Written at some time between 1602 and 1604, Othello belongs to the
period in which Shakespeare's powers as a tragic dramatist were at
their peak. On stage, the romantic cast of its story and the
remorseless drive of its plotting, combined with operatic
extravagance of its emotion and the swelling music of its poetry,
have made it amongst the most consistently successful of his
tragedies; and numerous anecdotes testify to its extraordinary
capacity to overwhelm the imagination of an audience. In recent
times the play's bold treatment of love and marriage across the
divide of race has made it a work of particular interest to theatre
directors and scholars alike. Yet Othello's critical fortunes have
been uneven; for, since Rymer's notorious denunciation of this
'tragedy of [a] handkerchief,' at the end of the seventeenth
century, its claim to rank amongst Shakespeare's greatest
achievements has been challenged by critics who have found its plot
too strained, its characters too improbable, and its tale of
marital jealousy and murder too meanly domestic to challenge
comparison with Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, or even that saga of
tragic infatuation, Antony and Cleopatra. The extensive
introduction to this new edition answers the play's detractors by
stressing the public dimensions of the tragedy, paying particular
attention to its treatment of colour and social relations. Although
'race' in the early modern period was still an embryonic category,
Othello is explored as a text that-not least in its performance
history-has played a formative role (for both good and ill) in the
emergence of racial thinking, and that as a result remains deeply
controversial. In the play's own time, however, the sensitivities
aroused by the hero's colour might well have seemed less
significant than the way in which Iago's perfidious role plays out
a crisis in the institution of service on which the entire social
order, including its treatment of gender, was founded. In this
respect, too, Othello emerges as a work profoundly involved in the
social and political processes that helped to shape the modern
world. The text has been freshly edited in accordance with the
general principles of the series. Othello has come down to us in
two markedly different early texts; and the substantial differences
between the 1622 Quarto and the 1623 Folio have led to its becoming
involved, along with Hamlet and Lear, in an intense debate over
Shakespearian revision. Michael Neill argues however, that, in the
case of Othello, variation is much less likely to be the result of
changed authorial intentions than of theatrical cutting and the
peculiar circumstances of textual transmission. While the Folio is
generally the more reliable of the rival versions, the Quarto's
origin in a text that has been modified for performance text make
it indispensable, and the two have been fully collated. This
edition also makes full use of the Second Quarto (1632) a text
which, although it is without independent authority, preserves
important textual decisions made by an intelligent and
well-informed editor nearly contemporary with the dramatist
himself. Further appendices include a discussion of dating
problems, an account of the music in the play, and a full
translation of the Italian novella from which the story derives.
The detailed commentary is designed to alert readers to the play's
theatrical life, as well as helping them to explore its rich
language and notoriously treacherous word-play.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
