Othello and Desdemona

Author(s): PETER HOLLINDALE

Source: Critical Survey , 1989, Vol. 1, No. 1, Shakespeare (1989), pp. 43-52
Published by: Berghahn Books

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41556462

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 Othello and Desdemona
PETER HOLLINDALE

Helen Gardner's influential essay on 'The Noble Moor' begins thus: 'Among the
tragedies of Shakespeare Othello is supreme in one quality: beauty. Much of its poetry
. . . enchants the sensuous imagination. This kind of beauty Othello shares with Romeo
and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra ; it is a corollary of the theme which it shares with
them.'1 As the grouping in this statement makes clear, Othello is one of Shakespeare's
tragedies of love, and the balance of critical discussion might have been better if it had
also shared a form of title with the others. A tragedy called Othello and Desdemona
would have directed us more readily towards the tragic centre of the play, and avoided
the extraordinary neglect of its heroine's influence and status. More particularly, it
might have warned against the error which has undermined so much commentary on
Othello : the identification of its tragic centre with its psychological centrepiece.
Although there are patent differences of maturity, emphasis and kind between
Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra and Othello, the tragedies of love have in
common the unsurprising fact that they are double tragedies. It would not occur to
anyone that a difference of title might give us a tragedy of Romeo, or of Antony, nor yet
that either figure has the fullness of tragic stature to bear the role in isolation; the plays
are unmistakably about a mutuality of tragic love, and hero and heroine together
achieve a dramatic power to move us which is greater than seems warranted by their
qualities as individuals. The purpose of this essay is to argue that Othello is another such
play. Its critical history is notable for disappointed efforts to see it as a fully convincing
unilateral tragedy, exemplified by Wilson Knight's remark that 'Othello often just
misses tragic dignity'.2 We can account for it satisfactorily only when we have
accounted satisfactorily for Desdemona.
The main deflector of attention has of course been the dramatic prominence and
psychological enigma of Iago, and the centrality of his truly awesome tour deforce of
destructive persuasiveness in Act III scene 3. For many critics the only acceptable
retitlement of the play would be Othello and Iago, or even perhaps Iago : it was W. H.
Auden who best summarised this deviant allure with his observation that 'Any
consideration of the Tragedy of Othello must be primarily occupied, not with its official
hero but with its villain.'3 Even when a critic questions the excess of psychological
curiosity about Iago, as F. R. Leavis does in his essay 'Diabolic Intellect and the Noble
Hero', the effect is to transfer attention to Othello's individual weaknesses and
Dr Peter Hollindale lectures in English at York University.
© C.Q. & S. 1989

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44 Peter Hollindale

shortcomings rather than the full marital duality which is tragically ruined.
there are two essential critical scenarios: the first has Iago as the clever and d
manipulator and Othello as the noble and heroic victim, while the second has
the confusedly motivated, malicious and lucky improviser who exposes flaws
delusions already inherent in Othello's fragile self-conception. On either readin
play the role of Desdemona tends to be, as Leavis sees Iago's, 'subordina
ancillary'. The centre of gravity is displaced in much discussion, and I shall t
relocate it by arguing for the truth which Leavis states but does not adequately pu
'The tragedy is inherent in the Othello-Desdemona relation'.4
The prefatory statement of Othello' s place amongst the tragedies of love should
another point in common between seemingly disparate plays. In all the thre
mentioned, love's tragic intimacy is contained within and precipitated by a h
context of social belief. This is obvious in Romeo and Juliet: the lovers are isola
killed by dynastic hatred; obvious, too, in Antony and Cleopatra ; the private
ticity of love is incompatible with Roman political realities, and cannot insula
from them. Othello is another such play: love's intimate separateness, I shall a
destroyed not only by Iago's personal malignity but by omnipresent Venetian
naturalness.

