Key Context Flashcards
Historical context
Shakespeare situated the events of Othello in the midst of this war. In doing so, he made a significant change from his main source material, Giraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi. Like Giovanni Boccaccio’s earlier Decameron, the Hecatommithi contains one hundred individual tales. However, unlike the work of his predecessor, which was framed by the historical nightmare of the Black Plague’s arrival in Florence, Cinthio’s tales are not united by an overarching frame narrative. In other words, his tales lack an obvious connection to historical reality. Thus, by setting his adaptation of Cinthio’s tale during the War of Cyprus, Shakespeare has amplified the tensions of an intimate drama by placing them in relation to a political crisis from recent historical memory.
