Views on 'Othello'

Reactions to performances of the tragedy have indeed been strong; during an 1882 performance in Baltimore a soldier on guard duty, "seeing Othello… about to kill Desdemona, shouted: 'It will never be said in my presence a confounded Negro has killed a white woman!' whereupon "he fired his gun and broke an arm of the actor who was playing Othello" (quoted Bate, 222)" (Pechter 12). John Quincy Adams used words rather than gunfire in his indictment of the play, stating "The great moral lesson of the tragedy of Othello is that black and white blood cannot be intermingled in marriage without a gross outrage upon the law of Nature; and that, in such violations, Nature will vindicate her laws" (Kaul 10).

"It is a tragedy of racial conflict, a tragedy of honor rather than jealousy. It is because he is an alien among white people that his mind works as quickly, for he feels dishonor more deeply" Robeson

A.C Bradley, on the comparisons between Hamlet and Othello: “[Hamlet and Othello share] the fascination of the supernatural, the absence of the spectacle of extreme undeserved suffering, the absence of characters which horrify and repel and yet are destitute of grandeur.”




Carol  Thomas  Neely  writes  that  Iago,  “destroys  his  superior  by destroying Othello’s belief in his own superiority and the bonds which confirm that superiority.”

Carol Thomas Neely ‘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.’