Othello Critics

Catherine Bates

“Love is a great binding force uniting two quite disparate cultures” and “Shakespeare heightens the tragic potential: Othello’s miraculousy effective words find their demonic counterpart in Iago”

O’Toole

“His tragic flaw is jealousy”  'there is no Othello without Iago' “Othello takes on Iago’s characteristics and style of speech… Iago takes on Othello’s association with blackness”

Coleridge

“Keen sense of his intellectual superiority” “Motive hunting of motiveless malignity” “Love of exerting power” “A being next to the devil”

Loomba

“England was increasingly hostile to foreigners” “Would this play have unsettled or reinforced such hostility” “Some writers extolled by virtues of Venice”

Kermode

Act 3 scene 3 “Pivotal scene” “Desdemona aids the process” “sowing seeds of doubt about Cassio”

Valerie Wayne

"Handkerchief - It is an emblem of Desdemona's body” "Iago is the presence of misogynist discourse in the Renaissance."

Bradley

“The consciousness of his high position never leaves him… at the end… he is as anxious as hamlet not to be misjudged by the great world”

S.C Garner

"The crucial fact of her marriage is not that she elopes but that she, a white woman, weds a black man.”

Philips

"Othello's love of Desdemona is the love of possession. She is a prize, a spoil of war."

Andy Serkis

Iagos "He is not the devil. He's you or me being jealous and not being able to control our feelings" 

Greer

 "it is only Othello's jealousy, not Iago's hatred, that is the real tragedy"