Othello

En este trabajo se analizará en Shakespeare, sobre todo a partir de King Lear, aquellos rasgos que lo acercan al movimiento barroco -y su posible explicación desde el contexto histórico-, por comparación con los dramaturgos españoles y a partir de la conceptualización de Emilio Carilla sobre el estilo artístico. Desde Carilla, se prestará atención especialmente al desengaño, la quinta característica que el crítico argentino reconoce en el movimiento, para explicar cómo se manifiesta el "pesimismo" shakesperiano en las grandes tragedias del dramaturgo isabelino: "Hamlet", "Othello", "Macbeth" y, especialmente, "King Lear".

This paper has been published in a somewhat different form in Meg Harris Williams' "Aesthetic Conflict  and its Clinical Relevance." - Karnac, 2018.

It outlines the various "knife-edge" defenses the infant mind must struggle with in the face of the emotional impact of the mother's beauty, particularly when there is no absolute guarantee of this being reciprocated.
An attempt is made to disambiguate this vulnerability from those which call into play defenses against (Kleinian) unconscious envy.
Both serve to protect the internal good/beautiful mother from destruction, in the infant mind.
One aspect of Narcissism, not usually emphasized, is the lack of conscious awareness of one's rejection of love and beauty when offered by another.
Instead, the narcissist remains almost totally merely conscious of his or her own feelings of being rejected, especially aesthetically.

This paper examines the issue of race in Shakespeare’s Othello. It attempts to show that race is a very important issue raised by Shakespeare in the play in his eagerness to highlight the racial problems confronting Europe in the seventeenth century. In this play he attempts to expose the racial prejudice that exists in the Venetian society in particular and Europe in general. He also attempts to subvert the European feelings of racial superiority against the blacks in particular and people of other races in general. He sets out to do this by making a black man (Othello) marry a white woman (Desdemona) of an aristocratic extraction against the will and wish of her father. This inter-racial marriage may not in reality be possible in the seventeenth century, but all the same Shakespeare contrived it to be so, possibly as a way of foregrounding future change in European attitudes toward other races. The paper also looks at how individual citizens of a city-state like Venice can constit...

Though Iago prides himself in weaving a web of deceit, he does not deserve all the blame for the tragedy that ensues. Cassio, Emilia, Desdemona and Othello may not be as calculating and malicious, but they should be held more accountable for their actions. In order to understand why characters find it so compelling to blame Iago, I compare him and his scheming to Don John’s in Much Ado About Nothing. In both plays, the villainous character is blamed for the tragedy, when on closer examination, each play has several characters who enable the villain and greatly contribute to their own destruction.
This paper will address the difference between villainy—setting out to intentionally harm someone, and enjoying the process and result—and characters whose flaws allow the villain to manipulate them. What is special about Iago is that he finds four distinct character types, flaws you could say, and uses them to his advantage. He finds a character who is ignorant of his larger intent (Emilia), who is naive and ambitious (Cassio), who will not defend herself (Desdemona), and whose judgment is clouded (Othello). In finding these four character types, the villain is able to achieve the destruction he desires. Since he is the villain of the story, characters blame him without further examining their own role in becoming puppets to his nefarious schemes. I argue that there are three reasons why Iago is blamed: he is a villain, a manipulator, and a scapegoat.

La traduction en français par Antoine La Place d’un choix de drames de William Shakespeare a permis de mettre sur le devant de la scène les grands héros de son théâtre. Parmi ceux-ci, Othello, le More de Venise, va inspirer plusieurs dramaturges au tournant des Lumières : Butini, Ducis et Vigny, via le trio formé par Radet, Barré et Desfontaines. Via l’analyse de leurs œuvres, ce sont les formes et enjeux de la représentation du Héros noir sur la scène française dont il va être ici question.

Tracing connections between research methodologies and classroom practices in the study of Shakespeare and race, this essay argues for the importance of offering students’ opportunities to build and demonstrate expertise. The essay discusses the use of a glossary exercise in classes on race and early modern literature, and the learning objectives for such courses. Finally, the essay offers a critique of such courses as commonly structured and suggestions for new directions in teaching race in literature from this period.

Popular English travel guides from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries asserted that women who wandered too far afield were invariably suspicious, dishonest, and unchaste. As the essays in Travel and Travail reveal, however, early modern women did travel, often quite extensively, with no diminution of their moral fiber. Female travelers were also frequently represented on the English stage and in other creative works, both as a reproach to the ban on female travel and as a reflection of historical women’s travel, whether intentional or not.

