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Othellois perhaps Shakespeare's most troublesome tragedy. While it has retained its popularity on the stage, many critics have struggled to come to terms with it. The Romantics warmed to the figure of Othello himself and wrung their hands over the plight of Desdemona; the Modernists looked down on the play as an achievement of Shakespeare's stagecraft rather than of his imagination. Excerpting and discussing the critical history of the play from the earliest pronouncements to present-day criticism, this guide does justice to the variety of opinion and points out significant themes and recurring critical concerns, without glossing over the ugly racism of many critical accounts and the inadequacy of many attempts to face up to the issues raised by the play.

Nicholas Potter teaches at the Swansea Institute of Higher Education

Introduction

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This briefly discusses the nature of criticism and the difficulties that confront an engagement with the criticism of the past

Restoring Order: `The Tragedy of the Handkerchief'

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This chapter is dominated by the essay written by Thomas Rymer and published in 1693 as the main part of A Short View of Tragedy

The first part of the chapter considers the kind of criticism prevalent in the period following the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and relates this criticism to the experience of revolutionary upheaval during the seventeeth century

Rymer's significance as a critic for his time and for later periods is discussed, and his essay is considered in detail

The Age of Johnson: The Triumph of Reason

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The development from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries is seen as a process of liberalisation; Neo-classicist rigour is softened by a more thoughtful and generous interpretation of `the Rules'

At the same time the theatre and criticism begin to part company

Shakespeare is all but idolised as a `National Poet' and David Garrick becomes little short of a high priest of the Cult

Dr. Johnson claims that Shakespeare cannot be justly represented on the stage as it has become

Another important theme is the almost unconscious development of a habit of discussing the play as one would discuss real life

The morals drawn from the play often diminish the impact Rymer had identified: `If this be our end, what boots it to be vertuous?'

The Nineteenth Century: Romantics to Victorians

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Coleridge's and Hazlitt's masterly accounts of the play dominate the early part of this chapter

The previous century's attempt to domesticate the moral of the play is replaced by an enthusiasm for the emotional tempest the work depicts and excites

Edward Dowden and A. C. Bradley follow

Dowden is an authoritative mid-Victorian with a severe moral (but not moralistic) outlook; Bradley is the critic who brings to perfection the psychological approach begun in the eighteenth century that is so much more suitable to the discussion of the century's great art form in English, the Novel

The Moderns: The Ghost of Rymer

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The early twentieth century saw the emergence of a distinct set of attitudes and approaches often collectively thought of as Modernism

This chapter excerpts from four leading critics who are `modern' in different and complementary ways

The `ghost of Rymer' stalks these accounts in that they are notably less impressed by the play than their predecessors usually had been, with the exception of Rymer himself

The invocation of his name is meant as a reminder that a new sternness entered criticism with the emergence of the `modern'

The Mid-Century: Revaluation

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The chapter begins with Helen Gardner's review in the Shakespeare Survey for 1968 of the first half-century of criticism of the play

Taking this essay as a reference point, the chapter excerpts and examines the work of Gardner herself, John Bayley and Jan Kott

The chapter reveals softening attitudes in much the same way as the eighteenth century had become more liberal than the late seventeenth had been

Gardner stresses Othello's `heroism' and sees it as `Romantic'; Bayley looks at the apparently quite different worlds of the Novel and the Opera to understand the play's `domesticity' in a new way; Kott draws on the frightening severity of existentialist and absurdist outlooks to show the bleakness of the play's conclusion

In this he confirms Rymer's terrifying question: `If this be our end, what boots it to be vertuous?'

`The Play's the Thing': Some Postmodern Voices

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The final chapter brings the Guide up to date with extracts from Valerie Traub, Leonard Tennenhouse and Stanley Cavell

The theme of the chapter is that any `common sense' that might have existed from time to time has been replaced by an insistence on fission and contradiction

The goal of criticism is to expose power, not to achieve agreement

This has released individual voices and Cavell ends the Guide with a gentle, almost whimsical and often perverse reading of the play, full of compassion, to remind the reader that the play itself offers an image of what may happen when people try to overcome difference with hope and love

Notes

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Selected Bibliography

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