ao5 othello

Kenneth Muir

referring to Emilia’s speech, ‘we need not assume, because she frankly expresses the view that husbands who are unfaithful deserve to have their wives follow suit, that this view is based on her own experience or practice.’

E.A.J Honigmann

“Othello is almost the ventriloquist’s dummy”

F R Leavis

“… in the temptation scene, Iago represents something that is in Othello… Othello yields with extraordinary promptness to suggestion, with such promptness as to make it plain that the mind that undoes him is not Iago’s but his own”

Judith Butler

Gender is a performance

Sean McEvoy

‘audience becomes complicit in Iago’s intentions…share Iago’s delight’

Marilyn French

Suggests Desdemona ‘accepts her culture’s dictum that she must be obedient to males’ and is ‘self-denying in the extreme’ when she denies

Liz Lewis

Desdemona’s identity ‘disappears as Othello’s jealousy becomes more pronounced’

Leonard Tennenhouse

Emilia’s death ‘is the silencing of a rebellious female voice’

Explores the way in which women are cast as monsters in Jacobean tragedy, primarily because of their sexuality even if they are ‘completely innocent, her torture gratuitous’

Also suggests male-female relationships in Jacobean drama are always political - Desdemona’s smothering is an example of silencing the female political voice

Coleridge

Iago acted from ‘motiveless malignity’

T. S. Eliot

accuses Othello of self-dramatisation

Ania Loomba

Women and blacks exist as ‘the other’ in the play

Class and gender relations are invaded by race and the play should be used to ‘examine and dismantle the racism and sexism’ of hegemonic ideologies

Rosenberg

Soliloquies are essential for the audience to recognise Iago’s humanity and by humanising the villain, Shakespeare recognises that the ‘evil’ traits that are amplified in Iago’s character are an integral part of humanity – concept of hamartia, to have a fatal flaw