Learner Resource 8
1. ‘A Bloody Farce’
(Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy, 1693)
2. [of Iago] ‘the motive-hunting of motiveless malignity’
(Samuel Taylor Coleridge, marginalia on Othello, early nineteenth century)
3. ‘So he comes before us, dark and grand, with a light upon him from the sun where
he was born; but no longer young, and now grave, self-controlled, steeled by the
experience of countless perils, hardships and vicissitudes, at once simple and stately
in bearing and in speech, a great man naturally modest but fully conscious of his
worth, proud of his services to the state, unawed by dignitaries and unelated by
honours, secure, it would seem, against all dangers from without and all rebellion
from within. And he comes to have his life crowned with the final glory of love, a love
as strange, adventurous and romantic as any passage of his eventful history, filling
his heart with tenderness and his imagination with ecstasy . . .
The sources of danger in this character are revealed but too clearly by the story. In
the first place, Othello's mind, for all its poetry, is very simple. He is not observant.
His nature tends outward. He is quite free from introspection, and is not given to
reflection. Emotion excites his imagination, but it confuses and dulls his intellect . . .In
addition, he has little experience of the corrupt products of civilised life, and is
ignorant of European women.
In the second place, for all his dignity and massive calm (and he has greater dignity
than any other of Shakespeare's men), he is by nature full of the most vehement
passion.’
(A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 1904)
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4. [Of Othello at the end of the play] ‘Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to
achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of oneself.’
(T. S. Eliot, ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’, in Selected Essays, 1932)
5. ‘Othello, in his magnanimous way, is egotistic. . . . a habit of self-approving selfdramatisation is an essential element in [his] make-up, and remains so at the very
end.’
(F. R. Leavis, ‘Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero’, in The Common Pursuit, 1952)
6. ‘Othello’s values are those of aristocratic Venice; Iago’s are those of its underside.
Iago has contempt for the feminine principle, for women, and feeling, and sex.
Othello, without his awareness, shares this contempt.’
(Marilyn French, Shakespeare’s Division of Experience – the late tragedies, 1981)
7. ‘We no longer feel, as Shakespeare’s contemporaries did, the ubiquity of Satan,
but Iago is still serviceable to us, as an objective correlative of the mindless
inventiveness of racist aggression. Iago is still alive and kicking and filling migrants’
letter-boxes with excrement.’
(Germaine Greer, Shakespeare, 1986)
8. ‘The Moor is a member of a more interesting and more permanent people: the
race of the displaced and dispossessed, of Time’s always-vulnerable wanderers; he
is one of the ‘Strangers’ who do not belong where once they ruled and now have no
claim to the ancient ‘royal siege’ except the lasting dignity or indignity of their misery.’
(Barbara Everett, ‘Spanish Othello’, in Young Hamlet: Essays on Shakespeare’s
Tragedies, 1989)
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9. ‘In loving and marrying each other, Othello and Desdemona instinctively act
according to principles of racial equality and sexual freedom which are still not
normative, still far from generally accepted and practised even in our own day, let
alone in Shakespeare’s.
Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists are all overpowered by the prevailing social and
ideological tides which sweep them unawares out of their depth, rather than by some
metaphysically predestined misfortune or by some flaw, whether culpable, haphazard
or innate, in the composition of their characters.’
(Kiernan Ryan, Shakespeare, 1989)
10. Othello self-destructively internalises the prevailing racism, while Desdemona . . .
remains an idealised, virtuous woman – keeping alive the image of a besieged, white
femininity so crucial to the production of the black man as a ‘savage’.
(Jyotsna Singh, ‘Othello’s identity, postcolonial theory and contemporary African
rewritings of Othello’, in Lena Cowen Orlin (ed.) Othello, New Casebook series,
2004)
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