CRITICS Flashcards
Phillip Sidney on ‘Othello’ as a tradegy
In Sidney’s view, tradegy provokes ‘the affects of admiration and commseration’ and so demonstrates ‘the uncertainty of this world’
Helen Gardener on Othello’s characterisation
“He has the heroic capacity for passion. But what most sets him apart is his solitariness”
F.R. Leavis on Othello’s characterisation
“Othello in his own magnanimous way, is egotistic”
F.R.Leavis on Othello’s Characterisation
“This self-centredness doesn’t mean self-knowledge”
A.C. Bradley on Othello’s Characteristaion
“Othello is the greatest poet of them all”
A.C. Bradley on Othello’s Characterisation
“his sufferings are so heart-rending, that he stirs, I believe, in most readers a passion of mingled love and pity which they feel for no other hero in Shakespeare”
Nigel Wheale on the play as a tradegy
“observing a tragic event chills us with shock and moves us with compassionate pity, making us realise the frailty and vulnerability of human life.”
Nigel Wheale on the play as a tradegy
“They provide the focus for the most powerful (male) motivation of Renaissance tradegy - revenge”
Bernard O’Keefe on Othello’s Characterisation
“Othello is at first supremely confident”
Andrew McCulloch on Othello’s Characterisation
“Othello does love Desdemona and he is fully responsible for her death”
Andrew McCulloch on Othello’s Characterisation
“Othello is at war with himself and cannot win”
Bonnie Greer on Othello’s Characterisation
“Othello, the black man considered by some to be the enemy within, discovers that he is his own enemy”
Kiernan Ryan on Race
“Othello and Desdemona find unleashed upon them, in shape of Iago, the venomous rage of a society whose foundations are rocked by the mere fat of their marriage”
Kiernan Ryan on Race and Gender
“Othello’s dread of cuckoldry and the misogyny that feeds it are perfectly in tune with the patriarchal culture of a city where his colour makes him feel like an alien, but where he’s entierly at home as a man”
Johnathan Dollimore on Race and Gender
“A misogynistic conception of women is fused with a racist one of Othello and a xenophobic pne about who she should ‘naturally’ desire. And somewhere inside himself, Othello perhaps agrees. And if he does it may be because he has come to identify unconditionally with the society he serves”
Richard Lees on Race
“Elizabethans may have found travellers’ accounts of African peoples intrigungly exotic, yet the pervading stereotype to emerge from the plays they watched equated blackness with canibalism, cruelty, animal sexuality and the devil”
Richard Lees on Race and Gender
“Othello’s jealousy - a patriarchal possessiveness that Shakespeare is careful to represent as racially non-specific”
Marion Cox on Race
“His non-whiteness is the main issue, but his lack of faniliarity with Venetian customs and the way of peace are aggravating factors in his downfall; a world of courtesans and coutiers is incomprehensible to man who has been at war since the age of seven”
Bernard O’Keefe on Race
“It is this sense of his ‘otherness’, of belonging yet also being marginalised, that Iago is able to exploit”
Bernard O’Keefe on Race
“Iago cleverly plays on the insecurities and contradictions that Othello’s own stories have embodied”
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown on Race
“Othello, high-octane and contested, speaks acutely to our times, this age of high-migration anxiety”
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown on Race
“Othello’s tradegy is that cultural surrender is not enough for most Venetians. They cannot ever truly embrace him.”
Ania Loomba on Race and Gender
“Othello is both a fantasy of interracial love and social tolerance and a nightmare of racial hatred and male violence”
Ania Loomba on Race and Gender
“Othello is predisposed to believing his (Iago’s) pronouncements about the inhernet duplicity of women”
Ania Loomba on Race and Gender
“Othello is a victim of racial beliefs precisely because he becomes an agent of misogynist ones.”
Emma Smith on Race
“A ‘colour blind’ or racially neutral response is impossible”
Germaine Greer on Iago
“They [the audience] do not go home hoping that they will never meet an Iago but rather understanding something of the nature of evil and how soon bright things come to confusion.”
Germaine Greer on Iago
“We no longer feel as Shakespeare’s contempories did, the ubiquity of Satan, but Iago is still servicable to us, as an objective correlative of the mindless inventiveness of racist aggression.”
Germaine Greer on Iago
“Iago is still alive and kicking and filling migrants’ letterboxes with excrement”
Kiernan Ryan on Iago
“The really disturbing thing about Iago is not that he’s an unfathomable psychopath, but that he’s pathologically normal and theatrically irresistable.”
Kiernan Ryan on Iago
“when he retorts unfazed in his final speech ‘Demand me nothing: what you know, you’, refusing point blank to explain his malevolence, we can be sure every word of that barbed line is addressed, disoncertingly, to us too”
Bernard O’Keeffe on Iago
“We are simultaneously aware of both Iago’s fabrication and the plausability of his narratives.”
Bernard O’Keefe on Iago
“he is driving him [Othello] into an emotion from which he himself suffers and which he understands intimately”
Simon Bubb on Iago
“by sharing his villainy with us, he draws us into the darkness and somehow makes us part of it”
Simon Bubb on Iago
“It seems the playwright wantes to spend time examining the nature of villiainy”
Giles Block on Iago
“Iago’s plan takes place as we watch him; and as he watches us watching him, we become complicit in his devilry. By listening to him, it’s as if we encourage him to tell us more.”
Sarah Robertson on the presentation of women
“He seems to mock [male character’s misogyny], as everything the men say about the women is completely untrue”
Sarah Robertson on the presentation of women
“the actual representations of the womens themselves are not degrading or insulting, as theu are shown as strong women who have all the virtues that the men lack.”
