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Summary: Shakespeare doesn't need war or royalty to make great drama
Review: William Shakespeare is perhaps at his most subtle best in _The Tragedy of Othello_. Unlike in many of his other plays, particularly tragedies and certainly histories, Shakespeare writes on a massive scale - about the highly privileged, about royalty, about bloody family feuds and wars. Not only does _Othello_ contain none of that, but it manages to be Shakespeare's most intense play, hitting the audience harder than any other.Like _Romeo and Juliet_, it involves star-crossed lovers: an older black officer (Othello) and a young white woman (Desdemona). Shakespeare's modernity is particularly shocking. Even in the latter half of the 20th century, audiences were not ready to see a black man with his hands upon a white woman, even if it's a white man in blackface - and yet four hundred years ago, Shakespeare wrote this play. It shatters immense racial barriers, and yet Shakespeare never intended it to be a play about race - and it isn't. Othello's race is, amazingly, highly unimportant in the grand scheme of the play. _Othello_ hits very close to home. Rather than dealing with things most audiences never have to face, the plot is extremely domestic and straightforward - unlike in Shakespeare's other tragedies, there is no comic relief. There is one plot, one line of thought, and you are forced to deal with every minute of it. You never get a rest from the action. Then there's the domesticity of it - the villainous Iago wants to take revenge upon Othello, and so, in the guise of an honest friend, convinces Othello that Desdemona has been sleeping with fellow officer Cassio. No matter our position in life, we can all empathize with Othello's struggle between trusting his friend and trusting his wife, and the madness that comes from being overtaken by extreme jealousy. Iago's elaborate plot to destroy the lives of Othello, Cassio, and Desdemona is extremely simple to understand, even in iambic pentameter. This is also one of the only plays where the villain, not the hero, is the one who speaks most to the audience. We learn everything about Iago and his plans, because we as an audience develop a close relationship with him as he talks to us - seeing his charming side and the side that is purely amoral and perhaps even purely evil. Shakespeare, in Iago, has created the first true villain of drama, the ultimate "charming man without a conscience." The only thing we truly -don't- know about him is why he wants to ruin the lives of these people - and perhaps that's for the best. Shakespeare has left scholars and actors to wonder about it for hundreds of years, and come up with all sorts of theories. _The Tragedy of Othello_ just goes to prove that Shakespeare did not rely on elaborate stories of royalty and war, but could create the most intense dramas revolving around the most intimate and domestic of settings - the bedroom. If you think you know _Othello_ because you saw the film _O_, you couldn't be more wrong. There's no such thing as a Shakespeare plot without the brilliance of Shakespearean language - and nothing captures the innocence of Desdemona and the near gleeful evil of Iago like the words of Shakespeare, the greatest dramatist to write in the English language.
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Summary: A boring book I had to read for school that I actually liked
Review: Yes, I had to read this book for my honors english class at school. I go to San Marcos High and I'm a sophomore. My teacher assigned us this book and I thought it was going to be another boring book to screw around with and get a bad grade like usual. Well, I ended up loving this book and It's great reading for those who aren't much of Shakespeare readers because this book has the meanings of words and phrases on the opposite page! It's awesome and I never thought I'd be saying that after reading a school assinged book!
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