critics

• “The audience becomes complicit in Iago’s intention” Sean McAvoy
• “The motive-hunting of motiveless malignity” Coleridge
• “There is so much in Othello of which Iago never dreamed” Eastman
• Othello is “by far the most romantic figure among Shakespeare’s heroes” AC Bradley
• “Othello loves emotion for its own sake” G Wilson Knight
• “I have never read a more terrible exposure of human weakness than the last great speech of Othello” TS Eliot
• “The thing that sets him apart is his solitariness” Gardner
• “The story of a melodramatic villain entrapping a credulous fool” K Muir
• Othello and Desdemona are “united in a marriage which all other characters view as unthinkable. Shakespeare uses their assumption to generate the plot itself” Newman