Travel and Travail conclusively refutes the notion of female travel in the early modern era as “an absent presence.” The first part of the volume offers analyses of female travelers (often recently widowed or accompanied by their husbands), the practicalities of female travel, and how women were thought to experience foreign places. The second part turns to literature, including discussions of roving women in Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, and Thomas Heywood. Whether historical actors or fictional characters, women figured in the wider world of the global Renaissance, not simply in the hearth and home

In this essay, the magical handkerchief given by Othello to his wife Desdemona will be discussed through a deconstructive approach. The handkerchief in 'Othello' is the only prop that acts as a catalyst to increase the turmoil within Othello and Desdemona's marital life. It is the most insignificantly significant inanimate object within the tragedy Iago uses to dominate Othello's mindset. It is further used by Iago as a sign of Desdemona's infidelity. However, the handkerchief in the play is mostly considered only as a prop that supports the ongoing tragedy and is rarely considered as one of the most important aspects of the play that emphasizes the inability of Othello to think logically and rationally about the story of the handkerchief that he narrates to Desdemona.

Iago’s choice of words manipulates the audience by painting a negative image of a character or incident. He describes Othello as an evil moor with an animal-like sex drive that is threatening. Iago describes him as a “moor” (1.1.58) and being a “Barbary horse’ (1.1.111). This is when the play begins and the audience has not known about Othello, but it derives opinion from Iago’s description of the race. Later in the play, the audience learns that, unlike the violent character they expected, Othello is calm and quiet who ignores Roderigo’s insult and does not want conflict. This shows that the power of language Iago applies can manipulate anyone who listens to him.

In his famous handbook on war, written in the context of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, Carl von Clausewitz argues that military contlict is the continuation of politics with other means. To highlight the irresolvable antagonism that will continue to be played out once soldiers have returned from battle, Michel Foucault, in his series of lectures, "Society Must Be Defended", takes this definition a step further to suggest that if war merely continues political power struggles, this is so because power is anchored in the particular relationship of force established in and through war. To claim that politics is the continuation of war by other means implies that the political system merely reinscribes an adversarial relationship of force by sanctioning
and reproducing the disequilibrium of forces manifested in scenes of war, where a combat decides that the day after battle one party will have triumphed over another party. Far from being averted in times of peace, Foucault claims, war should be thought of as presiding over its birth; "indeed the laws of peace are born in the blood and mud of battles". Not, he adds, in some ideal sense of battles and rivalries dreamed up by philosophers and jurists, however, but of "real battles, victories, massacres, and conquests which can be dated and which have their horrific heroes". Not only does confrontation sustain political power even after a concrete war has come to an end. Foucault goes a step further to suggest that law itself "was born in burning towns and ravaged fields. It was born together with the famous innocents who died at break of day."1 The critical metaphors deployed by Foucault in themselves resonate with the poetic language of Shakespearean history plays and yet, by the time Foucault reaches the acme of his argument, we have also - thus my wager - entered the dark logic of Shakespeare's problem plays. War, Foucault concludes, is the "motor behind institutions and order". Even in a world after battle, it continues to persist as a force beneath peace, because "peace itself is a coded war [...] a battle front runs through the whole of society, continuously and permanently, and it is this battlefront that puts us all on one side or the other". There is no such thing as a neutral subject, he adds, because in our social relations "we are all inevitably someone's adversary".

"When Muslim students take up the study of English literature, it is typically for the purpose of improving their English, much in demand in today’s world. While this is no doubt a worthy motivation, a systematic study of literature can bring additional benefits."

