Critics quotes

how does Coleridge describe Iago’s actions/motives

motive searching of a motiveless malignity

quote about Iago being motivated by racism

J.R Andreas: Iago is not motiveless but clearly motivated by racism and hatred

Stage manager interpretation of Iago

Jan Kott: diabolical stage manager

interpretation of Iago’s soliloquies in relation to his motives

Epsom: motive hunting of the soliloquies must … be seen as a part of Iago’s 'honesty’; he is quite open to his own motives or preferences and interested to find out what they are

Ania Loomba ‘Othello and the Radical Question’ 1998 (1/3): quote about Othello being a victim and an agent

Othello is a victim of racial beliefs precisely because he becomes an agent of misogynistic ones

Ania Loomba ‘Othello and the Radical Question’ 1998 (2/3): quote about why Iago’s manipulation works

Iago’s machinations are effective because Othello is predisposed to believe his pronouncements about the inherent duplicity of women

Ania Loomba ‘Othello and the Radical Question’ 1998 (3/3): quote about their relationship

interracial love [becomes] a nightmare of racial hatred

quote about the reasons for Iagos actions

A.C Bradley: Iago’s actions are those of a man who has been unjustly wronged

quote about Iago’s machinations being effective because of Othello

John C McCloskey: through the medium of psychological suggestion … [Iago] works upon the imagination of the suggestible Othello that the catastrophe is inevitable

quote criticising the handkerchief symbol and state when it was from

Thomas Rymer 18th C: so remote a trifle no booby could make any consequence of it

quote about the handkerchief linking to virginity

Lynda Boose: strawberries symbolise virgin blood

A.C. Bradley on Othello’s character

a man of mystery and pity, exoticism and intense feeling… he inspires a passion of mingled love and pity

F.R Leavis on Othello and jealousy

Othello has a propensity to jealousy and possesses a weak character… His love is composed largely of ignorance of self as well as ignorance of Desdemona

Caryl Phillips on Othello’s life

life for him is a game in which he does not know the rules

T. S. Eliot on Othello’s final speech

‘exposure of human weakness’ as he seems to be ‘cheering himself up… he has ceased to think of Desdemona and is thinking only about himself’

Neville Coghill in rebuttal to T.S Eliot: Othello is..

cheering the audience up by showing… a true flash of that nobility which first honoured him

Randolph Splitter on the monster in Othello

the monster is, equally, in Othello’s thoughts, and it is hard to say whether Iago put it there or simply found it, latent, potential, unconscious, waiting to be made conscious

Stephen Greenblatt on Othello’s identity

depends upon a constant performance… of his ‘story,’ a loss of his own origins, an embrace and perpetual reiteration of the norms of another culture

Orki on Othello

the white man’s myth of the black man

J Stewart on Othello’s undoing

The mind that undoes Othello is not Iago’s but his own; the main datum is not Iago’s diabolic intellect but Othello’s readiness to respond

Rymer on Desdemona

silly woman

Samuel Johnson on Desdemona

the soft simplicity of Desdemona … her artless perseverance in her suit, and her slowness to suspect that she can be suspected

Caryl Phillips on Othello’s love of Desdemona

is the love of a possession. She is a prize, a spoil of war

Marylin French on Desdemona

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

EAJ Honigmann on Desdemona’s last words

an act of forgiveness

EAJ Honigmann on Desdemona

the strongest, most heroic person in the play

Tennenhouse on Desdemona’s smothering

an example of the silencing of the female political voice

Ania Loomba on Desdemona

she passes from being (Othello’s) ally who would guarantee his white status to becoming his s-ual and racial ‘other’ when her husband sees her as an adulteress

William Hazlitt on Iago

Iago is an example of the typical stage Machiavel who personifies rationality, self-interest, hypocrisy, cunning … he is an amoral artist who seeks to fashion the world in his own interest

