Othello

• 1. Introduction

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  Othello, written by William Shakespeare around 1603, opens with a secret. A Moorish general and a senator's daughter have eloped in the night, and before morning their marriage will become the pivot on which an entire civilization's anxieties about race, jealousy, and trust will turn. The play is set across two locations: the mercantile republic of Venice and the island of Cyprus, where a war against the Turks is expected. The soldier at the center of the story is distinguished enough to command the Venetian armies, yet vulnerable enough to be destroyed by a subordinate's whispered insinuations. The person doing the whispering is Iago, Othello's ensign, and his reasons for doing so have kept scholars and audiences arguing ever since the play's first performance.

  Othello was not published during Shakespeare's lifetime. It survived in a quarto edition from 1622 and in the First Folio printed the following year. Those two early texts differ in over a thousand ways, from a single word to passages of more than a hundred lines, and no scholarly consensus has ever settled which text should be trusted more. That unresolved textual mystery sits beneath every production and edition that has followed.

  What makes the play unusual even within Shakespeare's major tragedies is the intimacy of its destruction. This is not a play about kingdoms or armies in the end; it is about a man smothering his wife in their bed because a colleague forged the evidence of an affair using a handkerchief. The roles of Othello, Iago, Desdemona, and Emilia are considered among the most demanding and desirable in the entire acting repertoire. The questions the play raises about race, jealousy, and the treatment of women have grown more contested, not less, across four centuries of performance.

• 2. Shakespeare's Sources

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  The story Shakespeare borrowed came from a 1565 Italian collection called Gli Hecatommithi, written by Giovanni Battista Giraldi, known as Cinthio. The collection groups a hundred novellas into ten thematic decades; Othello draws from the third decade, which deals with marital infidelity. In Cinthio's original tale, only one character has a name: Disdemona, whose name means "ill-omened" in Italian. The Moor, the Ensign, and the Corporal are described only by their roles.

  The differences between Cinthio and Shakespeare reveal how much Shakespeare invented. In Cinthio, the Ensign falls in love with the Moor's wife; when she rebuffs him, love curdles into hatred, and he turns the Moor against her. The murder itself is far more squalid: the Moor and the Ensign beat Disdemona to death using socks filled with sand, then bring down the ceiling of her bedchamber to make it appear an accident. The Ensign is later tortured to death for unrelated crimes, and the Moor is eventually killed by Disdemona's family.

  Shakespeare removed the Turkish military threat entirely from his source, introducing it himself to fix the story at a historically recognizable moment, apparently sometime before the Ottoman capture of Cyprus in 1573. That date would have been well known to Shakespeare's original audience, who would have understood that the Turks, contrary to the play's opening, ultimately did take Cyprus.

  For a portrait of the Moor character, Shakespeare drew on Leo Africanus's A Geographical Historie of Africa. Leo, himself a Moor from Barbary, wrote of his own people that they were prone to credulity and to an intense jealousy over their women. From Leo's personal biography Shakespeare took the figure of a well-born, educated African who had found a place within a white European court. The ambassador from the Moorish King of Barbary visited London for half a year in 1600, and Shakespeare's company is known to have performed at court during that period, giving the playwright a direct encounter with the kind of figure he was imagining.

• 3. The Jealousy Machine

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  A. C. Bradley, the influential early twentieth-century Shakespeare critic, defined Othello's tragic flaw as a sexual jealousy so intense that it converts human nature into chaos. What makes the play mechanically strange is how jealousy spreads through it like an infection, carried not just through plot events but through language.

  In the early acts, Iago dominates the play's animal imagery. He introduces references to asses, rams, goats, monkeys, wolves, and wild-cats to describe Othello's marriage. From the third act onward, as Othello's suspicions take hold, he begins using the same imagery himself. The same transfer occurs with the play's diabolical language. Iago uses fourteen of his sixteen images of hell and devils in the first two acts; Othello uses twenty-five of his twenty-six in the last three. The language of corruption travels from villain to victim.

  Iago's jealousy is equally central but differently constituted. The philosopher Francis Bacon, writing in the same era, described envy as "the vilest affection, and the most depraved... it always cometh to pass that envy worketh subtilly, and in the dark." That description fits Iago precisely. The word "honest" appears more than forty times in the play, almost always applied to Iago with a double meaning: both a condescending term for a social inferior and a claim to truthfulness. Othello calls Iago "honest" precisely because Iago has arranged to seem so.

  The play reaches its emotional center when Othello makes a vow with Iago to kill Desdemona and Cassio, and then appoints Iago his lieutenant. The promotion is the reward for the destruction. By that point, the two men's fates are so entangled that the scholar Robert Watson concluded that Iago may be "a reflection of our own destructive tendencies" rather than simply a monster imported from outside the relationship.