Popular English travel guides from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries asserted that women who wandered too far afield were invariably suspicious, dishonest, and unchaste. As the essays in Travel and Travail reveal, however, early modern women did travel, often quite extensively, with no diminution of their moral fiber. Female travelers were also frequently represented on the English stage and in other creative works, both as a reproach to the ban on female travel and as a reflection of historical women’s travel, whether intentional or not. Travel and Travail conclusively refutes the notion of female travel in the early modern era as “an absent presence.” The first part of the volume offers analyses of female travelers (often recently widowed or accompanied by their husbands), the practicalities of female travel, and how women were thought to experience foreign places. The second part turns to literature, including discussions of roving women in Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, and Thomas Heywood. Whether historical actors or fictional characters, women figured in the wider world of the global Renaissance, not simply in the hearth and home. Introduction: Early Modern Women, English Drama, and the Wider World Patricia Akhimie and Bernadette Andrea Part 1. Early Modern Women Travelers: Global and Local Trajectories 1. Desdemona and Mrs. Keeling Richmond Barbour 2. A Stranger Bride: Mariam Khan and the East India Company Karen Robertson 3. Sailing to India: Women, Travel, and Crisis in the Seventeenth Century Amrita Sen 4. Teresa Sampsonia Sherley: Amazon, Traveler, and Consort Carmen Nocentelli 5. The Global Travels of Teresa Sampsonia Sherley’s Carmelite Relic Bernadette Andrea 6. Gender and Travel Discourse: Richard Lassels’s “The Voyage of the Lady Catherine Whetenall from Brussells into Italy” (1650) Patricia Akhimie 7. Advance and Retreat: Reading English Colonial Choreographies of Pocahontas Elisa Oh 8. Lady Anne Clifford’s Way and Aristocratic Women’s Travel Laura Williamson Ambrose Part 2. Early Modern Women and the Globe: Gendered Travel on the English Stage 9. Mapping Women: Place Names and a Woman’s Place Laura Aydelotte 10. Eroticizing Women’s Travel: Desdemona and the Desire for Adventure in Othello Stephanie Chamberlain 11. Desdemona’s Divided Duty: Gender and Courtesy in Othello Michael Slater 12. From Adventure to Danger in the Travels of Desdemona and Miranda Eder Jaramillo 13. Marian Mobility, Black Madonnas, and the Cleopatra Complex Ruben Espinosa 14. Precarious Travail, Gender, and Narration in Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World Dyani Johns Taff 15. Traveling Companions: Shakespeare’s As You Like It and the Book of Ruth Suzanne Tartamella 16. English Women, Romance, and Global Travel in Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West, Part I Gaywyn Moore Afterword: Looking for the Women in Early Modern Travel Writing Mary C. Fuller

Come ci suggeriscono la maggior parte dei testi critici a riguardo, il principale motivo da cui si scatenano i tragici eventi dell'Otello è la gelosia insita nell'animo di Iago, gelosia generalmente riconosciuta nella scelta del Moro di non nominarlo come suo fidato luogotenente, preferendolo a Cassio. E se questo sentimento invece nascondesse qualcosa di più? In questo saggio si analizzerà come, da una prospettiva di lettura diversa, sia plausibile ipotizzare che la gelosia di Iago derivi da un amore latente verso Otello, che non potendosi realizzare concretamente, porterà al famoso finale drammatico.

William Shakespeare was an actor, playwright, and poet often called England's national poet and "Bard of Avon."He is widely regarded as the world's best dramatist and is known for his tragedies. Othello, one of the most famous tragedies by Shakespeare, portraits the story of Othello, the protagonist, and the tragic hero of the story. Othello, a moor, commander of the Venetian army. He is a heroic figure whose "free and open nature" allows Iago, the antagonist, and Othello's ensign, to twist his love for his wife Desdemona into a powerful jealousy. Iago is Shakespeare's greatest villain.Jealousy, manipulation, racism, and domestic abuse are concepts that dominate the human world irrespective of region, race, gender, or class. It is essential to know how modern audiences see or analyze Othello, acknowledge these concepts, and compare the two periods of time.The paper would thus address the effect of these ideas in two different times of history.Thus , bringing light to the thoughts of a modern audience about Othello.

This article considers an ambiguity concerning the stage presentation of Pug, the inept devil-servant of Ben Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass, and explores the implications that ‘complete’ or ‘partial’ costume changes have for how an audience interprets the character, and how this apparent visual ambiguity may have been resolved by cosmetics and/or through the performance of a specific King’s Men actor. The article concludes with a comparison with ‘devilish servants-types’ in Othello and The Changeling, and argues that these three plays articulate early modern insecurities about the servant through an explicit association between the servile and the demonic.

Gherardo Casale argues that the cinematic style crafted by Orson Welles for his productions of Shakespeare’s plays (Macbeth, 1948, Othello, 1950, and Chimes at Midnight, 1965) recreated an actualized poetic language that, through symbolic writing, retains the foundations of Shakespeare’s art. Although made at very different stages of his career and exhibiting diverse cinematic styles, Welles’s filmic adaptations of Shakespeare‐s plays share a peculiarity with many of his other works: an engaging incipit that sets the movie’s tone and mood in a uniquely powerful and assertive fashion, oftentimes deviating from the standard conventions of narration. From Citizen Kane (1941) to Touch of Evil (1958), Mr. Arkadin (1955) to The Trial (1962), Welles could have written an encyclopaedia about the opening sequences in the cinema. This essay closely examines these brief segments of film, and argues that they can provide a great deal of information on Welles’s strategies in adapting the ‘playhouse documents’ that we know as the works of William Shakespeare.

