Critics Flashcards
(13 cards)
Loomba
‘Othello is both a fantasy of interracial love & social tolerance’
Coleridge
Iago = ‘the motive hunting of a motiveless malignity’
Othello = ‘being next to the devil’
O’Toole
Iago = ‘Machiavellian villian’
‘there is no Othello without Iago’
Koomba
Othello = ‘victim of racial beliefs’
Raatzch
Phonetic affinity between ego & Iago
Heilman
Othello = ‘the least heroic of Shakespear’s tragic heroes’
Leavis
Iago = ‘sufficiently convincing as a person’ & ‘necessary piece of dramatic mechanism’
Tragedy is Othello’s fault due to his shortcomings = ‘the essential traitor is within the gates’
Wain
‘The assassination of love by non-love’
Iago = ‘less than a complete human being because love had been left out of his composition’
Muir
‘Secret of Iago is not a motiveless malignity, nor evil for evils sake, nor a professional envy, but a pathological jealousy of his wife, a suspicion of every man who whom she is acquainted, a jealous love of Desdemona which makes him take vicarious please in other mens actual or prospective enjoyment of her at the same time’
Lauren Olivier played Iago opposite Ralph Richardson playing Othello in 1938
Played Iago as a repressed homosexual whose motive was unrecognised passion for Othello
Jameson
Desdemona = ‘less quickness of intellect & less tendency to reflection than most of Shakespeare’s heroines’
Honigman
Iago = ‘anything but straightforward & audiences have responded to him in different ways, depending on the actor’
Iago = ‘humour either intends to give pain or allows him to bask in his sense of superiority, very rarely is it at his own expense’
Lamb
‘We think not so much of the crimes which they commit, as of the great ambition, the aspiring spirit, the intellectual activity which prompts them to overleap those moral fences’
