I cannot overestimate the value of actually seeing productions of the plays. Many of the difficult bits work themselves out nicely when actors are speaking the lines and moving on the stage or set, when scene changes are apparent, when bit parts are played by different actors and thus are distinguishable.

Particularly, seeing the play clarified some of Iago’s movements in Othello: Is he on stage or off, behind a curtain or visible? One can look back in the text to check, but in performance it’s just easier to tell without breaking the action. Monologues are easier to distinguish, too.

Returning to Hamlet, after only reading the play I didn’t realize that Osric was supposed to be buffoonish. (He’s cut out of the performance I’ve seen most often.) The lines and some stage directions are there, of course, but Branagh’s Hamlet at least made the whole scene a physical joke, with Osric perpetually trying to stay out of Hamlet’s way and Hamlet perpetually getting in Osric’s way to needle him by forcing ever-more-awkward obeisances.

But maybe it just makes more sense to me, and isn’t a big deal to others. I’m a visual person.

I am finally settling down with Othello. I don’t know why I kept putting off this particular play, but I didn’t read it when it was assigned in class and I haven’t read it since then, even though I’ve meant to. I’m now halfway through a three-day weekend and I find myself with a nice, Othello-shaped block of time, so here we are.

At the library today I picked up Modern Critical Interpretations: Othello, edited by our old friend Bloom, along with two interesting titles: Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays by Shakespeare (the linked book is a reissue with an additional essay) by Stanley Cavell and Elizabethan Psychology and Shakespeare’s Plays by Ruth Leila Anderson. Speaking of Bloom, I’m sure I have his tome Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human somewhere, but I haven’t found it yet. Maybe it’s in one of the remaining boxes.

At any rate, the plan is to read the text of Othello and watch the Laurence Fishburne movie version … assuming one of the above titles doesn’t catch my interest first.

I just finished chapter 13, “A Gentleman of Means”, in Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life.

First, I still have amazingly high reading comprehension while nearly asleep — I blame procrastination and LITR 416. If one can read and understand literary theory in that state, one can read and understand anything.

Second, who owned New Place in Stratford and when and how the building was changed and what evidence supports these conclusions is all mind-numbingly dull. I’m sure the information is worthwhile, but — wow. I should have focused my reading comprehension skills on the book’s title.

Actually, the other chapters have been interesting, but nothing if not thorough. The book is describing exactly what I wanted to know, and that is Shakespeare’s life; through no fault of the writer does biography not dwell on literary criticism.