Bob and Emily Talk VIII

It's an extremely hot night in August (hard to believe, but maybe imagining such a night will help keep you warm in this unusually cold December we've been having). It's also somewhat late on a Sunday night. Bob and Emily have spent the evening playing board games (also hard to believe, in December, that Bob and Emily ever have time to play board games) and splitting a bottle of wine (not so hard to believe). Now, they are reading. Bob: the Sunday comics. Emily: Othello.

Emily: You know, Iago is one of the most despicable characters ever created.

Bob: Oh yes. Evil. He was a Republican, you know.

Emily (ignoring that comment): That's the brilliance of Shakespeare. He created a true sociopath before anyone even talked about sociopaths. The man had no feelings.

Bob doesn't respond. He's laughing at something in the funnies. There's silence for a while.

Bob: You know, if someone were to ask me, I'd say that, after an exhausting weekend and drinking half a bottle of wine isn't exactly the best time to be reading Shakespeare.

Emily: Well, I'm enjoying it immensely.

Nobody asked him, right? Obviously, though, this is not the time to have a deep conversation with him about Shakespeare's views on women as argued by one of the notes she read from this 1903 The Modern Reader's Shakespeare edition, a note that stated "...it ought to be considered a very exalted compliment to women, that all the sarcasms on them in Shakespeare are put in the mouths of villains." That will have to wait for some other Bob and Emily talk.