Othello
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THE KING'S MANOn Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1603, the new king, James I, who had held the Scottish throne as James VI since he had been an infant, immediately took the Lord Chamberlain’s Men under his direct patronage. Henceforth they would be the King’s Men, and for the rest of Shakespeare’s career they were favored with far more court performances than any of their rivals. There even seem to have been rumors early in the reign that Shakespeare and Burbage were being considered for knighthoods, an unprecedented honor for mere actors—and one that in the event was not accorded to a member of the profession for nearly three hundred years, when the title was bestowed upon Henry Irving, the leading Shakespearean actor of Queen Victoria’s reign.Shakespeare’s productivity rate slowed in the Jacobean years, not because of age or some personal trauma, but because there were frequent outbreaks of plague, causing the theaters to be closed for long periods. The King’s Men were forced to spend many months on the road. Between November 1603 and 1608, they were to be found at various towns in the south and Midlands, though Shakespeare probably did not tour with them by this time. He had bought a large house back home in Stratford and was accumulating other property. He may indeed have stopped acting soon after the new king took the throne. With the London theaters closed so much of the time and a large repertoire on the stocks, Shakespeare seems to have focused his energies on writing a few long and complex tragedies that could have been played on demand at court: Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Cymbeline are among his longest and poetically grandest plays. Macbeth only survives in a shorter text, which shows signs of adaptation after Shakespeare’s death. The bitterly satirical Timon of Athens, apparently a collaboration with Thomas Middleton that may have failed on the stage, also belongs to this period. In comedy, too, he wrote longer and morally darker works than in the Elizabethan period, pushing at the very bounds of the form in Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well.From 1608 onward, when the King’s Men began occupying the indoor Blackfriars playhouse (as a winter house, meaning that they only used the outdoor Globe in summer?), Shakespeare turned to a more romantic style. His company had a great success with a revived and altered version of an old pastoral play called Mucedorus. It even featured a bear. The younger dramatist John Fletcher, meanwhile, sometimes working in collaboration with Francis Beaumont, was pioneering a new style of tragicomedy, a mix of romance and royalism laced with intrigue and pastoral excursions. Shakespeare experimented with this idiom in Cymbeline and it was presumably with his blessing that Fletcher eventually took over as the King’s Men’s company dramatist. The two writers apparently collaborated on three plays in the years 1612–14: a lost romance called Cardenio (based on the love-madness of a character in Cervantes’ Don Quixote), Henry VIII (originally staged with the title “All Is True”), and The Two Noble Kinsmen, a dramatization of Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale.” These were written after Shakespeare’s two final solo-authored plays, The Winter’s Tale, a self-consciously old-fashioned work dramatizing the pastoral romance of his old enemy Robert Greene, and The Tempest, which at one and the same time drew together multiple theatrical traditions, diverse reading, and contemporary interest in the fate of a ship that had been wrecked on the way to the New World.The collaborations with Fletcher suggest that Shakespeare’s career ended with a slow fade rather than the sudden retirement supposed by the nineteenth-century Romantic critics who read Prospero’s epilogue to The Tempest as Shakespeare’s personal farewell to his art. In the last few years of his life Shakespeare certainly spent more of his time in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he became further involved in property dealing and litigation. But his London life also continued. In 1613 he made his first major London property purchase: a freehold house in the Blackfriars district, close to his company’s indoor theater. The Two Noble Kinsmen may have been written as late as 1614, and Shakespeare was in London on business a little over a year before he died of an unknown cause at home in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1616, probably on his fifty-second birthday.About half the sum of his works were published in his lifetime, in texts of variable quality. A few years after his death, his fellow actors began putting together an authorized edition of his complete Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. It appeared in 1623, in large “Folio” format. This collection of thirty-six plays gave Shakespeare his immortality. In the words of his fellow dramatist Ben Jonson, who contributed two poems of praise at the start of the Folio, the body of his work made him “a monument without a tomb”:And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read and praise to give …
He was not of an age, but for all time!
