Similarities Between Othello And Omkara

Abstract

The project presents a cinematic overview of a popularly known play by William Shakespeare, Othello. A conceptualized analysis of text and context, of theatre and cinema, of William Shakespeare’s Othello and Vishal Bharadwaj’s Omkara. Othello itself is a pioneer of the tragedies written by William Shakespeare and the Indian context of Othello is as appealing as the text itself. It is a tragically moulded plot around a moor, a moor of Venice as the title suggests. Omkara more or less is the cultural translation of cinematic emotions by Vishal Bharadwaj through big screen. Through this project the we see how Omkara alludes to the history of Indian and non-Indian film and much

His early plays were mainly comedies and histories, genres he raised to the peak of sophistication and artistry by the end of the sixteenth century. Next he wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, Othello considered some of best tragedies ever written. Othello is the story of a Moor, a North African in Venice who loves the fair Desdemona. In simple terms, his chief lieutenant Iago, when passed over for a rank in favour of Cassius, plots to wreck revenge on Cassius by poisoning Othello’s mind through allusion to an affair between Desdemona and Cassius. In Othello, Shakespeare creates a powerful drama of a marriage that begins with fascination (between the exotic Moor Othello and the Venetian lady Desdemona), with elopement, and with intense mutual devotion and that ends precipitately with jealous rage and violent deaths. He sets this story in the romantic world of the Mediterranean, moving the action from Venice to the island of Cyprus and giving it an even more exotic hue with stories of Othello 's African past. Shakespeare builds so many differences into his hero and heroine—differences of race, of age, of cultural background—that one should not, perhaps, be surprised that the marriage ends disastrously. But most people who see or read the play feel that the love that the play presents between Othello and Desdemona is so strong that it would have overcome

There are more than twenty film versions and adaptations of the play. Of the four main film versions of Othello directed by Orson Welles (1952), Sergei Yutkevich (1955), Stuart Burge (1965) and Oliver Parker (1995), only the last one has a black actor playing the Moor. Each of these versions maintains fidelity to Shakespeare where the black protagonist gets involved in murder and jealousy. Many popular Hindi films include elements of Elizabethan drama, but only a handful use them as a base to build more reflective perspectives of Shakespearean texts. Some incorporate the story, themes, and even specific sequences of Shakespeare’s plays. Romeo and Juliet, for example, has been an immense source of inspiration to quite a numbers of Hindi films like Bobby and Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak. There have been some adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays too – Gulzar’s Angoor, an adaptation of the Comedy of Errors, and two recent adaptations of Shakespeare’s tragedies – Maqbool, an adaptation of Macbeth and Omkara, Othello. The text can be said to have more inclination towards jealousy of Othello as the major tool for the plot resulting into the tragic end of the play. The cocktail of both the text and context is a masterpiece. To draw a parallel between both would not be wrong. Vishal Bharadwaj has finely adapted the soul and emotion of Shakespeare inscribed with the very essence of him and then also adding his fuel to it.