the entire passage from Othello at the top of the first page. This makes it easy for readers keep looking back at it as they proceed through your analysis.

6. After considering feedback from peer editors and reconsidering your own argument, revise your paper.

7. Proofread your draft to identify and correct spelling and grammatical errors.

8. Turn in the completed final draft along with a peer-edited working draft in class on 30 October 2025.

Close Reading

Close reading means paying careful attention to details in a written work. It is an element in any literary analysis, regardless of your chosen critical approach. Since you will be looking more closely at this poem than most people who read it, your paper can offer perspectives on its meaning that will engage your audience and challenge its expectations. In analyzing a poem, you might ask yourself the following questions:

What, literally, does the passage attempt to describe and/or argue for? Who speaks it, and to whom? For what purpose?

Which techniques has Shakespeare (and his speaking characters) used to express their ideas? Is the passage in verse or prose?

Does the passage use any forms of figurative language in order to express complex ideas—metaphor, simile, personification, symbol?

How is this passage different from other passages in the play? When in the play does it occur? Why should your reader pay close attention to this passage? How does it reward a reader's close attention?

What will make this passage analysis interesting to an audience consisting of your classmates, your teacher and yourself? You will want to tell them something new—something that would not otherwise have occurred to them after reading the poem.

Thesis Statement

This is a one-to-two-sentence version of the whole paper, and it should present an arguable claim. It should not merely restate the passage in your own words. A good thesis statement refers directly to the chosen poem, saying something like, "In this passage, William Shakespeare . . ."

Good thesis statements will challenge readers in some way to regard the work in a new light. They may make claims regarding its importance to the larger play or to the larger corpus of Shakespeare's work, or to a little-noticed subtext within the play.

Some possible thesis language:

This passage provides one of the clearest examples of Shakespeare's world-view by showing . . .

The dominant feature of this passage is a contradiction between . . . and . . . which the play must then reconcile by . . .

This passage may appear on its surface to be about . . . but it is actually about . . .

These are just a few examples of thesis statement language that can lead to productive arguments about the text. Please adapt these to your needs or develop your own.

Writing Tips

1. MLA format means you should include a list of works cited at the end of your paper, even if it only includes one work. For example:

   Shakespeare, William. Othello. Ed. Edward Pechter. W. W. Norton, 2017.

2. Some grammatical tips:

   1. Avoid using the passive voice whenever it is possible to do so. When writing in the passive voice, you remove the subject from the sentence or at least de-emphasize it. This makes writing less engaging to most readers.

      Example:

      PASSIVE VOICE (Does Coleridge ever use the passive voice here!):

      For in all acts of judgment it can never be too often recollected, and scarcely too often repeated, that rules are means to ends and, consequently, that the end must be determined and understood before it can be known what the rules are or ought to be. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "[Comments on Othello]," Othello, edited by Edward Pechter, W. W. Norton, 260)

      (Structure: object/"to be" verb/past participle)

      ACTIVE VOICE:

      For in all acts of judgment, one can never too often recollect and scarcely too often repeat that rules are means to ends and, consequently, that one must determine and understand the end before one can know what the rules are or ought to be.

      (Note structure: subject/verb/object—with the addition of the implied subject)

   2. Avoid contractions when writing college papers. Replace they're with they are and replace don't with do not (these are just a few examples of the numerous possible contractions out there.

   3. Italicization is the best way to signal that you are referring to a word itself and not to the thing that the word represents. Notice how I am using italicization of the terms in the following section "d". You should also italicize titles of books (even in parenthetical references and lists of works cited) and foreign-language words like Bildungsroman or sine qua non.

   4. The word it's (with an apostrophe) is a contraction of it is. The word its (without an apostrophe) is the possessive of it. Its and whose both deviate from standard rules governing possessives.