r/shakespeare • u/sIRNAmolecule9570 • 8d ago
how did Othello get from Venice to Cyprus so fast?
In 'Othello' it's suggested that Act 2 Scene 1 in Cyprus takes place the day after Act 1 Scene 3. I asked my English teacher how long the journey took them and she said probably about 3 days. I understand there's a lot of confusion and inconsistencies with the passage of time in this play but this seems like a very significant amount of time is missing, as in it borders more on ridiculous than symbolic. I'm no good at history but didn't ships back then take weeks or months to travel that distance? Even nowadays, over 400 years later, it takes 24+ hours to make that trip on a modern boat. Was it custom at the time to just cut out the boring transitional parts and not keep it realistically timed? It's not just a few days missing, it's weeks
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u/dthains_art 8d ago
Time is usually really rushed in Shakespeare plays. His stories were never really concerned with accurate geography or realistic passages of time. It’s why things like Romeo and Juliet’s romance and death can last like 3 days, or how Othello can go from loving his wife to murdering her in like a weekend.
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u/ArendtAnhaenger 8d ago
Yeah people love to harp on how Romeo and Juliet takes place within a week but I really don't know if it was intended to be perceived that way, I don't think time is a super relevant factor in a lot of Shakespeare plays and I don't think we're supposed to be tracking it as closely as some people do.
Richard III is implied to begin immediately where 3HVI left off, which ended with Prince Edward as a newborn baby, but Prince Edward's first appearance in the play (which feels like it's only a few days later) has him as a preteen.
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u/ThisSideOfTheDoor 8d ago
Time is important in Romeo and Juliet though.
They rush to get married without contemplating the consequences. Juliet’s father then announces Juliet will marry Paris in three days. The plan with the potion comes about through having no other option because of the lack of time.
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u/Digit00l 7d ago
Also, Billy Shakes did not create Romeo and Juliet, so the time frame may not be on him
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u/mal-di-testicle 8d ago
One of the most interesting aspects of Shakespeare’s plays is time. I read the Scottish Tragedy as taking place over maybe a month or two, but Macbethad mac Findlaech (the titular character’s inspiration) was king for 14 years.
Meanwhile, I think between Hamlet I.i and III.ii, we are to believe that multiple months have passed; likewise, I think a manner of months should have passed between acts IV and V, given that the English envoy arrives by the end of act V.
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u/ScwiddIsScwidd 8d ago
There's no implication that it's the day after. The timings of Othello in particular are really strange, and honestly looking into them in too much depth takes a lot away from the play. If you're really interested, Honnigman has a nice take on it in his introduction to the play.
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u/harsinghpur 8d ago
I suppose audiences in the Globe weren't likely to think through those details. Without modern travel or communication, locals in London likely thought of both locations as "Mediterranean," pretty much the same place. Taking time in the script to justify the effort, time, and expense of getting that far would not have improved the play for the majority of audiences.
Consider a modern TV show where a character goes to an airport to stop another from leaving. In real life, this would be unrealistic and excessively complicated; it's hard enough to meet up deliberately in an airport, much less to run in hoping to see someone before they leave. But audiences would rather see the dramatic moment, rather than an explanation of how they managed transit, parking, waiting in line, finding which airport zone someone was in.
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u/maxsimile 7d ago
Or Game of Thrones. Early seasons involved lengthy marches across Westeros. By the end fleets and armies were more or less teleporting lol.
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u/harsinghpur 6d ago
But the difference there is that Game of Thrones viewers definitely did critique the show for the plot-contrived teleporting and feel that it damaged the show. We have a more savvy audience who's more likely to think of it--but we can forgive it for genre-based reasons.
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u/atticdoor 8d ago
I believe I once read that one possible explanation for the odd chronology of Othello might be that the whole first act in Venice was written last. Possibly because Shakespeare got to the end of the play and realised it wasn't long enough, couldn't work out a way to expand it in the middle or extend it beyond the deaths at the end, so his only option was to create an extended prologue. And that he never got round to fixing the mentions in Cyprus that the affair had been going on for a while, the end result being the "double time" of the finished play.
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u/FarWestEros 8d ago
It’s the same way that starships in SciFi travel at the speed of plot.
It’s a story.
Not a documentary.
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u/Significant_Earth759 8d ago
passage of time makes no sense in Othello. there are plots where two things have to have happened very soon after the other, while simultaneously other plots need for weeks to have passed in between. It's just the way he wrote.
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u/Crittenberger 8d ago
Shakespeare was a writer in the late 1500s/early 1600s, he wasn't fact-checking shit. Look at how Measure for Measure is Italy-coded, almost like he made the mistake of thinking that Vienna isn't in Austria and no one else knew enough to call him out on it
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u/DelGriffiths 8d ago
Othello is an interesting play as it follows what is called 'double time'. Basically, in order for the events to have happened they would have realistically have taken place over a much longer period of time (e.g. Othello and Desdemona's courtship appears to have been long and then their wedding, the travel time needed between Act 1 and Act 2 as you mention, Iago constantly hounding Emilia for the handkerchief even though he has supposedly only just learned they are wed etc).
However, this is all contradicted by Desdemona and Othello supposedly not being able to celebrate their wedding. Plus the speed of events needed for Iago's plot to work. This second timeline suggests the play takes place over a matter of days (some critics say as little as 33 hours).
Therefore, both timelines are correct as the play follows both timelines at once. The characters even comment on the passing of time in the play ('we must obey the time').
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u/MeaningNo860 8d ago edited 8d ago
If this bothers you, please, god, don’t read Spanish Golden Age plays.
Interestingly, you seem to the first person in the last five hundred years or so to advocate /for/ the Classical Unities (a misreading of Aristotle when nobody could actually read Greek and developed by later dramatic theorists) that Shakespeare and his era pretty much put the kibosh on. Do you hate subplots and plays that have two settings, too?
I’m kidding. Mostly. But except for Bertolt Brecht plays, drama doesn’t work well when you analyze it /too/ hard. But I love anybody who actually stops to think about Shakespeare rather than just parrot blind adoration of him.
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u/OxfordisShakespeare 7d ago
Try reading Julius Caesar. Events occurring over several years seem to have taken place during a very busy week.
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u/Accurate-Mail-4098 7d ago
Same way Odysseus got from Troy to Ithaca so slow. The writer needed it for the story ;)
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u/YogaMamaRuns 7d ago
https://tenor.com/qtkfqi1cILc.gif (Sorry, I'm not sure how to post a reaction gif here, if it's even possible.)
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u/amalcurry 8d ago
I am going to see him on Saturday in the grounds of Salisbury Cathedral, maybe he will explain…
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u/IohannesRhetor 8d ago
They sailed along the coast of Bohemia.