A lot will come of Nothing

“Nothing will come of Nothing” (King Lear, Act 1,1)

My absolute favourite quote from “Shakespeare”, and I think it is very fitting that it is from “King Lear”, though my predilection in this case has not that much to do with its context in the play where it is just a cynical comment on Cordelia’s “inadequate” account of her love. As I usually try not to do, I isolated the quote from its context, and it took on a much larger meaning. In general terms Lear is right. It applies to all kinds of situations where people think they are owed without any previous effort or having anything to offer. Like “I wasted time, and now does time waste me” from “Richard II” it is this imaginary sticker on my fridge, and I think it belongs there. (No explanation, though, why I LIKE it so much …?)

The reason why I find it so apt that it is from “Lear” is that I finally got thrilled about the play when I got the idea that it might be about Nothing. The quote is certainly not a coincidence. Obviously Shakespeare got very much involved with the concept writing “King Lear”. The play is really big on “Nothing moments”. One of my favourites is of course “Not mad!” as Simon Russell Beale played it, catapulting the play from its historical pedestal into the 21^st century. Millions of people with a diagnosis of dementia would know the depth of it – and would certainly NOT have enjoyed seeing it on the stage. (I am rather sure I wouldn’t have understood “To be or not to be” at the time it happened to me, let alone appreciated it! This is not how “it” works. I still don’t know how it works, just THAT it does!) Nonetheless, my favourite “Lear” was not this one by the National Theatre but Ian McKellen’s, the one where he has this particularly close relationship with his fool played by Sylvester McCoy. Also one of these less conspicuous Nothing moments: when he is genuinely distressed about his fool’s death. Actually it is one of the biggest, most distressing, and most common in real life: losing people we depended on.

I know I should read the play again, make a list of all its big and small “Nothings”. Unfortunately I won’t get round to it because I have to move on swiftly to “Anthony and Cleopatra” which I am planning to see in the theatre (!) in London (!) in January (!!) (2019!!!). But I remember this as my deepest impression from seeing “King Lear” with Ian McKellen: that the play actually is ABOUT Nothing. So, instead of further looking into it now, I will make a synopsis of “great” Nothing moments acquired so far from “Shakespeare” in biographical order:

The biographical approach entails that I begin with a moment which I haven’t got from “Shakespeare” but which is linked to the moment of “initiation” from “Hamlet” and came up in the same context: the initial boredom when we are growing out of childhood. It is so important because it is really our first encounter with Nothing – at least if we have had a reasonably happy childhood, and - as most children do - tend to leave things we cannot understand – like the loss of loved ones and the possibility of our own death – unprocessed. The ridiculous intensity of despair children experience at being bored is not that ridiculous because it is this first and purest expression of our fundamental relation with Nothing. The realization that there can be nothing where something used to be. I just recently found out – not having been bored for a second in the last twenty years, except in the company of boring people – that I am still dealing with this. That I STILL believe that life should be filled with delightful adventures and lots of fun – and this is good! It is just that it is ME now who has to live up to these standards, NOT LIFE.

There definitely is a certain amount of juvenile depression to be found in “To be or not to be”, but also the EXPERIENCE that life can turn out different – not at all as what it is supposed to be. “We” will never ever understand it again, though – neither the deadly scare of boredom nor the existential crisis - when we have decided against topping ourselves, as we usually do, and have grown up, learning to need the things we never wanted in the first place (as in “Passenger”, or “Woody Allen”). Or, of course, have successfully chased our dreams … But there is a lot of trying and brutal competition “out there”, and the percentage of people who finally make “it” is somewhere very low in the one digits. So, there IS some kind of logic to what Macbeth does. Sometimes, maybe often, there is just this ONE chance … But, of course, there are limits! The bugger is to decide WHERE they are. Macbeth is not clever – not in the sense Hamlet is. (In fact, I already decided that Hamlet was clever and that was why I wanted to see Benedict Cumberbatch play him. He did play Julian Assange and Sherlock for a reason.) But it is not because he is an intellectual – because he talks loads of sophisticated rubbish. It is because he actually THINKS and comes to the conclusion that what will happen when he has killed Claudius will NOT be good. He actively tries to hold tragedy at bay – unsuccessfully though. In the end they encounter the same fate, but Hamlet retains the comfort of having tried and lived as a “good person”. And it appears as if Shakespeare thought that this counted for something. In fact, thinking about it, so do I. “I’ll fight till from my bones my flesh be hacked” is still strangely attractive (?). Actually it is rubbish, and not, in my opinion, because of giving up the “eternal jewel”. Not even because people might look upon us favourably instead of hating us. In fact, Hamlet succeeds where Macbeth fails, TAKING CONTROL of the last thing we have left when it comes to the worst: ourselves.

