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.

A very Shakespeare Themed day

Yesterday was a very Shakespeare themed day. Which isn't surprising, considering I started my Shakespeare class this semester and so far it rocks. We're reading Shakespeare's later plays, beginning with Twelfth Night (which is my favorite Shakespearean Comedy ever) and yesterday I decided I wanted to watch the movie. Not knowing if there was one, I looked on YouTube first...and found the whole version of the 1996 version with Toby Smith as Duke Orsino, Helen Bonham Carter as Countess Olivia, Imogen Stubbs as Viola/Cesario, ben Kingsley as Feste and Imelda Staunton as Maria. Let me tell you, Shakespeare is awesome on his own, but put together a bunch of actors who really know how to do what they do, set the play in this Victorian-esque background, and then let what you will happen, it becomes a beautiful, beautiful thing.

After I finished my movie, I went to dinner, then read a book on the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem and how it could be considered a colonial extension of Europe (this was an interesting direction for me to read in because I have Post-Colonial Lit this semester too) and after that went to go find the posse and watch a movie. We ended up watching Shakespeare in Love (another excellent film) which, as many learned men know, has in it a lot of references to Twelfth Night and, again, a lot of actors who know very well what they are about.

After that we watched Twilight, which, after following so much Shakespeare, fell farther and flatter on its face than it probably would have done if we had watched something a little less awesome beforehand. We talked through the whole movie and related why it was terrible and what was wrong with the characters (We have a theory now that Edward should be called nothing but Eddy C for the sake of his mind-altering coolness, and all were agreed that Bella is a Mary Sue.) and it was fun.

But I was still thinking alot about Shakespeare when I went to bed, including one of the discussion questions our professor is having us ruminate on, the idea of whether Cesario is a real person or not. If you haven't read Twelfth Night, here's a little summary for you: A pair of twins, brother and sister, are separated during a storm. One of them, Viola, washes up on a beach in a foriegn country. She dresses like a man to keep her options open and her safety in check, goes to serve the local duke, and ends up trying to woo the woman he's in love with for him. She falls in love with Viola/Cesario instead. Meanwhile, her brother, Sebastian, has also come ashore, and is looking for the Duke to also go into service with him. Sebastian is confused for Viola, vice-versa, and then it all seems to work out at the end. (If you want a more detailed plot summary, try CliffNotes.)

So Olivia falls in love with Cesario. Orsino finds a bosom buddy in Cesario. Sir Andrew and Sir Toby have a bone to pick with Cesario. But Cesario isn't really a person -- he's a constructed identity. I realized after class on Thursday that Cesario sounds a lot like Caesarion (as in Caesarion birth or C-section) and his role in the play bears a lot on that. His birth or creation is forced, just like a c-section is, and it is done out of necessity, when all the other options are given up on.

And it occured to me (because I am self centered, and the chain of events lent itself to it) that Cesario and Audemande have something in common. Neither one of them becomes who they are, essentially, until they are removed to this far, foriegn place. Cesario offers himself to the duke as a performer because he doesn't have any other talents. Audemande culitvates her skill at telling stories so she becomes useful to Baldwin and Sybilla. If Viola had stayed in Messaline, she never would have married Orsino. If Aude had stayed in Poitou, she never would have met and befriended all the people that she does. Both women occupy traditionally male places, as public members of a ruling party's retinue, and both are very close to their soveriegns. Is Audemande a constructed identity, too, then? I say no, because she remains who she is throughout the story. She adapts her manners and her skills to her situation, but she doesn't usurp who she is for the sake of the people who control her life.

That's about where the comparisions end (Spoiler for the end of Song of a Peacebringer -- Aude and Baldwin do NOT get hitched.) but it was still really interesting to me. Here's a play I really enjoy watching and a story I really enjoy writing, and they're remarkably similiar.

So that was my very shakespeare themed day. I hope everyone else's Friday was just as fun and exciting.