lOMoARcPSD|59658805
Critics Quotes FOR Othello
English Language and Literature (University of Oxford)
Scan to open on Studocu
Studocu is not sponsored or endorsed by any college or university
Downloaded by olinder seth ()
, lOMoARcPSD|59658805
Critical Analysis for Othello (Quotes for Critics)
Critical views of Othello have polarized during the last forty years. The dispute is
between those who follow Coleridge and Bradley, who see Othello as noble but
diabolically misled, and those who follow Eliot and Leavis, who seem him as a criminal
egotist’. Jane Adamson from her book ‘Othello as Tragedy: Some problems of judgement and
feeling’. 1980.
Character Critique
Othello
EAJ Honigmann (1927-2011): ‘Both are outsiders, Othello as a moor, Iago as a malcontent with a
grudge against privilege’. Both stand apart from their fellow men and both want to be accepted’.
AC Bradley (critic from early 1900s – 1904-1919): In regard to the essential character,
Othello’s race isn’t important’.
AC Bradley: ‘purely noble, strong, generous and tragic hero – merely a victim’.
AC Bradley: ‘Othello – most romantic figure amongst Shakespeare’s heroes’ + ‘the greatest poet
of them all’.
Samuel Coleridge: describes Othello as ‘a noble moor’.
Stephen Greenblatt: ‘Othello is both a monster and hero’.
EAJ Honigmann: ‘Othello’s emotional range is huge, Iago’s is limited’.
FR Leavis: ‘Othello is too stupid to be regarded as a tragic hero’. (1937)
FR Leavis: ‘Othello yields with extraordinary promptness to suggestion’. (1937)
FR Leavis (Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero, 1937): ‘Othello dies belonging to the world of
action in which his true part lay’. (1937)
Wilson Knight: ‘Othello loves emotion for emotion’s sake, luxuriates in it’.
Samuel Coleridge: ‘Let me repeat, Othello does not kill Desdemona in jealousy, but in a
conviction forced upon him by the almost superhuman art of Iago, such a conviction as any man
would and must have entertained who had believed Iago’s honesty as Othello did’. (1813)
TS Eliot: ‘What Othello seems to me to be doing in {his last} speech is cheering himself up. He is
endeavouring to escape reality, he has ceased to think about Desdemona, and is thinking about
himself … I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this *bovarysme, the human will to see
things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare’. (TS Eliot ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of
Seneca, Selected Essays, 1953’).
(* bovarysme is a term derived from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857). It denotes a tendency
toward escapist daydreaming in which the dreamer imagines himself or herself to be a hero or
heroine in a romance, whilst ignoring the everyday realities of the situation).
Albert Guerard: ‘Othello is the story of a barbarian who – the pity of it! – relapses’.
Emily C Bartels: ‘Shakespeare uses the stereotype of the Moor as a means of subverting it’.
Ania Loomba (Indian literary scholar and critic on Race in Othello, 1998) – Shakespeare gives us
‘a black Moor who has both a slave past and a noble lineage, a black skin and thick lips as well as
great military skills and rhetorical abilities, a capacity for tenderness as well as a propensity to
violence’.
Frances E Dolan (English professor and modern day critic) – describes Othello as ‘a domestic
tyrant’.
Downloaded by olinder seth ()
, lOMoARcPSD|59658805
Iago
Frank Kermode: of Iago’s language ‘at its core it is filth’.
Jane Adamson (author of ‘Othello as Tragedy’ - 1980: ‘Iago is more a catalyst that precipitates
destruction than a devil that causes it’.
EAJ Honigmann (1940s-1980s): ‘Iago is excellent in short term tactics, not long term strategy’.
EAJ Honigmann: ‘Iago is a liar, betrayer and mental torturer’.
Andre Holland (actor who played Othello opposite Mark Rylance’s Iago): ‘Iago is the stage
manager’.
EAJ Honigmann: ‘Othello’s emotional range is huge, Iago’s is limited’.
Dieter Mehl (1970/80/90s) : ‘Iago is a satanic tempter’.
Thomas Rymer (1693): ‘Iago is too evil to be believed’.
Fintan O’Toole: ‘Iago’s success lies in Othello’s readiness to respond’.
Samuel Coleridge: Iago is an ‘example of motiveless malignity’.
