Othello critics Flashcards
4
Shakespearan Tragedy - the idea of tragedy
- ‘The idea of tragedy as the fall from prosperity to wretchedness became commonplace’
- ‘It is the emotional truth of the struggle rather than the metaphysical truth of the worldview that is at the center of these plays’
- ‘Tragedy, for Shakespeare, is the genre of uncompensated suffering’
(Kastan - ‘Shakespeare and the Idea of Tragedy 2003’)
2
The pleasure of tragedy
- ‘Oikeia hedone’ - the ‘proper pleasure’ of tragedy - suffering and death are percieved as matter for grief and fear’
- ‘Nietzschean oxymoron’ - ‘tragic joy’ is, oddly, easier to accept, because it fights fire with fire’
(Nuttall - ‘Aristotle and After’ 1996)
The Shakespearan tragic hero
- ‘An instantanous death occuring by accident in the midst of prosperity would not suffice for it. It is in fact, essentially a tale of suffering and calamity conducting to death’
- ‘Contrasted with previous happiness or glory’ - ‘Othello himself is no mere private person; he is the General of the Republic…the consciousness of his high position never leaves him’
(A.C.Bradley - ‘The Substance of Shakespearan Tragedy’ 1991)
4
Tragedy and madness
- ‘The excess of any passion approached madness’ in Elizabethan psychological lore and that ‘Madness is to some degree a punishment or doom’
- ‘To communicate at all, you must acknoqledge the opposing voice’ - ‘madness verbally assigned to other Shakesapearean tragic heroes - contains both punishment and insight’
- ‘Caught between absolute and expedient’ - Shakespeare himself-perhaps - who having been given the power to see the ‘truth’, can convey it only though poetry - what we commonly call a fiction and dismiss’ - if you question the basis of sanity, you are seen as crazy
(Mack - ‘What happens in Shakespearean Tragedy’ 1993)
2
The character of Othello
- ‘The tragedy doesn’t involve the idea of the hero’s learning through suffering’
(Leavis - ‘Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero’ 1937)
2
Leavis and Bradley head to head
- ‘It is not so much Iago’s diabollic intellect as Othello’s readiness to respond’ - ‘vindication of Othello’s perfect nobility Bradley is preoccupied with’
- ‘However nobly he may feel about it…it can only be in an oddly qualified sense love of her…overcome with the pathos of it’
4
Othello, race and society
- ‘Othello is both a fantasy of interracial love and social tolerance, and a nightmare of racial hatred and male violence’
- Othello is predisposed to believing his prnouncements about the inherent duplicity of women…ideologies, the plays tells us, only work because they are not entirely external to us’
- ‘Othello is needed in order to combat the Turks, the Senate is willing to regard as ‘more fair than black’ but for Desdemona’s father such colour-blindness is not possible..state between state and family’
(Loomba - ‘Othello and the Radical Question 1998)
Shakespeare reproduced: The text in history and ideology
- Modern critical theory
‘The meaning of a Shakespearean text is ineluctably in that text’ ‘Shakespearean text resides in an easthetic zone above ideology’
Howard and Connor 2005
5
Shakespeare in the present
- New historicism
- ‘the critic own situatedness does not-cannot-contaminate the past’
- ‘how can we decide whose historical circumstances will have priority in that process, Shakespeare’s, or our own?’
- ‘they can’t afford to examine the position in the present from which that manoeuvre is undertaken, as a result, they discount the nature of the choosing and the omission, the selections and suppressions that determine it’
Hawkes
3
Shakespeare and Gender
- ‘Shed light not only on Shakespeare’s women but on his men, which has examined the cultural constructs of masculinity and feminity and the playing of gender roles’
- ‘Interest in the overt exploration of role playing and gender performance by the androgynous heroines of the comedies; exploration of male anxiety in the face of assertive and dominant women and the need to perform masculinity’
(Woolf - A Room of One’s Own 1945)
Sex in the City: An Ecocritical Perspective on the Place of Gender and Race in Othello
‘Shakespearean Wild is represented by landscape, foreigners, animals, and especially women’
Strickler
3
Ethnicity - ‘Diversifying Shakespeare’
- ‘There is a clear value in drawing on the energies of the present to understand the past, especially when it comes to the subject of race’
- ‘The relationship between socieities separated in time is as complex as the one between societies that are spatially and culturally apart’
Espinosa
2
‘And wash the Ethiop white’: femininity and the monstrous in Othello
- ‘Much of the disgust Rymer, Coleridge and other critics betray comes not from the fact of Othello’s individual blackness, but from the relation of that blackness to Desdemona’s fair purity’
- ‘Miscegenation is an issue not only on the levell of plot, but also of language, for linked oppositions, especially of black and white and their cultural associations, characterise the play’s discourse’
Newman
Belsey
‘Imperial values developed a mythology of white civilisation and black barbarity, readily mapped onto an existing system of differences’
Cowhig
‘Only as we recognise the familiarty of the figure of the black man as villain in Elizabethan drama can we appreciate what must have been the startling impact on Shakespeare’s audience of a black hero of outstanding qualities his play Othello’
2
Briggs
‘Elizabethan edicts suggest that her society discriminated against people with different colour skin in the same way that many societies still do today..
