Mister Shakespeare

For those of you who don't already know, one of the English Classes I'm taking this semester is Shakespeare. So far, we've plowed through Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and latest, Othello. Now I have to say, of the plays so far I'm two for four on enjoying reading them. (Measure for Measure, while an intense play with lots of great stuff to discuss about hypocrisy and the nature of power, didn't quite do it for me, and Troilus and Cressida ends poorly.)

So in the spirit of plays I actually enjoy, I watched the 1995 Fishburne/Branagh version of Othello (SO good!) and then played around a little with Wordle. (If you haven't tried it yet, stay away! It will eat your life.)

So, here's the full text of Othello:

Hamlet, because I felt like it and it turned out well...
And King Lear. We're reading that next! I'm not excited so much for the story but that I've read it once before, in high school. I remember disliking it then.

I think I enjoyed Othello for what some might consider a strange reason -- We started reading some of it in my Post Colonial Lit class, which gets more face-time on this blog than Shakespeare does, probably because it's po-co, and it wants to make me feel bad for letting my literary tradition disenfranchise it for so many years. Mea culpa. In one of the books we read for Po-Co, Season of Migration to the North, by Talib Salih, one of the main characters, Mustapha, references Othello after one of his lovers asks him where he's from in Africa, since he doesn't quite look Arab and he doesn't quite look African (He's Sudanese.) Here's an excerpt from my latest paper for Po-Co, addressing Salman Rushdie's phrase about the empire writing back --

“The Colonized world,” Frantz Fanon writes in his 1963 book The Wretched of the Earth, “is a world divided in two. The dividing line…is represented by barracks and police stations…” This division Fanon speaks of is also evident in our Empire model, divided into Imperial Center and Periphery. (We can also designate this as “Everything that belongs to the Empire but isn’t the home country.”)

However, if we introduce into this model a group of people who are neither Central or Peripheral, the binary is undermined and proven useless for the purpose it was designed for, to separate and legitimize Central power. Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso SeaSeason of Migration to the North both give us characters who exist in this neither-nor group; Rhys’ Antoinette is born of European parentage but is culturally a black Islander, and Salih’s Narrator and Mustapha are born Sudanese but are educated in the European fashion. In the case of Antoinette, these differing identities drive her to insanity, forcing her into an identity that can be compatible with the Center-Periphery model as a crazy Islander, the ultimate expression for the Center of how backwards and Other the Periphery is.

Salih takes a somewhat different approach with Mustapha Sa’eed and his unnamed narrator. While Antoinette goes insane trying to satisfy both identities, Periphery and Center, Mustapha exploits the created identity assigned to the Periphery by exposing women to so much of it they realize how false it really is. Bringing the created Periphery into such close contact with the Center and exposing it as creation drives the Center into insanity, leading two women Mustapha seduced into killing themselves after they understand the truth. Salih’s Mustapha makes two comments about this collision, invoking Shakespeare’s tragic hero Othello to express himself. In the first, he says that “I am Othello – I am a lie” but in the second, later on in the book, he says “I am not Othello – Othello was a lie.” The first comment expresses Mustapha’s acceptance of the created Peripheral identity, and the denial of any true Native identity; the second, however, is his acknowledgment of the created nature of the Peripheral and his assertion that he has no obligation to be part of that creation.