Title: Othello
Author: William Shakespeare
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 240
Rating: 3.5/5
William Shakespeare – Othello
This play has been on my TBR pile for a while now, but I didn’t actually get around to picking it up until I saw that Roya Eve Reads, a fellow BookTuber, was reading it. It seemed like the perfect excuse to pick it up too, and I got more out of it than I was expecting to because my copy was second hand and somebody had written their own notes throughout it.
As for the play itself, I enjoyed it, although it was a tad melodramatic at times and there were a few times at which I thought that the plot didn’t really make sense. It was also overly theatrical and ever so slightly racist, but in a weird way it was also fairly progressive for the time at which it was written. And by that I’m basically referring to how Othello is black and how black protagonists were rare, but also how he’s described as thick-lipped. The edition that I had went to great pains to explain that people thought that the devil was black, which was kind of sad to read about.
Still, it’s a decent play and after reading it, I also wouldn’t mind going to see it performed sometime. Not my favourite Shakespeare play, but still a pleasure to read. Bring on A Midsummer Night’s Dream next month.
William Shakespeare