There is, in fact, an awfuI lot of life to come of Nothing. Investigating “Richard III” I find how this refers even to one of the most influential of human ambitions: the desire for POWER. In fact, as Richard unfolds, his desire to rule is triggered by existential boredom – the war being over, he doesn’t know what to do with himself – and the crucial fear of being diminished. As “a packhorse in the wars” at least nobody doubted his usefulness. At that point there certainly are decisive measures in order for Richard to regain control over his life, and he decides that power might work for him. He anticipates that manipulating people might be something he would be good at, which is true – and then it becomes some kind of game. I often ask myself why I actually have fun at work – my work clearly being so boring that I got stuck with it because nobody else wants to do it. The reason is, actually, that I PLAY TO WIN when I am working. As – what is playing but taking control of an area where it is easy to gain control? Or difficult, depending on how good or ambitious we are, but still something we know we can handle. So, one promising option of dealing with Nothing is to play, and the most “serious” and highly rated way of playing is certainly to exercise power. To experience that it is possible to take control of everybody and everything. It often doesn’t really work, though, especially not for people with human skills who might recognize limits which inhibit them from ENJOYING the game. (I guess I wasn’t really surprised to see how good Donald Trump is at it compared to Barak Obama – though I so hoped he would fail!) Richard REALLY enjoys it, therefore he is good at it, and singularly successful. Up to a certain point … Within “Shakespeare” the WHEEL OF FORTUNE is sufficient to explain something that infallibly happens when something has gone on “long enough”: ruling, career, playing, life … whatever. Things suddenly begin to go wrong. I stick to the belief, though, that, unlike the wheel of fortune, it isn’t some kind of law of nature. One of my favourite sayings is the French “Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.”  Not because I really know what it is supposed to mean but because it somehow refers to one of the very few things I believe in, disagreeable as it may be: that everything – and everybody - has to change into something/somebody else or ceases to exist. Richard’s frustrated rage is understandable: He doesn’t know what he has done wrong because he has done nothing different. He has just NOT CHANGED when it would have been necessary. The unfair truth about it is, of course, that it is not just really difficult to change. (“Never change a winning team” is probably even less valid than “Plus ca change, plus c’est la même chose”. What happened to the German national football team after they became world champions is not some kind of mishap but EXACTLY what was to be expected!) It is that we cannot know IN ADVANCE what kind of change will be beneficial, or necessary. Thence all the frantic changing just for the sake of something new, and politicians running amok about the wrong issues. When it comes to the really important things in life we never know WHEN the time is ripe for a change. IF we notice at all we are probably already half down the other side … Accordingly, the wheel of fortune continues to be a good METAPHOR, an expression of the fact that everything, at all times, is threatened by Nothing. And when Nothing strikes people will find somebody to blame for it – usually the person in power. So Macbeth gets dismembered – and I loved the open grave in the Almeida Theatre’s production of “Richard III” exactly for this reason. The pit is already dug, and people will find somebody to go into it. Only THEN the war will be over, and everybody can go home and get on with their lives. But this is not yet the worst …
 

Luckily, a big part of the worst I have already dealt with in my last post about “Being Nothing”. Now I come to the last things – which, as I have already concluded, are BEYOND death and destruction. (At the idea of “beyond” I actually remembered “House of Cards” and was amazed that there is already a sixth (and finally last!) season announced ON DVD. I hadn’t even checked yet if there would BE a sixth season! Without Frank Underwood, obviously, and I hadn’t checked because I was against it, but now I can hardly wait until March. The bugger with series is that they have the promise of “beyond” worked into their fabric. If nothing else, I want to see how Robyn Wright does. The reason why I suddenly remembered the series was the use they made of the concept of “beyond” in the 5^th series (if I remember this correctly). I was thrilled because Beyond suddenly emerged as some kind of reality  – something quite substantial, like a different “mode” of existence.) Fiction is, and always has been, the realm of Beyond. So, the most inconsistent bullshit as well as the utmost horror - like wanting to destroy oneself, finding in oneself no pity for oneself, or being nothing - becomes possible. We might even enjoy it! But almost all this might happen in real life as well where it is just impossible for us to process it completely. Like the death of loved ones and people we depend on – which also is a major issue in “Shakespeare”, of course, one that I usually refuse to read. Probably just because I have never lost a child or a partner, and am unlikely to do so. Of course there doesn’t HAVE to be some kind of concrete fear, or shred of experience, to “really read” issues like this, but sometimes it “helps”.

