So this quarter I did something unexpected and took a Shakspeare class. I loved it so much. We read 13 different plays in around 11 weeks. It was insane and incredible. I learned so much about Shakespeare and the period. I dove deep into the meanings of each play and grasped a deeper understanding of what they meant. Over the next few years, I hope to devour everything Shakespeare ever wrote. Shakespeare wrote around 38 distinct works.
Out of everything we read this quarter, my favorite one by far has to be Othello. There is just something about this beautiful piece. I read this book in four different formats or versions. So I have read it a total of four times now. I don't think I have re-read a classic before.
I don't feel qualified to "review" a peice of shakespeare so I am titling this a book thoughts rather than actual review.
Othello by William Shakespeare:
“The trust, the office I do hold of you
Not only take away, but let your sentence
Even fall upon my life.” Act I, Scene 3.
This is the moment that I fell in love with this play. I have always had a love-hate relationship with Shakespeare. I wasn't able to comprehend his brillance when I was a teenage. This is just a moving play. I find it interesting that throughout this play Shakespeare makes it abundently clear that race is a very important in this play. He explores a rehotoric of "blackness", but with a sort of ironic distance.
Othello, is valiant, honorable, and very much in self control. He is an archetypal hero, one that is extremely ideal in any shakespeare play. He is an African, or something that is refered to as " The Moor", which is a name that is applied to the Arab and Berber people of North Africa, who actually inhabited medievil Spain. He is a general in the ventian Army and a Christian of all things. He is essentially the epitome of charaters in my opinion. He has evil forces working against him, and to be honest at points he is uncharateristiclly gullible. He is a man with a double nature and often a man of intense self doubt.
He is married to the beautiful and lovely Desdemona, who is the daughter of a noble man. She is a young Venetian debutante. She is also white, completely infatuated, head over heals in love, with Othello.She has a calm dignity about her. She is ofthen the voice of reason in the play. She has very charming qaulities about her. She is completely and utterly unimpressed by the rich, noble men that have prusede her. She is going to marry whom she wishes. She is an adorable character, bold, and also possitive.
She has guts, she thumbs her nose at tradition, and decides to enter into an interacal marraige of which is frowned upon in her time period. I believe at this moment Shakespeare is challenging the typical 16th centery attitudes that surronded sex, gender, and race.
That I did love the Moor to live with him
My downright violence and storm of fortunes
May trumpet to the world. My heart's subdued
Even to the very quality of my lord.
I saw Othello's visage in his mind,
And to his honor and his valiant parts
Did I my soul and fortunes consecrate.
So that, dear lords, if I be left behind,
A moth of peace, and he go to the war,
The rites for which I love him are bereft me
And I a heavy interim shall support
By his dear absence. Let me go with him. (1.3.283-294)
Her love Othello will eventually break her sprit but not her will. I personally feel like Desdemona is really in love with the idea of Othello, rather than the actual man. Desdemona, is a bit niave, she doesn't really understand how marital relationships work. She has no idea how Othello feels, and how his actions throughout the play. She is so inexperienced that at one point she asks Emilia if women can even chat on their husband. She doesn't realize that Othello in this very moment believes that she is being unfaithful. She just believes the idea is unthinkable. Even with the fact that Othello physically and verbally abuses her, by slapping her and calling her a whore in public. She is so extremely passive that she doesn't even fight Othello when he strangles her, she even blames her self with her dying breath. In my opinion she is truly the victim in this tragedy.
The difference between the four versions I read:
Goodreads Description:
In Othello, Shakespeare creates a powerful drama of a marriage that begins with fascination (between the exotic Moor Othello and the Venetian lady Desdemona), with elopement, and with intense mutual devotion and that ends precipitately with jealous rage and violent deaths.
He sets this story in the romantic world of the Mediterranean, moving the action from Venice to the island of Cyprus and giving it an even more exotic coloring with stories of Othello's African past. Shakespeare builds so many differences into his hero and heroine—differences of race, of age, of cultural background—that one should not, perhaps, be surprised that the marriage ends disastrously. But most people who see or read the play feel that the love that the play presents between Othello and Desdemona is so strong that it would have overcome all these differences were it not for the words and actions of Othello's standard-bearer, Iago, who hates Othello and sets out to destroy him by destroying his love for Desdemona.
As Othello succumbs to Iago's insinuations that Desdemona is unfaithful, fascination—which dominates the early acts of the play—turns to horror, especially for the audience. We are confronted by spectacles of a generous and trusting Othello in the grip of Iago's schemes; of an innocent Desdemona, who has given herself up entirely to her love for Othello only to be subjected to his horrifying verbal and physical assaults, the outcome of Othello's mistaken convictions about her faithlessness
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