Othello Key Quotes Flashcards
(38 cards)
AC Bradley on Othello’s temperamental nature
‘Othello’s nature is all of one piece… If such a passion as jealousy seizes him, it will swell into a well-nigh uncontrollable flood.’
AC Bradley on Othello as the outsider
‘he does not belong to our world’
Lynda E Boose on audience’s complicity
‘Holds up a mirror that mercilessly exposes the complicity of the audience’s spectatorship’
‘Refusal to gratify the audience’s need for retributive justice’
Coghill on Iago’s motives
‘powerfully possessed by a hatred against a master who (as he thinks) has kept him down’
Leavis on Othello’s pride
‘a habit of self-approving self-dramatisation is an essential element in Othello’s make-up’
Gardner on Iago’s motives
‘malice is motiveless’
Germaine Greer on Iago’s racism and today
‘Iago is still alive and kicking and filling migrant’s letterboxes with excrement’
Ianouttue on Othello as a morality play
‘from the Medieval morality play in which typically the “good angel” and the “evil angel” are battling for the soul of the “everyman”.’
‘Consistent with the characteristics of a morality play is the fact that both Desdemona and Iago are comparatively one-dimensional characters. Desdemona embodies innocence, sincerity and selflessness’
Ianouttue on interracial marriage
the interracial element serves to emphasize the hard-won nature of the love between them, making it that much more tragic to see it undermined
Dickson on Othello’s stories
‘The Moor’s stories allow Desdemona to experience the exotic/erotic delight’
‘At the same time, romances, poems and plays often countered patriarchal authority in favor of romantic love’
Vaughan on female sexuality
‘early modern England’s preoccupation with cuckoldry demonstrates a basic male insecurity about women’s sexuality’
Quarshie on racial stereotypes
‘perhaps Othello is the one which should most definitely not be played by a black actor’
Dickson on challenging racial stereotypes
‘On the other, the Moor of Venice is the hero of the play, a decorated general in the service of the Venetian state. The villain of the piece is the white racist who plots Othello’s downfall’
‘There is also an alternative history of Othello, in which the role has been interpreted as an act of out-and-out emancipation’
Dickson on Othello and society
Perhaps this is the lesson to draw from Othello, Quarshie suggests: that the play’s history on stage uncovers as much about the societies in which it appears as the play itself.
Dickson on Othello’s tragic fall
‘The more successful you are in depicting the first Othello, this man who is wise, astute, mature, magnanimous, the harder it is to show a man who is persuaded that his wife has committed adultery, and who turns into an obsessive, compulsive, murderous maniac.’
Kiernan Ryan on Othello’s race
‘The colour of Othello’s skin is obviously a crucial factor in his downfall, because his visibly alien racial identity makes him and his bride far more vulnerable to the machinations of Iago’
Kiernan Ryan on Othello as a black man
‘his colour makes him feel like an alien, but where he’s entirely at home as a man’
Kiernan Ryan on Iago’s manipulations
‘‘The divine Desdemona’ (2.1.73) into the ‘subtle whore’ (4.2.21) he thinks every woman really is, and to turn the noble, eloquent Othello into a deranged wife-killer, who proves the racist’s worst fears fully justified’
Kiernan Ryan on Iago’s motivations
‘Iago is not that he’s an unfathomable psychopath, but that he’s pathologically normal and theatrically irresistible’
Key Quotes on Iago’s motivation
‘Mere prattle without practice’
‘I follow him to serve my turn upon him. We cannot all be masters, nor all masters cannot be truly followed’
‘I hate the Moor and it is thought abroad that ‘twixt my sheets he has done my service’’
Key Quotes on manipulation
‘I am not what I am’
‘Though I do hate him as I do hell’s plains, Yet…I must show out a flag and sign of love’
‘As tenderly be led by the nose as asses are’
‘I do love her too…but partly to diet my revenge’
‘I am your own forever’
‘Oh help, ho! Light! Surgeon!…Enter Iago with a light ’
Key Quotes on race
‘Even now, now, very now, an old black ram is tupping your white ewe’
‘you’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse, you’ll have your nephews neigh to you’
‘Foul charms, abused her delicate youth with drugs or minerals’
‘Against all rules of nature’
‘She had eyes and chose me’
Key Quotes on evilness
‘Thou art a villian. You are a senator.’
‘Out of her own goodness make the net that shall enmesh them all’
‘Abused by some villainous knave’
‘From this time forth I never will speak a word’
Key Quotes on Othello’s characterization/downfall
‘My parts, my title and my perfect soul shall manifest me rightly’
‘Rude I am in my speech’
‘I therefore beg it not to please the palate of my appetite’
‘The Moor already changes with my poison’
‘He foams at mouth…breaks out to savage madness’
‘A murder, which I thought a sacrifice’
