SOURCE: Hopkins, Lisa. “‘This is Venice: My house is not a grange’: Othello's Landscape of the Mind.” Upstart Crow 20 (2000): 68-78.

In the following essay, Hopkins views Othello as a reversal of the pastoral pattern of a retreat to an idealized world where regeneration occurs. The critic maintains that in Othello Venice represents a pastoral inversion, a desolate place rather than a setting that fosters self-education and personal renewal.

It has been often noticed that many of Shakespeare's comedies depend for their dénouement on retreat to a green world, a life-giving natural space which allows for personal growth and regeneration and a rebalancing of psyches unsettled by the pressures of urban living. It is rather less of a critical commonplace that several of his tragedies feature an inversion of this pattern,¹ generally in the form either of an image pattern playing on death, waste, and decay, or...