critics Flashcards
othello and human nature
samuel johnson - 1765
samuel johnson, defended the play specifically on the basis of its compelling portrait of human behaviour.
johnson highlights the aesthetic value of othello, and then argues that the play offers crucial insight into human nature: the beauties of this play impress themselves so strongly upon the attention of the reader, that they can draw no aid from critical illustration.
the fiery openness of othello, magnanimous, artless, and credulous, boundless in his confidence, ardent in his affection, inflexible in his resolution, and obdurate in his revenge; the cool malignity of iago, silent in his resentment, subtle in his designs, and studious at once of his interest and his vengeance; the soft simplicity of desdemona, confident of merit, and conscious of innocence, her artless perseverance in her suit, and her slowness to suspect that she can be suspected, are such proofs of shakespeare’s skill in human nature, as, i suppose, it is vain to seek in any modern writer
iago and his motivations
samuel taylor coleridge - romantic era
othello depicts fundamental truths about human nature and did not always lead to the sort of condemnation of its central character found in schlegel.
favouring a view of othello ‘not as a negro, but a high and chivalrous moorish chief’
reads the tragic hero’s actions as the product not of innate and
uncontrollable passions, or even of jealousy, but rather as the consequence of moral indignation and wounded honour, and he argues that by generating an empathetic response in the audience the play is finally sympathetic to othello .
also fascinated by the figure of iago, and his assessment of the play’s enigmatic villain as a ‘passionless character, all will in intellect’ influenced readings of the play for decades .
claims that iago’s final soliloquy is best understood as ‘the motive-hinting of motiveless malignity’ remains one of the most quoted assessments of iago to this day.
the role of desdemona
anna jameson - 1832
jameson locates othello’s tragedy not in the plight of its male hero, but rather in the character of its heroine, arguing that ‘the source of the pathos throughout-of that pathos which at once softens and deepens the tragic effect-lies in the character of desdemona’
describes her in amusingly patronizing terms as one in whom the absence of intellectual power is never felt as a deficiency, nor the absence of energy of will as impairing the dignity, nor the most imperturbable serenity as a want of feeling: one in whom thoughts appears mere instincts, the sentiment of rectitude supplies the principle, and virtue itself seems rather a necessary state of being, than an imposed law
a young woman who is neither clever nor dynamic, and whose
dominant features-her goodness and gentleness-are both beyond her control and inadequate to ensure her survival: ‘desdemona displays at times a transient energy, arising from the power of affection, but gentleness gives the prevailing tone to the character-gentleness in excess-gentleness verging on passivity-gentleness which not only cannot resent-but cannot resist’
jameson’s work on othello is also significant for its location of the play’s fundamental opposition not in the marriage of desdemona and othello that so many view as a hopeless mismatch, but in the relationship between desdemona and iago - had the colours in which shakespeare has arrayed desdemona been one atom less transparently bright and pure, the charm had been lost; she
could not have borne the approximation; some shadow from the overpowering blackness of [iago’s] character must have passed over the sunbright purity of hers … to the brutish coarseness and fiendish malignity of this man, her gentleness appears only a contemptible weakness; her purity of affection … only a perversion of taste; her bashful modesty only a cloak for evil propensities; so he represents them with all the force of language and self-conviction, and we are obliged to listen to him
picking up on the play’s discourse of colour, jameson argues convincingly that othello’s horror lies not in the affectionate relationship of the white-skinned desdemona and the black-skinned othello, but rather in the profound clash between the virtuous desdemona and the malevolent iago.
tragedy in othello
a.c bradley - 1904
leavis - 1937
bradley found othello ‘the most painfully exciting and the most terrible’ of the tragedies, arguing that ‘the reader’s heart and mind are held in a vice, experiencing the extremes of pity and fear, sympathy and repulsion, sickening hope and dreadful expectation’
locates a thoroughly romanticized othello, a noble and mysterious everyman whose destruction results from the cunning iago’s ability to turn his virtues against him and whose ruin speaks to a universal experience of tragedy.
like othello, desdemona is not a particularized character on bradley’s account, but a representative figure, “the ‘eternal womanly’ in its most lovely and adorable form, simple and innocent as a child, ardent with the courage and idealism of a saint,” and the story of her love for the “noblest soul on earth” becomes for bradley the story of anyone who has ever aimed high and been held back: “She met in life with the reward of those who rise too far above our common level”
while bradley’s brand of character criticism - his practice of treating the literary text as a “little world of persons” populated by characters whose behaviour could be explored just as one might discuss the behaviour of one’s neighbours-is the defining feature of his approach to shakespeare’s tragedies, he is also attuned to matters of dramatic
structure.
of othello, not only the most masterly of the tragedies in point of construction, but its method of construction is unusual- this method, by which the conflict begins late, and advances without appreciable pause and with accelerating speed to the catastrophe, is a main
cause of the painful tension.
leavis contributes to this attack, finding bradley’s reading of othello excessively sentimental, and accusing him of an over-identification with othello that blinds him to what leavis reads as the general’s “self-approving self-dramatization’’ on leavis’s account, othello is not the naive and noble victim of lago’s superior intellect, but an egoist whose “self-pride becomes stupidity, ferocious stupidity, an insane and self-deceiving passion”
tragedy in othello
wilson knight - 1930
for knight, bradley’s romantic reading of the play as an anatomy of generalized human nature misses the point completely.
