During the past twenty years or so, Othello has become  the Shakespearean tragedy that speaks most powerfully to our  contemporary concerns. Focusing on race and gender (and on class,  ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality), the play talks about what  audiences want to talk about. Yet at the same time, as refracted  through Iago, it forces us to hear what we do not want to hear-like  the characters in the play, we become trapped in our own prejudicial  malice and guilt.    In this stimulating study, Edward Pechter describes the play's design  and effects in a way that accounts for its extraordinary power to  engage the interests of audiences and readers not just in our time but  throughout history. Going back to the play's original production, he  argues Othello is unique in that it divides the central space of its  action equally between protagonist and antagonist. This design has  made strenuous demands on theatrical productions; the stage history of  the play may be plotted as a continuous refusal or inability to allow  for Othello's and Iago's equivalent attractive power.    While Othello and its interpretive traditions are distinguishable from  one another as a matter of analytical convenience, Pechter  demonstrates how they are mutually dependent, reciprocally  constitutive ways of talking about the same thing. As a result, the  distinction between the current and historical versions tends to blur  if not collapse. Since so many current versions of Shakespeare's  tragedy depend fundamentally on claims of an enlightened critical  detachment from tradition, the situation may be taken as a peculiarly  intense instance of the power of Othello to defeat what we may think  of as our better nature.

'Othello'' and Interpretive Traditions (Studies Theatre Hist & Culture) PDF

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