Othello Criticism

Critic: Carol Thomas Neely

They see Othello and Iago as closely identified with each other; they are "two
parts of a single motive--related not as the halves of a sphere, but each implicit
in the other."'
Structure, too, imitates that of the pastoral comedies in its movement from an
urban center to an isolated retreat, with resultant intensity, freedom, breakdown,
and interaction among disparate characters. Though Othello refers to Cyprus as
a "town of war," once the threats of Turks and the storm have lifted, it is instead
Venus's isle, a place for celebration--relaxation, drinking, eating (dinner
arrangements are a frequent topic of conversation here as in Arden), flirting,
sleeping, lovemaking. In the comedies, the potential corruption of these activities
is suggested in witty banter, songs, comic simile and metaphor; in Othello, this
corruption becomes literal.
Critic: Pierre Machery
"The book revolves around this myth [i.e., that the book is uncannily alive]; but
in the process of its formation the book takes a stand regarding this myth,
exposing it. This does not mean that the book is able to become its own
criticism: it gives an implicit critique of its ideological content, if only because it
resists being incorporated into the flow of ideology in order to give a determinate
representation of it."
Critic: Paul Yachnin
"In Othello, Shakespeare maneuvers to make wonder out of the material he has
to work with, which, among other things such as language and costume, includes
the fabric of the handkerchief and the body of the boy actor who plays
Desdemona. These two objects are constructed so as to enhance the cultural
status of the play by raising it above the commercialism and materiality of actual
play production. But if we can deploy a strategic resistance to the play's
sublimity (a resistance that came more easily to the original audiences), then the
ordinariness of these "wonders" and the particular ways in which they are
presented will allow us critical insight into the mystifications of Shakespeare and
Shakespeare criticism."
"A text like Othello will be to the engrossed reader as Desdemona is to her
husband--an object whose capacity to arouse wonder in the beholder is seen to
underwrite the beholder's selfhood."
"For most of the characters, the handkerchief is reproducible, exchangeable, and
has a certain cash value. Furthermore, although it circulates widely, everyone
recognizes it as private property. Because it is private property, Emilia, Cassio,
and Bianca all speak about making copies of it. In this regard, is it even clear that
Emilia plans to keep it after having found it? For Desdemona, the handkerchief
balances between the everyday and the sacred, becoming a hugely valued love
token that is nonetheless commensurable with monetary value. "Where should I

lose the handkerchief?" she asks, "Believe me, I had rather have lost my purse /
Full of crusadoes" (3.4.23,25-26)."
Critic: Stephen Gosson
Behavious in the theatre: "In our assemblies at plays in London, you shall see
such heaving and shoving, such itching and shouldering to sit by women. Such
care for their garments that they should not be trod on, such eyes to their laps
that no chips light in them, such pillows to their backs that they take no hurt ...
such tickling, such toying, such smiling, such winking, and such manning them
home when the sports are ended that it is a right comedy to mark their
behavior."
Critic: Kenneth Burke
Othello and Desdemona: Burke explains Othello's stake in Desdemona as
"ownership in the profoundest sense of ownership, the property of human
affections, as fetishistically localized in the object of possession, while the
possessor is himself possessed by his very engrossment."
Critic: Arthur M. Eastman:
Nothing that is in Iago is absent from Othello, though there is much in Othello of
which Iago never dreamed. It would be misleading to say that Iago is an
extension of Othello, for Iago is complete in himself. But it may be illuminating to
point out that the response of one to the other is immediate, or if not immediate,
sure.
Iago, we might say, is able to find his way to Othello's heart by looking within his
own.
Both Othello and Iago are ironists. Within certain important limitations, they tend
to think and feel in the same ways. The elements that Iago finds within Othello,
by looking within or projecting himself, are these: first, a sense of authority from
the ironist's superior power or knowledge in a conflict situation; second, an
almost overpowering frustration when one is denied this superior knowledge-either by conscious ignorance of the salient elements in the situation or by
finding that one is the victim of another's irony; third, a general tendency, which
under the stimulus of frustration may mount to compulsion, to confront or
manipulate situations so that one achieves ironic mastery--by reserving
knowledge, by finding knowledge hidden from others, by posing as ignorant
where one has knowledge or as weak where one is strong; and fourth, a
tendency to project one's own nature, to assume that others also confront life
ironically.
For Iago irony is compensatory. It bridges the gap between his self-esteem and
the place accorded him by the world. Irony becomes for him both a means and
an end, a means of getting what he wants, whether Roderigo's money or the
downfall of his enemies, but an end as the very act of irony indulges his selfimportance.
Critic: James R. Aubrey

Iago awakens Brabantio with the cry that "an old black ram / Is tupping your
white ewe" (1.1.89-90)--an image of Othello and Desdemona intended to horrify
her father. Iago next represents their sexual union as "your daughter cover'd with
a Barbary horse" (1.1.112). Desdemona's imagined mating with an African
animal is the kind of act which Par describes among the causes of monsters, a
"copulation with beasts" that leads to "the confusion of seed of diverse kinds"
(25.982). Reminding her father that Othello and Desdemona may be generating
monsters.
Social anthropologists would say that this idea, that blacks and monsters are
related, if not equated, on some level of the popular imagination, constituted
part of early modern London's "habitus," what Pierre Bourdieu defines as "a
system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences,
functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and
actions," or more simply, "a socially constituted system of cognitive and
motivating structures."7 If there was a social disposition in 1604-5 to regard
blacks and monsters as similar manifestations of the Other, as Strange News
implies that there was, such a disposition would have affected both the
generation and the reception of Othello at that historical moment. Indeed, as
parts of the same habitus, each text simultaneously reflected and reinforced that
very mental linkage.

