Beds, Handkerchiefs, and Moving Objects in Othello

Authors

  • Sujata Iyengar University of Georgia

Abstract

This paper argues that a viewer watching Othello in an unfamiliar language, without subtitles, can more narrowly focus upon the life of things in the play and in adaptations or appropriations of it. Jane Bennett argues in Vibrant Matter for a renewed vital materialism — an emphasis on objects in the world and on attributing agency or actantial ability to them. In Shakespeare's Othello, two objects dominate the play: most obviously, the handkerchief; less obviously, because it is sometimes part of the stage, the bed in which Desdemona is smothered. I consider the ways in which three films, a South Indian art film, a North Indian "Bollywood" musical, and an Italian "Shakesteen" adaptation of Othello permit these objects to act expressively. These adaptations (Kaliyattam; Omkara; Iago) indigenize and transform both the handkerchief and the "tragic loading" of the bed, in the last case turning (or returning) the Shakespearean source from tragedy to comedy.

Author Biography

Sujata Iyengar, University of Georgia

Sujata Iyengar, Professor of English at the University of Georgia, is author of Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), Shakespeare's Medical Language (Arden/Bloomsbury, 2011), and editor of Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body (Routledge, 2015). She has scholarly articles in press or in print in ELH, Literature/Film Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Quarterly, and many essay collections. Her essay in this issue forms part of a trio of articles on Othello on film or video; the others appear in A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, edited by Dympna Callaghan (Blackwell, 2016) and in the Oxford Handbook to Shakespearean Tragedy, edited by Michael Neill and David Schalkwyk (Oxford, 2016). With Christy Desmet, Professor Iyengar co-founded and co-edits Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation.

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Published

2017-09-01