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In:Voices Past and Present - Studies of Involved, Speech-related and Spoken Texts: In honor of Merja Kytö
Edited by Ewa Jonsson and Tove Larsson
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 97] 2020
► pp. 47–62

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Chapter 4
Revealing speech

Agentivity in Iago’s and Othello’s soliloquies

 | Tampere University
Published online: 5 October 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.97.04rud
In several of Shakespeare’s plays, soliloquies serve as a window into the speaker’s mind and a view of the world at the time of the soliloquy. The framework of analysis in this chapter is that of semantic roles, with the focus on the Agent. The author develops a view of the Agent based on a cluster of selected semantic features, and applies it to thematically linked soliloquies in Othello. Each subject in the set of soliloquies is considered with respect to its agentivity or lack of it on the basis of the nature of the predicate in question. Iago’s soliloquies are seen to be higher in agentivity than Othello’s, revealing Iago as a “doer” and Othello as someone being acted upon.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The analytic framework: Agentivity and the Agent role
  • 3.Analysis of selected soliloquies by Iago and Othello
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (44)
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