When and for Whom the Play Was Written
Othello was written in the first years of the seventeenth century, at a moment when Shakespeare's company was changing patrons. Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, the new king, James I, took the company under the protection of the crown, and the actors came to be called the King's Men. Everything suggests that the first Othello was Richard Burbage, the company's most famous actor, to whom fell the task of carrying scene 3 of Act III, the longest in the play, in which the general passes from trust to conviction. The audience was mixed, and the text serves every taste: the verse of the senators, the prose of the soldiers and the drinking songs of scene 3 of Act II.
An African of High Standing, in London and in Venice
In 1600 and 1601, an envoy of the Sultan of Morocco spent some months in London, and the city's public saw up close an African of high rank, like the general whom the Venetian Senate hears with respect in scene 3 of Act I. At the same time, hostility was common: in 1601, the queen herself ordered that Black people and Moors be expelled from the kingdom. This is the atmosphere that the words of Iago and Roderigo presuppose when, in scene 1 of Act I, they shout under Brabantio's window that there are thieves in the house, and Iago adds that a black ram is covering his white ewe.
Venice and the War for Cyprus
For the English, Venice was the republic well ordered par excellence: a treatise on its government, written by Cardinal Gasparo Contarini, had been circulating in English since 1599. The city of laws and of the Senate, where Othello is heard and acquitted in the same scene 3 of Act I, is this ideal Venice. It also used to hire foreign commanders for its wars, which is why the Senate needs an outsider like Othello and sends him to Cyprus that very night, after hearing Brabantio's accusation.
Cyprus, for its part, had belonged to the Turks for more than thirty years when the play was written: the island was taken between 1570 and 1571, and the naval victory of Lepanto, in 1571, did not give it back to Venice. The storm that sinks the Turkish fleet in scene 1 of Act II is, therefore, a choice of the play, and not the outcome of history.
The Fear of Witchcraft
Brabantio accuses Othello of having won his daughter with potions and charms in scene 3 of Act I, and the English audience heard this at a time when witchcraft was a matter of state. James I had written in 1597 a treatise on witches and demons, the Daemonologie, and the law of 1604 made dealing with evil spirits punishable by death. For this reason the old senator's accusation carried a weight that is lost today, and the Duke's reply, that to claim is not to prove, sounds like the demand for proof that so grave a crime required.
From Stage to Book
On the public English stages of the time, women did not act: Desdemona, Emilia and Bianca were played by boys, and only from 1660 did actresses take these roles. The bedchamber scene, in scene 2 of Act V, was written for a young actor lying in the bed, not for an actress. The play was printed only in 1622, six years after Shakespeare's death, in a small separate volume, and again in 1623, in the First Folio, which presents it longer and with passages missing from the first edition. The willow song that Desdemona sings in scene 3 of Act IV, for example, appears only in the Folio.