What makes othello worthy of critical study

Knights's objection to Bradley, famously articulated in his mockingly-titled essay "How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth" , lies in what he sees as Bradley's refusal to acknowledge Shakespearean tragedy's status as poetry. Knights accuses Bradley of treating the plays as novels, an approach he claims leads to an erroneous emphasis on their psychological dimensions at the expense of their verbal constructions.

Leavis contributes to this attack, finding Bradley's reading of Othello excessively sentimental, and accusing him of an over-identification with Othello that blinds him to what Leavis reads as the general's "self-approving self-dramatization" According to Empson, Shakespeare is attentive to this semantic slippage and employs "honest," particularly as it is associated with Iago, as a means of acknowledging a gradual cultural shift toward individualism.

Bernard Spivak's reading of Othello also afforded Iago particular attention, though his Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil locates the play not within linguistic history but within the history of dramatic form. Noting that Othello shares a number of features with traditional morality plays, Spivak argues that Iago is best understood as a version of the stock character Vice, a personification of evil with a dangerously privileged relationship with the audience.

In the s, critics on both sides of the Atlantic sought to understand Othello not as remote from the social and political effects of its historically specific sites of production and reception but as shaped by them. Influenced by the same impulses that propelled the American civil rights movement, many of these critics explored the play's relationship to early modern representations of race rather than its formal properties.

The collective effect of these studies was to remind readers of the prominence of black characters on the early modern stage and literary page, to prompt new thinking about the impact of pernicious stereotypes equating blackness with ugliness, disloyalty, and evil, and to encourage further investigation of the historical realities and enduring legacies of slavery. Othello criticism became increasingly politically charged as scholars debated the play's relation to modern conceptions of race and racism.

For some the play came to be about "a black man whose humanity is eroded by the cunning and racism of whites" Cowhig 7 , while for others it was an antiracist polemic that "in its fine scrutiny of the mechanisms underlying Iago's use of racism, and in its rejection of human pigmentation as a means of identifying worth.

Bradleian character criticism had fallen out of favor, but the impulse to address the psychological complexities of Shakespeare's characters found fertile new ground in the insights of psychoanalytic theory. First published in the s and reprinted a decade later, a series of influential psychoanalytic readings of the plays found a readership fascinated to explore links among Shakespeare, Freud, and the psychological dimensions of human sexuality.

Martin Wangh's " Othello : The Tragedy of Iago," for instance, treats Iago as a case study in repressed homosexuality, arguing that the ensign's stifled erotic desire for Othello causes him to despise, and so to seek the destruction of, his rival for the general's affection, Desdemona. Building on Wangh's analysis of Iago as a paranoiac motivated by hatred for the wife of the man he cannot admit he desires, Gordon Ross Smith adduces a more general case for a psychoanalytic approach to Shakespearean drama on the grounds that it provides a "common sense" understanding of tragedy.

Instead, in a move reminiscent of the character criticism that dominated in the previous century, he suggests that it is best to understand "all the major figures" of the play as "possible people caught in a net of circumstance which their characters make them unable to escape" In an oft-quoted article titled "Othello's Handkerchief: 'The Recognizance and Pledge of Love,'" for instance, Lynda Boose argues that the strawberry-spotted handkerchief given to Desdemona by her husband gathers a heavy symbolic burden in the course of the play as it comes to stand for that much larger expanse of fabric, the couple's wedding sheets, and thus for both "the sanctified union promising life and the tragic union culminating in death" Similarly, Edward A.

Snow's "Sexual Anxiety and the Male Order of Things in Othello " offers a symptomatic reading of Othello in which the "truth" of its determination to expose a "pathological male animus toward sexuality" rooted in "the social institutions with which men keep women and the threat they pose at arm's length" is both revealed and concealed by its theatrical and verbal discourses.

Snow notes that the play's language and its "theatrical spectacle" are marked by disavowal, denial, and introversion, and he calls on readers to "look for what resists dramatic foregrounding and listen for what language betrays about its speaker" , a process which reveals a world of sexual repression and misogyny in which the superego, the "voice of the father" upon which patriarchal social order is founded, is exposed as the site of "evil and malice" Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning also finds in Othello the operations of a patriarchy based in sexual repression and the subordination of women.

According to Dash, Othello explores the tragic possibilities for married women trapped within a patriarchal system that condones their subjection and even their abuse. Desdemona experiences "a slow loss of confidence in the strength of the self, always with the aim of adjusting to marriage" , and thus her death must be laid at the door of a sexist system that celebrates compliance and self-abnegation in wives rather than mutual respect in marriage.

A few years later, Carol Thomas Neely's Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays , with its nuanced understanding of history and its attentiveness to the operations of power within patriarchy, helped feminist criticism develop a more robust account of the role of marriage in the social and dramatic construction of early modern women. Her reading of Othello locates the characters within an early modern moment that celebrates a newly emerging ideal of companionate marriage even as it continues to advocate for women's subservience to their husbands.

Desdemona and Emilia become, on Neely's reading, the victims not of marriage but of male characters who view them through the opposing but mutually reinforcing cultural lenses of romantic idealization and anxious misogyny.

The legacy of feminist scholarship committed to exploring both the historical and political dimensions of Othello continued throughout the s in the work of critics such as Lisa Jardine, who reads the accusations of adultery levied against Desdemona within the context of defamation cases involving real early modern women, and in the s by critics such as Sarah Munson Deats, who reads the play within the context of early modern debates between the religious doctrines of obedience and conscience.

In 's "'And wash the Ethiop white': Femininity and the Monstrous in Othello ," for instance, Karen Newman argued that Desdemona's love for Othello represents a direct threat to Venice because it embodies the twin dangers of freely expressed female desire and miscegenation.

This take on the play was then developed by Ania Loomba who argued that "the 'central conflict' of the play. But these two are not simply aligned against white patriarchy, since their own relationship cannot be abstracted from sexual or racial tension" "Sexuality" The work of male critics, too, integrated analysis of the play's psycho-sexual elements with historically aware discussions of its treatment of race and of gender.

For example, picking up on Snow's earlier analysis of Iago's repressed sexuality and employing a similar hermeneutic of suspicion, Michael Neill's "'Unproper Beds'" finds in the play's curtained bed a potent symbol for an "unutterable" anxiety about interracial love and sex Bruce Smith's pioneering work on homosexuality in early modernity also built on Snow's insights as it investigated the fraught relationship between masculine friendship and marriage in Shakespeare Homosexual Desire Smith's reading of Othello suggests that aspects of the relationship between Iago and Othello that might be characterized in modern terms as gay, are presented in the play as assertions of masculinity, while love of women is consistently associated with the threat of effeminacy.

Most notable was Parker's own "Fantasies of 'Race' and 'Gender'" which interrogates notions of monstrosity, barbarousness, and civility by locating in the play a series of "split chiastic exchanges and divisions" that see Desdemona and Othello trading cultural identities as they assume varied roles within the complexly racialized and gendered narratives of literary teratology and colonialism.

In the same year, Ruth Vanita's work on Othello addressed directly the vexed issue of its relationship to both sexism and racism, arguing that "the play forcefully combats racism which posits blacks and whites as essentially different precisely by its presentation of Othello as not at all different from any white husband" Vanita's article indicts not only the play's male bystanders but also its readers and audiences for silent collusion in Desdemona's murder, claiming that she "is killed not only by Othello and Iago but by all those who see her humiliated and beaten in public, and fail to intervene" Virginia Mason Vaughan's Othello: A Contextual History embodied the scholarly commitment to recognizing literature and history as mutually constitutive modes of discourse, both intimately connected to expressions of, and struggles for, power.

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