I’m starting in on the Othello criticism now, but it’s difficult to get into. Possibly my reading comprehension skills are not amazing after all. Possibly I didn’t connect as a reader with the play. It’s a very different kind of play; domestic rather than political, the relationships of its characters carry no consequences beyond the characters themselves. Othello’s suicide may put Venice in a difficult spot as far as finding a new general, but no villages are going to get burnt and no innocents are going to die and no property is going to change hands and no loyal subjects are going to feel a change in their daily lives.

Criticisms I’ve read so far also point out that Othello keeps the closest of Shakespeare’s plays to the Aristotelian unities of action, place, and time; that it has one of the smallest casts of Shakespeare’s plays; that Othello is the most romantic hero of the plays; that if Hamlet and Othello switched situations, there wouldn’t be plays; and what I’ve mentioned above, that it is only briefly political. The lines about the Turkish fleet can easily be cut.

For some reason, it also seems that this edition’s writers generalize less and quote more lines and phrases from the play than writers did for Macbeth and Henry IV, indicating a closer engagement with the text. In my own readings, I’m taking the quotes for granted instead of remembering them in the general context of the play. Then again, I’ve read Macbeth several times in a classroom setting and Othello only once on my own, and that probably has a lot to do with it.

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.