Summary OTHELLO Critics A Level English Literature
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Course
Unit 1 - Drama
Institution
PEARSON (PEARSON)
2 PAGE DOCUMENT
A summary of every important critic quote for an A Level English exam, based (and separated by) the main themes and characters in the play, and what different critics have had to say regarding different themes and characters. It is succinct and designed to be a practical revision r...
Othello Critics (AO5)
A.C Bradley “Othello’s nature is all of one piece. His trust where he trusts is
absolute. Hesitation is almost impossible to him. He is extremely
self-reliant and decides and acts instantaneously […] If such a
passion as jealousy seizes him, it will swell into a well-nigh
incontrollable flood”.
“As tragic hero, merely a victim, he is blameless, honourable and
romantic and thus his fall is entirely the fault of Iago, who
colonises his mind.”
F.R Leavis “He really is, beyond any question, the nobly massive man of
action, the captain of men he sees himself as being… In short a
habit of self-approving self-dramatisation is an essential element
in Othello’s make-up”
“[Iago] represents something that is in Othello”
“Iago’s prompt success is not so much Iago’s diabolic intellect as
Othello’s readiness to respond”
Sean McEvoy “Othello’s tragedy is that he lives according to a set of stories
through which he interprets the world- an ideology- but it is a
world that has been superseded. He cannot see that this is so, and
the contradictions within his ideology destroy him. He is living the
life of a chivalric warrior in a world run by money and self-
interest.”
John Bayley “Othello retains to the end his agonised incomprehension”
Iago Critics (AO5)
E.A.J Honigmann “Iago excels in short –term tactics, not in long-term strategy”
“Despite his cleverness, he has neither felt nor understood the
spiritual impulses that bind ordinary human beings together:
loyalty, friendship, respect, compassion- in a word, love”
“Dramatic perspective can even make us [Iago’s] accomplices: he
confides in us, so we watch his plot unfolding from his point of
view”
Iago “enjoys a godlike sense of power”
Samuel Johnson “The character of Iago is so conducted that he is from first scene
to the last hated and despised”
G.Wilson Knight “Cynicism is the key to his mind and actions”
A.C Bradley Explores Iago’s humanity, hunts down his motives and admires his
“intellect and will”
Thomas Rhymer Iago is “too villainous to be believed”
F.R Leavis Iago is “a mechanism necessary for precipitating the tragedy”
Coleridge Iago has “the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity”
Cassio critics (AO5)
Veronika Walker “Cassio in the end seems to represent the better man. The higher
sophisticate in Othello’s mind than his own self”
Critics on Race (AO5)
Ania Loomba “Othello is both a fantasy of interracial love and social tolerance,
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