Haply for I am black,
And have not those soft parts of conversation
That chamberers have; or for I am declined
Into the vale of years—yet that’s not much—
She’s gone. I am abused, and my relief
Must be to loathe her. O curse of marriage,
That we can call these delicate creatures ours
And not their appetites! I had rather be a toad
And live upon the vapor of a dungeon
Than keep a corner in the thing I love
For others’ uses. Yet ’tis the plague of great ones;
Prerogatived are they less than the base.
’Tis destiny unshunnable, like death. (III.iii.267–279 )
When, in Act I, scene iii, Othello says
that he is “rude” in speech, he shows that he does not really believe
his own claim by going on to deliver a lengthy and very convincing
speech about how he won Desdemona over with his wonderful storytelling
(I.iii.
The ugly imagery that follows this declaration of abandonment—Othello
finds Desdemona to be a mere “creature” of “appetite” and imagines
himself as a “toad” in a “dungeon”—anticipates his later speech
in Act IV, scene ii, in which he compares Desdemona to a “cistern
for foul toads / To knot and gender in,” and says that she is as
honest “as summer flies are in the shambles [slaughterhouses], /
That quicken even with blowing” (IV.ii.