FR Leavis: ‘Othello yields with extraordinary promptness to suggestion’. (ie to Iago’s cunning
manipulation)
Harold Bloom: ‘in a play that held a genius opposed to his own – a Hamlet or a Falstaff – he would
be only a frustrated malcontent’, yet ‘given a world only of gulls and victims – Othello, Desdemona,
Cassio, Roderigo, even Emilia until outrage turns her – Iago scarcely needs to exercise the full
range of powers that he keeps discovering’.
William Hazlitt (early 1800s): ‘Iago belongs to a class of characters common to Shakespeare, and
at the same time peculiar to him – namely, that of great intellectual activity, accompanied with a
total want of moral principle’.
Emily C Bartels: ‘Iago is a villain by remorseless choice, and Othello by unfortunate chance’.
Dr Samuel Johnson, essayist and critic in 1700s: ‘The character of Iago is so conducted, that he is
from the first scene to the last hated and despised’. Dr Johnson’s verdict was echoed by AC
Bradley, who reacted to Act 4, Scene 2, lines 112 (approx. – ie, scene between Iago and
Desdemona when she is upset Othello has called her a whore) with ‘burning hatred and burning
tears’.
Charles Lamb, writer and essayist 1175-1834: ‘while we are reading any of (Shakespeare’s) great
criminal characters – Macbeth, Richard, even Iago – we think not so much of the crimes which they
commit, as of the ambition, the aspiring spirit, the intellectual activity which prompts them to
overleap those moral fences’.
EAJ Honigmann: ‘Iago enjoys another important advantage, that he is the play’s chief humorist’.
WH Auden- poet, writer of prose essays (1907-1973): called Iago ‘the joker in the pack’ – ‘a
practical joker of a peculiarly appalling kind’. As Honigmann says, ‘Auden’s loose label really
identifies one of Iago’s convenient masks, not the inner man’.
Harold C Goddard – author of ‘The Meaning of Shakespeare’ 1951: thought that Shakespeare
bestowed ‘the highest intellectual gifts’ on Iago.
EAJ Honnigmann – ‘Introduction’ Othello 2001 – Iago excels in short-term tactics, not in long-term
strategy’. … ‘despite his cleverness, he has neither felt nor understood the spiritual impulses that
bind ordinary human beings together, loyalty, friendship, respect, compassion – in a word, love.
Emilia’s love (of Desdemona) is Iago’s undoing’.
Downloaded by olinder seth ()
Critics Quotes FOR Othello
English Language and Literature (University of Oxford)
Scan to open on Studocu
Studocu is not sponsored or endorsed by any college or university
Downloaded by olinder seth ()
, lOMoARcPSD|59658805
Critical Analysis for Othello (Quotes for Critics)
Critical views of Othello have polarized during the last forty years. The dispute is
between those who follow Coleridge and Bradley, who see Othello as noble but
diabolically misled, and those who follow Eliot and Leavis, who seem him as a criminal
egotist’. Jane Adamson from her book ‘Othello as Tragedy: Some problems of judgement and
feeling’. 1980.
Character Critique
Othello
EAJ Honigmann (1927-2011): ‘Both are outsiders, Othello as a moor, Iago as a malcontent with a
grudge against privilege’. Both stand apart from their fellow men and both want to be accepted’.
AC Bradley (critic from early 1900s – 1904-1919): In regard to the essential character,
Othello’s race isn’t important’.
AC Bradley: ‘purely noble, strong, generous and tragic hero – merely a victim’.
AC Bradley: ‘Othello – most romantic figure amongst Shakespeare’s heroes’ + ‘the greatest poet
of them all’.
Samuel Coleridge: describes Othello as ‘a noble moor’.
Stephen Greenblatt: ‘Othello is both a monster and hero’.
EAJ Honigmann: ‘Othello’s emotional range is huge, Iago’s is limited’.
FR Leavis: ‘Othello is too stupid to be regarded as a tragic hero’. (1937)
FR Leavis: ‘Othello yields with extraordinary promptness to suggestion’. (1937)
FR Leavis (Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero, 1937): ‘Othello dies belonging to the world of
action in which his true part lay’. (1937)
Wilson Knight: ‘Othello loves emotion for emotion’s sake, luxuriates in it’.
Samuel Coleridge: ‘Let me repeat, Othello does not kill Desdemona in jealousy, but in a
conviction forced upon him by the almost superhuman art of Iago, such a conviction as any man
would and must have entertained who had believed Iago’s honesty as Othello did’. (1813)
TS Eliot: ‘What Othello seems to me to be doing in {his last} speech is cheering himself up. He is
endeavouring to escape reality, he has ceased to think about Desdemona, and is thinking about
himself … I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this *bovarysme, the human will to see
things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare’. (TS Eliot ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of
Seneca, Selected Essays, 1953’).