Critic: Richard Mallette

Where the play intersects with religious discourses, especially at those pressure
points identified by poststructural analysis, we find words at their most potent,
piercing and bruising hearts.
We are accustomed to thinking of Shakespearean plays as secularizing religious
themes and diction, often ironically. More unexpected is how the play
foregrounds those concerns in mapping the characters moral and emotional
lives, and how the plays economies racial, sexual, epistemological are
buttressed by those discourses.
Iagos polemics is modelled on and distorts methods prescribed by sixteenthcentury sermon theory. His warping of contemporary preaching makes him even
more diabolical than hitherto recognised. He seizes on discourses that the
Shakespearean audience was accustomed to as salvific, and he deforms them
toward an evil end.
Iago refashions his listeners and inscribes them anew in a different narrative,
modelled on the narratives of salvation and damnation, of faith and doubt that
preoccupy early modern English culture. He entangles that narrative with other
heightened discourses, such as marriage, adultery, and race. (Pechter 1999, 25)
But Iago is the chief representative of the plays oral/aural economy, and his
goal will be to draw others into that realm. He exploits the culturally privileged
discourse of preaching, figured through the metonym of the ear, and implicates
that discourse with the sexual economies of the play.
The early modern affiliation between Reformed pastor and sinner clearly
foretells the modern relationship of analyst and patient, an association carefully

reproduced in Iagos treatment of Othello. But the therapy Iago practices will
bring his listener neither comfort nor the assurance of salvation, but instead the
assurance of torment, indeed torment itself.
Critic: Linda Woodbridge
'misogynists libel womankind; slanderers blacken one woman's reputation.'
Critic: Valerie Wayne
The very presence of misogynist discourse in the Renaissance suggests the
instability of that view of women. It was not that no one any longer associated
women with evil, but that the ideology was at issue and not an unquestioned
presupposition or a given of the culture
Critic: Madeleine Doran
In Shakespeare slander is one of the worst of evils; it is a vice that I do not recall
ever being excused. When Iago declares at the end of the play that 'From this
time forth I never will speak word' (V, ii, 301), the very means by which he avoids
self-incrimination becomes an assurance that he will not repeat his offence.
Critic: Valerie Wayne
Shakespeare's Venice looks like some accounts of his plays, since it is not a place
that can tolerate difference: the only characters left alive on stage are white
men. But all of the white men left on stage are not the same, and it is important
that Iago's misogynist discourse is specific to his character and then spreads,
through a kind of oral/aural abuse, to Othello.
Critic: Norman Sanders
The biblical chapter advises against whoredom and compares the wife of a man's
youth to 'thine owne well' or a 'fountaine blessed'. A woman's womb sustains her
husband with life-giving water, and to be discarded from it is to die of thirst. Yet
the waters offered there are not for everyone: 'But let them be thine, even thine
onely, and not the strangers with thee.' 48 It is this verse that prompts Othello's
alternative image of the womb as a site for engendering foul creatures when it is
not exclusive property. The womb is either a place of privileged ownership or a
common pond breeding bestiality.

Critic: Valerie Wayne

Because the handkerchief serves as proof of married chastity, it cannot be
copied by Emilia and Bianca. It is an emblem of Desdemona's body that does not
circulate because her body is not supposed to circulate: the regulated passage of
the handkerchief is along family lines, not elsewhere. This restriction usually
applied as well to the woman's text, for her work was private, performed for her

family and produced primarily for their consumption. The value of married
chastity, which is figured in the handkerchief, asserts a worth and purpose for
women that contradict the assertions of misogyny by requiring the sexual control
of women in marriage. Chastity was a charm. The Egyptian charmer knew that 'if
she lost it / Or made a gift of it', Othello's father and any husband would lapse
into misogyny--he 'should hold her loathed, and his spirits should hunt / After
new fancies' (III, iv, 56-9). When Desdemona loses the handkerchief, she loses
the means of presenting herself as amiable, the proof that she is doing her
private, domestic, bed-work. She loses her own text, as the Renaissance
constructed it for her.

Critic: Thorell Porter Tsomondo

For my purposes, then, a helpful starting point is Robert Scholes's contrastive
definition of the two genres: "drama is presence in time and space; narrative is
past, always past" (206; emphasis mine). Because narrating can take place only
in the "once upon a time" of the story that it relates, in the dramatic here and
now of the play, the staged present of the tale that Othello tells about himself is
not the events he recounts or the "self" he re-creates but the act of narration.
This act or role directs attention to past events and to a protagonist (the hero of
his narrative) whose experiences are framed in an earlier time than stage time,
the time of the narrating, and in unfamiliar, distant locations.
Through the narrative/dramatic strategies that Shakespeare employs, Othello
reveals, among divided impulses and motives, some instructive exclusions,
emphases, and suppressions. Othello's initial introduction to the audience takes
place in his absence and in the form of gossip between Iago and Roderigo. This
gossip may be likened to the third person narrative point of view which
voyeuristically creates the character it describes. Shakespeare's use of this
means of introducing Othello is felicitous. The familiarity that is apparent in Iago
and Roderigo's conversation, in the coarse language they use and in their
interrelationship, is soon seconded by the concordant sentiments that their
"concern" about Desdemona's elopement awakens in the socially and politically
privileged senator and parent, Brabantio, who endorses Roderigo: "O would you
had had her" (1.1.175). This breakdown of reserve between social classes and
individuals signifies the existence of common cause with the Elizabethan
audience; it articulates the society's deepest fears: sexual deviation and
miscegenation.

Critic: Kenneth Tyan

'Not easily jealous' it's the most appalling bit of self-deception. He's the most
easily jealous man that anybody's ever written about. The minute he suspects, or
thinks he has the smallest grounds for suspecting, Desdemona, he wishes to
think her guilty, he wishes to"