Othello eBook
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Critical Reviews
“Othello is the most domestic of Shakespeare's tragedies. Its focus is not on the fall of a king, the collapse of a nation, the agony of a prince or the contradiction between love and duty. Rather, it is about the end of a marriage and a husband's murder of his wife. It is intimately concerned with the details of sexual jealousy: how it is sparked, how the flames are fueled and how it brings down catastrophe on the protagonist's shoulder.
The poetry and formal control of Othello make it as organized as a symphony: scholars rightly talk of ‘the Othello music.' In particular, this quality is signaled by the soaring language that Othello, and Othello alone, is given to speak—in a marked contrast, for example, to Iago's style, which is witty, ironical, matter of fact and ruthless.”
-A Pocket Guide to Shakespeare's Plays. Kenneth McLeish and Stephen Unwin. 1998.
“Iago stands supreme among Shakespeare's evil characters because the greatest intensity and subtlety of imagination have gone into his making, and because he illustrates in the most perfect combination the two facts concerning evil, which seem to have impressed Shakespeare the most. The first of these is the fact that perfectly sane people exist in whom fellow-feeling of any kind is so weak that an almost absolute egoism becomes possible to them, and with it those hard vices—such as ingratitude and cruelty—which to Shakespeare were by far the worst. The second is that such evil is compatible, and even appears to ally itself easily, with exceptional powers of will and intellect.”
-A.C. Bradley. “Othello” in Iago. 1992.