Othello: Critics Flashcards
Loomba?
‘England was increasingly hostile to foreigners’
‘black people were usually typed as godless, bestial, and hideous, fit only to be slaved by Christians’
‘Both blacks and Muslims were regarded as given to natural sexual and domestic practices, as highly emotional and even irrational, and prone to anger and jealousy’
‘existed outside the Christian hold’
Philips?
‘Othello feels constantly threatened and profoundly insecure’
Honnigman?
‘Iago is a seductive character’
‘Iago appeals to us as more amusing’
‘A traditional Christian view assigns a far from passive role to Desdemona: in the plays moral struggle she affirms and radiates Christian virtues (love, patience, forgiveness)’
‘she may seem passive, [but] it would be kinder to describe her as bewildered, out of her depth, not as defeated’
Lise Jardine?
‘Desdemona is a stereotype of female passivity’
Adams?
‘Who can sympathise with Desdemona? She falls in love and makes a runaway match with a blackamoor…she not only violates her duties to her father, her family, and her country, but she makes the first advances!’
Dillion?
‘She’s a tough character, because what is asked of her Is to play this huge embracing love that very rarely exists’
Dr Johnson (1765)?
‘Othello is ‘magnanimous, artless, and credulous, boundless in his confidence, ardent in his affection, inflexible in his resolution, and obdurate in his revenge’. essentially saying depicts human nature very skilfully.
‘provided a ‘very useful moral, not to make an unequal match’
Coleridge? and Hazlitt?
19th century view
Coleridge - Iago = ‘A being next to the devil’ (Othello depicted as the devil could talk about?)
Hazlitt - ‘an aesthete of evil’
Bradley (1904)?
Othello ‘so noble.. [he] inspires a passion of mingled love and pity’
T.S. Elliot?
Othello’s last speech is a terrible ‘exposure of human weakness’. Attempts to evade reality
F.R. Leavis?
Rejects Bradley’s reading saying Iago’s role is ‘subordinate and merely ancillary’
‘the stuff of which he is made begins at once to deteriorate and show itself unfit’ > Essentially Othello only knows battlefield, the marriage just provided space for his flaws to be exposed.
1950s suggestions?
- That Iago is driven by latent homosexuality
- Iago is a ‘amoral artist’ (Scragg)
Kazan?
‘There are unanswered questions in the tragic world’
‘agonising silence of Shakespeare’s tragedies’
West?
‘Iago has all the psychological traits of a psychopath’
Rymer?
‘The plays setting and change in location was unnecessary’
Play is ‘the most lamentable [play] that ever appear’d on any stage’
