Othello

 

Othello, Act V, Sc. ii, l. 337 ff.

Othello:  

Soft you; a word or two before you go.

I have done the state some service, and they know't;

No more of that. I pray you, in your letters

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,

Nor set down aught in malice; then, must you speak

Of one that loved not wisely but too well;

Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,

Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,

Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away

Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdu'd eyes

Albeit unused to the melting mood,

Drop tears as fast the Arabian trees

Their med'cinable gum. Set you down this:

And say besides, that in Aleppo once,

Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk

Beat a Venetian and traduc'd the state,

I took by throat the circumcised dog,

And smote him thus.

 

-William Shakespeare

 

Othello has just learned that he has been bamboozled by Iago; he'd killed Desdemona, who had been perfectly true to him, and had attempted to have Cassio, his lieutenant, killed for sleeping with Desdemona, a thing that never happened. With 'And smote him thus' he stabs himself in place of the Turk, and dies two lines later. Iago has just murdered his wife Emilia, in front of magistrates and the audience, and is about to be hauled off to jail, and likely torture.

 

We saw Othello on Tuesday at the Stratford (Ontario) festival in a very good production. Evan Bullung as Iago and André Sills as Othello (both 12 year Stratford veterans) were superb, and did a convincing job of the tricky scene (Act III, sc. iii) where the insinuating Iago turns Othello from trusting, infatuated husband to victim of the green-eyed monster (also a line from this play...)

 

I like to reread a Shakespeare play before seeing it on stage and did this time, too. It not like I've ruined the suspense--and I find it helps to have the language in my head when I hear it played. 

 

Don't worry--it wasn't all tragedy. We also saw the musical Something Rotten while there... 

Classics Club Spin #45

 

What will I next read? Only the owl knows...

It's the 45th Classics Club spin and this will be my 25th spin. You've seen the rules before so straight to the list of books:

1.) Frances Burney/Evelina

2.) Willa Cather/Lucy Gayheart

3.) Willa Cather/Sappho and the Slave Girl

4.) Nella Larsen/Passing

5.) Sinclair Lewis/Elmer Gantry

6.) Jack London/The Iron Heel

7.) Jack London/Martin Eden

8.) Walter Pater/Imaginary Portraits

9.) Harry Mark Petrakis/A Dream of Kings

10.) Leslie Marmon Silko/Ceremony

11.) Edgar Wallace/The Four Just Men

12.) Eudora Welty/Delta Wedding

13.) Andrei Bely/Petersburg

14.) Mikhail Bulgakov/The Heart of a Dog

15.) Joachim Machado de Assis/The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas

16.) Benito Perez Galdos/That Bringas Woman

17.) Dee Brown/Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee

18.) W. E. B. Du Bois/The Autobiography

19.) R. L. Stevenson/An Inland Voyage

20.) Gotthold Lessing/Nathan the Wise 

 

On Sunday August 16th the number will be revealed. 

 

Which look good to you? Which have you read? 

Helen MacInnes' Prelude to Terror

Colin Grant is an art critic. He's recently moved to New York City to work at the Schofeld Gallery. A woman in the art world he knows approaches him on the behalf of millionaire art collector Victor Basset. Could he buy a painting at an auction in Vienna on Mr. Basset's behalf? The painting is a river scene by Salomon von Ruysdael of 1642. It might go for a $200,000, but Basset is worried he has a rival and if it were known Basset was bidding the price would go up.

There's an additional complication. The owner is a Hungarian national who wants to get out of Hungary (this is the 1970s) with this painting that the government would cheerfully confiscate if they knew about it. So for both those reasons it all needs to be hush-hush.

Of course it's Helen MacInnes so there are more complications than that...

This is the first of three spy novels by MacInnes which feature Robert Renwick. He's in Vienna working on a money-laundering scheme run from Eastern Europe. The money's being used to finance terrorist activity in the West. (The Red Army Faction had been in the news in the 70s.) 

I thought this was one of the better MacInnes books. It is fairly dark for MacInnes, though. This is her first novel after her husband Gilbert Highet died. Grant is a widower still in grief when it starts; if you know MacInnes, you won't be surprised that as an American dragged into a spy story, he will be involved in a romance. It doesn't pan out in this one.

It's possible I read this when it came out--both my parents were MacInnes fans--but if so I didn't remember it.

Vintage Mystery Scavenger Hunt

Silver Age (1978). Painting. Is that a von Ruysdael river scene on the left of the cover?