Othello themes, lenses and criticisms

AO5 criticism — The Neoclassicist Approach

Early Critics

• Rymer, Johnson

• Compare play to classical literature

• Influenced by Aristotle

• Women must be polite and only contribute to plot, no stories of their own.

• Language must be appropriate, no crude or rude words

• The overall play must have a moral focus

Thomas Rymer

• Said Othello wasn’t a proper tragedy because it didn’t have enough poetic justice and because it was unrealistic.

Samuel Johnson

• Said play was realistic. Impressed by ‘the fiery openness of Othello’, ‘the cool malignity of Iago’, ‘the soft simplicity of Desdemona’

AO5 Criticism — The Romantic Approach

• Coleridge, Hazlitt

• Approach of the late 18th and early 19th century

• Less concerned with morality, more with psychological states

• How individuals could be affected by isolation, melancholy, personal misery

• Relate Othello to the tragic heroes

• Admired Shakespeare’s presentation of emotions

Samuel Coleridge:

• Othello didn’t kill Des out of jealousy, but because of Iago’s manipulation

• Othello isn’t to blame

• Iago is ‘a being next to devil’, his monologues are ‘the motive-hunting of motiveless malignity’

• Iago has no reason to be evil but he’s evil anyway

William Hazlitt:

• Othello has great ‘depth of passion’, evokes a lot of pathos (has a quality that evokes pity and sadness)

• Sympathises with Othello, says he’s ‘noble’

• Iago is only evil because he knows how to exercise his intellect more than anyone else

AO5 Criticism — 20th Century Critics

• A.C. Bradley, T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis

• Debate the characters and their actions

• Focused on the play’s protagonist and antagonist

• Either Othello is a noble hero or he is deeply flawed

A.C. Bradley

• The tragedy of the play is that Othello is ‘exceptionally noble and trustful’ and is manipulated by Iago

• Othello is a ‘great man’

• Othello is ‘the most romantic’ of all of Shakespeare’s characters, his intense emotions means that he can’t think clearly about Desdemona. This is his downfall.

• Many in Othello’s situation would have reacted in the same way

• Iago has ‘supreme intellect’ and that makes him dangerous

• Iago is angry because he is overlooked because he is not a good person, ‘goodness therefore annoys him’

• Iago is tragic because his intellect and skills backfire and hurt him

• Iago is ‘a thoroughly bad, cold man’ who is ‘supremely wicked’

⤷ Iago has the best understanding of human psychology by how he manipulates the characters by playing into the prejudices they already have

T.S. Eliot

• Othello is deeply flawed

• Said that Othello’s final speech was a ‘terrible exposure of human weakness’

• The final speech was weak because it was full of ‘an attitude of self-dramatization’, Othello is too aware of the audience and the other characters, therefore it is less realistic

• Othello tries to escape reality at the end, doesn’t face up to what he has done

• Othello grieves himself more than he grieves Desdemona ‘and is thinking about himself’

F.R. Leavis

• Othello is deeply flawed

• His downfall was because of his own weakness, not because of Iago

• Iago’s success isn’t due to his ‘diabolical intellect’ but due to Othello’s weakness and hubris

• Othello gives in too quickly

• Othello is self-centred

Otherness Concept

• Modern critics talk about otherness being people or things which don’t fit in with social norms of the time

• Being an ‘other’ means being outside the norm, and being excluded from society as a result

• Desdemona is an ‘other’ because of her rebellious nature

• Othello is an ‘other’ because of his race

AO5 Criticism — 20th Century Feminist Criticism

Private sphere - typically the domain of women (domestic)

Public sphere - the domain of men

• French, Jardine, Tennenhouse, Traub, Greenblatt, Loomba

• How women are presented in contrast to men

⤷ its when women turn on each other that they, like men, reinforce the patriarchy (emilia)

⤷ shakespeare - women should stick together, work together, because they are the equal of men

⤷ are women more powerful than men? They have nothing to lose so they are - desdemona trapped in the patriarchy because she focuses on men, but Bianca is almost outside the patriarchy because she is called whore etc. but is not subjugated to a man like desdemona is, so isn’t affected by it like desdemona is (killed). Does Bianca have a freedom that the others don’t have?

• How women escape or adhere to strict social structure and the patriarchy

Marilyn French

• Othello is a masculine play because it rejects female sexuality and freedom

• Men holding all the power in the play reflects how men how hold all the power in society

• Desdemona accepts that because of her society ‘she must be obedient to males’

• All women are destroyed by Iago

Lisa Jardine

• Jacobean drama as a whole only presents a male point of view

• Desdemona is punished for being ‘too-knowing’ and ‘too-independent’

• Desdemona’s death is her being taught a lesson in what happens if you go against the patriarchy

⤷ does this play serve as a warning to women? Not a call to arms?

