Apparently there was in interesting part to reading the play Othello that I missed simply because I was overconfident that I knew what the verb to turn meant. The essay “Turning Turk in Othello” spent a bit of time examining this verb and its many uses throughout the play, and I have to admit that I’m completely fascinated by it.
While there is undeniably a sense of warring religions in the play, knowing that the verb turn could mean both to convert in a religious sense and to pervert adds quite a bit, even to some of the exchanges that I thought I really enjoyed and understood. Suddenly, when Othello yells at his subordinates wondering if they’d all turned Turk, I no longer think that it is only on insult but possibly a sort of self-reflection.
The language of this play is really beginning to interest me, and while I’m not sure that I’ve really started to get any of it quite yet, or maybe I should say that I’ve just been thrown into continual doubt about what anything means, I do recognize that each new word use I learn seems to open up a new level of depth to the play that I had not first experienced.
1 comment:
I agree with you that the idea of "turning" was very interesting. As I think about it, I wonder if that is part of how stereotypes work. A person who holds stereotypes about people of different group finds that people of that group keep "turning out" to fulfill the stereotype -- they read and twist certain actions to see them through a lens they have already had in place... You can see that I am trying to think about the biases toward Moors that Shakespeare's audience, or Shakespeare himself, might have had and how those influenced how the character was perceived, or created.
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