The play Othello is one of Shakespeare’s grimmest tragedies. Cinthio’s Desdemona: the Story that inspired Othello, is almost horror.
Written in the Duchy of Ferrara decades before the Shakespeare play, the story Cinthio gives us is centred on its only named character: Desdemona.
It is a story about a man obsessed with a woman he cannot have (Desdemona) and who, because of it, he wants to kill. Shakespeare’s play is about a man’s hatred of a man: Iago’s hatred of Othello. It is a profound difference between the story and the play.
This publication of Cinthio’s Desdemona, as well as giving us a fresh new English translation (in a parallel language edition) is accompanied by an extensive introduction and afterword. These explore the relationship between the Italian and English versions of the story as well as misogyny and attitudes towards race and gender in Renaissance Italy and Elizabethan England.
What were attitudes to domestic violence of this era, and what would Cinthio’s readers and Shakespeare’s audience have understood from the story? What might Cinthio and Shakespeare have wanted them to take away? Are the story and play racist, or do they only portray racism? Can we talk of racism, before the word was even invented? How has the story influenced our ideas about relationships between men and women and race down the centuries?
These and other questions are explored.
Yet at its heart, this book presents Cinthio’s storytelling, storytelling so compelling that it inspired Shakespeare to pen one of literature’s most famous plays. It is a story which explores the worst in human nature and captures realities which are still with us today.
Following Matteo Bandello’s, Romeo and Juliet, Cinthio’s Desdemona is the second book in the series Shakespeare Begins.
