the contrary, Shakespeare must be viewed as the author of the 37 plays and 154 sonnets that bear his name. The legacy of this body of work is immense. A number of Shakespeare's plays seem to have transcended even the category of brilliance, becoming so influential as to affect profoundly the course of Western literature and culture ever after. Othello was first performed in front of James I of England on November 1, 1604. One of Shakespeare's greatest tragedies (written after Hamlet but before King Lear and Macbeth), Othello is set against the backdrop of the wars between Venice and Turkey, which raged in the latter part of the 16th century. Cyprus, which is the setting for most of the action, was a Venetian outpost attacked by the Turks in 1570 and conquered by the Ottomans the following year. Shakespeare's information on the conflict probably derives from The History of the Turks, by Richard Knolles, which was published in England in the autumn of 1603--so the play was composed at some point between that time and the summer of 1604. Shakespeare's choice of a black man was strikingly original. (Othello is called a Moor, which can suggest Arabic descent, but the language of the play insists that he is a black African.) Blackness in Elizabethan England was a color associated with moral evil, decay, and death, and Moors in the theater were usually stereotyped villains, like Aaron the Moor in Shakespeare's early play Titus Andronicus. Othello embodies none of the characteristics typical of the "Moor"; instead of being lecherous, cunning, and vicious, he is a noble, towering figure whose fall is therefore all the more difficult to watch. Like many of Shakespeare's plays, Othello is derived from another source--an Italian prose tale written in 1565 by Giambattista Cinzio Giraldi. The original story contains the bare bones of the tale: a Moorish general is deceived by his ensign into believing his wife is unfaithful. To Gir...
