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
...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.
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
The unity of God, man, and nature is of course a common theme in Wordsworth's poetry, having been given equally memorable treatments in Tintern Abbey and elsewhere, but it was the seemingly paradoxical sentiment of this passage from The Prelude that made such a strong impression on me. As John Beer points out in his article "Romantic Apocalypses," "Although traditionally the apocalypse and the millennium have gone together, recently, the first, with its sense of doom, has been more prominent" (109). To a reader who has lived through the passing of both a new century and a new millennium, the phrase "Characters of the great Apocalypse" tends to evoke feelings of eschatological anxiety, and to suggest the fragility and transience of the landscape Wordsworth is attempting to describe. It is easy to forget that Wordsworth used the term in its original sense of "simply 'revelation,' the name given to the English version in the New Testament" (Beer 109); and that in its evocations o...
These differences are created to relate to people in this generation. Iago is a very confident, devious, terrible person. For example Iago never doubts his plans. He always believes that his plans will work to convince Othello of the worst. What creates his almost perfect plan is how well he knows Othello. Iago knows what will make Othello second guess himself. What makes Iago devious is the way in which he performs his plans. He acts as if he is a best friend of Othello while he secretly attempts to ruin his life. Lastly, what makes Iago a terrible person in general is how he has no respect or care for who he hurts in the process of ruining Othello’s life. He kills his own wife, Emilia, which proves his lack of care for others. However, in a few scenes Iago can be humorous. For example in many scenes with Roderigo the audience sees a humorous way in which Iago manipulates people and lies through his teeth. On the other hand, Hugo has similar personality traits such as being devious and manipulative. In “O” Hugo sneaks around and discovers ways in which he can make Odin or others look bad without getting any blame. Hugo manipulates a boy name Roger, which like Roderigo is the one who does the dirty work. Unlike Iago, Hugo appears to have childish or jealous-like characteristics. He has ‘daddy issues’ which means he wishes that his father would approve of him the way that he does
Williams, Helen Maria. A Tour in Switzerland; or, A view of the present state of the Government and Manners of those Cantons: with comparative sketches of the present state of Paris. 2 Vols. London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1798. http://www.ualberta.ca/~dmiall/Travel/Coxe-Williams.htm.
"Othello." The English Review 15.3 (2005): 15. Literature Resources from Gale. Web. 8 May 2014. .
...Gardner, Helen. “Othello: A Tragedy of Beauty and Fortune.” Readings on The Tragedies. Ed. Clarice Swisher. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1996. Reprint from “The Noble Moor.” British Academy Lectures, no. 9, 1955.
For the production of “O” to advertise that the movie will be a modern translation of William Shakespeare’s tragic Othello creates a compelling inaccurate statement. Do to the fact that Odin’s character remains on a very different level than Othello in almost every situation of these two pieces of entertainment. The speech, racism, and the portrayal of the characters within their themes couldn’t have been more different. The level of importance and intensity within the play Othello will always be much more relevant to the main ideas of what Shakespeare really wanted in his play. Everything else seems to be a classic movie production attempting to make a lot of money off of someone else’s idea.
Throughout Othello the Moor of Venice we experience a rather uplifting story that seems to somehow come crashing down on not only the characters in the story but the reader also. Author William Shakespeare does a tremendous job at connecting us with the characters in the play. Othello, the protagonist in the play, falls slowly into the pit of destruction where jealousy takes control. He along with many other characters in the play are manipulated by Iago and slowly taken down from a peaceful, love filled, and triumphant place in their lives to one that is dark and revengeful. Many are led to their deaths because of the terrible deeds done by Iago, some of which include Othello himself who commits suicide only after murdering his new wife over nothing but the mindset of jealousy and hate. Shakespeare explores a vast amount of literary content here some of which delve into Jealousy. Jealousy alongside intense deceitful manipulation can introduce a person to another sinister side of themselves they never knew to existed. Iago 's ultimate goal in the play is not yet clearly laid out; there is much to
Othello is one of Shakespeare’s four pillars of great tragedies. Othello is unique in comparison to the others in that it focuses on the private lives of its primary characters. When researching the subject of Othello being an Aristotelian tragedy, there is debate among some critics and readers. Some claim that Shakespeare did not hold true to Aristotle’s model of tragedy, according to his definition in “Poetics,” which categorized Othello as a classic tragedy as opposed to traditional tragedy. Readers in the twenty-first century would regard Othello a psychological thriller; it definitely keeps you on the edge of your seat creating the emotions of terror, heart break, and sympathy. This paper will focus on what Shakespeare actually intended regarding “Othello” and its Aristotelian influences.
Texts and their appropriations reflect the context and values of their times. Within Shakespeare’s Othello and Geoffrey Sax’s appropriation of Othello, the evolution of the attitudes held by Elizabethan audiences and those held by contemporary audiences can be seen through the context of the female coupled with the context of racism. The role of the female has developed from being submissive and “obedient” in the Elizabethan era to being independent and liberated within the contemporary setting. The racism of the first text is overtly xenophobic and natural, whilst the “moor” is unnatural whereas the updated context portrays Othello’s race as natural and racism as unnatural. Therefore these examples show how Shakespeare’s Othello, and it’s appropriation, Geoffrey sax’s Othello, reflect the context and values of their times.
“The integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects… in the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature” (Emerson). Rather than providing a technical, concrete definition of nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson brings a fresh take to how nature is defined. In fact, other authors and individuals have shaped their own definition of nature: what they believe it possesses in addition to what it encompasses. This theme has been widely discussed, with a peak in the nineteenth century. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are responsible for the fixation of nature in literature, and Christopher McCandless plus Cheryl Strayed are answerable for bringing that fixation into a more recent time period. Nature was and is a prevalent theme in literature and society; however, every individual views it differently. While Emerson, Thoreau, McCandless, and Strayed all took similar approaches in interacting with nature, they differ in their belief of what nature offers individuals.
The Tragedy of Othello William Shakespeare’s, The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, from the sixteenth century is an excellent example of Renaissance humanism. “A poet of unparalleled genius, Shakespeare emerged during the golden age of England under the rule of Elizabeth I.”(Fiero 3:98) He produced comedies, tragedies, romances and histories. According to Webster’s pocket dictionary, a tragedy is defined as a form of drama in which the protagonist comes to a disaster, as through a flaw in character, and in which the ending is usually marked by pity or sorrow. I would like to concentrate on the character Iago and the theme of deceit.
Of Shakespeare’s five greatest tragedies, Othello is by far the most passionate and gripping. It is a tale of love, deception, evil, honesty, and virtue. Othello himself is set apart from other Shakespearean tragic heroes by the absolute feeling of affection the audience feels for him even unto the very end of the play. Any discerning reader painfully recognizes the virtue and goodness of Othello throughout the entire play, in contrast to the general degeneration of character so typical of a tragic hero. It is this complete pity that makes the death of Othello so tragic as the audience lends their full support to the inevitable and unavoidable fall.
"Othello." Shakespeare for Students: Critical Interpretations of Shakespeare's Plays and Poetry. Ed. Anne Marie Hacht. 2nd ed. Vol. 2. Detroit: Gale, 2007. 649-87. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 30 Oct. 2013. .