Friends, Roderigos, Textual Deviants, lend us your ears! We come to reanimate the Moor of Venice and his envious antagonist, not to bury them!
This week on Texting, forsooth, Tomek and I revisit the work of the Bard of Avon. Whereas our first engagement with Billy Shakes focused on Sonnet 129, this time we discuss his tragic play Othello (no, not Julius Caesar).
The pod begins with friend of show Greg’s meditation on “the green-eyed monster” of jealousy, friend of show (and my sometime co-author) G.J. Villa’s reflection on the duumvirate (no, not triumvirate) referenced in the title of this episode, and my own bombastic recitation of an invocation to Shakespeare’s most notorious villain which I composed as a nihilistic undergraduate:
Iago, brave conniver, pious fraud,
Thy treachery I do intend to extol!
Envious of thine evil, I shall laud
The low and bitter cruelty of thy soul!
(Youth is an excuse for everything, says Ionesco. Let’s hope he was right.)
After the intro theme music plays, Tomello (or is it Tomago?) and yours truly perform a dramatic reading of an excerpt from Act 3 Scene 3 in which I take the part of Othello (though obviously not in blackface, as Sir Laurence Olivier infamously did). We then address textual issues of race, gender roles, sexuality (is Iago gay for Othello?), polyamory (why can’t all these lustful humans frolic together like “goats and monkeys” in one big happy family?), feminism, the patriarchy, sociopathy, psychosis, the Elizabethan-Jacobean Machiavel, and the nature of evil. I describe my first textual encounter with Othello (the Cheers episode “Homicidal Ham,” in which Othello is played by a white actor) and I reminisce about the cat that I named in honor of Iago’s shrewish but sexy wife. The teen movie O. and Verdi’s Otello are mentioned as well. At one point, Tomek insists that we play Fuck, Marry, Kill with the triumfeminate (no, not triumvirate) of Desdemona-Emilia-Bianca, a.k.a. Desdemilianca. (Go ahead, cancel us!)
At the end of the pod, Professor Greg continues his mini-lecture with an excursus on the textual significance of shame before the outro theme music segues into an entertaining clip filched from Key & Peele.
What more could you want from a season finale?
Yes, that’s right, this is the last episode of season 2 and Texting will be on hiatus for a while. As Tomek and I enjoy some much-needed downtime, feel free to contact us with your ideas for season 3!
Talk to you soon!
MW
P.S. Thanks to friend of show Rich for designing this lovely graphic:
"Iagothello and the Green-Eyed Monster"