Modern Age - Spring 2016 - 26

MODERN AGE

SPRING 2016

Othello is a thoroughly paradoxical character: a hardened veteran
of the wars who has spent his life in camps among soldiers and
camp followers, with all that may imply; but he is also a chevalier
of the imagination, whose storytelling turns his experience into a
fable that enchants Desdemona.
Yet when Iago, a monster of malice and envy, succeeds in arousing jealousy by corrupting and dirtying Othello's imagination,
then the dream of love becomes a nightmare. For Shakespeare,
tragedy very often is precisely a failure or perversion of imagination. When Rodrigo, a foolish courtier infatuated with Desdemona
mentions her "most bless'd condition," Iago makes a cynical rejoinder: "Bless'd fig's-end! The wine she drinks is made of grapes"
(2.1.251-52). What Iago says is, of course, factually accurate, but
it also obscures the truth. Love is transformative, and a woman
who is beloved truly transcends the coarse implication of Iago's
reductive dismissal. "Realism" devoid of imagination, without the
romance of the real, is ultimately false, and it is Othello's loss of his
imaginative vision of his bride that ends in tragedy.
Even in those plays that generations of scholars have agreed
to refer to as the "late romances," Shakespeare creates a complex interpenetration of the real with what seems mere fantasy.
The Tempest, probably his last play, exemplifies the necessary
recourse to what might be called the romantic or transformative
imagination to get at all that is real in human experience. Without Prospero's magical powers-a figure for the poetic imagination-without the obscure reaches of human nature symbolized
by the spirit Ariel and the fish-scaled monster Caliban, human
life would be defined by the cynical calculations of Antonio and
Sebastian, who plot against their king and regard the power to
dominate as everything.
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Modern Age - Spring 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Spring 2016

Contents
Modern Age - Spring 2016 - Cover1
Modern Age - Spring 2016 - Cover2
Modern Age - Spring 2016 - Contents
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Modern Age - Spring 2016 - Cover4
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