context

• Othello was first performed by the King’s Men at the court of King James I on November 1, 1604. Written during Shakespeare’s great tragic period, which also included the composition of Hamlet (1600), King Lear (1604–5), Macbeth (1606), and Antony and Cleopatra (1606–7).
•  Othello is set against the backdrop of the wars between Venice and Turkey that raged in the latter part of the sixteenth century. Cyprus, which is the setting for most of the action, was a Venetian outpost attacked by the Turks in 1570 and conquered the following year.
• The story of Othello is also derived from another source—an Italian prose tale written in 1565 by Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinzio (usually referred to as Cinthio). The original story contains the bare bones of Shakespeare’s plot: a Moorish general is deceived by his ensign into believing his wife is unfaithful.
• Othello’s darkness or blackness is alluded to many times in the play, but Shakespeare and other Elizabethans frequently described brunette or darker than average Europeans as black. The opposition of black and white imagery that runs throughout Othello is certainly a marker of difference between Othello and his European peers, but the difference is never quite so racially specific as a modern reader might imagine it to be.
• Othello, by contrast, is a noble figure of great authority, respected and admired by the duke and senate of Venice as well as by those who serve him, such as Cassio, Montano, and Lodovico. Only Iago voices an explicitly stereotypical view of Othello, depicting him from the beginning as an animalistic, barbarous, foolish outsider.
• Shakespeare uses features of traditional Greek tragedy (Othello suffers from the fatal flaw of pride) and revenge tragedy (Iago is a scheming machiavel).
• Most Elizabethans believed in the devil and accepted evil was hard to detect, thus making Iago's deceptions both plausible and terrifying. The need for Desdemona to confess her "sin" before she dies reflects the Christian beliefs about a "good death" and how to prepare for eternal life and reconciliation with God.
• Ironically, the marriage of Othello and Desdemona is destroyed in Cyprus, the birthplace of the goddess of love, Aphrodite.#
• A cuckold is a man who has been betrayed by his wife. When Othello thinks Desdemona has been unfaithful, he complains of "a pain upon [his] forehead" - an allusion to the mating habits of stags, who forfeit their mates when they are defeated by another male