Othello has remained largely immune to the disfavour which has overtaken the analysis
of 'character' practised by A. C. Bradley and his successors. Although few critics
would now be happy with the earlier exclusive preoccupation with character and
motive, Othello is generally considered to require this kind of attentiveness. William
Empson was writing about Othello when he observed: 'Some recent critics have
objected to this sort of analysis, but I think it is clearly wrong to talk as if coherence of
character is not needed in poetic drama, only coherence of metaphor and so on.'5
Wilson Knight argued that the play's characteristic language 'suggests a proper
approach to Othello which is not proper to Macbeth or King Leaf , and found the centre
of the play in the individual solidity and separateness of its three chief characters:
'Othello, Desdemona, Iago . . . are clearly and vividly separate . . . Othello is statuesque,
Desdemona most concretely human and individual, Iago, if not human or in any usual
sense 'realistic', is quite unique. Within analysis of these three persons and their
interaction lies the meaning of Othello.'' ( The Wheel of Fire, p. 105).
It may be said that Othello reverses the characteristic form of the other three great
tragedies, Macbeth, Hamlet and King Lear, in a way which emphasises its
claustrophobic domestic centre. In the other plays human evil is accompanied by
awesome disturbances in the universe. The ghosts of murdered men, Banquo and
Hamlet's father, rise to accuse the guilty and to call for vengeance. Human offences
against order cause shock waves in the universe at large - the sun fails to rise,
cataclysmic storms break. The fate of individual figures has enormous political
consequences: it causes wars and civil dissension, giving rise to disorder that goes far
beyond the individuals themselves. The usual world of Shakespearean tragedy is an

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 Othello and Desdemona 45

expanding universe. The act of one individual is like a stone thrown into a po
causes concentric rings of movement in the water: rings that are the individual lif
family, the social order, the state, and finally the cosmos.
In Othello, however, the characteristic movement is shrinkage and contrac
Geographically, the play begins in Venice. Before and beyond that is th
geographical range of Othello's previous military career. From Venice, the huge
and important city state, we move to Cyprus. In Cyprus we move from port and la
beach to the governor's palace and the streets around it; then to the palace interior
at last to a bedroom and a bed.
The social range is likewise puckering and constrictive. In Othello's past were who
armies. As the play begins we have the noisy Venetian streets, the court and senate
Then there is a welcome to Cyprus from the Venetian diplomatic residency there. A
last there is a small inner circle, and at its heart just two fateful partnerships: Othel
and Desdemona, Othello and Iago.
The psychological movement in Othello himself is similarly compressive and intens
fying. He begins with a vast, confident sense of himself in all sorts of settings: Othello
the general, Othello the super-mercenary, Othello the indispensable state servant,
Othello the civilised dinner-guest, Othello the covert but honourable lover, Othello t
governor, Othello the husband; and then Othello the dupe, the jealous husband, th
eavesdropper; and then Othello the conspirator, the closet wife-killer and the suicid
in terms of passion//obsession;
The story of these contracting roles is the story of an obsession.
compressive, intesifying, fixation

In its characteristic languages the play reflects this process with great power. A wide
polarity of dominant idioms sets it apart from all other Shakespearean plays. At on
pole is what Wilson Knight so aptly termed 'the noble Othello music: highly coloured
rich in sound and phrase, stately.' It is the language of Othello's great speech of prou
defence to the Venetian senate, distinguished by its marvellous sonority, amplitude and
resource. At the other pole is the speech typified by the reductive carnal bestialities
Iago, adopted by Othello himself once jealousy has taken hold. As much as bestiality
however, the debased vocabulary of the tragic process is characterised by narrowne
and obsessive repetition. The most conspicuous example, 'honest', infects the play
from the outset, applied repeatedly to Iago and in due course carrying its contaminat
meaning elsewhere. But contamination of meaning is essential to Iago's slanderous
techniques: he is expert in the discolouration of values by reiteration and clou
innuendo. He creates a vocabulary honed for perversion, and so educates Othello tha
use of language in the end he can create one for himself. The effect is a condensed vocabulary of words
which can carry approving, neutral, or licentious meanings, depending on the contex
and insinuating frequency of usage: 'honest', 'committed', 'free', 'gentle', 'virtuous
'appetite', 'obedient'. Others, rich in spiritual meaning, are so drained of power by
over-usage that they render extremities commonplace: 'heaven', 'hell', 'devil'. Y
others, devoid of all but innocent surface meaning, are poisoned by mere restatemen
'indeed', 'thought', 'seem'. And there is scope for endless defamation in the passiona
and the diluted social meanings of 'love'. Iago's destructive power, and Othello
vulnerability are exercised and deepened by linguistic shrinkage, so that this play
which at one extreme voices the amplitude of the Othello music, also contains the mo

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 46 Peter Hollindale

claustrophobic and fixated language anywhere in Shakespeare. In his extremity Othe

exclaims, 'It is not words that shake me thus'; but it is. For such linguistic devastation t
occur, either Iago is diabolically clever, or Othello is neurotically insecure a
susceptible; or else there is some mutual vulnerability in the love which is so ruinou
defamed. The third possibility, I shall argue, is the most sustainable one.

