Othello critics Flashcards
Granville barker
’ a tragedy without meaning’
“motiveless malignity”
Coleridge
O’toole
“there is no Othello without iago”
Hugh Quarshie, a black actor
he ? S’s intentions regarding race:
is Othello’s quick transition into insanity Shakespeare succumbing to Elizabethan conventions that Moors were a threat to society due to their tendency to violence?
‘racist by omission, not commission’
Smith
Iago is a repressed homosexual
Koomba
Othello is an “agent of mysoginy” and a “victim of racial beliefs”
Raatzch
phonetic affinity between “EGO” and “IAGO”
TS Elliot
Argues Othello does not obtain redemption although Othello believes he is honourable as he acted accordingly to the circumstances of female infidelity
Lisa Gardine
‘Renaissance women were often seen as suffering martyrs’
Rymer (1600s)
‘a woman [Desdemona] without sense because she married a blackamoor’
‘Tragedy of the Handkerchief’
John Wain (1971)
“a tragedy of misunderstanding”
“O does not see D as a real girl, but as something magical that has happened to him”
~ none of the characters understand each other and that is why everything goes wrong
JW (1971)
he has “a patchwork of motives”
JW (1971) ~ Venice
- Their “acceptance is partial” of Othello
- “Desdemona’s love… gives him an intimate, living link with Venice and promises to break his outsiderdom, [and thus] central to his whole being”
JW (1971) ~ race
“it is the outward symbol of his isolation”
Robert B. Heilman
‘the least heroic of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes’
John E. Seaman
It is a Christian tragedy ~ Othello’s fall is a version of Adam’s, while Desdemona’s is an inversion of Eve’s
Lilian Winstanley, ‘‘Othello’ as the Tragedy of Italy’ (1924)
It is a diagram of Spanish political history, with Othello as Philip II and Iago as his enemy, Antonio Perez.
Bradley
“a great heap of contradictions”
G. I. Duthie (1951)
’ caused by an external force of evil deliberately bringing itself to bear on a noble figure which has within it a seed of evil’
J.Wain - love
‘the assassination of love by non-love
John W. Draper
Elizabethan notions of honour made the cuckold a universally despised figure
Kenneth Muir - Iago’s motivations
‘The secret of Iago is not a motiveless malignity, nor evil for evil’s sake, nor a professional envy but a pathological jealousy of his wife”
Empson (1951) ~ Iago
his cynicism has ‘deep roots in destructive emotions’
PERFORMANCE: Laurence Olivier played Iago , 1938
played Iago as a repressed homosexual whose motive was unrecognised passion for Othello
Heraud (1865) ~ Desdemona
“She suffers from illusion and loves to be deluded’
W. H. Auden
In the ‘willow scene’, it ‘is as if she had suddenly realised that she ought to have married was someone of her own class and colour like Ludovico’
Sean McEvoy
‘The audience becomes complicit in Iago’s intention and, like it or not, is soon involved in his vengeful plotting’
Fintan O’Toole
racism isn’t just the context in which Othello lives. It hasentered his mind and his soul. It is an integral part of him
A.C. Bradley (1905)
‘Desdemona is helplessly passive’
Samuel Johnson praised ‘the
soft simplicity of Desdemona
Karen Newman argued that
the play is a critique of male anxieties about the dangers of freely expressed female desir
Roxanne Schwab (2005) argues that
Iago’s ‘most underrated and constant victim is his wife, Emilia
