Notes on Shakespeare's Othello and Literary Criticism

Shakespeare’s Othello and Literary Criticism

• Othello is a significant testament to human nature, grappling with emotions and tragic self-discovery.
• Various schools of criticism have tried to decipher the play's implications and motivations, focusing on the fragility of human emotions like love, jealousy, pride, and ambition.

Critical Approaches

New Criticism

• Focused on Iago's character and ambiguities within the play.
• Wilson Knight: "Spatial" qualities are more important than character analysis.
• Essay: “The Othello music,” the cynical intellect (Iago) is pitted against lovable humanity.
• Iago is a devil figure destroying the love between Othello and Desdemona.
• William Empson: Analyzed the word “honest,” which appears fifty-two times in the play, suggesting it carried an obscure insult and social issues.

Jungian Criticism

• Carl Gustav Jung: Humans have individual and collective unconscious called archetypes.
• Lisa Hopkins analyzed Terrell L. Tebbetts’s essay “A Jungian Reading of Othello’s Fictive Self”.
• Contradictions in Othello’s character result from the inability to understand Othello's repressive ego.
• Jungian reading supports both F. R. Leavis’s denigration and A. C. Bradley’s admiration of Othello’s character.
• Explains Othello’s suicide in terms of tragic self-discovery.
• Jung provides a complete model for understanding the play.

New Historicism

• Emergence: 1980s and 1990s in Britain and the United States.
• Stephen Greenblatt: A given idea "circulating" in a particular culture.
• Essay: “The Improvisation of Power,” from Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (1980), talks about increased self-consciousness about identity.
• Iago was fully aware of himself as the manipulator, governed by the political ideology that saw a Moor as an outcast.
• Iago constructed a narrative to which the characters submitted.
• Iago's improvisation turns love into hatred for Othello.
• Accusations: Falsifying history, codified and prescriptive formula.

Marxist and Feminist Approaches

• Dealt with the unmasking of social and political ideologies.
• Frederic Jameson: Marxism is a problematic identified by allegiance to a specific complex of problems.
• Dympna Callaghan: “Looking well to linens: women and cultural production in Othello and Shakespeare’s England,” talks about the material dimensions of Desdemona’s handkerchief and wedding sheets.
• Female labor was visible to Shakespeare’s audience but was subsequently occluded, enabling exploitation.
• Household stuff is dependent on women’s labor and is essential to domestic life.
• Othello blames Desdemona for the loss of the handkerchief as the supervisor of “house affairs”.
• The handkerchief passage demonstrates the creative labors invested by women.
• The handkerchief in Othello figures the borderland between writing and materiality itself.
• Mark Rose: Views Iago’s speeches as loaded with the language of commerce.
• The commercial setting and language show a structured pattern of thefts, beginning with a stolen daughter and ending with a stolen handkerchief.
• Othello speaks of robbery, accusing Desdemona of stealing her honor.
• Tragedy subverts, deconstructs…Shakespeare converts Elizabethan romance into tragedy.

Postcolonial Criticism

• Informed by awareness of a decolonized world and neo-colonial regimes.
• Focuses on how Shakespeare’s plays were implicated in colonialism.
• Daniel Vitkus: Turning Turk: English Theatre and Multicultural Mediterranean (2003) suggests that the tragedy of Othello is a drama of conversion.
• Tropes of conversion run throughout the play.
• Othello’s fear of sexual instability is aligned with racial and cultural anxieties about "Turning Turk."
• Othello has “converted to a black, Muslim identity."
• Othello enacts his own punishment by killing the Turk he has become.

Conclusion

• Critical theories highlight broader issues pertaining to Shakespeare’s plays.
• Theories emerge from a particular way of viewing and allow new inflections to understand "the soul of the age”.
• The inability of theories to fully comprehend Shakespeare shows that Shakespeare will never age for us.

Bibliography

• Armstrong, Philip. Shakespeare’s Visual Regime: Tragedy, Psychoanalysis and the Gaze. New York: Palgrave, 2000.
• Bradley, A.C. Shakespearean Tragedy (1904). Basingstoke: Macmilan, 2006.
• Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980.
• Greenblatt, Stephen. “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance culture”. Learning to Curse. London: Routledge, 1990.
• Hopkins, Lisa. Beginning Shakespeare. New Delhi: Viva Books Private Limited, 2010.
• Jameson, Frederic. “Actually Existing Marxism”. Polygraph 6, 7:170-195.
• Hadfield, Andrew. A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on William Shakespeare’s Othello. London: Routledge, 2003.
• Wilson Knight, G. The Wheel of Fire. 2nd edition. London: Methuen, 1949.
• Tebbetts, Terrell L. “A Jungian Reading of Othello’s Fictive Self”, Publications of the Mississippi Philological Association, 1995: 106-111.
• Vitkus, Daniel. Turning Turk: English Theatre and the Multicultural Mediterranean. New York: Macmilan, 2003.
• Howard, Jean E., and Scott Cutler Shershow, eds. Marxist Shakespeares. London: Rotledge, 2001.
• Alexander, Catherine M.S. Shakespeare and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
• Bloom, Harold. William Shakespeare’s Othello. New Delhi: Viva Books Private Limited, 2007.
• Kolin, Philip C. Othello: New Critical Essays. New York: Routledge, 2002.
• Shakespeare, William. Othello. Ed. E.A.J. Honigmann. London: Arden Shakespeare, 1997.
• Gardner, Helen. “Othello: A Retrospect, 1900-67”. Shakespeare Survey 21. Ed. Kenneth Muir. Cambridge: The University of Cambridge Press, 2002.
• Empson, William. “Honest in Othello”. A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on William Shakespeare’s Othello. Ed. Andrew Hadfield. London: Routledge, 2003.
• Minear, Erin. „Music and the Crisis of Meaning in Othello‟. Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, Vol. 49, No. 2, (Spring 2009), pp. 355-370.
• Marchitello, Howard. „Vesalius' "Fabrica" and Shakespeare's