Michael Neill argues however, that, in the case of Othello, variation is much less likely to be the result of changed authorial intentions than of theatrical cutting and the peculiar circumstances of textual transmission. Othello has come down to us in two markedly different early texts and the substantial differences between the 1622 Quarto and the 1623 Folio have led to its becoming involved, along with Hamlet and Lear, in an intense debate over Shakespearian revision. The text has been freshly edited in accordance with the general principles of the series.

In this respect, too, Othello emerges as a work profoundly involved in the social and political processes that helped to shape the modern world. In the play's own time, however, the sensitivities aroused by the hero's colour might well have seemed less significant than the way in which Iago's perfidious role plays out a crisis in the institution of service on which the entire social order, including its treatment of gender, was founded. Although 'race' in the early modern period was still an embryonic category, Othello is explored as a text that-not least in its performance history-has played a formative role (for both good and ill) in the emergence of racial thinking, and that as a result remains deeply controversial. The extensive introduction to this new edition answers the play's detractors by stressing the public dimensions of the tragedy, paying particular attention to its treatment of colour and social relations. Yet Othello's critical fortunes have been uneven for, since Rymer's notorious denunciation of this 'tragedy of handkerchief,' at the end of the seventeenth century, its claim to rank amongst Shakespeare's greatest achievements has been challenged by critics who have found its plot too strained, its characters too improbable, and its tale of marital jealousy and murder too meanly domestic to challenge comparison with Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, or even that saga of tragic infatuation, Antony and Cleopatra. In recent times the play's bold treatment of love and marriage across the divide of race has made it a work of particular interest to theatre directors and scholars alike. On stage, the romantic cast of its story and the remorseless drive of its plotting, combined with operatic extravagance of its emotion and the swelling music of its poetry, have made it amongst the most consistently successful of his tragedies and numerous anecdotes testify to its extraordinary capacity to overwhelm the imagination of an audience.

Written at some time between 16, Othello belongs to the period in which Shakespeare's powers as a tragic dramatist were at their peak.

Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Global Public Health.The European Society of Cardiology Series.Oxford Commentaries on International Law.

Shakespeare othello the moor of venice