| 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