Othello Critical Views

Morals, Decorum and Reflections of Real Life

Thomas Rymer: no satisfactory moral for the audience to take home, “a warning to good housewives to look well to their linen”, “A noble Venetian Lady is to be murdered by our Poet…in sober sadness, purely for being a fool”

Dr Johnson: Shakespeare depicted human nature skilfully, Othello was “magnanimous, artless, and credulous, boundless in his confidence, ardent in his affection, inflexible in his resolution, and obdurate in his revenge”

Critique of Desdemona

Rymer: Desdemona was a strumpet who lacks morals for marrying a Moor

Newman: Desdemona’s decision to challenge traditional views is “heroic rather than demonic”, she is attracted to Othello because of his sexual “otherness”

Greenblatt: Her marriage was her attempt to gain power in a society ruled by men, their passion was based on lust

Critique of Iago

Rymer: Iago was too villainous to be believed

Coleridge: “A being next to the devil” driven by “motiveless malignity”, Othello killed Desdemona “in a conviction forced upon him by the almost superhuman art of Iago”

Scragg: Iago is driven by latent homosexuality, an example of a typical stage Machiavelli who “personifies…self-interest, hypocrisy, cunning”

Bradley: Iago’s actions are plausible, “Goodness annoys Iago” because he has been overlooked", “defeated by the power of love” because he could not understand it,

Elliot and Leavis: Iago’s role is “subordinate and merely ancillary”, Othello was responsible for his downfall, Iago displays “a not uncommon kind of grudging malice” and has grievance to explain his motivation, “Iago simply exploits a weakness that already existed in Othello’s character”

Johnson: “Iago’s manipulating was artfully natural”

Hazlitt: Iago is “motivated by power”, something “natural to man”

Critique of Othello

Swinburne: Othello is “the noblest man of man’s making”

Bradley: Blameless, “the most romantic figure among Shakespeare’s heroes”, “so noble…[he] inspires a passion of mingled love and pity”, the newness of his marriage makes his jealousy credible, Othello never falls completely and we feel “admiration and love” for him at the end of the play, he is able to get jealous easily because he is “by nature full of the vehement passion”, Othello gets jealous as it is black people’s nature,

T.S Eliot: “A terrible exposure of human weakness”, “Othello is anything but noble and endeavours to escape reality”

F.R Leavis: Othello is responsible for his own downfall because he has a weak character, “the stuff of which he is made begins at once to deteriorate and show itself unfit”, his love is dismissed and “composed largely of ignorance of self as well as ignorance of [Desdemona]”, (in his final speech) Othello has “discovered his mistake, but there is no tragic self discovery”, he remains “un-self-comprehending”, “The mind that undoes him is not Iago’s but his own”

Newman: Othello fears femininity

Loomba: His marriage isolates him, “a victim of racial beliefs precisely because he becomes an agent of misogynistic ones”, his feeling of belonging makes him “near schizophrenic”

Christianity

Brown: “An audience that believed in devils might see Iago as someone working in close allegiance to an evil power that is greater than any human force”

Other: Othello is damned when he commits suicide because he has sinned, entering into a compact with the devil / Othello affirms a morality that is consistent with Christianity - a positive view of love and faith, vengeance is wicked and pride dangerous

Freudian interpretation

Iago’s pain and distrust is caused by his repressed homosexual desire for Othello that is completely unrequited

Religious interpretation

Desdemona is angelic, while Othello and Iago represent hell

Marxist interpretation (Socioeconomic)

The handkerchief acts as a miniature of nuptial linens.

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