At least where last things are concerned in “King Lear” it did. Certainly when Simon Russell Beale scared me into finally embracing the play. His “Not mad!” moment compressed this deep fear of complete loss of control into one intense “stab” of truth. I think that everybody knows this fear, at least when we are old enough – and this is usually when our parents are getting old. In my case it’s not parents yet, it was my grandmother who died at the age of 93. It is not good, of course, but at that age it is almost always a relief. But there is this constant threat where parents are concerned, and, of course, the thought that, one day, it will be me … In any case, this is much, much closer to home than the fear of becoming nothing, or the possibility of total self-rejection. I loved how precisely Simon Russell Beale pinned down the worst bit – that’s what he does! To “sound” the personal abyss obviously is his thing, and of course I like that immensely, at least in fiction. I even think there is a “healthy” fear of Nothing at the bottom of it. To admit that “we” are afraid of it – as we should be! – but not beaten … And I like these “shortcuts” that convince me that I WANT to deal with the play. When I saw the RSC’s production on DVD I probably knew already what I was looking for and consequently found it. Such an amount of great “Nothings” I could hardly believe it … No wonder that I always felt the play to be weighing me down and didn’t want too much to do with it. But I also felt, for the first time, that it wasn’t JUST distressing. In this case, it was rather the genuine EMPATHY the other actors on the stage displayed towards Lear – even though he doesn’t deserve it! – that made me aware HOW MUCH of this there is in “Shakespeare” as well, and how essential it is. That there is, in fact, this flicker of hope, this little flame in a seemingly infinite darkness. There isn’t much to WRITE about it - reading it was much more beautiful. And there is certainly no less truth - or less beauty – to be found in this experience than in the depth of despair conveyed by Nothing. So, quite inadvertently, this turned into my Christmas post ***!

So, Merry Christmas to all the readers out there! (“Readers of fiction”, of course, not mine, thence the plural!) And I am looking forward very much to a period of NOT WRITING, and to “House of Cards” 6 in March, and - maybe? - “Humans” …

About Being Nothing

“… I shall despair.

There is no creature loves me

And when I die no soul will pity me.

And wherefore should they, for I myself

Find in myself no pity to myself.”

(Richard III, Act V, 3)

One of my most special “natural high” moments of reading Shakespeare – and one I certainly cannot claim any personal acquaintance with. Not yet anyway, as this kind of total “despair” should occur only once in people’s lives – if at all! – usually when they are close to death or on the brink of topping themselves. Nonetheless it generated one of my most beautiful reading experiences, of the kind that made me feel a hundred and fifty percent ALIVE.

The obvious explanation for this puzzling experience is that this moment has triggered some of the most beautiful poetry ever written. It basically is pure music without a tune. Like “Life is a walking shadow …” and other moments of this kind it is usually the worst bit for the protagonists, the moment they encounter their all-time low, AND the climax of any play, respectively tragedy. And I find that the difficulty for actors is mostly rather to penetrate the beauty towards the ugly and distressing TRUTH at the bottom of it. But without the distressing content the poetic intensity couldn’t be created. It is, in turn, what makes the truth bearable, even attractive, makes us willing to deal with it, maybe even too much …

So, beauty is only part of the explanation why “we” enjoy these moments so much, just one side of the coin. Of course I cannot know what other people enjoy about “Shakespeare”, but great actors are always a good indication as they are the ones to know what “we” want to see. And they certainly strife never to miss out one of these moments.

(I think, though, that one of the greatest attractions for me about Simon Russell Beale is that he ISN’T going for these tragic “ranting moments” but tries to find INDIVIDUAL moments of this kind - like “Not mad!” - which might be more relevant for a 21^st century audience. Even on the level of character: He made me finally see the bottomless pit of Nothing beneath the entertaining surface of Falstaff, made me SEE Falstaff in the first place. What he does is more genuinely contemporary, and therefore great even though it tends to “defeat” beauty. His Lear wasn’t beautiful, as Ian McKellen’s was, though both were “great Shakespeare” in their own way. Maybe I ENJOY more what Ian McKellen does and still VALUE what Simon Russell Beale does infinitely.)

