Othello critical analysis

Question 1

‘Shakespearean tragedy’
by Kastan (2003)

Answer 1

-It defines the inescapable trajectory of the tragic action but not its cause, and in its reticence about who or what is responsible for the dire change of fortune it speaks tragedy’s fearful incomprehensibility

-is the tragic meter human error or capricious fate?

-for shakespeare the uncertainty is the point

-The refusal of any answers starkly prevents any confident attribution of meaning or value to human suffering

Question 2

‘The Shakespearean tragic hero’
A.C Bradley (1851-1935)

Answer 2

-The story depicts also the troubled part of the hero’s life which precedes and leads up to his death […] It is, in fact essentially a tale of suffering and calamity conducting to death’
-His [Othello’s] fate affects the welfare of a whole nation or empire, and when he falls suddenly from the height of earthly greatness to the dust, his fall produced a sense of contrast, of the powerlessness of man, and of the omnipotence- perhaps the caprice- of fortune or fate, which no tale of private life can possibly rival

Question 3

‘The character of Othello’
Leavis

Answer 3

-There is no tragic self discovery
-The noble Othello is now seen as tragically pathetic and he sees himself as pathetic too
-Othello dies belonging to the world of action in which his true part lay

Question 4

‘Tragedy of Madness’
Mack

Answer 4

-‘Madness allowed the combination in a single figure of tragic hero and buffoon to whom could be accorded the license of the allowed fool in some speech and action (Macj suggests this resembles Shakespeare’s own use of art to reveal painful truths)

-Madness is to some degree a punishment or doom

-Madness has a further dimension, as insight

Question 5

‘The pleasure of tragedy’
A.D Nuttall (1996)

Answer 5

-It would not be surprising if an audience inwardly driven by envy were to delight in the fall greater than they

-A later kind of moralism taught a new generation of reader and theatre goers to despise the pleasurable and value the disturbing, the jagged, the painful work’

(He suggests that characters somehow deserve their suffering and teach audiences a difficult lesson about themselves)

Question 6

‘The portrayal of Iago’
Honigmann (1991)

Answer 6

-If Iago were a straightforward character villian he would arouse little fellow feeling in audiences

-Dramatic perspective can even make us the villains accomplices: he confides in us so we watch his plot unfolding from his point of view

-[Iago] is the play’s chief humourist’

-His humour either intends to give pain or allows him to bask in his sense of own superiority; very rarely is it at his own expense and it is never merely delightful

-he enjoys a god-like sense of power

-Iago excels in short-term tactics not in long-term strategy

-Despite his cleverness, he has neither felt nor understood the spiritual impulses that bind ordinary human beings together […] in a word, love. Emilia’s love of Desdemona is Iago’s undoing

Question 7

‘Othello, race and society’
Ania Loomba

Answer 7

-Othello is both a fantasy of interracial love and social tolerance and a nightmare of racial hatred and male violence
-Location, skin colour, and class are seen to add up to ‘nature’ itself. But the real tragedy of the play lies in the fact these hierarchies are not external to the pair

-Othello is predisposed to believing his [Iago’s} pronouncements about the inherent duplicity of women and the necessary fragility of an ‘unnatural’ relationship between a white, well born woman and an older black soldier

-Ideologies, the play tells us only work because they are not entirely external to us. Othello is a victim of racial beliefs precisely because he becomes an agent of misogynistic ones