Great play. I re-wrote the play for a university assignment and put it in a Canadian context where Othello was Aboriginal.

When I was learning Russian, we were taught that a large portion of Russian is idiomatic and cannot be translated literally. For example, дождь идёт translates literally as "rain takes a walk," but really means "It is raining." This makes learning Russian even that much more difficult than English, not to mention the complex grammar in Russian with multiple declensions and cases for nouns and adjectives (even more than in Latin) and multiple ways of conjugating verbs, not counting all the irregular verbs. We were also taught that most Russians do not speak proper Russian - mainly because it is too difficult. English is much simpler and easier, and still native English speakers often do not speak proper English. It's too bad that Latin is not taught as much in schools as it used to be.

And for those of us who didn't know: Snuff is a smokeless tobacco made from ground or pulverised tobacco leaves. It is inhaled or "snuffed" into the nasal cavity, delivering a swift hit of nicotine and a lasting flavoured scent (especially if flavouring has been blended with the tobacco). Was that the same as "take a powder"? Or was the powder something else?

Wow did I learn something from this! I always thought "take a powder" was like "take a chill pill" and it referred to snuff or smelling salts or other things they'd use to calm down "hysterical" women in Victorian times. So much for what I know!