Preview

What Was Shakespeare's Main Source For Othello

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
264 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
What Was Shakespeare's Main Source For Othello
Othello is chronologically

the first of Shakespeare’s Jacobean tragedies, written during the reign of King James I (1603-25). (In Latin, the word for James is “Jacobus.”) the second, after Hamlet, of Shakespeare’s “four great tragedies.”

In the Renaissance, a novella (an Italian word that literally means “a little new thing”) was a short prose tale. In literature today, however, what is a novella?
Who wrote the Italian novella that was Shakespeare’s main source for Othello?
When did Shakespeare write Othello?
What is the full title of this play? In what sense does the title contain an oxymoron or contradiction in terms?
In Early Modern English, the word “Moor” could refer to either a black African or an Arab from Northern

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    A short play is usually filled with a theatrical energy of diverse anthologies. The time allotted may be only ten or fifteen minutes, so it must be able to capture and engage the audience with some dramatic tension, exciting action, or witty humor. Just as in a short story, a great deal of the explanation and background is left for the reader or viewer to discover on their own. Because all the details are not explicitly stated, each viewer interprets the action in their own way and each experience is unique from someone else viewing the same play. Conflict is the main aspect that drives any work of literature, and plays usually consist of some form of conflict. In “Playwriting 101: The Rooftop Lesson,” Rich Orloff explores these common elements of plays and creates an original by “gathering all clichés into one story and satirizing them” (Orloff as cited by Meyer, 2009, p. 1352).…

    • 798 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    This play has a moral message (like a fable, with a lesson to be learned at the end); that we should think of others and work together to ensure a fairer, more equal society, This idea is known as socialism; even now, the political party Labour to some extent follow this idea. When the play was…

    • 884 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Othello and Related

    • 1507 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Discuss this statement, showing how composers of texts represent their ideas in relation to identity. In your response you must refer to Othello and one other related text.…

    • 1507 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Is there one kind of mindset in the book Othello? Some people might think since this was a time where everyone practically had to be the same and do the same things everyone would think the same too. But in reality we are human and we all think differently. A lot of us do certain things to uphold our image, and to “keep order” within our social class.…

    • 878 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Othello: A Story Of Tragedy

    • 2284 Words
    • 10 Pages

    Othello is a story of tragedy; a failed marriage between a Moor and the white daughter of a political figure. Through jealousy and deception, Othello and Desdemona’s, his wife, marriage goes from a love story to two tragic and preventable deaths. Othello is a highly respected general in the defense forces of Venice; his charismatic and intelligent demeanor allows him to gain power and status in a majority white atmosphere. Desdemona is the daughter of a high ranking chauvinistic political figure. Desdemona is nothing like her father, she believes in true love which is why she falls in love with Othello even though during the 16th century, interracial relations are frowned upon. The Great…

    • 2284 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Jacobean Theatre

    • 477 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Jacobean theatre refers to the sub-classification of English Renaissance theatre during the reign of King James I (1603-1625). It is a dark and disturbing literary form, spiritually gloomy, grotesquely violent and often shockingly obscene.…

    • 477 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Shakespearean scholar M.R. Ridley suggests that the theme of Othello centers on the conflict between “reason and instinct.” There is main reason of why did Iago go to Othello accusing his wife of cheating. And the instinct Othello had to kill his wife Desdemona due to these accusations. Shakespeare has many underlying and reoccurring themes throughout as well. One major theme is that of betrayal and loyalty. During the entire play, every character is either loyal to, or betrays another character. In the case of Othello, like all other tragedies, it is the passion of the hero that is the root of all the action of the play that destroys the hero.…

    • 1480 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Comparisons between plays can always be made; the question is, how useful are they? The core comparison that springs to mind between these two plays, Othello and Hamlet, is that these are both tragedies driven by character. That is to say, they all follow classically great men from great heights to terrible ends and deaths. Each man is in a situation where he is especially vulnerable. If these men swapped places, they might not have fallen so easily. As they fall, others fall with them, including those they love. When the great fail, entire sections of society fail.…

