critics Flashcards
‘Othello is a man of mystery, exoticism and intense feeling, trustful, open, passionate but self controlled: so noble’
A.C. Bradley
‘For Shakespeare… the uncertainty is the point’
David Kastan
Iago ‘has neither felt nor understood the spiritual impulses that bind ordinary human beings together, loyalty, friendship, respect, compassion - in a word, love’
Honigmann
‘The tragedy doesn’t involve the idea of the hero’s learning through suffering’
Leavis
‘Othello is a victim of racial beliefs precisely because he is an agent of misogynist ones’
Ania Loomba
‘The play should be used to examine and dismantle the racism and sexism of the leadership in of the state’
Ania Loomba
‘Iago… knowing every twist which can be given to the Moor because of his alien and inferior race does not reckon with the full primitive power of the passion with which he unleashes’
Margaret Webster
‘This is not a text about race (or even racism) but this is the tale of a man that fell victim to and committed terrible acts’
Nicole Smith
‘Race is the otherness that separates Othello’
Fear of the unknown.
Nicole Smith
‘As the play progresses, it is clear that Othello is a man like any other in the text, the only difference is his race’
Nicole Smith
Iago is a character of temptation - he tempts Cassio to drink, and Othello to kill his wife and give into jealousy.
Mark Goth
‘In spite of her masculine assertiveness in choosing her own husband, Desdemona accepts her culture’s dictum, that she must be obedient to males and is self denying in the extreme when she dies’
Marilyn French
‘The soft simplicity of Desdemona, confident of merit, unconscious of innocence, her artless perseverance in her suit, and her slowness to suspect that she can be suspected’
Samuel Johnson
‘Iago is a being next to the devil, only not quite devil - and this Shakespeare has attempted - and executed - without disgust, without scandal’
Coleridge
Iago is an ‘amoral artist who seeks to fashion the world in his own interest’
William Hazlitt
