English Literature: Othello: Critics

Ralph Allen Smith

Othello is an everyman character mimicking Adam in a Catholic morality play

Doris Tishkoff

Madonna/Whore complex in relation to Desdemona

Margaret Loftus Ranald

Desdemona would not have been seen as the perfect Jacobean woman due to her sociability and wit

Coppelia Kahn

The obsession with cuckoldry was based in misogyny and a male belief that women were inherently lustful.

Virginia Mason Vaughan

Family is the state in microcosm

Lisa Jardine

3 women of 3 separate social ranks and yet all experience the same outrage to accusations of sexual misconduct, a united female experience.

Sam Mendes

Desdemona makes huge plot altering decisions and is therefore not weak or submissive.

Karen Newman

In the time, Black men were associated with ‘tainting’ sexual partners- a metaphorical blackness for the partner and a literal one for the child produced.

Elena Arsenteva

Genesis began the idiom of a black sheep, associating black with ‘otherness’

Ruth Cowhig

Weird that Shakespeare goes against stereotypes to present Othello as a hero when he obeyed stereotypes fine with Aaron in Titus Andronicus.

Edward Said

Orientalism