Renato's Reviews > Otelo

Not trying to upset Proust or Joyce, but these days, it's Shakespeare who's been taking me to bed every night. He's become part of my daily routine and his are my last conscious thoughts before departing to dreamland. Granted, it could be another playwriter or even a regular book. All I need really are small chapters that I can finish quickly when slumber's tentacles start to wrap my body and their calming effects slowly soothe my mind. But it's been Shakespeare... and any insomniac who's recently found a new drug isn't willing to give it up that easily. So Shakespeare stays.

I've recently finished Hamlet and King Lear and rated them 5 stars for I truly considered them nothing short of amazing plays, but I confess so much has been written about them, not only in amazing reviews but also in other literary classics that I'm not sure I have much to add. Plus - while I enjoy writing my usual ramblings about books I just finished, I try to keep this exercise as natural as possible and avoid turning it into a mandatory thing - my feelings about them were not necessarily words - or known words, and I don't want to emulate Joyce's style by having a review filled with weenybeenyveenyteeny. So I let them be, aware that they might come back as ghosts to haunt me at anytime.

"Jealousy is often only an uneasy need to be tyrannical, applied to matters of love."
Marcel Proust, La Prisonnière

Othello, however, has its plot centered around one of my favorite subjects - and on that I always have one or two things to say: jealousy and its outcomes. Ah, that powerful, destroying force that can conjure up hurricanes in sealed bedrooms where the wind wouldn't possibly get in otherwise. That overwhelming emotion that can spontaneously generate - or mutate - fear, anxiety and insecurity out of nothing.

"My jealousy was born of mental images, a form of self torment not based upon probability."
Marcel Proust, La Prisonnière

A mind affecting virus - and the powers of the mind are unlimited, specially when it's running unbridled, wildly on its own - that's invisible, a quality that makes it even more dangerous. Could our eyes perceive jealousy - they can only see it's effects after it has taken over its victims - or had it a distinct color or even a form that we could see surrounding the jealous, Desdemona perhaps would've not been blindsided the way she was by Othello, and Othello perhaps would've been able to escape Iago's double-dealings.

"Jealousy, which wears a bandage over its eyes, is not merely powerless to discover anything in the darkness that enshrouds it, it is also one of those torments where the task must be incessantly repeated, like that of the Danaids, or of Ixion."
Marcel Proust, La Prisonnière

I've read some criticism cast upon Othello (the play) because of how easily he (the character) believes in Iago's schemes and lies. Never, not even for one second, I could doubt the realism of Shakespeare's plot (of course, some of the drama is over the top, but still...) As much as insecurity can act as an inflammatory factor for a little kid to believe he's seeing monsters when he's all alone up in his room, watching different and unsettling shadows dance on his walls, it can also - for a person who's jealous is merely insecure - make a handkerchief look like an indisputable evidence of guilt in the court of jealousy.

"For what we suppose to be our love or our jealousy is never a single, continuous and indivisible passion. It is composed of an infinity of successive loves, of different jealousies, each of which is ephemeral, although by their uninterrupted multiplicity they give us the impression of continuity, the illusion of unity."
Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

Had it not been written a couple of centuries before Proust was even born, I would suspect Iago read In Search of Lost Time. Not only he understood how jealousy works - he himself was suffering from it - but he also devised a plan that would grant him his revenge by using its vigorous strengths. His only downfall was not foreseeing jealousy would eventually be up against other powers, as it happens constantly in life's battles.

Rating: for yet another masterful play, with great lines and for allowing me to connect his work to my favorite author: 5 stars.