Othello Questions Act V Scene II: Who exposes Iago’s corruption

1. Emilia discovers the truth about Iago’s plotting and reveals it to the world. She can’t bring Desdemona back to life, but she does clear her friend’s name.

2. Iago kills Emilia as payback for unmasking him, but Emilia dies proud that she set the record straight.

3. Before Othello kills himself, he invokes his prior services to the state, asking Lodovico and the other Venetians to listen to him for a moment.

At this point, he is resolved to die, and his concern is with how he will be remembered. When he appeals to his listeners to describe him as he actually is, neither better or worse, the audience may or may not agree with his characterization of himself as one not easily made jealous, or as one who loved “not wisely but too well” (V.ii.353).

As he continues, though, he addresses an important problem: will his crime be remembered as the fall from grace of a Venetian Christian, or an assault on Venice by an ethnic and cultural outsider? He stresses his outsider status in a way that he does not do earlier in the play, comparing himself to a “base Indian” who cast away a pearl worth more than all of his tribe (V.ii.356–357). Finally, he recalls a time in which he defended Venice by smiting an enemy Turk, and then stabs himself in a reenactment of his earlier act, thereby casting himself as both insider and outsider, enemy of the state and defender of the state.

4. Cassio is to replace Othello as governor.

5. Cassio is to determine Iago’s punishment.