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AO5 requires you to "explore literary texts informed by different interpretations." This does not mean simply listing critics or bolting on references to named scholars. It means using critical perspectives as analytical tools — ways of opening up meaning in the text, generating alternative readings, and deepening your own argument. This lesson surveys the major critical approaches relevant to the set plays, providing you with the theoretical vocabulary and specific references that will strengthen your Paper 1 responses.
Paper 1, Section A: Shakespeare (AQA 7712). Set text: Othello, with reference to Measure for Measure, The Winter's Tale and The Taming of the Shrew.
AO Focus in this lesson Weight here AO1 Using critical perspectives to build, not replace, a personal argument Developed AO2 Showing how a critical lens directs attention to specific features of language/form Supporting AO3 The contexts that produced each critical school (and that the schools attend to) Supporting AO5 Dominant. The full apparatus of interpretation — character criticism, feminism, postcolonialism, new historicism, psychoanalysis, performance Dominant Section A assesses AO1, AO2, AO3 and AO5 (not AO4). The dominant objective here is AO5, but with the essential proviso that interpretations must be deployed, not listed — used to generate genuine analytical alternatives that your own argument then weighs.
The AO5 principle in one line: a critic is not an authority you defer to but a position you think with. The phrase the top band rewards is not "Bradley says X" but "If, with Bradley, we read this as Y, then the line means…; but Leavis's reading would direct us instead to…". Interpretation is something you do, using critics as tools.
Character criticism treats Shakespeare's characters as if they were real people with consistent psychologies. It asks: what motivates this character? What kind of person are they? How do they change?
A.C. Bradley (1851–1935) is the most influential character critic. His Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) set the terms for critical debate about Shakespeare for a century. Bradley's key claims about the set plays:
| Play | Bradley's Reading |
|---|---|
| Othello | Othello is "the most romantic figure among Shakespeare's heroes" — a man of natural nobility destroyed by the extraordinary villainy of Iago. The tragedy lies in the waste of a great soul |
| The tragic hero | Must be a person of high status whose fall arouses pity and fear; the hero has a "fatal flaw" but is not simply wicked — their goodness is what makes their destruction tragic |
| Strength | Limitation |
|---|---|
| Takes Shakespeare's characters seriously as complex creations | Treats characters as real people rather than textual constructs |
| Provides rich, detailed readings of individual plays | Tends to ignore the theatrical dimension — Shakespeare wrote plays, not novels |
| Accessible and engaging for students | Can sentimentalise characters and avoid difficult political questions (race, gender, power) |
F.R. Leavis (1895–1978) launched a famous attack on Bradley's reading of Othello in his essay "Diabolic Intellect and the Noble Hero" (1937).
Leavis argues that Bradley sentimentalises Othello. According to Leavis:
AO5 Application: The Bradley/Leavis debate is the single most useful critical disagreement for Paper 1 responses on Othello. You can use it to structure alternative readings of almost any extract: "Bradley would read this passage as evidence of Othello's tragic nobility, while Leavis would identify the same rhetorical eloquence as self-dramatisation."
Feminist criticism examines how literary texts construct, reinforce, or challenge gender hierarchies. Key questions:
| Critic | Key Argument | Relevant Play |
|---|---|---|
| Juliet Dusinberre (Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, 1975) | Shakespeare was a proto-feminist who consistently challenged patriarchal assumptions; his female characters are given more agency and complexity than contemporary convention allowed | All four plays |
| Kathleen McLuskie ("The Patriarchal Bard," 1985) | Shakespeare's plays are structurally patriarchal — to enjoy them requires "an acceptance of the structures of sexual difference" that feminist criticism should resist rather than accommodate | Measure for Measure, King Lear |
| Carol Thomas Neely (Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays, 1985) | Shakespeare's tragedies systematically destroy women who assert themselves; marriage in the comedies offers only illusory liberation | Othello, The Taming of the Shrew |
| Germaine Greer | Kate's final speech in The Taming of the Shrew is ironic — its very excess signals that it cannot be taken at face value | The Taming of the Shrew |
| Coppélia Kahn (Man's Estate, 1981) | Masculine identity in Shakespeare is constructed through the subordination of women; jealousy (Othello, Leontes) reflects male anxiety about identity, not genuine concern about female behaviour | Othello, The Winter's Tale |
AO5 Application: Feminist criticism is especially productive for The Taming of the Shrew and Measure for Measure, where the treatment of female characters raises questions that cannot be answered without reference to gender politics. When writing about Kate's final speech, Isabella's silence, or Hermione's trial, feminist criticism provides essential analytical tools.