‘in othello, we are faced with the vividly particular rather than the
vague and universal,’ and his own reading of the play focuses on explicating the symbolic function of its characters and celebrating what he calls the play’s “formal beauty”
tragedy in othello
l.c knights - 1933
knights’ objection to bradley, lies in what he sees as bradley’s refusal to acknowledge shakespearean tragedy’s status as poetry.
accuses bradley of treating the plays as novels, an approach he claims leads to an erroneous emphasis on their psychological dimensions at the expense of their verbal constructions.
tragedy in othello
f.r leavis - 1937
finds bradley’s reading of othello excessively sentimental, and accusing him of an over-identification with othello that blinds him to what leavis reads as the general’s ‘self-approving self-dramatization’
on leavis’s account, othello is not the naive and noble victim of iago’s superior intellect, but an egoist whose ‘self-pride becomes stupidity, ferocious stupidity, an insane and self-deceiving passion’
honesty in othello
william empson - 1951
bernard sivak - 1958
Notes that the word ‘honest’ appears so often throughout the play, empson explores how this key term is used by various characters at significant junctures in the action, locating his discussion within an analysis of shifts in the word’s meaning over time.
shakespeare is attentive to this semantic slippage and employs “honest,” particularly as it is associated with iago, as a means of acknowledging a gradual cultural shift toward individualism.
spivak’s reading of Othello also afforded iago particular attention,
locates the play not within linguistic history but within the history of dramatic form.
Othello shares a number of features with traditional morality plays, spivak argues that iago is best understood as a version of the stock character vice, a personification of evil with a dangerously privileged relationship with the audience.
modern interpretations of othello and race
critics of the 1960s were influenced by many of the same impulses that propelled the american civil rights movement to explore the play’s relationship to early modern representations of race.
eldred jones offered accounts of medieval and early modern discussions of blackness, traced the effect of racial prejudice on the reception of literary texts featuring characters of colour, and so introduced productive ways of exploring race in/and othello.
remind readers of the prominence of black characters on the early modern stage and literary page, to prompt new thinking about the impact of pernicious stereotypes equating blackness with ugliness, disloyalty, and evil, and to encourage further investigation of the historical realities and enduring legacies of slavery.
for some the play came to be about “a black man whose humanity is eroded by the cunning and racism of whites” - cowhig, while for others it was an antiracist polemic that “in its fine scrutiny of the mechanisms underlying iago’s use of racism, and in its rejection of human pigmentation as a means of identifying worth … continues to oppose racism” - orkin
psychoanalytical theories
gordon ross smith
martin wangh
martin wangh treats iago as a case study in repressed homosexuality, arguing that the ensign’s stifled erotic desire for othello causes him to despise, and so to seek the destruction of, his rival for the general’s affection, desdemona.
gordon ross smith adduces a more general case for a psychoanalytic approach to shakespearean drama on the grounds that it provides a “common sense” understanding of tragedy. ‘one may, if he wish, continue to consider othello a poetic melodrama creakily hinging upon an inexplicable villain and trivial mischance, but the sense of tragedy cannot be brought about by such elements’
suggests that it is best to understand “all the major figures” of the play as “possible people caught in a net of circumstance which their characters make them unable to escape’
feminism and gender
lynda boose 1975
boose argues that the strawberry-spotted handkerchief given to desdemona by her husband gathers a heavy symbolic burden in the course of the play as it comes to stand for that much larger expanse of fabric, the couple’s wedding sheets, and thus for both “the
sanctified union promising life and the tragic union culminating in death”
feminism and gender
edward a. snow
offers a symptomatic reading in which the “truth” of its determination to expose a “pathological male animus toward
sexuality” rooted in “the social institutions with which men keep women and the threat they pose at arm’s length” (388) is both revealed and concealed by its theatrical and verbal discourses.
snow notes that the play’s language and its “theatrical spectacle” are marked by disavowal, denial, and introversion, and he calls on readers to “look for what resists dramatic foregrounding and listen for what language betrays about its speaker” , a process which reveals a play world of sexual repression and misogyny in
which the superego, the “voice of the father” upon which patriarchal social order is founded, is exposed as the site of “evil and malice” .
feminism and gender
stephen greenblatt - 1980
also finds in othello the operations of a patriarchy based in sexual repression and the subordination of women.
reading desdemona’s proud claim “my heart’s subdued / even to the utmost pleasure of my lord” as a “moment of erotic intensity,” greenblatt argues that her forthright display of sexual submission, rather than reassuring othello of her fidelity, plays into iago’s slanderous account of her as adulterous because it appears to confirm her as a sensual and desirous woman instead of as the sexually reluctant but obedient wife that marriage manuals and church doctrine taught men to expect and to value
feminism and gender
irene dash
carol thomas neely
focused critical attention on its depiction of the potential destructiveness for women of the institution of marriage.
othello explores the tragic possibilities for married women trapped within a patriarchal system that condones their subjection and even their abuse. desdemona experiences “a slow loss of confidence in the strength of the self, always with the aim of adjusting to marriage” and thus her death must be laid at the door of a sexist system that celebrates compliance and self-abnegation in wives rather than mutual respect in marriage.
carol thomas neely’s reading of othello locates the characters within an early modern moment that celebrates a newly emerging ideal of companionate marriage even as it continues to advocate for women’s subservience to their husbands.
desdemona and emilia become, the victims not of marriage but of male characters who view them through the opposing but concomitant cultural lenses of romantic idealization and anxious misogyny
society and race
karen newman
argued that desdemona’s love for othello represents a direct threat t
venice because it embodies the twin dangers of freely expressed female desire and miscegenation.
