Othello Critics

Question 1

What does Samuel Johnson say about Iago?

Answer 1

“The character of Iago is so conducted that he is from the first scene to the last hated and despised”

Iago doesn’t change or undergo any personal journeys

Question 2

What does Charles lamb say about Iago?

Answer 2

Shakespeare’s criminal characters: “we think not so much of the crimes which they commit, as of the ambition, the aspiring spirit, the intellectual activity”

We enjoy the ambition they have to climb the chain of being

Question 3

What does W.H Auden say about Iago?

Answer 3

“Joker in the pack” “practical joker of a peculiarly appalling kind”

Dramatic perspective allows us to share his humour- his victims lack humour which makes him seem clever

Question 4

Harold Goddard on Iago

Answer 4

“Highest intellectual gifts”

Question 5

Samuel Coleridge on Iago

Answer 5

“The motive-hunting of motiveless malignity”

Question 6

What did Samuel Johnson say is the key quality of the play?

Answer 6

Crucial insight into human nature

Question 7

What are Anna Jameson’s views on Desdemonas role in the play?

Answer 7

She is “the source of pathos throughout”

The plays fundamental opposition is not the marriage but Iago and desdemonas relationship
“Her gentleness appears only a contemptible weakness”

The horror lies between the virtuous Desdemona and malevolent Iago

Question 8

What does AC Bradley say about the character of othello

Answer 8

“Noblest soul on earth”

Question 9

What are F.R Leavis views on othello

Answer 9

Self dramatisation

“Self pride becomes stupidity… an insane and self deceiving passion”

Question 10

Bernard Spivak on Iago

Answer 10

He is the personification of evil with a dangerously privileged audience relationship

Question 11

How did criticism change in 1960s

Answer 11

Influenced by same impulses of American civil rights movement- explore race

Question 12

Cowhig view on race in othello

Answer 12

“A black man whose humanity is eroded by the cunning and racism of whites”

Question 13

Coppelia Kahn on gender

Answer 13

Men’s expectations about women’s lustful nature is responsible for her death

Early modern anxiety about cuckoldry

Question 14

Irene Dash on marriage

Answer 14

Desdemona experiences self degradation “with the aim of adjusting to marriage”

Death= sexist system that celebrates compliance in wives

Question 15

Carol Thomas Neely- why are Desdemona and Emilia victims?

Answer 15

Not marriage but of males who view them through cultural lenses of romantic idealisation and anxious misogyny

Question 16

Karen Newman- why was the marriage politically significant

Answer 16

It is a threat to Venice as it embodies the dangers of freely expressed female desire and miscegenation

Question 17

Ruth Vanita on race

Answer 17

Play “combats racism by its presentation of othello as not at all different from any white husband”

Question 18

Daniel Vitkus on othello and religion

Answer 18

He reverts back to “a version of the Islamic tyrant”

Question 19

Johnathon Burton on othello

Answer 19

Begins to believe in his “irredeemable difference” and embraces misogyny he looses the ability to “unsettle the meaning of his skin”

Self doubt means he tries to price himself Venetian- marriage and fighting Turks- proof of his Christian faith

Question 20

AC Bradley on Desdemona

Answer 20

She’s not a real character but the ideal “eternal womanly” Elizabethan woman

Question 21

Harold bloom on Emilia

Answer 21

Emilia is the only character that Iago underestimates

Emilias revelation of Iago is “one of Shakespeare’s grandest ironies”

Question 22

Carol Thomas Neely on Emilia

Answer 22

She’s the only character that realises the central conflict is between men and women

Question 23

Penny Gay on Emilia

Answer 23

Final refusal to please her husband makes her more complex than Desdemona- she’s almost as much of a tragic figure as othello

Question 24

Ania Loomba’s view on the play

Answer 24

“A nightmare of racial hatred and male violence”

Question 25

E A J Honigmann’s view on dramatic perspective

Answer 25

“Dramatic perspective can even make us the villains accomplices”