Traditional

• Overview of Traditional Criticism

  Othello has been reviewed by many critics, both negatively, positively and probingly.
• Rymer

  • Thomas Rymer (c.1641-1713) attacked the play for its use of Othello as a tragic hero and said that it was contrived because, unlike classical tragedies, it shifted its location (the conventional model was to have one location).
  • He felt that the play had an ‘improbable’ plot.
• Racism

  • Rymer seemed to have a racist outlook because he could not conceive of how a Moorish or Black character could be a tragic hero.
  • Rymer also argued that one of the play’s morals was a warning ‘to all good wives that they look well to their men’.
  • Feminist Literary scholarship may have something to say about this, as examined below.
• Johnson

  • Samuel Johnson (1709-84) meanwhile, praised the play for its ‘aesthetic qualities’ showing that he much appreciated the poetry in the text.
  • He also admired the ‘cool malignity’ of Iago and saw the play as being very modern in its presentation of characterisation.
  • He also admired the swift movement of the action.
• Coleridge

  • The critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) gave a series of lectures about Othello made between 1818-9.
  • Coleridge most admired Shakespeare’s creation of Roderigo as a ‘dupe’, but he contested the common interpretation of Othello as a Black sub-Saharan African.
  • Coleridge felt he should be truly presented as a Muslim North African, though admits that seemingly characters in the play are unable to make the distinction.
• Motives and suspicion

  • Coleridge famously also said that the search for Iago’s motive was ‘the motive-hunting of [a] motiveless Malignity’ and that, in fact, Iago was ‘a being next to a devil, but not quite a devil’.
  • Interestingly, Coleridge also said that the play was not really about ‘jealousy’ and that, in fact, it was about ‘suspicion’.
• Overview of Traditional Performance

  The first known performance of Othello occurred on 1 November 1604, at Whitehall Palace in London.
• Alterations

  • After the death of Shakespeare, many of his plays were altered and changed to fit tastes in successive centuries.
  • However, Othello is one of the few Shakespearean plays not to be adapted or changed during the Restoration and the eighteenth century.
• Endurance

  • History has shown that Othello is one of Shakespeare’s most enduring plays.
  • One of its core themes—the notion of jealousy—is so timeless, that this may well be the reason why it is still well-received today.