Othello quotes

Nostbakken, Faith. Understanding Othello: A Student’s Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents. Ed. Claudia Durst Johnson. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000.

1.       Despite malice lurking in his heart, he cloaked with proud and valorous speech and with a specious presence the villainy of his soul (9).

2.       Othello provides the play’s emotional focus as a man of stature who rises and falls from greatness (19)

3.       Iago is the intellectual focus as the manipulator who convinces his victims to respond and act in certain ways (20).

4.       The end – whether it be money, ambition, or personal gains – can justify the means, whatever cruel and inhuman actions are required (22).

5.       Iago, as a consummate plotter and schemer who sometimes appears to be in control of everyone’s actions and responses on stage (6)

Potter, Nicholas. Othello Character Studies. London: Continuum, 2008.

6.       He takes delight in showing us just how casually wicked he is. He is lightly but determinedly vindictive (54).

7.       But if ‘black’ is not ‘white’ the ‘white’ is not ‘black,’ and so ‘black’ is not ‘not-black’ and ‘white’ is not ‘not-white.’ In other words they need each other to define themselves (42).

Bloom, Harold. An Essay by Harold Bloom. Othello. By William Shakespeare. Yale: Riverhead Books, 1998.

8.       The love of power, which is another name for the love mischief, was natural to man (205).

9.       Othello was everything to Iago, because war was everything; passed over, Iago is nothing, and in warring against Othello, his war is against ontology (209).

10.   He will die under torture, silently, but he will have left a mutilated reality as his monument (209).

11.   Othello, the skilled professional who maintains the purity of arms by sharply dividing the camp of war from that of peace (208).

12.   [Iago’s] web has all of war’s game like magic, but no place in it for Emilia’s honest indignation (221).

13.   [Othello] presents himself as a living legend or walking myth, nobler than any antique Roman (222).

14.   Othello’s warlike fullness of being was in part another emptiness (242).

15.   By working so close to his victim, Iago becomes the Devil-as-matador (242-243).