A Comparison of Othello and the Movie O
When Shakespeare composed the tragedy Othello televisions were not. Along with no televisions, life in the late 1500s had many different qualities than it does today. This time period had no war on drugs and no high school shootings. Peer pressure was not an issue. The audiences of Othello in the 1500s did not face the circumstances that we, American high school students, face today. With these significant differences in daily life, come the attempts of movie creators to help prevent our modern day tragedies.
The movie "O", released on August 31, 2001, is a retelling of Shakespeare's Othello set in a college prepatory school. This movie, shelved over two years due to the epidemic of high school shootings in the late 1990s, is an attempt to take in hand these disasters caused by peer pressure and jealousy (Kurnit). "O" is an effective restoration of Shakespeare's Othello in this day and age as it addresses issues that are imperative and dangerous to its audience.
Jealousy is a dominating factor in both the modern day and Shakespearean Othello. In Othello, the jealousy develops from Iago, who thinks he has been overlooked as his flag officer and as Othello's loyal best friend. In "O", Hugo is jealous of his father's relationship with Odin. Hugo's father, Duke, is also the basketball coach of the team both Odin and Hugo play for. Odin is the team captain and receives the "most valuable player" award which he shares with his "go-to guy," Mike--not Hugo. Hugo believes that he is the M.V.P. of the Hawks and is filled with jealousy when his father gives the award to Odin and says, "I'm very proud to say this publicly, I love him like my own son" ("O").
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...ence more reasoning to the jealousy of the characters and the actions they take. With the changed setting come many differences: drugs and alcohol, peer pressure, violence, and different sources for jealousy and hatred. These issues are the dilemmas we, as teenagers in this new millennium, are faced with day to day. "O" addresses these new era evils without abandoning the original themes and major issues of Shakespeare's Othello. The audience can relate to a story written down hundreds of years ago and benefit from it.
Works Cited
Hartnett, Josh. Interview following "O". 23 March 2010
Kurnit, Scott. "O" movie review. www.romanticmovies.about.com 20 March 2010
List of School Shootings. www.abcnews.com 20 March 2010
Nelson, Tim Blake. Interview folloing "O". 23 March 2010
"O". dvd. Dir. Tim Blake Nelson, Lions Gate Films, 2001
“The power of imagination makes us infinite.” (John Muir). Both John Muir and William Wordsworth demonstrate this through their use of language as they describe nature scenes. John Muir studies nature and in his essay about locating the Calypso Borealis he uses scientific descriptions to grab his reader’s attention and to portray his excitement at finding the rare flower. William Wordsworth on the other hand shows his appreciation for the beauty of nature and its effect on a person’s emotions in the vivid visual descriptions that he gives of the daffodils in his poem ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud.’ Wordsworth with his appreciation of beauty and Muir through scientific descriptions provide an indication of the influence that nature has had on them as they capture their reader’s attention both emotionally and visually through their personal and unique use of tone, diction, syntax and vocabulary.
‘O is a modern spin on Othello that attempts to address issues that are relevant for a contemporary audience. However, ultimately the literary value of Othello is lost in this appropriation”
...s dissatisfied with is the extent of Quesnel's "improvements," for the enlargemenmt of which Quesnel boasts is characterized by excess. (It is to be noted that, when improving his own house, St. Aubert adapted his enlargements "to the style of the old one" [2]). Thus, as an exploration of the importance of boundaries, and of the symmetry and continuity that those boundaries give, Radcliffe's novel enters into the discourse of its decade.
Nelson’s film adaptation of Othello is one of the many adaptations that Hollywood has created to modernize old works to fit into current times. “O” is about an African American high school basketball star that attends an all white prep school Palmetto grove. Odin James is the MVP of his basketball team; he shares this title with his best friend Michael. Odin dates Desi the Dean’s daughter and they are madly in love. Hugo is the coaches’ son, and is jealous of O and Michael’s success on the basketball court. Hugo then plots to play O against Desi and Michael. This works and in the end O ends up killing Desi, along with himself. In the end Hugo gets caught.
In the Shakespearean tragedy Othello the number and description of themes is open to discussion. With the help of literary critics, we can analyze this subject in detail.