Leonard Tennenhouse

• Desdemona’s death is the silencing of a rebellious female voice

• Elizabethan/Jacobean tragedies use violence against women who challenge the patriarchy

• Women who die in these plays blame themselves for their deaths

⤷ patriarchy working through these women

⤷ desdemona “i am to blame” – acceptance

• Desdemona as a character must dies because she is ‘the embodiment of power’ when she first arrives in Act 1

⤷ she takes the voice of a general of the venetian army, an exercise of power – does she need to be punished for this?

Stephen Greenblatt

• Othello marries Desdemona in an attempt to gain more social power

• Othello is concerned with Desdemona’s sexuality because it goes against her ‘obedience’ as a woman

• Othello feels he has to punish Desdemona for stepping out of bounds and for being sexual

• Desdemona’s sexuality is what makes Othello question his ‘carefully fashioned identity’ and leads to his downfall.

• Their relationship is based more on lust than love.

Ania Loomba

• The play shows that Jacobean women were defined by ‘their sexual activity’

• The worth of women was decided by their relationship with men

• Shakespeare was concerned by ‘unregulated female sexuality’

• Iago is successful in manipulating Othello because he taps into temporal concerns about women

• Emilia is the voice of wisdom for Desdemona, and even she is destroyed

• Desdemona and Othello have a truer love than Iago and Emilia because Othello does not initially subjugate Desdemona to the standards of the Venetian woman, and maybe Desdemona is attracted to Othello because of this
  

AO5 — Performance Criticism

• A modernist criticism of the play, performance critics consider the way a reader or audience would react to Othello

⤷ e.g. 2015 production with a black iago undermines the influence of racial prejudice in the play. Emphasises the betrayal due to brotherhood rather than Iago’s othering of Othello

⤷ or does Iago use race and otherness as an excuse?

• Example: considering the way the play could be presented on screen

AO5 — Marxist Criticism

• Interested in the political and social context of Othello

⤷ he is of high status, not high born but has a noble characteristic that gets corrupted. He is highly valued because he has worked hard to gain such high status, and this is why the Duke doesn’t care that he married the white daughter of the senator

• Power structure of society

⤷ how feminism can be seen as emerging from Marxism

• The relationship between ‘master’ and ‘servant’

⤷ there is a gender hierarchy as well as a racial hierarchy (e.g. white women are only just above black men, and black women are the lowest in the hierarchy) (captain’s captain takes a new meaning)

AO5 — New Historicist Criticism

• Marsh, Dolan

• Consider Othello in its social and historical context

• The ideology and beliefs of Shakespearean society

• KEY – whether Othello reinforces or subverts the values of Shakespeare’s society

Frances Dolan

• In Shakespeare’s society, murdering your spouse was a threat to the social order

• Jacobean drama reflected social anxieties about the plotting subordinate and the abusive authority figure, and the idea of a traitor inside a social order who betrays everyone

• Othello is a ‘domestic tyrant who murders his wife on spurious grounds’

⤷ very little grounds - tenuous (not much to it)

New Historicist – Nicholas Marsh

• Iago wants to get back at a society that has wronged him

• Othello’s love for Desdemona is courtly love

AO5 — Postcolonial approach

• Loomba, Newman

• Considers the way in which Othello’s race is portrayed. The status of a black man in a white world.

• How Othello’s race determines his downfall before the play has even begun

⤷ the title – Othello the moor of venice

⤷ we can partly foresee his downfall before even stepping into the theatre

Frances Dolan

• Othello loses everything because he is a black man in a white man’s world

• His race means that he is doomed before the play has even begun (Is he being punished for marrying Desdemona?)

• ‘By making his protagonist black, Shakespeare prepares his original audience to question Othello’s authority, to suspect that he might misuse it groundlessly’

Ania Loomba

• The central conflict of the play isn’t love, it’s racial conflict

• The racism of white patriarchy hurts Desdemona and Othello more than Iago ever could

• The racism of Venice give Othello a split personality as ‘a bear schizophrenic hero’ (Christian and infidel, the Venetian and the Turk, the defendant of the state and its opponent)

• Othello is split between being a black man, and being a black man trying to fit in a white society

• At the beginning of the play, Othello is an honorary white man but becomes a ‘total outsider’ to society because of his relationship with Desdemona ruins his ‘precarious entry into the white world’

Karen Newman

• The play exposes the ‘racial fear’ of the period

• White males in the play, especially Iago, feel threatened by the ‘power and potency of a different and monstrous sexuality’ which Othello represents

• It was feared that ‘the black man had power to subjugate his partner’s whiteness’

• By making a black man a hero, Shakespeare’s play challenged the colonialist views of his society.

