The Essay: Reading the First Folio

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The Essay: Reading the First Folio: Professor Dame Marina Warner on Othello

Professor Dame Marina Warner on Othello

Reading the First Folio

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Reading the First Folio, Professor Dame Marina Warner on Othello

Author and historian Marina Warner chooses a speech from early in Othello: Act 1, Scene 3.

Author and historian Marina Warner chooses a speech from early in Othello - from Act 1, Scene 3 of the play.

400 years after the publication of William Shakespeare's First Folio, five writers are each asked to pick a speech from one of the Folio's plays, tell it what they think it means, and what it means to them. In the last essay of this series, award-winning writer and historian Professor Dame Marina Warner chooses a speech from Othello - from Act 1, Scene 3 of the play. She tells us why it raises questions about stories and history as well as ideas about heroism, prejudice and fantasy.

As a writer who has often grappled with the truthfulness of stories, myths and fairy tales, Marina reveals she selected the speech because in the passage, Shakespeare is reflecting on the ways imagination makes things real. At this point in the play, Othello is setting out to clear himself after Brabantio, the father of his new wife, Desdemona, has railed against the 'practices of cunning hell' which Othello must have used to make her fall in love with him. Marina reflects on the reciprocal projections exchanged between tellers of tales and their audiences and considers how suggestible Othello and Desdemona are. 

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Essays marking the 400th anniversary of the printing of Shakespeare's First Folio in 1623.

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