Shakespeare’s Othello and Verdi’s Otello: One Story, Two Representations, Three Perspectives

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Giuseppe Verdi’s penultimate opera Otello is considered one of a few works that achieved artistic integrity of its own without doing much harm to the original. This could not have been possible without ingenuity of Arrigo Boito who knew how to transform a play for spoken drama into a libretto for opera. Among many theatrical changes Boito brought to the opera, Iago’s Credo in Act II is of special interest. The scene is absent from Shakespeare’s play and newly invented by Boito in which he simplified the villain’s character from complicate human being to devil incarnate. The current paper suggests that such simplification of Iago’s image is not irrelevant to the problem of having to deliver Iago’s wickedness in limited time with much reduced lines. The current paper also brings attention to a possibility that Verdi and Boito considered Iago rather than Otello a principal role. As supportive evidence is compared musical style for Iago, Otello, and Desdemona, although a conclusive answer is left for further investigation.

참고문헌 (Reference)

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