Othello: A Contextual History

Introduction; Part I. Jacobean Contexts: 1. Global discourse: Venetians and Turks; 2. Military discourse: knights and mercenaries; 3. Racial discourse: black and white; 4. Marital discourse: husbands and wives; Part II. Representations: 5. Othello in Restoration England; 6. Amateur versus professional: the Delaval Othello; 7. William Charles Macready and the domestic Othello; 8. Salvini, Irving, and the dissociation of intellect; 9. 'The Ethiopian Moor': Paul Robeson's Othello; 10. Orson Welles and the patriarchal eye; 11. Othello for the 1990s: Trevor Nunn's 1989 Royal Shakespeare Company production; Conclusion.

Shakespeare's Othello has exercised a powerful fascination over audiences for centuries with its intense portrayal of passionate love and destructive jealousy. This study is a major exercise in the historicization of Othello. Initially the author examines the early Jacobean context of the play, and the discourses which formed its writing. Circulating simultaneously in late Renaissance London were accounts of Mediterranean clashes between Turks and Venetians, treatises on the professionalization of England's military forces, depictions of North Africans and blackamoors, and narratives of jealous husbands who murdered their wives. In the centuries after 1604, productions of Othello stressed the contextual discourse that best reflected current cultural concerns. The first section examines these four sets of contemporary writings and demonstrates how they were embedded in the text of Othello. The following chapters trace Othello's history on stage or in film in England and the United States from the Restoration to the late 1980s. Each chapter highlights particular pro

"This eloquently written book offers, a mix of the old and the new....Despite the familiarity of some of its materials and the ease of some of its arguments, Othello: A Contextual History is full of fresh and informative discussion....Anyone interested in the rich web of meanings that Shakespeare's Othello has created and absorbed will want to start here, with Othello: A Contextual History." Emily C. Bartels, Modern Philology