why, iago? A. C. Bradley remarked, 'There is no mystery in the psychology of Iago; the mystery
lies in a further question, which the drama has not to answer, the question why such a
being should exist.'6 Perhaps there is not too much mystery in the 'further question'
either. What Shakespeare was recognising in Iago, as other dramatists of his age did in
many other characters, is the endemic presence in human society of profitless
malevolence towards one's fellow beings, and whilst this presents an inexhaustible
ethical mystery to those who believe that human behaviour might be rationally
governed, it is nonetheless an observable fact of life. Bradley's crucial assertion is his
first one, and his discussion of Iago is his masterpiece. It will be worthwhile briefly to
retrace his steps, in order to expose the factor which he omitted, and which has been
noticed but habitually understated in later discussions.
There is no mystery in Iago's psychology once we admit that evil behaviour may have
multiple and loosely associated motives. Essentially Bradley gives four such motives:
the existence of 'reasons', in the form of specific resentments; delight in exercising
power and superiority over others; 'joy in exciting action'; and artistic satisfaction,
comparable with that of the dramatist himself, in creative dramatic composition. All of
these are plausible and convincing, and all can quite believably co-exist, but they leave
Bradley with a residual sense of something unaccounted for, which explains his sense of
metaphysical (rather than psychological) mystery. Equivalent formulations have left
later commentators with a similar sense of something additionally present and unde-
fined. Little satisfaction has accrued from looking for it in some supernatural zone: the
'devilish' or literally 'inhuman' Iago is believable in terms of the miniature Chaos he
succeeds in de-creating, but less so in terms of the man himself. It may be productive to
look for a more human and commonplace Iago at the centre, rather than a more
inhuman, diabolic one.
Iago, then, is in many ways a regular Elizabethan figure: cynical, malcon tented,
scheming, filled with ambition and envy and hate, yet with some perversely attractive
qualities too - nerve, a taste for risk, wit, a kind of double 'honesty'. To simplify the
dramatic meanings of this complex word, one could point to the external honesty which
is call-a-spade-a-spade candour, amusing to watch because it is so impudently and
successfully deluding, and the secret honesty which privately acknowledges his villainy,
and shares it with the audience in the profane confessional of soliloquy.
As to the motives of a rationally explicable kind, Iago has several. He has been
passed over for promotion in favour of Cassio; the practical soldier has been cheated by
the theorist. This is a classic grievance in itself. Worse still, both Othello and Cassio (a
Florentine) are foreigners, and Iago is a Venetian. Othello is 'the Moor' to Iago, who is

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 Othello and Desdemona 47

nothing if not a racist. He is 'an old black ram', 'a Barbary horse', a human an
fact to one who constantly sees the world in animal terms. It is a sexual anim
brute lust which to Iago is the reality of so-called love. And he thinks Othello has
the beast with two backs' with his own wife, Emilia. All of these are quite bel
reasons for vengeful malice. The only trouble lies in their number and variety;
is surely right to suggest that 'most of lago's reasons for actions are no more
ones than Hamlet's reasons for delay were the real ones' ( Shakespearean Trag
p. 226).
We can find a very real reason, however, in the crucial event which instigates the
whole action. Othello marries Desdemona. And lago's whole campaign is directed
towards destroying the life and peace of this marriage. Several commentators have
pointed to the believable sincerity of a number of lago's beliefs and actions, and much
of his sincerity concerns this, to him, offensive and incredible match. Wilson Knight
puts it thus:

He believes Othello's and Desdemona's happiness will be short-lived, since he puts no faith in
the validity of love. Early in the play he tells Roderigo:
It cannot be that Desdemona should long continue her love to the Moor . . . nor he his to her . . .
These Moors are changeable in their wills . . . the food that to him now is as luscious as locusts,
shall be to him shortly as bitter as coloquintida. She must change for youth: when she is sated
with his body, she will find the error of her choice: she must have change, she must.
This is probably lago's sincere belief, his usual attitude to love. ( Wheel of Fire, p. 112.)

