Studying English Literature

Character and role of Desdemona in Othello . Is Desdemona a pathetic character rather than tragic? Discuss. It is very easy, as several recent critics have noted, to canonize Desdemona, a fate rather common to a number of Shakespeare’s particularly appealing heroines. Desdemona, however, is made of stern stuff and not all her characteristics are quite so saintly. This is far from giving credence to Iago’s insinuations. It implies rather that she is human. It is a little too easy to consider Desdemona as not much more than the object of Othello’s love and the victim of the passion. This is ironic, for Desdemona’s chief quality is her independence, a characteristic not uncommon in a number of Shakespeare’s female characters. She is no shy, reticent creature when it comes to standing up for herself before the senators of Venice . We have to consider that she is brought at night to speak for herself and Othello before an angry and distressed father. Her language is firm, temper...

Lear’s relationship with the Fool is no mere static pictorial contrast, but part of the tragic movement of the play: the movement downwards towards that ultimate exposure and defeat when the king is degraded to the status of the meanest of his servants. It is the presence of the Fool which reinforces the meaning of Lear’s loss of sanity. As his wits begin to leave him, Lear begins to see the truth about himself; when they are wholly gone he begins to have spasmodic flashes of insight in which during the momentary comments on the storm in revengeful personal resentment, he sees the truth about the world. It is important to remember that it is the Fool who points out at the beginning of Lear’s misfortune—“Thou would’st make a good fool”. In saying so the Fool also speaks as a prophet. Here Shakespeare makes the fullest possible use of the accepted convention that it is the Fool who speaks the truth, which he knows not by ratiocination but by inspiring intuition. Hooker h...

Published in 1919, Hamlet and His Problems may be considered an example of “destructive criticism” in the sense that it challenges the age-old established critical perspectives on a work of art. Eliot puts forward his contention that much of the critical has been devoted to analysing the character of Hamlet, rather than analysing the play, which should be the primary business of the critics. He cites the example of two great minds, Goethe and Coleridge, who also who were not immune to this kind of fallacy and who have substituted “their own Hamlet for Shakespeare’s”. Eliot alleges that instead of studying it as a “ work of art”, they have imposed their personalities on Shakespeare’s Hamlet and “made of Hamlet a Werther” and “ of Hamlet a Coleridge” respectively. Eliot, on the other hand, praises J.M. Robertson and Stoll, who, according to him, tried to shift the critical focus of Hamlet to a right direction by pointing out the genesis of Shakespeare’s play from his predecessors: “ H...

Macbeth impresses the audience/reader with an uncertain and unstable state. It is possible to describe the structure of the play as a series of situation exemplifying the conflict between Good and Evil, the story of the fall of a great man. It may even be described as a parable illustrating how man can be gulled by the forces of evil into accepting the appearance as the truth. But structures or themes abstracted from this play would not include the dominant impression left by the play. This impression is not simply the effect of its plot; the quality of the whole tragedy is conveyed by the poetry, which reinforces the situations and their representation on the stage. Poetry succeeds in producing the impression of an equivocal and ambiguous world, where what is seen appears to be different from what is. In fact, the riddling phrases in the very opening scene of the drama are capped with “Fair is foul, and foul is fair”, an image which indicates the moral topsy-turvy in the world of th...

The tragic hero’s downfall, said Aristotle, in the Poetics , was brought upon not by vice and depravity but by some error of judgement. Aristotle’s theory is not the final word on tragedy, but it happens, can usefully point to what is going on in Othello. This tragic ‘flaw’ has sometimes been incorrectly interpreted in moral terms, and some critics have looked for some moral weakness in the tragic hero. For Othello, this has led to the commonplace assertion that Othello falls because he was too jealous—hence the arguments about whether he was naturally or racially prone to jealousy or easily made jealous. But this is to miss Aristotle’s points. Obviously Othello becomes jealous, but we can defectively avoid the argument about whether he was naturally jealous or not by looking for error of judgement rather than moral flaw. The same may be said about the debate concerning Othello’s ‘nobility’. Up to the beginning of this century there seems to have been general agreement among the best a...

S hakespeare has conceived of and presented Lady Macbeth with extreme care of theatrical technique so that she can play every important part and contribute to the tragic process of the drama. Sometimes some critics tend to compare her activities with witchcraft and call her the “fourth Witch”. But none of these attempts has been successful, as she is very much a flesh and blood character, who exhibits enough of her humanity hidden within in the later scenes. The development of Lady Macbeth’s character acts as a parable with that of Macbeth, thus at once complementing and illuminating the action where necessary. At the very first appearance of Lady Macbeth, reading a letter from her husband in Act I, scene v, the audience can notice from her facial expressions and eagerness that she is immediately possessed by the prospects of the prophecies. But as she knows the real nature of her husband, she rightly expresses her doubts about the mental strength of her husband, which is necessar...