Critics: Race Flashcards
Charles Gildon - fairer hue
‘tis such a vulgar error to allow nothing of humanity to any but of our own acquaintance the fairer hue.’
Meredith Anne Skura
‘Until the nineteenth century, the Moor was a tragic hero whose color was irrelevant and whose greatness and savagery could be considered together without contradiction.’
Charles Lamb - Didn’t mind reading play
'’extremely revolting’ to see on stage ‘the courtship and the wedded caress of Othello and Desdemona.’
Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Othello only acted by white man
‘it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro.’
Martin Orkin
‘There is a racist sentiment within the play but it is confined to Iago, Roderigo, Brabantio.’
Loomba
‘Othello is both a fantasy of interracial love and social tolerance, and a nightmare of racial hatred and violence.’
Hugh Quarshie - 1st black actor of Othello
‘Shakespeare was endorsing a racist convention.’
Coleridge - bronze, light-skinned
‘Can we imagine him [Shakespeare] so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth… a more pleasing probability,’
Inter-racial marriage - Newman
Shakespeare’s contemporaries feared ‘the black man had the power to subjugate his partner’s whiteness.
Paul Robeson - Black American actor of Othello
‘Shakespeare amazes me. His psychology is uncannily true all the time… ‘Othello’ is a tragedy of racial conflict… His colour heightens the tragedy.’
Laurence Olivier - interracial marriage in contemporary audience
‘I’m sure Shakespeare meant there to be a great splash of shock.’
John Dover Wilson
‘The heroic Moor who is Shakespeare’s noblest tragic figure.’
