Well, as almost all high school seniors must do, our English class is reading Shakespeare. I went through a classical literature phase, so I have read quite a few of his plays and some of his sonnets. I was pleased to discover that we were reading Othello in class, because I hadn't read it before. We have been reading it out loud. When we started the unit, our teacher was in Poland, so Act I was painful. It was terrible to listen to my classmates as they trudged through the flowery prose, misprounouncing words and managing to read it in an impressive monotone. Our sub was asleep by part 2 of Act I. I'm happy to say that our reading improved when our teacher returned. She stopped us every few minutes to explain, and by Act IV, most of us had gotten the hang of it. I was reading Emilia, which is one of my favorite roles.
The interesting part for our class (being the immature creatures that we are) is that ours is the unabridged version. That means that all the sexual connotations and pervy parts are left in the play. I had always thought that my dirty mind was just making false sexual references, but no. After reading the play carefully and improving our inflections (we even acted some parts out) we realized that Shakespeare made SO many sexual references. He also has some racist themes going on.
For those of you who this suprises, read the play. The real play. You'll understand. When Iago tells Barbantio that a black ram is "tupping" his white ewe, he means that Othello (who's black) is sleeping with his daughter. Seems like it's right out in the open, but it's difficult to find the references beneath all the muck and mire that Shakespeare's language can turn into. Another thing that our class was very suprised at were the many genital references, and the fact that Iago suspects Othello of sleeping with his wife (Emilia), but doesn't confront her. He instead plots against Othello (he does have some other reasons as well).
So, for those of you that would like to discover the comic relief (and not just the clowns) that exists in Shakespeare's plays, get out a book and let your dirty mind take over. As my teacher would say, "If you think it's dirty, it probably is."
