Othello: A Tragic Tale of Jealousy and Deception

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis
Buy “Othello” on Amazon

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. A commission may be earned if you buy through this link, at no extra cost to you.

On 1 November 1604, the King’s Men performed a tragedy about a Moorish general and a poisoned rumor before King James I at Whitehall. That court performance is the earliest one on record for Othello, and it is the first firm date the play has. Four centuries later the story still runs on the same mechanism: a decent man is talked into catastrophe by someone he trusts, one small piece of false evidence at a time. This review covers where the play came from, how it is built, what it does with jealousy, reputation and race, and how stages and screens have treated it since.

Where Othello Came From

Scholars place the writing around 1604, or the year before, after Hamlet and ahead of King Lear, according to Folgerpedia, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s reference wiki. The Whitehall performance is the first documented staging. The play may have reached the Globe earlier, but no date or evidence for that survives. It did not appear in print during Shakespeare’s lifetime. The first Quarto came out in 1622, the First Folio followed in 1623 with a somewhat fuller text, and a second Quarto arrived in 1630, as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s notes on the play lay out. The early texts differ enough that editors still have to choose between them; one summary puts about 160 lines in the Folio alone (Wikipedia).

The plot comes from Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi, a story collection published in 1565, which Shakespeare may have read in a 1584 French translation (RSC). In Cinthio’s version only Desdemona is named. The other characters go by their roles, so Othello is simply “the Moor,” and Bell Shakespeare’s historical notes point out that the name “Othello” may be Shakespeare’s own coinage. He kept the outline but changed three things that matter. He invented Roderigo. He dropped Cinthio’s ending, in which the Moor is murdered back in Venice by his wife’s family. And he discarded Cinthio’s moral, a warning to young women about disobeying their parents, in favor of something a good deal harder to summarize.

The Plot in Brief

Othello, a Moorish general in Venice’s service, secretly marries Desdemona, the daughter of a Venetian senator, and is sent to defend Cyprus. His ensign, Iago, has watched the lieutenant’s post go to Michael Cassio instead of to him. Iago recruits Roderigo, a rejected suitor of Desdemona, gets Cassio drunk and disgraced, and then lets Othello infer an affair between his wife and the officer he has just promoted. The single piece of “proof” is a lost handkerchief. Othello kills Desdemona in their bed. When Iago’s wife, Emilia, exposes the lie, he takes his own life.

Iago and the Problem of Motive

Iago offers several reasons for his hatred of Othello: envy of Cassio’s promotion, suspicion of both men, even desire for Desdemona. The reasons contradict one another, and none of them is large enough for what follows. At the end he refuses to explain himself at all. Coleridge’s verdict, as Wikipedia’s summary of the play’s critical history reports it, was that Iago displays “the motive-hunting of motiveless malignity.” Early in the first scene, Iago describes his own method in a line that works almost as a stage direction:

Venetian canal at dusk with an empty moored gondola

But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at. I am not what I am.

Iago, Act 1, scene 1 (Folger Shakespeare Library text)

Nobody else in the play gets such a clean self-description, and nobody else lies so fluently. Iago has no stable face to protect. Each character he meets gets the version of him that will be believed, which is why the others keep calling him honest.

Jealousy as a Method, Not a Mood

The play’s most quoted line about jealousy belongs to the man spreading it. Iago delivers it while pretending reluctance, warning Othello away from the exact thing he is planting:

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy!
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.

Iago, Act 3, scene 3 (Folger Shakespeare Library text)

Read closely, the scene shows how little Othello is given to work with. A handkerchief, a few hints, a conversation he overhears only in part. The belief arrives long before the evidence, and then the evidence is bent to fit it. That is the play’s real subject. Jealousy here is less an emotion that overtakes Othello than a process Iago runs on him, step by step, with Othello’s own pride in his judgment as the lever. A man who thinks himself a good reader of people is the easiest man to misdirect.

Reputation, Lost and Defended

Reputation carries almost as much weight as jealousy. After the brawl Iago engineers on Cyprus, it is Cassio, not Othello, who cries out over what he has lost:

Reputation, reputation, reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself

Cassio, Act 2, scene 3 (Folger Shakespeare Library text)

The same concern comes back at the other end of the play. Othello’s last request, before he stabs himself, is about how he will be spoken of: “Then must you speak / Of one that loved not wisely, but too well” (Act 5, scene 2, per the Folger text). He is still managing his story as the curtain comes down. Whether that last speech is dignity or self-deception is one of the standing arguments about the ending.

