This work expands upon recent historical analysis of Shakespeare's 'Othello', which has foregrounded issues of race, colonialism, and feminism, in order to show how the discourse of religion might ...affect our understanding of this play. It specifically looks at how the discourse of Catholicism, itself a highly contested topic in Shakespeare's world, affects our understanding of Desdemona, whom the play so directly compares to perhaps the most divisive and controversial figure of the entire 'Reformation' period, Mary the Mother of God. Explaining how this comparison is developed and clarified by Shakespeare, this book explores the difference our interpretation of Desdemona's 'Marian' dimension might make to critical understanding of the tragedy of 'Othello'.
Including twenty-one groundbreaking chapters that examine one of Shakespeare's most complex tragedies. Othello: Critical Essays explores issues of friendship and fealty, love and betrayal, race and ...gender issues, and much more.
"Kolin's article is a masterful survey and in itself makes the book worthwhile. He is especially comprehensive and even-handed with the most recent era. Anyone undertaking the study of this play should begin here." William Procter Williams, Shakespeare Bulletin
"...unlike many collections of Shakespeare criticism, this volume does not include well-worn essays, but rather new, thought-provoking selections that extend the critical discourse; open up the play's connection to such diverse concepts as feminism, Marxism, new historicism, and semiotics; consider the play's relevance to broad cultural issues; and examine challenging new stagings. . .This title will be the go-to book on the play for scholars and theater practitioners, offering value for both students at the beginning of their Shakespeare study and scholars at an advanced level of study." Choice
"Professor Kolin has given us more than yet another addition to Shakespeareana. This volume of essays is stimulating and sound both in its scholarly conclusinos as well as in its noteworthy considerations of both the critical and the theatrical. These complementary assessments increase its value as a resource to both critics and producers of Shakespeare." Sidney Berger, University of Houston/Houston Shakespeare Festival, Journal of Drama Theory and Criticism
"Put together these essays are complementary rather than competing, the sign of an editor with a wide vision and critical horizon." Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, University of Cape Town, The Shakespeare Newsletter
"In this exceptional collection of essays on Othello, twenty authors range across a vast landscape of critical practice, regularly startling us with insights about this play and performances of it. Where else can one read in side-by-side essays a lucid account of the textual intricacies of the quarto and folio editions of the play and then a compelling study of stage violence, citing actual productions? Roderigo, a dangerous guide for the audience; Iago, a master actor in a metatheatrical allegory; and Desdemona, caught in conflicting matrimonial models, all emerge in astute new critical understanding. Philip Kolin deserves our thanks for initiating and producing this volume that will compel every serious student of Shakespeare to think anew about the joys and terror of this spare and frightening tragedy." David M. Bergeron, University of Kansas
"This is a well-organized, comprehensive, and often innovative account of issues in current Othello criticism. The volume includes a refreshing array of critical and ideological perspectives in essays which are uniformly scholarly and thorough in their treatment of the subject matter. The collection makes clear that while Othello may well be a play for all times, it is especially a play for our times when questions of racial and religious difference and the relation between the private individual and the state beset us with renewed and ever-more urgent intensity." Dympna Callaghan, Syracuse University
"In this fascinating collection, some of today's liveliest and most distinguished Shakespeareans engage with Othello from across a broad spectrum of historical and theoretical perspectives. Along with Kolin's substantial introductory survey of the play's critical and performance history, this book is bound to reinforce Othello's extraordinary current appeal, not just to scholars and students of Shakespeare but to non-academic readers, theatrical audiences and moviegoers as well." Edward Pechter, Concordia
