Tragedy Flashcards
(16 cards)
F.R. Leavis
It is not so much Iago’s diabolic intellect as Othello’s readiness to respond
T.S. Eliot
“Othello is a terrible exposure of human weakness”
Kastan
“Tragedy, for Shakespeare, is the genre of uncompensated suffering”
Michael Neil
“Tragedy becomes the place where the impossibility of transcending the contradictions of human existence is dramatised”
A.C. Bradley
“The pang of Othello is the most piercing of all the pangs of Shakespeare’s heroes”
Fintan O’Toole
“Othello is both a play about race and a tragedy of man who lives at the intersection of racial and cultural conflict”
W.H. Auden
“Iago is a portrait of a practical joker of an appalling kind”
Jonathan Dollimore
“Desdemona’s desire for Othello, and his for her, are both inflected with racial idealisations… as a way of escaping the limitations of their own life”
Jennifer Wallace
“The standards by which we can judge the nature of his tragic sense were invented, or at least developed, by the playwright himself”
Emma Smith
“Act 1 of Othello is a miniature comedy of lovers”
“It is a tragedy cruelly created out of comedy’s greatest human insight” (that is that the individual is incomplete without their partner)
Coleridge
“the motive-hunting of motiveless malignity”
A.C. Bradley
“Iago is the main source of tragic situation in Othello”
Honigmann
Iago is the play’s chief humorist.. He exploits the comic mask for his own mischievous ends
Mc Evoy
“Othello is a tragedy of epistemology - a study of how we know what we know” “Iago speaks and others change”
Kievnan Ryan
“What drives Othello to destroy Desdemona is not jealousy, but the illusion that she is the incarnation of evil”
Rex Gibson
“The audience is always aware of Iago’s duplicity, while other characters are not”
