The most influential writer in
all of English literature, William Shakespeare was born in 1564 to
a successful middle-class glove-maker in Stratford-upon-Avon, England.
Shakespeare attended grammar school, but his formal education proceeded
no further. In 1582 he married an older woman,
Anne Hathaway, and had three children with her. Around 1590 he
left his family behind and traveled to London to work as an actor
and playwright. Public and critical acclaim quickly followed, and
Shakespeare eventually became the most popular playwright in England
and part-owner of the Globe Theater. His career bridged the reigns
of Elizabeth I (ruled 1558–1603) and James
I (ruled 1603–1625), and he was a favorite
of both monarchs. Indeed, James granted Shakespeare’s company the
greatest possible compliment by bestowing upon its members the title
of King’s Men. Wealthy and renowned, Shakespeare retired to Stratford
and died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two.
At the time of Shakespeare’s death, literary luminaries such as
Ben Jonson hailed his works as timeless.
Shakespeare’s works were collected and printed in various
editions in the century following his death, and by the early eighteenth century
his reputation as the greatest poet ever to write in English was
well established. The unprecedented admiration garnered by his works
led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeare’s life, but the dearth
of biographical information has left many details of Shakespeare’s
personal history shrouded in mystery. Some people have concluded
from this fact and from Shakespeare’s modest education that Shakespeare’s
plays were actually written by someone else—Francis Bacon and the
Earl of Oxford are the two most popular candidates—but the support
for this claim is overwhelmingly circumstantial, and the theory
is not taken seriously by many scholars.
In the absence of credible evidence to the contrary, Shakespeare must
be viewed as the author of the thirty-seven plays and 154 sonnets
that bear his name. The legacy of this body of work is immense. A
number of Shakespeare’s plays seem to have transcended even the category
of brilliance, becoming so influential as to affect profoundly the
course of Western literature and culture ever after.
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. Shakespeare’s information on the Venetian-Turkish conflict
probably derives from The History of the Turks by
Richard Knolles, which was published in England in the autumn of 1603.
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.
To Cinthio’s story Shakespeare added supporting characters such
as the rich young dupe Roderigo and the outraged and grief-stricken
Brabanzio, Desdemona’s father. Shakespeare compressed the action into
the space of a few days and set it against the backdrop of military
conflict. And, most memorably, he turned the ensign, a minor villain,
into the arch-villain Iago.
The question of Othello’s exact race is open to some debate.
The word Moor now refers to the Islamic Arabic inhabitants of North Africa
who conquered Spain in the eighth century, but the term was used
rather broadly in the period and was sometimes applied to Africans
from other regions. George Abbott, for example, in his A Brief
Description of the Whole World of 1599,
made distinctions between “blackish Moors” and “black Negroes”;
a 1600 translation of John Leo’s The
History and Description of Africa distinguishes “white
or tawny Moors” of the Mediterranean coast of Africa from the “Negroes
or black Moors” of the south. 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.
While Moor characters abound on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage,
none are given so major or heroic a role as Othello. Perhaps the
most vividly stereotypical black character of the period is Aaron, the
villain of Shakespeare’s early play Titus Andronicus. The
antithesis of Othello, Aaron is lecherous, cunning, and vicious;
his final words are: “If one good deed in all my life I did / I
do repent it to my very soul” (Titus Andronicus, V.iii.188–189).
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.
