OTHELLO’S COMIC FOUNDATION.

OTHELLO’S COMIC FOUNDATION. Joel Henning reports in the Wall Street Journal (March 22) on his interview with Michael Witmore, the director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, who is a leader in the “data mining of Shakespeare”. One recent analysis by Jonathan Hope found that Shakespeare’s vocabulary and syntax “vary significantly among his comedies, historical plays and tragedies.” Witmore has found from his digitizing analysis that “…in linguistic terms, Othello uses some of the dance steps of Shakespeare’s comedies. We have an intense dialogue between Othello and Iago dancing around a subject, like the language of courtship but it’s really a perverse seduction of Othello by his lieutenant.” Witmore sees the play as a tragedy built on a comic foundation.