Othello William Shakespeare

Shakespeare's sources

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]

One such influence is not a literary work at all. 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.[23]

Among Shakespeare's non-fiction, or partly-fictionalised, sources were Gasparo Contarini's Commonwealth and Government of Venice[24][25] and Leo Africanus's A Geographical Historie of Africa.[26] Himself a Moor from Barbary, Leo said of his own people "they are so credulous they will beleeue matters impossible, which are told them" and "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" - both traits seen in Shakespeare's Othello.[27] And from Leo's own life story Shakespeare took a well-born, educated African finding a place at the height of a white European power.[28] From Philemon Holland's translation of Pliny's Natural History Shakespeare took the references to the Pontic Sea,[29] to Arabian trees with their medicinable gum,[30] and to the "Anthropophagi and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders",[31][32] elements which also featured in the fantastic The Travels of Sir John Mandeville.[33]

Date

The terminus ad quem for Othello (that is, the latest year in which the play could have been written) is 1604, since a performance of the play in that year is mentioned in the accounts book of Sir Edmund Tilney, then Master of the Revels.[34]

A terminus a quo (i.e. the earliest year in which it could have been written) is given by the fact that one of its sources, Holland's translation of Pliny's Natural History, was published in 1601.[34]

Within this range, scholars have tended to date the play 1603–1604, within the reign of James I, since the play appears to have elements designed to appeal to the new king, who had written a poem about the defeat of the Turkish navy at Lepanto, and to the new queen, Anne of Denmark, in whose circle there was an interest in the blackface exoticism also reflected in Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blackness, in which the queen and her ladies appeared as "daughters of Niger".[35] That dating is supported by similarities to Measure for Measure, another of Shakespeare's plays often dated around 1604, and which, like Othello, draws its plot from Cinthio's Gli Hecatommithi.[36] This date is also supported by the possibility that Shakespeare may have consulted Richard Knolles' 1603 The Generall Historie of the Turkes.[37]

However, evidence of an earlier date, 1601–1602, is provided by the so-called bad quarto of Shakespeare's play Hamlet, published in 1603. The theory is that the bad quarto is a memorial reconstruction of Hamlet, made by some of its actors: so where there are unintentional echoes of Othello in the bad quarto (for example "to my vnfolding / Lend thy listning eare"[38] in the bad quarto and "To my unfolding lend your prosperous ear"[39] in Othello - and a number of others) it suggests that the actors must have been performing Othello, at the latest, in the season preceding the bad quarto's publication.[40]

Early editions

Othello was not published in Shakespeare's lifetime.[41] The first published version of the play was a quarto in 1622 (usually abbreviated to "Q"), which was followed a year later by the play's appearance in the First Folio (usually abbreviated to "F").[41]

There are significant differences between the two early editions, the most prominent of which are:

• F contains about 160 lines which are not in Q, sometimes in passages which are quite extended and well-known, such as Othello's "Pontic Sea" speech[42] and Desdemona's "Willow Song".[43][44]
• Q has fuller and more elaborate stage directions than F.[41]
• Q has 63 oaths or profanities which do not appear in F, suggesting the possibility that F was based on a manuscript which had been edited to conform with the 1606 Act of Abuses.[45]
• There are over a thousand variations in wording, lineation, spelling and punctuation.[41]

There is no scholarly consensus to account for the differences between Q and F:[46]

• E. K. Chambers in 1930 argued that Q derived from a scribal manuscript, and F from the author's holograph.[47]
• Alice Walker in 1952 argued that F was printed from a corrected copy of Q.[47]
• W. W. Greg in 1955 argued that Q's copy must have been a difficult-to-read transcript of Shakespeare's "foul papers" (i.e. first drafts).[48]
• M. R. Ridley in 1958, rejecting Walker's argument and accepting Greg's, argued that Q had greater authority and rejected F's changes as "memorial contamination" from a theatre prompt book or as "sophistications" by the editors of F.[49]
• Nevill Coghill in 1964 argued that the changes in F were improvements made by the author, who might have taken advantage of the need to revise the play in consequence of the Act of Abuses to make other changes.[50]
• Gary Taylor in 1983 agreed with Coghill that F incorporated the author's own improvements to Q, but argued that another scribal hand had also made intervening changes to F.[51]
• E. A. J. Honigmann in 1996 partly revived Walker's theory, by arguing that the scribe responsible for preparing the manuscript for F had consulted Q whenever the copy was illegible.[52] He also argues that sequences in F but not in Q, such as the Willow Song, may have been cuts from the original made for the manuscript of Q, rather than later additions made for the manuscript of F.[53]

As the Oxford Shakespeare editor Michael Neill summarises things: "The textual mystery of Othello is unlikely ever to be resolved to general satisfaction."[54]