INTRODUCTION xl Othello a 'black devil' and Desdemona's 'most filthy bargain' ^ we cannot doubt that she speaks the mind of many an Englishwoman in the seventeenth-century audience. If anyone imagines that England at that date was unconscious of the 'colour-bar' they cannot have read Othello with any care? And only those who have not read the play at all could suppose that Shake­ speare shared the prejudice, inasmuch as Othello is his noblest soldier and he obviously exerted himself to represent him as a spirit of the rarest quality. How significant too is the entry he gives him! After listening for 180 lines of the opening scene to the obscene suggestions of Roderigo and lago and the cries of the outraged Brabantio we find ourselves in the presence of one, not only rich in honours won in the service of Venice, and fetching his 'life and being from men of royal siege',3 but personally a prince among men. Before such dignity, self-possession and serene sense of power, racial prejudice dwindles to a petty stupidity; and when Othello has told the lovely story of his courtshipj and Desdemona has in the Duke's Council- chamber, simply and without a moment's hesitation, preferred her black husband to her white father, we have to admit that the union of these two grand persons, * 5. 2.134, 160. The Devil, now for some reason become red, was black in the medieval and post-medievcil world. Thus 'Moors' had 'the complexion of a devil' {Merchant of Venice, i. 2. 125). * Withington, op. cit. disputes this but ignores the senti­ ments of lago, Roderigo and Emilia. See also E. E. Stoll, Othello (1915), pp. 45-6, and K. L. Little, Negroes in Britain (1947), pp. 195-6. 3 An important point, when considering the play in the light of modern opinion, which is apt to think of Negroes as either the descendants of slaves or members of illiterate and poverty-stricken African tribes. xli OTHELLO so far from being unnatural, is that rare human event, the marriage of true minds and a real love-match. Yet the difference in their complexions, and the atmosphere of colour-prejudice that attaches itself to it, cause both the shipv^Treck of the marriage and the tragedy that follows. How absurd, one often hears it said or reads it written, is the jealousy of Othello! Surely he might have trusted Desdemona a little? Shakespeare, as we shall see, moulded his plot in order to meet this very criticism. The point here, however, is that the trustfulness and simplicity, which Bradley among others notes'' as Othello's, seem his by nature, when he is played by a Negro gifted with all the winning integrity of that race. As lago contemptuously boasts. The Moor is of a free and open nature That thinks men honest that but seem to be so. And will as tenderly be led ky th'nose As asses are— (i- 3» 397-400) lines which may be said to sum up the relations between African and European for the past three and a half centuries. Finally, the primitive yet dignified spirit which a Negro Othello brings to the play accounts at once for the mingled tenderness and ferocity of the murder- scene and the priest-like attitude in which he addresses himself to the sacrifice. Never too shall I forget the radiant bliss of Robeson's face as Othello first greeted Desdemona at Cyprus or its dreadful deformation when he became possessed with the 'green-eyed monster'o * Bradley, 0^, ciu p. 19O0 INTRODUCTION xui II. Date and Source Most students now agree that Othello follows Hamlet in the chronological order of Shakespeare's plays. Bradley stresses their 'similarities of style, diction and versification', and even detects 'a certain resemblance in the subjects'. 'The heroes of the two plays', he remarks, 'are doubtless extremely unlike, so unlike that each could have dealt without much difficulty with the situation which proved fatal to the other; but still each is a man exceptionally noble and trustful, and each endures the shock of a terrible disillusionment.'^ Furthermore, though Hamlet is the most discursive and leisurely of Shakespeare's tragedies, and Othello the tensest and swiftest, they have much the same atmos­ phere. That of Hamlet, as Caroline Spurgeon first pointed out, is one of corruption, which Wolfgang Clemen later showed may be traced to the leperous disease that invades the body of Hamlet's father after his poisoning in the orchard. For, he says, this now becomes the^zV-wo^/t'of the imagery: the individual occurrence is expanded into a symbol for the central problem of the play. The corruption of land and people throughout Denmark is understood as an imperceptible and irresistible process of poisoning.