The Critics

You were curious what the critics and the reviews have said. The short version is that Othello has been making smart people uncomfortable since 1693, and the discomfort is the throughline. Here is the argument, in order.

The page

Three centuries of critics

It opens with an insult. Thomas Rymer thought the whole thing was ridiculous, a tragedy undone by a prop, and said so with a sneer that still stings:

“the tragical part is, plainly none other, than a Bloody Farce, without salt or savour.”^[2]

Thomas Rymer · A Short View of Tragedy · 1693

What shaped this reading

Rymer was a neoclassicist, committed to Aristotle’s dramatic unities and to the principle that tragedy requires proportion between cause and effect. A handkerchief toppling a general struck him as bathetic, not tragic. He also believed in decorum — that characters should behave according to their station — and a Moorish general married to a Venetian senator’s daughter violated that hierarchy. His critique is not entirely wrong (the handkerchief isa small thing) but it misses Shakespeare’s point: the play knows the cause is small. That is the horror.

Samuel Johnson set the counterweight that held for a century: never mind the handkerchief, look at the people.

“such proofs of Shakespeare’s skill in human nature, as, I suppose, it is vain to seek in any modern writer.”^[3]

Samuel Johnson · Notes to Shakespeare · 1765

What shaped this reading

Johnson was the great empiricist — a moralist who trusted observation over theory. He did not need a play to follow Aristotle’s rules; he needed it to show him people he recognized. His defense of Shakespeare, here and across the Notes, rests on the claim that human truth excuses structural imperfection. This became the dominant framework for English Shakespeare criticism for the next hundred and forty years: what matters is the psychology, not the machinery. Bradley would take it further than Johnson ever intended.

By 1904 A. C. Bradley had made it the tragedy that hurts the most to watch, and meant it as the highest praise:

“Of all Shakespeare’s tragedies … Othello is the most painfully exciting and the most terrible.”^[4]

A. C. Bradley · Shakespearean Tragedy · 1904

What shaped this reading

Bradley was an idealist philosopher — his brother F. H. Bradley was the leading British Hegelian of the era — and he read Shakespeare’s characters as if they were real people with interior lives that extended beyond the scenes. His Othello is a great and noble spirit destroyed by a force external to his nature: Iago. The tragedy is that goodness is vulnerable to malice, not that it was always compromised. This reading became the establishment view, the one taught in schools for decades, and the one that Eliot and Leavis would both set themselves against. Bradley wrote at the high-water mark of Romantic sympathy; everything that followed was reaction.

Then the twentieth century turned on the hero himself. T. S. Eliot listened to Othello’s magnificent last speech and heard a man performing his own nobility for an audience of one:

“What Othello seems to me to be doing … is cheering himself up. He is endeavouring to escape reality.”^[5]

T. S. Eliot · Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca · 1927

What shaped this reading

Eliot’s reading is the hinge of modern Othello criticism, and it comes from somewhere specific. By 1927 he had spent a decade building an anti-Romantic poetics. His 1919 essay on the “objective correlative” argued that emotion in art should be produced by the situation, not performed by the speaker. His 1921 essay “The Metaphysical Poets” praised Donne for thinkingthrough feeling rather than simply expressing it. When Eliot hears Othello’s final speech — “Speak of me as I am” — he hears exactly what he distrusted in the Romantic poets: a man narrating his own greatness, turning real suffering into a verbal monument to himself.

What shaped this reading

The personal context deepens the reading. In 1927 Eliot was mid-conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, in the wreck of his first marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, and writing verse (Ash-Wednesday, published 1930) about the impossibility of sincerity — about whether any speech act can be genuine or whether all self-expression is performance. His suspicion of Othello’s final speech may be partly self-suspicion: a poet who could not trust his own eloquence hearing the same problem in Shakespeare’s most eloquent character.

What shaped this reading

The intellectual scaffolding is the essay’s title: “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca.” Eliot’s argument is that Senecan stoicism — the pose of noble suffering — had become a substitute for genuine moral thought in Elizabethan drama. Othello’s final speech, in this reading, is not wisdom but a stoic attitude: a man choosing how he wants to be seen over reckoning with what he has done. Whether this is fair to the character is exactly the question the play refuses to answer. But Eliot cracked open a door that can never be shut: after 1927, every actor playing the final speech must decide whether Othello is speaking truth or performing it.

F. R. Leavis drove the knife in further, against Bradley directly: the tragedy is not something Iago does to a noble man, it is something already inside that man.

