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Summary Othello critical opinions
List of critical opinions for Othello A level edexcel exam - organised by critic
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Honigmann - ‘Iago excels in short-term tactics, not in long-term strategy’- ‘Play’s chief humorist’
- ‘Dramatic perspectives can even make us the villain’s accomplices: he
confides in us, so we watch his plot unfolding from his POV.’
- ‘Dramatic perspective compels us to see with his eyes, and to share his
‘jokes.’
- ‘He enjoys a godlike sense of power’
- ‘Despite his cleverness, he has neither felt, nor understood the
spiritual impulses that bind ordinary human being together, loyalty,
friendship, respect, compassion – in a word, love.’
Kastan - ‘Uncertainty is the point’
Nutall - ‘Enjoyed discomfort’
Mack - ‘Madness is to some degree a punishment or doom’
- Divine punishment
- ‘Any excess of passion approaches madness’
- "The female is doomed never to be believed"
McCulloch - Tragedy = man destroyed by his fatal flaw
- Desdemona hasn’t fallen in love with a story, she actually loves
Othello
- Suggests Othello’s awareness of political rhetoric prevents sincerity of
feelings for Desdemona
- Othello destroys himself through love
- Prospect of losing his job/reputation hurts othello more than losing
desdemona
- Othello is BY NATURE two-faced, both ‘great of heart’
and ‘ignorant as dirt’ → we should not try search for an
‘authentic’ Othello
- His SvB problem is only bc his profession requires careful management
of his image and profile
Mcrae - ‘Foolish lover’ (Roderig)
- ‘Bianca is the only one who remains her dignity right to the end’
- ‘The honest whore’
Rymer - "The play's setting and change in location was
unnecessary"
- 'the tragedy of the handkerchief'
- the moral of Othello was that it was 'a warning to all good wives that
they look well to their linen'
Greer - ‘Othello lives because it exposes something within us, something that
we cannot – or do not want to – face.’
- ‘In Othello, Shakespeare lifts us above the ordinary socio-political facts
, and resents us with a universal drama for all time, the story of us all:
the weakness inherent within every human being.’
- ‘Through the play we come to know Othello, come to know exactly
who he is.’
- ‘Othello has gone through life, won battles, won great office, won the
love of a beautiful young woman – but has never known himself.’
- ‘Jealousy is destroying him [Othello] […] not the unmotivated hatred
of Iago.’
- Desdemona is a young, inexperienced girl, but she knows her own
heart’
Wain - "a tragedy of misunderstanding"
Leavis - ‘Othello dies belonging to the world of action in which his true part
lay’
- ‘Discovers his mistake, but there is no tragic self-discovery’
- Othello is the ‘stoic captain.’
- In short, a habit of self-approving self-dramatization is an essential
element on Othello’s makeup, and remains so at the very end.
- [About final speech] ‘The quiet beginning gives us the man of action
with his habit of effortless authority.’
- ‘He speaks his last words as the stern fighting man who has
done the state some service.’
- "Iago simply exploits a weakness that already existed in
Othello's character"
- ‘ferocious stupidity, an insane and self-deceiving passion.’
Loomba - [black people] ‘godless, bestial and hideous’ and ‘propensity to
violence’
- ‘Victim of racial beliefs because he becomes an agent of misogynistic
ones’
Phillips - "Othello feels constantly threatened and profoundly insecure"
- "Othello is a man of action, not a thinker. In his first
speech he subconsciously acknowledges the social
pressure he is under"
- "Othello's love of Desdemona is 'the love of possession.
She is a prize, a spoil of war"
Coleridge - ‘Motive-hunting of motiveless malignity’
Bradley - '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'
- The Othello who enters the bed-chamber with the words, 'It is the
cause, it is the cause, my soul', is not the man of the Fourth Act.
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.”
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