Jamie's Reviews > Othello

New York City, sometime in the late 1990s: I'm in the first semester of my freshman year of college. I'm in way over my head financially (Manhattan is expensive, y'all). I'm working 40+ hours a week, making a whopping $6.50 an hour selling porcelain dolls at a certain famous toy store for the Christmas season and attending classes full time. One night while I'm at work listening to some old rich biddy yell at me because her credit card is expired and I can't magically make it work (“NOW I'M GOING TO HAVE TO GET MY DRIVER TO DRIVE ME ALL THE WAY BACK TO CENTRAL PARK WEST TO GET THE NEW CARD, I HOPE YOU'RE HAPPY!!”) when I realize “Oh, fudge.* My term paper on Othello is due tomorrow morning!” I'm supposed to have written about how reading the play differs from watching it on film (specifically the 1995 version starring Laurence Fishburne as Othello), but have inconveniently forgotten about actually reading the book … or watching the movie, for that matter. So after work I swing by the Astor Place Blockbuster to rent the film (where the manager yells at me because I don't have my own pen to fill out the membership application – I'm still salty about it twenty-five years later because shouldn't a business that relies on paper forms have a stock of pens?!), and proceed to go back to my dorm room and do what any fine red-blooded American college student would do: I watch the movie and bullshit the actual book-related bits. Even got a good grade in the end, thank you very much.**

Anyway, here I am in the present day, working my way through the 2015 PopSugar Reading Challenge (I realize it's 2024, but I didn't like this year's prompts so I'm completing a previous year's challenge instead), and lo and behold one of the prompts is “A book you were supposed to read in school but didn't.” So, whoo hoo, I've finally read Othello two-and-a-half decades after the fact.

And, well, what is it with the men in Shakespeare's plays? They're dense and gullible and incapable of actually communicating with their spouses. I mean, why have an honest conversation when you can just strangle your wife in bed, amirite?

But, anyway, it's a perfectly fine play, Othello's stupidity aside. It's not my favorite Shakespeare, but it's still a solid four-star read.

*Not actual f-word used.

**I'd go on to repeat this minor bit of sorcery years later during grad school when writing a paper comparing two editions of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn without having actually read either.