So here we are again–finally out of the Sherlock Apt and out and about in Modern (or not depending where you are at) London.
Today we’re still on the Good Bad and Ugly of love with Will and one of his many characters
and as usual a wee bit of Scotland or at least Scotman sand trust me that boy’s hardly wee.
“I will wear my heart upon my sleeve for daws to peck at; I am not what I am.”
We have looked at young and all or nothing love…then we looked at unrequited love and now we’re looking at jealousy—not something that’s really love but is found in many lover….and often as in the story ruined everything that was…and left nothing in its wake bu tears and sorrow. Pain and loss.
In Othello Shakespeare give us an interracial relationship and –something we have come to accept as part of the scene but in his day and age it was not something so common but not totally unknown:
“From the beginning, blacks were not willing European travelers. Habib points out that Elizabethan adventurers John Hawkins, John Lok and Martin Frobisher were among those raiding African coastal villages, kidnapping inhabitants and bringing them back to England in the mid-1550s. Although initially a small population, these involuntary exiles were the forerunners of much larger numbers who would eventually be enslaved in the Caribbean and the American colonies. Initially, Habib concludes in Shakespeare and Race, the transported Africans “existed initially as a miscellaneous assemblage of exotic, personally possessed decorative fetishes and human curiosities, and constituted a totally culturally unrecorded and hence silent and invisible community.”
That invisibility would gradually diminish, as blacks were gradually absorbed into society, given Christian names, acquired skills, and dispersed into roles as, usually, laborers, menial workers, servants, maids and, for the aristocracy, entertainers. Yet because there was no official categorization for race, few other than diarists remarked on that distinction. A visible minority in Shakespeare’s London, blacks attempted to carve out lives for themselves in what must have seemed an often bizarre majority culture in which they found themselves ensconced.”
Shakespeare’s Colors: Race And Culture In Elizabethan England
By James Schultz
“To mourn a mischief that is past and gone is the next way to draw new mischief on.”
Now that said I might explain a bit more—while black inhabitants weren’t unknown at this time in London we have to say more about this. Othello was not some kidnapped inhabitant but rather a Moorish general in the Venetian army. And according to Weikipedia: The term Moors refers to the Muslim inhabitants of the Maghreb, North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, Sicily, and Malta during the Middle Ages, who initially were Berber and Arab peoples from North Africa. Just a little explimation . As a general he was well off.
Desdomona, his wife is a lady of Venice, a real beauty (of course who wants an ugly heroine?), who is also a senator’s daughter and she elopes with Othello against he father’s wishes.
The whole thing takes place in Cyprus where the general is employed and is accompanied by his wife.
“T’is neither here nor there.”
so you have a union that is probably not extremely popular with the establishment of Desdomona’s birth and in which she lives with her husband….then enters
So finally to my points
The good is the lovely Desdomona who seems to be rather an innocent in a world that has lost most of it’s.
And there is their love and affection for each other…which seem to be stronger on one side or the other.
The bad is the people who resent her husband, the bigoty of her father and all that.
The ugly is the companions of the general who convince him–untruely of his wife being unfaithful and the worse to me is a man who claims he loves the lady and yet can be so easily convinced she has been untrue and the really, really ugly is that he allows this to so twist him that he actually kills the woman who defied her own father to love him
And then instead of facing up to what he has done he commits suicide…This guy’s on my creep list big time.
“[w]ho would not make her husband a cuckold to make him a monarch?”
The person who lies is Iago, who has spent the whole play trying to cause problem for Othello and Desdomona (he is the one that tells her father about her marriage to the Moor and he set things up so that she goes to bat for the man whom she is suppose to be having the affair with and his evil ways manipulates the many parties in the play to the eventual more than one near fatal end—and in the case of Othello and his bride a fatal one. In fact there are so many layers of jealousy in this particular novel that it is like a primer for the subject.
But back to the lovers. In the end Othello for insecurity, as I insist a person secure in his/her self and their relationship does not allow the lies of other to destroy a relationship and someone who truly loves someone in my opinion does not murder someone who is unfaithfulness (though Othello keeps insisting he didn’t do it out of jealousy or hate but as a function of justice—PLEASE) but at worse lets them go as to destroy something or one is not a part of true love—one can be hurt but not destructive.
Othello kills (by smothering with a pillow) his wife and then Iago’s wife rats lago out and Othello still insisting that he was an honorable murderer eventually is convinced and kills himself with a concealed weapon before he can be arrest joining multiple other characters (including his father-in-law who died from grief at his daughter’s wedding choice and Iago’s wife whom Iago murders). The fake blood must run into the million in these Shakespeare’s production.
“I kissed thee ere I killed thee, no way but this, Killing myself, to die upon a kiss.”
That death’s unnatural that kills for loving.
Alas, why gnaw you so your nether lip?…
“For when my outward action doth demonstrateThe native act and figure of my heartIn compliment extern, ’tis not long afterBut I will wear my heart upon my sleeveFor daws to peck at: I am not what I am.”
” O! beware, my lord, of jealousy;It is the green-ey’d monster which doth mock The meat it feeds on.”
