AO5 Flashcards
Desdemona
“Defined by man, but she challenges this identity of the ‘pure angel’” - Rokison- Woodall
“She is a prize, a spoil of war” - Caryl Phillips
“possible to see her as the strongest, most heroic person in the play” - Honigmann
“Othello is a victim of racial beliefs precisely because he becomes an agent of misogynistic ones” - Loomba
“D accepts her culture’s dictum that she must be obedient to males” “self-denying in the extreme” when she is murdered- Marilyn French
D is punished for being “too knowing, too independent” - Lisa Jardine.
Iago
“Motiveless malignity”- Coleridge
“Malice is motiveless…secret of it’s power and it’s horror…why it’s revelation always shocks” - Helen Gardner
“He wants to make Othello’s deeds ‘fit in with the prejudice that his face excited’” “intention is to prove black men are evil” - Hunter.
“Iago’s manipulating was artfully natural” - Samuel Johnson.
“Iago and Othello in “sexual competition”” - Dominic West.
“Christianity can be worn as a mask- consciously by Iago and perhaps unconsciously by Othello” - Honigmann
Othello
New Historicist- Frances Dolan- murdering one’s spouse was considered a threat to social order. ‘Traitor inside’ reflected anxieties about ‘spectres of disorder’
“Othello dies belonging to the world of action in which his true part lay” - Leavis
“Driven by moral indignation and regret that Desdemona’s virtue has been destroyed” - Coleridge.
“Life is a game in which he does not know the rules” - Caryl Phillips
“Othello’s love of Desdemona is the love of a possession” - Caryl Phillips
“Othello becomes a tragedy of the loss of faith” G.K Hunter
Marxist political theme: Conflict between Christians and Muslims contribute to destruction – Iago able to take advantage of political tension to destabilise O’s marriage.
O has a split consciousness “near schizophrenic hero… becomes simultaneously the keeper of the state and its opponent- Loomba.
Emilia
“the mouthpiece of repressed femininity” - Bayley
“Her handing over of the napkin was stupidity and nothing worse”- Bradley
“Emilia’s love (of Desdemona) is Iago’s undoing” - Honigmann
“Either Shakespeare wants us to consider Emilia incredibly dimwitted or he made her too afraid of Iago to challenge him until it’s too late” - Honigmann.
Cassio
“Bianca is like Othello and Cassio, an outsider” - Simpson.
“One wonders whether the men are capable of unselfish love” - Honigmann
“He is brave benevolent and honest”- Dr Johnson
Brabantio
Karen Newman- assumptions that “the black man had the power to subjugate his partner’s whiteness” - fears of mixed marriages in Renaissance culture that Brabantio explicitly references.
Bianca
“Bianca is like Othello and Cassio, an outsider” - Simpson.
“good women in Renaissance tragedy are often represented as long suffering martyrs” - Lisa Jardine.