1. Darkness Made Visible: A survey of Othello in Criticism and on Stage Philip C. Kolin 2. The Audience's Role in Othello Hugh Macrae Richmond 3. White Faces, Black-Face" The Production of "Race" in Othello Sujata Iyengar 4. Images of White Identity in Othello Peter Erickson 5. 'Words and Performance": Roderigo and the Mixed Dramaturgy of Race and Gender in Othello John R. Ford 6. The Curse of Cush: Othello's Judaic Ancestry James R. Andreas 7. Relating Things to the State: "The State" and the Subject of Othello Thomas Moisan 8. Venetian Ideology or Transversal Power? Iago's Motives and the Means by which Othello Falls Bryan Reynolds & Joseph Fitzpatrick 9. Othello: Portrait of a Marriage David Bevington 10. "Truly, an Obedient Lady": Desdemona, Emilia, and the Doctrine of Obedience in Othello Sara Deats 11. Morality, Ethics, and the Failure of Love in Othello John Gronbeck-Tedesco 12. Keeping Faith: Water Imagery and Religious Diversity in Othello Clifford Ronan 13. Representing Othello: Early Modern Jury Trials and the Equitable Judgments of Tragedy Nicholas Moschovakis 14. Othello Among the Sonnets James Schiffer 15. The "O" in Othello: Tropes of Damnation and Nothingness Dabiel J. Vitkus 16. Trumpeting and "Seeled" Eyes: A Semiotics of Eyeconography in Othello LaRue Love Sloan 17. "Work on My Medicine": Physiology and Consumption in Othello Mary Lux 18. Reading Othello Backwards Jay L. Halio 19. "The Mystery of the Early Othello Texts" Scott McMillin 20. "My Cue to Fight": Stage Violence in Othello Francis X. Kuhn 21. An Interview with Kent Thompson, Artistic Director of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival Philip C. Kolin
Philip Kolin is Professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. He is the series editor of the Shakespeare Criticism series.
Recently, Global Shakespeare critics have begun to situate Shakespeare within a wide network of cultural exchange.1 This “global turn” expands the scope of New Historicist scholarship, in which ...Shakespeare is often read as a tool of nationalist and imperialist projects. Within this field of Global Shakespeare studies, however, certain approaches fall back on the historicist tendency to privilege nationalist narratives wherein Shakespeare stands in for Western cultural dominance, seen as emanating from the center to the peripheries. Critique from the margins under this model merely reverses the polarity of cultural dominance, reaffirming the authority of the “center” under critique.2 Thus, other critics, recognizing the limitations of this binary approach, have attended to the rhizomatic, multidirectional nature of Shakespeare’s dissemination, which decentralizes and fragments the very cultural authority and hegemonic power Shakespeare is meant to name.3 In response to the notion that Global Shakespeare “perpetuates global inequality...
Folklorists have much to learn from Shakespeare's protoethnographic handling of the storytellers and storytelling he portrays in his plays. One case in point is Othello in which our title protagonist ...disclaims an aptitude for oratory (“Rude I am in my speech, / And little blessed with the soft phrase of peace” 1.3.96-97), a common disclaimer to performance, yet Othello's subsequent storytelling betrays that he is in fact a skilled narrator who recounts personal experience with rhetorical prowess and expressive style. Furthermore, despite being an outsider in Venice, Othello enjoys an elevated station due in part to his artful narrative building. We witness the depreciation of his status as a master narrator, however, when Iago takes over the storytelling ethos of the play with whispers, innuendo, and veiled aspersions. Once Iago's deceptions fully bloom, there is, in the end, no accommodation for Othello's lofty personal narratives. Tracking both how Othello uses personal narrative to construct and present a coherent self, and how Iago deploys equally virtuosic verbal skill to dissolve Othello's persona and narrative authority, reminds us of the fictive nature of narrative, its variable power to build and destroy, and the competition inherent in the discursive construction of social realities.
When a Shakespearean play (re)presented anywhere either in opera or theatre or film or any other mode of performance, it needs to address the social and ideological concern of that public if the ...performance attempts to anything more than of historical interest. This presentation may uphold or subvert in order to make it relevant to new audiences. Through the close examination of adaptation both from Europe and India, a greater degree of transculturation is to be found in those media in which a number of semiotic codes are simultaneously in operation, such as in theatrical, cinematic or musico-dramatic performances, where verbal, visual and musical codes come together. As Bakhtin and Sartre argue from their different theoretical premises, a work of art is always addressed to some kind of reader or audience has in mind, and even the most individual minded adapter would have to place his work in a socio-cultural matrix, so some kind of transculturation is bound to happen in the process of adaptation.Keywords: Different Othello(s), Translation, Adaptation, Acculturation, Transculturation.
