The play doesn’t change, we change as a society | Adrian Lester |
There is a discrepancy between what is being said about him and what he is doing | Margaret reynolds |
Desdemona is an idealised idea of the female | Ato Quayson |
Othello is not jealous, he is trustful | Dostoevsky |
A drama of race relations, anxiety, miscommunication and evil | Ato Quayson |
The world they communicate over is so narrow it is easy for Iago to manipulate | Ato Quayson |
Iago’s passion for destruction is the only creative passion in the play | Harold Bloom |
neither felt not understood the spiritual impulses that bind ordinary humans together | Honigmann |
Cyprus is a bastion of male power | Flachmann |
Iago’s is a motiveless malignity | Coleridge |
We have motives, but added together they do not make an adequate cause for his actions | Ato Quayson |
Shakespeare could and should have tried harder | Hugh Quarshie |
Iago’s machinations are effective because Othello is predisposed to believing his pronouncements about the inherent duplicity of women | Ania Loomba |
Othello is a victim of racial beliefs precisely because he is an agent of misogynist ones | Ania Loomba |
It would argue a disproportionateness, a want of balance in Desdemona | Coleridge |
Race is simply the tool Iago uses to manipulate Othello, it is nothing more | Adrian lester |
Othello is racist by omission | Lucian Msamati |
The loneliness of colour made worse by the solitude of power | Ben Okri |
He is from the first scene to the last, hated and despised | Dr Samuel Johnson |
Shakespeare was a man not for an age, but for all time | Jonson |
A fantasy of interracial love and social tolerance, and a nightmare of racial hatred and male violence | Ania Loomba |
About the way an unequal society polices against change | Ellen McDougall |
Warning fair woman against speaking out, speaking up, instructing them to define female virtue as modesty | Carol rutter |
Iago is a practical joker | W H Auden |
Othello is othello’s tragedy, but Iago’s play | Harold bloom |
Iago annexes not only the other characters, but the resisting spectator as well, into his world and its perspective | Karen Newman |
Dramatic perspective can even make us the villain’s accomplices; he confides in us, so we watch his plot unfolding from his point of view | Honigmann |
Emilia is the moral heart of the play | Jude Kelly |
Emilia’s love of Desdemona is Iago’s undoing | Honigmann |
Shakespeare was preoccupied with the uncontrollability of woman’s sexuality | Valerie Traub |
Critics Othello
September 30, 2019