The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare

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Othello

Othello
Shakespeare's claustrophobic tragedy of jealousy and slander belongs to the same period of his career as three plays with equally dark views of sexuality, Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and All's Well That Ends Well: it is close in its use of rare vocabulary to the former tragedy, and similar in its versification to the two comedies. According to the Revels accounts, it was acted at court in November 1604, and it is apparently echoed in a play by Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, 1 The Honest Whore, composed in the same year. It is just possible that Othello was already in the King's Company's touring repertoire towards the end of 1603 (some commentators find echoes of its phrasing in the 1603 quarto of Hamlet, a reported text compiled by an actor perhaps influenced by recollections of Othello), but it seems likeliest that the play was composed in late 1603–4 and first acted in 1604,...

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