Othello
William Shakespeare
Russ McDonald (Editor)
Stephen Orgel (Contributor)
A. R. Braunmuller (Contributor)
ISBN 9780143128618
eISBN 9780698410817
ASIN B01BK0WS5I
Six years back I started reading Shakespeare again, as my children were being introduced to it in High school. Then four years ago my son who is now 18 found he had a love for the Bard and for his plays, much as I did at that age. We had been sticking to the Oxford School Shakespeare editions as those were the versions they were reading in school, but my son decided to collect these Pelican editions because they are all available as individual volumes. We loved that the Pelican has the complete works of Shakespeare in individual volumes, and we have been picking those up to read, he gets the physical and I grab the eBooks. I loved that there are eBooks for all volumes in this series, because of a dual form of dyslexia. This year we picked up tickets for three Shakespeare plays at The Stratford Festival, including this play, we did three of the Bards plays each of the last few years well.
The Pelican Classics were among my favourite editions of the plays when I was a youth myself. I often hunted used bookstores for the hard cover edition. I think the last time I read this would have been about 35-40 years ago. This has always been among my favourites plays by Shakespeare. The description of this edition states:
“This edition of Othello is edited with an introduction and notes by Russ McDonald and was recently repackaged with cover art by Manuja Waldia. Waldia received a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators for the Pelican Shakespeare series.
The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare’s time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read editions incorporate over thirty years of Shakespeare scholarship undertaken since the original series, edited by Alfred Harbage, appeared between 1956 and 1967. With stunning new covers, definitive texts, and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.”
Based on the commonly accepted chronological order of Shakespeare’s plays this usually ranked as the 26th written believed to have been written in 1604 or 1604. The sections in this volume prior to the text of the play are:
Title Page
Copyright
Publisher’s Note
The Theatrical World
William Shakespeare of Stratford-Upon-Avon, Gentleman
The Question of Authorship
The Texts of Shakespeare
Introduction
Note on the Text
The publishers note states:
“THE PELICAN SHAKESPEARE has served generations of readers as an authoritative series of texts and scholarship since the first volume appeared under the general editorship of Alfred Harbage over half a century ago. In the past decades, new editions followed to reflect the profound changes textual and critical studies of Shakespeare have undergone. The texts of the plays and poems were thoroughly revised in accordance with leading scholarship, and in some cases were entirely reedited. New introductions and notes were provided in all the volumes. The Pelican Shakespeare was designed as a successor to the original series; the previous editions had been taken into account, and the advice of the previous editors was solicited where it was feasible to do so. The current editions include updated bibliographic references to recent scholarship.
Certain textual features of the new Pelican Shakespeare should be particularly noted. All lines are numbered that contain a word, phrase, or allusion explained in the glossarial notes. In addition, for convenience, every tenth line is also numbered, in italics when no annotation is indicated. The intrusive and often inaccurate place headings inserted by early editors are omitted (as has become standard practice), but for the convenience of those who miss them, an indication of locale now appears as the first item in the annotation of each scene.
In the interest of both elegance and utility, each speech prefix is set in a separate line when the speakers’ lines are in verse, except when those words form the second half of a verse line. Thus the verse form of the speech is kept visually intact. What is printed as verse and what is printed as prose has, in general, the authority of the original texts. Departures from the original texts in this regard have the authority only of editorial tradition and the judgment of the Pelican editors; and, in a few instances, are admittedly arbitrary.”
And the introduction begins with:
“WHY HAS OTHELLO always stood slightly apart from the other tragedies generally acknowledged to be among Shakespeare’s supreme achievements? Regularly grouped with Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, it is sometimes described as the most dramatic, the most playable, of the great tragedies, but such praise often masks a dubious assessment of its artistic status. Even those who most admire it, however, agree that Othello exhibits distinctive qualities that separate it from its dramatic kin. First, its title character is different. The Moor of Venice differs conspicuously from the other tragic heroes, differs from the English audience for which he was created, differs from the rest of the cast of Othello. The playwright takes pains to depict Othello as the alien whose strangeness is both fascinating and threatening. Second, the play’s subject is unusual for tragedy in that it is not a struggle for control of the state, nor a study of ancient heroism, nor royal biography. Rather, Othello is about love – its beauty, its fragility, its vulnerability to hate. The passions represented seem private or perhaps narrow, not historically momentous. Here the battle for power is domestic, emotional, and personal.”
Later we are informed:
“These comic affinities enrich Shakespeare’s tragic representation by producing an unsparing critique of comic optimism. The correspondences are not exact, of course, and most pertain to the opening movement of the tragedy, but such comic staples invite familiar reactions that the playwright then foils by driving the narrative in a contrary direction. The resemblances of setting and character matter less than the meanings to which they contribute and the responses to which an audience is prompted. Othello is a penetrating examination of the nature of evil, particularly its destructive capacity in the realm of love. A precondition of appreciating that portrayal is recognizing Shakespeare’s challenge to the affirmations that normally attend the comic ending.”
The introduction concludes with:
“Tragedy has proven a durable and esteemed form through the centuries because it raises profound questions, elicits meanings from serious stories, explores the mysteries of experience. To see Othello as a tale of jealousy as Rymer and others have done is to mistake a partial manifestation of the play’s subject for the subject itself. Jealousy is an emotional symptom. The real subject of Othello is the fragility of love, its inability to survive the corrosive conditions of a tragic world. Likewise, Iago is not ultimately responsible for the tragedy: he supplies the weapon, but Othello uses it on himself. Shakespeare represents and permits the audience to savor the potential joys of human love – physical, emotional, spiritual – and then depicts the brutal self-destruction of those possibilities. Looking hard at human experience through the dark filter of tragedy, the playwright portrays the vulnerability of mortals, even the most gifted and accomplished, to the forces of hatred and fear within themselves.
If Othello’s tragedy is the paradoxical self-annihilation of his imaginative talent, a trait that ought to be beneficent and consolatory, then it is hard not to see Shakespeare the artist as exploring his own distinctive vulnerability. At the same time, however, he could not have been unaware of the ironic triumph that the play itself constitutes, an imaginative tour de force about the hazards of the imagination. Perhaps it is troubling to read Othello as Shakespeare’s self-indictment, and yet the corollary to that reading is the recognition that his self-scrutiny produced a work of art that still disturbs, moves, and even consoles us.”
This play comprises 5 acts and a total of 15 scenes, the play takes place over a roughly 3 to 4 days. It is interesting play both intense and at times humorous. Though overall a very dark play, one of Shakespeare’s darkest, there bursts of humour, and wit. I have seen several excellent productions over the years, both on stage and film.
My son and I are glad we picked up this edition to read before going to see a performance. It is one of the stories that really stays with readers. It is another play reminded me how much I loved these editions when I was young and we have started collecting the eBook versions now. If you are looking for a good copy of the play to read or study I can easily recommend this edition.
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