“the nobility … no longer something real, but the disguise of an obtuse and brutal egotism.”^[6]

F. R. Leavis · Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero · 1937

What shaped this reading

Leavis was the most combative English literary critic of the twentieth century. He ran Scrutiny, a journal built on the conviction that most of the English literary establishment was intellectually lazy, and Bradley was his primary exhibit. Where Bradley read Othello as noble, Leavis read the same speeches and saw self-regard. Where Bradley blamed Iago, Leavis blamed Othello: the jealousy was not planted from outside but triggered because Othello’s self-image was always brittle. The essay’s title — “Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero” — is Leavis sarcastically summarizing Bradley’s view before demolishing it. Leavis took Eliot’s one-paragraph insight and turned it into a sustained prosecution. Together they shifted the critical center of gravity permanently: after Eliot and Leavis, nobody could call Othello noble without defending the claim.

And William Empson did the closest reading of all, counting a single word the play cannot stop saying:

“The fifty-two uses of honest and honesty in Othello are a very queer business.”^[7]

William Empson · The Structure of Complex Words · 1951

What shaped this reading

Empson was trained at Cambridge under I. A. Richards, the founder of practical criticism — the discipline of reading what the words actually do on the page, shorn of biography and context. His Seven Types of Ambiguity(1930) had already demonstrated that great poetry works by holding multiple meanings simultaneously. His Othello essay is the same method applied to a single word: “honest.” He showed that the word means something different almost every time it appears — sincere, chaste, plain-spoken, loyal, naïve, socially inferior — and that the play’s tragedy is partly the tragedy of a word that means too many things to be reliable. Empson’s method is the economist’s: count the data, and the structure will tell you what the play is about.

For three hundred years the argument has circled one nerve: is Othello noble and destroyed, or self-deceived and exposed? The play refuses to decide, which is why no critic can.

The stage

And on stage, right now

The argument is still live in the theater. The National Theatre’s 2013 production, with Adrian Lester and Rory Kinnear, was widely called definitive, and its Iago was the draw:

“a stunning study of a sociopath whose destructive tendencies have hitherto been held in check only by soldierly discipline.”^[8]

Michael Billington · The Guardian, on the National Theatre Othello · 2013

In 2015 the RSC made history by casting Lucian Msamati as the first Black actor to play Iago at Stratford, opposite Hugh Quarshie. Reviewing it for the Guardian, Michael Billington argued that Iqbal Khan’s modern-dress staging, which makes Othello the commander of a multiracial unit, exposes exactly why this Iago would resent a white Cassio, and dismantles the old image of the “noble Moor” by showing a general who sanctions torture.^[8] The casting did not soften the play. It sharpened it.

The recent star runs split the room, which is its own kind of consistency. Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal packed Broadway in 2025 to mixed reviews. Jesse Green in the Timesgranted Kenny Leon’s production all of the play’s lean, headlong velocity and found it had mislaid the one thing that matters:

“Leon’s Othello gets all that, except the themes.”^[9]

Jesse Green · The New York Times, on the Broadway Othello · 2025

And later that year, in London, David Harewood returned to the role under Tom Morris, with Toby Jones as an Iago whose relish, Arifa Akbar wrote in the Guardian, “borders on the comically conniving.” She admired the look of it and faulted its depth, landing on the now-familiar verdict that the production never quite connects the play to us:

“This is an unanchored Othello, afloat against its shifting shades of sky.”^[9]

Arifa Akbar · The Guardian, on the Theatre Royal Haymarket Othello · 2025

The role

What the reviews reward

Set those reviews side by side and a sharper question surfaces. Not which production was best, but what the notices keep rewarding, and keep punishing, in the man at the center. Three star Othellos in two years are enough to read the pattern, and the pattern turns out to be the craft rubric observed in the wild. Every quote below is verbatim, from a named critic.

The role · by the reviewsThree recent Othellos, graded by the critics

Wendell Piercenow, in DC

Shakespeare Theatre Company, Harman Hall, DC · 2026 · dir. Simon Godwin · Iago: Ben Turner

On the Othello

“a layered, deeply human performance that charts the character’s tragic unraveling with heartbreaking precision”Keith Loria, TheaterMania
“imposing and charismatic and even a little twinkly-flirty at times, as genuinely likable as any Othello I can recall”Trey Graham, DC Theater Arts

On the Iago

“an unsettlingly charismatic manipulator … his direct-address moments crackle with sinister energy”Keith Loria, TheaterMania
“fits the seductive-villain bill as tidily as anyone has since Kenneth Branagh”Trey Graham, DC Theater Arts

The verdict

Gripping, startlingly immediate, and the warmest reviews of the three. Pierce gives Othello “a grounded dignity that draws the audience into his internal torment” (Loria). Running at Harman Hall through June 28, 2026.

