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
• Ryan: Iago is "theatrically irresistible" and "unfathomable psychopath"
• Bubb: "Iago chooses silence" as a primary method of manipulation
• Hunter: "The basic and ancient sense that black is the colour of sin and death"
• "[Othello] is living the life of a chivalric warrior in a world run by money and self-interest." Sean McEvoy
• Karen Newman argued that the play is a critique of male anxieties about the dangers of freely expressed female desire. Irene Dash saw the play as a critique of the tragic consequences for married women trapped within a sexist patriarchal system.
• Ruth Vanita (1994) criticises the play's male bystanders for silent collusion in Desdemona's murder
• Emilia is the foil for Desdemona and corrects Desdemona's occasional naivete"

  Carol Thomas
• Emilia's loyalty to her friend... is what remains whole in the debacle of Othello

  Bloom
• Desdemona's loyalty is her most distinctive quality

  Bradley
• Female loyalty is a tragic paradox in Shakespeares plays (admirable but also leads to death)

  Lisa Jardine