Critics: Othello Flashcards
Intro - Othello (Use Leavis)
Othello is a character that polarises critics.
‘the full complexity of Othello’s simple nature.’ - nuanced character.
Shlegel - first character-based approach
Othello as a barbarian, a savage.
F R Leavis
Stupid and self-decieving
A C Bradley - the romantic, Victorian Othello
‘He comes before us, dark and grand, with a light upon him from the sun where he was born.’
Helen Gardener
Heroic, principled, noble.
Lisa Hopkins - exotic
A window into other worlds.
Wilson Knight - The Othello Music
‘the exquisitely moulded language, the noble cadence and chiselled phrase, of Othello’s poetry.
Lisa Hopkins - imagination
mythopoeic imagination - Othello things allegorically and symbolically.
Leavis - no anagnorisis
‘No tragic self-discovery… He is ruined, but he is the same Othello in whose essential make-up the tragedy lay.’
Loomba
‘Othello is the victim of racial beliefs, precisely because he becomes an agent of misogynistic ones.’
Ben Okri
‘the white man’s myth of the black man’
T.S. Eliot - 20th C
‘endeavouring to escape reality’
About suicide speech: ‘I have never read a more terrible exposure of human weakness.’
Laurence Olivier - Othello’s jealousy and self-deception
‘When he says ‘Not easily jealous’ it’s the most appalling piece of self-deception.’