* It seems possible that what primarily attracted Shake" speare's attention to the Othello story was that he saw it as a particular example of such 'an imperceptible and irresistible process of poisoning' at work upon a character of exceptional nobility, corrupting his very soul and dragging him down from the height of human happiness to the gates of Hell itself. The 'dram of evil', ''• Bradley, op. cit. p. 17^. ' Wolfgang Clemen, The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery, p. 113,, xiv OTHELLO administered by lago, douts for a while 'all the noble substance' in his victim; lago himself pictures the operation as a process of poisoning; and when he says I'll pour this pestilence into his ear, (2- 3- 349) he seems to carry us back to the garden at Elsinore and Claudius pouring his leperous distilment into the ears of a sleeping brother. These symptoms of affinity are borne out by external evidence of a close proximity, evidence mostly dis­ covered or established within recent years. The earliest reference, for example, we have to Othello is an entry in one of the annual accounts of the Office of Revels which records the performance on Hallowmas Day (i.e. I November) 1604 by the King's Majesty's players (i.e. Shakespeare's company) 'in the Banketinge house att Whit Hall' of a play 'called The Moor of Venis', vsritten by a poet whose name the official, evidently no theatre-goer, writes as 'Shaxberd'.^ But this performance is the first of a number recorded in the Accounts between i November 1604 and Lent, 1605, including early plays by Shakespeare such as The Comedy of Errors, Love's Labour''s Lost, and The Merchant of Venice which King James and Queen Anne, newly arrived in England, had not yet seen. It by no means follows, therefore, that Othello was a new play at this time. Indeed, the 'bad quarto' oi Hamlet, published in 1603, sometime after 19 May,^ contains four or five echoes from it, which suggest that the pirate- ^ Though probably known to Malone and printed as long ago as :842 these Revels' Accounts were suspected of being a forgery until their final authentication in 1930 by A. E. Stamp. See his Disputed Refuels Accounts reproduced in collotype facsimik. * Greg, Bibliography of the English Drama, i. 197, INTRODUCTION xv player or players, responsible for this memorial recon­ struction, had been acting in Othello not long before. Further, in Part i of Dekker and Middleton's Honest Whore, published in 1604 and certainly written before 14 March, HippoHto, accused of murdering Infelice, is described as 'more sauage than a barbarous Moore', which sounds very like a reference to Othello.^ The play, then, can hardly be later than early 1603, and may even belong to 1602; and that would bring it close to Hamlet which Edmund Chambers places in the summer or autumn of 1601 in his final review of the matter.* This dating accords, moreover, with passages in the play which some have explained as echoes of books published in 1601 and read by Shakespeare. What he read for the plot itself, however, was the seventh novella of the third deca or decade of stories in the Hecatommitht by Giraldi Cinthio; and this he seems to have read in the original since there is no English translation known at this date;3 and indeed the play seems to suggest that he could read Italian with ease. In the first place Othello's account of the magical origin of the handkerchief given to Desdemona,4 not found in Cinthio, who merely relates that it was 'finely embroidered in the Moorish fashion', may well be ^ See I. I. 37-8; A. Hart, letter in The Times Literary Supplement, 10 October 1935. * E. K. Chambers, Shakespearean Gleanings (1944), pp. 68-70. 3 There have been three since: (i) in Mrs Lennox's Shakespeare Illustrated (1753); (ii) by W. Parr in a little volume entitled The Story of the Moor of Venice.. .nxiith fwo essays on Shakespeare, 1795 (reprinted in J. P. Collier's Shakespeare Library, 1844; 2nd ed. by W. C. Hazlitt, 1875); (iii) by J. E. Taylor (1855) (reprinted in Furness's Variorum ed. of Othello). None of these is satisfactory. 4 See 3. 4. 73-8. xvi OTHELLO derived from the description in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso of Hector's magical tent which his sister the 'damsel' Cassandra, inspired by 'prophetic fury', had worked with her needle. If so, Shakespeare would, it appears, have had it from Ariosto direct, not from Sir John Harington's translation printed by Richard Field in 1591, because the English version has nothing corresponding to the words 'furor profetico' which Shakespeare echoes. Again, the passage in question comes from stanza 80, canto 46, which suggests an easy familiarity with the language on the part of one who not only knew Orlando Furioso well enough to remember an incident in it and adapt it to another purpose, but had presumably perused the earlier forty-five cantos before he reached it.'' And there is a further point.