Parody and ideology: The case of Othello.

Abstract

This disertation is composed of a preface introducing the themes, the data and the reasons after their selection. My concern is to investigate some artistic and social aspects of parody, through the study of Shakespeare's Othello, and Dowling's 19th century and Welles' and Marowitz' 20th century parodies.<br/> Chapter one includes the theory. It studies the concepts of parody and ideology, and gives an approach of the politics of reworking Shakespeare. Shakespeare's patronage writings were found conservative. His elevation in the 18th century as a hero of wit against the 'French' and his canonizing in literature minimized negative criticism to his works. In the 19th century, veneration to Shakespeare continued though many restrictions were imposed on the performance of serious tragedies. Victorian parodists used subterfuges, such as singing and dancing, in order to be permitted to perform the tragedies. This is the case of Dowling's Othello Tavestie. <br/> In the 20th century, literature became a second hand writing, Shakespeare's works were reworked against a mark of social concerns. Welles' film and Marowitz' collage are representatives of this reworking and are concerned with the problems strangers suffer in occident.<br/> Ideology is a found to difuse term and its defining characteristics needing and common to other domains. Parody is ideological in its relation with art from where it sucks its form, and with society from where it lends its moral and aesthetic norms. It has a status of authorized transgresion, and often uses satire to denounce what it thinks old and immoral in the original texts.<br/> <br/><br/> In the conclusion, I see that parody has incessantly displaced the objectives of its writings and adapted itself to the ideological and aesthetic interests of its public. In the age of Shakespeare its objective was to enrich the new English culture by model-works of Italian Renaissance artists. The use of tragedy helped Shakespeare emphasize human weakness before the forces of evil and disorder and purge his public from disobedience and false appearances (chapter 2).<br/> In the nineteenth century, parody assimilated satire, burlesque, and ridicule to denounce social and artistic flaws. Dowling criticizes the oppression of the privileged official theatre to the illegitimate one. The comic transposition of the canon and the ridiculing of action and actors celebrates a popular carnival and taught realism by fixing the eyes of its humble public on vulgar objects and trivial actions proper to their way of life (chapter 3).<br/>By the times of Welles, imitating and rewriting ancient works were being considered necessary for new creations: The reflexive second degree literature. The cinema, by its visual and auditive effects, and its sophisticated techniques and illumination, came to pursue the role theatre as a denuder of literature. While parodying Othello, Welles questions the tragedy's conventions of causality and lineal composition by inverting the chronological order of the story and anticipating the final action through starting the film from the last scene of Othello's funeral and Iago's punishment, and narrating the story as flash backs in Iago's memories (chapter 4). <br/> Later on, parody gained a status equivalent to a vision of the world, with proper cultural <br/><br/>and ideological implications. It became a reflexive archeology of texts which analyzed the <br/><br/>conditions of composition and reception of these texts. In An Othello, Marowitz first inverted the <br/><br/>text of Shakespeare, then transtextualizes the tragedy giving it an actual context and a vivid <br/><br/>situation (multi-racial marriage in a post-holocaust society). He resumes to satire to crystallize his <br/><br/>moral and aesthetic vision, in a denouncing mood of what he sees as incongruities of <br/><br/>Shakespeare's work and society (the tragedy empathy and the society's tolerance with <br/><br/>outsiders), (chapter 5).

La parodia es un campo de ideología por dos razones: por su relación con el arte de donde saca su forma, y en relación con la sociedad donde reside sus valores morales y estéticos. És una transgresión authorizada que empieza como una crítica al viejo texto y termina como su protector.<br/> Ésta disertación estudia la transformación de una misma obra literaria: la historia de Cintio sobre el moro de venecia, en la tragedia de Otelo por Shakespeare en 1604, en la burleta de Otelo por Maurice Dowling en 1839, en un film melodramático por Orson Welles en 1952, y finalmente en un colage postmodernista por Charles Marowitz en 1972.<br/> Del estudio de éstas obras se ha podido llegar a la conclusión de que el acto de re-escribir un texto conlleva la introducción de cualquier cambio el parodista juzga necesario para modernizar el viejo texto y amoldarlo a las nuevas normas socials y estéticas; pero ésta recontextualization del viejo texto es al mismo tiempo el chivato de las intenciones ideological que el parodista intenta inculcar en el receptor.