Othello - Cinthio Source

Cinthio Source

Othello is an adaptation of the Italian writer Cinthio's tale "Un Capitano Moro" ("A Moorish Captain") from his Gli Hecatommithi (1565), a collection of one hundred tales in the style of Boccaccio's Decameron. No English translation of Cinthio was available in Shakespeare's lifetime, and verbal echoes in Othello are closer to the Italian original than to Gabriel Chappuy's 1584 French translation. Cinthio's tale may have been based on an actual incident occurring in Venice about 1508. It also resembles an incident described in the earlier tale of "The Three Apples", one of the stories narrated in the One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights). Desdemona is the only named character in Cinthio's tale, with his few other characters identified only as "the Moor" (Othello), "the squadron leader" (Cassio), "the ensign" (Iago), and "the ensign's wife" (Emilia). Cinthio drew a moral (which he placed in the mouth of Desdemona) that European women are unwise to marry the temperamental males of other nations.

Cinthio's Moor is the model for Shakespeare's Othello, but some researchers believe the poet also took inspiration from the several Moorish delegations from Morocco to Elizabethan England circa 1600. While Shakespeare closely followed Cinthio's tale in composing Othello, he departed from it in some details. Brabantio, Roderigo, and several minor characters are not found in Cinthio, for example, and Shakespeare's Emilia takes part in the handkerchief mischief while her counterpart in Cinthio does not. Unlike in Othello, in Cinthio, Iago lusts after Desdemona and is spurred to revenge when she rejects him. Shakespeare's opening scenes are unique to his tragedy as is the tender scene between Emilia and Desdemona as the lady prepares for bed. Shakespeare's most striking departure from Cinthio is the manner of his heroine's death. In Shakespeare, Othello suffocates Desdemona, but in Cinthio, Othello commissions Iago to bludgeon his wife to death with a sand-filled stocking. Cinthio describes each gruesome blow, and, when the lady is dead, Iago and Othello place her lifeless body upon her bed, smash her skull, and cause the cracked ceiling above the bed to collapse upon her, giving the impression its falling rafters caused her death. In Cinthio, the two murderers escape detection. Othello then misses Desdemona greatly, and comes to loathe the sight of Iago. He demotes him, and refuses to have him in his company. Iago then seeks revenge by disclosing to Cassio Othello's involvement in Desdemona's death. The two depart Cyprus for Venice, and denounce Othello to the Venetian Seignory; he is arrested, taken to Venice, and tortured. He refuses to admit his guilt and is condemned to exile. Desdemona's relatives eventually find and kill him. Iago, however, continues to escape detection in Desdemona's death, but engages in other crimes while in Venice. He is arrested and dies after being tortured. Cinthio's "ensign's wife", Emilia, survives her husband's death to tell her story.

Cinthio's tale has been described as a "partly racist warning" about the dangers of miscegenation. While supplying the source of the plot, the book offered nothing of the sense of place of Venice or Cyprus. For knowledge of this Shakespeare would have used Gasparo Contarini's The Commonwealth and Government of Venice, in Lewes Lewkenor's 1599 translation.