Critics:

General

- By poet and literary critic W

​ illiam Empson​'s count, there are ​fifty-two​ uses of "honest" and "honesty"
throughout the play.

- A. C. Bradley​saw Shakespearean tragedy characterized by the "tragic flaw," the internal imperfection in the
hero that brings him down.

- Shakespeare scholar ​Harold Bloom​thinks that Desdemona's virginity is the big driving question of the
play.

- Ato Quayson​: “a drama of race relations, anxiety, miscommunication and evil”

- David Scott Kastan​: “Characters may commit themselves to a confident sense of the tragic world they
inhabit; but the play inevitably render that preliminary understanding inadequate, and the characters
struggle unsuccessfully to reconstruct a coherent worldview from the ruins of the old.”

- Fintan O’Toole​:

- “because [the tragedy] is so intensely personal, the tragedy of a victim rather than an active
controller of other people’s lives, there is no need to restore the social and political order in the end.
It has not been destroyed.”

- “​Othello i​ s the story of the way in which external things - politics, culture, prejudices - become
internal, become part of the most intimate details of a man’s thoughts and feelings.”

- Ania Loomba​: “​Othello ​is both a fantasy of interracial love and social tolerance, and a nightmare of racial
hatred and male violence.”

- P. Seghal​: “jealousy is exhausting, it’s a hungry emotion and it must be satisfied”, it “trains us to look with
intensity not accuracy”

- Nicole Smith​: “This is not a text about race (or even racism) but this is the tale of a man that fell victim to
and committed terrible acts”

- Harold Bloom​: “it is Othello’s tragedy, even if it is Iago’s play”

- Russ McDonald​: considers the political implications of the tragedy - “for contemporary audiences, tragedy
was inevitably political, a representation of the actions of monarchs and a study..of the problem of good
government”

- Kiernan Ryan​: the “tragic protagonists are overpowered by the prevailing social and ideological
tides...rather than by some metaphysically predestined misfortune or by some flaw”

- Germaine Greer​: audiences go home with an “understanding of something of the nature of evil”
Themes

Love
- Sean McEvoy​: “Love and violence are crucially caught up”

- Ato Quayson​: Othello “is intimate with Iago - he is not necessarily intimate with his wife”

- Syed Anwarul Huq​: “Instead of merely representing love, the handkerchief becomes the definitive test of
love.”

- Helen Gardner​: Othello and Desdemona’s love is a “great venture of faith”

Communication

- Ato Quayson​: “the world [Othello and Desdemona] communicate over is so narrow it is easy for Iago to
manipulate”

- Syed Anwarul Huq​: “Throughout O ​ thello​, the handkerchief is “handled” by almost every character, which
reflects a significant problem existing within the marriage. A number of characters are involved in the
couple’s relationship, thereby interrupting effective communication between the couple to a fatal extent.”

Race
- Margaret Reynolds​: there is a “discrepancy between what is being said about [Othello] and what he is
doing”

- Ato Quayson​: Shakespeare “accentuates the stereotype to confound it”

- Jude Kelly​: race is the “ingredient” which is the “paranoia and ability to exploit”

- Ania Loomba​:
- “the real tragedy of the play is that these hierarchies [of race and class] are not external to the pair”

- “​Othello y​ okes together and reshapes available images of ‘blackamoors’ and Moors, giving us a black
Moor who has both a slave past and a noble lineage, a black skin and thick lips as well as great
military skill and rhetorical abilities, a capacity for tenderness as well as a propensity to violence”

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge​: “It would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl
falling in love with a veritable Negro.”

- Fintan O’Toole​:
- “racism isn’t just the context in which Othello lives. It has entered his mind and his soul. It is an
integral part of him, a piece of the outside world which he carries around in his most intimate,
private self.”

- “Marrying Desdemona may have proved Othello worthy of white love, respect and admiration,
but it has not made him white.”
 - “Racial antagonisms occur many times in Shakespeare...Shakespeare’s England was not a
multi-racial society”

Gender

- Margaret Reynolds​: three women and “all of them [...] get used by the men”

- Jude Kelly​: “the military training of the men, and the women being this emotional intelligence, coming
together on an island where nothing could happen except the exploration of each other is the volatility”

- ‘The Ladies’ Mercury’ (17th century periodical)​: “elasticity and obedience are pre-requisites of the ideal
woman”

- Harold Bloom​: “​Othello ​is Shakespeare’s most wounding representation of male vanity and fear of female
sexuality”

- Valerie Traub​: “to be a woman in Shakespearian drama means to embody a sexuality that often finds its
ultimate expression in death”

Setting (e.g Venice)

- Ania Loomba​:
- “Whereas female ‘openness’ was dangerous and immoral”

- “Venetian civility has been built by letting in the very foreigners who now threaten to undermine it
at a different level”

- Fintan O’Toole​:
- “Venice is on the one hand a shorthand for vigorous capitalism and its ability to break through
boundaries and mix up things which had previously been well-defined” but it is also a “byword for
exotic vice and unbridled passions”

- “it is interesting that no Venetian, even Othello’s deadliest enemies, however racist they may be,
ever suggests that a black outsider should not be allowed to lead the Venetian forces.”

- “The undisguised sexuality which runs through the play is made possible by its exotic setting.”

