Othello - SCHOLARSHIP

A.C. Bradley - Othello (nature)

• “a man of mystery, exoticism and intense feeling”

• “trustful, open, passionate, but self controlled: so noble”

Cinthio - Othello (nature)

• “concealed the malice he bore in his heart, in such a way that he showed himself outwardly like another Hector or Achilles.”

Kenneth Muir - Othello (downfall)

• “Othello’s fatal flaw was his credulity”

Wilson Knight - Othello (downfall)

• “composed very largely of ignorance of self as well as ignorance of her.”

F.R. Leaves - Othello (downfall)

• Argued that Othello was responsible for his own downfall, and therefore the play is not a tragedy for this reason

Richard Lees - Othello (isolation)

• “Othello’s isolation is emphasised casually and continually”

Helen Gardner - Othello (isolation)

• “He is a stranger, a man of alien race”

Ania Loomba - Othello (final speech)

• “In Othello’s final speech he becomes simultaneously the Christian and the Infidel, the Venetian and the Turk, the keeper of the state and its opponent”

Wilson Knight - Iago

• “Iago is a kind of Mephistopheles” (demon in German folklore)

Booth - Iago

• “Iago should appear to be what all but the audience believe he is”

Lytton Stachey - Iago (motive)

• “He [Shakespeare] conceived of a monster, whose wickedness should lie far deeper than anything that could be explained by a motive”

Coleridge - Iago (motive)

• “motive-hunting of motiveless malignity”

R.A. Flakes - Iago (motive)

• Iago is not driven by jealousy, but a “much more general stance of simple hatred for what is good”

Graham Bradshaw - Iago (director)

• “Iago is Shakespeare’s most extraordinary example of a “surrogate dramatist”

Kott - Iago (director)

• “diabolical stage manager”

Honigmann - Iago

• Iago enjoys a “godlike sense of power”

W.H. Auden - Desdemona

• “It is Othello’s adventures… which captivate her, rather than Othello as a person”

A.C. Bradley - Desdemona

• “Helplessly passive”

Lisa Jardine - Desdemona

• “becomes a stereotype of female passivity”

French - Desdemona

• “Desdemona accepts her culture’s dictum that she must be obedient to males and is self-denying in the extreme when she dies”

Jarvis - Desdemona (death)

• She dies “A whore’s death for all her innocences”

Neeley - Desdemona

• “the focus of Othello is love, which drives Desdemona but is tempered by her wit and realism”

A.C. Bradley - Cassio

• “we trust him to never pervert the truth for the sake of some doctrine or purpose of his own”

• “moral beauty”

V. Walker - Cassio

• “Cassio in the end seems to represent the better man, the higher sophisticate”

William Empson - Cassio

• “[Iago] regards the virtues of Cassio as part of his superficial and over-rewarded charm of manner”

Johnson - Cassio

• “Cassio is brave, benevolent and honest”

Ridley - Cassio

• “He is a pivotal figure with great importance to the movement of the plot”

Veronika Walker - Cassio

• “A beautiful written foil to the General”

Neeley - Emilia

• “prey to the dominant ideology of wifely virtue”

Abrahams - Emilia

• “accepts her role in society, but does not identify with it”

Simpson - Emilia (death)

• “She dies in the service of the truth”

Thomas - Emilia (catalyst)

• “She is dramatically, and symbolically, the play’s fulcrum”

Ward - Emilia (catalyst)

• “Emilia’s role as the backbone of the tragedy”

Thomas - Emilia (catalyst)

• “in stealing the handkerchief, is the catalyst for the play’s crisis”

Thomas - Emilia (foil)

• “Emilia is the foil for Desdemona and corrects Desdemona’s occasional naivete”

Simpson - Emilia (foil)

• “Emilia underscores Desdemona’s lack of knowledge in the world”

Thomas - Emilia (handkerchief)

• Steals the handkerchief due to “wifely virtues of silence, obedience and prudence”

Bayley - Emilia

• “mouthpiece of repressed femininity”

Ward - Emilia

• “Becomes a hero by the end of the play”

Schwab - Emilia

• “Iago’s most underrated but constant victim is his wife”

Honingham - Emilia

• “Fear of Iago explains Emilia’s attitude as Shakespeare’s tragedy unfolds”

Neeley - Emilia

• “Combines sharp tongue with warm affection”

Honigmann - Roderigo

• “activates poisonous impulses in Iago”

• “over-mastering, self-destructive desire for Desdemona mirrors Othello’s”