I don’t really think, though, that I have the explanation yet. And I didn’t get anywhere near it analyzing THIS moment. As often, I got closer to it about something that DIDN’T work when I was reading. It was when I noticed my dissatisfaction with the ending of “Othello”, wondering why Othello ANNOYED me so much. I love the play, mainly because of Iago for whom, in my opinion, Shakespeare has written some of his most beautiful text. And it is a great story. But Othello always put me off – even, I think, before I saw Anthony Hopkins playing him in the old BBC cycle of plays, at a time when there wasn’t such a thing as coloured contact lenses. (Othello with a painted face and huge blue eyes: urghhh!!! There are some things that just don’t work, never did! And the acting wasn’t good, by the way. He was great as Hannibal Lecter – amazing really! - but I never liked him as an actor apart from that.) Spotting Othello’s great hidden Nothing moment at the end by remembering this parallel moment from “The Spooks” I mentioned in my last post made me find out why.

(As I just realized that this will be a key issue of my theory of reading, here is the opportunity for this lengthy footnote: “Listening” to what I FEEL – especially when there are specific moments that make me distinctly uncomfortable, or feel great et cetera - is the most important method for me to find out WHAT THE TEXT IS ABOUT. This might not be so for most people, by the way, and the reason is not exactly that I believe “gut” to be more important than brain. It rather is a practical reason because, to find out what the text is about, I have to reproduce it in some way. Kind of like when I am waking, remembering a dream. I even am able to tell, sometimes, that the dream as such was just a bunch of rubbish. It is the ACT of reproducing it that gives it meaning. Nonetheless, the whole point of this activity is to make the reproduction as true to the original “event” as possible, and I find my memory about what I FELT at a specific moment more reliable and accurate than anything I think I THOUGHT at that moment. (There might actually not be that much CONSCIOUS thought involved in aesthetic activities, nothing at least which I could REPRODUCE. Though, as I wrote, this might just be so for me, not something that applies to reading in general. But it doesn’t matter as I must rely on myself to produce this text I am working with. Nonetheless, being able to find out what other people do when they are reading certainly is top of my list of wishes that will never be granted!) I remember DISTINCTLY what I felt when I consciously considered “There is no creature loves me …” for the first time – how it changed “the way I was wired” (“Doctor Who”, season 9). And I remember how the ending of Othello put me off when I “really read” the play for the first time, seeing the recent production by the RSC. Giving thought to my negative feelings about “Hamlet” in my recent post was equally important for finding out what the play might be about for me. I suppose it has something to do with the experience that every kind of fiction – when it is not just boring – contains this act of “poetic persuasion” which consists basically in “acting up” before myself. Kind of like I did as a child, just “silently”, PRETENDING to be this other person in a different reality. And this persuasion can only be successful when there is some kind of strong feeling involved. I remember that, when I was at uni, participating in a lecture about Musil, I became obsessed with the issue of WHERE exactly I - as the reader - AM in that text. Looking into it, I realized that critics didn’t really seem to care about this question. That there were only old-fashioned, rather inflexible, attempts available on a theory about perspective, narrator, reader et cetera that somehow didn’t fit what I wanted to describe. I was surprised, but now I am not anymore. The question where, and how, I find myself in the text seems totally irrelevant from a theoretical point of view, but it was also totally how these texts – in this case three novellas by Musil – came together and BECAME so beautiful. And I still think it is where Musil was going with these texts. To prove how completely the individual consciousness may change our perception of reality. And he NEEDS me as a reader for this. Of course I am fascinated by extreme expressions of this act of self-persuasion – like, actually, dreaming another person’s dreams (!?), or being crushed in the wake of seeing a play. There are various degrees of usefulness, as they can be totally specific (as dreaming another person’s dreams), or just kind of like a general aesthetic experience. Being crushed by the sheer impact of this beauty - or probably rather the sudden contrast with the bleak everyday reality in the aftermath. That there can suddenly be nothing where there was so much up to this point unfelt emotional content. It is interesting that Richard Armitage – playing John Proctor in “The Crucible” - described a similar experience. He expected to feel great, having actually succeeded, and then felt like “curling into a ball and cry” instead. It might have been the same kind of experience, or something quite different – like all these feeling having to “go” somewhere when the actual playing is over. Though probably not something very “text-specific” either. Nonetheless, it certainly was a memorable experience, saying a lot about the SIGNIFICANCE of the text we were dealing with.)