In the production “O” the main character’s position in society does not truly capture the same importance as it did in Othello. The life of a war leader seems much more influential than that of a basketball star’s life in high school. The drama that comes with being on the high school basketball team lacks the responsibility that Othello has. Othello has a well-known reputation for being able to handle himself in many situations emotionally and physically, which may be the reason the Duke of Venice chose him individually to lead the war in the foreign land of Cyprus. This being such a huge obligation for Othello, it created tension for the audience, especially one at the time of this plays creation. As the war breaks out between Venice and Turkey, things seem to be extremely tense within the characters, especially, Othello. Between the defeat of the Turkish and Cassio’s drunken fight, the recently captured Island of Cyprus and the venetians look overwhelmed with a lot of explosive emotions. Othello’s responsibility in the war creates an easy way for the audience to emphasize with the pressures his character faces.
Toynton, Evelyn. "A DELICIOUS TORMENT: The friendship of Wordsworth and Coleridge." Harper's. 01 Jun. 2007: 88. eLibrary. Web. 10 Mar. 2014.
This article provided valuable information that assisted me in the making of my essay. It helped me to form paragraphs 2 and 3, and provided enough background information of the plays being talked about for me to produce those paragraphs. For paragraph 2, i read and used information on the pages 64-70 (these pages sometimes do not work). Within those pages was the idea of the all knowing audience, and the unaware othello, creating suspense within the audience about the future event of othello's life. For paragraph 3 i read and used pages 102. On these pages was the aspect of how modern novelist elicit empathy towards their character and the way shakespeare elicited empathy from his audience to character within the play. Overall this article was extremely useful
In "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," William Wordsworth explains the impact of Nature from Tintern Abbey in his every day life. "Tintern Abbey" shows the great importance of nature to Wordsworth in his writings, love for life, and religion. The memories he has of Tintern Abbey make even the darkest days full of light.
Nature is often a focal point for many author’s works, whether it is expressed through lyrics, short stories, or poetry. Authors are given a cornucopia of pictures and descriptions of nature’s splendor that they can reproduce through words. It is because of this that more often than not a reader is faced with multiple approaches and descriptions to the way nature is portrayed. Some authors tend to look at nature from a deeper and personal observation as in William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, while other authors tend to focus on a more religious beauty within nature as show in Gerard Manley Hopkins “Pied Beauty”, suggesting to the reader that while to each their own there is always a beauty to be found in nature and nature’s beauty can be uplifting for the human spirit both on a visual and spiritual level.
Human nature is a complex concept that no one is able to fully grasp. In the play Othello, Shakespeare’s view of human nature is primarily based on being jealous of what others have. Roderigo, being jealous of Othello of how he was able to obtain Desdemona’s love and Iago, not being able to obtain a promotion like Cassio. While in Christopher Moore’s A Dirty Job, shows that you care for those that are dear to you. Charlie, having to deal with the loss of his beloved wife, he cherishes his daughter Sophie and protects her by any means. Having the contrast of jealousy presented by William Shakespeare in the play Othello and affection by Christopher Moore in A Dirty Job, gives each other completely different resonances.
Figurative language is used by William Wordsworth to show the exchange between man and nature. The poet uses various examples of personification throughout the poem. When the poet says:”I wandered lonely as a cloud” (line 1),”when all at once I saw a crowd” (line 3), and “fluttering and dancing in the breeze” (line 6) shows the exchange between the poet and nature since the poet compares himself to a cloud, and compares the daffodils to humans. Moreover, humans connect with God through nature, so the exchange between the speaker and nature led to the connection with God. The pleasant moment of remembering the daffodils does not happen to the poet all time, but he visualizes them only in his “vacant or pensive mode”(line 20). However, the whole poem is full of metaphors describing the isolation of the speaker from society, and experiences the beauty of nature that comforts him. The meta...
Durrant, Geoffrey. Wordsworth and the Great System, A Study of Wordsworth’s Poetic Universe. Cambridge: University Printing House, 1970.
"The Poetry of William Wordsworth." SIRS Renaissance 20 May 2004: n.p. SIRS Renaissance. Web. 06 February 2010.
In William Wordsworth’s poems, the role of nature plays a more reassuring and pivotal r ole within them. To Wordsworth’s poetry, interacting with nature represents the forces of the natural world. Throughout the three poems, Resolution and Independence, Tintern Abbey, and Michael, which will be discussed in this essay, nature is seen prominently as an everlasting- individual figure, which gives his audience as well as Wordsworth, himself, a sense of console. In all three poems, Wordsworth views nature and human beings as complementary elements of a sum of a whole, recognizing that humans are a sum of nature. Therefore, looking at the world as a soothing being of which he is a part of, Wordsworth looks at nature and sees the benevolence of the divinity aspects behind them. For Wordsworth, the world itself, in all its glory, can be a place of suffering, which surely occurs within the world; Wordsworth is still comforted with the belief that all things happen by the hands of the divinity and the just and divine order of nature, itself.