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Apr. 1st, 2011 06:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoception36. Othello
Read it aloud until my voice weakened, then just did Othello and Iago aloud. Yes, the best play in the world. Maybe the other three tragedies would rival it if their texts weren't so corrupted and/or overstuffed. No one has ever suspected that Othello's text isn't the director's cut.
It seems at first strange that my own unlucky years have echoed the central anguishes of all four, excepting Lear, but I guess there's only so many ways to be unlucky. And I guess aspects of Lear resonate too, just not the main ones.
I don't accept that Iago's motiveless. Emilia as much as says that someone had Iagoed Iago, egged him on to jealousy. Which may have been deserved (though my sense is that it wasn't), given her cavalier, jesting attitude toward adultery, but the point is it hit him as hearsay. The career grievance combines with it, sure, but the more for the two people keeping him from his rightful place just happening to be the ones said to have put him out of his invisible nest. Iago drives Othello crazy in twenty amazing pages - how long had he been crazy himself?
I think my reading of Romeo and Juliet applies here, too, unexpectedly, and to slightly different effect: the only other marriage exhibited is that of Emilia and Iago, and the only other kinds of amorous interest presented are Roderigo's stalking and Cassio's demi-pimpish exploitation of Bianca. A universe of mockeries of love, of obsessive, self-interested, bitter sex is set up in the supporting casts of both plays. So maybe Othello and Desdemona are peerlessly loving and guileless because that's just them, but maybe their love is worth killing and dying for because, virgins, they don't yet sense it has limits. Maybe Shakespeare is just letting this element in here to toss some more stars into catastrophe - or maybe it's to get us further into Othello's shoes, by making us doubt true love's existence outside of the foolishly high expectations of the uninitiated, by Iagoing us up a bit ourselves. The strangest thing about this play is its complete plausibility, outside of the mechanics of strangulation, even with all the heightened rhetoric and impossible speed and superheroism, superheroineism (1604-style), supervillainy of the leads - Shakespeare has you buying every second of it. I think it's because we're made to face the blatant fact that Iago or even some much stupider imitator could get any of us; even if we haven't been betrayed, we've all been led to fear we were by some accident or other, experienced the horror of how quickly the ground we base our life on can be pulled away, the other horror of how apt we were to believe it had been when it hadn't. We can't even trust ourselves to trust. And we can love more than we love our own life and still not trust there is such a thing.
We're not very safe. But that's a dangerous thing to let ourselves realize.
Read it aloud until my voice weakened, then just did Othello and Iago aloud. Yes, the best play in the world. Maybe the other three tragedies would rival it if their texts weren't so corrupted and/or overstuffed. No one has ever suspected that Othello's text isn't the director's cut.
It seems at first strange that my own unlucky years have echoed the central anguishes of all four, excepting Lear, but I guess there's only so many ways to be unlucky. And I guess aspects of Lear resonate too, just not the main ones.
I don't accept that Iago's motiveless. Emilia as much as says that someone had Iagoed Iago, egged him on to jealousy. Which may have been deserved (though my sense is that it wasn't), given her cavalier, jesting attitude toward adultery, but the point is it hit him as hearsay. The career grievance combines with it, sure, but the more for the two people keeping him from his rightful place just happening to be the ones said to have put him out of his invisible nest. Iago drives Othello crazy in twenty amazing pages - how long had he been crazy himself?
I think my reading of Romeo and Juliet applies here, too, unexpectedly, and to slightly different effect: the only other marriage exhibited is that of Emilia and Iago, and the only other kinds of amorous interest presented are Roderigo's stalking and Cassio's demi-pimpish exploitation of Bianca. A universe of mockeries of love, of obsessive, self-interested, bitter sex is set up in the supporting casts of both plays. So maybe Othello and Desdemona are peerlessly loving and guileless because that's just them, but maybe their love is worth killing and dying for because, virgins, they don't yet sense it has limits. Maybe Shakespeare is just letting this element in here to toss some more stars into catastrophe - or maybe it's to get us further into Othello's shoes, by making us doubt true love's existence outside of the foolishly high expectations of the uninitiated, by Iagoing us up a bit ourselves. The strangest thing about this play is its complete plausibility, outside of the mechanics of strangulation, even with all the heightened rhetoric and impossible speed and superheroism, superheroineism (1604-style), supervillainy of the leads - Shakespeare has you buying every second of it. I think it's because we're made to face the blatant fact that Iago or even some much stupider imitator could get any of us; even if we haven't been betrayed, we've all been led to fear we were by some accident or other, experienced the horror of how quickly the ground we base our life on can be pulled away, the other horror of how apt we were to believe it had been when it hadn't. We can't even trust ourselves to trust. And we can love more than we love our own life and still not trust there is such a thing.
We're not very safe. But that's a dangerous thing to let ourselves realize.
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Date: 2011-04-02 06:01 pm (UTC)