Critics - overall play

Question 1

John Wain (1971) - Response in the audience

Answer 1

‘We respond deeply or shallowly according to the play whether we have deep or shallow natures’

Question 2

John Wain (1971) - Cyprus atmosphere

Answer 2

‘Garrison town atmosphere’ - ‘garrison towns’ indicate a town near a military base, tending to be related to Muslim Asian countries

Question 3

John E Seaman (Shakespeare Quarterly) - Christian tragedy

Answer 3

‘It is a Christian tragedy - Othello’s fall is a version of Adam’s, while Desdemona’s is an inversion of Eve’s’

Question 4

John W Draper - Elizabethan notions of honour/Iago vindicating his honour

Answer 4

Assembles evidence that Elizabethan notions of honour make the cuckold a universally despised figure
Argues that Iago is ‘attempting along conventional lines to vindicate his honour’

Question 5

Hazlitt - Shakespeare and the love of power/Iago as an amateur

Answer 5

‘Shakespeare… knew that love of power… is natural to man’
‘Iago is an amateur to tragedy in real life’

Question 6

W.H Auden, ‘The Joker in the Pack’ (1963) - The Willow Scene and Desdemona’s realisation of her mistake

Answer 6

‘In the willow scene, it is as if she had suddenly realised that she was in a mesalliance and that the sort of man she ought to have married was someone of her own class and colour like Lodovico’

Question 7

G. Wilson Knight - a story of intrigue

Answer 7

‘[Othello is] a story of intrigue rather than a visionary statement’