Tech-knowledge-y for Teaching Othello

I'm currently away for two weeks but that doesn't stop me doing a bit of teaching on Othello, thanks to the twin wonders of my own carefully crafted worksheets and the miraculous internet. Not only can I keep in touch thanks to this beautiful blog, but there are also a fair few resources available online to help with the study.

For starters, there are plenty of online versions of the entire text of the play. A good place to start would be this version I found on Project Gutenberg (a fantastic site featuring thousands of online texts for free, provided they are out of copyright). This is especially helpful as you can search for all the occurences of a particular word (such as "black") and see all the different contexts it is used in and which characters use it.

But hey, somebody's already beaten us to that as there's also this concordance for all of Shakespeare's works (though you can search by individual play and even by character as well). A concordance counts up and brings together all usages of individual words in a particular piece of writing and is a great way to look at which words are important in a particular character's idiolect.

Finally, there's also Sparknotes' No Fear Shakespeare series which provides a "modern translation" of the entire play which you can look at side by side with the original. Now, this is great for understanding what the hell is going on in the play if you're struggling with a particularly knotty bit of Shakespearean language, but it is far from perfect and does not give an accurate presentation of how the characters really speak to each other, which, after all is what we should be focussing on for ELLA2. However, carefully considering these shortcomings could be an excellent way to start thinking specifically about representations of speech. If the translation doesn't give the full force of Shakespeare's original, what is it exactly about the original that has such power?

On a slightly different note, I thought this article from today's Guardian might be of interest either for our thoughts about Achebe or just for general interest considering the terrible recent developments in Nigeria.

That's all for now, and I look forward to some enlightened Othello discussion when I return.