OTHELLO CRITICS

Everett any colour

Othello is almost any ‘colour’ one pleases, so long as it permits his easier isolation and destruction by his enemies and himself

Berry dramatising alienation

Representing a homeless wanderer perhaps offered him [Shakespeare] a way of dramatizing alienation without the necessity of creating a credible cultural background’

Auden exoticisation

Desdemona ‘exoticisation of Othello’

Dollimore

A lurking psychosexual neurosis

Bartles simultaneously

Othello is simultaneously insider and othered; Venetian general and racial other

Loomba ideologies

Ideologies, the play tells us, only work because they are not entirely external to us

loomba yoking

(Othello is both) yoking together and reshaping (stereotypical narratives about Moors)

bloom crucial

(marriage consummation is) crucial… for the entire tragedy turns upon it

bradshaw ghastly

(the murder is) their marriage’s only consummation, and the ghastly tragicomic parody of erotic death

Bradley helplessly

(Desdemona is) helplessly passive

Dreher script

Desdemona’s love is an act of defiance, but her silence in the final act suggests submission to the patriarchal script

Boose handkerchief

says it’s a symbol of honour, passed around

Vanita complicity

complicity of male society in deaths of D & E – valuing male honour over female life

Kahn identities

women hold the ‘power to validate male identities through obedience and fidelity as wives’

Phillips possession

Othello’s love of Desdemona is ‘the love of possession. She is a prize, a spoil of war’

Honigmann misunderstands

‘Just about every character misunderstands her’

Emma Smith tragedy

inexorable, unstoppable

Honigmann 15

15 or 16

Christopher North

double time

Northrop Frye

Green Worlds

Parker instability

Instability of language mirrors instability of identity and truth

Thompson he who

He who controls the storytelling controls the world

Howard tragedy is

Tragedy is written in language long before it unfolds in action; Words create the reality that destroys him

Raatsch evil

Iago’s evil is in his enjoyment of it as much as the acts themselves

Bloom potential

Iago mirrors our own dark potential

Tilyard downfall

Othello’s downfall is not due to jealousy alone, but to the rigid worldview that makes him susceptible to it

Judith Butler

theory of peformativity (Butlerian reading)

Smith dyed in mummy

black handkerchief

Bartels simultaneously

Othello is simultaneously insider and outsider, Venetian general and racial other

Eagleton selfhood

Much of his jealousy is not more than this self-regarding fear that his own magnificently replete selfhood is collapsing from the inside

Kastan tragedy

fearful incomprehensibility

Hollingwood

Iago, gross and disnatured as he is, belongs in citizenship to a society… which sees Othello and Desdemona as gross and disnatured

Honan Iago & Othello

collusive intimacy

Norman Sanders

most popular [of Shakespeare’s plays]