Beds, Handkerchiefs and Moving Objects in Othello

This chapter opens our discussion of “variable objects” by exploring the extent to which objects in Othello can act expressively in the visual medium of film. In tandem, it offers another methodological approach to global Shakespeare, one that addresses concerns about how Shakespeare might speak or play in translation and through variable objects. In Vibrant Matter Bennett argues for a renewed vital materialism — an emphasis on objects in the world and on attributing agency or actantial ability to them. In Shakespeare's Othello two objects dominate the play: most obviously, the handkerchief; less obviously, because it is sometimes part of the stage, the bed in which Desdemona is smothered. Watching three films of Othello in an unfamiliar language, without subtitles – a South Indian art film in the Dravidian language Malayalam, a North Indian ‘Bollywood’ movie in the Uttar Pradesh dialect Khariboli, and an Italian teen movie adaptation – allows focus more narrowly upon what, adapting Bennett, we might call the life of things in the play and in adaptations or appropriations of it. These adaptations (Kaliyattam; Omkara; Iago) indigenize and transform both the handkerchief and the “tragic loading"” of the bed, in the last case turning (or returning) the Shakespearean source from tragedy to comedy.