critics Flashcards
Bradley 1904
“The Othello who enters the bedchamber with the words, ‘it is the cause, it is the cause, my soul’, is not the man of the fourth act. The deed he is bound to do is not murder, but a sacrifice. He is to save Desdemona from herself, not in hate but in honour; in honour and also in love”
Empson 1915
“The fifty-two uses of ‘honest’ and ‘honesty’ in the play are a very queer business: there is no other play in which Shakespeare worries a word like that… Everybody calls Iago honest once or twice, but with Othello it becomes an obsession; at the crucial moment just before Emilia exposes Iago he keeps howling the word out”
Newman 1988
“Many explanations have been given for the recovered stature which Othello achieves at the end. In spite of all the bizarre behaviour Iago has induced in him the dignity of his ending is impressive… In his final speech and his suicide he is able, as he was before the senate of Venice, to express his nobility and to manifest himself rightly”
Coghill
“Psychologically Iago is a slighted man, powerfully possessed by hatred against a master who (as he thinks) had kept him down, and by envy for a man he despises who has been promoted over him”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
‘the motive-hunting of motiveless malignity’
“a being next to a devil, only not quite the devil.”
“Shakespeare had portrayed [Othello] the very opposite to a jealous man; he was noble, generous, open-hearted, unsuspicious and unsuspecting; and who, of his wife’s guilt, bursts out in her praise… He was a gallant moor, of royal blood… whose noble nature was wrought on… by an accomplished and artful villain…”
Smith
‘as the play progresses, it is clear that Othello is a man like any other character in the play, the only difference is his race.’
Rymer
Desdemona is a ‘fool’ for marrying a ‘blackamoor’. This is a cautionary tale about marrying against your parents’ wishes.
Iago is too evil to be believed.
The play is a ‘bloody farce’
Honigmann
Iago is clever, but his failure to comprehend the power of love - in particular Emilia’s love for Desdemona - is his downfall.
Knight
“Othello’s language changes from noble, poetic free verse to erratic, clipped, repetitive prose to represent his descent into madness”
“Iago ‘hates the romance of Othello and the loveliness of Desdemona because he is by nature the enemy of these things’”
“Iago is cynicism incarnate”
Leavis
“His [Othello’s] downfall is because of his own weakness”
