extra critics

Question 1

Granville barker

Answer 1

’ a tragedy without meaning’

Question 2

“motiveless malignity”

Answer 2

Coleridge

Question 3

O’toole

Answer 3

“there is no Othello without iago”

Question 4

Hugh Quarshie, a black actor

Answer 4

he ? S’s intentions regarding race:
is Othello’s quick transition into insanity Shakespeare succumbing to Elizabethan conventions that Moors were a threat to society due to their tendency to violence?
‘racist by omission, not commission’

Question 5

Smith

Answer 5

Iago is a repressed homosexual

Question 6

loomba

Answer 6

Othello is an “agent of mysoginy” and a “victim of racial beliefs”

Question 7

Raatzch

Answer 7

phonetic affinity between “EGO” and “IAGO”

Question 8

TS Elliot

Answer 8

Argues Othello does not obtain redemption although Othello believes he is honourable as he acted accordingly to the circumstances of female infidelity

Question 9

Lisa Gardine

Answer 9

‘Renaissance women were often seen as suffering martyrs’

Question 10

Rymer (1600s)

Answer 10

‘a woman [Desdemona] without sense because she married a blackamoor’
‘Tragedy of the Handkerchief’

Question 11

John Wain (1971)

Answer 11

“a tragedy of misunderstanding”
“O does not see D as a real girl, but as something magical that has happened to him”
~ none of the characters understand each other and that is why everything goes wrong

Question 12

JW (1971) ~ Venice

Answer 12

• Their “acceptance is partial” of Othello
• “Desdemona’s love… gives him an intimate, living link with Venice and promises to break his outsiderdom, [and thus] central to his whole being”

Question 13

JW (1971) ~ race

Answer 13

“it is the outward symbol of his isolation”

Question 14

Robert B. Heilman

Answer 14

‘the least heroic of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes’

Question 15

John E. Seaman

Answer 15

It is a Christian tragedy ~ Othello’s fall is a version of Adam’s, while Desdemona’s is an inversion of Eve’s

Question 16

Lilian Winstanley, ‘‘Othello’ as the Tragedy of Italy’ (1924)

Answer 16

It is a diagram of Spanish political history, with Othello as Philip II and Iago as his enemy, Antonio Perez.

Question 17

G. I. Duthie (1951)

Answer 17

’ caused by an external force of evil deliberately bringing itself to bear on a noble figure which has within it a seed of evil’

Question 18

J.Wain - love

Answer 18

‘the assassination of love by non-love

Question 19

John W. Draper

Answer 19

Elizabethan notions of honour made the cuckold a universally despised figure

Question 20

Kenneth Muir - Iago’s motivations

Answer 20

‘The secret of Iago is not a motiveless malignity, nor evil for evil’s sake, nor a professional envy but a pathological jealousy of his wife”

Question 21

PERFORMANCE: Laurence Olivier played Iago , 1938

Answer 21

played Iago as a repressed homosexual whose motive was unrecognised passion for Othello

Question 22

Heraud (1865) ~ Desdemona

Answer 22

“She suffers from illusion and loves to be deluded’

Question 23

W. H. Auden

Answer 23

In the ‘willow scene’, it ‘is as if she had suddenly realised that she ought to have married was someone of her own class and colour like Ludovico’

Question 24

Sean McEvoy

Answer 24

‘The audience becomes complicit in Iago’s intention and, like it or not, is soon involved in his vengeful plotting’

Question 25

Fintan O’Toole

Answer 25

racism isn’t just the context in which Othello lives. It hasentered his mind and his soul. It is an integral part of him

Question 26

A.C. Bradley (1905)

Answer 26

‘Desdemona is helplessly passive'

Question 27

Samuel Johnson praised ‘the

Answer 27

soft simplicity of Desdemona

Question 28

Karen Newman argued that

Answer 28

the play is a critique of male anxieties about the dangers of freely expressed female desir

Question 29

Roxanne Schwab (2005) argues that

Answer 29

Iago’s ‘most underrated and constant victim is his wife, Emilia

Question 30

Giles Block (form of speaking... babeh)

Answer 30

Argues that blank iambic verse is the sound of sincerity "She loved me for the dangers I had passed, And I loved her that she did pity them" Mirrors our heartbeat

Question 31

Giles Block (form of speaking... dada)

Answer 31

Prose is the opposite of the sound of sincerity It is a smoke screen, hiding one though behind another Most of the 600 or so lines pf prose in play are instigated by I "Even now, very now, an old black ram is tupping your white ewe"

Question 32

Giles Block (dada and babeh)

Answer 32

I: "My lord, you know I love you" O: "I think thou dost" Shared line, O completed line I started This usually implies that the second speaker comes in on cue Though in this monosyllabic line there are eleven words, not ten. What happens here is that O hesitates before he speaks; he experiences a brief moment of uncertainty.

Question 33

James R. Siemon

Answer 33

Tendency to tone down the violence of Desdemona's physical struggle with Othello - contrast to Theatre Royal Haymarket production , Tom Morris , where D hits him back