What the reviews show

The most warmly reviewed of the three is also the most human: likable, grounded, the unraveling charted beat by beat. That interior work is what the notices single out.

Read together, three stagings in two years line up the same way. The reviews reward the interior work: the descent has to land as believable, the scale stays human, the pull toward Iago tightens by the scene. The productions that reached instead for spectacle and star power drew the cooler notices. Washington’s record-breaking run was shut out of the Tonys. Harewood’s ravishing staging was called unanchored. Pierce’s grounded, precisely-unraveling Othello drew the warmest reviews of the three. That is the hub’s craft rubric showing up in real notices, and it keeps returning to Eliot’s old question: in the end, is the nobility felt, or performed?

The map

Where the readings sit

Plotted, four centuries of argument take a shape. Almost every reading is a position on one axis, whether Othello is a noble hero destroyed from outside or a self-deceived egotist exposed from within, crossed with whether the critic argues it on the page or a production decides it on the stage. Bradley and Johnson hold the noble corner, Eliot and Leavis the self-deceived one, Rymer sulks in the margin calling the whole thing a farce, and the modern stagings cluster up top, where the question stops being theoretical and has to be played eight times a week.

The map · four centuries of argumentWhere the readings sit

STC 2026: Pierce & Godwin: human, gripping, startlingly immediate. This telling.

● critics● productions● this telling

This telling sits about where you would expect a 2026 staging to sit. The Shakespeare Theatre Company production, directed by Simon Godwin with Wendell Pierce in the title role, drew the warmest notices of the recent run: gripping, startlingly immediate, anchored by a human, precisely-charted unraveling rather than the grand noble music or the full Leavis indictment. That lands it nearer the human pole of the map than either extreme, which, by the reviews above, is exactly where the role is most rewarded right now. It is still running at Harman Hall as I write this. Four centuries on, nobody has settled this play, which is exactly why it is still being staged, and argued over, tonight.

Sources13 referencesShow

[1] Quotations verified against primary texts (EEBO, Project Gutenberg, Internet Archive) or authoritative scholarly transcriptions.

[2] Thomas Rymer, A Short View of Tragedy (London, 1693), chapter on Othello. He also asks “Why was not this call’d the Tragedy of the Handkerchief?”

[3] Samuel Johnson, General Observation on Othello, in The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765).

[4] A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (Macmillan, 1904), Lecture V, opening line.

[5]T. S. Eliot, “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” (1927), in Selected Essays. Written in the same year Eliot was received into the Church of England and became a British citizen. See also the “objective correlative” essay in “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919) for the theoretical framework behind his suspicion of Othello’s self-dramatization.

[6] F. R. Leavis, “Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero,” Scrutiny 6 (1937), reprinted in The Common Pursuit(1952). The anti-Bradley reading; Leavis also wrote that “the essential traitor is within the gates.”

[7] William Empson, “Honest in Othello,” in The Structure of Complex Words(1951). The count of 52 covers “honest” and “honesty” together. Empson’s method descends from I. A. Richards’ practical criticism at Cambridge; see also Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930).

[8] Michael Billington, reviews of the National Theatre Othello (dir. Nicholas Hytner), The Guardian, 23 Apr 2013; and the RSC Othello(dir. Iqbal Khan), The Guardian, 12 Jun 2015.

[9] Jesse Green, review of the Broadway Othello (dir. Kenny Leon), The New York Times, 23 Mar 2025; Arifa Akbar, review of the Theatre Royal Haymarket Othello (dir. Tom Morris), The Guardian, 5 Nov 2025.

[10] G. Wilson Knight, “The Othello Music,” in The Wheel of Fire (Oxford UP, 1930). Knight was also a theater practitioner; his readings integrate the aural and performative dimensions that purely textual critics miss.

[11] Daniel D’Addario, review of the Broadway Othello, Variety, Mar 2025. The production recouped in nine weeks and became the highest-grossing play revival in Broadway history, yet was shut out of the 2025 Tony Award nominations.

[12]Keith Loria, “Wendell Pierce Commands the Stage in STC’s Gripping Othello,” TheaterMania, May 2026 (Shakespeare Theatre Company, dir. Simon Godwin, Harman Hall, Washington DC).

[13]Trey Graham, “Wendell Pierce’s Othello at STC is a Moor to be reckoned with,” DC Theater Arts, 2 Jun 2026. Run extended through 28 Jun 2026.