Othello
Othello (/ɒˈθɛloʊ/; full title: The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice) is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare, around 1603. The story revolves around two characters, Othello and Iago.
This article is about the Shakespeare tragedy. For the title character, see Othello (character). For the board game, see Othello (board game). For other uses, see Othello (disambiguation).Othello is a Moorish military commander who was serving as a general of the Venetian army in defence of Cyprus against invasion by Ottoman Turks. He had recently married Desdemona, a beautiful and wealthy Venetian lady younger than himself, without the knowledge of and despite the later objection of her father. Iago is Othello's malevolent ensign, who maliciously stokes his master's jealousy until the usually stoic Othello kills his beloved wife in a fit of blind rage. Due to its enduring themes of passion, jealousy, and race, Othello is still topical and popular and is widely performed, with numerous adaptations.
Date and sources[edit]
Shakespeare's sources[edit]
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.[1] The third decade deals with marital infidelity.[2] Of Cinthio's characters, only Disdemona (the equivalent of Shakespeare's Desdemona - her name means "ill-omened" in Italian) is named - the others are simply called the Moor (the equivalent of Othello), the Ensign (Iago), the Corporal (Cassio) and similar descriptions.[3] In its story the Ensign falls in love with the Moor's wife Disdemona, but her indifference turns his love to hate and in revenge he persuades the Moor that Disdemona has been unfaithful. The Moor and the Ensign murder Disdemona with socks filled with sand, and bring down the ceiling of her bedchamber to make it appear an accident. The story continues until the Ensign is tortured to death for unrelated reasons and the Moor is killed by Disdemona's family.[4]
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. Those historical events would however have been well known to Shakespeare's original audience, who would therefore have been aware that - contrary to the action of the play - the Turks took Cyprus, and still held it.[5][6]
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:[7] these include Virgil's Aeneid,[8] Ovid's Metamorphoses,[9] both The Merchant's Tale and The Miller's Tale from Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales,[10] Geoffrey Fenton's Certaine Tragicall Discourses,[11][12] Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy,[13] George Peele's The Battle of Alcazar,[14][15] the anonymous Arden of Faversham,[16] Marlowe's Doctor Faustus,[17] and Heywood's A Woman Killed with Kindness.[18] These also include Shakespeare's own earlier plays Much Ado About Nothing, in which a similar plot was used in a comedy,[19] The Merchant of Venice with its high-born, Moorish, Prince of Morocco,[20] and Titus Andronicus, in which a Moor, Aaron, was a prominent villain, and as such was a forerunner of both Othello and Iago.[21]
