Othello (The Arden Shakespeare)

Description: This second edition of Othello has a new, illustrated introduction by leading American scholar Ayanna Thompson, which addresses such key issues as race, religion and gender, as well as looking at ways in which the play has been adapted in more recent times. Othello is one of Shakespeare's great tragedies-written in the same five-year period as Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth. The new introduction attends to the play's different meanings throughout history, while articulating the historical context in which Othello was created, paying particular attention to Shakespeare's source materials and the evidence about early modern constructions of racial and religious difference. It also explores the life of the play in different historical moments, demonstrating how meanings and performances develop, accrue, and metamorphose over time. The volume provides a rich and current resource, making this best-selling play edition ideal for today's students at advanced school and undergraduate level.

Review: The new introduction for the revised edition of Othello by Ayanna Thompson is a welcome reconsideration of the 1997 original Arden3 edition ... Thompson's introduction recognizes and incorporates the vast critical world of early modern race studies that has developed in the past twenty years ... [It] is wide-ranging yet absolutely clear, providing a new frame for the play that students and academics alike will find useful for years to come ... The superb introduction ... opens new avenues of research and frames the play in ways that bring it up to date with the latest scholarship. * Sixteenth Century Journal *

Contents: Introduction 1. Early Modern Contexts: Sources, Peoples, and Places 2. Genre 3. Sex, Love, and Objects 4. Othello and Scholarly Debates; 5. Othello Onstage, Part 1: Stage Histories 6. Othello Onstage, Part 2: Black Actors, White Actresses 7. Othello Onstage, Part 3: Othello in the World 8. Othello: Restaged/Rewritten; Othello Appendices Bibliography Index

Author Biography: Ayanna Thompson is Professor of English Literature at George Washington University, USA and author of several books about Shakespeare and race. E. A. J. Honigmann was Joseph Cowen Professor of English Literature at the Universty of Newcastle, UK.