• 4. The Handkerchief's Weight

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  Thomas Rymer, in his 1693 A Short View of Tragedy, proposed that the play should better have been called "The Tragedy of the Handkerchief." He thought the entire catastrophe hung on an object so trivial that "no booby on this side Mauritania could make any consequence from it." Yet the handkerchief is where the play's machinery becomes most exposed.

  Othello describes the handkerchief at one point as a gift from an Egyptian charmer to his mother, endowed with magical properties. He contradicts himself in a later act, saying his father gave it to his mother. Whether Othello believes in its magic or is using the contradiction to pressure Desdemona is a question the play deliberately refuses to settle. What the text does make clear is that the handkerchief is the first gift Othello ever gave Desdemona, making it the material symbol of their bond.

  The plot's dependence on the handkerchief is also a demonstration of how chance operates in Iago's favor. Desdemona loses it at precisely the moment Iago needs physical evidence. Cassio fails to recognize it as hers. Cassio then gives it to Bianca to copy, and Bianca throws it back at him at the exact moment Othello is watching from concealment. Each of those accidents had to occur in sequence. Shakespeare's double time scheme, the play's compressed thirty-three hours in Cyprus, adds further pressure: there is no time in the plot for the affair Othello believes in to have taken place, yet Iago persuades him that Desdemona and Cassio have committed "the act of shame a thousand times."

  Professor Ian Smith has proposed a reading in which the handkerchief, described as "dyed in mummy," would not be white at all but black, making it a symbol of Othello's own body rather than of Desdemona's purity. In a 1997 production at the Royal National Theatre, the handkerchief fell to the ground just before the interval and remained visible on the stage throughout it, as the reviewer Richard Butler wrote, "challenging one of us to pick it up and prevent a tragedy."

• 5. Race on Stage and Page

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  The Nigerian poet Ben Okri wrote in his 1997 collection A Way of Being Free that if Othello did not begin as a play about race, its history has made it one. The Oxford editor Michael Neill framed the ongoing tension precisely: where critical and performance anxiety once focused on the supposed scandal of miscegenation, it has more recently focused on the play's complicity in racial stereotyping.

  The racist slurs in the play are extensive and specific: "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." The scholar Jyotsna Singh argues that Brabantio's objection to the marriage of a decorated general to a senator's daughter only makes sense in racist terms. Martin Orkin's 1987 essay argued the opposite conclusion: that Shakespeare confined those racist sentiments to discredited characters, and that the play, in scrutinizing the mechanisms of Iago's racism, continues to oppose it.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, writing in 1818, argued that Othello could not have been conceived as black at all: he called it "monstrous" to imagine "this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro." Those views directly contributed to what became known as the "Bronze Age of Othello," a stage tradition initiated by Edmund Kean in the early nineteenth century in which lighter makeup replaced blackface, on the theory that the actor's facial expressions should be legible to the audience.

  The first known professional performance of the title role by a black actor was James Hewlett at the African Grove Theatre in New York in 1822. Hewlett's protege Ira Aldridge, billed as "The African Roscius," played Shakespearean roles across Europe for forty years, including Othello at the Royalty Theatre in London in 1825. The question of who should play the role remains genuinely contested. In 1998, the black actor Hugh Quarshie asked whether a black performer playing the role risks making racial stereotypes seem legitimate, given that the character is "over-emotional, excitable and unstable." The 1996 anthology Othello: New Essays by Black Writers, edited by Mythili Kaul and published by Howard University Press, made the structural point that black and white audiences may be experiencing fundamentally different plays when they watch the same production.

• 6. Women and the Play's Power

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  The word "whore" appears fourteen times in Othello, more often than in any other work by Shakespeare. It is also one of only two Shakespeare plays, alongside Timon of Athens, in which the word is applied with specific reference to every named female character. The scholar Kay Stanton described the word's function as a "male-initiated inscription onto the female as scapegoat," a projection of male fear entirely unrelated to the women's actual behavior or self-perception.

  Desdemona begins the play as a headstrong heroine who has chosen her own husband against her father's wishes and defended that choice before the Duke of Venice. By the final acts, critics have noted that she is increasingly stripped of agency, enduring public humiliation and even a blow from Othello in front of Venetian nobles. Her dying act is to try to exonerate the man who has just murdered her. Some scholars read this as long-suffering martyrdom; others argue it represents a different kind of strength and dignity.