In his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel describes tragedy as a ‘collision’ between opposing notions of the good. Two moral paradigms, each internally consistent, yet each apparently incompatible with the other, struggle ‘to destroy one another in their mutual conflict.’ In Greek tragedy, these ‘two sides’ tend to be represented by a different characters: Antigone vs. Creon; Philoctetes vs. Odysseus; Orestes vs. the Eumenides.  Building on this basic concept of what tragedy is, but departing from Hegel’s sense of Shakespeare’s distinctiveness, I argue here that in Shakespeare’s tragedies, as in those of Seneca, the two sides of the ethical dilemma at the heart of the play’s interest tend to be presented, not as opposing characters, but instead within the psyche of a single individual: the so-called ‘tragic hero.’ They appear as contending moral paradigms, not necessarily each personified: rival imperatives, each grounded in a different emotional impulse. The tension between these two poles is most clearly expressed in the protagonist’s repeated, climactic soliloquies, which show him deciding between irreconcilable courses of action. Moreover, the two value-systems in question tend to be more or less the same across all four of the major tragedies: ‘pity’ vs. ‘ambition’; ‘kindness’ vs. ‘honour’; ‘mercy’ vs. ‘constancy.’ Over the course of their soliloquies, Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, and Lear articulate and expose the incongruity Shakespeare discerns between Christianity and contemporary notions of honour: Christian compassion proves at odds with the desire to subjugate, dominate, and command.

Diese Masterarbeit behandelt die Faszination rund um das Thema Schurkerei im Film und Theater. Anhand von Faktoren wie Identifikation, Emotionalität und Empathie/Sympathie sowie der Analyse der Schurkenfiguren in den Filmen „Thor“, „The Avengers“ und „Suicide Squad“ und in den Werken „Betrayal“ von Harold Pinter und „Macbeth“ und „Othello“ von William Shakespeare zeigt sie auf, was den Begriff der Faszination für den Schurken in (fiktiven) Geschichten ausmacht und welchen Einfluss dies auf das Publikum und seinen Alltag nimmt.

This essay proposes an analysis based on Literary Semiotics in William Shakespeare’s King Lear, Macbeth and Othello. Few studies have been made in this area, not only because Semiotics is a much understudied area of Linguistics, but also due to the complexity of language in Shakespeare’s plays. This paper will begin with a small framework of Semiotics’ pioneers and will discuss the most basic notions of several semioticians (e.g. Saussure, Pierce, Jakobson and Eco). Moreover, the paper will explain how Semiotics and Structuralism were so influential in the development of Literary Theory.
In the tragedies mentioned,  the consistent repetition of several words is noticeable: nothing in King Lear, blood/bloody/bloodier in Macbeth and honest/honesty in Othello. These words have different meanings according to the context in which they are used. The same word can mean the exact opposite or have a sarcastic significance for the audience. A literary analysis is necessary to understand the alteration of meanings in the same word. With it, it is possible to have a better understanding of Shakespeare’s intent.

Keywords: William Shakespeare, Semiotics, Linguistics, Literary Analysis, Literary Theory

This is a reading of Shakespeare’s Othello (1603) as an intellectual play about the ambiguities of self-knowledge. While acknowledging the influence of philosophical scepticism, exemplified primarily by the character of Iago, the chapter focuses on the non-sceptical characters’ fear of doubt as well as on the discord between their beliefs and Iago’s incredulity. A twofold understanding of fear of doubt is proposed: Its passive aspect, exhibited by the female characters in the play, involves radical suppression of doubt before it has reached conscious awareness; the active aspect of fear of doubt, epitomized by the character of Othello, can be described as the inability to tolerate disbelief and uncertainty and the need for a radical resolution. This approach to the play reveals some of the principles behind its paradoxical plausibility and elucidates the differences in its reception as a text and as a theatrical performance.

Key Words: Scepticism, doubt, tolerance of uncertainty, paradoxical plausibility, love, jealousy, Shakespeare, Othello.

In: Framing Fear, Horror and Terror through the Visible and the Invisible. Edited by Joseph Campos II and Kornelia Boczkowska. Oxford, United Kingdom: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2016, pp. 39-64. ISBN 978-1-84888-333-8.

