Critics Flashcards
What does Ania Loomba state about critique of race in Othello?
‘Shakespeare and cultural differences’, 1996
Loomba notes the ‘enormous disparities of age, culture, and race’ between Othello and Desdemona – she suggests that in Shakespeare’s time, religion, not colour, was the main factor in promoting racial tension; she notes that Shakespeare makes his moor a Christian convert who keeps referring to his soul to solve this disparity.
- noted that of nearly 400 essays on ‘Othello’ written in the previous five years, most included some discussion of race. Had she analysed a similar sample a decade earlier, most wouldn’t have included a discussion of race. Race is a recent interpretation of the play.
Shakespeare gives us ‘a black Moor who has both a slave past and a noble lineage, a black skin and thick lips as well as great military skills and rhetorical abilities, a capacity for tenderness as well as a propensity to violence’.
what does Ania Loomba say about the women of the play?
‘Shakespeare and cultural differences’, 1996
- ‘There are only three women in ‘Othello’ – Bianca, who is treated as a whore, Desdemona, who is repeatedly accused on being one, and Emilia, who is dismissed as her ‘bawd’
- ‘women and blacks are the Others in the play’.
- ‘Othello is predisposed to believing (Iago’s) pronouncements about the inherent duplicity of women and the necessary fragility of an ‘unnatural’ relationship between a young, white, well-born woman and an older black soldier’.
What does Edward Petcher say about Othello as a tragedy?
‘Othello and Interpretive Traditions, 1999
Says ‘Othello’ has become “the tragedy of choice for the present generation”, because it is a potent mixture of race and sex.
What does Edward Petcher say about Iago?
‘Iago’s motivations are fabricated after the fact out of little or nothing; the intensity of his malice.’ So, Pechter agree with Coleridge’s ‘motiveless malignity’.
What does A.C Bradley say about Othello himself?
‘Shakespearean Tragedy’ 1904
- Othello is a ‘Noble Moor’ who has been driven out of his wits by the demon-like cunning of Iago
- ’ purely noble, strong, generous and tragic hero – merely a victim’.
- Bradley endorses Othello’s view of himself in the final scene – that he was ‘one that loved not wisely, but too well.’ And he is ‘Perplexed in the extreme’.
- Othello – ‘most romantic figure amongst Shakespeare’s heroes’ + ‘the greatest poet of them all’.
What does F.R Leavis argue about Othello himself?
‘Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero’, 1937
- argues that Othello loves himself, not Desdemona, and that Iago is ‘subordinate and merely ancillary’ – Othello caused his own problems.
- This is evidence enough for Leavis, who pounces on Othello’s apparent willingness to believe that his wife’s impulsive decision to marry him could be a sign she is fickle and untrustworthy.
- ‘There’, Leavis sarcastically notes, ‘we have the noble and magnanimous Othello, romantic hero and married lover, accepting as evidence against his wife the fact that, at the willing sacrifice of everything else, she has made with him a marriage of romantic love. Iago points out that Othello didn’t really know Desdemona, and Othello acquiesces in considering her as a type – a type outside his experience – the Venetian wife.’
- ‘Othello is too stupid to be regarded as a tragic hero’. (1937)
- They were doomed from the start, and the destructive influence of Iago was almost superfluous. Othello, in Leavis’s view, is destroyed by his own egoism. He is not capable of love.
An extreme view
What does A.D Nuttal say about Othello himself?
‘Shakespeare the Thinker’, 2007
Argues that Othello is not, or not necessarily ‘completely deluded about his own nature’ when he maintains that he was ‘not easily jealous’. The point that matters most for Nuttal (as for Coleridge and Bradley), is that the man who strangled Desdemona was ‘conceivably not the natural Othello but a substituted artificial man’. He argues: ‘The clue is in the word ‘wrought’ in Othello’s final speech – ‘but being wrought / Perplexed in the extreme.’ ‘Wrought’ is often misused as if it were the past tense of the word ‘wreak’. In fact, it is the old past tense of ‘work’ and is so used here. Othello is saying that he has been worked upon, wrought as a clay figure is wrought by the finger and thumb of the artist. He does not name Iago in the speech, but the sentence points at him and at no-one else.’
What does T.S Eliot say about Othello in his final scene
‘What Othello seems to me to be doing in [his last] speech is cheering himself up. He is endeavoring to escape reality, he has ceased to think about Desdemona, and is thinking about himself … I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this bovarysme, the human will see things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare.’
- Bovarysme: a disposition towards escapist day dreaming in which one imagine oneself as a heroine for hero of a romance and refuses to acknowledge everyday realities.
What does W.H Auden say on Desdemona?
‘The Joker in the Pack’, 1991
‘Everybody must pity Desdemona, but I cannot bring myself to like her. Her determination to marry Othello – it was she who virtually did the proposing – seems the romantic crush of a silly schoolgirl rather than a mature affection: it is Othello’s adventures, so unlike the civilian life she knows, which captivate her rather than Othello as a person.’
What does A.C Bradley say about Desdemona?
‘Desdemona is helplessly passive’
What does Lisa Jardine say about Desdemona?
‘Desdemona becomes a stereotype of female passivity’. + ‘Desdemona has a whore’s death for all her innocence’.
Femenist critic 1980s
What does R.A Foakes say on Iago?
‘Hamlet Versus Lear’,
Points out that Iago has ’32.58 per cent of the words in the play’ and ’43 per cent of the lines’ in the first two acts.
What does Samuel Taylor Coleridge say on Iago?
‘Note on Tragedies’, 1835
- Famously wrote of Iago’s ‘motiveless malignity’, calling it ‘fiendish’ – as though Iago’s urge to destroy is satanic or primeval, and doesn’t have motives in the ordinary sense.
- ‘Othello yields with extraordinary promptness to suggestion’. (ie to Iago’s cunning manipulation)
What does Samuel Taylor Coleridge say on Othello himself?
‘Let me repeat, Othello does not kill Desdemona in jealousy, but in a conviction forced upon him by the almost superhuman art of Iago, such a conviction as any man would and must have entertained who had believed Iago’s honesty as Othello did.
Othello innocent and driven to murder not an inherent murderer
What does A.W Schlegal say on Iago?
Although Iago is clever, he is also ignorant: ‘Accessible only to selfish emotions, he is thoroughly skilled in rousing the passions of others, and availing himself of every opening which they give him: he is as excellent an observer of men as anyone can be who is unacquainted with higher motives of action from his own experience.’
- What this sentence suggests is that the conditions of Iago’s power are also his weaknesses: Iago is, after all, sometimes wrong. He never suspects his own wife will betray him by exposing his villainy, and sacrifice her own life to her duty.
