othello

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Malinda Knows!

September 21, 2007 in Shakespearean Language | No comments

From The Washington Post:

“My favorite is ‘You lily-livered, rabbit sucker,’ ” said 11-year-old Malinda Reese, a student at Janney Elementary School in Northwest Washington who visited the [Shakespeare] exhibition recently.

Malinda said she is a big fan of Shakespeare’s and thinks that other kids her age, or even younger, shouldn’t be intimidated by his works. “If you sit down in a comfy place, and you read Shakespeare and really try and figure out what he’s saying, you’ll find the story very interesting. And then the language is kind of magic,” she said.

(There’s that “rabbit-sucker” term… If anyone can tell me what that really means—whether it’s some sort of sucking rabbit, person who sucks rabbits, or weasel—I’d be very grateful.)

See, Melinda has realized how to enjoy Shakespeare, and she’s only 11. It’s something most adults and teachers don’t even understand:

Will’s exotic use of language is what makes his works so enjoyable.

Most people are put off by the archaic lexicon and pervasive linguistic devices, allusion, and imagery found in the plays. Instead, they’d prefer to just read the story without having to struggle through the language. I read a comment on the Shakespeare Tribe talking about how an audio version of Othello made the Old English more bearable and the story easier to enjoy.

Well, I’ve got news for you: as enjoyable as the characters and plots may be, they’re only 10% of the Bardic Experience. Hamlet has a very basic plot; so does Othello; so does Comedy of Errors; so do… all of them. If you’re reading Shakespeare for the story, you’re going to be disappointed. That’s why tools like No Fear Shakespeare should be used very carefully: not as Modern English substitutes for the Old English, but simply convenient translations to get through the sticky parts.

Stepping over Will’s language to get to the story is like condensing Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture into a single-note melody line on an electic keyboard and expecting it to be exciting. I’m being serious.

In order to appreciate Shakespeare (and then, in order to fall in love with Shakespeare), you have to love language. You have to be the kind of person that picks up books like Word Smart or The Deluxe Transitive Vampire for fun on a Friday night. You have to love puns. You have to be intrigued by etymology. You probably want to study other languages. Take the time to learn some words. Take the time to look at the footnotes. Take some time to try and understand Will’s wordplay. And a whole new universe of pleasure will open up to you.

I promise.

Malinda knows it, and now she’s ahead of the game (and her classmates). Her teachers will try to make the language easier for kids instead of trying to get them to love language. They’ll try to teach the story of Comedy of Errors (booooring!) instead of teaching kids how to love
(Err.II.1.317-319)

which is just teaching them how to love the English language. You spend every moment of your life thinking in your native language… Imagine how your thoughts could change if you understood your native language on a deeper level.

Chicken Soup for the Angry Moore’s Soul

September 4, 2007 in Analyzing Shakespearean Plays | No comments

How poor are they that have not patience!
What wound did ever heal but by degrees?
Thou know’st we work by wit, and not by witchcraft;
And wit depends on dilatory time.
(Oth.II.3.376-379)

Maybe Shakespeare doesn’t spring to mind when you think of ways to deal with the emotional issues in your life. But, like all great works of art, Will’s works have a way of capturing the human condition in small, digestible spaces (in this case, manuscripts) that you can explore and learn from.

Take jealousy. It’s the double-edged companion to love and it affects us all. Feeling jealous is probably one of the worst emotional states to endure partially because it’s fueled and intensified by the freedom of our own imaginations. When you imagine your ex-girlfriend with her new boyfriend, you imagine them holding hands and frolicking through daisy-dotted fields then winding down in front of a cozy fireplace and exchanging acts of perfect love and affection. Without us. Without needing us. And it’s maddening.

Here’s where I’d hand you a copy of Othello: The Moore of Venice. Hardly ever are our jealous imaginings founded in reality, and no better story demonstrates this than Shakespeare’s posthumously produced tragedy of love and betrayal. Iago, a soldier and confidant of Othello the general, spends most of his time onstage convincing Othello, misleadingly, that the Moore’s wife is having an affair. While the betrayal depicted in Othello is positively stomach-twisting, those of us who are suffering from jealousy can, I think, find some comfort in the idea that our worst fears about the people we love are not necessarily true, and even if those people have moved on from us or are betraying us, it’s probably not as wonderful for them (or bad for us) as we imagine.

One of the best parallels between Iago and our own personal Jealousy Demons is the fact that both of them have deep, ambiguous origins that we cannot always place. Here, Wikipedia lists several possible motivations for Iago’s character:

  1. Failure to be promoted
  2. Racism
  3. Jealousy (of Emilia, of Desdemona or of Othello)
  4. Sexual infidelity
  5. Insecurity
  6. Supreme intellect unregulated by emotion or conscience (sociopathy)
  7. Sadism
  8. Homosexuality

That’s a lot of possibilities. It could even be a combination of these reasons that drives Iago’s personal quest to fuel Othello’s jealous imagination. What’s fueling your Iago, and how can you get over those problems and move on with your life?