Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's Othello (review)

138ComparativeDrama carrying workers home. They were lined up alongside the road, and one ofthe gunmen asked any Catholics present to step forward. The natural assumption would have been that the men in masks were Protestant paramilitaries looking for Catholics to murder. In this group there was only one, who did make a motion to step forward... . [I]n that split second ofdecision .. . he felt the hand of the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and squeeze it in a signal that said no, don't move, we'll not betray you, nobody need know what faith or party you belong to. AU in vain, however, for the man stepped out ofline; but instead offinding a gun at his temple, he was thrown backward and away as the gunman opened fire on those remaining in the Une, for these were not Protestant terrorists, but members , presumably, of the Provisional IRA. (17) In this anecdote, Heaney says more both about what is wrong with Northern Ireland and where its hope for the future lies than McKenna says in his entire monograph. Marilynn Richtarik Georgia State University Peter Erickson and Maurice Hunt, eds. Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare's Othello. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2005. Pp. ix + 244. $37.50 casebound; $19.75 paperbound. This latest volume in the valuable MLA Approaches to Teaching World Literature series does credit to everyone involved. It is difficult to imagine a reader who would not benefit from this book, for the volumes in this series are useful not only to novice and experienced teachers but also to anyone (including students and general readers) looking for kaleidoscopic overviews of the best that has been thought and said about the most important works ofliterature.The format of the series ensures that a wide range of significant approaches are discussed and employed: the volumes survey the most frequently discussed and debated topics relevant to a given literary work, and they also offer valuable practical suggestions for sharing not only the works themselves but also the scholarship about them with college students ofall levels and backgrounds. This volume on Othello exemplifies all the virtues for which the series is known and respected. The book opens, as is customary, with an overview ofthe"materials" available to teachers. It reports the results of a survey of college-level instructors, noting (for instance) that the Norton Shakespeare seems to be the complete edition most often preferred, by a wide margin, by teachers today, although the Reviews139 varied strengths and weaknesses ofall the competing editions are reported and assessed. Meanwhile, the Arden 3 edition (edited by E. A. J. Honigmann) and the Signet edition (edited byAlvin Kernan) are far and away the single-volume texts ofOthellomost used bythe instructors surveyed, although once again the distinctive features of all the various available texts are helpfully reported. An especially valuable feature ofthis section ofthe book is its discussion of"Textual Studies and Sources," which calls attention to the complicated issues involved in editing the play, especially since two competing (and distinctive) early texts survive. Erickson and Hunt, however, suggest useful ways in which this difficulty can be turned to an advantage in the classroom by encouraging students to compare and contrast the readings authorized by the two early editions. Finally, the "materials" section of the book closes with useful overviews of the current state of critical commentary on the play, including "performance and theater studies." In fewer than twenty pages, then, Erickson and Hunt manage to survey, clearly and coherently, an impressively broad range of data useful to any potential audience of this play. As is true ofalmost anycollection ofessays,the individual pieces that follow the introduction will appeal (or perhaps in some cases not appeal) to different readers for different reasons. It is hard to imagine anyone, however, who would not profit from reading the excellent essay on "Othello and Race" by Michael Neill.Neill covers responses to this topic from Shakespeare's dayto the present, makingmanyimportant distinctions alongthewayand evenprovocativelysuggesting that "for seventeenth-century audiences it [i.e., Othello] might have seemed to be a play more centrally concerned with the corruption of masterservant relationships than with issues of race...