AO5

othello (6)

• “Othello is egotistical” - F.R. Leavis

• “Othello’s blackness is constructed as inferior and dangerous” - Ania Loomba

• “Othello does not kill Desdemona in jealousy, but in a conviction forced upon him” - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• “Othello’s trust, where he trusts, is absolute” - A.C. Bradley

• Othello has a “propensity to jealousy” - F.R. Leavis

• Othello as a “domestic tyrant who murders his wife on spurious grounds” - Dolan

desdemona (3)

• “Desdemona’s desire is marked as transgressive” - Karen Newman

• “The tragedy is not Othello’s but Desdemona’s” - F.R. Leavis

• Desdemona is “self-denying in the extreme” - French

• “from Desdemona’s single figure emerges a split image of female sexuality, both sides so extended into symbols of cosmic good and evil that the outlines of her character begin to blur” - Kay Stockholder

iago (6)

• “the motive-hunting of motiveless malignity” - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• “Iago is an amateur of tragedy” - William Hazlitt

• “Iago’s power lies in his extraordinary insight into human weakness” - A.C. Bradley

• “Iago creates the illusion of honesty” - E. A. J. Honigmann

• Iago’s villainy as implausible - Rymer

• Iago as so seductive that he gets the audience to “collude with him” - Honigmann

jealousy (2)

• “Jealousy once aroused is a passion which cannot be checked” - A. C. Bradley

• The newness of the marriage as an justification for the plausibility of Othello’s jealousy - A.C. Bradley

race (3)

• Race as unimportant to Othello’s character - A.C. Bradley

• Play exposes the “fear of racial and sexual difference” in Renaissance culture - Newman

• Othello feels the need to ‘edit and dramatise his past histories” to suit a white European audience - Sharman

 

reputation (2)

• “Reputation is clearly more important for women than for men” because its loss leads total marginalisation - Jardine

• Idea that the accusation of sexual demeanours against women is a “form of assault on a woman’s reputation” - Jardine