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Shakespeare, Sir Thomas More and the Strangers’ Case
Shakespeare writes about race. A lot. Othello and The Merchant of Venice are just the best known examples. Most regard Shakespeare’s writings as humanising the ‘other’ — the stranger among us. Yet his plays portray the kinds of prejudices and hatreds that today we call racism. His pen portrait of Iago, the villain in Othello, is a master pen portrait of the true ugliness of racism. A passage which is generally attributed to Shakespeare (see sources below) is perhaps the only substantial manuscript handwriting of the playwright which has survived until today. The passage appears in a play known as the Booke of Sir Thomas More. It is an Elizabethan…
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Othello and Desdemona: An Italian novella of murder and manipulation
Until you read the stories that Shakespeare read, it’s difficult to fully understand the plays he wrote. This is the tale of a particular story he read: the Italian novella which inspired Othello. Shakespeare adapted its plot to the stage, and like Romeo and Juliet, he made it world famous. To Shakespeare, Othello was the most important person in the tale. For the author of the novella however, Desdemona was the heart of the story. For the novella focusses on hatred of a woman. In Shakespeare’s hands the story became a play about the hatred of a man. There is much that the two stories share in common. Most of…
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It’s funny, but Shakespeare is teaching me Italian stories
It’s curious to find the heart of Italy in the soul of England, but so it is. For Shakespeare put it there. For years now, I’ve been hunting down Italian stories, and the last thing I expected was that Shakespeare would give me the breakthrough I was looking for. The most desperate loves, the vilest deceptions, the most delightful cross-dressing dalliances and the bitterest revenge. Shakespeare found them in Italian novellas and adapted them to the London stage. I have to admit, although the journey has been fun, it’s not so easy to plunge into the ocean of Italian literature, not knowing where it might take you or in which…
