Your discussion questions & themes

Mary Ellen: Does the play confirm or deny assumptions about racial and religious difference in the early modern period?

Meghan: Given his status as a "foreigner," where does Othello belong?

Brigette: How do ideas about women's roles (where the household/family is the primary social unit dictating rules of behavior) affect your point of view of Othello's concerns over the loss of his reputation/honor?

Sarah: What anxieties about order and masculinity/mutability do we see at work in the play?

Megan: How do the passions influence the outcome of the play? What imbalances lead to extreme behaviors?

Hannahbeth: How legitimate and/or true do we consider appropriations, adaptations, or translations of the play?


Emerging Themes:

• control/containment
• projecting anxieties (on the "other")
• the problem of the binary
• rank & rule
• boundaries
• inner/outer and spiritual/physical

Also...the wiki is primed and ready for your handout posting.

Othello (1965): Laurence Olivier & Maggie Smith

We'll be discussing film adaptations and performances of Othello in class on Tuesday. Please take a look at this 10-minute clip of the play's final scene (Act 5, scene 2) from a 1965 performance with Laurence Olivier as Othello in blackface and Maggie Smith as Desdemona (a.k.a. Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter). How does it compare to the 1995 version with Laurence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh that you saw in class (& will hopefully watch at one of your HUST club events soon)?

Othello Resources

Resources:

• As you make your way through Othello, feel free to consult a few online summaries from the British Library , Cummings Study Guides, or even Spark Notes.
• Check out Terry A. Gray's outstanding web resource, Mr. Shakespeare and the Internet.

Reading Questions:

• What "languages of difference" do the other characters use when describing or interacting with Othello? How does Othello respond? How does he represent himself?
  
• The play opens in Venice, Italy. Given what you know about Venice in the 15th and 16th centuries, why might this be a significant choice?
  
• What are your impressions of Desdemona? Does she strike you as independent or "feminist"? In what ways is she caught in the oppressive cycle of her cultural moment?
  

There's still time...

...to see Twelfth Night through Notre Dame's Shakespeare Festival. The show runs until Aug. 30.

Welcome to the new & improved HUST blog

First of all--welcome to your senior year! I've caught glimpses of your blog posts about summer adventures and am eager to hear more about them.

You'll have the chance to bring your bloggin' into the 17th and 18th centuries this semester, both in Colloquium and in Cultural History. Raully Donahue will be joining the ranks of HUST bloggers and sharing this forum, posting his own thoughts/reflections/announcements from the historian's POV. The idea is that we can increase the overlap between the literature and history sides of the Restoration and Enlightenment. Of course, you're encouraged to do the same on your blogs.

See you in class.

Colloquium III

For those who are curious or who'd like to get a head start ordering/finding/reading books, I've begun posting information about our fall Colloquium III course on the wiki. Feel free to go check it out, and let me know if you have any questions.

Summer Film Series @ ND: 8/13-8/15

I just received a brochure in the mail the other day reminding me of the 2009 Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival. The mainstage production will be Twelfth Night, which runs the last two weeks of August. Also worth mentioning, though, is the film series they are running at the same time. If you'd like an excuse to watch some good films that will, among other things, prep you for Colloquium III (they all treat some aspect of 16th- and 17th-century England), go check out Twelfth Night (with Ben Kingsley and Helena Bonham Carter), Stage Beauty (with Claire Danes and Billy Crudup) or Shakespeare in Love (with Joseph Fiennes...think Luther....and Gwyneth Paltrow).