11.3 Othello

Suggestions to help with taking in difficult texts. We started class by discussing strategies for reading Shakespeare.  It is simply a fact that the language is unfamiliar, and that it takes some support to "get" what a play is about, at least until you become familiar with a particular text, or with Shakespeare in general.

• There are lots of "companion" texts, and it is actually a good idea to read the plays with an accompanying "gloss" or aid to interpretation open alongside.
  
• It can also help to read essays about the plays before, during, and after your reading of an individual play.  Scholarly essays address the language, the themes, the structure - just about everything you can imagine, and can give you a heads up in terms of what to look for and how others have interpreted what they see in the play.
  
• We also discussed watching performances of the plays as an accompanyment to reading the play.  Watching a play does not allow time for the close textual analysis that is generally required for writing about a play for literature courses, but it DOES present the plays in the medium they were created for, and is an important part of the study of a play.  It can also help you "get" passages that might not make sense on the page.  It rarely works to "read along" as you watch, since performances select from the text, and oftem move too quickly to follow on the page.

Scene by scene.

We spent the rest of the class doing a kind of read along, in-person spark notes scene by scene analysis for the play.  We got through all 5 acts ( the last act - which is about all action) very quickly.  We noticed parallel themes (in terms of Iago + Othello's jealousy, the notion of heresay in affairs of the heart and affairs of the state) , dramatic irony (when players said/did things which were interpreted in multiple contradictory ways (as when Iago spoke to Cassio about Bianca and Othello interpreted it as about Desdemona), the public versus private performances of feelings and "truth: and character (in terms of what the characters say to one another and as asides to the audience, as well as what is overheard or staged)  the movement between poetry (verse) and prose (the unrhymed sections); the way Shakespeare sets up the themes/characters; the overall movement of focus as we go from scene to scene, and so on.  

The object was that by the end of the class you would have a general feel for what happened, and some of the ideas that were developed.

For next class:

Read: Othello + Chapter 16.

Write: list/develop/identify features of the play as they correspond to 3 or so of the question listed at the end of Chapter 16.  The purpose of this writing is to prepare you to talk, at some length, about how Othello "works."

As I said in class, I will get started on your poetry papers, and if all goes well, they should be returned (and we can discuss them( if not by Thursday, then by the weekend.

I'm excited to hear what you have to say about Othello!