Paper , Order, or Assignment Requirements
ASSIGNMENT: Write a paper on Shakespeare’s Othello that responds to one of the prompts below. The essay is designed as an analysis essay but one that asks you to participate in an exchange with another critic’s ideas. A clear, concise thesis (as always) will be essential. (1) Critics have wavered when it comes to the importance of race to the play. For instance, C.L.R. James famously declared: “I say with the fullest confidence that you could strike out every single reference to his black skin and the play would be essentially the same.” Likewise Coleridge dismissed race (but for other reasons): “most surely as an English audience was disposed in the beginning of the seventeenth century, it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro.” Write an essay that either defends or rejects these comments. (2) Write an essay that analyzes the character of Desdemona and responds to the critic Francesco Ancona’s commentary: “I am so tired of Desdemona being portrayed as a victim, a blessed paragon of virtue and innocence, when she is merely a foolish girl, whose immaturity has no room for the consequences of her rash rebellion.” (3) Write an essay that focuses on the relationship between Desdemona and Othello, taking as its starting point the following comments: “The Earl of Shaftesbury asserts that the marriage of Othello and Desdemona is a mismatch, a monstrous union founded on the lying pretensions of a charlatan and the unhealthy imagination of a misguided young girl