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Othello
is generally regarded as one of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, ranking alongside
Hamlet,
Macbeth
and
King Lear,
all written in a remarkable six-year burst of creativity between 1600 and 1606. While it returns to Venice, we are no longer in the company of merchants or Jews; instead we meet Othello, a Moor living in a Christian world at the center of a political, romantic and military drama of which he is both master and captive. It is a play in which nothing is quite what it seems. Black and white, race and sex, seeing and believing, good and evil, are all subject to pitiless examination in some of Shakespeare’s most intense language and dramatic action. It has been called a “tragedy of probability,” testing the limits of what the audience is prepared to believe is true.
⁴²
Even its date is subject to intense speculation. The play was first performed in November 1604. Recent editors have argued that Shakespeare probably began writing it within months of the first appearances of
Lust’s Dominion,
during the winter of 1601–1602, based on similarities with his earlier plays
Hamlet
(c. 1600) and
Twelfth Night
(c. 1601).

The first printed edition, entitled
The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice,
was published in 1622 in a small, pocket-sized quarto format (hence its description as “Quarto”). Just a year later a second edition was published in the celebrated First Folio collection (“Folio”) in the section “Tragedies,” under the same title. However, this second edition contained 3,685 lines, 160 more than the first edition. At some point more than thirty passages were added to the Folio (or, alternatively, had been cut from the Quarto and then subsequently reinstated). To add to the confusion, both editions were published after Shakespeare’s death in 1616, making it almost impossible to ascertain which version is closest to Shakespeare’s original intention. Editors are at a loss to provide conclusive evidence as to how and why these changes occurred. Some argue that the Quarto represents Shakespeare’s first version of the play, probably intended for a shortened performance, and that the Folio represents his revised “second thoughts.” Others claim that the changes are the result of the inevitable corruption that took place once the handwritten text of the play passed through the diverse hands of compositors, proofreaders and printers in the chaotic atmosphere of printing shops, and that the Quarto may have been a reduced version of the Folio.
⁴³

The problem of the play’s two versions is compounded by the perennial question of race. For over three hundred years, most Shakespeareans in the English-speaking world fixated with horror on Othello’s blackness and his seemingly “unnatural” union with the “fair” Desdemona, while the later twentieth century reacted with equal abhorrence to the play’s blatant racial slurs. As early as 1693 the critic Thomas Rymer wondered why Shakespeare would write a play in which the Venetians “will set a negro to be their general, or trust a Moor to defend them,” concluding with the sneering condescension of someone used to seeing black men as servants that “with us a blackamoor might rise to be a trumpeter; but Shakespeare would not have him less than a Lieutenant-General.”
⁴⁴
Samuel Taylor Coleridge denied Othello’s ethnicity altogether, claiming he “must not be conceived of as a negro” because “it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro.”
⁴⁵
It was only with the advent of decolonization and the rise of the African American civil rights movement that a profound reassessment of the play’s racial politics began. Writing in 1997 the Nigerian-born novelist Ben Okri voiced a commonly held feeling among black writers that it “hurts to watch
Othello
.” Okri argues that “if it did not begin as a play about race . . . then its history has made it one.”
⁴⁶

Okri is right:
Othello
did not begin life as a play about race in our modern understanding of the term. Our conception of race—identifying people by their physical features (such as skin color) or ethnic characteristics—entered the English language only in the eighteenth century. It is derived from the Middle French
rasse,
meaning a group of people connected by common descent, and the Spanish
raza
and the Portuguese
raça,
both referring to lineage and genealogy.
⁴⁷
This is how Shakespeare used the word, such as when Mark Antony speaks of the “lawful race” of Rome in
Antony and Cleopatra
(1607–1608).
⁴⁸
The crux is Shakespeare’s use of the term “Moor.” In
Othello,
Shakespeare exploited its dual meaning of “Mahometan,” or Muslim, and “Maurus,” or black. The play uses both meanings but Othello’s blackness has come to predominate.

Shakespeare did not invent the high-ranking Moor: like most playwrights of this period he took his stories and ideas from other writers, and drew inspiration directly from a source he had used before. The Italian Giovanni Battista Giraldi, popularly known as “Cinthio,” wrote a series of short stories known as the
Hecatommithi
(1565), which, like Boccaccio’s
Decameron
(1353), revolve around a morality tale. In Cinthio’s story the character on which Shakespeare based Othello is called simply “a Moor, a very gallant man.” His blackness is mentioned only once, there are no Turks and the tragedy is primarily domestic. The inspiration for Shakespeare’s Iago is referred to simply as “the Ensign,” and only Othello’s wife is given a proper name: “Disdemona.” In Cinthio’s version although the two men collude in questioning Disdemona’s virtue, it is the Ensign who beats her to death. Both men’s deaths are reported as happening much later, Othello’s following his banishment for his part in the affair, and the Ensign’s after being tortured. Cinthio’s story was a standard example of moralized tales castigating the infidelity of husbands and wives that stretched back through Boccaccio as far as Socrates. What Shakespeare brought to the story was a generation of Elizabethan England’s fascination with the figure of the Moor, not incidentally at the very time of al-Annuri’s embassy.

