Othello Critics

Thomas Rhymer on Othello as a play

Othello might serve only as "a caution" to maidens not to run away with "blackamoors" without their parents’ consent. 

Outraged by the idea of a black hero

Carol Neely on the play’s central theme and conflicts

The play’s central theme is love – especially marital love; its central conflict is between the men and the women. 

Schlegel on Othello’s character

(modern readers would understand his argument as thoroughly racist)

Schlegel reads Othello's descent into murderous jealousy not as a shocking reversal, but as the inevitable return of an innately barbarous man to his ostensibly uncivilised roots

Samuel Johnson on Othello as ‘innately noble’

In Johnson’s view Othello was ‘magnanimous, artless, and credulous, boundless in his confidence, ardent in his affection, inflexible in his resolution, and obdurate in his revenge’. 

Swinburne on Othello’s character

Othello must be seen as ‘the noblest man of man’s making’.

Tony Tanner on Othello’s character

argued Othello ‘seems to dread the sexual act’

FR Leavis on Othello as an ignorant egoist

Othello is not the naïve and noble victim of Iago's superior intellect, but an egoist whose "self-pride becomes stupidity, ferocious stupidity, an insane and self-deceiving passion.” Othello's downfall is ‘composed very largely of ignorance of self as well as ignorance of Desdemona.’

Dolan on Othello’s character

Defines Othello as a ‘domestic tyrant who murders his wife on spurious grounds’.

Ania Loomba on Othello’s final speech

Othello has a split consciousness and is "a near schizophrenic hero"; his final speech "graphically portrays the split – he becomes simultaneously the Christian and the Infidel, the Venetian and the Turk, the keeper of the state and its opponent". 

Coleridge on Iago

Takes a psychological reading, arguing Iago is "A being next to the devil’, driven by ‘motiveless malignity". .

Dr Leah Scragg on Iago

taking into account earlier dramatic traditions, she argues Iago is "an example of the typical stage Machiavel who ‘personifies … self-interest, hypocrisy, cunning"

Marsh on Othello’s love for Desdemona

His love for Desdemona has strong overtones of medieval courtly love where the woman’s purity is worshipped and idolised."

Bradley on Desdemona

simple and innocent as a child, ardent with the courage and idealism of a saint," but Desdemona is helplessly passive. She can do nothing whatever. She cannot retaliate even in speech; no, not even in silent feeling. 

Tennenhouse on Desdemona

Tennenhouse suggests that Desdemona is ‘the embodiment of power’ when she appears in Act I and defends her right to choose her own husband.

Emma Smith on Desdemona

‘goes from being a person to a prop’ 

‘Desdemona is thus herself the final outsider’. 

‘She is steadily silenced by an abusive male authority figure’.

Marilyn French on Desdemona

In spite of her assertiveness in choosing her own husband, French suggests Desdemona "accepts her culture’s dictum that she must be obedient to males" and is "self-denying in the extreme" when she dies.

Jardine on Desdemona

suggests that the stage world of Jacobean drama is wholly masculine, there is only a male viewpoint on offer.

Suggests Desdemona is punished by the patriarchy for her independence and knowingness, taking a feminist approach.

John Quincy Adams on Desdemona violating her duties

Who can sympathise with Desdemona?

She falls in love and makes a runaway match with a blackamoor, for no better reason than that he has told her a braggart story

For this she not only violates her duties to her father, her family, her sex, and her country

Sam Mendes on Desdemona as an active character

from the RNT production, he argues she is in some ways extremely strong, an active participant in the drama, rather than an insipid feeble girl.

WH Auden on Desdemona

‘Everybody must pity Desdemona, but I cannot bring myself to like her. Her determination to marry Othello – it was virtually her who virtually did the proposing – seems the romantic crush of a silly school girl rather than a mature affection: It is Othello’s adventures, so unlike the civilian life she knows, which captivate her rather than Othello as a person.

Ania Loomba on race within the play

the central conflict in Othello is ‘between the racism of a white patriarchy and the threat posed to it by both a black man and a white woman’. 

women and Black people exist as "the other" in this play.

Othello is an honorary white at the beginning of the play but becomes a "total outsider" because of his relationship with Desdemona, which ruptures his "precarious entry into the white world".

Karen Newman on the Play

the play exposes the "fear of racial and sexual difference" of Renaissance culture.

However, "by making the black Othello a hero, and by making Desdemona’s love for Othello … sympathetic", Shakespeare’s play challenges the racist, sexist and colonialist views of his society.

Fielder on Race

suggests that ‘for Shakespeare “black” does not primarily describe an ethnic distinction but a difference in hue – and temperament – distinguishing from one another even what we would identify as members of the same white race’. 

EAJ Honigmann on Iago and Emilia

Despite his cleverness, [Iago] has neither felt nor understood the spiritual impulses that bind ordinary human beings together, loyalty, friendship, respect, compassion – in a word, love. Emilia’s love (of Desdemona) is Iago’s undoing.