This is, it seems to me, a true and important statement, requiring to be augmented by an
additional truth. It is particularly lago's sincere belief about this love, which is to him
both peculiarly repulsive and peculiarly aberrant. Diagnostically expert vilification
chimes with real sincerity in Act III scene 3, and accounts for lago's overwhelming
success:

othello And yet, how nature erring from itself -

iago Ay, there's the point; as, to be bold with you,
Not to affect many proposed matches
Of her own clime, complexion, and degree,
Whereto we see in all things nature tends -
Foh! One may smell in such a will most rank,
Foul disproportion, thoughts unnatural.
But pardon me - I do not in position
Distinctly speak of her, though I may fear
Her will, recoiling to her better judgement,
May fall to match you with her country forms,
And happily repent.
(III. 3.225-36)

To say that Iago is here speaking with sincerity as well as calculation is not to depict
him as eccentric; quite the opposite. As William Empson correctly notes: 'lago's
opinions, so far as he has got them clear, are shared by many people around him, and he

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 48 Peter Hollindale

boasts about them freely. To be sure, he could not afford to do this if they were no
confused, but even the confusion is shared by his neighbours.' ( The Structure
Complex Words, p. 233.)
The reason why Iago has attracted such disproportionate attention is to be f
here: in concentrating on Iago the malignant individualist, we have overlooked Ia
Venetian; in concentrating on his perversities, we have overlooked his ordinarine
concentrating on his improvised falsities, we have overlooked his sincerity. Iago,
and disnatured as he is, belongs in citizenship to a society (represented for us
Brabantio and Roderigo) which sees Othello and Desdemona as gross and disnat
At the tragic centre of the play is not Iago, but the lovers' own respective ide
naturalness in a context of social disbelief.

To understand the catastrophe that befalls Othello and Desdemona, and the reason
why Iago is able to precipitate it with such appalling ease, we need to accept only two
things: first, that their love is true and natural, and second, that it is extremely unlikely.
The facts about Othello are simple, believable and in every respect important. He is
middle-aged, and all his previous life before his marriage to Desdemona has been spent
othello's flaws/
insecurities in war, in a world of men and masculine comradeship, in situations which have
repeatedly tested his courage and honour. In this world he has been hugely successful.
In Venice he is a foreigner, and moreover black; but Venice habitually made use of
gifted foreign soldiers and conferred dignity upon mercenary status, so that as a general
of the army his race and colour are no bar to his stature and acceptance. The long
military past of his life has left no space for women, or love, or courtly behaviour; he is
outsider in society
sexually inexperienced, and in the unfamiliar discourse of love he is quick to learn the
high vocabulary but not, so to speak, the shades of meaning practised by a native
speaker. As a soldier, however, his language is magnificently sure and eloquent, a at home in the
military sphere
sureness which expresses a completeness of achieved identity. This is 'the Othello
music'.
The man, his past career and profession, his maturity and pride, his racial con-
fidence, his voice, his language, are all one thing. He knows himself, and he admires
himself - his soldiership, his manliness, his age and experience, his race and colour -
all. Certainly there is an element of grandiloquent performance in his self-projection,
and certainly it is an incomplete, asexual identity which is self-created over-perfectly.
But it is not false.
When Othello falls in love and marries Desdemona, he puts all this at stake. In
middle age he has entered on a new and risky adventure of the self. His gamble,
whether knowingly or not, is enormous: he is gambling an achieved completeness for a
larger one, a self-sufficiency for a dual and mutual one, a long-tried self-dependency for
a venture of faith. Moreover, the love he feels and receives is not with woman only, but
with a young, white, courtly, native-born Venetian. For Othello his marriage to
Desdemona is a sublime occurrence of self-enhancement, in senses which are at once

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 Othello and Desdemona 49

fatally egocentric and magnificently generous. Not surprisingly, his response at certain
moments is one of breathless wonderment:

Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul

But I do love thee! And when I love thee not,
Chaos is come again. (III. 3. 90-2)

Albert Gerard, in his essay ' "Egregiously an Ass": The Dark Side of the M
View of Othello's Mind', observes of these lines that the word 'again' '...is on
most pregnant words in the whole tragedy. It indicates (a) Othello's dim sense
life before he fell in love with Desdemona was in a state of chaos, in spite of the
he was at the time quite satisfied with it, and (b) his conviction that his lov
redeemed him from chaos, has lifted him out of his former barbarousness.'7 T
seems to me precisely opposite to this. Othello's former life was and remains f
condition of heroic order, a state of aesthetic completeness of being. 'Chaos' re
to some self-critical disparagement of his former personal condition, bu
Christianly conceived, cosmic, pre-Creational negation that would follow an
his former life's miraculously augmented state. He is speaking, in a word, o
unthinkable.
To put the matter more crudely, Othello cannot believe his luck. I use the phrase
advisedly, because there is a part of him that truly cannot believe it. John Bayley has
pointed out Othello's penchant for demanding the reason of things: 'Othello can
neither renounce love because of reason or discount reason because of love.'8 We can
see this mode of thought at work in his self- vindicating speech to the Venetian senate:

