After Romeo and Juliet, I have now just finished Othello from William Shakespeare. I must be getting used to the old language since I have been a lot faster to read it than Romeo and Juliet; I am getting used to refer constantly to the lexical at the end of the book as well so I'm not too lost when the text gets complicated.
Reading Othello has been much more interesting: the characters are more polished and their feelings are more detailed. I discovered the evil Iago (I am ashamed to admit that I only knew this name from the Walt Disney motion picture Aladdin... Better late than never I guess).
Obviously, everybody dies at the end of the book; Shakespeare likes to torture his characters... Well not everybody but the only guy who survives has lost a leg so... not too far from it :) Poor Desdemona though.
10 December 2013
Othello
After Romeo and Juliet, I have now just finished Othello from William Shakespeare. I must be getting used to the old language since I have been a lot faster to read it than Romeo and Juliet; I am getting used to refer constantly to the lexical at the end of the book as well so I'm not too lost when the text gets complicated.
Reading Othello has been much more interesting: the characters are more polished and their feelings are more detailed. I discovered the evil Iago (I am ashamed to admit that I only knew this name from the Walt Disney motion picture Aladdin... Better late than never I guess).
Obviously, everybody dies at the end of the book; Shakespeare likes to torture his characters... Well not everybody but the only guy who survives has lost a leg so... not too far from it :) Poor Desdemona though.
Romeo and Juliet
I thought it would be time now for me to start reading William Shakespeare's dramas. I remember I read a lot of William Shakespeare about 15 years ago in French but I can't remember what I read so now is the time to read it again, but in the original text.Obviously I was foolish enough to believe that I would be able to understand the text... Oh boy was I wrong!!
The text is complex, the vocabulary is complex and not understanding one every two words makes the reading pretty difficult... It took me about half the book to get accustomed to the text, so when I arrived at around the middle of the play, I decided to start all over again from the beginning. The second time was a bit better as far as understanding is concerned but by then, I had unfortunately made an opinion...
I have been extremely disappointed in this play: I was expecting the magical, or at least powerful, love story and I was left with a boy getting enamored with the first blonde "rebound" girl passing, and some misunderstandings as a plot... The characters are as shallow as can be, which is disappointing knowing the aura of Romeo and Juliet… I guess I got caught up too much in the modern “interpretation” of the legend and expected too much.
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