‘most of them are infidels having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel’
2
Cowhig II
‘Iago’s destructive cruelty has seemed to many characters to be inadequately motivated’
‘The attack demolishes Othello’s defences because this kind of racial contempt exposes his basic insecurity as an alien in a white society’
O’Toole
‘Shakespeare was certaintly conscious of race’
‘Racism isn’t just the context in which Othello lives. It has entered his mind and soul. It is an integral part of him’
Coryat
‘Courtezan of Venice is famoused over all Christendome’
William Davies, 1614
‘Italian women were very lwed and wicked’
Robert Burton
‘Wives are slippery, often unfaithful to their husbands but to old men most treacherous’
‘declined with the veil of years’ - Othello
Cornelius a Lapide
‘For the authority of man extends not only to inanimate things and brute beasts, but also to reasonable creatures, that is women and wives’
Fintain O Toole - Shakespeare is Hard, but so is life (1990,2000)
‘Venice is also a byword for exotic vices and unbridles passions’
4
‘Why should he call her a whore?’ (1996)
- ‘Bianca is a venetian courtesan’ PG171
- All three are wrongfully accused of sexual misdemeanour in the course of the play, all three, though unequal in their rank-power, are equally vulnerable to a sexual charge brought against them’
- ‘The identical slur’
- Lisa Jardine
2
Lisa Jardine II
- ‘Desdemona has been publicly desginated whore’ in terms damaging enough to constitute a substantial threat to her reputation’
- ‘A whore’s death for all her innocence’
4
Desdemona contrast
- ‘The soft simplicity of Desdemona’ by Samuel Johnson
- ‘Helplessly passive’ by Bradley
ALSO SEEN AS - ‘Concealing truth by prevarication’ - Nicholl
- ‘Extremely strong, an active participant in the drama, rather than an insipid feeble girl’ - Mendes
4
Shakespeare’s Division of Experience
- Marilyn French
- ‘Iago has contempt for the feminine principle, for women and feeling and sex’
- ‘Othello’s denial of the erotic element in love is related to Iago’s denail of the loving element in eros. Both denials emerge from a need to separate love (the inlaw aspect) from sex (the outlaw)
- ‘There are 2 types of women, one being superhuman, totally virtuos…the other kind is a dissembler, a deciever’
3
Women and Men in Othello - Iago
- ‘Iago, though primarily the manipulator of these conflicts in the other men is also the victim of his own’
- Little contact with women in the play’
- ‘Iago cynicism has cracks just as Othello’s idealism does’ - grudging admiration
Women and Men in Othello - Bianca
- ‘Like the comedy heroines, combine realism with romance, mockery with affection. Bianca comically reflects the qualities of women as Roderigo does those of the men’
Women and Men in Othello - Emilia
-‘Her views are mid-way between Desdemona’s and Bianca’s and between those of the women and those of the men’
Shakespearan Tragedy - Bradley
Iago and Emilia
- ‘He knows his wife, he thinks. She is not over-scrumpulous, she will do anything to please him….the foulness of his own soul made him so ignorant that he built into the marvellous structure of his plot a piece of crass stupidity’
Shakespearan Tragedy - Bradley
Cassio
- ‘Moralising critics point out that he pays for the first offence by losing his post, and for the second by nearly losing his life’
‘Shakespeare simply sets it down; and it is just because he is truthful in these smaller things than in the greater things we trust him absolutely never to pervert the truth for the sake of some doctrine’
Shakespearan Tragedy - Bradley
Just Emilia
-‘All her defects, vanish into nothingness when we see her face to face with that which she can understand and feel’
3
I nothing know: Emilia’s Rhetoric of Self-Resistance in Othello
Emilia
- Abrahams
- ‘Although I agree with Carole Thomas Neely that Emilia is prey to the dominat ideology of wifely virtue, I do not believe that is it either her conception of duty or her desire to act in accord with this ideology that compels her to lie’
- ‘Emilia recognises the degree to which women’s pre-ordained social roles both consign them to suffer’
I nothing know: Emilia’s Rhetoric of Self-Resistance in Othello
Iago
-‘Each man allows the vehemence of his passions, and here I concieve of Iago’s will to power as his passion, to determine his course of action, and each man rashly shifts from epistemic doubt abous his wife’s unfaithfulness to ontological certainty about it’
