Context

Context

1. Aristotle

   • Recommended that good drama maintain a unity of time and place, meaning that a play should take place in one spot over a realistic period of time.

2. Venice

   • Prosperous Italian city and a symbol of law and civilisation in 1500-1750.
   • Full of white people, making Othello stand out more as a moor.
   • common in Shakespeare's plays for daughters considered father's property, norm in the middle ages
     • unmarried women are often portrayed as something to be stolen, bartered for or traded by men:
       • Example, The Taming of the Shrew, when Baptista Minola bargains with his daughter's suitor, he treats Bianca like a possession and even refers to himself as a "merchant" who is undertaking a risky business deal (The Taming of the Shrew, 2.1.22).
   • Othello is Christian, Iago calls him "the devil," playing on a sixteenth century idea that black men were evil and that the devil often took the shape and form of a black man:
     • Reginald Scott, The Discovery of Witchcraft, 1584 "Bodin alloweth the divell the shape of a black moore, and as he saith, he used to appear to Mawd Cruse, Kate Darey, and Jon Harviller." not surprising that Brabantio accuses Othello of using black magic to “woo” Desdemona.
   • In Elizabethan England, Venice was infamous for its courtesans (prostitutes). When Elizabethans thought about Venice, they often imagined it to be a city full of unchaste women
     • This is what Thomas Coryat thought of travelling to Venice “[t]he name of a Courtezan of Venice is famoused over all Christendome

3. Cyprus

   • Cyprus was an island, very sacred to the goddess of love, Venus. Thus it is ironic, that on an island of love, Iago is able to convince Othello that Desdemona has been cheating on him.
   • In Cyprus, in a military encampment, Desdemona is not a home anymore, and therefore not used to the new environment, nor the lack of support she may have been able to have had in Venice, thus making her vulnerable to the kind of violence associated with the world of men and military.