Can there be a more evil villain in all of literature than Iago? Husband kills wife, based on a lie—but not of either. The lie is Iago's alone, and worse yet, the lie culminates a scheme in which Iago does not lift a finger, not even to misplace Desdemona's scarf to trick Othello into mistrusting her, eventually suffocating her in a love turned to jealousy turned to rage turned to ignorance turned to hate: " All my fond love thus do I blow to heaven " (3.3.445).

Shakespeare wrote a tragedy about a black military hero, portrayed in a glowing light in the beginning, in the midst of a Europe that was still killing people over whether or not they believed that wine is the blood of Christ, let alone a man who was from another continent, with entirely different genetic phenotypes, and whose family presumably had a history of not only Islam but a pagan religion. Considering that only a few years later Englishmen in the New World would begin enslaving Africans in mass numbers, Othello is a remarkable example of tolerance.

Many critics approached the racial dimensions and the cultural diversity in Shakespeare's play, which serves the plot and supports Iago's methods to destroy Othello. The ideas presented in Campbell and Neill papers assures that race and culture differences are the main reasons that contribute to the tragedy of Othello. This paper will first discuss the idea of racial consciousness through conquering Othello psychologically and mentality by Iago. Iago plants the idea of race in Othello's mind by using linguistic imperialism and manipulated speeches, as he distinguishes the actions of nature and against nature and the ideas of like and unlike. Secondly, the paper will introduce the references to the Arab, African and the Venetian cultures. The significance of these cultures will be discussed in terms of the character's behaviors and attitudes, the use of language and the handkerchief. This paper will introduce the significance of race and culture in Shakespeare's play through my reading of Campbell (2011) and Neill's (2005) articles.

Racial Injustice in "Othello: The Moor of Venice" Shakespeare's "Othello: The Moor of Venice" opens with Iago and Rodrigo warning Barbantio about "thick lips" and "old black ram" who has stolen his daughter from him and has eloped with her. The scene begins with racial references to Othello portraying how he is typically viewed in the eyes of Venice-as a "black devil." However, Othello is very confident in his speech, manner and actions. Iago's jealousy against Othello leads Iago to believe that since he is black, he does not deserve all the things he gets, therefore he plots to convince Othello that Desdemona is cheating on him. Iago uses Othello's race to make him accept the fact that after all Desdemona is a Venetian too, and his race affects her view of him as well. It is almost a shock to the audience that Othello even gets convinced of this fact, but after a careful reading of the play, one can understand how Othello starts doubting himself. He calls Desdemona as black as his face-an indicator that he has also started viewing himself as everyone else does. With this self-doubt, Othello not only goes to the extent of hating Desdemona as everyone hates his skin but also to the extent of killing her while she is sleeping.

This paper argues that a viewer watching Othello in an unfamiliar language, without subtitles, can more narrowly focus upon the life of things in the play and in adaptations or appropriations of it. Jane Bennett argues in Vibrant Matter for a renewed vital materialism — an emphasis on objects in the world and on attributing agency or actantial ability to them. In Shakespeare's Othello two objects dominate the play: most obviously, the handkerchief; less obviously, because it is sometimes part of the stage, the bed in which Desdemona is smothered. I consider the ways in which a South Indian, a North Indian "Bollywood" and an Italian teen movie adaptation of Othello permit these objects to act expressively. These adaptations (Kaliyattam; Omkara; Iago) indigenize and transform both the handkerchief and the "tragic loading" of the bed, in the last case turning (or returning) the Shakespearean source from tragedy to comedy.

http://www.borrowers.uga.edu/783651/show

Taking an Evolutionary Psychology perspective, this paper investigates Mogilskia and Wade's (2013) Friendship as a Relationship Infiltration Tactic during Human Mate Poaching juxtaposed with Tooby and Cosmodies (1989) methodology and  Tinbergen's Four Whys.

Προσωπική ανάλυση των χαρακτήρων, της πλοκής και άλλων κοινωνικοπολιτιστικών στοιχείων του θεατρικού έργου Οθέλος του Σαίξπηρ, στα πλαίσια του μαθήματος Ιστορία και δραματολογία παγκόσμιου θεάτρου Ι.
Υπεύθυνη καθηγήτρια Γεωργοπούλου Βαρβάρα
Πανεπιστήμιο Πελοποννήσου, Τμήμα Θεατρικών σπουδών.
Έτος συγγραφής 2015.