Bravo!

(I want to preface this by saying that this blog is and has been a work in progress...and thus, I apologize beforehand for any and all incongruities of time and space, sorry. )

Yesterday's group projects were really outstanding. I'm always impressed by the things this class comes up with when they work together, how incredibly diverse our presentations were, all plays written by the same person...crazy. I really loved the presentation of King Henry IV, and I must say, whoever played Falstaff..(don't know your name, sorry!) you did a really great job. Some people are just natural actors, and I think that parts like that are really challenging to begin with. However, just to put it out there, I think that everyone in this class who performed did really well, and THAT, I think, speaks to the natural human affinity for stage acting, for role-playing, (me-ow!), and for putting on masks. This reminds me of the Judith Butler article that we read in Lit Crit...it's the one where she discusses gender as a "performance". While I'm going to save any feminist/social tangents for another class, I think that the idea of "performance" of assigned roles really speaks to our ease not only in assuming "characters" different than our own, but also in our readiness to play along with that staged assumption (pardon all the scare quotes, but you get the point, right?...) It's too bad I'm not reading the Bloom Invention of the Human book right now, because I feel like some of this is similar to what was mentioned in class. Shakespeare's characters perhaps feel so rich and dynamic because, they, like us are caught up in this tangle of assumed identities, of expectations, etc., AND they know how to manipulate those expectations to get results...just as we do. Because I'm  in the Othello group, it's one of the first plays to come to mind, and I think my observation here could help explain (to me at least) why Othello the character is so weird...since Othello finds himself in an alien sociological situation, not to mention any potential language barrier, essentially, he suffers the same communication gap that I do when I try to tell a joke in Spanish. Though the basic communication is there, the subtleties, the formalities, come across translated. Thus, his "role" that he strives to fulfill in society comes off as aggressively resolute.

(AND, briefly, I just learned that there is an old proverb that goes, in Spanish: " El traducir es traicionar" or, to translate is to betray. For Othello, it's these misinterpretations, or "over interpretations" that drive his jealousy, and, essentially the tragedy in the play.)

Of course, this is just speculation. Maybe even the wild and unfounded kind. Othello is incredibly eloquent throughout the play, he is certainly not stupid, or in anyway less intelligent than the other characters, but still Cassio manipulates him by playing on his overly mythic interpretation of love, perhaps spawned from a translated understanding of language and culture. Obviously, any claim in this direction is bound to ruffle some feathers, but my emphasis here is on the interpretation, and subsequent "performance" of the expectations in a society, which are often outlined in the basic mythology of that culture (though perhaps not entirely or obviously congruent with it). The introduction to the play in our Pelican text outlines this really well. Othello seems to believe in the ideal of love, (and to paraphrase from there) a love where wives never lose keepsakes given them by their husbands. Other male characters make the same mistake. Postumous. Leontes. Maybe Shakespeare is trying to demonstrate the inherent fallibility of characters who are incapable of adjusting the role that they play.