She loved me for the dangers I had passed

And I loved her, that she did pity them.
(1.3.166-7)

Othello is seeking to account for the miraculous extension of his life and his identity,
to find a reason for it. He can only explain his present, as lover and husband, in terms of
his past as a soldier. Othello, who is deeply in love, genuinely believes at this point that
Desdemona is in love with him. But deep within himself he can only believe that
Desdemona has fallen in love with what he is (a romantic story, a biography, a
reputation), not that she has fallen in love with who he is (an un-courtly middle-aged
black). It is the sheer unlikelihood of this love which is the key to its sublimity and its
tragic brittleness. Othello's oversensitive pride can only use the impermeable heroic
past to validate the gloriously improbable extension of his present fortunes. Conse-
quently, and fatally, there is a line of joining between the unified completeness of
Othello's past and the extended self of the play. If the fragile line of joining can be
shivered by a skilled destructive tapping, Othello will disintegrate: not only the present
Othello who is husband and lover, but the past heroic Othello which he has gambled on
it.
For Othello his augmented self depends on a conditional and reasoning belief. In the
persons of Brabantio, Roderigo and Iago, Venice cannot believe in it at all, and does
not wish to. To Venetian prejudice the marriage is both aberrant and abhorrent, for

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50 Peter Hollindale

those selfsame reasons which render Othello vulnerable to self-suspicion and a logic
consequence of jealousy. It is the reasoning, explicative Othello on whom Iago can
play, and Iago the malignantly perspicacious but typical Venetian who knows how t
play effectively. The factors of age and race and urbanity combine too plausibly t
reveal to Othello the 'unnatural' naturalness of the love he experiences and receives:
Haply, for I am black
And have not those soft parts of conversation
That chamberers have; or for I am declined
Into the vale of years - yet that's not much -
She's gone. (III.3.26(M)
And with the imagined loss of Desdemona goes the l
as well as the transfigured new one. When the line o
Venetian, at the fragile point where reason is employ
present selves are shattered. Othello is left in a state of
O, now, for ever
Farewell the tranquil mind! Farewell content!
Farewell the plum&d troops and the big wars
That make ambition virtue. O, farewell!

Farewell! Othello's occupation's gone.

(III. 3. 334-54)

The past Othello is briefly revived at the end, wit

enlightened, only to dispose of the offending later s

Desdemona is arguably the most disregarded and underrated heroine in Shakespeare.

When they are not neglecting her altogether, most critics are either idealising her into
anonymity as 'love's martyr', or denigrating her as a naive and characterless girl, what
A. P. Rossiter called 'this pathetic, girlish, nearly-blank-sheet Desdemona.'9 It is,
however, Desdemona we must look to for completion of the tragic pattern, and this
play's true place among the tragedies of love.
In Act I scene 3, both Othello and Desdemona testify in public, before the Venetian
senate, to the mutuality of their love. There is, however, a vital difference in the terms
by which they do so. Desdemona's crucial lines are these:
That I did love the Moor to live with him,
My downright violence and storm of fortunes
May trumpet to the world. My heart's subdued
Even to the very quality of my lord.
I saw Othello's visage in his mind
And to his honours and his valiant parts
Did I my soul and fortunes consecrate.
So that, dear lords, if I be left behind

