Cinthio’s Desdemona: The Story that Inspired Othello (Forthcoming)

Shakespeare’s Othello is one of Shakespeare’s darkest tragedies. The story on which it is based is even darker. A story hard to read but one that, still today, we need to know.

Written in Ferrara, decades before the Shakespeare play by Giovanni Battista Giraldi (Cinthio), as the title Desdemona suggests, the story is centred on her.

In discovering the older story, we find that Shakespeare has changed the balance. Cinthio wanted to tell a story about Desdemona and her nemesis, a man who hated her and wanted her dead. Shakespeare shifts Iago’s hatred to Othello, making the play about of the hatred of a man.

This new English translation of Cinthio’s Desdemona, accompanied by an extensive introduction and afterword, explores the roots of misogyny and racism in Renaissance Italy and Elizabethan England.

What were attitudes to domestic violence in this era, and what did Cinthio (and Shakespeare) intend in telling the story? Is the play we know racist, or does it merely portray racism? Can we talk of racism, before the word was even invented? How has the story and the play influenced our ideas about race and racism down the centuries?

These and other questions are explored.

Yet at its heart, we have the Cinthio’s storytelling, storytelling that inspired Shakespeare to pen one of literature’s most famous plays. It is a story which still captures us today.