Abstract

in 1693 thomas rymer, a barrister by education but critic by profession, published A Short View of Tragedy, a tract which still deserves attention mainly because, nearly a century before thomas Warton’s History of English Poetry, it provides the first approach to a history of western literature. What shocked polite society at the time, however, was its savage attack on shakespeare’s Othello and on the playwright himself: the sixty pages devoted to a scene-by-scene analysis of the tragedy reveal an unusually arrogant attitude of scathing censure and sarcasm. appealing to the reader’s common sense and in close adherence to french formalist theory, rymer criticises the play for being “full of improbabilities”, with an “unsubstantial” plot, unnatural characters, vulgar, bombastic language, and utter disregard for the principles of poetic justice, eliciting not pity and fear but horror and disgust. he ends by pouring scorn on the role that such an insignificant item as a handkerchief performs in a play that would be more appropriately entitled The Tragedy of the Handkerchief, thus reiterating his previous point that the moral of the play, “a Bloody farce, without salt or savour”, was that wives should “look well to their linen”. savaging Othello, which rymer had once defined the “choicest” of shakespeare’s plays, was tantamount to destroying shakespeare himself. What could have lain at the origin of such a scathing attack? it might be that rymer’s “murderous” criticism against the acknowledged father of english drama was the unconscious repetition, on a literary level, of a tragedy involving rymer’s own family, when his elder brother had betrayed their father by bringing a charge against him, as a result of which the unfortunate man was hanged, drawn, and quartered