- “Iago makes darkness his element” (e.g scenes in the dark)

Characters

Othello

- Margaret Reynolds​: he is a “poet” who “believes he is in control of his own story”

- Sean McEvoy​:
- “The way that Othello talks and comports himself is more like the hero of a medieval romance”,
“He is living the life of a chivalric warrior in a world run by money and self-interest”
 - Othello is “living the life of a chivalric warrior in a world run by money and self-interest”

- F. R. Leavis​:
- “the tragedy doesn’t involve the idea of the hero’s learning through suffering” i.e. he never learns
from his mistakes

- (final scene) “Contemplating the spectacle of himself, Othello is overcome with the pathos of it.”,
“he speaks his last words as the stern fighting man who has done the state some service”, “Othello,
in his magnanimous way, is egotistic”, “a habit of self-approving, self-dramatisation is an essential
element in Othello’s make-up”

- : Othello doesn’t show “any real interest in Desdemona as a person”

- A.C. Bradley​:
- “the consciousness of his high position never leaves him”, “he is as anxious as Hamlet not to be
misjudged by the great world”

- “Hesitation is almost impossible to him”

- His “nature is all of one piece”

- Ania Loomba​: “Iago’s machinations are effective because Othello is predisposed to believing his
pronouncements about the inherent duplicity of women”

- C. Phillips​: Othello feels “constantly threatened and profoundly insecure”

- Fintan O’Toole​:
- “Othello cannot be considered in isolation from Iago. There is no Othello without Iago: it is Iago
who draws out his inner fears and longings, who makes him the character we see and hear.”

- “His story involves battles and a general threat to the stability of the state, but they are only to be
forgotten, to become irrelevant in the context of the emotional battle that he has to fight with
himself.”

- “He projects that insecurity [about race] on to Desdemona - if he is unworthy of her love, then she
must be perverse for loving him, and if she is perverse, then she must be unfaithful.”

- Nicole Smith​: “Othello is a man like any other in the text, the only difference is his race”

- Harold Bloom​:​ “​Othello is a great soul hopelessly outclassed in intellect and drive by Iago”

- Russ McDonald​: “tragic figures can be both monstrous and admirable”

- Helen Gardner​:
- Othello has a “heroic capacity for passion”
- “The thing which most sets him apart is his solitariness. He is a stranger, a man of alien race...a
‘self-made man’”
 - Samuel Johnson​: Othello is “inflexible in his resolution, and obdurate in his revenge”

Iago
- Jude Kelly​: he’s “not villainous”, rather he’s “driven to wicked acts”, there is a “huge energy in his bad
behaviour”

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge​: “motiveless malignity”

- Sean McEvoy​: he’s a “Machiavel”

- Ato Quayson​: “We have motives, but added together they do not make an adequate cause for his actions”,
“he is like a god”

- E.A.J. Honigmann​: not “ a straightforward villain”

- Dr Samuel Johnson​: “he is from the first scene to the last hated and despised”

- Charles Lamb​: with any villain, including Iago, “we think not so much of the crimes they commit, as of the
[...] intellectual activity which prompts them to overleap those moral fences”

- W.H. Auden​: he is a “practical joker of the most appalling kind”

- Honigmann​:
- “since his victims lack humour, Iago appeals to us as more amusing”

- “despite his cleverness, he has neither felt nor understood the spiritual impulses that bind ordinary
human beings together”

- M. Scott​: “evidence for Iago’s hatred for love is everywhere”

- F.R. Leavis​: Iago only succeeds because of “Othello’s readiness to respond”

- Fintan O’Toole​:
- “Iago is as much a tragic figure as any of Shakespeare’s protagonists, as much caught between one
world and another, one way of thinking and another.”; so “He is caught in an impossible
contradiction, using injustice to restore justice, lies to restore the truth, a convoluted disorder to
create a simple order.”

- “Iago’s brilliance lies not in what he puts into Othello’s mind, but what he draws out of it.”

- Harold Bloom​:
- Iago is originally “[Othello’s] most ardent devotee”
- Iago is a “moral pyromaniac setting fire to all of reality”
- “We are more like Iago than we resemble Othello”
- “Iago constantly re-creates his own personality and character”

- Stanley Wells​: Iago’s silence is Shakespearee’s “acknowledgement of the mysterious and inescapable power
of human evil”
Desdemona

- Margaret Reynolds​: “Venice is the world she has come from” i.e. rigid about social boundaries, “when
things happen that are no longer within this framework, she is [...] completely lost” so she reverts to what
she knows

- Ato Quayson​: “Desdemona is an idealised idea of the female”

- A. C. Bradley​: “helplessly passive”

- Karen Newman​: “her desire is punished because it threatens a white male hegemony”

- C. Phillips​: “she is a prize, a spoil of war”

- Honigmann​: she has an “almost childlike” relationship with Emilia

- Jan Kott​:
- Othello “personifies for her all the romance she has discovered to exist in life”

- “He kills Desdemona to be able to forgive her”

- Harold Bloom​: Desdemona is a “miracle of sincerity”

Bianca

- Evelyn Gajoswki​: “Her presence expands the theme of men’s treatment of women, particularly that which
is dramatised in the central relationship of a husband who believes his wife to be a whore”

- Joy Wittenburg​: “By retaining emotional and economic autonomy, she shatters the pleasant illusion that
sexual relations with her will conform to the norm of female subordination and faithfulness to the man who
has “had” her”

Roderigo

- Frank Kermode​: “Iago’s deception of Roderigo depends on the young man’s willingness to believe that
Desdemona is sexually corruptible”

- Lee Jamieson​: “Roderigo is Iago’s dupe, his fool”

Emilia

- M. Simpson​: “she dies in service of the truth”

- Jude Kelly​: “Emilia is the moral heart of the play”

- Harold Bloom​: “Emilia’s heroic victory over Iago constitutes the play’s more surprising dramatic
moment...where he ought to have been more discerning - within his marriage - Iago is blank and blind”