Monday, December 31, 2018



These letters give, Iago, to the pilot;



-Othello

                                   

Othello                                      Act III, Scene ii, Line 1





Iago, give these letters to the pilot. That would be the more common way that we would arrange the words in this sentence. It seems to work either way just as well as the other in terms of the iambic flow (though in either case the second syllable of ‘pilot’ seems to be an extra). So I don’t think Will rearranged it for meter. I guess it’s possible that’s just the more common arrangement for the way they talked back then. Or perhaps he just liked that flow of words as sounding better. Or, perhaps he was trying to accentuate the letters by putting them first. Whatever the reason, it is for sure that Will uses a lot of word order in his sentences that is very different from what we are used to seeing and hearing. And this is one of the reasons that his works are viewed by some as being hard to understand. But I don’t know why he’s using this word order here. I’m not even sure what these letters are that Othello is talking about, or for that matter, what purpose this very short scene is serving.


Here you go, the answer to the question from the blog post of Oct 19. If you recall, or even if you don't recall, on that date I posted a completely irrelevant picture to see if you could recognize it. Well here it is. It's Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. See that steeple in the middle of the roof? Well that picture from October 19 is a closeup of that steeple. That picture was taken from the south bell tower that you see in this picture of Notre Dame which was taken from across the river. So, Notre Dame Cathedral of Paris the answer is to the question, Yoda.


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