also, other shakespeare ramblings
Today I was kind of a flake: I have a lot of school reading and dissertation reading that needs...er, reading, but instead I flaked out and read something for fun during lunch and after office hours were over: the first two chapters of Carol Chillington Rutter's book Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare's Stage. I can't remember
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And, oh, goodness, Emilia. That scene is just one of the most wrenching things every written and it gets me EVERY TIME. I think I flailed about it at my students too, but some of them wrote really good short papers about her, so it seems like they got past my flailing. ;)
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For what it's worth, a version of the Ophelia chapter was previously published in Shakespeare Quarterly: "Snatched Bodies: Ophelia in the Grave," 49:3 (Autumn 1998), pp. 299-319. And a version of the Cordelia chapter was published in two parts as "Eel Pie and Ugly Sisters in King Lear," in Essays in Theatre/Études théâtrales 13 (1994-5), pp. 135-58; and 14 (1995-6), 49-63. (I put the latter on the list of King Lear criticism last year, in hopes that someone would write about it and then I'd have an excuse to read it--but no one did, alas.)
Almost all of my students who wrote about Othello wrote about O, for the film paper. Not as much fun. :) But the unpinning scene has probably always been my favorite part of Othello, and Emilia is a major reason why--though it's also that there's this momentary alternate world of women and women's stories that the rest of the play doesn't really have room for.
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