Disbelief in Othello Engler, Balz
The AnaChronist,
07/2018, Letnik:
18, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Belief and disbelief play an important role in Othello: between the figures and between the action and the audience. The focus here is on audience reactions. They are notoriously difficult to ...determine as they are poorly documented. Two general factors apart from historical evidence are used here to sketch them: the difference between reading and attending a performance, and the generic frames suggested by the play: comedy, tragedy and, in Shakespeare’s own time, the morality play. Audiences would easily get confused. It may be surprising, then, that Othello is the Shakespeare play where the most violent audience reactions are documented. It may be the very confusion produced by it that is responsible for them.
Through a system of births, parentage, bloodline, and marriage, the family emerges as a kind of affective and identificatory field where female and male figures play constructed and defined roles ...upholding both familial and national stability. Those who defy the dominant ideology of patriarchal authority are punished by being disowned by the representatives of the masculine ideology which consolidates itself by castrating/disowning the opposing forces/voices. Lawrence Stone points out that parent-child relations were remote and formal, singularly lacking in affective bonds and governed solely by a paternal authoritarianism through which the "husband and father lorded it over his wife and children with the quasi-authority of a despot" (The Crisis of the Aristocracy 371). As we will see, Shakespeare's Othello (1604) and Romeo and Juliet (1595) comment on the fatherly domination over their children, a domination that is expressed through Brabantio's and Capulet's disowning of their daughters.
Othello, Original Practices Conkie, Rob
Critical survey (Oxford, England),
06/2016, Letnik:
28, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This photographic essay documents an original-ish practices staged reading of Shakespeare’s Othello. The essay argues that such productions, in their rough approximation of early modern roughness, ...potentially offer a critique of – at the least an alternative to – modern productions of Shakespeare that are rehearsed for minute nuance and psychological detail. Moreover, this style of production, the essay further argues, this embracing of what Jeremy Lopez has called early modern drama’s ‘potential to be ridiculous or inefficient or incompetent’, has the potential to unearth aspects of Shakespeare’s plays that might be elided or eschewed by more polished and normative contemporary productions.
Despite twenty-first century research advances regarding the role of Islam in Shakespeare’s plays, questions remain concerning the extent of William Shakespeare’s knowledge of Muslim culture and his ...use of that knowledge in writing Othello. I suggest that the playwright had access to numerous sources that informed his depiction of Othello as a man divided between Christian faith and Islamic duty, a division which resulted in the Moor’s destruction. Sharia, a code of moral and legal conduct for Muslims based on the Qur’an’s teachings, appears to be a guiding force in Othello’s ultimate quest for honor. The advance of the Ottoman Empire into Europe with the threat of conquest and forced conversion to Islam was a source of fascination and fear to Elizabethan audiences. Yet, as knowledge increased, so did tolerance to a certain degree. But the defining line between Christian and Muslim remained a firm one that could not be breached without risking the loss of personal identity and spiritual sanctity. Denizens of the Middle East and followers of the Islamic faith, as well as travel encounters between eastern and western cultures, influenced Shakespeare’s treatment of this theme. His play Othello is possibly the only drama of this time period to feature a Moor protagonist who wavers between Christian and Muslim beliefs. To better understand the impetus for Othello’s murder of his wife, the influence of Islamic culture is considered, and in particular, the system of Sharia that governs social, political, and religious conventions of Muslim life, as well as Othello’s conflicting loyalties between Islam as the religion of his youth, and Christianity, the faith to which he had been converted. From Act I celebrating his marriage through Act V recording his death, Othello is overshadowed by fears of who he really is—uncertainty bred of his conversion to Christian faith and his potential to revert to Islamic duty. Without indicating Sharia directly, Shakespeare hints at its subtle influence as Othello struggles between two faiths and two theologies. In killing Desdemona and orchestrating Michael Cassio’s death in response to their alleged adultery, Othello obeys the Old Testament injunction for personal sanctification. But in reverting to Muslim beliefs, he attempts to follow potential Sharia influence to reclaim personal and societal honor.
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