Cheat+Sheet+5+-+AC+Bradley+II

//**1.Summary:**//  · Othello is by far the most romantic figure among Shakespeare’s heroes  · Believes that Othello is a misfit in Venetian society and lacks a sense of belonging  · There are many expressions of intense feeling which lead towards his grand sense of nobility through his whole life  · His poetry is of pride, pomp and circumstances of glorifying war  · He comes to have life crowned with the final glory of love, a lovers strange adventurous and romantic as any passage of his eventful history feeling his heart with tenderness and his imagination with ecstasy  · Othello’s downfall lies with the fact that he is not observant and his nature tends outwards  · Believes that any man in the high position of power as Othello would have succumb to the Machiavellian traits of Iago, and be made ‘wildly jealous’ //**Important quotes:**//
 * A.C.Bradley **

 · The sources of danger in this character are revealed but too clearly by the story … He is not observant. His nature tends outward. He is quite free from introspection, and is not given to reflection. Emotion excites his imagination, but it confuses and dulls his intellect.  · Othello’s nature is all of one piece. His trust, where he trusts, is absolute. Hesitation is almost impossible to him. He is extremely self-reliant, and decides and acts instantaneously.  · His confidence was misplaced, and we happen to know it; but was no sign of stupidity in Othello. For his opinion of Iago was the opinion of practically everyone who knew him: and that opinion was that Iago was before all things ‘honest’. His very faults being those of excess in honesty.  · This consciousness in any imaginative man is enough, in such circumstances, to destroy his confidence in his powers of perception… now I repeat that any man situated as Othello was would have been disturbed by Iago’s communications, and I add that many men would have been made wildly jealous.  · He (Othello) is so lost to all sense of reality that he never asks himself what will follow the deaths of Desdemona and Cassio  · He is to save Desdemona from herself, not in hate but in honour, in honour, and also in love.  · Othello in his final words creates… a triumphant scorn for fetters of flesh and the littleness of all lives that must survive him sweeps our grief away, and when he dies upon a kiss the most painful of all tragedies leaves us for moment free from pain, and exulting in power of ‘love and man’s unconquerable mind’. // Spencer Samuels and Will Royle //