humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare

On Feb 25, 3:34=EF=BF=BDpm, Greg Reynolds wrote:
> I was gonna bring my best girl but it was too cold for her

What a lame excuse. Do you know where her strawberry handkerchief is?

> so I brought my high school buddy who had never seen Shakespeare.

That's what you get for hanging around with high schoolers.

> it is all about the failed loving and never about the successful warring.

Interesting how Shakespeare goes through the entwined themes of love
and war: in Troilus and Cressida, in the midst of a seeming-
neverending war, the fight-weary Greeks lollygag about, and the
Trojans begin to consider returning Helen, while we focus on two young
kids trying on love in the midst of all that jadedness. In Antony and
Cleopatra, an aging warrior is so besotted he loses his abilities as
commander. In Titus Andronicus, a war-weary commander can't seem to
return to civilian life, and sets out blundering (killing his own son)
because of it, and his own "irreligious piety" is repaid several times
over in a cycle of revenge and revenge.

> I always get bogged down in Othello, because it is hard to
> find the character to love and enjoy.

I think there's something to this. But what I find are the
relationships between any two characters that makes this play
interesting... the Othello-Iago dynamic, both as it seems to Othello
and as it seems to Iago. And so on.

> but this is better because you sense then how every character
> could fully trust Iago almost all the time.

That's very interesting. I like when you see two different Iagos --
like Richard III, he shows the audience pure, laughing evil but hides
that hue to everyone else, until the very end.

> Our Emilia is the standout of this staging. This Emilia keeps open the
> question of how tinged is she in the guilt of "unwittingly" providing
> the found handkerchief.

She is sometimes played as being physically intimidated by her
husband; he beats her or it's obvious to the audience that he HAS
beaten her. Do you mean you think she knows the purpose for the
handkerchief's being sought by Iago?

> Our Brabantio looked like he also has a day job as Robert E. Lee.

Funny.

> Our Desdemona was elegant, bejewelled, and ho-hum with her red eye
> liner. Des-light.

After seeing Othello done by five actors in drab unisex costumes
(every actor playing multiple roles) I realized how much the play begs
for Desdemona to be an emblem of beauty and delicacy. It missed a lot
for her not being dressed elegantly.

> Othello was large and powerful. When he is ushering Desdemona to bed
> he sounds like he won't need a Barry White album tonight. When he is
> disciplining Michael Cassio he is James Earl Jones' Vader. Othello is
> bold and magnificent. That is is the typecast, after all. And that is
> the highlight of the evening.

He sounds wonderful. I have yet to see a really GREAT Othello on
stage.

> It seems that the purpose of the trip, the all-important war that
> calls for this larger than life general, WOULD have been the subplot.
> But without one, the characters take over and Iago is bad enough to
> run the show from there.

Idle hands are the devil's workshop, no? Especially hands conditioned
to fight, and hearts set on becoming heroes.

> Othello: "Else, she'll betray more men," as though that is his true
> concern/angle, that he even needs such a pitiful excuse. The "more
> men" would only be Des' future suitors, not people Othello would
> normally protect. (Ever laugh at the wrong parts?)

It doesn't strike me as funny; it strikes me as Othello attempting to
justify his action because he perceives himself as a 'hero.' Heroes to
not act merely out of self-vengeance, they must serve some greater
purpose. It's lame, but he needs something to push him to go through
with it, and he reaches for that.

Thanks for the review. Sounds like a great evening. I miss everything.