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Summary A* Othello context and criticism
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A* level document of key, detailed context regarding 'Othello' by William Shakespeare, and a range of key critical quotations by various critics - grouped by theme.
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Context and criticism in ‘Othello’Renaissance Humanism
The Book of the Courtier - how to guide
A move from a religious order to a more secular analysis of human beings, engaged with
agency and understanding. A thorough study in the cognitive mode of humans.
Shakespeare makes one of the first literary studies in psychology in Western Literature.
Renaissance self-fashioning (Greenblatt)
Greenblatt destabilises the notion of a "constant mode" of self, instead characters
"embody a profound mobility"
Sprezzatura - the contrast between external/internal --> Venetian 16th century beleif
governed by dress and exterior appearance
Hecatommithi (1565)
Shakespeare derived the plot from above
International politics
Venice owned Cyprus until 1569, when in 1571 Turkish forces seized the island
Later that year, an alliance of Christian powers defeated the Turk in the famous
battle of Lepanto
Writer Richard Knolles, published 'The General Historie of the Turks' (1603), in which
he demonised the Ottoman Empire as barbaric and cruel, even as they admired its
military success and bureaucratic structure
Machiavellian
Identity is fluid, it can be constructed and deconstructed
The Prince - possibility to shape one's future (tempt fate) through actions
Spaniards and Italians were often associated with a poisonous inwardness and a
Machiavellian ability to manipulate appearances --> declares personal God as 'Janus'
the two faced deity
'Machiavelli's treatise is not concerned with the questions of justice', 'he
demonstrates how effectively a ruler can apply psychological pressure to accomplish
his political aims.' - Lockyer
The book was so infamous that the Church placed it on the index of Prohibited
Books in 1559
Empiricism
Othello's faith in ocular proof - while Iago (puppet master) engineers the light and
dark of the play
John Locke's Empiricism - Shakespeare anticipates the ideas of John Locke
16th century racism
1601 Elizabeth I instructed for the deportation of the 'negroes'
Iago is the name of the patron saint of Spain,(Santiago) also known as the Moor-
Killer
Burbage --> skin blackened with charred cork and oil and his hair covered with black
cork and oil, and hair covered with lambswool - he embodied a difference rather
than an ethnicity
Leo Africanus used reductive racial stereotypes to describe the 'vertues' and 'vices'
of Africans in 1550 - 'no nation in the world is so subject to jealousie' and they
'beleeve matters impossible which are told to them'
Race as Projection - Janet Adelman
Play begins with Iago and not Othello, he is racially stereotyped as 'the moor' and
"the thicklips "before we meet him - Othello belies Iago's description as soon as he
appears
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