Full Description
Although other Shakespeare plays offer higher body counts, more gore, and more plentiful scenes of heartbreak, Othello packs an unusually powerful affective punch, stunning us with its depiction of the swiftness and thoroughness with which love can be converted to hatred, and forcing us to confront our complicity with social and political institutions that can put all of us—but especially the most vulnerable among us—at risk.
This edition features a variety of interleaved materials—from facsimile pages and musical scores to illustrations and extended discussions of myth and folklore—that provide a context for the social and cultural allusions in the play. Appendices offer excerpts from Shakespeare's key sources and historical materials on marriage, jealousy, and the treatment of people of African descent in Elizabethan England.
A collaboration between Broadview Press and the Internet Shakespeare Editions project at the University of Victoria, the editions developed for this series have been comprehensively annotated and draw on the authoritative texts newly edited for the ISE. This innovative series allows readers to access extensive and reliable online resources linked to the print edition.
Contents
FOREWORD
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
SHAKESPEARE'S LIFE
SHAKESPEARE'S THEATER
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AND OTHELLO
A BRIEF CHRONOLOGY
THE DATE OF THE PLAY
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
THE TRAGEDY OF OTHELLO, THE MOOR OF VENICE
APPENDIX A: SOURCES AND EARLY ANALOGS
From Cinthio, Gli Heccatommithi (1565)
From Geoffrey Fenton, Certain Tragical Discourses (1567)
From George Peele, The Battle of Alcazar (1588-89)
From Robert Greene, Selimus (1594)
From William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus (1594)
From William Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Sonnets 57 and 58 (1609)
From Thomas Coryate, Coryats Crudities (1611)
From Maurice G. Dowling, Othello Travestie (1836)
APPENDIX B: CULTURAL CONTEXTS
Prayers for Protection against Ottoman Attacks
a. A form to be used in common prayer (1565)
b. Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, A form to be used in common prayer (1566)
Elizabeth I, Letters Permitting Deportation of Blackamoors from England (1596-97)
a. 11 July 1596
b. 18 July 1596
From Robert Cleaver, A Godly Form of Household Government for the Ordering of Private Families (1598)
From Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Mind in General (1604)
From Ste[phen?] B., Counsel to the Husband: To the Wife Instruction (1608)
From Nicholas Coeffeteau, "Of Jealousy, Whether it Be an Effect and Sign of Love" (1621)
WORKS CITED AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
