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The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice, often shortened to Othello (/ ɒ ˈ θ ɛ l oʊ /), is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare around 1603. Set in Venice and Cyprus , the play depicts the Moorish military commander Othello as he is manipulated by his ensign , Iago , into suspecting his wife Desdemona of infidelity.
Iago's story, however, is a lie. Desdemona and Cassio try to convince Othello of their honesty but are rejected. Pursuing a plan suggested by Iago, Othello sends assassins to attack Cassio, who is wounded, while Othello himself smothers Desdomona in her bed. Iago's plot is revealed too late, and Othello commits suicide. Romeo and Juliet
Othello, a General in the Venetian army, promotes a young officer, Michael Cassio, enraging Iago—the General's ensign—who expected the post himself. Outwardly loyal to Othello and his recently married wife, Desdemona, Iago proceeds to cause dissension within Othello's camp (for instance, tuning Othello's new father-in-law against him, and causing Cassio to fight another officer).
Shakespeare combined the two throughout his career, with Romeo and Juliet perhaps the best example of the mixing of the styles. [6] By the time of Romeo and Juliet, Richard II, and A Midsummer Night's Dream in the mid-1590s, Shakespeare had begun to write a more natural poetry. He increasingly tuned his metaphors and images to the needs of the ...
H. L. Mencken wrote a withering review of the work, concluding that it makes sorry reading for those who revered Twain. [68] In 1918, Professor Abel Lefranc, a renowned authority on François Rabelais, published the first volume of Sous le masque de "William Shakespeare" in which he provided detailed arguments for the claims of the Earl of ...
Desdemona (/ ˌ d ɛ z d ə ˈ m oʊ n ə /) is a character in William Shakespeare's play Othello (c. 1601–1604). Shakespeare's Desdemona is a Venetian beauty who enrages and disappoints her father, a Venetian senator, when she elopes with Othello, a Moorish Venetian military prodigy.
Shakespeare was familiar with this book; it contains the original source for his Othello. Cinthio also published the story with some small differences as a play, of which Shakespeare may have been aware. The original story is an unmitigated tragedy: Isabella's counterpart is forced to sleep with Angelo's counterpart, and her brother is killed.
In 2013, scholar Douglas Bruster, after comparing spellings in the additions with what we know of Shakespeare's handwriting, concluded that Shakespeare did indeed write the additions. [8] Bruster attributed mistakes in the text of the additions to the illegibility of Shakespeare's handwriting; the resulting mistakes have led to the devaluing of ...