OTHELLO CRITICS

Loomba

'love & violence are crucially cut up'

'Othello is a fantasy of interracial love & social tolerance'

Coleridge

Iago's excuses are 'the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity'

Othello is 'a being next to the devil'

Hugh Quarshie, a black actor

questions Shakespeare's intentions of race: is Othello's quick transition into insanity Shakespeare succumbing to Elizabethan conventions that Moors were a threat to society due to their tendency to violence?

'racist by omission, not commission'

Raatzch

the phonetic affinity between 'ego' and 'Iago'

AC Bradley and FR Leavis

they had challenging views as to whether Othello is a man of nobility

TS Elliot

Othello does not obtain redemption

although Othello believes he is honourable & acted accordingly to female infidelity

Lisa Gardine

'Renaissance women were often seen as suffering martyrs'

John Wain (1971) ~ general

"we respond deeply or shallowly according to whether we have deep or shallow natures"

John Wain (1971) None of the characters understand each other and that is why everything goes wrong

"a tragedy of misunderstanding"

"[Othello] does not see [Desdemona] as a real girl, but as something magical that has happened to him"

JW (1971) ~ Iago has "a patchwork of motives"

A3S3 "shows Iago's fall as well as Othello's. At the beginning... they are both sane men; at the end, they are both mad and in the grip of the same madness"

Iago doesn’t foresee "the holocaust" at end, because he doesn't understand his own tendencies or Othello's love for Desdemona

JW (1971) Othello’s acceptance

Their "acceptance is partial" of Othello

"Desdemona's love... gives him an intimate, living link with Venice and promises to break his outsiderdom, [and thus] central to his whole being"

place with a "close-knit social fabric"

JW (1971) Race used against

"His racial difference from the other characters does not make him terrifying or disgusting, except to people with a grudge against him already”

JW (1971) ~ Cyprus has a strong military presence

"garrison-town atmosphere"

Robert Swinburne - Othello

'the noblest man of man's making'

Bradley - Othello is blameless

Why would anyone hate him enough to kill him,

the main complexity of the play is with Iago's character.

"a great heap of contradictions"

Leavis - tragedy is Othello's fault

Iago 'sufficiently convincing as a person' but 'subordinate and merely ancillary... a necessary piece of dramatic mechanism'

Leavis - Tragedy is due to Othello's shortcomings

- his feelings for D 'it may be love but it can only be in an oddly qualified sense of love of her'

- habit of self-idealisation

'the disguise of an obtuse and brutal egotism'

Leavis - Othello is an 'egotist'

- cool treatment of Brabantio

- description of wooing makes it seem as though she wooed him and not the other way round, do we believe?

essential point of the play: transformation

G. I. Duthie (1951) Othello’s ego

Othello's egotism is egregious enough to make Iago's work easy

two forces working in conjunction: it is caused by an external force of evil deliberately bringing itself to bear on a noble figure which has within it a seed of evil'

Leavis - Othello to blame

'the essential traitor is within the gates'

J.Wain - Iago is loveless

'the assassination of love by non-love'

Iago being 'less than a complete human being because love had been left out of his composition'

'it is only the loveless heart that cannot learn'

Bradley - Iago destroyed by love

'[Iago] was destroyed by the power that he attacked, the power of love; and he was destroyed by it because he could not understand it; and he could not understand it because it was not in him'

Bradley - Othello's love

Othello in middle age 'comes to have his life crowned with the final glory of love'

William Empson's (1951) the epithet "honest" Iago

'head sense' (telling the truth, not stealing, keeping promises)

medievally, meant 'deserving the receiving social honour' & 16th c, meant 'one of us, the type we like'

Restoration, anti-Puritan feeling that a man might be selfish and unreliable but honest in that he tells the truth about it so honesty not valued

Empson (1951) ~ Iago is truthful (supports Bradley's interpretation)

wicked, not to be defended, but human and credible - he sees honest as patronising

- Iago's uttering his true opinions but people assume he’s having a bit of fun,

his cynicism has 'deep roots in destructive emotions'

Bradley ~ Desdemona’s innocence

'the "eternal womanly" in its most lovely and adorable form, simple and innocent as a child, radiant with the heavenly purity of heart which men worship the more because nature so rarely permits it to themselves'

'a childlike boldness and persistency, which are full of charm but are unhappily united with a certain want of perception'

Mrs Jameson ~ Desdemona (does not agree with Bradley)

'She has less quickness of intellect and less tendency to reflection than most of Shakespeare's heroines'

but has 'the unconscious address common in women