What is so special about this moment from “Richard III” – and which made it useful for understanding Othello’s “Nothing” – is this absolute rejection of SELF-PITY. It certainly is what got me on my toes and made me LISTEN, apart from the great poetry. And it is what I LIKED about it in the first place because, of course, I despise self-pity, as “everybody” does … But liking something so much usually makes me look closer. Though it is also an integral part of the tragic sacrifice to get over self-pity, the significant thing about this quote is in fact that it shows why there has to BE self-pity in the first place to get over it. Richard III, when all is done, is NOT tragic. What he says is so remarkable because it contains this unique ANALYSIS of self-pity, of what self-pity is GOOD for. It is kind of this last link with ourselves, the most primitive part of our humanity. The point about Richard III is in fact to show him as INHUMAN. I think that the tragic sacrifice only works – in a fictional context on a stage or in a film – when there is a visible effort of clinging to this basic humanity, clinging to what there might be left when everything else is gone … There is an act of stoicism in Richard’s “Nothing moment” which I cannot help finding admirable, but it is just an acknowledgment of the fact that the unimaginable has happened. That he has severed this tie with himself a long time ago. What makes this moment so thrilling, I think, is to actually see it on a stage played by a great actor like Ralph Fiennes: the scandal – and DISBELIEF, from the audience’s point of view – that this total self-loss can actually happen though the person in question appears to be very much alive and, somehow, still HUMAN. (And I think this made Ralph Fiennes my “dream cast” for “Richard III” – though, in this case, I didn’t know it before he actually played him. He always makes me BELIEVE in these evil characters because he makes them so genuinely human. And I think this is because he kind of translates “being human” by acting into “being able to suffer”. (It is probably why I didn’t like him that much for a long time, not yet being old enough for this kind of stark truth.) He grants this humanity even to a character like Voldemort who, for me, only EXISTS because Ralph Fiennes played him. Otherwise he would have remained a “paper character” – like Grindelwald, whom I just saw Johnny Depp play appropriately weird and nasty and impressive, but who will certainly never come to life in the same way.)

Describing in detail what happens to Richard III made me notice that my key moment from the “Spooks” actually is closer to “There is no creature loves me …” than to “Othello”. In fact, it is probably the most weird variation on the theme of losing oneself I have encountered, but this is exclusively in the context. The sudden realization of what has happened - and the disbelief that something like this actually MIGHT happen. As in many series, even great ones, the bullshit tends to pile up towards the end, probably finishing the series. When nobody is likely to believe in these stories anymore. It definitely happened with “The Spooks”, so I might have written this moment off as bullshit, but it probably had too much to do with what I always loved about the series. Right now I am totally into “Doctor Who” where the same thing happens, usually towards the end of each season: the bullshit piling up. But I tolerate it and it keeps me entertained because of its singular variety of versions on the humanity theme. It might be about a whole lot of other things - like “The Spooks”, which are mainly about not very life-like Spooks and a rather imaginary MI5. But the chief attraction for me - when I am fed up with aliens or pompous bullshit - is this singular inventiveness in presenting the question of what makes us human in a different light, continuously pushing it to extremes. In this case the kind of lunatic story is that what Lucas North says is LITERALLY true. He tried to “move out” of who he had become in an attempt of going back to who he had been before what shouldn’t have happened happened. Failing this, he literally got stranded with nothing. Like “I myself find in myself no pity to myself” it is kind of trying out how far you can go with this kind of thing – which is something that actually occurs all the time in real life. This is the reason I was intrigued, I think, as it usually passes inconspicuously – certainly without causing havoc, even without being noticed. I usually notice years later that I have moved out of a former self – again! - but I have a rather disruptive case of this right now in my immediate social environment. We usually keep this ILLUSION OF OUR SELF, I suppose, so we don’t notice. If we have to it might just be too horrible to consider. It probably was, in this case, so the moment as such didn’t turn out great. Maybe it was just an attempt to give Lucas North a decent “send-off”. And this parallel I noticed about Othello when Hugh Quarshie played him. I think he tried to preserve Othello’s dignity, which is understandable though entirely the wrong thing to do in my opinion. I suppose for an actor to deal with the ABSOLUTE NOTHING – the bottomless pit – is really quite difficult. Even if you WANT to deal with it, there might just be NOTHING TO SHOW. What is interesting is what I think Shakespeare did trying to solve this problem.

