'Othello' AO5

Critical views & adaptations

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Iago possesses a “motiveless malignancy”

Janet Adelman

“Othello’s quickness to believe Desdemona as always-already contaminated is in part a function of his horrified recoil from his suspicion that he is the contaminating agent”

Jacobson

Iago replaces moral norms with alternative universals that support his radically profane, materialist and power-centred perspective

Solomon T Plaatje

Shakespeare’s dramas “show that nobility and valour, like depravity and cowardice, are not the monopoly of any colour”

Winthrop Jordan

• the Protestant Reformation, with its emphasis on personal piety, self-scrutiny and internalised control, facilitated the tendency to use people overseas as “social mirrors” ~ Englishmen were inclined to project their own weaknesses onto outsiders, discovering attributes in others “which they found first, but could not speak of, in themselves”

• Othello loses its power if read with “the assumption that because the black man was the hero English audiences were indifferent to his blackness”

Jane Adamson

Iago fails to recognise his own sense of failure/rejection, transforming his feelings into other ones that might allow retributive action, instead of suffering from “fear, loss and self-disgust and negation”

Martin Orkin

“The final image of a black man strangling a white woman, it might be argued, deliberately courts a racist impulse… But it does so only to explode any such response.”

Paul A Jorgensen

stresses the frequency with which the word “honest” is appended to Iago’s name

CO Gardner

for Shakespeare, the story is in part “not a realistic account” but “an image created in the process of distilling an insight into… human nature”

Bradley (1904)

• Othello is a nearly “faultless hero whose strength and virtue are turned against him”

• he is “the most romantic figure among Shakespeare’s heroes”

• at the end of the play we feel “admiration and love” for him

• “The deed he is bound to do is not murder, but a sacrifice. He is to save Desdemona from herself, not in hate but in honour; in honour, and also in love.”

TS Eliot

asserted he had “never read a more terrible exposure of human weakness… than the last great speech of Othello” where the hero could be seen “endeavouring to escape reality”

Thomas Rymer

“Why was not this call’d the Tragedy of the Handkerchief?”

Laurence Lerner

“When Othello falls there comes to the surface just this black savage that everyone in the first Act was so pleased that he wasn’t… the two Othellos are one: the play is the story of a barbarian who (the pity of it) relapses”

KW Evans

“the darkness in the bedroom is not complete but is broken by an enduring vision of Desdemona’s whiteness”

Kenneth Muir 1972

“It is his credulity which diminishes Othello as a tragic hero and therefore diminishes the tragic effect.”

Janet Alderman

“no other play subjects its ostensibly tragic hero to so long and intensive a debunking before he even sets foot onstage”

Freud

Madonna/whore dichotomy ~ men only ever see women as either promiscuous prostitute-figures or saintly madonnas

SN Garner

either Desdemona is pure or she is the “cunning whore of Venice”

Dr Farah Karim-Cooper

[it] “might be that Shakespeare is suggesting women do not fit easily into the categories created by Renaissance patriarchy, that they are human, and changeable and sometimes more noble and honourable, regardless of their sexual behaviour, than the men who try to control them.”

Baylay

“Emilia is the mouthpiece of repressed femininity”

Elise Walter

• Emilia offers a symbol of hope ~ years of an abusive marriage haven’t robbed her of wit/strength

• she represents what Desdemona might become: a wife whose individual character and identity remain intact

Robert H West

• Othello’s words to Desdemona before he murders her are replete with religious and Biblical allusion

• he uses language of Christian morality to justify an unjustifiable act

• refused to kill her “unprepared spirit”

• echo from Hebrews “For whom the Lord loveth he chastened” lies within his defence “this sorrow’s heavenly./ It strikes where it doth love”

Jonathon Bate

draws attention to the Gravedigger making bad jokes as Hamlet meditates upon the skull of the dead jester Yorick ~ tragicomedy

Johnson

• contrasts Aristotle who suggests tragedy and comedy shouldn’t be mixed

• “Shakespeare’s plays are not in the rigorous and critical sense either tragedies or comedies… the loss of one is the gain of another”