• Desdemona is attracted to Othello’s ‘otherness’ as a black man

Louis Montrose

• Othello shows how Jacobean society rejects other races

• Othello is desperate to be embraced by Venetian culture

THEMES — Othello’s hamartia

• pride if his fatal flaw and the cause of his downfall

• masculine bravado

• has a history of servicing men, and has achieved his reputation and rank based on this

• prioritises fraternal love over romantic love

  • he can do this so easily because his romantic love is undermined because of his race, where Cassio and Desdemona are the typical romantic ideal. Othello is the outcast — light vs dark

  • so, he feels as if Iago is there for him, and all he really knows is fraternal love, so he turns to this rather than the insecurity of romantic love

THEMES — marriage and gender roles

• Othello and Desdemona’s marriage is unconventional and goes against typical social standards — maybe this means their marriage was always doomed

• the only reason why it was accepted is because of Othello’s reputation and ranking

• Maybe Desdemona is just in love with the exoticness of Othello, as a woman who cannot experience such adventures

• Maybe it was actually her idealisation of Othello, and the idealisation Othello placed on the expected utmost obedience and loyalty of a white inexperienced younger wife, that doomed their marriage

  • the constant reminder of contrast (even by Othello himself) of his blackness and her whiteness

• maybe their marriage was doomed because it was more chivalric love than romantic love, the love of courtship, trying to attain the perfect fair girl, and Des being impressed by this. It was all in the moment, and would never really last anyway for Othello. Maybe Othello recognises that it was chivalric and was insecure and worried that the image of Des and Cassio is more typical and destined to last longer, that she would get sick of him and it was a moment of her desire and lust for him that will move onto the next man

• OR maybe their marriage was not doomed, it was rather romantic and true to begin, but both fall into the traps of toxic patriarchy and then their marriage fails because of this

• the woman is subject to the husband, and both Des and Emilia show a perfect portrayal of the obedient wife

• however, Desdemona goes from a place of equal status and authority as Othello to a lower one due to the effects of his anger and power within a patriarchal society, so Desdemona has no option but to be obedient and compliant

• and Emilia finds her voice and attempts to fight against gender inequality (within the frameworks of the patriarchy will though) and is silenced because of it

• maybe Shakespeare is trying to show the potential power and good women could do and have if they are allowed to be equally valued to men

  • male domination and insecurity is society only leads to destruction of humanity

THEME — inferiority complexes and otherness

OTHELLO

• as the white man establishes blackness as inferior to whiteness, the black man internalizes racist attitudes and wants to be white

• The black man has breathed and eaten the prejudices of racist Europe, and assimilated the collective unconsciousness of Europe

• Othello holds a similar inferiority complex - the psychological impact is seen in Othello’s character

• His sense of identity is altered by the complex dynamics of his presence as a racialized other in Venetian society

• Fed negative ideas about blackness, Othello seeks the privileges of whiteness in order to deny his perceived inferiority, a quest that eventually leads to his downfall.

• in European unconsciousness, the black man has become the symbol of evil and sin, assigned to the Devil

  • maybe Othello is subconsciously living up to these labels (self fulfilling prophecy)

• Another medieval component that added to Satan’s grotesque inhumanity in the people’s minds is the fear of bestiality and the animal within

• Medieval thought viewed human nature as something to be feared and susceptible to the evil within, of which bestiality was the greatest evil of them all

• Due to the adoption of classical humanism, typical Renaissance works elevated human nature from its unfavourable status

  • However, the medieval suspicion of human nature still existed

  • Renaissance thought adopts and builds on the medieval ideas of human fallibility and the omnipresent risk of primitive behaviour

• Othello marries Desdemona, white society is outraged by the implications of his interracial marriage

• Before the union, Brabantio loved Othello and often welcomed Othello in his home to ask Othello about his past battles and victories. Perhaps Brabantio’s fondness for Othello is partly due to Othello’s exotic appeal

• Brabantio’s attitude changes when Othello dares to think that he is worthy of marrying into the family

• Othello, despite all his great tales, courage and privileges, is not worthy of true whiteness

• B’s remarks suggest that if inferior people are treated as the white man’s equal, people who belong under white authority will eventually take away the white man’s power.

• Othello is assimilated into Venetian culture, he is wealthy, honorable, noble and courageous, is higher in the class hierarchy than many other characters, but Othello is not white

• His color will never allow him to acquire the full privileges of whiteness

• Othello can be liked and respected, but he can never be a white man’s equal.

• Ironically, the characters in Othello cannot be judged by appearances

• Perhaps Shakespeare is criticizing the absolute binaries of black/white and good/evil that existed in society’s subconscious

• Although Othello has a good character, he is associated with evil primarily because of his colour

• While Iago is white and has the appearance of a man with good character, he is the villain of the play

• This critique is exemplified in Bianca - her name means white, but she is not associated with the traditional traits of whiteness

  • Instead of being associated with purity, goodness and virginity, she is a courtesan, or from Iago’s perspective, Cassio’s whore

  • While the other characters continuously uphold the binary of whiteness as goodness and blackness as evil, Bianca’s placement in the play seem to question and deconstruct this binary.

IAGO

• Iago views himself as superior in worth than Cassio or Roderigo

• Cassio’s death has practical reason to it, but he is also just jealous

  • “He hath a daily beauty in his life that makes me ugly”

  • suggests that Iago feels Cassio is much more charming and attractive than he is

• until the end, he says he will not speak a word as to why he did the things he did to Othello, showing he views himself above everyone else to the bitter end

THEMES — Courtly love

Motifs — The Handkerchief