Jamieson - Roderigo

• “easily led by the evil Iago”

• “Roderigo is Iago’s dupe, his fool”

Ridley - Roderigo

• “main dramatic function seems to be what little comic relief there is in the play”

Barker - Roderigo

• “He goes to the devil with his eyes open, yet blindly”

Simpson - Bianca

• “Bianca is, like Othello and Cassio, and outsider”

• ”underscores the theme of jealousy”

Wiltenberg - Bianca

• “shatters the pleasant illusion that sexual relations will conform to the norm of female subordination and faithfulness”

Mazzola - Bianca

• “an emblem of a larger world”

• “mastery of her body”

• “picture of female freedom”

Bastin - Bianca

• “mute, peripheral figure… none of her thirty-four lines directly impact the plot”

Adamson - Bianca

• “no more a strumpet than Emilia or Desdemona

Newman - Prejudice

• “Iago’s manipulation of Othello depends on the moor’s own prejudices against his blackness”

Singh - Prejudice

• “As an outsider, he is forced to construct for himself a white, and therefore inauthentic, identity”

Briggs - Prejudice

• “Blackness was associated with the devil, evil doing, and death

Loomba - Prejudice

• “Women and blacks exist as other”

Ryan - Prejudice

• “He is primed to believe it by the warped view of women and female sexuality that he shares not only with Iago, but with other men”

Newman - Love

• “Desdemona is punished for her desire… because it threatens a white male hegemony in which women cannot be the desiring subjects”

Phillips - Love

• “Othello’s love of Desdemona is the love of possession. She is a prize, a spoil of war”

Wayne - Love (handkerchief)

• Handkerchief - “emblem of Desdemona’s body”

Bodkin - Love

• “Desdemona, as she appears in relation to Othello, is not so much individual woman as the Divinity of Love”

Phillips - Jealousy

• “Iago’s envy stems from a deep ingrained sense of inferiority”

A.C. Bradley - Jealousy

• “Othello’s jealousy stems from his noble yet overt trusting nature”

Ryan - Jealousy

• Jealousy in Othello “reveals the fragility of patriarchal relationships and the dangers of male possessiveness”

Bloom - Jealousy

• “Less about external circumstances and more about internal weakness and fear”

O’Toole - Jealousy

• “reveals the fragility of identity and the ease with which it can be unravelled”

Greer - Jealousy

• “It is Othello’s jealousy, not Iago’s hatred, that is the real tragedy”

• “Iago is the very voice of jealousy itself”

Serkis - Jealousy

• “He ids not the devil. He’s you or me being jealous and not being able to control our feelings”

Tyan - Jealousy

• “Othello is the most easily jealous man that anybody’s ever written about”

Pushkin - Jealousy

• “Othello was not jealous, he was trusting”

Jardine - Jealousy

• Othello murdered Desdemona “for adultery, not out of jealousy”

Mangan - Race

• “The general’s black skin marks him as an outsider in Venice”

M.H. Ross - Pregnancy

• “Othello sets forth Shakespeare’s fantasies of male conception and pregnancy”

Stallybrass - Reputation

• Honorar is a gendered concept”

Cox - Reputation

• “A man’s honour was inseparable from his wife’s behavior”

Cox - Reputation (2)

• “Men wished to marry virgins. This made reputation an essential commodity in society”

Woodbridge - Reputation

• “Misogynists libel women; slanderers blacken one woman’s reputation”

John McRae - Women

• “Bianca is the most realistic of the three women”

Cox - Women

• “All three women endanger their lives, and two of them lose it, for daring to break the silence”

Coleridge - Women

• “The perfection of women is to be characterless”

Cox - Women

• “[Female] characters divide into virgins and saints or whores and devils”

Abrahams - Women

• Each woman is so “measured in response o her husband’s malignancy” that she “fails to prevent her own destruction at her husband’s hands”

Neely - Women

• “Friendship is established in the willow scene”

French - Women

• “All women are destroyed by Iago”

Badley - Women

• “Passive” and “weak”

French - Women (2)

• “Othello is a masculine play, rejecting female sexuality”

Lapide - Women

• “excellent ornaments”

Tennerhouse - Women

• Women who challenge the patriarchy “demand their own deaths”

Eales - Women

• Women viewed as “morally, intellectually and physically weaker”

• Queen Elizabeth I - “body of a weal and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king”

Rymer - Language

• “Desdemona wads won by hearing Othello talk”

• “This was sufficient enough to make the blacks moor white”