Race, Prejudice, and Who Plays the Part

Race has shaped the way critics and audiences have received Othello from the start. Thomas Rymer, an early critic, questioned the match between a Moor and a white Venetian woman. Coleridge and Charles Lamb, in the nineteenth century, doubted the play could be a true tragedy at all. Later critics such as Martin Orkin argued that Shakespeare confined racist language to discredited characters. Since the 1980s the part has mostly gone to Black actors, and scholars still disagree about how central Othello’s race is to the play (all per Wikipedia’s account of the criticism).

Empty theatre stage with a red curtain and one chair under a spotlight

The performance history is its own record. Ira Aldridge is described as the first actor of African descent to play Othello in England, and a History News Network article recounts how a Covent Garden engagement drew racist press attacks and ended with his dismissal after only a few performances. White actors such as Edwin Booth and Walter Huston played the part, often in blackface, on Broadway. Paul Robeson took the role there in 1943, and Moses Gunn and James Earl Jones followed in later decades (New York Theater). Laurence Olivier’s filmed 1965 performance is now often criticized as racist, and a 1997 production with Patrick Stewart as Othello in a mostly African-American cast is described in Bell Shakespeare’s notes as a “photo negative” production. Folgerpedia carries a content advisory on its own Othello page for racist language, blackface and domestic violence, which is a fair warning to anyone reading or staging the play for the first time.

Desdemona, Reconsidered

Desdemona has been played as a saint for much of the play’s history. The late scenes especially have been read as portraits of a long-suffering martyr. Other readings see dignity and strength, and Wikipedia notes that the actress Fanny Kemble pushed against the passive tradition in 1848 by having Desdemona fight back against her murder. The shift matters because it changes what the final scene is about. A Desdemona who submits makes it a play about Othello’s fall. A Desdemona who resists makes it a play about a woman trying, and failing, to be heard by the one person who needed to listen.

On Stage and Screen

Orson Welles filmed Othello in stops and starts over several years, and the 1965 film of Olivier’s National Theatre production earned Oscar nominations. Oliver Parker’s 1995 version, marketed as an erotic thriller, cast Laurence Fishburne as Othello and Kenneth Branagh as Iago. In 2013 the National Theatre staged a production with Adrian Lester as Othello and Rory Kinnear as Iago (NT at Home), and in 2016 David Oyelowo and Daniel Craig played Othello and Iago Off-Broadway. A February 2025 report in New York Theater said Denzel Washington was set to play Othello on Broadway that March, directed by Kenny Leon.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Othello a good first Shakespeare play?
It is a reasonable candidate. The plot is a straight line of cause and effect, with one change of setting and one dominant manipulator. One reviewer at the Winding Way blog found the language hard going but the play surprisingly approachable once it was read aloud in class.

Hand holding a brass candle snuffer over a nearly extinguished candle

Where did Shakespeare get the story?
From Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi, published in 1565. Shakespeare followed the main plot but invented Roderigo and changed the ending and the moral.

Was Othello published in Shakespeare’s lifetime?
No. The first printing was the 1622 Quarto, followed by the 1623 First Folio and a second Quarto in 1630.

Can I read it free online?
Yes. Shakespeare’s text is long out of copyright, and the Folger Shakespeare Library posts the play on its website, scene by scene.

Where to Read It

Othello (Folger Shakespeare Library) (affiliate link) is the Folger edition prepared by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, and the Folger Shakespeare Library also posts the full text free on its own website.

Further Reading

Two independent book bloggers offer useful counterweights. Rachel at pace, amore, libri finds the play gripping but uneasy to read alongside questions of racial representation: “What’s compelling about this play is the interpersonal dynamics, not the characters individually.” Over at Miles of Pages, A.J. Reeves rates it five stars and praises how Shakespeare handles “Characters who fulfill tropes and yet are flawed and real.”

More from this site: Animal Farm: A Political Allegory of Totalitarianism and The Power of Knowledge: A Review of “Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury.

Sources

Similar Posts