Tonight I’m off to see Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Iago in Othello. The circumstances? A friend gave me a ticket last minute. This coincides with the Shakespeare course I’m currently taking, and of course, in the past 2 weeks I’ve become completely, utterly, bodily, irreconcilably obsessed with the great bard. This isn’t too uncommon for me to become obsessed with a writer, I only wish everyone felt this way about reading. When I read Virginia Woolf seriously for the first time 3 summers ago, I read every book she wrote, including her unabridged journals. I rented every film version of Mrs. Dalloway, and saw a version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in a high school theater. Twice. It’s not just literary characters either. When I was writing the next Great Research Paper on John Adams last fall I started to think like John Adams. All of sudden his problems became my problems, his interests my interests. I spend 48 consecutive hours watching the HBO series once I discovered it existed.
What kind of effect is Shakespeare having on my life? Apart from uttering the odd “my mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun” on the subway, or when I’m brushing my teeth a burst of Hamlet just happens to scare my roommate, or our cat Francois suddenly looks at me with disdain when I’m calling to him in iambic pentameter. And just when there was a collective lamenting throughout the city that “Shakespeare in the Park” finished with the summer (and also the just as good “Shakespeare in the Municipal Parking Lot” with the slogan “the Bard Doesn’t Need a Park.”) Never fear, I hope everyone braves monetary and geographic boundaries to see Seymour Hoffman in Othello and also Jude Law’s Hamlet, 2 wonderful productions to remind us that Shakespeare still reigns as our eternal poet.
-Nikki-Lee
Tags: Phillip Seymour Hoffman, play, Shakespeare