One down, Bard.

Othello by William Shakespeare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I decided to start my mission to read all 38 of The Complete Plays of Shakespeare with Othello. It turned out to be a good decision to start with the New Cambridge edition.

I was considering this reading as an academic reading of the bard and it generally took me almost 3 hours of constant reading to get through one average sized (10-15 pages) scene! Even after reading every scene three times – once aloud and twice normally – I still never felt I had enough of it, and moved on to the next only due to the suspense. What genius, what lovely wordplays and what sense of drama and malice. I can’t believe I never had this joy in shakespeare till now.

All in all, it took much longer than originally planned… But then that is the drawback of reading annotated works – had to read every scene three times… But these New Cambridge Editions are gold mines of information, will stick with them for the other plays also. I hope my mission will not take years to complete at this rate…

One closing statement: Iago is my favorite literary character after Don Quixote.

View all my reviews

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