Marilyn French on Emilia

she represents a voice which ‘counters the attitudes of the males in the play’ and, through her, Shakespeare mocks everything that the men say about women because it is completely untrue. Emilia is never unfaithful to Iago.

Penny Gay on Emilia

‘Whereas Desdemona is a pathetic victim of circumstances, it is arguable that Emilia is the truly tragic female figure in this story: a more complex woman, whose death is brought about as much by her own inner conflicts of loyalty as by her psychopathic husband.’

Carol Thomas Neely on Emilia

‘She moves from tolerating men’s fancies to exploding them and from prudent acceptance to courageous repudiation’

AC Bradley on Cassio

‘There is something very lovable about Cassio, with his fresh eager feelings’

Eileen Z Cohen on Cassio

If Iago embodies Othello’s worst nature, perhaps Cassio embodies his best.

Marilyn French on Cassio

Cassio does not treat women as human beings: either they are elevated as the male ideal of perfection and ‘divine’ [superhuman] like Desdemona, placed on a pedestal from which they must inevitably fall, or they are reduced to a ‘monkey’ [subhuman/ animal] like Bianca

Kiernan Ryan on Iago’s villainy

iago’s villainy is driven by a sense of outrage at the ‘unnatural black and white union: ‘As iago sees it, a black african has had the gall to court and marry a white venetian beauty [...] and she has had the gall to prefer a ‘lascivious moor’ to her own kind. 

Sean McEvoy on Iago and the audience

The audience becomes complicit in Iago’s intention and is soon involved in his vengeful plotting. He actually asks them what he should do [...] Many actors who have played the part have been capable of getting members of the audience to share Iago’s delight in his own powers of evil invention.

Carol Thomas Neely on Cassio and men

‘Cassio explicitly voices the men’s concern with “the bubble reputation” and reveals how central their position and image are to their sense of identity’

Veronica Walker on Cassio

‘the suave, debonair and eye-catching gallantry that attracts ladyfold to gallant men.’

Fintan O’ Toole on Othello and his speech

If you look at the character of Othello in isolation, in particular if you look at him through the notion of the 'tragic flaw', then he is not, for all his facility with words, very bright. He can talk up a storm, but he's not much for thinking.

Richard Dutton on the play’s tragedy

Othello is, of all Shakespeare's tragedies, the one in which the tragic outcome is most preventable

the moment of no going back in Othello occurs painfully late, Shakespeare keeps tantalisingly before us the possibility that Iago's plots will be discovered;

something as trivial as a handkerchief is all that stands between tragedy and comedy

the play is a comedy which goes tragically wrong

Stanley Wells on Othello

Othello will be transformed by Iago's poison from a sensible man to a fool, and then to a beast.

Carol Thomas Neely on Brabantio and gender

Brabantio shifts abruptly from protective affection for the chaste Desdemona... to physical revulsion from the sexuality revealed by her elopement

Carol Thomas Neely on Roderigo

Roderigo shows in exaggerated fashion the dangerous combination of romanticism and cynicism and the dissociation of love and sex which all the men share'.
'He is the conventional Petrarchan lover... yet he easily accepts Desdemona's supposed adultery

Farah Karim-Cooper on strangers in the city

In Shakespeare's England the abhorrence of 'otherness' was profound, and this anxiety ripples upon the surface of Othello.
The Venetian civic, military and economic tolerance of foreigners is combined with a patrician aversion to people from outside the city contaminating their pure lineage

Anthony Brennan on Iago

The structure of Othello develops in a series of improvised, undeclared playlets in which iago organises roles for his victims. 

He is a ‘strategist of separation’ 

Anthony Brennan on Roderigo

One important innovation that shakespeare makes is the invention of roderigo . Hes there to show ‘how a villain can wind a pliable tool into his plot’, but is also a kind of surrogate for the audience. 

it is remarkable that we fail to recognise our kinship with Roderigo. Roderigo, with an advantage denied to Othello, sees Iago without his mask, believes he can be part of an evil plot and yet invulnerable to it, and is even willing to pay money to be convinced of the gullibility of Othello while ignoring his own.

Callahan’s historicist argument

since there were no black actors othello was a white man – his blackness on the early modern stage was always performed rather than essential – its always about face paint and a curly wig, not some immutable essence which distinguishes one race from another.

Stephen Greenblat on Shakespeare’s ‘strategic opacity’

 he purposefully strips out explanations and makes motivations unclear whereas in the source text they were clear, substituting questions for answers.

TS Eliot on Othello

exasperated by the extreme self-centeredness of his final speech. ‘This is a fellow cheering himself up’ 

Jean Wilson Night on ‘Othello Music’

a term to describe Othello’s exotic lyricism and something about the overall quality of the play’s rhythms and registers. (prevalent in final speech) 

Emma Smith on the tragedy being domestic

The bed becomes a battlefield

The wedding sheets become winding sheets as the marital bed becomes her grave, as in Romeo and Juliet. Is the bed symbolic of the fact that interracial sex means death?