The audiobook was good. I got the gist of the story although all the intrigue around the handkerchief had me very confused, for good reason. You're telling me, Othello didn't even really hear what Cassio said about the handkerchief? Lord save me from jumping, no, leaping, actually vaulting to assumptions, ya Rab, ya Allaaaaaah. Yeah ok, I'm dramatic, but am I as dramatic as a man who who had a dream his wife was cheating?
Anyway, the reader for Othello in the audiobook had these really impressive groans that had me actually laughing out loud in the lab. I think I wasn't supposed to laugh.
The Great Courses talked a bit about why Iago did what he did. Theories range from homoerotic jealous rage to unhinged to evil. Another was on why Othello did what he did. Theories ranged from Shakespeare was a racist to Othello was just stupid to Iago trapped him good. The lecturer ascribed to the last one.
I don't know...while we're on the topic of assumptions, I think people are reading wayyyy too much into it. I heard all the explanations along with the evidence and thought, "yeah, no I don't think it's that complicated."
On to the movie. First of all, I enjoyed that the font was Arabic calligraphy reminiscent. That dot in the middle of the O, especially.
So my thoughts on Othello: I was hoping to really sink my teeth into the identity and history of this guy. I wanted to find the clues to what his background and experience was, why a likely Moroccan that was likely Muslim ended up fighting for the Venetians against the Ottoman Empire as an apparently Christian convert.
One of my favorite random Islamic facts is that Jack Sparrow of the Pirates of Caribbean fame was actually based off a real pirate that turned Muslim because the English (King James I actually, for whom Shakespeare was writing) wouldn't pardon him for attacking Venetian ships. Jack Sparrow and his crew went off to Tunis and turned Yusuf Reis and the Muslim pirate bros where the Ottomans let him plunder the English, the Spanish, really whoever he wanted, as a sort of defense system and a cut of the loot.
This all happened in 1606 and onwards and Othello was written in 1603 so I was SURE it was going to be the inverse story or at least something interesting because this was happening back then.
Actually there's not much. I even read the Asimov for this one just to see if he had something more to say and Asimov argued quite convincingly that Shakespeare just needed someone with exotic sexual appeal and hot temper that could be easily explained by genetics. Ok yeah, Edward Said's Orientalism talks about how this was the stereotype for Muslim men before it took shape into the current one.
So just, hunky, violent man of color, check.
In the movie, he's all head bowed, eyes lowered, but with a little smirky cockiness that indicates he knows they need him for their wars.
By the way, he's played by a black actor and Asimov seems to think him being referred to as "thick lips" confirms that he's black. I'm pointing this out because I think Asimov is putting some American racial history on the story. I think I will be maybe guilty of the same in a little. But as I understand it, in that time in England, Shakespeare would not differentiate between races of people who were not white.
Iago. Here's where I may be reading my perspective into the story, whether as a Muslim or as an American. I think, very simply racist. He gives a lot of reasons for why he's doing what he's doing but ultimately, the thing he repeats again and again is, he hates the Moor.
He's weirdly obsessed with the idea of this non-white man sleeping with a white woman. There was a LOT of sex in this book. I don't get any indication that he's interested in Desdemona or Othello for himself. First of all, I don't get the sense he actually really cares about people, not even owning them. But also, he's particularly just incensed that these specific two are getting it on.
"Even now, now, very now, an old black ram is tupping your white ewe."
To me it smacks of Jim Crow South. White men were not lynching black men because they were interested in a specific white woman--it was any white woman.
I really think in the end, Iago's problem with Othello was not just that he promoted someone over him, but that a black man got to lower him in position, that a black man got to be general, but then, worst of all, he got a white woman, MAYBE multiple white women, and MAYBE if he squinted the right way, MAYBE even HIS white woman. (For those who don't know, Iago claims there are rumors that Othello has slept with his wife and he acknowledges he has no idea if it's true but that he's just going to act like it is.)
Also like the Great Courses says, his villainy actually doesn't make a lot of sense and I really think because racism doesn't make sense, it expresses in ways that don't make sense. There is then the question of why his racism is so different from the general racism of his time, and I just think there are shades of racism. There are people who are uncomfortable if a black person gets close and then there's the KKK.
I mean I'm fine with believing he's a creepy, psychotic weirdo, who yes, is sniffing the aforementioned handkerchief while staring into the camera.
I think this play took me to the conclusion I was getting to in Much Ado About Nothing where I was appalled that Don Pedro and Claudio could make accusations, no matter how well-intentioned and get away with it. I don't care that Don Jon was the villain there or that Iago was the villain in this play. Don Pedro, Claudio and here, Othello did not do their due diligence.
I gave all of that Islamic law around infidelity in the Much Ado post, but here I think we can broaden the demand for evidence for infidelity to demanding evidence for everything. Society, whether through law, culture, religion or some other standard protocol, must have a way to establish truth. Humans must be able to have a way to discern reality. It is what prevents a man from smothering his wife in bed at the distant glimpse of a handkerchief, what prevents a mother from letting her child go to a measles party instead of get a vaccine at the behest of a TikTok.
Without a standard protocol for truth verification, very, very quickly society begins to crumple, from the level of a marriage all the way to the national institutes. Othello was a GENERAL. Don Pedro was a PRINCE. They are lucky that a marriage and a couple of lives are all that was sacrificed. What if the Turks had found out that Othello doesn't fact check when it comes to his wife? Othello was not compromised, the whole country was.
We of the fake news era, take heed.
Other notes: I liked the interpretation in the movie that Cassio snuck Othello the dagger to prevent him from being arrested. Othello said he loved Cassio and I think Cassio loved Othello and I'm always a sucker for good friendships.
Asimov has this interpretation of Othello's last words that I thought was interesting. Othello starts the passage by saying he hopes they'll tell his story fairly but then starts to ramble about his past, seemingly to distract from the fact that he's about to kill himself:
And say besides that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by th’ throat the circumcised dog
And smote him thus. (stabs himself)
Asimov wonders if he's telling his own story where he, the once Muslim (Turk) beat Desdemona (Venetian) and defamed the Venetian state as a result. And so he himself took the circumcised dog (Muslim men are circumcised at birth so Othello would be circumcised) and stabbed him. Asimov speculates this because it's unlikely that Othello could have successfully done this in real life inside the Ottoman Empire.
Not sure, plausible, interesting, could be true, could be not.
Last note: Othello's seizures were so random, what the heck Shakespeare..literally no explanation.
I did not feel as miserable as Missy because I had been this angry in Much Ado. I did not laugh there because it turned out well in the end and the inevitability of Othello had me angry from the beginning.
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