Tragedy and the Nation: Othello

Derek Cohen

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Tragedy and the Nation: Othello
Derek Cohen (bio)

Derek Cohen

Derek Cohen
Professor of English, York University The Politics of Shakespeare (1993); Shakespeare's Culture of Violence (1992)

Footnotes

1. We need look no farther than the case of Yugoslavia for a contemporary example.

2. It is noteworthy and unsurprising that it appears with greatest frequency in Henry V.

3. Quotations are from the Arden Edition of Othello.

4. Describing the uniqueness of 2 Henry VI, Helgerson writes that in the play, ‘Against the negative and exclusionist strategy of noble self-aggrandizement stands the positive and inclusionist ideal of the king and commonwealth ... [But] what Cade's rebellion does is to push that inclusionist ideal towards its own exclusionist extreme’ and thus undermine it (207).

5. The term ‘culture’ is used here in what Gellner calls its anthropological sense; that is ‘the distinctive style of conduct and communication of a given community’ (Gellner 92).

6. John Keegan discusses the sharp division among ‘pre-historians’ on whether ‘pre-men’ were aggressive towards each other in A History of Warfare 115–26.

7. Benedict Anderson defines the nation as ‘an imagined political community’; it is imagined because, he says, it is only in the minds of its members that lives the image of their communion (6). It is imagined, furthermore, I would suggest, because the notion of communion is based upon a set of impossibly purist assumptions and goals.

Works Cited

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Neill, Michael. ‘Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language, and the Optic of Power in Shakespeare's Histories.’ Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994), 1–32

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Shakespeare, William. The Merchant of Venice. Ed John Russell Brown. London: Methuen 1966

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——— Othello. Ed M.R. Ridley. London: Methuen 1968

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