Othello: Anomalies in the Comedy William Shakespeare's tragic play, Othello, boasts a rather limited list of anomalies in both events and personal behavior. In the volume Shakespeare and Tragedy John Bayley explains how the anomaly of the protagonist's behavior leads to the rejection of the critics: In our time more gentlemanly, but also more intellectualized versions of Rymer's disfavor have been expressed by TS Eliot and FR Leavis, who consider and they reject the personality that Othello presents to the outside world, emphasizing that he is not so much a deceived as a self-deceiver, a man presented by Shakespeare as constitutionally incapable of seeing the truth about himself. Thus the detached and ironic vision of the creator contrasts with the tragic and romantic vision that the created being has of himself. (201)But Othello is defended by other critics. In his book Everybody's Shakespeare: Reflections Chiefly on the Tragedies, Maynard Mack defends the Moor as someone who is not necessarily the victim of a psychological deficiency, as some critics claim: What should be particularly noted is that, in essence, Shakespeare invented Iago ; catalog him in his dramatis personae with the single epithet of “bad”; and devoted most of the play's lines and scenes to showing in detail the cunning, malignity, and cruelty of his nature, including the cowardice of his wife's murder. It therefore seems impossible to me to believe, as some recent critics would like us to, that the profound causes of Othello's ruin are to be found in some profound moral or psychological deficiency peculiar to him. (137)A more obvious example of irregularity is found in Iago's behavior. The ancient's abnormal behavior is partly rooted in his misogynism. In "Historical Differences: Misogyny and Othello" Valerie Wayne implicates Iago in sexism. He is one who is almost incapable of having any other perspective on women than a sexist one: Iago's concern that he cannot do what Desdemona asks implies that his contempt of women was sincere and easily produced, while praise requires work and inspiration from a source beyond himself. Its insufficiency is even more surprising because elsewhere in the play Iago appears as a master rhetorician, but as Bloch explains, "the misogynistic writer uses rhetoric as a means of renouncing it and, by extension, woman." (163)And what about epilepsy?