Cheat+Sheet+2+-+AC+Bradley

=AC Bradley = = =  - Othello is the most romantic figure among Shakespeare’s heroes   - He is a great poet, not as romantic as characters such as Hamlet though it is his poetic nature which is good. Othello’s most famous speeches show his poetic characteristics: //‘her father loved me’, ‘O now for ever’, ‘Never, Iago’, ‘Had it pleased Heaven’, ‘It is the cause’, ‘Behold, I have a weapon’, ‘Soft you. A word or two before you go’// and this is even seen in his casual phrases for example, ‘These nine moons wasted’.

 - Lines that are used to show Othello as his noble self include, //“keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them”.// This line shows his nobility and power, other lines include, //“If she be false, O then Heaven mocks itself, I’ll not believe it”.//

 - There are a lot of brief expressions of intense feeling in his prose and this imagination we feel has accompanied his whole life.

 - Othello is: Dark and grand,

 - No longer young, grave, self-controlled, steeled by the experience of countless perils, hardships and vicissitudes.  - Naturally modest but full conscious of his worth  - Proud of his services to the state  - Unawed by dignitaries and unrelated by honours.  - Secure against all dangers from without and all rebellion from within.

- Othello has striking self control where he endeavours to elicit some explanation of the fight between Cassio and Montano

- Othello’s trust is absolute, and he is extremely self reliant and spontaneous.

- Easily susceptible to jealousy and infatuation. Convinced, he will act with the authority of a judge (that’s a good quote fellas)

- His sufferings are so heart rending that he stirs in readers a passion of mingled love and pity that they feel for no other hero in Shakespeare.

- Some cherish a grudge against him saying in the late parts of the play he showed a certain obtuseness and acted with unjustifiable precipitance and violence. They say it was inexcusable for him to feel any suspicion of his wife at all and they blame him for never suspecting Iago.

- Although, Iago had proved his faithfulness to Othello. O’s confidence was misplaced, but it was no sign of stupidity for his opinion of Iago was the same as almost everyone that knew him.

- It would be unusual for O not to be moved by the warnings of a friend.

- Othello’s imagination is perhaps what destroyed him most.

- In his soliloquy the beginnings of O’s passion may be traced (III, iii 258)

- Even till the end, Othello is quite unlike the essentially jealous man.

- By III, iii 330 we see that the poison has been at work and ‘burns like the mines of sulphur’.

- The Othello of the fourth act is O in his fall, a fall that is never complete. His grandeur remains almost undiminished. - Our sympathy with him is hardly touched by any feeling of humiliation,

- The O that enters the bed chamber with the words “It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul” is not the man of the fourth act.

- A key theme is the power of love and man’s unconquerable mind. // Theo Wood and John Sideris and George Rees //