(* bovarysme is a term derived from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857). It denotes a tendency
toward escapist daydreaming in which the dreamer imagines himself or herself to be a hero or
heroine in a romance, whilst ignoring the everyday realities of the situation).
Albert Guerard: ‘Othello is the story of a barbarian who – the pity of it! – relapses’.
Emily C Bartels: ‘Shakespeare uses the stereotype of the Moor as a means of subverting it’.
Ania Loomba (Indian literary scholar and critic on Race in Othello, 1998) – Shakespeare gives us
‘a black Moor who has both a slave past and a noble lineage, a black skin and thick lips as well as
great military skills and rhetorical abilities, a capacity for tenderness as well as a propensity to
violence’.
Frances E Dolan (English professor and modern day critic) – describes Othello as ‘a domestic
tyrant’.
Downloaded by olinder seth ()
, lOMoARcPSD|59658805
Iago
Frank Kermode: of Iago’s language ‘at its core it is filth’.
Jane Adamson (author of ‘Othello as Tragedy’ - 1980: ‘Iago is more a catalyst that precipitates
destruction than a devil that causes it’.
EAJ Honigmann (1940s-1980s): ‘Iago is excellent in short term tactics, not long term strategy’.
EAJ Honigmann: ‘Iago is a liar, betrayer and mental torturer’.
Andre Holland (actor who played Othello opposite Mark Rylance’s Iago): ‘Iago is the stage
manager’.
EAJ Honigmann: ‘Othello’s emotional range is huge, Iago’s is limited’.
Dieter Mehl (1970/80/90s) : ‘Iago is a satanic tempter’.
Thomas Rymer (1693): ‘Iago is too evil to be believed’.
Fintan O’Toole: ‘Iago’s success lies in Othello’s readiness to respond’.
Samuel Coleridge: Iago is an ‘example of motiveless malignity’.
FR Leavis: ‘Othello yields with extraordinary promptness to suggestion’. (ie to Iago’s cunning
manipulation)
Harold Bloom: ‘in a play that held a genius opposed to his own – a Hamlet or a Falstaff – he would
be only a frustrated malcontent’, yet ‘given a world only of gulls and victims – Othello, Desdemona,
Cassio, Roderigo, even Emilia until outrage turns her – Iago scarcely needs to exercise the full
range of powers that he keeps discovering’.
William Hazlitt (early 1800s): ‘Iago belongs to a class of characters common to Shakespeare, and
at the same time peculiar to him – namely, that of great intellectual activity, accompanied with a
total want of moral principle’.
Emily C Bartels: ‘Iago is a villain by remorseless choice, and Othello by unfortunate chance’.
Dr Samuel Johnson, essayist and critic in 1700s: ‘The character of Iago is so conducted, that he is
from the first scene to the last hated and despised’. Dr Johnson’s verdict was echoed by AC
Bradley, who reacted to Act 4, Scene 2, lines 112 (approx. – ie, scene between Iago and
Desdemona when she is upset Othello has called her a whore) with ‘burning hatred and burning
tears’.
Charles Lamb, writer and essayist 1175-1834: ‘while we are reading any of (Shakespeare’s) great
criminal characters – Macbeth, Richard, even Iago – we think not so much of the crimes which they
commit, as of the ambition, the aspiring spirit, the intellectual activity which prompts them to
overleap those moral fences’.
EAJ Honigmann: ‘Iago enjoys another important advantage, that he is the play’s chief humorist’.
WH Auden- poet, writer of prose essays (1907-1973): called Iago ‘the joker in the pack’ – ‘a
practical joker of a peculiarly appalling kind’. As Honigmann says, ‘Auden’s loose label really
identifies one of Iago’s convenient masks, not the inner man’.
Harold C Goddard – author of ‘The Meaning of Shakespeare’ 1951: thought that Shakespeare
bestowed ‘the highest intellectual gifts’ on Iago.
EAJ Honnigmann – ‘Introduction’ Othello 2001 – Iago excels in short-term tactics, not in long-term
strategy’. … ‘despite his cleverness, he has neither felt nor understood the spiritual impulses that
bind ordinary human beings together, loyalty, friendship, respect, compassion – in a word, love.
Emilia’s love (of Desdemona) is Iago’s undoing’.
Downloaded by olinder seth ()
