Critics Flashcards
(13 cards)
Honigmann (Iago)
- “play’s chief humourist”
- cleverest person in the play
- “excels in short term tactics, not long term strategy”
- “evil”
- “essential sadism”
- interacts with the audience to the extent where the play is watched from his perspective
what could be said against Auden (Iago)
Auden = ‘blinds readers to his sadism’
it could be argued that his sadism isn’t masked because his asides reveal his inner self to the audience and he’s willing to take lives to advance himself strategically (Roderigo or Cassio)
Lamb (Iago)
“we think not so much of the crimes they commit, as of the ambition, the aspiring spirit, the intellectual activity which prompts them to overleap these moral fences”
Leavis (Othello)
- “a man of action with habit of effortless authority”
- does not learn through suffering
- no tragic self-discovery
- constantly sentimentalising, so we shouldn’t pity him
Loomba (race)
- Othello subverts + conforms to early modern stereotypes
- Venice = open and cosmopolitan
- “both a fantasy of interracial love and social tolerance, and a nightmare of racial hatred and male violence”
- Othello is easily manipulated because he believes his relationship is unnatural
- Othello = victim or racial beliefs because he becomes an agent of misogyny
- black people were to be enslaved by Christians
Blount (race)
- Muslims were organised and sophisticated, not as sexually unnatural, highly emotional, and prone to anger/violence, as Europeans believed
- Muslims and Africans (like Othello) would have been seen as overly lustful, wild, and passionate, which would be corruptive of chaste white women (like Desdemona)
Bradley (tragedy)
- Tragedy is characterised by fatal flaws
- Othello is the most Romantic figure among Shakespeare’s heroes
- “it is in fact essentially a tale of suffering and calamity conducting to death”
Coleridge (Iago)
‘Othello kills Desdemona out of Iago’s superhuman art, not because of jealousy’
Cox (sex)
“Characters divided into virgins and saints or whores and devils”
Kastan (tragedy)
- Shakespearean tragedies = an exploration of age-old questions about the human psyche
- The emotional struggle of the characters is the center of the plays
- The plays question the cause of pain and loss
Chaucer (tragedy)
tragedy is the fall from prosperity to wretchedness
Nuttal (tragedy)
- The play is cathartic
- Tragedy is designed to be uncomfortable
- “Grief and fear become in their turn matter for enjoyment”
Mack (madness)
- Shakespearean tragic heroes suffer from madness
- Shakespeare’s art reveals painful truths
