othello critics

• Loomba


  'love and violence in the play are crucially cut up'

  'Othello is both a fantasy of interracial love and social tolerance
• Granville Barker


  'a tragedy without meaning
• Coleridge


  Iago's excuses are 'the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity' and Othello is 'a being next to the devil
• O'Toole


  Iago is the 'Machiavellian villain'

  'there is no Othello without Iago
• Hugh Quarshie, a black actor


  he questions Shakespeare'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 a 'victim of racial beliefs' because is an 'agent of misogyny
• Raatzch


  the phonetic affinity between 'ego' and 'Iago
• AC Bradley and FR Leavis


  they had challenging views as to whether Othello is a man of nobility
• TS Elliot


  he 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
• John Quincy Adams


  believed Desdemona deserved her fate as 'black and white blood cannot be intermingled
• Rymer (1600s)


  'a woman [Desdemona] without sense because she married a blackamoor'

  'a Bloody Farce without salt or savour'

  'Tragedy of the Handkerchief
• John Wain (1971) ~ general


  "we respond deeply or shallowly according to [the play] whether we have deep or shallow natures"
• John Wain (1971) ~ Othello / Desdemona


  "a tragedy of misunderstanding"

  "[Othello] does not see [Desdemona] as a real girl, but as something magical that has happened to him"

  ~ contention is that none of the characters understand each other and that is why everything goes wrong
• JW (1971) ~ Iago


  Acct 3 Scene 3 "shows Iago's fall as well as Othello's. At the beginning... they are both sane men; at the end, they are both mad and in the grip of the same madness" ~ Iago does not foresee "the holocaust" at the end, because he doesn't understand his own tendencies or Othello's love for Desdemona

  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"

  place with a "close-knit social fabric"
• Louis Auchincloss


  '[The Venetians] regard [Othello] as Victorian Englishmen might have regarded some splendid Maharajah
• JW (1971) ~ race


  "racial difference from the other characters is not that it makes him terrifying or disgusting - it manifestly doesn't, except to people with a grudge against him already - but that it is the outward symbol of his isolation" ~ interesting, maybe don't memorise this whole thing
• JW (1971) ~ Cyprus


  "garrison-town atmosphere"
• Robert Swinburne


  'the noblest man of man's making
• Robert B. Heilman


  'the least heroic of Shakespeare's tragic heroes
• John Middleton Murray


  The idea of magic is central to it
• David Kuala


  The idea of magic is not central to it
• John E. Seaman in 'Shakespeare Quarterly' XIX


  It is a Christian tragedy ~ Othello's fall is a version of Adam's, while Desdemona's is an inversion of Eve's
• E. E. Stoll 'Othello, An Historical and Comparative Study' (1915)


  Its plot is incredible
• R. B. Heilman


  Its plot has 'surrealistic rightness
• Emrys Jones


  It is part of the response to James I's heroic poem 'Lepanto
• 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.
• Thomas Babington Macaulay, 'Essay on Dante' (1824)

  'Perhaps the greatest work in the world
• Thomas Rymer, 'A Short View of Tragedy' (1693)


  'A bloody farce without salt or savour
• Bradley - Othello


  Othello is entirely blameless, has to explain why anyone would hate him enough to kill him, so sites the main complexity of the play within Iago's character.

  "a great heap of contradictions"
• Leavis - Iago


  Iago 'sufficiently convincing as a person' but 'subordinate and merely ancillary... a necessary piece of dramatic mechanism'

  - tragedy is Othello's fault
• Leavis - Othello


  Tragedy is due to Othello's shortcomings e.g.

  - his feelings for D 'it may be love but it can only be in an oddly qualified sense of love of her'

  - habit of self-idealisation

  - heroic way of seeing himself in widescreen, cinematically

  'the disguise of an obtuse and brutal egotism
• Leavis - tragedy


  criticises Othello's character, calling him an 'egotist' ~ an account of what he is, forgetting what he may become (missing the essential point of the play: transformation)

  - cool treatment of Brabantio

  - description of wooing makes it seem as though she wooed him and not the other way round, do we believe?
• G. I. Duthie (1951)


  Othello's egotism is egregious enough to make Iago's work fairly easy

  the tragedy is caused by 'two forces working in conjunction: it is caused by an external force of evil deliberately bringing itself to bear on a noble figure which has within it a seed of evil
• Leavis - Othello to blame


  'the essential traitor is within the gates
• J.Wain - love


  'the assassination of love by non-love' Iago being 'less than a complete human being because love had been left out of his composition'

  'it is only the loveless heart that cannot learn
• Bradley - love


  '[Iago] was destroyed by the power that he attacked, the power of love; and he was destroyed by it because he could not understand it; and he could not understand it because it was not in him
• Bradley - Othello's love


  Othello in middle age 'comes to have his life crowned with the final glory of love