Loomba

'love and violence in the play are crucially cut up' 'Othello is both a fantasy of interracial love and social tolerance'

Granville Barker

'a tragedy without meaning'

Coleridge

Iago's excuses are 'the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity' and Othello is 'a being next to the devil'

O'Toole

Iago is the 'Machiavellian villain' 'there is no Othello without Iago'

Hugh Quarshie, a black actor

he questions Shakespeare's intentions regarding race: is Othello's quick transition into insanity Shakespeare succumbing to Elizabethan conventions that Moors were a threat to society due to their tendency to violence? 'racist by omission, not commission'

Smith

Iago is a repressed homosexual

Koomba

Othello is a 'victim of racial beliefs' because is an 'agent of misogyny'

Raatzch

the phonetic affinity between 'ego' and 'Iago'

AC Bradley and FR Leavis

they had challenging views as to whether Othello is a man of nobility

TS Elliot

he argues Othello does not obtain redemption although Othello believes he is honourable as he acted accordingly to the circumstances of female infidelity

Lisa Gardine

'Renaissance women were often seen as suffering martyrs'

John Quincy Adams

believed Desdemona deserved her fate as 'black and white blood cannot be intermingled'

Rymer (1600s)

'a woman [Desdemona] without sense because she married a blackamoor' 'a Bloody Farce without salt or savour' 'Tragedy of the Handkerchief'

John Wain (1971) ~ general

"we respond deeply or shallowly according to [the play] whether we have deep or shallow natures"

John Wain (1971) ~ Othello / Desdemona

"a tragedy of misunderstanding" "[Othello] does not see [Desdemona] as a real girl, but as something magical that has happened to him" ~ contention is that none of the characters understand each other and that is why everything goes wrong

JW (1971) ~ Iago

Acct 3 Scene 3 "shows Iago's fall as well as Othello's. At the beginning... they are both sane men; at the end, they are both mad and in the grip of the same madness" ~ Iago does not foresee "the holocaust" at the end, because he doesn't understand his own tendencies or Othello's love for Desdemona he has "a patchwork of motives"

JW (1971) ~ Venice

Their "acceptance is partial" of Othello "Desdemona's love... gives him an intimate, living link with Venice and promises to break his outsiderdom, [and thus] central to his whole being" place with a "close-knit social fabric"

Louis Auchincloss

'[The Venetians] regard [Othello] as Victorian Englishmen might have regarded some splendid Maharajah'

JW (1971) ~ race

"racial difference from the other characters is not that it makes him terrifying or disgusting - it manifestly doesn't, except to people with a grudge against him already - but that it is the outward symbol of his isolation" ~ interesting, maybe don't memorise this whole thing

JW (1971) ~ Cyprus

"garrison-town atmosphere"

Robert Swinburne

'the noblest man of man's making'

Robert B. Heilman

'the least heroic of Shakespeare's tragic heroes'

John Middleton Murray

The idea of magic is central to it

David Kuala

The idea of magic is not central to it

John E. Seaman in 'Shakespeare Quarterly' XIX

It is a Christian tragedy ~ Othello's fall is a version of Adam's, while Desdemona's is an inversion of Eve's

E. E. Stoll 'Othello, An Historical and Comparative Study' (1915)

Its plot is incredible

R. B. Heilman

Its plot has 'surrealistic rightness'

Emrys Jones

It is part of the response to James I's heroic poem 'Lepanto'

Lilian Winstanley, ''Othello' as the Tragedy of Italy' (1924)

It is a diagram of Spanish political history, with Othello as Philip II and Iago as his enemy, Antonio Perez.

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 'Essay on Dante' (1824)

'Perhaps the greatest work in the world'

Thomas Rymer, 'A Short View of Tragedy' (1693)

'A bloody farce without salt or savour'

Bradley - Othello

Othello is entirely blameless, has to explain why anyone would hate him enough to kill him, so sites the main complexity of the play within Iago's character. "a great heap of contradictions"

Leavis - Iago

Iago 'sufficiently convincing as a person' but 'subordinate and merely ancillary... a necessary piece of dramatic mechanism' - tragedy is Othello's fault

Leavis - Othello

Tragedy is due to Othello's shortcomings e.g. - his feelings for D 'it may be love but it can only be in an oddly qualified sense of love of her' - habit of self-idealisation - heroic way of seeing himself in widescreen, cinematically 'the disguise of an obtuse and brutal egotism'

Leavis - tragedy

criticises Othello's character, calling him an 'egotist' ~ an account of what he is, forgetting what he may become (missing the essential point of the play: transformation) - cool treatment of Brabantio - description of wooing makes it seem as though she wooed him and not the other way round, do we believe?

