Islands and Heaths in William Shakespeare’s Othello, the Tempest, Macbeth, and King Lear: Homelands or Hinterlands?
Creators: name: BEN AMOR, Zied
Publisher: name: figshare
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: 200503 British and Irish Literature
subject: FOS: Languages and literature
subject: 210305 British History
subject: FOS: History and archaeology
subject: 190404 Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies
subject: FOS: Arts (arts, history of arts, performing arts, music)
subject: Drama
subject: 200211 Postcolonial Studies
subject: FOS: Other humanities
subject: 200525 Literary Theory

description: <b>Islands and Heaths in William Shakespeare’s Othello, the Tempest, Macbeth, and King Lear: Homelands or Hinterlands?</b><b><br></b>Dr. Zied BEN AMORFaculty of arts and humanities of SousseUniversity of Sousse, Keywords: hinterlands, islands and Shakespeare, heaths and Shakespeare, the Tempest, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth ziedamor@yahoo.comhttps://orcid.org/ 0000-0003-3138-0088<br><br>The article studies and compares the significance of islands as hinterlands in Othello and the Tempest. Cyprus, a fortified outpost, and a military encampment in the borderline of Christendom. The island is in an enemy territory and an area of unrest and instability. Cyprus echoes the accounts of the exotic hinterlands that Othello describes in his stories. The article proves that geographical locations and their meanings are dependent on collective imagination shaped by religion and honed by conflicts and wars in the Mediterranean against what has been commonly agreed on as “the scourge of God”. Islands as hinterlands affect the mood of characters and situations. Othello and The Tempest have the same emotional logic; they both follow the same dynamics where seas are crossed, tempests are faced, and flights and groups travel from North to South. The island in The Tempest offers a flight from a well-ordered society, extremely sophisticated and bound by laws into a tabula rasa where values are juxtaposed, carnivalesque situations and drunken scenes are introduced, grotesque and heretic statements are experienced, music and chants are performed, and love and desire are experienced. As for Caliban, he narrates his own island as his homeland and writes back its history. The second part of the article shows how heaths in Macbeth and King Lear are associated with desolation, danger, violence, and wrath. The emotional logic of the heath episodes in both plays are shown to be diametrically opposite. Meanwhile the heath scenes in Macbeth accentuate degeneration and fall; they contribute to elevate Lear into a homely status through the expiation of his misdeeds. However, it is possible to read the heaths in Macbeth and Lear not as hinterlands but also as homelands. Contextual historical, theological and postcolonialist readings relevant to the study of the islands will be used in the article as well as empirical text-focused analyses to unravel the significance of the heath as hinterlands/homelands.<br><b>The Higher Institute of Applied Languages and Computer Science of Beja (ISLAIB)</b><b>The Department of Languages</b><b>The INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON</b><b>“ON HINTERLANDS AND HOMELANDS”</b><b>3-5 March 2022</b><b>Venue: Hammamet</b><br><br><b></b>