Othello

• Othello is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare, around 1603
• Othello


  • General in the Venetian military, a noble Moor
• Desdemona


  • Othello's wife; daughter of Brabantio
• Iago


  • Othello's trusted, but jealous and traitorous ensign
• Cassio


  • Othello's loyal and most beloved captain
• Emilia


  • Iago's wife and Desdemona's maidservant
• Bianca


  • Cassio's lover
• Brabantio


  • Venetian senator and Desdemona's father (can also be called Brabanzio)
• Roderigo


  • Dissolute Venetian, in love with Desdemona
• Gratiano


  • Brabantio's brother
• Lodovico


  • Brabantio's kinsman and Desdemona's cousin
• Montano


  • Othello's Venetian predecessor in the government of Cyprus
• Clown


  • Servant
• Plot


  1. Act I

  2. Act II

  3. Act III

  4. Act IV

  5. Act V
• Shakespeare's primary source for the plot was the story of a Moorish Captain (third decade, story seven) in Gli Hecatommithi by Cinthio (Giovanni Battista Giraldi), a collection of one hundred novellas about love, grouped into ten "decades" by theme
• Shakespeare's direct sources for the story do not include any threat of warfare: it seems to have been Shakespeare's innovation to set the story at the time of a threatened Turkish invasion of Cyprus - apparently fixing it in the events of 1570
• Scholars have identified many other influences on Othello: things which are not themselves sources but whose impact on Shakespeare can be identified in the play
• In 1600, London was visited for "half a year" by the Moorish ambassador of the King of Barbary, whose entourage caused a stir in the city. Shakespeare's company is known to have played at court during the time of the visit, and so would have encountered the foreign visitors at first hand
• Among Shakespeare's non-fiction, or partly-fictionalised, sources were Gasparo Contarini's Commonwealth and Government of Venice and Leo Africanus's A Geographical Historie of Africa
• In 1600, London was visited for "half a year" by the Moorish ambassador of the King of Barbary, whose entourage caused a stir in the city
• Shakespeare's company is known to have played at court during the time of the visit, and so would have encountered the foreign visitors at first hand
• Shakespeare's non-fiction or partly-fictionalised sources

  • Gasparo Contarini's Commonwealth and Government of Venice
  • Leo Africanus's A Geographical Historie of Africa
  • Philemon Holland's translation of Pliny's Natural History
  • The Travels of Sir John Mandeville
• Leo Africanus: 'They are so credulous they will beleeue matters impossible, which are told them<|>No nation in the world is so subject vnto iealousie; for they will rather [lose] their liues than put vp any disgrace in the behalfe of their women'
• From Leo Africanus's own life story Shakespeare took a well-born, educated African finding a place at the height of a white European power
• A performance of Othello is mentioned in the accounts book of Sir Edmund Tilney, then Master of the Revels


  1604
• One of Othello's sources, Holland's translation of Pliny's Natural History, was published

  1601
• Scholars have tended to date the play, within the reign of James I

  1603-1604
• Othello was not published in Shakespeare's lifetime
• Differences between the first quarto (1622) and First Folio (1623) editions of Othello


  • F contains about 160 lines which are not in Q
  • Q has fuller and more elaborate stage directions than F
  • Q has 63 oaths or profanities which do not appear in F
  • There are over a thousand variations in wording, lineation, spelling and punctuation
• Jealousy


  A wide-ranging emotion encompassing the spectrum from lust to spiritual disillusionment
• Othello becomes persuaded that his honour is tarnished by his wife's unfaithfulness and can only be restored through Desdemona's and Cassio's deaths
• This - a code of behaviour no longer considered valid - is one reason why modern critics rarely regard Othello among Shakespeare's greatest tragedies
• Race


  Othello's race serves to mark him as "other" - both a Christian and a black African, he is of, and not of, Venice
• Racist slurs used in the play

  • "thicklips"
  • "an old black ram is tupping your white ewe"
  • "you'll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse"
  • "the sooty bosom of such a thing as thou"
• There is no consensus over Othello's ethnic origin - "Moor" was used with broader connotations in Shakespeare's England
• Scholar Virginia Vaughan: 'I think this play is racist, and I think it is not'
• In Shakespeare's main source, Cinthio's Gli Hecatommithi, the character Disdemona says "I know not what to say of the Moor; he used to be all love towards me; but within these few days he has become another man"
• Thomas Rymer: 'A caution to all Maidens of Quality how, without their Parents consent, they run away with Blackamoors'
• Charles and Mary Lamb: 'For this noble lady, who regarded the mind more than the features of men, with a singularity rather to be admired than imitated, had chosen for the object of her affections a Moor, a black'
• In the nineteenth century, writers like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb questioned whether the play could even be called a "true tragedy" when it dramatized the inviolable taboo of a white woman in a relationship with a black man