    • 3664 Words
    • 15 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Shakespeare when writing Othello uses many different underlying themes for the reader to try and pick up on. One of the biggest is otherness. Otherness is defined as the quality or condition of being other or different, especially if exotic or strange. Shakespeare throws at the reader some interesting topics to think about race, a handkerchief, feminism, and many more. All these different topics Shakespeare wants the reader to pay attention to are all underlying issues that better help the reader to understand the playwright from Shakespeare’s point of view. Otherness is not always understandable but it gives the reader an idea as to why certain characters act as the way they do.…

    • 1349 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Othello is, in one sense of the word, by far the most romantic figure among Shakespeare’s heroes; and he is so partly from the strange life of war and adventure which he has…

    • 1926 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Shakespeare explains Macbeth’s tragic flaw to compare The Tragedy of Macbeth and Othello, the Moor of Venice. The play begins with a scene in which three witches make a prophecy. On their way back to the king to report the good news, Macbeth and Banquo meet the group of witches and learn about their future: Macbeth becomes Thane of Cawdor and eventually king, and Banquo earns a line of kingship after his death. The two men skeptically think about their prophecies until some of King Duncan’s men inform Macbeth of his new title as Thane of Cawdor. As a result, Macbeth considers ways to gain the title as king. Macbeth knows that Duncan respects him, but his “vaulting ambition” leads him to kill Duncan for his kingship (Shakespeare The Tragedy of Macbeth 1.7.27).…

    • 553 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    othello

    • 789 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Shakespearean tragedies follow an accepted formula: they are about an articulate, social authority, someone who is “important”, within his society; this hero has at least one weakness or fault – a fatal flaw – which during the course of the drama grows until it overcomes his virtues and leads to his downfall, death and the destruction of his world. For Othello, however, this is slightly different as he is not royalty, merely someone in command and is also a Moor.…

    • 789 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    As was common in the period, Shakespeare based many of his plays on the work of other playwrights and recycled older stories and historical material. His dependence on earlier sources was a natural consequence of the speed at which playwrights of his era wrote; in addition, plays based on already popular stories appear to have been seen as more likely to draw large crowds. There were also aesthetic reasons: Renaissance aesthetic theory took seriously the dictum that tragic plots should be grounded in history. This stricture did not apply to comedy, and those of Shakespeare's plays for which no clear source has been established, such as Love's Labour's Lost and The Tempest, are comedies. Even these plays, however, rely heavily on generic commonplaces. For example, Hamlet (c.1601) may be a reworking of an older, lost play (the so-called Ur-Hamlet),[27] and King Lear is likely an adaptation of an older play, King Leir. For plays on historical subjects, Shakespeare relied heavily on two principal texts. Most of the Roman and Greek plays are based on Plutarch's Parallel Lives (from the 1579 English translation by Sir Thomas North,[28] and the English history plays are indebted to Raphael Holinshed's 1587 Chronicles.…

    • 486 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Aristotle establishes elements that are necessary to define a tragedy. In Poetics, Aristotle asserts that the definition of tragedy can be divided into six parts: plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle and song. In Shakespeare’s Othello, Aristotle’s notion of tragedy is apparent through the elements of plot, character and diction. Othello follows Aristotle’s convention of a tragedy.…

    • 561 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Othello - Shakespeare

    • 511 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Shakespeare’s play “Othello” both challenges and reflects the values and beliefs of his Elizabethan context. To please his audience Shakespeare’s presentation of Venetian society replicates English society and therefore the audience is positioned to see the Venetians as upholding English Christian beliefs. Yet Shakespeare also challenges Elizabethan audience’s perception of ethnicity and race through the characterisation of Othello as being foreign in appearance but having status in the armed forces.…

    • 511 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays