Deception in Shakespeare's Plays | Trevor McNeely (essay date 1989)
Trevor McNeely (essay date 1989)
SOURCE: "Supersubtle Shakespeare: Othello as a Rhetorical Allegory," in Dutch Quarterly Review, Vol. 19, No. 4, 1989, pp. 243-63.
[In the following essay, McNeely analyzes Othello as Shakespeare's allegory on the power of rhetoric to deceive. McNeely observes that just as Iago dupes Othello, Shakespeare dupes his audiences and critics, persuading us to believe in the plausibility of the story, rather than its essential absurdity.]
Criticism has been aware for almost three centuries, since Rymer first raised the question in 1693, of a striking contradiction in Othello and in the character of its hero. E.É. Stoll, writing in 1915, sketched something of the critical history of this contradiction, noting that while the contradiction has sometimes been acknowledged by the critics, it has invariably been ignored in interpretations of the play. The contradiction has to do, of course,...
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