The play’s opening lines immediately set a tone of profound ambiguity. Iago appears, describing himself as “his Moorship’s ancient,” or standard-bearer, who has been passed over for promotion by his superior, Othello. He meets the wealthy and foolish Roderigo, who is in love with Desdemona, and persuades him to defame her for marrying Othello. He tells the bemused Roderigo, “Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago. / In following him I follow but myself,” concluding, “I am not what I am.”
⁴⁹
Iago’s elliptical reference to both himself and Othello begins one of Shakespeare’s most troubling presentations of psychological manipulation. Iago is going to penetrate Othello’s psyche in order to destroy him. “I am not what I am,” he states defiantly, and by the end of the play he leaves hardly any characters with an unequivocal sense of who they are. Iago’s line has a powerful religious dimension that none of its contemporary audience could have missed. He is the opposite of the Old Testament God, who says “I am that I am” (Exodus 3:14). At this stage, although the Moor has yet to appear, the audience has already met a version of him in Iago, who is behaving rather like the “irreligious” blackamoor, Aaron. When Shakespeare had written
Titus Andronicus
ten years earlier, he followed fashion by showing the Moor as a villainous outsider who destroys the virtuous warrior Titus. His first disturbing innovation in
Othello
was to invert these roles, giving the part of the villain to the Italian lieutenant and making the virtuous warrior a Moor.

Within twenty lines Iago is standing in the shadows outside the house of Brabantio, Desdemona’s father, taunting him:

Zounds, sir, you are robbed, for shame put on your gown!

Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul,

Even now, now, very now, an old black ram

Is tupping your white ewe! Arise, arise,

Awake the snorting citizens with the bell

Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you.
⁵⁰

Iago accuses the Moor—who has still not been named—of everything from stealing Desdemona from the paternal household, to bestial sexual behavior and representing the devil. When Brabantio demands that Iago and Roderigo explain themselves, Iago imagines Othello and Desdemona having sex, warning of the “monstrous” offspring that could ensue. He goads Brabantio, “you’ll have your daughter covered with a Barbary horse; you’ll have your nephews neigh to you, you’ll have coursers for cousins and jennets for germans!”
⁵¹

Iago uses the image of a Barbary horse to identify Othello as North African and offers up a prurient vision of miscegenation, or crossbreeding. His insults are rather opaque today—“jennets” are Spanish horses and “coursers” chargers, noted for their speed and stamina—but by drawing on the aristocratic language of horse breeding, Iago attempts to appeal to Brabantio’s sense of propriety. His insinuation is that Othello’s marriage to Desdemona disrupts the natural order of decorum and lineage. It is precisely this kind of insidious racism that makes Shakespeare’s play so uncomfortable to watch: today this is the language of white Christian superiority that delights in mocking the black man. Driving home his point with voyeuristic pleasure, Iago says, “your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs.”
⁵²

Roderigo’s speech (only in the 1623 Folio text and not the 1622 Quarto edition) reiterates Iago’s slander and claims that Desdemona is in “the gross clasps of a lascivious Moor.”
⁵³
She has

made a gross revolt,

Tying her duty, beauty, wit and fortunes

In an extravagant and wheeling stranger

Of here and everywhere.
⁵⁴

This accusation finally stirs Brabantio to action. Without Roderigo’s intercession the audience sees Iago as a spiteful lone voice; with it, a group voice begins to emerge.

When Othello finally enters, in the following scene, Iago, who intimates that Brabantio will seek to discredit him in front of the Venetian Senate, follows him. In only his second speech in the play, Othello responds grandly:

Let him do his spite;

My services, which I have done the signiory,

Shall out-tongue his complaints. ’Tis yet to know—

Which, when I know that boasting is an honor,

I shall promulgate—I fetch my life and being

From men of royal siege.
⁵⁵

His confident response proves him to be anything but a “Barbary horse,” quite ready to “out-tongue” any charges made against him.

Shakespeare had probably seen al-Annuri at one of his many widely reported London appearances or during the performances of his theatrical company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, at Elizabeth’s court in the winter of 1600–1601, when the Moroccan was locked in negotiations with Elizabeth and her advisers. When Othello is called before the Venetian Senate in the play’s third scene, the setting resembles a royal audience. Just as Elizabeth’s counselors were considering Turkish affairs, so the duke and senators gather to respond to a serious threat to Venice’s security: “A Turkish fleet, and bearing up to Cyprus.”
⁵⁶
Cinthio mentions Cyprus—the
Hecatommithi
was written before the island fell to Sultan Selim II in 1573—but not Turks. Shakespeare introduces them here as a shadowy, emblematic menace to Venetian interests. As the Venetians discuss how to combat the Turkish threat, Brabantio and Othello enter. The Venetian duke then addresses Othello using his proper name for the first time in the entire play:

Valiant Othello, we must straight employ you

Against the general enemy Ottoman.

[
to Brabantio
]

I did not see you; welcome, gentle signior;

We lack’d your counsel and your help tonight.
⁵⁷

While Othello is welcomed as “valiant,” Brabantio is initially overlooked, then reproached for his absence from important decisions of state. All talk of Othello’s skin color recedes: he is a “valiant” and “brave” military leader whom the Venetians need to defend themselves against the Turks. At this moment Othello looks and sounds like the Prince of Morocco, a noble Moor who has successfully wooed and married his Portia and is waving his scimitar and promising to go into battle once more against the Turks. Shakespeare now had both kinds of Moor onstage: the diabolical blackamoor Aaron reborn in the guise of Iago, and the chivalric Moroccan prince recast as the exotic mercenary Othello, whose name sounds uncomfortably close to the Ottomans he must confront in defense of his adopted homeland.

The anxieties aroused by Othello are hard to dispel. Brabantio accuses him of using witchcraft to entrap Desdemona, and when asked to explain himself, Othello delivers an oratorical tour de force designed to “out-tongue” Brabantio:

Her father loved me, oft invited me,

Still questioned me the story of my life

From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes