Selected byChoicemagazine as an Outstanding Academic Title "Speak of me as I am," Othello, the Moor of Venice, bids in the play that bears his name. Yet many have found it impossible to speak of his ...ethnicity with any certainty. What did it mean to be a Moor in the early modern period? In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when England was expanding its reach across the globe, the Moor became a central character on the English stage. InThe Battle of Alcazar,Titus Andronicus,Lust's Dominion, andOthello, the figure of the Moor took definition from multiple geographies, histories, religions, and skin colors. Rather than casting these variables as obstacles to our-and England's-understanding of the Moor's racial and cultural identity, Emily C. Bartels argues that they are what make the Moor so interesting and important in the face of growing globalization, both in the early modern period and in our own. InSpeaking of the Moor, Bartels sets the early modern Moor plays beside contemporaneous texts that embed Moorish figures within England's historical record-Richard Hakluyt'sPrincipal Navigations, Queen Elizabeth's letters proposing the deportation of England's "blackamoors," and John Pory's translation ofThe History and Description of Africa. Her book uncovers the surprising complexity of England's negotiation and accommodation of difference at the end of the Elizabethan era.
Othello in European Culture Bandín Fuertes, Elena; Rayner, Francesca; Campillo Arnaiz, Laura
2022, 2022-05-15, Volume:
3
eBook
This volume argues that a focus on the European reception of Othello represents an important contribution to critical work on the play. The chapters examine non-anglophone translations and ...performances, alternative ways of distinguishing between texts, adaptations and versions, as well as differing perspectives on questions of gender and race.
Othello Evans, Robert C
2015, 2015/01/01, 2015-08-27
eBook
Othello has long been, and remains, one of Shakespeare's most popular works. It is a favourite work of scholars, students, and general readers alike. Perhaps more than any other of Shakespeare's ...tragedies, this one seems to speak most clearly to contemporary readers and audiences, partly because it deals with such pressing modern issues as race, gender, multiculturalism, and the ways love, jealousy, and misunderstanding can affect relations between romantic partners. The play also features Iago, one of Shakespeare's most mesmerizing and puzzling villains. This guide offers students and scholars an introduction to the play's critical and performance history, including notable stage productions and film versions. It includes a keynote chapter outlining major areas of current research on the play and four new critical essays. Finally, a guide to critical, web-based and production-related resources and an annotated bibliography provide a basis for further research.
Literature, which awakens esthetic pleasures in the human soul, has as its theme man and life, and psychology has as its theme sensation, thought, and behavior. In both fields, imagination, the ...importance of the subconscious, the method of association, and similar methods of investigation are used. In the studies of narratives, literature in the broadest sense benefits from psychology in terms of method, and psychology benefits from literature in terms of the effects of the works on the human mind. The main axis of our study is to evaluate folk songs, which are anonymous types of folk literature, on the basis of psychological data within the framework of this relationship. Cases that were the source of each genre in the context of the subject and theme can be accepted as human behavior and artistic reflection of this behavioral model. Since man has existed, he has established his relationship with the environment first with the basic impulses and then with the cultural achievements he has acquired. Jealousy is one of the most important factors that influence these relationships. If we approach folk songs from a thematic point of view, the tragic consequences of the impact of the events caused by pathological jealousy on the community spirit become clearly visible. For this reason, it is necessary to consider the psychological depth of the emotion that had such an impact on a genre and its effects on literary and artistic works previously written or created. Any impulse becomes art, and the phenomenon used in art becomes the name of this impulse. The terminology thus named sets in motion a cycle of analysis of subsequent creations. In this context, the impulse is reflected in Othello’s work; the theme is called a syndrome because of its similarity to real events, and becomes a source for similar situations in subsequent narratives. Since folk songs cannot be isolated from this cycle, they have become the focus of the study. In this sense, pathological jealousy in folk songs was analyzed in the context of the Othello syndrome.
In this volume on Othello, Laurie Maguire examines the use and misuse of language, the play's textual and performance histories and how critics and directors have responded to the language of sexual ...jealousy.
Early film theorist Ricciotto Canudo equated cinema with music because of the Seventh Art’s inherent plasticity; in the 21st century, plasticity extends to the soundtrack. In this article, I explore ...the fusion of cinema with the musical genre of opera. By considering that film is a performative medium, beyond the actors’ agency, I confirm music’s importance in it as part of the structure and style of opera. Unlike Franco Zeffirelli’s adaptation of Verdi’s opera Otello, Orson Welles’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play conforms to Jacques Aumont’s concept of “operatic film” in that it engenders a coexistence of the verbal and the non-verbal, balancing drama and music with a performative intention. However, this film is so musicalized and operatically rendered, especially through its soundtrack, that it exceeds Aumont’s intention and becomes what I call a “cinematic opera”: a film that is operatic in its artificial and ritualistic nature as well as in its well-woven soundtrack of music, sound effects and voice working together in a common musicalized pattern.
Lindsey R. Swindall examines the historical and political context of acclaimed African American actor Paul Robeson's three portrayals of Shakespeare's Othello in the United Kingdom and the United ...States. These performances took place in London in 1930, on Broadway in 1943, and in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1959. All three of the productions, when considered together, provide an intriguing glimpse into Robeson's artistry as well as his political activism.The Politics of Paul Robeson's Othello maintains that Robeson's development into a politically minded artist explicates the broader issue of the role of the African American artist in times of crisis. Robeson (1898-1976) fervently believed that political engagement was an inherent component of the role of the artist in society, and his performances demonstrate this conviction.In the 1930 production, audiences and critics alike confronted the question: Should a black actor play Othello in an otherwise all-white cast? In the 1943 production on Broadway, Robeson consciously used the role as a form for questioning theater segregation both onstage and in the seats. In 1959, after he had become well known for his leftist views and sympathies with Communism, his performance in a major Stratford-upon-Avon production called into question whether audiences could accept onstage an African American who held radical-and increasingly unpopular-political views. Swindall thoughtfully uses Robeson's Othello performances as a collective lens to analyze the actor and activist's political and intellectual development.
This article aims at observing and analyzing two filmic productions ofWilliam
Shakespeare’s Othello. The first, entitled Othello, was directed, produced and starred by
Orson Welles in 1952 andthe ...second, also entitled Othello, was directed by Oliver Parker in
1995. My main interest in studying these two filmic productions is to observe – based on the
notions of theatrical adaptation by Jay Halio (2000), Patrice Pavis (1992), and Allan Dessen
(2002) – how each director constructed the seduction moment that happens in Scene III, Act
III of Shakespeare’s playtext in their filmic productions. The analysis proves that two
different conceptions, separated in time and space, are capable of making Shakespeare’s
timelessness transcend and make the modern spectators aware of the fact that the human
artistic capacity is able to cross unimaginable limits of creativity and transform a great literary
work of art in a great (filmic or theatrical) spectacle.
Full text
Available for:
IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
In Othello (2003) offers both a critique and inadvertent affirmation of racial and colonial hierarchies and a reflection on the postcolonial nation. The film fosters Orientalist sensibilities via a ...fetishisation of ‘otherness’, in order to subvert it. It is a hybrid and ambivalent production in which the characters possess intersectional identities that are always multiple, in line with Hindu philosophy. This hybridity can also be observed in the mixture of traditions on which the film is based, and as such, it serves as a ‘rhizomatic interrelation’. The film shows how Shakespeare's play may provide a meditation on the Indian nation, where issue ssuch as transgressive romance, ostracisation, and gender roles remain unsettled.
Full text
Available for:
NUK, OILJ, SAZU, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
PDF