SHAKESPEARE’S WORKS: A CHRONOLOGY
1589–91 ? Arden of Faversham (possible part authorship) 1589–92 The Taming of the Shrew 1589–92 ? Edward the Third (possible part authorship) 1591 The Second Part of Henry the Sixth, originally called The First Part of the Contention betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster (element of co-authorship possible) 1591 The Third Part of Henry the Sixth, originally called The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York (element of co-authorship probable) 1591–92 The Two Gentlemen of Verona 1591–92; perhaps revised 1594 The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus (probably cowritten with, or revising an earlier version by, George Peele) 1592 The First Part of Henry the Sixth, probably with Thomas Nashe and others 1592/94 King Richard the Third 1593 Venus and Adonis (poem) 1593–94 The Rape of Lucrece (poem) 1593–1608 Sonnets (154 poems, published 1609 with A Lover’s Complaint, a poem of disputed authorship) 1592–94/1600–03 Sir Thomas More (a single scene for a play originally by Anthony Munday, with other revisions by Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Heywood) 1594 The Comedy of Errors 1595 Love’s Labour’s Lost 1595–97 Love’s Labour’s Won (a lost play, unless the original title for another comedy) 1595–96 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1595–96 The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet 1595–96 King Richard the Second 1595–97 The Life and Death of King John (possibly earlier) 1596–97 The Merchant of Venice 1596–97 The First Part of Henry the Fourth 1597–98 The Second Part of Henry the Fourth 1598 Much Ado About Nothing 1598–99 The Passionate Pilgrim (20 poems, some not by Shakespeare) 1599 The Life of Henry the Fifth 1599 “To the Queen” (epilogue for a court performance) 1599 As You Like It 1599 The Tragedy of Julius Caesar 1600–01 The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (perhaps revising an earlier version) 1600–01 The Merry Wives of Windsor (perhaps revising version of 1597–99) 1601 “Let the Bird of Loudest Lay” (poem, known since 1807 as “The Phoenix and Turtle” [turtledove]) 1601 Twelfth Night, or What You Will 1601–02 The Tragedy of Troilus and Cressida 1604 The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice 1604 Measure for Measure 1605 All’s Well That Ends Well 1605 The Life of Timon of Athens, with Thomas Middleton 1605–06 The Tragedy of King Lear 1605–08 ? contribution to The Four Plays in One (lost, except for A Yorkshire Tragedy, mostly by Thomas Middleton) 1606 The Tragedy of Macbeth (surviving text has additional scenes by Thomas Middleton) 1606–07 The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra 1608 The Tragedy of Coriolanus 1608 Pericles, Prince of Tyre, with George Wilkins 1610 The Tragedy of Cymbeline 1611 The Winter’s Tale 1611 The Tempest 1612–13 Cardenio, with John Fletcher (survives only in later adaptation called Double Falsehood by Lewis Theobald) 1613 Henry VIII (All Is True), with John Fletcher 1613–14 The Two Noble Kinsmen, with John Fletcher
THE HISTORY BEHIND THE TRAGEDIES: A CHRONOLOGY
FURTHER READING AND VIEWING
CRITICAL APPROACHESCalderwood, James L., The Properties of Othello (1989). Theoretically informed account using the concept of “property” to explore different aspects of the play including historical, psychological, and linguistic.Erickson, Peter, and Maurice Hunt, eds., Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare’s Othello (2005). Useful review of resources and discussion of varied approaches.Heilman, Robert, Magic in the Web: Action and Language in Othello (1956). Excellent analysis of patterns of imagery.Honigmann, E. A. J., The Texts of “Othello” and Shakespearian Revision (1996). Detailed account of
the relationship between Folio and Quarto texts.Loomba, Ania, Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism (2002). Postcolonial reading on race and history of imperialism, includes excellent essay on Othello.Muir, Kenneth, and Philip Edwards, eds., Aspects of Othello (1977). Useful selection of articles reprinted from Shakespeare Survey.Nostbakken, Faith, Understanding Othello (2000). Useful student casebook covering drama, context, and performance.Orlin, Lena Cowen, ed., Othello, New Casebook Series (2004). Useful selection of recent critical essays.Pechter, Edward, Othello and the Interpretive Traditions (1999). Overview of critical approaches.Potter, Nicholas, ed., William Shakespeare: Othello (2000). Columbia Critical Guides series. Useful, detailed account of critical history.Spivack, Bernard, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (1958). Relates the role of Iago to the figure of Vice in medieval morality plays.Vaughan, Virginia Mason, Othello: A Contextual History (1994). Excellent on play’s Jacobean contexts in Part I; Part II considers a range of historical performances.Vaughan, Virginia Mason, and Kent Cartwright, eds., Othello: New Perspectives (1991). Useful collection of varied essays on text, performance, and contemporary critical approaches.Wain, John, ed., Shakespeare: Othello: A Casebook (1971, revised 1994). Useful collection including important early essays.