John Philip Kemble

• played Othello in 18th century

• majestic and stately

• restrained performances unpopular with audiences

• comments by critics suggest some of the negative response resulted from destabilising effect of his dignified Othello on widely held assumptions about the inability of Africans to control their tempestuous passions

Ida Aldridge

• 1825 ~ became 1st professional black actor to play Othello

• some acknowledged the affective power of Aldridge's performances

• some dismissed as "natural" Aldridge's ability to embody an Othello so tempestuous that he could wrench audiences from terror to sympathy over the course of a brief scene

• Athanaeium reviewer called it a “blow at respectability” having black actor play a Shakespeare character

Sean Benson

Othello is a domestic tragedy, of less worth than political tragedies which deal with the fate of nations

Ania Loomba: ‘Othello and the Radical Question’

“London had witnessed several major riots against foreign residents and artisans. Would this play have unsettled or reinforced such hostility?”

Ania Loomba

• Othello has a split consciousness and is “a near schizophrenic hero”

• post-colonial reading focusing on race

• his final speech “graphically portrays the split - he becomes simultaneously the Christian and the Infidel, the Venetian and the Turk, the keeper of the state and its opponent”

Norman Sanders

Venice was “a racial and religious melting pot”

Paul Robeson

‘Othello’ is a “tragedy of racial conflict”

Thomas Rymer (1693)

• outraged by idea of black hero

• play only functions as a “caution” to maidens not to run away with “blackamoors” without their parents’ consent

Marilyn French

• feminist reading

• Desdemona “accepts her culture’s dictum that she must be obedient to males”

FR Leavis

• Othello remains “un-self-comprehending” even at the end of the play

• “the tragedy may fairly be said to be Othello’s character in action”

New Historicists

interested in whether Othello reinforces or subverts the values of Shakespearean society

Leonard Tennenhouse

• new historicist

• “Jacobean tragedies offer up their scenes of excessive punishment as if mutilating the female could somehow correct political corruption”

Caryl Phillips

Othello’s tragedy begins when he “begins to forget that he is black”

Lisa Jardine (1996)

 "The play reinforces patriarchal power; Desdemona’s death is a ritual punishment."

Samuel Johnson

“Had the scene opened in Cyprus, and the preceding incidents been occasionally related, there had been little wanting to a drama of the most exact and scrupulous regularity.”

G Wilson Knight

“Othello is dominated by its protagonist”

William Empson

• suggests that the 52 uses of honest/honesty are “very queer”

• everybody calls Iago honest once or twice, but with Othello “it becomes an obsession”

• even in the crucial moment before Emilia exposes Iago he keeps “howling the word out”

John Baylay

the fact that Othello does not hit Iago from the outset “is one of the great disappointments of the play”

Anthony Brennan

In Othello’s final speech and suicide he is able to “express his nobility” and “manifest himself rightly” as he did before the Senate of Venice

Karen Newman

“Othello is of course the play’s hero only within the terms of a white elitist male ethos, and he suffers the generic ‘punishment’ of tragedy” (but nevertheless he is represented as heroic and tragic at a moment when the only role blacks played on stage was villains of low status)

Helen Gardner

• “whatever its proximate motives, malice is motiveless; that is the secret of its power and its horror, why it can go unsuspected and why its revelation always shocks”

• the terrible end to Othello has “a sense of completeness”

Germaine Greer

“Iago is still serviceable to us, as an objective correlative of the mindless inventiveness of racist aggression. Iago is still alive and kicking and filling migrants’ letterboxes with excrement.”

Sean McEvoy

“The audience […] is soon involved in [Iago’s] vengeful plotting. He actually asks them what he should do…”

Kastan

“Tragedy, for Shakespeare, is the genre of uncompensated suffering”

Stephen Greenblatt

Despite the number of geographical outsiders working within the Venetian military, it is not until Othello “gets alarmingly close to the centre of Venice” that “the outsiders in the employment of Venice suddenly seem as frightening or more frightening than the enemy Turks”