A.C. Bradley on nobility
‘the character is so noble’
Samuel Johnson on Othello’s character
‘boundless in his confidence’
‘ardent in his affection’
‘inflexible in his resolution’
‘obdurate in his revenge’
A.C. Bradley on trust
Othello’s ‘trust, where he trusts, is absolute’
G. Wilson Knight on Othello’s language
‘Othello music’ – Othello’s language ‘holds an imaginative realism’ and a ‘certain exotic beauty’
Paul A. Cantor
‘Othello seems to have stepped right out of the pages of some great martial epic, yet what he has stepped into is the world of Italian bedroom comedy’
Coleridge on jealousy
‘the very opposite to a jealous man…a gallant Moor, of royal blood’
Cox on secret marriage
‘questionable how noble it is to marry secretly without permission’
John Bayley
‘wholly martial personality’
F.R. Leavis on Othello’s central role
‘the chief personage in such a sense that the tragedy may fairly be said to be Othello’s character in action’
F.R. Leavis on Othello’s distrustful nature (3)
‘Othello’s readiness to respond’
‘the essential traitor is within the gates’
‘Othello’s trust, then, can never have been in Desdemona’
Jane Adamson on Othello’s emotions
‘When Othello does open himself to the full brunt of what he really feels, he utterly disintegrates’
A.C. Bradley on the cause of Othello’s downfall
‘the wreck of his faith and love’
Phillips on Othello’s nature
‘a man of action not a thinker’
A.C. Bradley on Othello and emotion
‘emotion excites his imagination, but it confuses and dulls his intellect’
G. Wilson Knight on Othello’s images
Othello remains ‘aloof’ just like his images are
Hugh Quarsie on race
Played Othello in an RSC production
‘Shakespeare reverts to the convention as voiced by Iago: “These Moors are changeable in their wills”’
F.R. Leavis on Othello and Desdemona’s relationship (3)
‘the tragedy is inherent in the Othello-Desdemona relationship’
Othello’s love is ‘composed very largely of ignorance of self as well as ignorance of her’
His love for Desdemona is more ‘a matter of self-centred and self-regarding satisfactions’
Thomas Rhymer on the potential for ‘Othello’ to be a comedy
A man deceived into thinking he has been cuckolded would normally provide the basis for a comedy – link to ‘Much Ado About Nothing’
A.C. Bradley on Othello’s murder of Desdemona
‘not in hate but in honour; in honour, and also in love.’
Tony Tanner on Othello’s sexual drive
‘seems to dread the sexual act’
Verdi on Othello’s culpability
Iago is ‘the Demon who sets everything in motion, but Othello is the one who acts’
Kenneth Muir on how to play Othello and Iago
‘If Iago is played as an obvious villain, Othello and the other characters are reduced to credulous fools’
Simpson on Othello, Iago and Desdemona
‘Othello allows Iago to replace Desdemona’
Braham Murray on Othello’s race and its (lack of) importance
Othello’s race is intrinsic to his character but ‘it is not what Shakespeare is writing about. The crux of the play is the love between opposites’
Coleridge on the unlikely nature of the love between Othello and Desdemona
Argues that Desdemona would never have fallen in love with Othello because he was black
Valerie Traub on racism
‘internalised racial self-hatred’
E.A.J. Honigmann
Argues that given the context of the time, Othello was not necessarily black
Virginia M. Vaughn on Othello’s outsider status
‘The Moor…remains an alien in Venice’
G. Wilson Knight on Othello’s centrality
‘Othello is dominated by its protagonist’
Guy Hollands on Othello’s character development
‘His is the dynamic story, he is the most changed by the events of the play’
Paterson Joseph on depicting Othello’s decline
‘challenge’ of depicting Othello’s shift from a ‘man who is calm in the face of danger’ to a ‘beast’
Graham Bradshaw on Othello’s dynamic character
Othello’s character is not fixed – his perceptions of the other characters shift between extremes within the same scene
T.S. Eliot on Othello’s final speech (4)
‘terrible exposure of human weakness’
‘cheering himself up’
‘ceased to think about Desdemona’
‘endeavouring to escape reality’
Anthony Brennan on Othello’s final speech and death
‘In his final speech and his suicide he is able, as he was before the Senate of Venice, to express his nobility and to manifest himself rightly’
A.C. Bradley on Othello’s character after his murder of Desdemona
Emerges as ‘a greater or nobler Othello still’ – he kills her out of love and regains or even surpasses his former nobility at the end
Laurence Olivier
1964 performance as Othello saw him blacking up
Patrick Stewart
Played a white Othello in 1997 but the entirety of the rest of the cast was black (race reversed production)
Michael Neill on Othello’s language
Othello’s jealousy gives his language an ‘intensely erotic charge’
John McRae on Othello’s final speech
‘a triumphant, brilliant and beautiful aria’
