Summary Notes on the key points of context in Shakespeare's Othello
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Course
Unit 1 - Drama
Institution
PEARSON (PEARSON)
Detailed context notes on Shakespeare's Othello, for revision. Produced by a student who achieved A* in the Pearson Edexcel A-level in English Literature.
INTERTEXTUALITY
Shakespeare took the plot of Othello from Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi (1565) – a story
about Disdemona and her Moorish husband, who is duped by his villainous Ensign.
Shakespeare removed the idea that the Ensign was motivated by lust for Disdemona,
and he added the characters of Roderigo and Brabantio.
‘it’s easy to forget the startling boldness of Shakespeare’s decision to take Cinthio’s brief
tale of a doomed mixed-race marriage and transform it into a heart-breaking tragedy.’
Kiernan Ryan
RACE
The word ‘Moor’ had a number of different connotations in Shakespeare’s era. In Cesare
Vecellio’s 16th-century costume guide, the term is used to describe both the people of
North Africa and sub-Saharan Africans. As such, it has provoked heated debate about the
identity of Shakespeare’s ‘Othello, the Moor of Venice’.
The Moroccan Ambassador visited London in late 1600, to negotiate with Queen
Elizabeth I about a military alliance against Spain. Shakespeare may have seen the
impressive North African party before he wrote Othello.
A draft proclamation of 1601 asked for the deportation of black people, described as
‘Negroes and blackamoors’, from the realm of England. This was justified on the grounds
that they were draining national resources at a time of ‘dearth’ or hardship.
The Travels of John Mandeville was one of the most popular travel books of the Middle
Ages. The narrative describes wondrous races and creatures that inhabit the edges of the
known world, including men with eyes in their shoulders.
Leo Africanus used reductive racial stereotypes to describe the ‘vertues’ and ‘vices’ of
Africans in 1550. He says ‘no nation in the world is so subject to jealousie’ and claims
that Africans are ‘so credulous that they beleeve matters impossible which are told to
them’.
At the age of 17, the American Ira Aldridge was the first black actor to play Othello – or
any Shakespearean role – in Britain in 1825.
‘Shakespeare produced in Othello a searing critique of racial and sexual injustice, which
is more powerful now in the 21st century than it could ever have been at the dawn of the
17th.’ Kiernan Ryan
SETTING
A number of contemporary visitors were struck by the multinational character of 16th-
century Venice, particularly in the trading centre, the Rialto. Gasparo Contarini notes the
‘wonderful concourse of strange and forraine people … of the farthest and remotest
nations’. This multiculturalism is also reflected in Carpaccio’s painting of The Miracle of
the Relic of the True Cross on the Rialto Bridge (1494).
, In Shakespeare’s day, Venice was notorious for its high-class prostitutes or courtesans,
as shown by the rich illustrations in Coryate’s Crudities, Vecellio’s costume guide and the
friendship album of Moyses Walens.
In the huge sea- battle of Lepanto (1571) Christian forces regained control of Cyprus
from the Ottoman Turks. Shakespeare set parts of Othello in war-torn Cyprus, giving the
play a strong political resonance for its first audiences.
MAGIC/DRUGS
In early modern England, people were keenly aware of the dangers and benefits of plants
as remedies and poisons. In his finely illustrated Herball (1597), John Gerard describes
plants like the potato which were used as aphrodisiacs or lust-inducing drugs.
CRITICAL REVIEWS OF THE TIME
In A Short View of Tragedy (1693), the critic Thomas Rymer cuttingly asks why Othello
was not ‘call’d the Tragedy of the Handkerchief?’ He wonders how ‘it entered into our
Poets head to make a Tragedy of this Trifle.’
In his notes on Othello (c. 1818), the poet and critic, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
commented on Iago’s ‘motiveless malignity’.
POSTCOLONIAL READING
Postcolonial readings focus on the play’s representation of Ottoman Turks.
Shakespeare derived Othello’s plot from a short narrative in Giraldi Cinthio’s Gli
Hecatommithi (1565), but set his play within the context of Venice’s struggle
during the 1570s with the Ottoman Empire for control of Cyprus, the eastern
Mediterranean island that overlooked the shipping lanes between Europe and
trading centres in the East. Venice owned Cyprus from 1470 to 1569, but in 1571
Turkish forces seized the island. Later that year an alliance of Christian powers
defeated the Turk in the famous naval battle of Lepanto.
As a young man, James VI of Scotland (James I of England in 1603) celebrated that
battle, fought ‘Betwixt the baptiz’d race, / And circumcised Turband Turkes’.
References throughout Othello to ‘the Turk’ or ‘turning Turk’ evoke the
intermittent conflict between Europe’s Christian powers and the Islamic Ottoman
Empire, which was as much an economic competition as a clash of religions.
In sermons and treatises, English writers like Richard Knolles, who published The
General Historie of the Turks (1603), demonised the Ottoman Empire as barbaric
and cruel, even as they admired its military success and bureaucratic structure.
Shakespeare draws upon the Christian-Turkish binary but also undercuts it by
making the play’s most villainous character a Venetian and its hero an
outsider. Fearful of vesting military power in one of its own citizens, Venice’s republican
government contracted with foreign mercenaries who could easily be dismissed once the
crisis was over (as Othello is in Act 5). Although Othello has been chosen by the Venetian
government to lead its army, ‘the Moor’ (a term that originally referred to practitioners of
Islam) remains an alien in Venice. Like the liminal island of Cyprus, he is caught in the
middle, neither European nor Turk yet embodying both, and in his suicide he highlights
his service as a Christian hero by killing the ‘turbaned Turk’ within, who ‘beat a Venetian
and traduced the state’ (5.2.352–53).
Othello’s geopolitical impact is not limited, however, to conflicts between Venice and the
Ottoman Empire. Othello’s blackness and his background as a foreign mercenary
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