Hi, I’m back.  Sorry if you missed me.  I took a bit of a summer break.  Ahhhh!

I went back to Ashland, OR to see some more Shakespeare at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF).  My partner and I saw 5 plays in 5 days including an amazing production of Othello.  Othello is primarily about jealousy.  It is the story of an embittered military aide, Iago, who nurses a vengeful hate for his commander, Othello.  By clever innuendo and artful lying Iago convinces Othello that Othello’s beautiful new bride is having an affair with Othello’s second-in-command.

Sitting in the audience I felt an almost overwhelming impulse to shout at the actors, to tell Othello to stop listening to Iago.  The audience around me, so uncomfortable with the ruin that Iago is creating, started hissing and booing at him, like children at a Saturday matinee movie.  Being a tragedy, it does not end well.

At the end of the play Othello describes himself as “one that loved not wisely but too well.“  But I think he really means that he his jealousy made him stupid (not wisely).  That his failure to believe in love, his need to feel secure, his own doubt about his worthiness drove him to kill that which he most loved.

And that idea - that in the absence of our own sense of self-worth, in our fear that we really can’t control our beloved and therefore can’t rely on them, in our fear of being abandoned, we kill that which we love - is as real and compelling today as it was 400 years ago when Will Shakespeare first penned it.