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 Othello and Desdemona 51

A moth of peace, and he go to the war,

The rites for which I love him are bereft me
(1.3.245-54)
Like Othello's love for her, Desdemona's love for Othello is genuine and natural,
whatever Venice may think, but unlike Othello's love for her, Desdemona's love is
seamless. There are no reasons, categories or divisions in her profession of love, fidelity
and obedience. Her love for 'the very quality of my lord' embraces undivisively his
soldierly occupation and his physical self, his reputation and his character, his past and
his present. Her plea to accompany Othello on what then seems destined as a warfare
enterprise is a self-identification with a warrior husband: an affirmation of partnership
which Othello later recognises when he greets her, at a stilled moment of triumphal
happiness, as 'fair warrior' (II. 1.176) and which she self-accusingly revives when she
calls herself 'unhandsome warrior' (III. 4. 147) because in her own eyes she has put
womanly fastidiousness before soldierly understanding. 'The rites for which I love
him', referred to with such grace in the senate speech, are simultaneously military and
sexual. There is a oneness and indivisibility in Desdemona's love which form its tragic
greatness and its weakness.
The weakness of Desdemona's strength lies in her insulation from the socio-sexual
world of Venice, and her wrong assumption of equivalent insulation on Othello's part.
Desdemona is not sexually naive: she can engage in risque time-passing banter with
Iago while waiting for Othello's ship to reach Cyprus, and later avails herself
disastrously of the coquettish freedoms of marital intimacy while urging Cassio's
reinstatement. But her womanly Venetian sophistication is external to her marriage,
and does not encroach upon her sense of inviolable sacredness in the marital bond.
There is no inconsistency between Desdemona the provocative young wife and the
Desdemona who can enquire of Emilia with innocent seriousness if there really are
unfaithful wives. Marriage is for her a thing apart, whole and complete. The seamless-
ness of her devotion renders her fatally unguarded and unsuspicious.
The tragedy hinges on the nature of Desdemona's love for Othello. I have said that it
is the sheer unlikelihood of this love that determines its fate. Neither Venice nor even
Othello himself can quite believe it. To fall in love - she, a beautiful Venetian girl of
noble family - with 'what she feared to look on', a middle-aged, black, uncourtly
foreign soldier. The nerve-centre of the tragedy is that she has done precisely that. Her
love for Othello is true and constant, not a perverse girlish whim but a woman's choice.
For her there is nothing strange about it. It is Desdemona's absent sense of strangeness
that gives Iago his destructive opportunity. The tragedy rests in the fact that there really
is nothing strange about it - that love has no rules or laws, no social permissions or
constraints, but is its own law. And in the last analysis Desdemona is the only person in
the play who really believes it. Othello is the tragedy of a love which is deep and genuine
and mutual, but socially and racially 'beyond belief.
This, then, is the tragedy of a love which cuts across conventions and expectations, in
regard to race, and age, and social status, as love very often does. Its improbability
causes disaster: Othello and Desdemona are not unequal in love, but unequal in their
secure conceptions of naturalness. At its claustrophobic emotional centre, the play is

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52 Peter Hollindale

about a few individual characters, but it is also about the conflict between publ
private belief, public and private truth, what two people believe about each othe
what Venice believes about them. Iago is certainly clever, but he has no ne
superhuman cleverness to cause havoc in the play.
Othello has taken too big a risk - ironically, not too big a risk with Desdemona
too big a risk with a soldier's loyalties and friendship, too big a risk with Ven
ultimately too big a risk with himself. At the crisis of choice, Othello places his trus
the world he has always known, where his sense of his identity is most secure -
soldier, the comrade, the man, 'honest Iago' - rather than in his newly discove
world of love - in the wife, the lover, the woman, Desdemona - a world where
vulnerable once his freshly extended selfhood is assailed by doubt. This would n
very surprising even if Iago were not so brilliant an improviser as he is. As the
sees it - even as Othello sees it - Desdemona's love for him is unnatural. Her part in t
tragedy is that it is not. Othello is a double tragedy, rooted in mutuality of improba
love but discordant conceptions of naturalness, discordant capacity for belief.

All quotations and line references refer to the New Penguin edition of Othello , ed. Kenneth Muir.

1 Helen Gardner. The Noble Moor'; British Academy Shakespeare lecture, 1955, reprinted in Shakes
Criticism 1935-60. ed. Anne Ridler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963).
2 G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire, revised edition (London: Methuen, 1949), p. 117.
3 W. H. Auden, The Joker in the Pack', reprinted in The Dyer's Hand (London: Faber, 1963).
4 F. R. Leavis, 'Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero', The Common Pursuit (London: Chatto and Windus,
p. 141.
5 William Empson, 'Honest in Othello', The Structure of Complex Words (London: Chatto and Windus, 1951),
p. 231.
6 A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1904), pp. 229-30.
7 Albert Gerard, ' "Egregiously an Ass": The Dark Side of the Moor. A View of Othello's Mind', Shakespeare
Survey 10 , 1957; reprinted in Aspects of 'Othello', ed. Kenneth Muir and Philip Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1977), p. 15.
8 John Bayley, The Characters of Love (London: Constable, 1960), p. 170.
9 A. P. Rossiter, Angel With Horns (Harlow: Longman, 1961), p. 206.

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