Othello Key Quotes Flashcards
AC Bradley on Othello’s temperamental nature
‘Othello’s nature is all of one piece… If such a passion as jealousy seizes him, it will swell into a well-nigh uncontrollable flood.’
AC Bradley on Othello as the outsider
‘he does not belong to our world’
Lynda E Boose on audience’s complicity
‘Holds up a mirror that mercilessly exposes the complicity of the audience’s spectatorship’
‘Refusal to gratify the audience’s need for retributive justice’
Coghill on Iago’s motives
‘powerfully possessed by a hatred against a master who (as he thinks) has kept him down’
Leavis on Othello’s pride
‘a habit of self-approving self-dramatisation is an essential element in Othello’s make-up’
Gardner on Iago’s motives
‘malice is motiveless’
Germaine Greer on Iago’s racism and today
‘Iago is still alive and kicking and filling migrant’s letterboxes with excrement’
Ianouttue on Othello as a morality play
‘from the Medieval morality play in which typically the “good angel” and the “evil angel” are battling for the soul of the “everyman”.’
‘Consistent with the characteristics of a morality play is the fact that both Desdemona and Iago are comparatively one-dimensional characters. Desdemona embodies innocence, sincerity and selflessness’
Ianouttue on interracial marriage
the interracial element serves to emphasize the hard-won nature of the love between them, making it that much more tragic to see it undermined
Dickson on Othello’s stories
‘The Moor’s stories allow Desdemona to experience the exotic/erotic delight’
‘At the same time, romances, poems and plays often countered patriarchal authority in favor of romantic love’
Vaughan on female sexuality
‘early modern England’s preoccupation with cuckoldry demonstrates a basic male insecurity about women’s sexuality’
Quarshie on racial stereotypes
‘perhaps Othello is the one which should most definitely not be played by a black actor’
Dickson on challenging racial stereotypes
‘On the other, the Moor of Venice is the hero of the play, a decorated general in the service of the Venetian state. The villain of the piece is the white racist who plots Othello’s downfall’
‘There is also an alternative history of Othello, in which the role has been interpreted as an act of out-and-out emancipation’
Dickson on Othello and society
Perhaps this is the lesson to draw from Othello, Quarshie suggests: that the play’s history on stage uncovers as much about the societies in which it appears as the play itself.
Dickson on Othello’s tragic fall
‘The more successful you are in depicting the first Othello, this man who is wise, astute, mature, magnanimous, the harder it is to show a man who is persuaded that his wife has committed adultery, and who turns into an obsessive, compulsive, murderous maniac.’
