Contemporaneity In William Shakespeare's Othello

Redefining Othello: A Study of Charles Marowitz' 'An Othello'

Shakespeare’s significance can hardly be over emphasized as a repository of a great culture. But more important is the fact that on account of the wisdom born out of rich humanity and his universal humanism, he has carved a permanent niche for himself in all great literary traditions. The permanent contemporaneity of Shakespeare’s work has been hinted at more than once by Shakespeare himself. In Julius Caesar he writes:
How many ages hence Shall this our lofty scene be acted over In states unborn and accents unknown. (III.i.128-30)
Shakespeare’s works are not limited to expressing the concerns and interests of a narrowly confined historical period. They have in them the
And in Lionel’s and Virginia Tiger’s words, “So are the times the respective plays are about, and so are the issues these times generate.”In An Othello the artfulness of Othello’s supporting characters is lost - “all the various psychologically elegant gestures of the Cassios, Iagos, Roderigos” These subtleties are burned away by the heat and their absence taunts us. “What remains striking is the muscular contemporaneity of Shakespeare’s ideas about Moors, about fathers of white girls, about rich fathers, about the feckless passions of the socially
And one was also trying to say that the characters themselves from Shakespeare’s play, as a result of being around for almost four hundred years, have now detached themselves from their original context, so they’re in a sense roaming free in a kind of cultural terrain, and therefore they can be appropriated and put into a new context, although all the resonances from the original play will still be part of those characters. (Marowitz,