Coleridge describes Iago as being

next to the devil

A C Bradley on Iago and tragedy

the tragedy of Othello is in a sense (Iago’s) tragedy too. Its shows us not a violent man, who spends his life in murder, but a thoroughly bad, cold man, who is at last tempted to let loose the forces within him, and is at once destroyed

FR Leavis on Iago’s role

subordinate and merely ancillary

Susannah Clapp on Iago vs Othello

Iago is ‘a thinker’ and Othello is ‘a feeler’

Sean McEvoy on Iago and the audience

the audience becomes complicit in Iago’s intention and, like it or not, is soon involved in his vengeful plotting

Neville Coghill on Iago

psychologically Iago is a slighted man, powerfully possessed by hatred against a master who (as he thinks) has kept him down

Stephen Greenblatt on Iago

Iago is fully aware of himself as an improviser and revels in his ability to manipulate his victims, to lead them by the nose like asses, to possess their labor without their ever being capable of grasping the relation in which they are enmeshed

Fintan O’Toole on Iago and Othello

so close are Iago and Othello, indeed that they start to melt into eachother

A C Bradley on Emilia

till close to the end she frequently sets one’s teeth on edge; and at the end one is ready to worship her. She nowhere shows any sign of having a bad heart; but she is common, sometimes vulgar, in minor matters far from scrupulous, blunt in perception and feeling, and quite destitute of imagination

Simpson on Emilia

she dies in service to the truth

Lisa Jardine on Emilia’s speech

without Emilia’s speech, the willow scene ‘becomes a stylised, emblematic representation of female passivity’

Eamon Grennan on Emilia

she shows how free her speech can be when the men are absent, as well as revealing what appears to be a painful sexual experience festering at the core of her character

Honigmann on Emilia

Emilia’s love [of Desdemona] is Iago’s undoing

Farah Karim-Cooper on Emilia

she is complex and not conforming to the ‘categories created by the Renaissance patriarchy’

R Vanita on Emilia

Emilia isn’t killed by Iago alone. The other men present by their inaction literally create the space wherein a wife can be killed by her husband

S.N Garner on Cassio

The embodiment of style, Cassio is hollow at the core. Bur just as he knows that he has a tendency toward drunkenness, so he recognises his own impotence

W H Auden on Cassio

Cassio is a ladies’ man, … a man who feels most at home in feminine company, where his looks and manners make him popular, but he is ill at ease in the company of his own sex because he is unsure of his own masculinity

Further W H Auden on Cassio

with women on his own class, he enjoys socialised eroticism; he would be frightened of a serious personal passion’. For physical sex her goes to prostitutes and when Bianca falls for him he ‘behaves like a cad and brags of his conquest to others’

Michael Nell on race

to talk about race in Othello is to fall into anachronism: yet not to talk about it is to ignore something fundamental…the emergence of modern European consciousness

Emma Smith on race

is this a racist play in which a black man is driven to homicidal rage, revealing that his civilisation is only skin-deep? Or a plea for a more tolerant society in which Othello and Desdemona’s marriage might flourish?

Ania Loomba on race

the conflict in the play is ‘between the racism of white patriarchy and the threat posed to it by a black man’

Further quote by Ania Loomba on race

Othello is both a fantasy of interracial love and social tolerance and a nightmare of racial hatred and male violence

Philip Sidney on tragedy

[tragedy] stirring the affects of admiration and commiseration, teacheth the uncertainty of this world and upon what weak foundations gilden roofs are builded

Dutton on tragedy

of all S’s tragedies, Othello is the one where the tragic outcome is most preventable… the moment of no going back is painfully late… something as trivial as the handkerchief is all that stands between tragedy and comedy…the play is a comedy that goes tragically wrong

Ania Loomba on tragedy

the real tragedy of the play lies in the fact (social) hierarchies are not external to the pair. Iago’s machinations are effective because Othello is predisposed to believing in pronouncements about the inherent duplicity of women