Othello Comparative Essay

Although many directors have their own vision of how to portray Shakespeare’s plays, they attempt to keep the film as close to the plays as possible. Unfortunately, Oliver Parker’s adaption of Shakespeare’s Othello did not only contain additional non-Shakespearean lines, but it also had inverted dialogues and removed content. Parker’s film version twisted the entire play because it ignored essential and important character scenes that made the play complicated, that is, the film had not shown the scenes that progressed the play forward. For example, in Shakespeare’s Othello, act 1, scene 3, the character Iago, an antagonist, is supposed to have said, “My cause is hearted, thine hath no less reason. Let us be conjunctive/ in our revenge against him [Othello]. If thou canst cuckold him,/ thou dost thyself a pleasure, me a sport” (Act 1.3: 355 – 8). However, in Parker’s version, this section (21:45) of Iago’s dialogue was omitted and the character proceeded with his next lines. This directorial decision is critical because the director has taken away one of Shakespeare’s traditional elements, that is, one of Shakespeare’s techniques is to have subplots trigger an emotional effect on the

Not to mention that removing Iago’s “conjunctive revenge” plot makes Iago a passive character rather than active because he no longer poses as a threat to Othello as he does in the play. In other words, in the play, Iago is meant to be an antagonist while Othello is the protagonist, but in the film, these two positions are reversed. In fact, the audience is supposed to take sides with Othello because Iago’s revenge is for “sport” and “pleasure.” This is one of the subplots that progressed the play forward because it introduced complications that made the play have multiple themes of love, war, and