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Othello

Many would regard Verdi’s late masterpiece, Otello, as the most successful operatic adaptation of Shakespeare. Some have also even opined that it is better than the play. There is no doubting that it is a remarkable work and a towering landmark in nineteenth-century opera. It was a remarkable alignment of fate for this reviewer to able to see the Verdi work a day before a third viewing of perhaps the most successful Shakespeare adaptation of the twenty-first century, Brett Dean’s Hamlet.

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Whatever else Peter Evans's production of Othello has going for it, and it has indeed much, the speaking of Shakespeare's verse is outstanding. It is never declamatory, in the way that some famous actors of earlier decades dealt with it. The verse emerges entirely intact, but is always made to ...

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The title of this book accurately represents Jane Adamson’s approach to Othello, her view of the play, and her critical achievement. Rejecting from the outset the ‘conventionalist’ approach, which would have us discount our own responses and treat the play as ‘artificial’, a ‘purely dramatic phenomenon’ (ars gratia artis: the old lie), she bases her critical judgment on a systematic consideration of the feelings it arouses. This leads her to the view that. the connection (or disconnection) between the characters’ feelings and their judgments is at the heart of the play, and at the heart of the tragedy.

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