Inside Othello

Summary

All Shakespeare’s major tragedies but one take their source from true or mythical history, whether British or classical or European. To the Elizabethan mind, not yet as relativistic about history as ourselves, this plainly invested tragedy with a special privilege, a depth and reach, a stability as of truth itself. Othello is the exception; it takes its story from fiction only. Cinthio’s narrative of a jealous Moor in Venice, a man trapped in sexual intrigue, necessarily bequeaths to the play a yarn urban and realistic in its hard knowingness, its concise brutality, its final lack of the metaphysical. Jealousy, the very centre of the story, is nothing if not a function of love as possession and possessiveness. That Shakespeare was aware of these limiting pressures is clear from the brilliance of his evocation, in two plays, of Venice as the greatest trading-centre of Europe, its riches both extreme and vulnerable. All the many readers who have seen in Othello what Bradley once called its lack of universality, seen the problem of meaning in this tragedy of love-trade, are surely seeing in the play Cinthio’s source: tragedy as mere narrative.