Postcolonial criticism examines how literary texts represent race, empire, and cultural difference. For the set plays, this is most directly relevant to Othello.
| Critic | Key Argument |
|---|---|
| Ania Loomba (Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama, 1989) | Othello internalises Venetian racism — his tragedy is partly the tragedy of a man who defines himself through the values of a culture that will never fully accept him |
| Ben Okri | Othello is a man "who has to be more noble, more articulate, more everything than anyone else" because of his racial position — his eloquence is a survival strategy, not simply a character trait |
| Karen Newman ("'And wash the Ethiop white'," 1987) | The play stages anxieties about miscegenation (interracial marriage) that reflect Renaissance Europe's growing encounter with racial difference |
Postcolonial readings illuminate moments that character criticism might overlook:
New historicism reads literary texts in relation to the power structures and cultural discourses of their time. It rejects the idea that literature is separate from politics and argues that literary texts both reflect and participate in the power relations of their society.
| Concept | Explanation | Relevant Play |
|---|---|---|
| Subversion and containment | Literary texts may appear to subvert authority but ultimately contain that subversion, reinforcing the status quo | The Taming of the Shrew — Kate's rebellion is "contained" by her submission; or is it? |
| Power and surveillance | Authority operates through watching, knowing, and controlling — not just through force | Measure for Measure — the Duke as a figure of surveillance who watches, tests, and judges from behind a disguise |
| The politics of representation | How a text represents power tells us about the power structures of the society that produced it | Othello — the representation of Venice as a cosmopolitan but racist society reflects Jacobean England's own contradictions |
AO5 Application: Stephen Greenblatt (Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 1980) argues that Renaissance identity was not fixed but "fashioned" — constructed through performance, rhetoric, and social positioning. This is directly applicable to Othello (who "fashions" himself through narrative), Iago (who fashions multiple identities for different audiences), and Katherine (who is "re-fashioned" by Petruchio's taming).
Psychoanalytic criticism reads literary texts through the lens of psychological theory — typically Freudian or post-Freudian. Key concepts:
| Concept | Explanation | Application |
|---|---|---|
| The unconscious | Characters (like real people) are driven by desires and fears they do not fully understand | Leontes' sudden jealousy may express unconscious anxieties that have no rational cause |
| Repression | Socially unacceptable desires are pushed into the unconscious but emerge in disguised forms | Angelo's desire for Isabella — long-repressed sexuality erupting through the persona of puritanical authority |
| Projection | Attributing one's own unacceptable feelings to another person | Leontes projects his own sexual guilt onto Hermione; Othello may project his own insecurities onto Desdemona |
| The Oedipal complex | The child's desire for the opposite-sex parent and rivalry with the same-sex parent | Some critics read Hamlet through this lens; less directly applicable to the set plays but useful for understanding parent-child dynamics |
Stanley Cavell (Disowning Knowledge, 1987) reads The Winter's Tale through the lens of philosophical scepticism: Leontes' jealousy expresses the fundamental impossibility of knowing another person's mind. His jealousy is not about evidence (there is no evidence) but about the gap between what he can see and what he can know.
Janet Adelman (Suffocating Mothers, 1992) argues that Shakespeare's plays are haunted by anxieties about maternal power — the mother's body is both desired and feared, and male characters' attempts to control women reflect deep psychological anxieties about dependence and autonomy.
Performance criticism reads Shakespeare's plays as scripts for performance rather than literary texts for private reading. It asks: how does this moment work on stage? What choices do actors and directors make? How do different performances create different meanings?
| Question | Why It Matters |
|---|---|
| How is Kate's final speech delivered? | Sincere, ironic, exhausted, knowing, forced — each delivery creates a fundamentally different meaning |
| Does Isabella take the Duke's hand? | The text gives no stage direction — her silence can be played as acceptance, refusal, shock, or uncertainty |
| How is Othello's race represented? | Historically played by white actors in blackface; modern productions cast black actors, raising different questions about the play's racial politics |
| Is Hermione's statue a genuine miracle? | Productions that emphasise the miraculous create a different meaning from those that show Hermione has been alive and in hiding |
AO5 Application: Performance criticism is particularly useful when the text is ambiguous — when Shakespeare provides no stage direction and the meaning depends on how the moment is played. Referencing specific productions (e.g., "In Iqbal Khan's 2015 RSC production, Othello's final speech was played as a public performance for the Venetians, reinforcing Leavis's argument about self-dramatisation") demonstrates sophisticated engagement with interpretation.
Exam Tip: The most effective use of AO5 is to generate genuine analytical alternatives — moments where you say, "A feminist reading would foreground X, while a psychoanalytic reading would emphasise Y, and I would argue that the text supports both because Z." This demonstrates independent thinking, engagement with multiple perspectives, and confident command of the text.
To see how perspectives do analytical work, apply three of them to Iago's most quoted self-description:
"I am not what I am." (Othello, 1.1.65)
A character critic in the Bradley tradition reads this as the key to Iago's psychology — a man defined by the gap between his shown self and his true self, the consummate dissembler. A new historicist, following Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning, reads the same line as an extreme instance of a period-wide phenomenon: Renaissance identity as something "fashioned" through performance and rhetoric rather than fixed, so that Iago is not an aberration but the dark logic of his culture's theatricality of selfhood. A theological/intertextual reading hears the line invert God's self-naming in Exodus ("I am that I am"), casting Iago as a satanic anti-God whose very being is negation — a reading that resonates with Coleridge's sense of his "motiveless malignity." None of these readings is "the answer"; each directs attention to something different — psychology, history, metaphysics — and the strongest essays move between them, using the friction to deepen analysis. That is the difference between listing critics and thinking with them.
Exam Tip: When you bring a second critic in, make sure they pull the analysis in a genuinely different direction. Two critics who say the same thing add nothing. Bradley and Leavis on Othello, or Dusinberre and McLuskie on gender, are valuable precisely because they disagree — the disagreement is the analytical engine.
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