Othello Critics

• Loomba - Othello, race and society


  'Othello is both a fantasy of interracial love and social tolerance, and a nightmare of racial hatred and male violence
• Loomba - Othello, race and society


  'Location, skin colour and class are seen to add up to nature itself
• Loomba - Othello, race and society


  'Iago's machinations are effective because Othello is predisposed to believing his pronouncements about the inherent duplicity of women
• Loomba - Othello, race and society


  ' The portrayal of Othello, the 'Moor of Venice' stands at the complicated crux of contemporary beliefs about black people and Muslims.
• Loomba - Othello, race and society


  'Black-skinned people were usually typed as Godless, bestial and hideous
• Loomba - Othello, race and society


  'Both blacks and Muslims were regarded as given to unnatural sexual and domestic practises, as highly emotional and irrational, prone to anger and jealousy
• Loomba - Othello, race and society


  'both existed outside the Christian fold
• Loomba - Othello, race and society


  'Othelo yokes together and reshapes available images of 'blackamoors
• Loomba -Othello, race and society

  'Venetian civility has been built by letting in the very foreigners who threaten to undermine it
• F.R Leavis - The character of Othello


  'He remains the same Othello; he has discovered his mistake but there is no tragic self-discovery
• F.R Leavis - The character of Othello


  'The noble Othello is now seen as tragically pathetic, and he sees himself as pathetic too
• F.R Leavis - The character of Othello


  'Othello really is, we cannot doubt, the stoic captain whose few words know their full sufficiency
• F.R Leavis - The character of Othello


  'He dies drawing himself up as the stern fighting man who has done the state some service
• F.R Leavis - The character of Othello


  'Othello dies belonging to the world of action in which his true part lay
• Honigmann - The portrayal of Iago


  'If Iago were a straightforward villain he would arouse little fellow feeling
• Honigmann - The portrayal of Iago


  'The character of Iago is so well conducted, that he is from the first scene to last hated and despised.
• Honigmann - The portrayal of Iago


  'we may come close to sympathising with the villain because he confides in us, so we watch the plot unfolding from his point of view.
• Honigmann - The portrayal of Iago


  'Iago enjoys another important advantage, that he is the plays chief humourist
• Honigmann - The portrayal of Iago


  'Because Emelia speaks of him as her 'Wayward husband' she must know Iago better than anybody else does
• Honigmann - The portrayal of Iago


  'His humour intends to give pain or allows him to bask in his sense of his own superiority' very rarely is it at his own expense
• Honigmann - The portrayal of Iago


  'He enjoys God-like sense of power
• Honigmann - The portrayal of Iago


  'Since his victims lack humour, Iago appeals more amusing.. his humour also makes him appear cleverer than his victims
• Honigmann - The portrayal of Iago


  'Iago excels in short-term tactics, not in long-term strategy
• Honigmann - The portrayal of Iago


  'He has neither felt nor understood the spiritual impulses that bind ordinary human beings together, loyalty, friendship, respect, compassion. Emelia's love for Desdemona is Iago's undoing
• A.C Bradley - The Shakespearean tragic hero


  'The heroine, if there is one is at much centre as the hero
• A.C Bradley - The Shakespearean tragic hero


  Talking about tragic hero - ' They appeal strongly to human sympathy and pity; it startled that of another feeling - fear
• A.C Bradley - The Shakespearean tragic hero


  'It made them feel that man is blind and helpless
• A.C Bradley - The Shakespearean tragic hero


  Tragedy with Shakespeare is concerned always with persons of 'high degree
• A.C Bradley - The Shakespearean tragic hero


  About Othello - 'The consciousness of his high position never leaves him. At the end, when he is determined to live no longer, he is as anxious as Hamlet not to be misjudged by the great world.
• A.C Bradley - The Shakespearean tragic hero


  'The pangs of despised love and the anguish of remorse, we say, are the same in a peasant and a prince
• A.C Bradley - The Shakespearean tragic hero


  'But not to insist that they cannot be so... the story of a prince has a greatness and dignity of its own. his fate affects the welfare of a whole nation or empire.
• A.C Bradley - The Shakespearean tragic hero


  'And when he falls, his fall produces a sense of contrast, of the powerlessness of man, and of the omnipotence of fortune and fate, which no tale of private life can possibly rival
• Coleridge


  'Everyone wishes a Desdemona for a wife
• Jan Knott


  "Desdemona is the victim of her own passion"

  "Her love testifies against her not for her"
• Samuel Coleridge- Iago


  'Motiveless malignity
• A.C Bradley on Othello's actions


  'He (Othello) is so lost to all sense of reality that he never asks himself what will follow the deaths of Desdemona and Cassio
• TS Eliot on Othello's character


  "I have always felt that I have never read a more terrible exposure of human weakness - of universal human weakness - than the last great speech of Othello."
• F.R. Leavis- Othello's Harmartia


  'Othello has a weak character and propensity to jealousy tested by marriage'

  'The stuff of which he is made begins at once to deteriorate and show itself unfit
• Ruth Cowhig


  'Othello is an alien in a white society
• Leavis- race dynamic in Desdemona and Othello relationship


  'his colour, whether or not 'colour-feeling' existed among the Elizabethans, we are certainly to take as emphasising the disparity of the match