  Emilia stands in direct contrast. Stage director Michael Attenborough called her "the only real grown-up in the play." In the final scene, she defies Iago's demands three times, ultimately exposing his manipulation of the handkerchief at the cost of her own life. The actress Charlotte Cushman's Emilia was said to upstage Edwin Forrest's Othello in an 1845 production. When Fanny Kemble played Desdemona in 1848, she broke with a tradition in which previous Desdemonas had accepted their murders with what she called "wonderful equanimity." Kemble decided to make "a desperate fight for it," and that choice opened a conversation about agency in the role that has continued ever since.

  Even after Desdemona's death, Othello speaks of her in terms of ownership: "Had she been true, / If heaven would make me such another world / Of one entire and perfect chrysolite, / I'd not have sold her for it." The play names the possessive structure of the world it depicts and allows Emilia, at least, to revolt against it.

• 7. Four Centuries of Performance

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  The earliest documented performance of Othello took place at court on the 1st of November 1604. The play was written for the King's Men, and performed at both the Globe, which accommodated an audience of three thousand, and the indoor Blackfriars, which seated around seven hundred at higher prices. The title role was originally played by Richard Burbage. Moorish characters were conventionally costumed in turbans, long white gowns, and red trousers, with the actor's face darkened using lampblack or coal.

  The first professional performance by a woman on the English stage was that of Desdemona in Othello, on the 8th of December 1660. The first professional performances in North America came nearly a century later, when Robert Upton performed Othello at a makeshift theatre in New York on the 26th of December 1751. The play arrived in a Portuguese-speaking country in 1765, making it the first of Shakespeare's works to do so.

  Paul Robeson's 1943 Broadway production, directed by Margaret Webster with Jose Ferrer as Iago and Uta Hagen as Desdemona, was seen by over half a million people between its Broadway run and subsequent tour. When Robeson played the role in London in 1930, his cast had included Peggy Ashcroft, Sybil Thorndike, and Ralph Richardson. Earle Hyman, who saw the Broadway production numerous times at seventeen, later recalled "this tremendous excitement - the first African-American onstage to be playing this role... to all the blacks, he represented us."

  Janet Suzman's 1988 production in South Africa during Apartheid foregrounded the racism of Iago, modelled on Eugène Terre'Blanche, and provoked walk-outs and hate mail over the physical contact between the black John Kani and the white Joanna Weinburg. At the other extreme of the spectrum, Jude Kelly's 1997 "photonegative" production for the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington cast the white Patrick Stewart as Othello while almost all other speaking roles were played by actors of African descent. The script's references to the character's race remained unchanged throughout.

  When Antony Sher played Iago for the RSC, director Greg Doran arranged for the final moment before a snap blackout to be Sher staring directly at the audience. Sher later wrote that in his own head, the question ringing out was always: "You saw what was happening - why didn't you stop it?"

• 8. On Screen and Beyond

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  Orson Welles spent years financing his film of Othello by taking acting roles in other productions and using the fees to reconvene his cast and crew. The result was a film in which one actor might have been filmed in Italy one year and another in Morocco the next, then spliced together in the same scene. The film was critically rejected on its 1955 release, with headlines calling it "Mr Welles Murders Shakespeare in the Dark" and "The Boor of Venice." It was reappraised as a classic upon its re-release in a restored version in 1992.

  Laurence Olivier's 1964 stage performance at the National Theatre, later filmed, earned Oscar nominations for Olivier as Othello, Maggie Smith as Desdemona, Frank Finlay as Iago, and Joyce Redman as Emilia. It was a financial success, but later critics have found it difficult to separate from its racial politics. Jonathan Miller's subsequent version for the BBC Television Shakespeare series, with Anthony Hopkins in the title role, was the last screen Othello to use blackface. Miller reportedly said the play was "about jealousy, not race."

  Verdi's 1887 opera Otello, with a libretto by Arrigo Boito, is considered a masterpiece that returns to fidelity with Shakespeare after decades of looser adaptations, including a version of Rossini's 1816 Otello that ended happily. The Willow Song that Desdemona sings in Act 4 is not Shakespeare's invention but an existing ballad; the version thought most authentic to Shakespeare's text is known as "The Poore Soule Sate Sighing" and is one of the most performed pieces of early modern English music.

  The play's geographic reach is visible in the range of twentieth and twenty-first century film adaptations. Alexander Abela's French Souli set the story in a modern Madagascan fishing village. Vishal Bhardwaj's Hindi Omkara placed it amid political violence in Uttar Pradesh. Cathy Downes' 2001 New Zealand stage production set the action in the Waikato Land Wars, with Othello as a British-adopted general ultimately leading forces against his own people before delivering a "terrifying wero" before his final act. The handkerchief that set everything in motion has crossed more borders than most objects in literature.