“Iago, sensing that she’s about to expose him, tells her to shut up and go home. She responds with a speech that puts the rest of the characters of the play to shame:
No, I will speak as liberal as the north:
Let heaven and men and devils, let them all,
All, all, cry shame against me, yet I’ll speak.”
“Emilia demonstrates the potency of female rage in the face of violence.”
“Hamlet is supposed to be the post-modern play, the play of our historical moment (the Romantics had Lear; Shakespeare’s own generation, uneasy about the inevitable death of heirless Elizabeth, enjoyed tormenting themselves with Henry IV, Part I and Richard III), but the situation Desdemona and Emilia face—damned if you do, damned if you don’t, damned if someone says you did, damned if you misplace your handkerchief—resonates with me far more than Hamlet’s more generalized angst. At its heart Othello is not a play about sexual jealousy; Othello is a play about control, and what happens to women who resist or subvert that control.”