What links Lucas North to Othello, not Richard III – who, though lying to everybody else, constantly presents the audience with his true intentions and genuine insight – is the LYING. In “The Spooks” it is just layers and layers of lies piling up until you cannot see the “real” person anymore– which is probably an illusion in the first place, but it is what “we” at least are TRYING to do, in real life. What we go on trying when we are reading fiction until it doesn’t work anymore. What put me off about Othello, I realized, is his attempt to preserve the illusion that the person he has been is still there after what he has done. That THIS appears to be the most important thing. Which is totally unfair because it is perfectly natural. It IS the most important thing, in a tragic context, for the protagonist to preserve his dignity. To somehow continue “in one piece”. Nonetheless there is a reason for being so pitiless – why Othello doesn’t DESERVE to be pitied. Probably just because it is the brutal core of the tragic narrative that this is NOT true: “We” don’t continue in one piece, or as the same person, after what shouldn’t have happened has happened – even if it is not (entirely) our own fault. (There is also this great bit in “The Spooks” where Lucas North explains to Conny James that everything good she has done counts for nothing after she became a traitor. Tough! He might have been a bit less judgmental. Or I might have been, about Othello … or not!)  

I still don’t know why this is so important, but I feel this post about LYING coming on for some time. Lying in “Shakespeare”, “House of Cards”, “Woody Allen” … with my favourite quote about lying by Claire Underwood as a centerpiece: “I HATE LYING”. I actually believed her, by the way, and I believe Macbeth about lying becoming such a BURDEN. And this is why: I only realized recently, about things happening in real life, that not having to lie actually is a LUXURY, not some kind of achievement. In fact, continuous lying turns out as a really horrible thing FOR THE LIARS, stripping them of their own truth and literally wearing their humanity away. And, in extreme cases, there might actually be nothing left. So, this really bleak kind of truth like “I am nothing” might actually come as some kind of tragic RELIEF. Just the simple act of taking a breath and STOP LYING.

In “Othello”, in my opinion, Shakespeare tried to give his protagonist this moment of GENUINE dignity, which means, quite literally, to give the actor this actual “Nothing moment” TO PLAY, like in “Richard III”. But what is so different about Richard III is that he is granted this luxury of directly addressing the audience. As far as I know, he is the only person in Shakespeare who gets it. It would be possible for Iago or Macbeth to play their asides like this all the way through, but I don’t think it would come out right. In any case, Othello doesn’t have this freedom. He has to speak to his imminent social environment, the people who will pass judgement on him. And this is rather a different position. But, I think, Shakespeare tried to give him something - which might not really work as well as Richard III but presents at least an opportunity for the actor to convince HIMSELF and somehow go deeper with the character. Not just give him this half-hearted “send-off”. It might not really work on the stage, in this case. I couldn’t know until I had seen somebody give it a try. But it worked for me, reading it, with Iago in mind. As I wrote, in my opinion Iago gets some of the most beautiful text Shakespeare has ever written, and this is great for the actor, but there is also a danger of succumbing to this beauty. Lucian Msamati’s performance was singularly beautiful, nonetheless he did exactly the right thing: He never forgot to show how hard it actually is for Iago to be himself and to pull this off. That he is feeling genuinely uncomfortable, driven hard by ambition, hurt pride, and fear. Watching him, I realized that, in “Shakespeare”, there is no real contradiction between beauty and the horror transformed by it. If it is done right it is just two sides of the same thing. And this is because most of what happens is already contained in the text, which is, in fact, full of “stage directions”, giving the actor what he IS SUPPOSED TO PLAY.

Othello is more difficult because he doesn’t get this abundance, but Shakespeare definitely tried to give him SOMETHING. After having made sure of posterity getting his epitaph, Othello begins to tell a story. It evidently is a ruse to deter the onlookers from the fact that he has a weapon and intends to use it on himself. But, as often in “Shakespeare”, there is a second dimension. His story is the tale of how he killed an enemy he REALLY HATED, ENJOYING IT. And, the moment he is telling this, he stabs himself. This is probably not something easy to get through to a contemporary audience. Nonetheless, I assume this unmitigated SELF-HATRED is what Othello REALLY FEELS when he is finally alone with himself. It is almost unimaginable: hating oneself so much to WANT to destroy oneself. And it shows how completely Iago has succeeded. There really is no degree of hope or comfort left where Othello is concerned, and tragedy like this might stop working. There is nothing we would WANT to feel anymore. Still, I liked this notion so much better than the frantic lying. Maybe because it turns Othello into SOME SORT of tragic hero, as this might be the very last kind of relief “we” will be able to get? That death and destruction might actually FEEL BETTER than running on and on, driven by the lies piling up in our wake …