A couple of weeks back, I took a look at Heaven and Hell. Not physically, of course. I’m just going to one of those (and it’s not the one with the rarely used stairway, it’s the one with the packed highway). No, I meant a view of Othello, shot through the prism of a concordance. For those who don’t know, a concordance is an exhaustive listing of the uses of any word within a given body of work. And if you’ve been following along for any length of time (or have just checked out the not-so-digital tools of the trade), I love the one over at OpenSource Shakespeare, I like to take a dive into it for words like “nothing” in Much Ado About Nothing, “gulling” in Twelfth Night, “man” and “play” in As You Like It, “noble” and “honor” in Julius Caesar, “play” (again) in Hamlet, and “mercy” in Measure for Measure. And as I said, earlier in the month, I took a look at Heaven and Hell in Othello.
Today, I want to tackle another “H” word: Honest.