G. I. Duthie (1951)

Othello's egotism is egregious enough to make Iago's work fairly easy the tragedy is caused by 'two forces working in conjunction: it is caused by an external force of evil deliberately bringing itself to bear on a noble figure which has within it a seed of evil'

Leavis - Othello to blame

'the essential traitor is within the gates'

J.Wain - love

'the assassination of love by non-love' Iago being 'less than a complete human being because love had been left out of his composition' 'it is only the loveless heart that cannot learn'

Bradley - love

'[Iago] was destroyed by the power that he attacked, the power of love; and he was destroyed by it because he could not understand it; and he could not understand it because it was not in him'

Bradley - Othello's love

Othello in middle age 'comes to have his life crowned with the final glory of love'

'Gentleman of Exeter' (1790) 'An Apology for the Character and Conduct of Iago'

Argues that because Iago has a good reputation, someone would have noticed beforehand if he was really evil (btw Iago is 28)

Heraud and Snider (writing separately in the 20th C)

they argue that if Iago had been cuckolded by Othello, it would give him a powerful motive thus explaining his conduct

John W. Draper

assembles evidence that Elizabethan notions of honour made the cuckold a universally despised figure - argues that Iago is 'attempting along conventional lines to vindicate his honour'

Mario Praz

Iago 'incensed by the public report that Othello has cuckolded him' seeing 'parallels in may cases of retaliation instanced by the Italian novelle'

Hazlitt - Iago's motivations

'Shakespeare... knew that love of power, which is another name for the love of mischief, is natural to man' so Iago is 'an amateur of tragedy in real life'

Kenneth Muir - Iago's motivations

'The secret of Iago is not a motiveless malignity, nor evil for evil's sake, nor a professional envy, but a pathological jealousy of his wife, a suspicion of every man who whom she is acquainted, a jealous love of Desdemona which makes him take vicarious please in other men's actual or prospective enjoyment of her at the same tim as

William Empson's 'Honest in Othello' in 'The Structure of Complex Words' (1951)

Argues that as regards the epithet "honest" Iago, the word has a cluster of possible meanings and a 'head sense' (in this case, telling the truth, not stealing, keeping promises) - medievally, it meant 'deserving the receiving social honour' - 16th c, it meant 'one of us, the type we like' - Restoration, anti-Puritan feeling that a man might be selfish and unreliable but honest in that he tells the truth about it so honesty not valued - Victorian times, used to patronise the lower classes or suggest that they had common sense

Empson (1951) ~ Iago (supports Bradley's interpretation)

certainly wicked and not to be defended, but also human and credible if he sees honest as patronising - also says that Iago's uttering his true opinions for most of the play but people assume it is him having a bit of fun, while his cynicism has 'deep roots in destructive emotions'

PERFORMANCE: Laurence Olivier played Iago opposite Ralph Richardson playing Othello, 1938

played Iago as a repressed homosexual whose motive was unrecognised passion for Othello

Bradley ~ Desdemona

'the "eternal womanly" in its most lovely and adorable form, simple and innocent as a child, radiant with the heavenly purity of heart which men worship the more because nature so rarely permits it to themselves' 'a childlike boldness and persistency, which are full of charm but are unhappily united with a certain want of perception'

Mrs Jameson ~ Desdemona (does not agree with Bradley)

'less quickness of intellect and less tendency to reflection than most of Shakespeare's heroines' but has 'the unconscious address common in women

Heraud (1865) ~ Desdemona

'there exists fiction in whatever is romantic. She suffers from illusion and loves to be deluded' 'she frequently evades the truth, when attention to its strict letter would raise difficulties'

John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States

she is 'a wanton' and 'when Othello smothers her in her bed, the terror and pity subside immediately into the sentiment that she has her deserts'

W. H. Auden, 'The Joker in the Pack' (1963)

In the 'willow scene', it 'is as if she had suddenly realised that she had made a mésalliance and that the sort of man she ought to have married was someone of her own class and colour like Ludovico'

Thomas Rymer (example of neo-classicist criticism) (1693)

sees it as having a compendium of faults - N-Cs derived critical theory from Aristotle's 'Poetics' so he expected (i) the doctrine of generality, which says that the difference between the poet and the historian is that describe what was and what could be (ii) the quadrivium of 'Plot, Character, Thought, and Expression' so should produce a nugget of wisdom/moral

Rymer's criticisms

Othello is too idiosyncratic to have a moral The characters are not realistic: Iago is not soldierly but 'a close, dissembling, false, insinuating rascal, instead of an open-hearted, frank, plain-dealing Souldier'

Dr Johnson (1765)

'His story requires Romans or kings, but he thinks only in men... [knows that every city] had men of all dispositions' 'we learn from Othello this very useful moral, not to... yield to suspicion' it was 'more moral than almost any play'

G. Wilson Knight

'a story of intrigue rather than a visionary statement' (to do with the moral)

John Dennis 'An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Shakespeare' (1712)

urges a narrow conception of nature

Voltaire 'L'appel à toutes les nations d'Europe' (1761)

also urges a narrow conception of what is natural in people, similar to Rymer